Hillary Clinton Cries Crocodile Tears for Latin American Immigrants
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hillary_clinton_cries_crocodile_tears_fo
r_latin_american_immigrants_2016021/
Posted on Feb 19, 2016
By Meleiza Figueroa
The Huffington Post
At first glance, Thursday seemed like a banner day for Hillary Clintons
minority firewall. Several respected leaders of Latinx organizations
offered their enthusiastic support for the Democratic presidential
candidate, while at the same timeBeyoncé-styleher campaign dropped a new,
emotionally charged ad into the Nevada market two days before the states
crucial caucus event. In the ad, a 10-year-old Latina girl expresses fear
for her parents, who have just received a letter of deportation. Clinton
urges her to be brave and let Clinton do all the worrying; the candidate
chokes up as she tells the child, Im going to do everything I can so you
wont be scared.
Though the ad was obviously meant to be warm and inspiring, it chilled me to
the bone. I grew up in Los Angelesthe great Latinx-majority metropolis I
once heard described as the northernmost city in Latin Americaas the
child of immigrants, and I have been a witness to the great transformations
wrought by the dynamics of immigration over the last few decades. And I
cannot reconcile Clintons newfound role as worrier-in-chief for
immigrants in the U.S. with what I know about the policies she has supported
for that vast region south of our border where many immigrants to the United
States (especially those lacking legal permission) come from.
The pull factor of her new, fashionably humane stance on immigration
policy cannot be considered outside the context of the push factors that
compel poor, peasant and working-class Latin Americans to leave their
families and brave the incredibly hard, long and increasingly dangerous
route to El Norte. Many of these push factorsincluding the devastation of
local livelihoods and family-based agriculture, extreme exploitation
(especially of women) in the low-wage maquiladora economy, and the outright
terror of political violencecan be traced directly to policies Clinton
supported and, in a few cases, personally acted upon as secretary of state.
A look at her foreign policy record with regard to Latin America finds
plenty to be scared about. Indeed, the very prospect of Clinton in the
drivers seat of the American empire should trigger alarm bells in anyone
who has witnessed or lived through the consequences of Central Americas
dirty wars. Yes, the bloody legacy of regime change in Americas backyard
started with President Reagan, not Secretary Clinton, but two thingsher
embrace of Henry Kissinger as a friend and mentor on foreign policy and
her personal involvement in the 2009 coup in Honduras that forcibly removed
President Manuel Zelaya, a left populist, from powerreveal her commitment
to maintaining a legacy of political terror in Latin America that has caused
millions of people to flee their homelands.
Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic Policy Research has reported
extensively on the Honduran coup and its bloody aftermath, as well as
Clintons personal involvement in forcibly removing a democratically elected
leader from office and preventing his returna plan of action to which she
not only admits but boasts of in her memoir (and ode to Kissinger), Hard
Choices. This approach to foreign policy, as Weisbrot notes in one report,
is also where Clintons secret email issue becomes extremely relevant to
the question of what kind of commander in chief she would be:
A number of Clinton emails show how, starting shortly after the coup, HRC
and her team shifted the deliberations on Honduras from the Organization of
American States (OAS)where Zelaya could benefit from the strong support of
left-wing allies throughout the regionto the San José negotiation process
in Costa Rica. There, representatives of the coup regime were placed on an
equal footing with representatives of Zelayas constitutional government,
and Costa Rican president Oscar Arias (a close U.S. ally) as mediator.
Unsurprisingly, the negotiation process only succeeded in one thing: keeping
Zelaya out of office for the rest of his constitutional mandate. ...
... A careful reading of the Clinton emails and Wikileaked U.S. diplomatic
cables from the beginning of her tenure, expose a Latin America policy that
is often guided by efforts to isolate and remove left-wing governments in
the region [see Latin America and the Caribbean and Venezuela in the new
book The Wikileaks Files]. The chapter on Latin America in Clintons
memoir Hard Choices reaffirms this vision of U.S. Latin America policy, and
one short passage from the chapter is particularly telling:
We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free
and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would
render the question of Zelaya moot.
...The hard choices taken by Clinton and her team didnt just damage U.S.
relations with Latin America. They contributed to the enormous damage done
to Honduras. In the years following the coup, economic growth has stalled,
while poverty and income inequality have risen significantly. Violence has
spiraled out of control. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has increased
military assistance to Honduras, despite alarming reports of killings and
human rights abuses by increasingly militarized Honduran security forces.
Many Congressional Democrats have asked for a complete suspension of
security assistance while human rights violations continue with impunity.
But neither the Clinton nor Kerry State Departments have heeded their call.
Clintons role in the Honduras coup alone should be sufficient to show that
she is no friend of the Latinx immigrant community, but in the last
Democratic presidential debate, on Feb. 11 in Milwaukee, she went even
further to dismiss the humanity of migrant children caught up in the violent
aftermath of the regime change she encouraged and partially engineered. Here
is the pivotal exchange between Clinton and Bernie Sanders:
SANDERS: Secretary Clinton, I do have a disagreement here. If my memory is
correct, I think when we saw children coming from these horrendous,
horrendously violent areas of Honduras and neighboring countries, people who
are fleeing drug violence and cartel violence, I thought it was a good idea
to allow those children to stay in this country. That was not, as I
understand it, the secretarys position. ...
