To separate children from their parents for no reason is inhumane anytime. But to separate families when they are fleeing violence, trauma, and poverty is approaching evil.
What we don’t understand in the United States is that poverty and violence in Central America are the direct result of decades of U.S. actions. MSNBC finds that of the 326 children housed in a tent city in Tornillo, Texas only three are from Mexico. The rest are from Central America. San Salvador, Guatemala City, and Tegucigalpa, Honduras have the dubious honor of being the murder capitals of the world. This violence has roots in the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War and the U.S. War on Drugs.
I suppose that as a nation we have suppressed knowledge of foreign policy in Central America. Instead we say it is implausible to say that the Reagan administration poured billions of dollars into Central America to buy weapons and pay for training for soldiers in death squads. That it was U.S. dollars and logistical support that helped murder Archbishop Oscar Romero while he was saying mass in San Salvador on March 24, 1980. That around 75 civilian bodies a day turned up at the dump in San Salvador as a result of U.S. bullets for years throughout the 1980s. That 400 entire Mayan villages were wiped off the face of the map under the genocide of Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. That the Reagan administration supported Ríos Montt both financially and morally throughout his reign of terror with aid jumping from 11 million in 1980 to 106 million dollars in 1986. That soldiers trained at the U.S. School of the Americas ripped babies away from their mothers and bashed their heads on rocks. That Honduras became a de facto military base for the U.S. efforts to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and became the epicenter for Cocaine trade of the Iran Contra affair. Unfortunately these and many more horrific human rights abuses occurred with either outright support or tacit consent from the United States.
The subsequent entanglement of anti-communism with the War on Drugs created a deadly cocktail in Central America. We are becoming aware how the War on Drugs has destabilized our own communities and cynically targeted poor neighborhoods and minority youth. We are less aware of the legacy of brutality and violence that the War on Drugs has bestowed on the rest of the world. If militarizing Central America through the Dirty Wars of the 60s, 70s and 80s was not enough, we continued to pour military aid to fight the failed War on Drugs. We can imagine the road map to look something like this. Families flee the violence of their countries during the ’80s and ’90s to the streets of LA. Poor immigrant youth find a home in gang life. The War on Drugs targets these youth for incarceration. While in jail or prison the youth further develop gang connections. After imprisonment they are deported to their home countries where they have no family or connections. They take deadly gangs like Mara Salvatruchas or Calle 18 with them. The thirst for drugs in the U.S., the rise of the Narco culture in Mexico, and the violent U.S.-supported methods used by Central American governments to fight gangs provides all the pieces to turn these countries into war zones. A culture of violence invades every nook and cranny of daily life and people are desperate to get out. They flee in search of safety and come to our borders.
The wave of outrage against the detention and separation of families is a credit to U.S. people of all political stripes. But we in the U.S. need to go much further to help rebuild communities that we have helped destabilize. We need to once and for all stop sending armaments to these hotbeds of violence and to commit to a Marshall plan-type program that helped rebuild the devastation of Europe following World War II.
It is time to change the reality of what Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz once said, “Pobre México, tan lejos a Dios, tan cerca a los Estados Unidos” –Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.
Janine Fitzgerald is a long time resident of Bayfield. She teaches Sociology at Fort Lewis College and is one of the architects of the new Borders and Languages major.
