What is forcing thousands of migrants to flee their home countries?

Wed 5 Dec 2018 15.48 GMT

What is forcing thousands of migrants to flee their home countries?

The United States is more to blame for its immigration problem than it would like to take credit for

By Michael Deibert

The Guardian

(Read the original article here)

The mass of humanity living in a makeshift encampment at the US border with Mexico is driven by historical forces of which many Americans are only dimly aware.

Demonized by Donald Trump as an “invasion” of miscreants who should be housed in concentration camp-like tent cities, the migrants, many of whom are in fact planning on applying for asylum, persist under the weight of a US history in their home countries as heavy as any burden they carry with them.

Though several caravans have made the trek to the United States over the last year, the one that attracted Trump’s attention left San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras, on 12 October. It was largely made up of citizens of that country, as well as some from El Salvador and Guatemala.

Traversing a route infamous for its danger – the Mexican leg of the journey crosses states long in thrall to the country’s powerful drug cartels – their safety in numbers logic is self-evident. What is forcing thousands of people into such a precarious flight?

In Honduras, where the caravan originated, the past decade has seen the terrorizing effects of street violence by criminal gangs exacerbated by an increased presence of Mexican cartels, police abuses and the murder of human rights and environmental activists, most notoriously that of Berta Cáceres in 2016.

Much of this current instability can be traced back to the June 2009 ouster of its then president, the erratic leftist Manuel Zelaya. Though the then US president Barack Obama declared the ouster “not legal”, his administration subsequently worked with regional powers such as Mexico to assure Zelaya did not return to office.

After Zelaya’s overthrow, Honduras was run by a series of rightwing leaders. When the most recent of them, Juan Orlando Hernández, looked likely to lose his re-election last year to the former journalist Salvador Nasralla, his government responded with a repression that Amnesty International characterized as having “violated international norms and the right to personal integrity, liberty and fair trial guarantees”.

At least 31 people, the vast majority civilians, died in the violence, but Orlando Hernández continued in office, with Trump’s state department congratulating him on his victory while stressing “the need for a robust national dialogue”.

Honduras is hardly the only country whose society has been undermined by US political decisions both recent and historic.

In neighboring Guatemala, the US provided extensive aid to the Guatemalan military during the country’s 1960 to 1996 civil war, which killed an estimated 200,000 people. The war itself was to a large extent an outgrowth of a US-backed coup that ousted the country’s democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz, in 1954.

More recently, the Trump administration has lent its support to attempts to neutralize the Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (Cicig), a United Nations-backed body tasked with investigating organized crime and its links to political actors.

One of those actors is Guatemala’s current president, former comedian Jimmy Morales, who is under investigation for allegedly accepting illicit campaign contributions, and came to power with the support of some of the most reactionary elements of the country’s military.

Under the rule of Morales, the Guatemalan government was one of only a handful that followed Trump’s decision to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem this past May. With his undercutting of Cicig, many view Trump as returning the favour.

But perhaps no country’s history attests to the US role in helping to create the conditions for this latter-day exodus than El Salvador.

After an October 1979 coup resulted in a military-civilian junta, the US government, first under Jimmy Carter and then under Ronald Reagan, supported the junta even as its civilian members resigned and it grew more violent.

As political polarization accelerated, a bubbling multi-front guerrilla insurgency united under the umbrella of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). In turn, the FMLN was met with increasing death-squad activity by the right. Much of this violence was orchestrated by US-trained Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, a former intelligence official.

The United States worked furiously to prevent a D’Aubuisson victory in 1984 elections that saw center-right José Napoleón Duarte come to power. Despite its role in preventing D’Aubuisson’s election, the US government for years poured money into Salvadoran military bodies such as the Atlacatl Battalion, whose chief military maneuver appears to have been the massacre, a tendency which it carried out in mass killings in hamlets such as El Mozote and El Calabozo and even in the capital, where it murdered six Jesuit priests and two lay workers in 1989.

Both during his campaign and his president, Trump has frequently inveighed against criminal organizations with links to El Salvador and their malign influence on the United States. Here, too, the history is more complicated – and more shaped by the US – than many acknowledge.

During El Salvador’s civil war, which lasted until 1992 and killed an estimated 75,000 Salvadorans, hundreds of thousands fled to the United States, especially to southern California. There, young Salvadoran boys found themselves endangered by local gangs and coalesced into their own groups, including Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

When some of these young gang members, not US citizens though culturally American, were deported back to El Salvador, they took California’s gang culture with them. The gangs have since proliferated throughout Central America. Though MS-13 remains the bete noire of Trump and his acolytes, the American origins of the gang go almost unreported.

