To honor those who have died and suffered from the fires Biden nominee Elliott Abrams lit and fanned abroad, we must stop his appointment.

( Cronkite News ) – TAPACHULA, MEXICO – The desperation here is palpable.

It fills the stifling air as migrants line up in the hot sun outside the National Migration Institute in hopes of receiving an interview, their children close at hand and their visa applications tucked under their arms in colorful protected sleeves so the papers won’t get ruined on the nights their families sleep outside in the rain.

It strains the voices of the asylum seekers protesting outside a news conference by Mexico’s president, as they chant demands for action before some sew their mouths shut in defiant, gruesome silence.

Yobel Ruiz and his daughter, Milaidy, 5, wait outside one of the immigration offices in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 8, 2022. The pair fled their home in Panama’s Darién Province the month before, after guerrillas kidnapped Ruiz’s wife. Ruiz hopes to be granted asylum and move to Florida, where a cousin lives. He still doesn’t know the fate of his wife. (Photo by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project)

And it wells in the eyes of displaced Haitians – struggling to deal with a system entrenched in anti-Black racism – when they throw rocks and set fires on the streets to bring attention to their plight.

These moments unfold day after day in Tapachula, a city of about 350,000 near the border of Guatemala that has long served as a waystation for migrants spurred north by political turmoil, gang violence, discrimination and poor economic prospects in their countries of origin.

But as the United States has pressed Mexico to stem the flow of people heading to the U.S. in recent years, tens of thousands of migrants have become trapped here in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state.

They now face extreme limitations on their movements, few job prospects, poor living conditions and long waits for immigration hearings in an environment some have labeled an “open-air prison” and others have described as a southern extension of the U.S.-Mexico border.

“You see misery. You see anger. You see desperation,” said Freddy Castillo, a Haitian migrant who arrived in Tapachula last August. “People say, ‘Well, what did I come here for?’ You know, the situation is bad in my country. But that’s supposed to stay there, because I (want to) have maybe a better life someday.”

As frustrations have reached a boiling point in the city, thousands of migrants set off in the rain Monday for the United States. The group intends to walk the length of Mexico and could grow to as many as 15,000 people, by some estimates – a number that would make this caravan the largest ever recorded in the country, according to The Guardian.

Many of the migrants who end up in Tapachula are from Honduras, El Salvador and other Central American countries, but others started their journeys from such far-flung places as Palestine, Cuba, Nigeria, Brazil and, recently, Ukraine.

After escaping the sometimes brutal conditions in their home countries, migrants moving up through South America must pass through the treacherous Darién Gap, a more than 60-mile stretch of jungle that connects Colombia to Panama, where robberies, rapes and encounters with animals are frequent.

The journey takes multiple days for most migrants. And those who make it out alive sometimes view Mexico as a reprieve, said Yamel Athie, a Tapachula resident and community organizer who has been facilitating dialogue between migrants and locals.

Instead, they face only more challenges.

“Imagine if you are from Africa or the Middle East or Haiti and you have spent months fighting to survive, to live, to eat, to pay for your trip,” Athie said. “And when you arrive here, with all of your emotions at the surface because you are reaching your goal, you smash into a wall. And it is a wall that will break your soul.”

Left: Haitian migrants clash with the Mexican National Guard in front of the National Institute for Migration in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 4, 2022. During the protest, migrants threw rocks and set street fires in frustration with their conditions in the city of 350,000 people. Right: Katerine Martinez, 28, has her mouth sewn shut during Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s visit to Tapachula on March 11, 2022. López Obrador told local officials the best way to help migrants was not to improve conditions in Mexico but to create work programs for them in Central America. Not all the migrants in Tapachula are from Central America. (Photos by Drake Presto/Cronkite Borderlands Project)

The new caravan is yet another sign that although Mexico has stemmed the flow of migrants on their way to the United States, it hasn’t shut it off completely. In April, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that U.S. officials encountered about 230,000 people attempting to cross the southern border – the highest monthly total in at least the past four years. An encounter is defined as either the apprehension or expulsion of a migrant.

