Joe
Biden beloofde bij zijn aantreden dat hij de inhumane politiek tegen
immigratie van Trump zou veranderen met zijn ‘Plan
to Build Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of
Central America‘ door VS leiderschap in die regio te herstellen
en zoals je begrijpt heeft dit bij de bevolkingen van Midden-Amerika
een onheilspellende klank, immers VS bemoeienis met Midden-Amerika
betekent steun voor rechtse repressieve regimes en als gevolg daarvan vaak zware terreur tegen de bevolking…… (dat geldt overigens voor heel Latijns-Amerika) In plaats van het helpen van de bevolking in Midden-Amerika, hangt Biden het oude model aan: ‘economische ontwikkeling van landen’ waarbij zoals je begrijpt de onderliggende bedoeling is om grote bedrijven uit de VS zoveel mogelijk te laten verdienen, juist ten koste van de verschillende bevolkingen en waarbij de grondstoffen van een land op een schunnige manier worden geplunderd….. Daarbij stimuleert de VS de militairen van de landen ‘veiligheid’ te garanderen door het middels geweld tegengaan van migrantenstromen…..
Sterker
nog: deze bemoeienis betekende voor democratische gekozen Midden-Amerikaanse (en Zuid-Amerikaanse) regeringen
in het (recente en langere) verleden dat ze zich hadden te schikken
naar de eisen van de VS, daar deze grootste terreurentiteit ter wereld
er de hand niet voor omdraait om in landen met VS onwelgevallige
regimes opstanden te organiseren en regisseren om zo een verandering
van regering door te drukken, waarbij de VS illegale sancties instelt
(zonder VN resolutie) om zo’n land aan de bedelstaf ‘te helpen’, in
de hoop dat de daardoor ontevreden wordende bevolking in opstand komt….. En mocht dat niet
lukken gaat de VS nog verder en probeert dan de top van het leger in
die landen om te kopen en een staatsgreep te laten uitvoeren, uiteraard geregisseerd
door de CIA…… Als zelfs dat niet lukt staat de VS nog het wapen
van een false flag operatie ter beschikking, waarbij een onwillige
regering wordt beschuldigd van het aanvallen van VS burgers, of bijvoorbeeld een marineschip van de VS om zo een ‘legitimatie’ te creëren voor een inval
in zo’n land…….. (ook leugens van de CIA, veelal in samenwerking met de reguliere [massa-] media van de VS over zware onderdrukking van de bevolking van zo’n land kan een legitimatie zijn >> een ‘mooi voorbeeld’ is de enorme berg met leugens over hoe ‘inhumaan’ de regering Maduro van Venezuela omgaat met het Venezolaanse volk…..*)
Vergeet
bij dit alles niet dat Biden als vicepresident onder Obama mede
verantwoordelijk was voor het op grote schaal deporteren van
vluchtelingen naar hun land van herkomst, ook werden bij binnenkomst van die vluchtelingen in de VS kinderen
gescheiden van ouders, iets waarover de media met geen woord repten
ten tijde van dat gebeuren, dit in schrille tegenstelling tot eenzelfde handelswijze door de Trump
administratie….. (en nee ik ben om het zacht te zeggen geen fan van fascist Trump)
Ook al
onder Obama besteedde de VS kapitalen aan het versterken van de
grenscontroles aan de zuidelijke grens van Mexico en de zuidelijker liggende Midden-Amerikaanse landen……
Lees het artikel op CounterPunch dat Aviva Chomsky schreef over deze zaak en je zal helaas
moeten concluderen dat het er allesbehalve goed uitziet voor de
verdrukte volkeren in Midden-Amerika, die straks nog moeilijker
zullen kunnen vluchten voor in feite door de VS gecreëerd
geweld….. Het lijkt bijkans de EU wel met de Turkije deal, waarvan wat vluchtelingen in modelkampen hebben geprofiteerd, kampen die werden bezocht door delegaties van het EU ‘parlement’, terwijl de rest van de vluchtelingen of langs de kant van de weg ‘woonden of nog woont’ (niet langs wegen waarlangs de Turkse politie patrouilleert), dan wel in kampen in onherbergzame gebieden, kampen waar noch het Rode Kruis, of de Rode Halvemaan, noch advocaten en mensenrechtenorganisaties welkom waren en zijn…. (natuurlijk zijn dat niet de kampen die worden bezocht door delegaties van de EU……)
April
1, 2021
Will
Biden’s Central American Plan Slow Migration (or Speed It Up)?