CLINTON: ... Two quick responses. One, with respect to the Central American
children, I made it very clear that those children needed to be processed
appropriately, but we also had to send a message to families and communities
in Central America not to send their children on this dangerous journey in
the hands of smugglers.
SANDERS: ... But in terms of the children, I dont know to whom youre
sending a message. Who are you sending a message to? These are children who
are leaving countries and neighborhoods where their lives are at stake. That
was the fact. I dont think we use them to send a message. I think we
welcome them into this country and do the best we can to help them get their
lives together.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: Well, that just wasntthat just wasnt the fact, senator. The fact
is that there was a great effort made by the Obama administration and others
to really send a clear message, because we knew that so many of these
children were being abused, being treated terribly while they tried to get
to our border.
Once again, like a Freudian slip, Clintons hawkish attitude undermines her
attempt to claim the mantle of humanitarianism, and I was a little
disappointed that Sanders in that moment did not go further to press her
about her role in creating and maintaining the violence in Honduras that
families were desperate to send their children away from.
For her part, Clinton seemed completely uninterested in why children were
trying to get to our border; she insisted twice that her refusal to allow
child refugees into the U.S. was to send a message to familiesthe message
being, apparently, to accept their childrens fates at the hands of
U.S.-backed military thugs. Clinton remains utterly unrepentant about her
actions in Honduras. And with her old mentor Kissinger at her side, it seems
reasonable to expect more of the same as other Latin American countries sink
deeper into economic recession, political uncertainty and pervasive
violence.
Bloody coups aside, perhaps the biggest single action that transformed
immigration into the problem we face today was President Bill Clintons
implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. NAFTA
opened the floodgates to transnational corporate profitmaking by removing
the barriers that the U.S.-Mexico border posed to the free flow of
investment. But instead of being a magic wand that, as Bill Clinton
contended, would bring economic prosperity for all and fix undocumented
immigration to the United States, the impacts of the free-trade agreement on
the Mexican economy actually increased the number of undocumented immigrants
in the United States by 185 percent.
How did NAFTA and CAFTA (the Central America Free Trade Agreement) propel
undocumented immigration? In academia, we can spend years counting all the
ways. But in large part, it was because of the absolute devastation free
trade brought to these countries family-based agricultural economies.
Peasants who had supplied themselves and their communities with staple foods
for centuries could not compete when thrust into a global market against a
flood of cheap corn and wheat produced by the U.S. government-subsidized
agricultural industry. This, and the opening of collectively held lands for
sale on the private market, left millions of peasant families broke and
landless, with no choice but to go north. Here is a vivid description of
what that meant for communities on the ground:
A number of formerly vibrant places are now ghost towns, all their able
adults having gone abroad; about one-third of all Mexican municipalities
have lost population during the last decade, some by half or more. The
counterpart of this hollowing out of the Mexican countryside is the growth
of the Mexican migrant population in the U.S., much of it undocumented.
At the same time, manufacturers fled the U.S., eviscerating the American job
market, and set up low-wage maquilas south of the border with minimal
government regulations or labor standards. The 1.3 million jobs created in
Mexicos manufacturing sector as a result could not keep up with the loss of
employment in agriculture, and over the years these jobs too dried up as the
globalized race to the bottom motivated multinational corporations (such
as Wal-Mart, where Hillary Clinton was on the board of directors) to
outsource to China and other countries willing to submit to ever greater
terms of exploitation.
Twenty-two years after NAFTA went into effect, contemporary Mexico is an
economic and political basket case, where economic growth barely tops 2.5
percent per year and is propped up by three major sources of income: drugs,
oil, and migrant remittances (which in 2015 overtook oil as Mexicos No. 1
source of revenue.) The vicious drug war that has raged throughout Mexico
and spread to parts of Central America over the last decadeclaiming a
staggering 164,000 lives in Mexico aloneis a direct product of the economic
devastation caused by NAFTA and is also a major cause of immigration to the
U.S. without legal permission.
At best, Hillary Clinton has an inconsistent record on free trade: An
accounting of her flip-flops on NAFTA, CAFTA and other free-trade agreements
over the years can be found here. It must be said, however, that she has
been a staunch defender of her husbands legacy on NAFTA. And though she
very recently came to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement,
as secretary of state she was its chief advocate during the major part of
its formationin fact, as David Axelrod put it, she owned the TPP.
Although she says she would fight for protections, there is logically no
reason to believe she would truly reverse course on free-trade
agreementsand theres no sign of her even making the connections between
the trade policies she supported, the gutting of Latin American economies
and increased immigration to the U.S.