And some analysts predict even more will come because of President Joe Biden’s stated intention to end Title 42 – a policy the federal government used during the pandemic to expel thousands of migrants under the guise of public health protections. Shortly after Biden’s April 1 announcement, groups of migrants took off from Tapachula for the United States, defying local restrictions on their movements. Some fought with police and Mexican immigration officials.

On May 20, a U.S. federal judge blocked the Biden administration from ending Title 42, agreeing with a complaint from 24 states that the move would increase illegal immigration. He also ruled that the administration must provide public notice and a comment period before ending the policy. The administration has announced it intends to appeal the ruling.

Despite migrants’ frequent complaints of poor conditions in Tapachula, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico offered little recognition of and few solutions during his remarks at a news conference in the city March 11.

The best way to help migrants, he said during a brief discussion of the issue, was not to improve conditions in Mexico but to create work programs for them in Central America.

“People don’t hit the road because they enjoy it but because of necessity,” he said. “The majority of the migrants are young people who want to move forward and progress in life – so we have been proposing that there be investment in Guatemala, in Honduras, in El Salvador.”

That approach mirrors the United States’ “root causes” strategy, which seeks to address the forces that push people to leave their home countries as part of an effort to stem migration before it begins. But the strategy would do nothing to help improve conditions for the migrants who protested beyond the white tent set up for López Obrador’s visit.

Wairiuko Samuel Kimani, an asylum seeker who said he fled his home country of Kenya after his family learned he was gay, survived 10 days in the rainforest in Panama. He said being in Tapachula has been worse even than that. At least in the jungle, he saw a way out.

“These people you see here,” he said, motioning around to the mass of migrants nearby, “they are very frustrated because we thought getting out of the Darién Gap was all. We thought that was our living nightmare. But actually Mexico is.”

The U.S flag is set up in the Suchiate River, which separates Mexico and Guatemala, during a 10-day religious festival on March 4, 2022. Some observers have called the nearby city of Tapachula, Mexico, the “new U.S. border,” and the flag served as a physical representation of that idea. (Photo by Drake Presto/Cronkite Borderlands Project)

‘The job of President Donald Trump’

During a religious festival in early March, three national flags were posted in the middle of the Suchiate River, which separates Chiapas state and Guatemala – the Mexican flag, the Guatemalan flag and the stars and stripes – a symbol of U.S. influence here, although its border is more than a thousand miles to the north.

Unless they pay a coyote who takes a different route or they have the means to fly over Tapachula, many of the thousands of migrants who make the journey north through Central America each year will cross the Suchiate here.

About 70% to 80% of all asylum applications in Mexico are filed in Tapachula, according to the local refugee office. In 2021, that number was 89,000 applicants. And because the city is so close to a main route into the country from Guatemala, Tapachula is “always going to be a place of pressure and then relieving that pressure and then pressure again” when it comes to migration, said Rachel Schmidtke, an advocate for Latin America with the global nonprofit Refugees International.

But the pressures here have felt higher than ever in recent years, thanks to a complicated cocktail of government bureaucracy, politics and pandemic-related challenges that have further exacerbated the difficult conditions for migrants. The same cocktail has strained Tapachula residents, who face great competition for jobs and housing.

Most experts agree that the current situation in Tapachula took root in 2019, after then-President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs starting at 5% on Mexican imports if the country didn’t increase efforts to “reduce or eliminate the number of illegal aliens” coming to the United States.

Fearing the potential impact to its economy, Mexico – whose biggest trading partner is the U.S., and vice versa – struck a deal promising to deploy members of the National Guard to its border with Guatemala. The deal also expanded the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as the “Remain in Mexico” program, which requires grants to stay in that country while awaiting immigration processing in the United States. Most applications for asylum or other forms of entry are denied.

Schmidtke said Mexico’s harder line toward immigration has in part reflected its own values, noting that the country doesn’t want “a lot of refugees or migrants.” But the U.S. also plays a “pretty significant role in Mexico’s immigration policies,” she said.

“I absolutely believe that U.S. pressure on Mexico has a lot to do with why Mexico has militarized its southern border and is trying to keep migrants out of the country – to stop flows of people coming to the U.S.-Mexico border,” she added.

