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Back in the USSR explores the roots of the US
government's present policy toward Central American migrants and how brutal
imperialism, unrestrained capitalism, and systemic racism came together to
produce atrocities such as the current mass imprisonment of children, the
horrific abuse of minors in detention, and the viciously traumatic separation
of thousands of families.
Theme
You’re listening to Back in the USSR. Last weekend, I reported on the collaboration
between the Apartheid state of Israel and Ukrainian neo-Nazis like the Azov
Battalion. This week, that same Apartheid
state has shot and killed another Palestinian child in Gaza: Fifteen
year old, Osman Halas, was shot and killed by an Israeli Snipers this Friday. 18 year old Muhammad Nasser Sharab died in the same way on the same
day.
Like all the 150 others who have died since the end of March since the
Great March of Return, they were unarmed when they were brutally murdered. Today, Saturday, Israel struck 40 targets in
Gaza in the heaviest bombing of the area since 2014. Two more teenagers died in these airstrikes:
Amir Al-Nimra, 15 and Louay Kuhail, 16.
For these boys, whose lives were cruelly taken away from them by a
remorseless occupying army, I will observe a minute of silence.
Solidarity to Osman Halas, Muhammad Nasser Sharab, Amir Al-Nimra and
Louay Kuhail. And solidarity with the
Palestinian people as they bravely fight for liberation. Tonight I want to focus on something I’ve
mentioned in previous shows over the past few weeks, but never actually
dedicated an entire show to. I’ve
mentioned the barbaric detention of migrant children by American authorities,
something which only recently made the news when it was revealed that children
from more than 2,300 families were being forcibly separated from their parents
by immigration agents before being detained enmasse in what amount to
concentration camps for children. Children
as young as four have been held in cages in cold warehouses in border states.
Just last month, on June 21st,
Telesur reported on how one group of young migrants is now suing the US
government for being “subjected to unconstitutional conditions that shock the
conscience." Immigrant youths, some as young as 14, held in the Shenandoah
Valley Juvenile Detention Center in Virginia, were beaten while handcuffed, detained
in solitary confinement for long periods, and kept naked inside freezing cold
cells. Guards would sometimes strip them
naked, restrain them in chairs and put bags over their heads. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former
child-development specialist who worked at the detention center said she saw
kids with broken bones and bruises. She said they blamed the injuries on the
guards, according to The Associated Press.
Many of the children were transferred to the center after being accused
of belonging to violent gangs, including the MS-13, by U.S. immigration
authorities. This is a talk given last year by Sofia Adams of Worker’s World Party (WWP), a communist
party in the US that is active in solidarity work with detainees, about
conditions in migrant detention facilities around the country:
WWP - ICE Detention Centers
After the separation of migrant children from their
families made international headlines, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
gave his usual lukewarm criticism of the Donald Trump Administration and said
something to the effect that “this is not the way we do things in Canada” and
he’s lying. Blatantly lying. As I’ve talked about previously, in recent
years Canada has detained hundreds of migrant children from the Middle East,
West Africa, Central America and the Caribbean.
In February 2017 the "Invisible Citizens: Canadian Children in
Immigration Detention," study produced by the International Human Rights
Program at the University of Toronto's faculty of law revealed that there were
48 children being detained at the Toronto Immigration Holding Centre alone at
that time, including infants and toddlers.
Putting migrant children behind bars is not just an American phenomenon.
Canada does not have clean hands and,
very notably, continues to classify the United States as a “safe country” for
refugees, which it is most certainly not.
Many of the Central American migrants who have reached
Canada and the US are fleeing truly brutal violence. To give you some illustration of this, in the
campaign leading up to the July 1st general elections in Mexico more
than 111 candidates were murdered. Due
to the escalation of the so-called “war on drugs” in Mexico, literally tens of
thousands of people have died since 2006.
In 2016 23,000 died in Mexico as a result of drug violence, making it
the world’s second deadliest conflict zone after Syria. By comparison, the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan claimed 17,000 and 16,000 lives respectively in 2016. The drug war began in late 2006 when
former President Felipe Calderon unleashed the military on the country's drug
cartels — a move immediately backed by a US$1.8 billion military aid package by
former U.S. President George W. Bush. Washington provided further annual drug
war aid to Mexico through the Merida Initiative since. So the US has its hands all over the violence
in Mexico, which is driving many people to flee northwards.
Honduras in particular has been a major source for
refugees heading north to the US border.
It’s important to remember that this is a country that has been crushed
by American imperialism, going back more than a century. Even in 1914 American banana interests
controlled more than 1 million acres of the country’s best land. Peasants were evicted from this land to make
way for cash crop plantations and this was made possible by military force; in
1907 and 1911 the US Marines directly intervened in Honduras to secure and
expand the holdings of United Fruit Company and other US agribusiness interests. The Honduran ruling class was and remains
dependent on US support in order to maintain the deeply unequal society it
benefits from. By the 1980s, when
hundreds of US soldiers were stationed in the country to train contra
terrorists then launching bloody cross-border attacks on socialist Nicaragua, U.S.
political and military policy was so influential that many referred to the
Central American country as the “U.S.S. Honduras” and the “Pentagon Republic”.
