During the 1980s, the U.S.' principle "export" to El Salvador was violence against people just trying to live; today its principle export to the country is stll violence against those same people

 

In the bottom left hand corner of my laptop there is a pop-up icon displaying news items from MSN, and the items shown generally remain for maybe 30 minutes or less before something else “newsworthy” replaces them. But what is one person’s news item is another person’s daily reality, as this story that briefly "popped-up" yesterday courtesy of the Business Insider informs us:

https://www.businessinsider.com/one-family-the-true-cost-of-ms13-crackdown-el-salvador-2022-12

The truth is hard to come by when it has to do with this country’s mindless migrant labor policy, sort of like these two snakes that have killed each other—one by poison and the other by constriction…

 

…or as in the story told in The Crying Game about the scorpion that stung the frog causing them both to drown because it was “in its nature”—meaning the minds of nativists and xenophobes.  The border “crisis” was inevitable given the “nature” of people, one side wanting to get out, and the other to keep out. This began in earnest when the bracero program was ended in 1964, which had been more-or-less successful in regulating seasonal farm labor from Mexico and reducing the desire to illegally enter the country.

But it was the “liberal” side of the political spectrum—particularly unions and African-American civil rights activists—who fought for the end of the program, and employed the propaganda lie that “real Americans” still wanted to do field work, when in fact by that time those who  benefited from labor and civil rights legislation were no longer willing to do such "demeaning" work given that better-paying, better benefit manufacturing jobs were still plentiful. It was all really just a measure of prejudice against Hispanics from both the white and black side.

The 1986 immigration law in conjunction with an economic cooperation agreement with Mexico and Central American countries made the incentive to illegally immigrate greater, since it again practically banned the usual cross-border labor “contract” migrants had with American employers, again mainly in the farm and food production industry that “real Americans” tended to find too “difficult” to do. If employers couldn’t get the labor through legal channels, it was just a matter of looking the other way in regard to labor that might not be legal.

But I’ve discussed this many times before. I’ve also discussed the fact that it is a lie that Donald Trump and Republicans have been pedaling that violent gangs are crossing the border into the U.S. If anything, the opposite is true—violent gangsters bred in the U.S.  being deported to Central America and practicing their trade on defenseless local communities who feel they have nowhere to go but to the U.S. It is no longer just about migrants looking for work, but now those escaping the violence brought upon them.

For once, immigrant rights activists are not completely alone in pointing out the truth. The Insider report written by Danielle Mackey about how El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele's “deal making” with rival gangs to insure his reelection broke down, and in an effort to “control” renewed outbreaks of violence and murder has sanctioned police action that has arbitrarily arrested 60,000 mostly men and boys in a wide net in the “hope” that at least some of them could be gang members—an action that has caused great collateral suffering in the country as most of the arrested are innocent laborers whose detentions have devastated farming and fishing communities.

El Salvador is being described as one of the most violence-wracked countries in the world not "officially" at war. Some might disagree, that there is a “war” going on between the “authorities” and the gangs, but it is a “war” in which the lines between who is on the “right” side is blurred. "Unofficial" wars is nothing new there; during the late Seventies and throughout the Eighties the U.S. government armed and funded right-wing murder regimes in Central America against "leftists," the ones in El Salvador and Guatemala particularly infamous. 

But today, another U.S.-supplied menace is threatening these people, and anyone here has the "right" to wonder why people are looking for a “safe” place to escape it? People here may hate asylum seekers from these countries, but migrants are generally aware that there are penalties for killing people in this country even if they don’t “belong” or someone doesn’t like the way they “look,” penalties that don't seem to exist in places like El Salvador, still.

Insider tells us that the El Salvador government's quest to “rid” itself of its “problem” has resulted in overcrowded and “disease-ridden” prisons which are now the home of the world’s highest percentage of its population behind bars, edging ahead of the U.S. whose own crime problem is largely the result of its fascination with violence and guns; the recent news story of two groups of people opening fire on each other during a “disagreement” at the self-checkout line in a Mobile, Alabama Walmart is typical of this "phenomenon."

El Salvador’s current problem—and Central America’s generally as Insider notes—is the

MS-13 and Barrio 18, which began in Los Angeles in the late twentieth century and arrived in El Salvador by way of gang members deported from the US. In 2018, then-President Donald Trump referenced MS-13 to say the US had allowed "animals" to cross into the country, and to justify draconian immigration policies. In El Salvador, the gangs have become one of the country's biggest employers, and they have cemented their power through backroom deals with elected leaders. 

At least someone in the mainstream media has it right. Before, the right-wing murder regimes only had to worry about a few poorly-armed rebels while they massacred civilians believed to support them, before being forced into “peace” agreements with the rebels in the early 1990s. Now, governments backed by police or paramilitary forces that act like little more than armed bandits who shoot to kill on the slightest "provocation"—in El Salvador, police forces have been accused of 40,000 murders during the current “state of exception”—are finding themselves up against even more ruthless adversaries for whom violence is just part of the MO they learned in the U.S. from the “Bloods,” “Crips” and other experienced gangster operations in Los Angeles.

Bukele and “senior officials” had been accused of “cutting deals” with the gangs, such as blocking extraditions of MS-13 “terrorists” to the U.S., in which the gangs agreed to commit fewer murders to make it appear that Bukele was actually doing something about the gang problem to get himself and his party reelected by landslide margins.

Today, the gangs are not playing ball, and many gang members have simply kept a lower profile while watching police "fight" them by conducting sweeps of 60,000 random people, most of them believed to be just ordinary people trying to live. These sweeps seem to have been a "success" in unaffected communities,  seen by human rights activists as merely a public relations stunt to convince people that the government is actually doing "something."

In the overcrowded, fetid prisons where officials are only required to provide two barely sustainable meals a day and inmate relatives are required to provide them with whatever else will keep them alive, innocent people do not have access to lawyers under the “state of exception,” which brands all those they have scooped-up in mass arrests as “terrorists” who have no rights. As mentioned this has had a devastating effect on the economy of affected communities and people’s whose lives depend on farming and fishing, since most of those arrested work in these occupations.

People in El Salvador and Guatemala have already suffered much from U.S. “intervention” over the past century, certainly not the “good neighbor” it claims to be. As The Insider notes

From late 1979 until 1992, vicious US-backed government forces clashed with a leftist guerrilla movement. More than 75,000 Salvadorans died and thousands more were disappeared. A United Nations truth commission later found that 85% of the war kidnapping, torture and murder were committed by the government forces, including police and military. 

And now they have the U.S.-bred MS-13 and Barrio 18 to deal with, along with state-sanctioned kidnapping and murder under the guise of fighting these gangs. Farming and fishing communities most effected by random round-ups have staged protests and conducted meetings about what to do. But

Members of the group have been harassed by the police, and there was always concern that cops might show up in the middle of the meeting to arrest everyone. One woman who had started attending after her husband was arrested was then herself arrested.

Now, the neighbors couldn’t agree on what was best. The state of exception allowed the police to detain anyone for any reason. If they protested and ended up incarcerated alongside their loved ones, who would defend them then?  

What are these human beings expected to do? They come all the way to the U.S. border to seek asylum, and they are confronted by inhuman types now backed by an inhuman U.S. Supreme Court which is keeping in place an inhuman policy that has nothing to do with anyone’s reality.