In this moment when we're forced to watch the laughably undemocratic (small "d") U.S. Senate thwart the will of a sizable majority of us, it's worth recalling that the democratic impulse is astonishingly resilient -- and on the move in unlikely places.
Honduras: In 2009, the U.S.-backed a military coup ousted the more or less legitimate government of President Manuel Zelaya. That unfortunate country has been governed (and misgoverned) by a series of unpopular violent kleptocrats ever since. At times, narco traffickers seemed to own the state. The 2017 election was a violent mess; 23 people died and protesters filled the streets, protesting electoral manipulation which kept the ruling party in power. Even the Organization of American States called that "election" a fraud.
But this November, Hondurans gave Xiomara Castro 51 percent of their vote to only 37 percent for the previous ruling party's candidate. Somewhat remarkably the losing candidate conceded. Castro brings her own baggage -- she's the wife of the deposed Manuel Zelaya and governing Honduras involves overwhelming challenges and opportunities for corruption. But the people are getting what they chose, democratically.
Chile: On December 19, it was that Latin American country's turn to endorse a democratic triumph:
SANTIAGO, Chile — Gabriel Boric, a tattooed 35-year-old former student leader from the far south of Patagonia, has secured a crushing victory to become Chile’s president-elect.
Chile was Latin America's most stable democracy until the U.S.-backed a coup in 973 overthrew its elected socialist government. U.S. rightwing economists used the unfortunate country as a playground for trying out their exploitative theories. Chile then suffered under a vicious fascist military dictatorship until 1990. It seemed to have established a viable constitutional system including peaceful transitions of power, but popular fury over remnants of the dictatorship and economic inequity has been rising.
The election was a runoff between Boric, representing younger people and the impoverished, against the rightwing populist José Antonio Kast. The coalition of the left was broad and held together, proving simply larger than the opposing coalition of the right. Kast conceded within 24 hours.
It seems ages ago now, but as recently as 2016 ,U.S. policy toward Central American migration was at least nominally to try to improve the quality of life in the sending countries so as to encourage desperate people to stay home. That's not to say that our governments haven't historically made life harder for the people of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. We've propped up a long string of dictators and oligarchs in those suffering countries. But in the middle of the last decade, the U.S. did commit funds to healthier development and to supporting domestic human rights movements.
All that disappeared under Trump. U.S. policy today is to indiscriminately deport migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees and pretend these corrupt governments will deal with the reality of hungry people.
"will immediately do away with the Trump Administration’s draconian immigration policies and galvanize international action to address the poverty and insecurity driving migrants from the Northern Triangle to the United States. ... The people of the region understand that addressing these challenges in a sustainable way demands systemic change and reforms across many sectors of society in the Northern Triangle–and that sort of change requires a serious investment of political will and resources at every level."
More substantively, he calls for
• Developing a comprehensive four-year, $4 billion regional strategy to address factors driving migration from Central America; • Mobilizing private investment in the region; • Improving security and rule of law; • Addressing endemic corruption; • Prioritizing poverty reduction and economic development.
Just words? Maybe. It wouldn't be the first time in the U.S. relationship with these countries. But Central America needs the northern colossus to at the very least pretend to do the right thing.And according to Welsh, Biden has a good history with Central America in his previous role.
"Biden met multiple times with the presidents of the three countries, traveling to Central America, chairing meetings, and using personal diplomacy to lobby for an agreement that included pledges to reduce the corruption that has long been endemic in the region.
"The vice president’s personal engagement was key to getting El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to agree to serious reforms, as well as to significant financial contributions of their own, according to Mark Feierstein, who served during the Obama administration as assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean at the U.S. Agency for International Development."
Fernando Cutz, who worked in the National Security Council under both Trump and Obama, thinks there's hope for a return to a sensible, even helpful, policy after Trump.
“But … in Central America, I do think that — more than almost any other foreign policy area that I can think of — we probably can, in many ways, just rebuild the old program.”
Last week I had the chance to attend a talk by Noah Bullock, director of Cristosal, on his organization's work in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Cristosal works across the Northern Triangle of Central America to monitor forced displacement by physical and sexual extortion and violence, to create models for humanitarian, psychological, and legal assistance to victims of human rights violations, and to demonstrate effective strategies for sustainable, community-based victim protection and support.