Rosbalis Parez and her son, Daniel Alejandro, 2, wait in the crowd outside the COMAR office in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 9, 2022. The Venezuelan migrants have been living in a tent close to the office while waiting for their immigration paperwork. (Photo by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project)

Left: Venezuelan migrants compile a list of their names and immigration numbers at a protest outside the COMAR office in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 9, 2022. The group planned to give the list to COMAR and ask that their immigration paperwork be expedited. Right: Two people hug as they wait to enter the COMAR office in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 9, 2022. Mexico’s complicated process of applying for asylum typically takes months, and many applicants are unsuccessful. (Photos by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project)

López Obrador, for his part, has said the shifts in Mexican policy are not a result of his bowing to U.S. pressure. Instead, migrants are being kept in the south to protect them from the powerful gangs that operate near Mexico’s northern border, he said.

“We don’t want them to come to the north where they might become drug addicts or victims of crime,” he said in a press conference in January 2020.

Whatever the motivations, experts say the policy shifts that resulted from the 2019 deal have significantly restricted the movement of migrants.

Before the agreement, “people were for the most part getting through Mexico,” said Arturo Viscarra, a staff attorney with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, a nonprofit migrant advocacy and civil rights group that is working in Tapachula.

But the National Guard’s increased militarization of the southern border has since made it “more difficult” for people to get through the country, he said.

Just one month after the countries signed their deal, the Mexican National Institute for Migration held more than 30,000 migrants in detention – “the highest number of detentions made in a month in the last 13 years,” according to Refugees International.

In Tapachula, Kimani, the Kenyan migrant, described the city as a prison, noting that many migrants struggle to leave without proper paperwork.

“I think this, all this you see here, is the job of President Donald Trump,” he said, gesturing to the masses of people gathered outside the National Migration Institute office.

Although experts and migrants blame Trump for some of the on-the-ground realities migrants face in Mexico, Kimani said U.S. politics continue to drive changes here even under a new administration.

He said he’s heard from several migrants who began their journeys after Biden was elected in 2020, in hopes that they might benefit from the Democrats’ softer approach to immigration.

But while the rhetoric has changed significantly under the new president, many U.S. immigration policies have remained much the same – and they continue to send ripple effects from the southern border of one country to the other.

“Most people came because they thought Biden would have a new effort or a better effort toward migration,” Kimani said. “According to what I have read, he hasn’t done much.”

‘I need free movement’

On a muggy day in March, migrants line the wall up and down a colorful mural outside the National Migration Institute office, desperate to obtain an audience with officials who could grant them an earlier immigration appointment. The energy in the air is at once frenetic – as if a protest could erupt at any moment – and listless, as the day gets hotter and they go longer without food and water.

“Every day people are here,” Kimani said, “because they’re trying to reduce their dates. There are people whose dates have been reduced, but I don’t know how they choose who they reduce their dates for.”

Near the office, National Guard members with shields keep the crowd at bay, avoiding eye contact with the migrants huddled before them.

Daniela Cisneros and her son, Mesias, 5, rest outside an immigration office in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 8, 2022. The family arrived at 4 a.m. to wait for her husband’s immigration appointment. Cisneros and her son weren’t able to get an appointment until 10 days later. (Photo by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project)

Left: National Guard officers stand between an immigration office in Tapachula, Mexico, and the dozens of migrants awaiting entry on March 8, 2022. In recent months, there have been multiple clashes between migrants and law enforcement in the city of 350,000. Right: A young girl waits with her family outside an immigration office in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 8, 2022. Obtaining the necessary paperwork to move freely throughout Mexico can take months. (Photos by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project)

Among the group are Maria Linares and Yandry Mijares of Venezuela, who said they fled the government corruption and violence of their home country in hopes of securing a better life for their son and daughter.

But after they arrived in Tapachula in January, the family found that their struggles were only compounding. Unable to find work, they struggled to pay rent and instead had to sleep on the streets each night. Unable to buy food, their children were facing malnutrition. And without proper immigration documents, they said, their asthmatic son can’t get a prescription for an inhaler.

