Saturday 14 July 2018

Central American Migrants and America's Bloody Hands

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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.

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