Anti-Empire Report - Those in the US generally opposed to immigration make it a point to declare or imply that the United States does not have any legal or moral obligation to take in these Latinos. This is not true. The United States does indeed have the obligation because many of the immigrants, in addition to fleeing from drug violence, are escaping an economic situation in their homeland directly made hopeless by American interventionist policy.
It’s not that these people prefer to live in the United States. They’d much rather remain with their families and friends, be able to speak their native language at all times, and avoid the hardships imposed upon them by American police and other right-wingers. But whenever a progressive government comes to power in Latin America or threatens to do so, a government sincerely committed to fighting poverty, the United States helps to suppresses the movement and/or supports the country’s right-wing and military in staging a coup. This has been the case in Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua and Honduras.
The latest example is the June 2009 coup (championed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) ousting the moderately progressive Manuel Zelaya of Honduras. The particularly severe increase in recent years in Honduran migration to the US is a direct result of the overthrow of Zelaya, whose crime was things like raising the minimum wage, giving subsidies to small farmers, and instituting free education. It is a tale told many times in Latin America: The downtrodden masses finally put into power a leader committed to reversing the status quo, determined to try to put an end to two centuries of oppression … and before long the military overthrows the democratically-elected government, while the United States – if not the mastermind behind the coup – does nothing to prevent it or to punish the coup regime, as only the United States can punish; meanwhile Washington officials pretend to be very upset over this “affront to democracy” while giving major support to the coup regime. The resulting return to poverty is accompanied by government and right-wing violence against those who question the new status quo, giving further incentive to escape the country.
Joseph Nevins, The Conversation - U.S. military presence in Honduras and the roots of Honduran migration to the United States are closely linked. It began in the late 1890s, when U.S.-based banana companies first became active there. As historian Walter LaFeber writes in “Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America,” American companies “built railroads, established their own banking systems, and bribed government officials at a dizzying pace.” As a result, the Caribbean coast “became a foreign-controlled enclave that systematically swung the whole of Honduras into a one-crop economy whose wealth was carried off to New Orleans, New York, and later Boston.”
3 comments:
NAFTA
The reason is most of latin America has draconian vicious anti abortion and anti birth control laws that create poverty, chaos and violence
The "2009" Obama coup sounds like bullshit to me. Speaking as a Hispanic (okay, mostly Italian and Irish, only 12% Spanish, but my family came from Mexico, has the Spanish surname, and had lived there for generations), Mexico's problems are purely of Mexican origin. Their murder rate now is 27 per 100K, even worse than Chicago, a very difficult feat. No one is forcing the NARCOs to gang rape little girls to prep them for a life of prostitution, behead rivals, or cannibalize policemen in demented rituals. There is no right wing government out there that is forcing them to do that. And if there WAS a right wing government, all of that would be put an end to. Your position is basically that brown people have no agency because evil white Americans won't let them turn Communist.
To be honest, the only way a Hispanic country can obtain any sense of stability and order is if it is being run by a far right wing dictatorship where the communists and other assorted miscreants are systematically murdered.
That sounds ugly, but it's true. Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, all of these trash people merely incite the mob and then immediately begin persecuting that segment of the population that actually produces anything. You know, one of my own ancestors was murdered by the "heroic" Pancho Villa because he wouldn't reveal the location of the family gold. They are bandits who think that you can take gold from the super wealthy and give it to some tribe out in the middle of the rainforest, and tomorrow they'll produce a 1st world country.
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