Linares spread paperwork out across her hands showing that each family member had a different immigration appointment date – all of which were weeks into the future.

Even under normal circumstances, the process to apply for asylum or a humanitarian visa in Mexico can be long and complex, requiring multiple appointments, interviews and documents. And the stakes are high for people like Linares and Mijares, who are sometimes stuck in limbo for weeks or even months without proper immigration papers.

As they wait for their applications to be processed, migrants are required to stay in the state where they submitted their claim. In the meantime, they become effectively stuck in Tapachula, with limited housing and job opportunities.

Left: Migrants sign up for a day’s work at Mercado Laureles in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 8, 2022. They can earn a modest income by helping maintain public spaces, such as parks and markets, through a government work program. Right: Eduin and his son, Samid, 4, pick up trash on the grounds of Mercado Laureles in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 8, 2022. The family, who provided only their first names and are seeking asylum, left Venezuela two months earlier and are living in a shelter while they apply for refugee status. (Photos by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project)

Those who try to leave the city without authorization risk detainment in the government-run immigration center known as Siglo XXI, and they could be deported to their home countries.

Mexico’s already challenging immigration process was further complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted the United States to effectively close its borders to migrants under Title 42. Since Title 42 was enacted, Schmidtke said, many migrants became “basically incentivized to stay longer in Mexico.”

The number of asylum applications had already been rising in Mexico, doubling “each year from 2015 to 2019,” according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service. But by 2020, the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid, known by its Spanish acronym of COMAR, faced steep backlogs, which it was able to work through only with help from the U.N. High Commissioner. The agency in 2021 again struggled “to meet record demand” for asylum claims.

Although the number of applications has spiked, not all these migrants want to achieve refugee status in Mexico – particularly because doing so could complicate their efforts to ultimately get legal protection in the United States. And not all the applicants are necessarily eligible for asylum, an international protection available only to people who can prove a “well-founded fear of persecution” based on their race, religion, political opinion, nationality or membership in a particular social group.

Mexico does offer asylum to a broader subset of people than the United States. People whose home countries face “generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive human rights violations, and other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order” are also eligible for asylum under the Cartagena Declaration, a non-binding agreement reached in 1984.

In some cases, migrants apply for asylum in Tapachula as a protection against deportation because they can’t be booted out of the country until their claim has been processed. Others apply so they can obtain a humanitarian visa free of cost, according to Alma Cruz, who is in charge of COMAR’s Tapachula office.

The visas, which are issued by the National Institute for Migration and are valid for six months to a year, facilitate access to important government services, including education, health care and permission to work, according to Refugees International.

That’s why long waits for humanitarian visas pose such a problem for migrants stuck in Tapachula.

“The people are coming to us, and if you ask them, they don’t want to be here,” Cruz said. “They don’t want to be refugees here. The complaint of the people is, ‘I need free movement in Mexico. … I need a humanitarian visa. I need to go out from here as soon as possible.’ And COMAR is not the source of the problem.”

‘It’s better not to come right now’

While they wait for documentation, masses of migrants in Tapachula spend long days in parks or in the city square, where the men often bide their time playing chess and the women braiding each other’s hair.

Some resell goods on the streets, keeping a watchful eye out for city employees who could shut them down for operating without work permits. Others beg passerbys for money for food or other necessities.

Migrants help unload produce at Mercado San Juan in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 5, 2022. They work at the market from 2 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily, earning the equivalent of $10 a day. (Photo by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project)

Haitian women braid hair in Parque Benito Juárez in central Tapachula, Mexico, on March 8, 2022. With few work opportunities, many migrants have come up with creative ways to earn a living. (Photo by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project)

Oscar Sierra, who fled Honduras with his wife and three children in early January, looked for formal work when he arrived in Tapachula but found his options limited. He considered a particular job only to learn that it required grueling hours from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., with a daily wage of 150 pesos (about $7.50).

“It is heavy,” he said, standing with his wife and three children in front of the city steps where they slept their first night in Tapachula. “The people are taken advantage of.”