Photograph
Source: Matt Johnson – CC
BY 2.0
Joe Biden entered the White House
with some inspiring yet contradictory positions on immigration and
Central America. He promised to reverse Donald Trump’s draconian
anti-immigrant policies while, through his “Plan
to Build Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of
Central America,” restoring “U.S. leadership in the region”
that he claimed Trump had abandoned. For Central Americans, though,
such “leadership” has an ominous ring.
Although the second half of his
plan’s name does, in fact, echo that of left-wing, grassroots
organizations like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El
Salvador (CISPES),
its content highlights a version of security and prosperity in that
region that’s more Cold War-like than CISPES-like. Instead of
solidarity (or even partnership) with Central America, Biden’s plan
actually promotes an old economic development model that has long
benefited U.S. corporations. It also aims to impose a distinctly
militarized version of “security” on the people of that region.
In addition, it focuses on enlisting Central American governments
and, in particular, their militaries to contain migration through the
use of repression.
Linking
Immigration and Foreign Policy
The clearest statement of the
president’s Central America goals appears in his “U.S.
Citizenship Act of 2021,” sent to Congress on January 20th.
That proposal offers a sweeping set of changes aimed at eliminating
President Trump’s racist exclusions, restoring rights to asylum,
and opening a path to legal status and citizenship for the immigrant
population. After the anti-immigrant barrage of the last four years,
that proposal seems worth celebrating. It follows in the footsteps of
previous bipartisan “comprehensive” compromises like the 1986
Immigration Reform and Control Act and a failed 2013 immigration
bill, both of which included a path to citizenship for many
undocumented people, while dedicating significant resources to border
“security.”
Read closely, a significant portion
of Biden’s immigration proposal focuses on the premise that
addressing the root causes of Central America’s problems will
reduce the flow of immigrants to the U.S. border. In its own words,
the Biden plan promises to promote “the rule of law, security, and
economic development in Central America” in order to “address the
key factors” contributing to emigration. Buried in its fuzzy
language, however, are long-standing bipartisan Washington goals that
should sound familiar to those who have been paying attention in
these years.
Their essence: that millions of
dollars in “aid” money should be poured into upgrading local
military and police forces in order to protect an economic model
based on private investment and the export of profits. Above all, the
privileges of foreign investors must not be threatened. As it
happens, this is the very model that Washington has imposed on the
countries of Central America over the past century, one that’s left
its lands corrupt, violent, and impoverished, and so continued to
uproot Central Americans and send them fleeing toward the United
States.
Crucial to Biden’s plan, as to
those of his predecessors, is another key element: to coerce Mexico
and Guatemala into serving as proxies for the wall only
partially builtalong the southern border of the U.S. and proudly
promoted by presidents from Bill
Clinton to Donald Trump.
While the economic model lurking
behind Biden’s plan may be old indeed, the attempt to outsource
U.S. immigration enforcement to Mexican and Central American military
and police forces has proven to be a distinctly twenty-first-century
twist on border policy.
Outsourcing the Border
(from Bush to Biden)
The idea that immigration policy
could be outsourced began long before Donald Trump notoriously
threatened, in mid-2019, to impose tariffs on Mexican goods to
pressure that country’s new president into agreeing to his demand
to collaborate with Washington’s anti-immigrant agenda. That
included, of course, Trump’s controversial “remain in Mexico”
policy that has continued to strand tens of thousands of
asylum-seekers there.
Meanwhile, for almost two decades
the United States has been bullying (and funding) military and police
forces to its south to enforce its immigration priorities,
effectively turning other countries’ borders into extensions of the
U.S. one. In the process, Mexico’s forces have regularly been
deployed on that country’s southern border, and Guatemala’s on
its border with Honduras, all to violently enforce Washington’s
immigration policies.