What's that boilerplate mean? Cristosal is currently assisting litigation for recognition of and compensation to the survivors of the El Mozote massacre and other war crimes of decades past within the legal institutions of the Salvadoran state. This effort strengthens what should be foundations of reliable rule of law in that violent country. Today, all these countries suffer from oligarchic gangster governments which do not provide security to their people. Chronic violence and the nonexistence of effective state institutions that might protect people in their homes drive migration both within these countries and out of the countries. Cristosal has been instrumental in supporting local initiatives to recognize the rights of citizens to live in their home places in peace and without fear.
And, since these Central American countries come nowhere near providing their people the security they have a right to expect from law enforcement, Cristosal -- where it can -- provides immediate protection to move people out of danger. Moreover, they are attempting to show that people displaced by violence can be reintegrated into new communities where they'll be safe and can live in peace. This is not simple -- it's not as if anyone anywhere really wants an influx of traumatized newcomers; that sentiment is not unique to the U.S. Before Trump came along, the USAID funded some of these initiatives but nowadays the US government likes the gangster status quo. As in so many policy areas, our government acts as if it hopes all those annoying Spanish-speaking poor people would just die where they are.
Cristosal is well known in El Salvador and the rest of Central America for its work; the organization is demanding that governments and all of us take human rights as inviolable and worth defending.
I did not come up as a leftish activist in a time when human rights were at the top of our minds. In the decades of the struggle within the United States for African-American civil rights, during the heady rush of decolonization across the globe, and of the struggle against imperial resistance to national freedoms, we thought that some form of revolution was the way to justice. The suffering people would (and should) rise up and replace the bums in power. Unhappily, the track record of 20th century revolutions has not been that good. We thought "human rights" was something some First World liberals tried to impose on the world after they won their anti-fascist war in 1945 -- a good thing, but peripheral to the real conflict of classes and races.
Meanwhile, it was activists in what we then called the Third World -- developing countries as we'd probably call them now -- who occasionally reminded enthusiastic North Americans that international institutions like the the United Nations and the World Court should be guarantors of human rights, of human decency. They knew something about permanent struggle and the need for institutional bulwarks of freedom that we thought we could skip over.
On the Cristosal website, Noah Bullock explains how a nice young man from Montana who landed in El Salvador in 2005 (and stayed), understands the centrality of human rights law and concepts in the long arc toward justice and freedom.
“Human rights were taught to me as a historical process, and every generation has to be able to understand human rights and violations in their own time.
"Our moment has changed significantly from when these frameworks were established, so we are challenged now to find ways to apply these same principles in programming to address our moment’s greatest challenges of displacement by violence, poverty, and inequality.”
I am appending here a short film (10 minutes) that tells a story of Central American violence as lived by some of its victims. It has been shown more than 10 times on Salvadoran television -- and that legislature recently enacted a law purporting to guarantee that police should protect citizens. They neglected to append any funding though ... And so the struggle continues ...
Amilcar Perez Lopez traveled to San Francisco to work for his family's well-being; the boy from Guatemala kept his head down and was a "good worker" according to those who knew him. He found a neighborhood where there were many others like him; in the photo, the Mission community turned out to protest impunity for the SFPD officers who shot him in the back in 2015.
Erudite Partner argues that the current surge of migration from Central America that Donald Trump is using to stir up racist fears of "invasion" has been building for decades. In fragile states, corruption, and climate chaos have pushed people onto a terrible road."The US has driven Central Americans to flee," she explains:
There is indeed a real crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Hundreds of thousands of people like Amílcar are arriving there seeking refuge from dangers that were, to a significant degree, created by and are now being intensified by the United States. But Donald Trump would rather demonize desperate people than deploy the resources needed to attend to their claims in a timely way — or in any way at all.
It's time to recognize that the American way of life — our cars and comforts, our shrimp and coffee, our ignorance about our government's actions in our regional "backyard" — has created this crisis. It should be (but in the age of Trump won't be) our responsibility to solve it. ...
We broke these countries, we continue to break them, and we don't understand we own this.