Sierra said his family had a good life in Honduras and never imagined they would have to leave everything. But as their piñata business became more successful, gangs took notice and began extorting them for money. They were quickly in over their heads, estimating that they owed thousands in protection money. And they feared that they would be killed when the payday came.

That’s when they left everything they owned and got on a bus to Tapachula.

The family ultimately hopes to make it to the United States to restart their business. In the meantime, they’re trying to pay the bills by churning out piñatas in their small apartment at a rate of four or five per day. But at 2,000 pesos a month, the apartment isn’t cheap, and they’ve had trouble making rent.

Oscar and Lizeth Sierra and their three children pose on the steps where they slept after arriving in Tapachula, Mexico, two months earlier. They left their home and thriving piñata business in Honduras after falling $180,000 behind on extortion payments to local gangs. The family eventually hopes to go to the United States. (Photo by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project)

“The economic situation is complicated,” said Lizeth, Oscar’s wife.

Government jobs programs can help some migrants, but not everyone can take advantage of them.

After finding ways to make money, obtaining shelter is among the biggest challenges migrants face in Tapachula.

Landlords often charge them exorbitant rents, which some migrants counter by sharing a unit with others to split the cost. Athie, the community organizer, said space was so limited in December that some homeowners began charging people to sleep on their roofs.

“They put up plastic tarps, and people charged them for this,” she said. “It is very sad.”

Some migrants end up in shelters, but space is limited and they often are over capacity, according to a March report from the humanitarian aid organization UNICEF. So those who can’t find work often end up sleeping on the streets; the lucky ones finding an out-of-the-way corner or a thick piece of cardboard to provide some support from the hard ground.

Darwin Chevez and his girlfriend, Anna, relax on their “bed” in Parque Bicentenario in Tapachula, Mexico, on March 8, 2022. While living in the park for three months, the pair slept on a piece of cardboard and walked 4 kilometers to a river to bathe. They have since arrived in California and are looking for work. (Photo by Juliette Rihl/Cronkite Borderlands Project)

Despite their limited resources and different backgrounds, some migrants do their best to help others.

On one occasion, a group pooled their money together so they could prepare a community meal near the town square – a small act of solidarity within a population that so often ends up fighting for scraps.

“Many of the children were very hungry – not just the Haitian children, but Venezuelan children, all of us,” said Wilnot Devalsaint, a Haitian migrant who has been in Tapachula since late last year. “So what do we do among all of us? We asked, ‘Do you have 10 pesos, 5 pesos, 4 pesos, 20 pesos?’ And so we put it all together to make food. To help each other.”

For all the challenges migrants have faced here, Athie said, their influx also has strained longtime residents of Chiapas state, leaving them with fewer jobs and housing options. Some even see the presence of so many outsiders in the small, poor city of Tapachula as something of an invasion, she said.

“The local people feel really harmed by the presence of migrants here,” Athie said.

Oscar Ulises Sol Diva, a lifelong Tapachula resident, said he has stopped walking his dog at night over fears of violence. He said he understands the obstacles migrants face but noted that many permanent residents in the community don’t have much to give – they’re struggling themselves to find work and to feed their families.

“I don’t know,” he said, “it makes us mad sometimes, with the migrants. They want everything. They say, ‘Give me, give me!’”

Athie, whose family migrated to Mexico from Lebanon, said she has tried to help both sides better understand one another through a community Facebook group she started. On it, she advocates for “a dialogue and a language where we are able to share the co-humanity of everyone and the necessities that we all have.”

Because in an area that’s long been shaped by migration, for better and for worse, experts say it’s unlikely that the flow of people through Tapachula will end anytime soon.

Kimani and other migrants, however, said that if they’d known what awaited them in Tapachula and on their journey here, they would have never left home.

“If you are not in immediate danger, if it’s something you can control, it’s better not to come right now,” Kimani said he would advise other migrants. “Here, people are sleeping out. They don’t have food. They don’t have somewhere to sleep. People are desperate.”

Don’t come, he added, unless “you are willing to be that kind of desperate.”