The
Reagan years also saw the construction of numerous joint Honduran-U.S. military
bases and installations. Such moves greatly strengthened the militarization of
Honduran society. In turn, political repression rose. There was a dramatic
increase in the number of political assassinations, “disappearances” and
illegal detentions. Under these
conditions, economic austerity was imposed and traditional forms of agriculture
were even further undermined while an already weak social safety net was
basically torn up. It was in this
context that emigration from Honduras to the United States would dramatically
increase starting in the 1990s. It looked
like the situation might change in 2006 with the election of left-wing reformist
Manuel Zelaya to the presidency who tried to rebuild the social safety net,
raise the minimum wage and reform the constitution in a progressive
direction. For his efforts he was overthrown
in a US-backed military coup in 2009, and this is where the emigration crisis
really begins.
Since the coup, writes historian Dana Frank, “a series
of corrupt administrations has unleashed open criminal control of Honduras,
from top to bottom of the government.” Politically motivated killings and
assassinations are common, organized crime and drug traffickers work hand in
glove with the police, and the country is the most dangerous place in the world
to be an environmental activist according to Global Witness. The social safety net has collapsed and poverty
is skyrocketing, even as global investors are given a free hand in the country
and corporate profits are soaring. All
of this is mainly the result of US foreign policy, which has created an
El-Dorado for vicious and unregulated capitalism in Central America in which
human needs don’t factor at all. This is
why people are running away and leaving their homes behind. These are the desperate people that the US
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) detains and brutalizes in
their concentration camps; refugees the US itself created. The following is another shocking report about conditions in these
places:
You’re listening to Back in the USSR. If you believe the mainstream media,
notorious for its lack of context, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this
harsh crackdown on immigrants and the separation of families was all the product
of the uniquely evil genius of Donald Trump and that it’s some kind of
aberration in recent American history.
This is nonsense. A good article
to read, which blows the mainstream narrative out of the water, was written in
the Nation Magazine by Marisa Franco and Carlos Garcia in June 2016 entitled “The Deportation Machine Obama Built for President Trump”. The article says of Obama, “When he leaves
office he will leave behind to his successor the most sophisticated and
well-funded human-expulsion machine in the history of the country.” Before the
end of his first term in office, Obama had expanded ICE and the migrant detention/deportation
apparatus he had inherited from George W. Bush by 3,600%. His Director of the Office of Homeland
Security Tom Ridge expanded the purview of his department to include an
immigration enforcement plan that sought to achieve a “100% removal rate” of
the undocumented population in the United States by seeing to the drafting of a
document that came to shape the next 15 years, “ENDGAME Office of Detention and
Removal Strategic Plan.” To pay for the ballooning
enforcement-first approach, the budget for immigration enforcement grew 300
percent from the resources given at the time of its founding under Bush to $18
billion annually, more than all other federal law-enforcement agencies’ budget
combined.
As record numbers of people were being deported, an
increasing number were also charged and channeled into federal prison before
their expulsion. Within two years of coming into office, President Obama
doubled the number of people being prosecuted for reentry by expanding Bush’s
border-court system, Operation Streamline, which tries up to 70 people per day
in a cattle line of sentences. The experiment went from three jurisdictions in
2008 to every single border sector except California by 2010. From the time of
its invention in 2005 to just four years later in 2009, Streamline sent over
209,000 individuals to serve federal prison sentences for no reason other than
crossing the border.
The article concludes: “As Obama enters his final
months, some say the record deportations he oversaw and the raids against
refugees mothers and children already seal his legacy as the deporter-in-chief”. I want to replay a report from the Real News I aired a few weeks back
dealing with this to emphasize the significance of this:
So America has a deeper problem than just one man with
a bad attitude. If America’s first black
president could pursue such an inhumanly racist policy, I think it’s clear for
all to see that capitalist America itself is systemically racist. Just as the black men and women getting
targeted by the cops with impunity in the streets of Ferguson and other cities
found out during the Obama years, having a black man in the White House doesn’t
change that fundamental fact. Certainly
for the Central American migrants fleeing the effects of American foreign
policy in places like Honduras, where the military coup in 2009 was fully
backed by the Obama Administration, Obama was not a savior, but a sign of what
was to come under his successor.
When you have fascist institutions like ICE working
hand in glove with private prison contractors like GEO Group who literally
profit from the misery of detained migrants and you have a situation where half
of California’s LGBT Caucus in the state assembly accept money from these
private prison contractors – you’re dealing with an incredibly sick society
where even so-called progressives are corrupted by structures of racism and
exploitation. This is why socialist revolution
is a necessity all over this continent and all over the world. This system must be stopped, it must be broken
down – capitalism, imperialism, settler-colonialism – it all has to be
overthrown and a socialist system centered on human needs and human liberation
must be built in its place. The only
alternative is fascist barbarism. WE
MUST WIN.
Rebel Diaz - Craazy
