Kamala Harris and the Central American migration crisis
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United States Vice President Kamala Harris has been handed the mammoth task of handling the long-troublesome issue of Central American migration into the US southern border with Mexico and the humanitarian crises that this has created. Vice President Harris in making her first trip outside of The United States visited the Central American peninsula with the blunt response that the Biden Administration’s focus would be asserting control over its borders. This might, for the time being, men turning away those fleeing persecution and poverty whom the vice president had promised to help in the long run. In response to the arguments about the root causes prompting migrants to make the long, dangerous trek north, she announced that the United States would assist an anti-corruption panel that had been denounced by President Alejandro Giammattei — even as the Guatemalan leader stood watching.
Vice President Harris, in commenting on the migration issue, told the prospective migrants in Guatemala, “do not come”. This statement immediately prompted a new round of criticism, both at home and abroad, for herself and the administration. Immigration advocates desperate for a win after the unmitigated disaster of the last four years accused the vice president of undermining the immigration law and Mr Biden’s pledge to restore the asylum-processing system at the southwest border.
Vice President Harris then visited Mexico City the following day where she said there was “no question” that her work in Central America would have a positive effect on the region in the long term, but the issue of root causes would not be solved in two days. “It is not a new issue for the United States to feel the root causes on our shores.” VP Harris added.
The genesis of the USA’s southern border crisis occurred more than six decades earlier with the CIA’s covert operation to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954. Washington, at the time, backed the Guatemalan military which was responsible for the genocide of an estimated 200,000 people between 1960 and 1996. Then there was America’s intervention in the region in the 1970s in Nicaragua culminating in America’s role in El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s. The conflict pitted leftist revolutionaries against the alliance of the country’s oligarchs and generals that had ruled El Salvador for decades, albeit with US support, keeping peasants illiterate and impoverished. It was a bloody, brutal, and dirty war in which more than 75,000 Salvadorans were killed in the fighting. Most were victims of the military and its death squads. Massive numbers were executed. Many while trying to flee. Their bodies were left on roadsides as a warning to others. All of this while the US poured billions of dollars of economic and military aid into the tiny country. In the early 80s, El Salvador was receiving more such aid than any country except for Egypt and Israel, and the embassy staff was nearly as large as that in New Delhi.
For the Reagan Administration, El Salvador was the place to draw the line in the sand against the country’s ideological enemy, communism, less than had been pursued by his predecessors against little Jamaica in the 1970s. When Congress eventually blocked funding for these activities, CIA operatives encouraged the production and distribution of cocaine in Central and South America to provide continued funding for these operations.
By the mid-1980s, the US had shifted its focus to Nicaragua in an effort to stem the flow of weapons destined for the rebels in El Salvador. It would later give up on these covert activities leaving the vestiges of drug trafficking, murder, and mayhem along the South American peninsula. The decades-long history of failed US intervention left Central American governments weak and fragile while empowering oligarchs and drug cartels.
In addition, the global drop in coffee prices was further exacerbated by the lockdowns which have further reduced the demand for the beverage. This hit coffee farmers in the Central American areas particularly hard with many going bankrupt and forcing the dislocated workforce to look outside of the region for economic opportunities.
This is the situation that has been driving residents of Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador to flee. It is one that has been entrenched by the United States misdirected foreign policy and it will take more than Kamala Harris imploring Central Americans to “stay home” to reduce America’s embarrassment at its southern border with Mexico.
Richard Hugh Blackford is a Jamaican creative artist residing in the United States.