All this being the case, it is rather irresponsible for the United States to take such an active role in creating the conditions that make people want to flee the countries that make up the Central American isthmus and then profess shock when they do so.

The caravans themselves push on, as the assassinated Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton once wrote, “far from where hope is already left behind”.

Garífunas Confront Their Own Decline

Garífunas Confront Their Own Decline

The Garífuna culture, a "masterpiece" of human heritage according to UNESCO, could disappear as the result of the privatization of Central America's beaches.

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

MIAMI, Honduras, Oct 6, 2008 (Tierramérica).- "The Garífuna were the best sailors in the world," says Jermonino Barrios, standing barefoot on this slender thread of land between the Laguna de Los Micos and the blue Caribbean Sea.

Barrios, 67, a former soldier, speaks proudly of his ethnic group, whose members are scattered across Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

"Before, we had 200 or 300 Garífuna living here; now there are only a few," he tells Tierramérica.

"They went to the United States for work, and other places," he explains with a note of regret, gazing back at the collection of thatched-roof huts lazing under palms trees that front the crashing surf.

In the tumultuous history of Europe's incursion into the Americas and the trafficking of slaves from Africa to its shores, their are few stories as dramatic or moving as that of the Garífuna.

Read the full article here.

Remembering Andy Palacio

In the fall of 2003, I lived in Guatemala for a time while covering that country’s presidential election. My work reporting on the electoral contest between former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt and his opponent Óscar Berger, and the legacy of the country’s terrible 36-year civil war, took me to many parts of this often almost surreally beautiful place.

In Guatemala City, I spoke with people like Jose Ruben Zamora, editor of Guatemala's El Periodico newspaper, and listened to his struggle trying to function as an independent, investigative journalist in a country where clandestine forces attacked him physically and regularly threatened him with death. I traveled through the breathtaking but tragic Triángulo Ixil, the homeland of the Ixil Maya nestled in the Cuchumatanes mountains, interviewing Indians and religious officials about their experiences during the war and during the then-current rule of Rios Montt’s political party, the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG). I ventured into the lush jungle of the Petén to interview former members of the Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil (PAC) that Rios Montt had set up in the 1980s as a kind of civilian paramilitary against the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP) rebels, as if the military’s scorched-earth attacks against Mayan civilians weren’t enough.

But I also saw the pleasant side of Guatemala, and one of the most lovely parts began with a voyage down the Rio Dulce on a small boat, fecund vegetation hanging from the opposite banks, on my way to a small town named Livingston on the Bahía de Amatique. Quite different from the indigenous and mestizo culture that dominated elsewhere in Guatemala, Livingston was in fact home to the Garifuna, the descendants of Amerindian tribes and African slaves who live scattered in coastal settlements in Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and Nicaragua, speaking an Arawakan language as well as an Spanish and often Caribbean-accented English.

When my boat pulled up to the jetty, a dreadlocked old man threw a rope around it and said “You don’t have to worry no more. You’re in Africa now.” I spent quite a few days in Livingston, decompressing from several stressful weeks reporting, and I got to see a bit of the Garifuna and their culture, which often included pumping Garifuna-language music blaring out of the speakers at hotels and restaurants. It was a constant echo in the background when I would stop to chat with the matrons sipping lemonade at the Café Bar Ubougarifuna.

Many Garifuna worry that their culture - the unique language, the music, the history, the very way of life - is disappearing amidst the influence of other Caribbean styles and, particularly, North American hip-hop culture.

No one in recent years did more to promote Garifuna culture than the songwriter, singer and guitarist Andy Palacio. Born in a small coastal village in Belize in 1960, Palacio defiantly sang the vast majority of his songs in Garifuna, and utilized distinctive Garifuna rhythms in his compositions. Named a UNESCO Artist for Peace last year, he also released an outstanding album, called Wátina (which means “I called out” in Garifuna) in 2007. Buoyant, uplifting, yet at the same time, thoughtful, music. Palacio’s recent success has helped spur a revival of interest in preserving Garifuna culture, not least of all among the Garifuna themselves.

Andy Palacio passed away, far too young, of a massive stroke and heart attack on Saturday evening. An eloquent spokesman and passionate artistic champion for an often-marginalized people, Andy Palacio’s loss will be deeply felt, but all his work at promoting and helping to preserve Garifuna culture will not be forgotten, not least of all by this journalist. When my African sojourn finishes this fall, it may very well be time to visit with the Garifuna again, and listen closely to what they and their music have to tell the world.

Ayo, Andy Palacio.