Such outsourcing was, in part, a
response to the successes of the immigrant rights movement in this
country. U.S. leaders hoped to evade legal scrutiny and protest at
home by making Mexico and Central America implement the uglier
aspects of their policies.
It all began with the Mérida
Initiative in 2007, a George W. Bush-initiated plan that would
direct billions of dollars to military equipment, aid, and
infrastructure in Mexico (with smaller amounts going to Central
America). One of its four pillars was the creation of “a 21st
century border” by pushing Mexico to militarize its southern
border. By 2013, Washington had funded
12 new military bases along that border with Guatemala and a 100-mile
“security cordon” north of it.
In response to what was seen as a
child-migrant crisis in the summer of 2014 (sound
familiar?), President Barack Obama further pressured Mexico to
initiate a new Southern
Border Program. Since then, tens
of millions of dollars a year have gone toward the militarization
of that border and Mexico was soon detaining tens of thousands of
migrants monthly. Not surprisingly, deportations and human-rights
violations against Central American migrants shot
updramatically there. “Our border today in effect is Mexico’s
border with Honduras and Guatemala,” exulted
Obama’s former border czar Alan Bersin in 2019. A local activist
was less sanguine, protesting
that the program “turned the border region into a war zone.”
President Trump blustered and
bullied Mexico and various Central American countries far more openly
than the previous two presidents while taking such policies to new
levels. Under his orders, Mexico formed
a new, militarized National Guard and deployed 12,000 of its members
to the Guatemalan border, even as funding from Washington helped
create high-technology infrastructure along Mexico’s southern
border, rivaling that
on the U.S. border.
Trump called for reducing aid to
Central America. Yet under his watch, most of the $3.6 billion
appropriated by Congress continued
to flow there, about half of it aimed at strengthening local military
and police units. Trump did, however, temporarily withhold
civilian aid funds to coerce Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador
into signing “safe third country” agreements that would allow the
United States to deport people with valid asylum claims to those very
countries.
Trump also demanded that Guatemala
increase security along its southern border “to stem the flow of
irregular migration” and “deploy
officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement to advise and mentor host nation
police, border security, immigration, and customs counterparts.”
Once the Central American countries conceded to Trump’s demands,
aid was restored.
This February, President Biden
suspended those safe third country agreements, but is clearly
otherwise ready to continue to outsource border enforcement to Mexico
and Central America.
The Other Side of
Militarization: “Economic Development”
As Democratic and Republican
administrations alike outsourced a militarized response to
immigration, they also sought to sell their agendas with promises of
economic-development aid to Central America. However, they
consistently promoted the very kind of assistance that historically
brought violence and poverty to the region — and so led directly to
today’s migrant crisis.
The model Washington continues to
promote is based on the idea that, if Central American governments
can woo foreign investors with improved infrastructure, tax breaks,
and weak environmental and labor laws, the “free market” will
deliver the investment, jobs, and economic growth that (in theory)
will keep people from wanting to migrate in the first place. Over and
over again in Central America’s tormented history, however, exactly
the opposite has happened. Foreign investment flowed in, eager to
take advantage of the region’s fertile lands, natural resources,
and cheap labor. This form of development — whether in support of
banana and coffee plantations in the nineteenth century or sugar,
cotton, and cattle operations after World War II — brought
Central America to its revolutions of the 1980s and its north-bound
mass migration of today.
As a model, it relies on
militarized governments to dispossess peasant farmers, freeing the
land for foreign investors. Similarly, force and terror are brought
to bear to maintain a cheap and powerless working class, allowing
investors to pay little and reap fantastic profits. Such operations,
in turn, have brought deforestation to the countryside, while their
cheap exports to the United States and elsewhere have helped foster
the high-consumption lifestyles that have only accelerated climate
change — bringing ever fiercer weather, including the rising sea
levels, more
intense storms, droughts, and floods that have further undermined
the livelihoods of the Central American poor.
