I am grateful to Alfredo Corchado for doing an important piece of journalism for the Dallas Morning News. He went down to Mexico and followed the path of the Central American migrants who are trying to move north and enter the United States of America.
In the process, he managed to bring something hidden to light and to humanize the people who are making this journey. I don’t have any easy answers for how to deal with this crisis. These people appear to be making rational decisions based on how bad things are at home, particularly in Honduras. What can we do to make Honduras less miserable? I think that has to be part of the solution here. We can welcome some of these people, but a better solution is to change the logic of the situation. Making it harder to get here is part of changing the logic, but it doesn’t seem like it will do much but increase the hardship these people experience. Things have to be unimaginably bad for parents to send their kids unaccompanied to a foreign country, but even the adults face grave dangers and exploitation along the way.
So, what is it that is making Honduras such a miserable place to live right now? Is it mainly gang-violence and a lack of law and order? Is it joblessness? Is it political in nature? I want to know more about how things broke down so badly.
Here’s a good piece on bad the gang-violence is.
The first thing Hillary Clinton did as Secretary of State was look the other way while a military coup took over Honduras. Whose policy was that?
Better stated, what exactly have Thomas Shannon, Arturo Valenzuela, and Roberta Jacobsen been doing about the issues that is causing this crisis? And what have US special operations agencies and the US military been doing, which apparently has been making these problems worse?
And what has Chiquita Brands been doing? And the officials managing the US trade policy? Or the IMF?
Bad policies create crises.
Does Chiquita even have the pull to launch coups anymore?
As well as it ever did. The methods have changed — sending in the US Marines is so 20th century.
Eric Holder and Chiquita
It was more than “looking the other way.” The US defied the consensus of the Latin/South American countries on the Honduran coup. That “looking the other way” was for public consumption the way President Obama publicly expresses sorrow for the slaughter in Gaza.
As Greenwald points out:
The Honduran coup was complete with a full on propaganda campaign in the US managed by Hillary’s good friend Lanny Davis to demonize Zelaya.
Zelaya’s real crime? Supporting an increase in the minimum wage. (Same problem Aristide ran into a couple of times in Haiti that led to the US backed ousting of him.) So, five years on, Hondurans are so poor and desperate that their children are sent on dangerous journeys to get to the US. The bonus is the additional devastation the US “war on drugs” continues to wreak in Latin American countries.
That’s what counts. Nicaragua, where the US has been unable to prevent democracy, is just as poor as Honduras but sends no child immigrants north, because children are safe there. Same for Costa Rica.
So Nicaragua, a place where we tried and failed to do what we do in central America, is pretty decent, and the central American countries that we succeeded in doing what we do are all a mess.
You would think someone in charge would be paying attention, but alas, we never learn.
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It might be a matter of goals, not learning. It may be that Honduras and Guatemala represent “mission accomplished”–no land reform here.
The similarity between Gaza and Central America is that they are all kleptocracies. It is the Koch brothers’ wet dream. The people at the top steal all the money and leave very little for everybody else. The question is why do people put up with that and how do you change it.
Gaza is a kleptocracy? How many oligarchs has it spawned?
Roght. If you wanted to be a kleptocrat, moving to Gaza would be a poor career move. There needs to be something to steal.
Meshal is worth over $2 billion. Pretty successful for him.
The rest of Hamas’ officials are stealing pretty good, too. http://www.jewishpress.com/news/middle-east/hamas-officials-get-rich-in-gaza/2014/07/13/
BBC is always a good place to start. They still practice news over there.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-18954311
I’m sure the horrendous conditions in Honduras have nothing to do with the US (Hillary Clinton SOS, cough, cough) supported coup in 2009. And how is the regime change she supported in Libya going? Minor glitch?
Then today we learn:
USAID programme used young Latin Americans to incite Cuba rebellion
Complete with a fake HIV prevention program to facilitate getting recruits in Cuba. (Because the fake vaccine program in Afghanistan didn’t do enough damage.)
USAID – Wiki
Imagine the foreign policies that Hillary could implement as POTUS without constraints from Obama.
If you believe the lead-crime hypothesis — and I think that so far it’s by far the most stringent and biologically plausible of all theories, including income inequality and abortion — then the explosion in crime waves and murder have been directly caused by Central America being so slow to remove lead from gasoline. Lead causes childhood brain damage, especially in the impulse control centers, which leads to aggression and impulsiveness and of course crime.
If it makes you feel any better many of these countries (most notably Honduras) banned lead from gasoline in the mid-90s. So the first batch of young adults who haven’t had their brains poisoned are entering maturity. And like the United States, they’ll start to see a meteoric drop in violent crime levels.
I agree completely.
It would also help if the US would stop f*cking with these countries, and stop using them as free market experiments.
I’m not sure if a lead free environment can out weigh US corporate instigated corruption and a US drug policy that exports crime, but it’s a first step.
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well there’s more to it than that; they need a functioning police force, not to mention other systems (education, health etc) and for that their plutocrats need to ante up and pay some taxes.
Want to know what has made it so bad all over? That one is easy. The majority of mankind is now practicing a lifestyle of I got mine, FU! There is very little practice of compassion and caring for others practiced in society now. It is a world wide cultural change that keeps growing. The more it grows the worse it will get for those that have not or very little.
deport all illegals.
If you live by settler colonialism, you die by settler colonialism. Presence creates legality. Just ask John Smith and John Winthrop.
There’s a Mexican documentary on La Bestia/ The Beast Train made about 6 years ago.
maybe I’m not supposed to embed something 44 minutes?