Via Cronkite News

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Earlier this month, a Honduran court found David Castillo, a U.S.-trained former Army intelligence officer and the head of an internationally financed hydroelectric company, guilty of the 2016 murder of celebrated Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres. His company was building a dam that threatened the traditional lands and water sources of the Indigenous Lenca people. For years, Cáceres and her organization, the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, or COPINH, had led the struggle to halt that project. It turned out, however, that Cáceres’s international recognition — she won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 — couldn’t protect her from becoming one of the dozens of Latin American Indigenous and environmental activists killed annually.

Yet when President Joe Biden came into office with an ambitious “Plan for Security and Prosperity in Central America,” he wasn’t talking about changing policies that promoted big development projects against the will of local inhabitants. Rather, he was focused on a very different goal: stopping migration. His plan, he claimed, would address its “root causes.” Vice President Kamala Harris was even blunter when she visited Guatemala, instructing potential migrants: “Do not come.”

As it happens, more military and private development aid of the sort Biden’s plan calls for (and Harris boasted about) won’t either stop migration or help Central America. It’s destined, however, to spark yet more crimes like Cáceres’s murder. There are other things the United States could do that would aid Central America. The first might simply be to stop talking about trying to end migration.

How Can the United States Help Central America?

Biden and Harris are only recycling policy prescriptions that have been around for decades: promote foreign investment in Central America’s export economy, while building up militarized “security” in the region. In truth, it’s the very economic model the United States has imposed there since the nineteenth century, which has brought neither security nor prosperity to the region (though it’s brought both to U.S. investors there). It’s also the model that has displaced millions of Central Americans from their homes and so is the fundamental cause of what, in this country, is so often referred to as the “crisis” of immigration.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the U.S. began imposing that very model to overcome what officials regularly described as Central American “savagery” and “banditry.” The pattern continued as Washington found a new enemy, communism, to battle there in the second half of the last century. Now, Biden promises that the very same policies — foreign investment and eternal support for the export economy — will end migration by attacking its “root causes”: poverty, violence, and corruption. (Or call them “savagery” and “banditry,” if you will.) It’s true that Central America is indeed plagued by poverty, violence, and corruption, but if Biden were willing to look at the root causes of his root causes, he might notice that his aren’t the solutions to such problems, but their source.

Stopping migration from Central America is no more a legitimate policy goal than was stopping savagery, banditry, or communism in the twentieth century. In fact, what Washington policymakers called savagery (Indigenous people living autonomously on their lands), banditry (the poor trying to recover what the rich had stolen from them), and communism (land reform and support for the rights of oppressed workers and peasants) were actually potential solutions to the very poverty, violence, and corruption imposed by the US-backed ruling elites in the region. And maybe migration is likewise part of Central Americans’ struggle to solve these problems. After all, migrants working in this country send back more money in remittances to their families in Central America than the United States has ever given in foreign aid.

What, then, would a constructive U.S. policy towards Central America look like?

Perhaps the most fundamental baseline of foreign policy should be that classic summary of the Hippocratic Oath: do no harm. As for doing some good, before the subject can even be discussed, there needs to be an acknowledgement that so much of what we’ve done to Central America over the past 200 years has been nothing but harm.

The United States could begin by assuming historical responsibility for the disasters it’s created there. After the counterinsurgency wars of the 1980s, the United Nations sponsored truth commissions in El Salvador and Guatemala to uncover the crimes committed against civilian populations there. Unfortunately, those commissions didn’t investigate Washington’s role in funding and promoting war crimes in the region.

Maybe what’s now needed is a new truth commission to investigate historic U.S. crimes in Central America. In reality, the United States owes those small, poor, violent, and corrupt countries reparations for the damages it’s caused over all these years. Such an investigation might begin with Washington’s long history of sponsoring coups, military “aid,” armed interventions, massacres, assassinations, and genocide.