Starting in the 1970s, many of
those poor workers and peasants pushed for land reform and investment
in basic rights like food, health, and education instead of simply
further enriching foreign and local elites. When peaceful protest was
met with violence, revolution followed, although only in Nicaragua
did it triumph.
Washington spent the 1980s
attempting to crush Nicaragua’s successful revolution and the
revolutionary movements against the right-wing military governments
of El Salvador and Guatemala. The peace treaties of the 1990s ended
the armed conflicts, but never addressed the fundamental social and
economic divides that underlay them. In fact, the end of those
conflicts only opened the regional floodgates for massive new foreign
investment and export booms. These involved, among other things, the
spread of maquiladora export-processing plants and the growing of new
export-oriented “non-traditional” fruits and vegetables,
as well as a boom in extractive
industries like gold, nickel, and petroleum, not to speak of the
creation of new infrastructure for mass
tourism.
In the 1980s, refugees first began
fleeing north, especially from El Salvador and Guatemala, then riven
by war, repression, and the violence of local paramilitary and death
squads. The veneer
of peace in the 1990s in no way brought an end to poverty,
repression, and violence. Both public and private armed forces
provided “security” — but only to elites and the new urban and
rural megaprojects they sponsored.
If a government did threaten
investors’ profits in any way, as when El Salvador declared a
moratorium on mining licenses, the U.S.-sponsored Central America
Free Trade Agreement enabled foreign corporations to sue and force it
to submit to binding arbitration by a World Bank body. In the Obama
years, when the elected, reformist president of Honduras tried to
enact labor and environmental improvements, Washington gave the nod
to a coup there and celebrated when the new president proudly
declared
the country “open for business” with a package of laws favoring
foreign investors.
Journalist David Bacon termed
that country’s new direction a “poverty-wage economic model”
that only fostered the rise of gangs, drug trafficking, and violence.
Protest was met with fierce repression, even as U.S. military aid
flowed in. Prior to the coup, Hondurans had barely figured among
Central American migrants to the United States. Since 2009, its
citizens have often come to predominate among those forced to flee
their homes and head north.
President Obama’s 2014 Alliance
for Prosperity offered a new round of aid for investor-driven
economic development. Journalist Dawn Paley characterized
that Alliance as in “large part a plan to build new infrastructure
that will benefit transnational corporations,” including “tax
breaks for corporate investors and new pipelines, highways, and power
lines to speed resource extraction and streamline the process of
import, assembly, and export at low-wage maquilas.” One major
project was a new gas pipeline to facilitate exports of U.S. natural
gas to Central America.
It was Obama who oversaw
Washington’s recognition of the coup in Honduras. It was Trump who
looked the other way when Guatemala in 2019 and Honduras in 2020
expelled
international anti-corruption commissions. And it was Trump who
agreed to downplay
the mounting corruption and drug trafficking charges against his
friend, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, as long as he
promoted
an investor-friendly economy and agreed to collaborate with the U.S.
president’s anti-immigrant agenda.
The January 2021 Caravan
Marks the Arrival of the Biden Years
All signs point to the Biden years
continuing what’s become the Washington norm in Central America:
outsourcing immigration policy, militarizing security there, and
promoting a model of development that claims to deter migration while
actually fueling it. In fact, President Biden’s proposal
designates $4 billion over four years for the State Department and
the U.S. Agency for International Development to distribute. Such
disbursement, however, would be conditioned on progress toward
Washington-approved goals
like “improv[ing] border security,” “inform[ing]… citizens of
the dangers of the journey to the southwest border of the United
States,” and “resolv[ing] disputes involving the confiscation of
real property of United States entities.” Significant resources
would also be directed to further developing “smart” border
technology in that region and to Border Patrol operations in Central
America.
A preview of how this is likely to
work came just as Biden took office in January 2021.
One predictable result of
Washington’s outsourcing of immigration control is that the migrant
journey from Central America has become ever more costly and
perilous. As a result, some migrants have begun gathering in large
public “caravans” for protection. Their aim: to reach the U.S.
border safely, turn themselves in to the border patrol, and request
asylum. In late January 2021, a caravan of some 7,500 Hondurans
arrived
at the Guatemalan border in hopes that the new president in
Washington would, as promised, reverse Trump’s controversial
remain-in-Mexico policy of apparently endless internment in crowded,
inadequate camps just short of the U.S.