The Trump administration would like to turn Guatemala into an open air prison for Central American asylum seekers. Johnathan Blitzer explained at the New Yorker that:
... the Trump Administration is expected to announce a major immigration deal, known as a safe-third-country agreement, with Guatemala. For weeks, there have been reports that negotiations were under way between the two countries, but, until now, none of the details were official. According to a draft of the agreement obtained by The New Yorker, asylum seekers from any country who either show up at U.S. ports of entry or are apprehended while crossing between ports of entry could be sent to seek asylum in Guatemala instead.
We have such an agreement with Canada -- asylum seekers who somehow get to Canada are deemed to be in a safe country and so are almost always ineligible to apply for asylum in the United States.
But Guatemala?
In addition to the fact that many of the current wave of asylum seekers are running away from danger in Guatemala, that country is designated as very dangerous indeed according to the U.S. State Department's own travel advisory system.
Violent crime, such as armed robbery and murder, is common. Gang activity, such as extortion, violent street crime, and narcotics trafficking, is widespread. Local police may lack the resources to respond effectively to serious criminal incidents.
The whole country is labeled "Level 2: Exercise Increased Caution." As for the capital city and airport, it's even worse: "Level 3: Reconsider Travel."
Now obviously, no U.S. court would approve such a travesty of justice as allowing this phony "safe country" designation to stop asylum claims by migrants at the border?
Perhaps so. But people better versed in the law than I at Rational Security assert that the determination of whether a country is really "safe" is reserved under U.S. statutes to the sole authority of the Attorney General. And we have ample evidence that the current Attorney General is a Trump toady.
The Israelis have Gaza for their open air prison for Palestinians; apparently we're aiming to replicate that in Guatemala.
And the administration aims to coerce Mexico into another phony "safe-country" deal. Will Mexican nationalists resist? They often have in the past, but we'll see.
The long suffering poor peasants of Central America have been waiting for this (and so much more) for 35 years. In this clip, Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar demands Trump's Venezuelan enforcer own up to our past imperial crimes in El Salvador and beyond -- Elliot Abrams clearly never thought such a non-person could be in a position question him. The old defender of death squads was taken aback. Per CNN:
"I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful," Omar said. When Abrams attempted to respond, she told him it was "not a question," to which Abrams countered that it was "an attack."
... The Minnesota Democrat also brought up Abrams' past comments on the US policy in El Salvador. Abrams called that policy "a fabulous achievement" and during a February 1982 Senate testimony, he appeared to downplay reports of a massacre in the Salvadoran town of El Mozote in December 1981. Nearly 1,000 people were killed in by US-trained and -equipped military units in that massacre -- it was the largest mass killing in recent Latin American history.
The seemingly endless migration of desperate people from devastated societies in Central America that Trump so abominates has much of its genesis in the exploits of swashbuckling Reagan-era imperialists of whom Abrams is the exemplar.
I carry no brief for today's Maduro government in Venezuela, but let's hope Abrams can be restrained from letting loose more of the same in that unhappy country.
U.S. juries have agreed our authorities can shoot people through the Mexican border.
In our outrage about Trump's Border Patrol teargassing rowdy asylum seekers near San Diego, this should not get lost:
PHOENIX -- An Arizona jury [last week] acquitted a U.S. Border Patrol agent of manslaughter in the shooting of a Mexican teen through a border fence, sparking a protest in downtown Tucson following the second loss for federal prosecutors in the second trial over the 2012 killing. Jurors in Tucson found Lonnie Swartz not guilty of involuntary manslaughter but didn't come to a decision on voluntary manslaughter.
The verdict comes months after Swartz was acquitted of second-degree murder by another jury that had deadlocked on manslaughter charges, allowing prosecutors to pursue the case again.
Border Patrol agents are rarely criminally charged for using force. But the killing of 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez sparked outrage on both sides of the border and came at a time when the agency was increasingly scrutinized for its use of force.
So long as intolerable conditions persist in Central America, people will keep on coming. Any of us would if our loved ones were being murdered and simply living was no longer possible. The tiny chance that we might luck into asylum would look better than sticking around to be slaughtered. Without more law and more justice in Central America, the flow of desperate people isn't going to stop.