The U.S. would have to focus as well on the impacts of ongoing economic aid since the 1980s, aimed at helping U.S. corporations at the expense of the Central American poor. It could similarly examine the role of debt and the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement in fostering corporate and elite interests. And don’t forget the way the outsized U.S. contribution to greenhouse gas emissions — this country is, of course, the largest such emitter in history — and climate change has contributed to the destruction of livelihoods in Central America. Finally, it could investigate how our border and immigration policies directly contribute to keeping Central America poor, violent, and corrupt, in the name of stopping migration.

Constructive Options for U.S. Policy in Central America

Providing Vaccines: Even as Washington rethinks the fundamentals of this country’s policies there, it could take immediate steps on one front, the Covid-19 pandemic, which has been devastating the region. Central America is in desperate need of vaccines, syringes, testing materials, and personal protective equipment. A history of underfunding, debt, and privatization, often due directly or indirectly to U.S. policy, has left Central America’s healthcare systems in shambles. While Latin America as a whole has been struggling to acquire the vaccines it needs, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua rank at the very bottom of doses administered. If the United States actually wanted to help Central America, the emergency provision of what those countries need to get vaccines into arms would be an obvious place to start.

Buy the Book

Reversing economic exploitation: Addressing the structural and institutional bases of economic exploitation could also have a powerful impact. First, we could undo the harmful provisions of the 2005 Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Yes, Central American governments beholden to Washington did sign on to it, but that doesn’t mean that the agreement benefited the majority of the inhabitants in the region. In reality, what CAFTA did was throw open Central American markets to U.S. agricultural exports, in the process undermining the livelihoods of small farmers there.

CAFTA also gave a boost to the maquiladora or export-processing businesses, lending an all-too-generous hand to textile, garment, pharmaceutical, electronics, and other industries that regularly scour the globe for the cheapest places to manufacture their goods. In the process, it created mainly the kind of low-quality jobs that corporations can easily move anytime in an ongoing global race to the bottom.

Central American social movements have also vehemently protested CAFTA provisions that undermine local regulations and social protections, while privileging foreign corporations. At this point, local governments in that region can’t even enforce the most basic laws they’ve passed to regulate such deeply exploitative foreign investors.

Another severe restriction that prevents Central American governments from pursuing economic policies in the interest of their populations is government debt. Private banks lavished loans on dictatorial governments in the 1970s, then pumped up interest rates in the 1980s, causing those debts to balloon. The International Monetary Fund stepped in to bail out the banks, imposing debt restructuring programs on already-impoverished countries — in other words, making the poor pay for the profligacy of the wealthy.

For real economic development, governments need the resources to fund health, education, and welfare. Unsustainable and unpayable debt (compounded by ever-growing interest) make it impossible for such governments to dedicate resources where they’re truly needed. A debt jubilee would be a crucial step towards restructuring the global economy and shifting the stream of global resources that currently flows so strongly from the poorest to the richest countries.

Now, add another disastrous factor to this equation: the U.S. “drug wars” that have proven to be a key factor in the spread of violence, displacement, and corruption in Central America. The focus of the drug war on Mexico in the early 2000s spurred an orgy of gang violence there, while pushing the trade south into Central America. The results have been disastrous. As drug traffickers moved in, they brought violence, land grabs, and capital for new cattle and palm-oil industries, drawing in corrupt politicians and investors. Pouring arms and aid into the drug wars that have exploded in Central America has only made trafficking even more corrupt, violent, and profitable.

Reversing climate change: In recent years, ever more extreme weather in Central America’s “dry corridor,” running from Guatemala through El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, has destroyed homes, farms, and livelihoods, and this climate-change-induced trend is only worsening by the year. While the news largely tends to present ongoing drought, punctuated by ever more frequent and violent hurricanes and tropical storms, as well as increasingly disastrous flooding, as so many individual occurrences, their heightened frequency is certainly a result of climate change. And about a third of Central America’s migrants directly cite extreme weather as the reason they were forced to leave their homes. Climate change is, in fact, just what the U.S. Department of Defense all-too-correctly termed a “threat multiplier” that contributes to food and water scarcity, land conflicts, unemployment, violence, and other causes of migration.