They hadn’t known that Biden
would, in fact, continue his predecessors’ outsourcing of
immigration policy to Mexico and Central America. As it happened,
2,000 tear-gas and baton-wielding Guatemalan police and soldiers
(armed, trained, and supported by the United States) massed
at the Guatemala-Honduras border to drive them back.
One former Trump official (retained
by President Biden) tweeted
that Guatemala had “carr[ied] out its responsibilities
appropriately and lawfully.” The Mexican government, too, praised
Guatemala as it massed thousands of its troops on its own southern
border. And Juan González, Biden’s National Security Council
director for the Western Hemisphere lauded
Guatemala’s “management of the migrant flow.”
In mid-March, President Biden
appeared
to link a positive response to Mexico’s request for some of
Washington’s surplus Covid-19 vaccine to further commitments to
cracking down on migrants. One demand:
that Mexico suspend its own laws guaranteeing humane detention
conditions for families with young children. Neither country had the
capacity to provide such conditions for the large number of families
detained at the border in early 2021, but the Biden administration
preferred to press Mexico to ignore
its own laws, so that it could deport more of those families and keep
the problem out of sight of the U.S. public.
In late January 2021, CISPES joined
a large coalition of peace, solidarity, and labor organizations that
called
upon the Biden administration to rethink its Central American plans.
“The intersecting crises that millions in Central America face are
the result of decades of brutal state repression of democratic
movements by right-wing regimes and the implementation of economic
models designed to benefit local oligarchs and transnational
corporations,” CISPES wrote. “Far too often, the United States
has been a major force behind these policies, which have impoverished
the majority of the population and devastated the environment.”
The coalition called on Biden to
reject Washington’s longstanding commitment to militarized security
linked to the creation and reinforcement of investor-friendly
extractive economies in Cent
ral America. “Confronting displacement
demands a total rethinking of U.S. foreign policy,” CISPES urged.
As of mid-March, the president had not responded in any fashion to
the plea. My advice: don’t hold your breath waiting for such a
response.
This essay was distributed by
TomDispatch.
===============================================
* Al heeft de VS het tot nu toe niet aangedurfd Venezuela aan te vallen, waar Biden en zijn vicepresident Harris in aanloop van de presidentsverkiezingen in de VS de Trump administratie beschuldigde van slap optreden tegen Venezuela, wat niet veel goeds beloofd voor de nabije toekomst….. Toevallig werd vanmorgen bekend gemaakt op Radio1 dat er gevechten tussen het Venezolaanse leger en ‘gewapende groepen’ zijn uitgebroken in een Venezolaanse provincie grenzend aan Colombia, groepen uit Colombia die de grens met Venezuela oversteken als het Colombiaanse leger hen op de hielen zit…. Volgens het gekleurde verslag van Marc Bessems, correspondent van de ‘onafhankelijke’ NOS, valt het Venezolaanse leger daarbij burgers in dat gebied aan, gegarandeerd dat ook dit weer een leugen van grote proporties is…… Het is wel bijna zeker dat de VS ook hier weer loopt te stoken (later meer daarover)……..
Zie ook: ‘Honduras in de greep van VS ‘vriendelijke terreur’: een deel van de bevolking vlucht richting VS‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht!!)
‘BBC met ‘onafhankelijke propaganda’ tegen de Venezolaanse president Maduro‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht!!)
‘Met Joe Biden is er niets veranderd op de wereld, anders dan dat ‘het Trump fascisme is weggestemd’‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht!!)
‘Biden komt verkiezingsbeloften niet na: zo blijft de VS oorlog voeren en de genocide in Jemen steunen‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht)
‘Joe Biden, de nieuwe VS president heeft een ‘grote’ racistische geschiedenis‘
‘NOS liegt weer over Evo Morales (Boliviaanse president) die met coup werd afgezet‘ (en zie de links in dat bericht)
‘Hugo Chavez dood‘ (bericht van 6 maart 2013)