The United States has, of course, played and continues to play an outsized role in contributing to climate change. And, in fact, we continue to emit far more CO2 per person than any other large country. We also produce and export large amounts of fossil fuels — the U.S., in fact, is one of the world’s largest exporters as well as one of the largest consumers. And we continue to fund and promote fossil-fuel-dependent development at home and abroad. One of the best ways the United States could help Central America would be to focus time, energy, and money on stopping the burning of fossil fuels.

Migration as a Problem Solver

Isn’t it finally time that the officials and citizens of the United States recognized the role migration plays in Central American economies? Where U.S. economic development recipes have failed so disastrously, migration has been the response to these failures and, for many Central Americans, the only available way to survive.

One in four Guatemalan families relies on remittances from relatives working in the United States and such monies account for about half of their income. President Biden may have promised Central America $4 billion in aid over four years, but Guatemala alone receives $9 billion a year in such remittances. And unlike government aid, much of which ends up in the pockets of U.S. corporations, local entrepreneurs, and bureaucrats of various sorts, remittances go directly to meet the needs of ordinary households.

At present, migration is a concrete way that Central Americans are trying to solve their all-too-desperate problems. Since the nineteenth century, Indigenous and peasant communities have repeatedly sought self-sufficiency and autonomy, only to be displaced by U.S. plantations in the name of progress. They’ve tried organizing peasant and labor movements to fight for land reform and workers’ rights, only to be crushed by U.S.-trained and sponsored militaries in the name of anti-communism. With other alternatives foreclosed, migration has proven to be a twenty-first-century form of resistance and survival.

If migration can be a path to overcome economic crises, then instead of framing Washington’s Central American policy as a way to stop it, the United States could reverse course and look for ways to enhance migration’s ability to solve problems.

Jason DeParle aptly titled his recent book on migrant workers from the Philippines A Good Provider is One Who Leaves. “Good providers should not have to leave,” responded the World Bank’s Dilip Ratha, “but they should have the option.” As Ratha explains,

“Migrants benefit their destination countries. They provide essential skills that may be missing and fill jobs that native-born people may not want to perform. Migrants pay taxes and are statistically less prone to commit crimes than native-born people… Migration benefits the migrant and their extended family and offers the potential to break the cycle of poverty. For women, migration elevates their standing in the family and the society. For children, it provides access to healthcare, education, and a higher standard of living. And for many countries of origin, remittances provide a lifeline in terms of external, counter-cyclical financing.”

Migration can also have terrible costs. Families are separated, while many migrants face perilous conditions, including violence, detention, and potentially death on their journeys, not to speak of inadequate legal protection, housing, and working conditions once they reach their destination. This country could do a lot to mitigate such costs, many of which are under its direct control. The United States could open its borders to migrant workers and their families, grant them full legal rights and protections, and raise the minimum wage.

Would such policies lead to a large upsurge in migration from Central America? In the short run, they might, given the current state of that region under conditions created and exacerbated by Washington’s policies over the past 40 years. In the longer run, however, easing the costs of migration actually could end up easing the structural conditions that cause it in the first place.

Improving the safety, rights, and working conditions of migrants would help Central America far more than any of the policies Biden and Harris are proposing. More security and higher wages would enable migrants to provide greater support for families back home. As a result, some would return home sooner. Smuggling and human trafficking rings, which take advantage of illegal migration, would wither from disuse. The enormous resources currently aimed at policing the border could be shifted to immigrant services. If migrants could come and go freely, many would go back to some version of the circular migration pattern that prevailed among Mexicans before the militarization of the border began to undercut that option in the 1990s. Long-term family separation would be reduced. Greater access to jobs, education, and opportunity has been shown to be one of the most effective anti-gang strategies.

In other words, there’s plenty the United States could do to develop more constructive policies towards Central America and its inhabitants. That, however, would require thinking far more deeply about the “root causes” of the present catastrophe than Biden, Harris, and crew seem willing to do. In truth, the policies of this country bear an overwhelming responsibility for creating the very structural conditions that cause the stream of migrants that both Democrats and Republicans have decried, turning the act of simple survival into an eternal “crisis” for those very migrants and their families. A change in course is long overdue.

Copyright 2021 Aviva Chomsky

Via Tomdispatch.com