Among the Latinx community leaders who backed Hillary Clinton on Thursday
was legendary civil rights leader Dolores Huerta. But she and other movement
luminaries of color, such as John Lewis, seem compelled to accompany their
endorsements with vicious attacks on Bernie Sanders progressive
credentials. On a conference call with reporters, Huerta asked: Bernie,
where have you been?
Granted, Vermont is a very small and very white state, and Sanders may not
have had much opportunity to advocate in a broad way for the Latinx
community and for immigration reform (although we do know how steadfast he
is as an advocate for workers rights in general). We may not know where
Sanders has been, but we do know where Clinton has been, on both sides of
the borderand her record doesnt bode well for immigrants, their families
or their communities back home.
Meleiza Figueroa is a Ph.D. candidate in geography at the University of
California at Berkeley and a producer at KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles. She
was head researcher on the 2005 film Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
and has been a longtime social justice activist and organizer in Los Angeles
and the Bay Area.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
Hillary Clinton Cries Crocodile Tears for Latin American Immigrants
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hillary_clinton_cries_crocodile_tears_fo
r_latin_american_immigrants_2016021/
Posted on Feb 19, 2016
By Meleiza Figueroa
The Huffington Post
At first glance, Thursday seemed like a banner day for Hillary Clintons
minority firewall. Several respected leaders of Latinx organizations
offered their enthusiastic support for the Democratic presidential
candidate, while at the same timeBeyoncé-styleher campaign dropped a new,
emotionally charged ad into the Nevada market two days before the states
crucial caucus event. In the ad, a 10-year-old Latina girl expresses fear
for her parents, who have just received a letter of deportation. Clinton
urges her to be brave and let Clinton do all the worrying; the candidate
chokes up as she tells the child, Im going to do everything I can so you
wont be scared.
Though the ad was obviously meant to be warm and inspiring, it chilled me to
the bone. I grew up in Los Angelesthe great Latinx-majority metropolis I
once heard described as the northernmost city in Latin Americaas the
child of immigrants, and I have been a witness to the great transformations
wrought by the dynamics of immigration over the last few decades. And I
cannot reconcile Clintons newfound role as worrier-in-chief for
immigrants in the U.S. with what I know about the policies she has supported
for that vast region south of our border where many immigrants to the United
States (especially those lacking legal permission) come from.
The pull factor of her new, fashionably humane stance on immigration
policy cannot be considered outside the context of the push factors that
compel poor, peasant and working-class Latin Americans to leave their
families and brave the incredibly hard, long and increasingly dangerous
route to El Norte. Many of these push factorsincluding the devastation of
local livelihoods and family-based agriculture, extreme exploitation
(especially of women) in the low-wage maquiladora economy, and the outright
terror of political violencecan be traced directly to policies Clinton
supported and, in a few cases, personally acted upon as secretary of state.
A look at her foreign policy record with regard to Latin America finds
plenty to be scared about. Indeed, the very prospect of Clinton in the
drivers seat of the American empire should trigger alarm bells in anyone
who has witnessed or lived through the consequences of Central Americas
dirty wars. Yes, the bloody legacy of regime change in Americas backyard
started with President Reagan, not Secretary Clinton, but two thingsher
embrace of Henry Kissinger as a friend and mentor on foreign policy and
her personal involvement in the 2009 coup in Honduras that forcibly removed
President Manuel Zelaya, a left populist, from powerreveal her commitment
to maintaining a legacy of political terror in Latin America that has caused
millions of people to flee their homelands.
Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic Policy Research has reported
extensively on the Honduran coup and its bloody aftermath, as well as
Clintons personal involvement in forcibly removing a democratically elected
leader from office and preventing his returna plan of action to which she
not only admits but boasts of in her memoir (and ode to Kissinger), Hard
Choices. This approach to foreign policy, as Weisbrot notes in one report,
is also where Clintons secret email issue becomes extremely relevant to
the question of what kind of commander in chief she would be:
A number of Clinton emails show how, starting shortly after the coup, HRC
and her team shifted the deliberations on Honduras from the Organization of
American States (OAS)where Zelaya could benefit from the strong support of
left-wing allies throughout the regionto the San José negotiation process
in Costa Rica. There, representatives of the coup regime were placed on an
equal footing with representatives of Zelayas constitutional government,
and Costa Rican president Oscar Arias (a close U.S. ally) as mediator.
Unsurprisingly, the negotiation process only succeeded in one thing: keeping
Zelaya out of office for the rest of his constitutional mandate. ...
... A careful reading of the Clinton emails and Wikileaked U.S. diplomatic
cables from the beginning of her tenure, expose a Latin America policy that
is often guided by efforts to isolate and remove left-wing governments in
the region [see Latin America and the Caribbean and Venezuela in the new
book The Wikileaks Files]. The chapter on Latin America in Clintons
memoir Hard Choices reaffirms this vision of U.S. Latin America policy, and
one short passage from the chapter is particularly telling:
We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free
and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would
render the question of Zelaya moot.
...The hard choices taken by Clinton and her team didnt just damage U.S.
relations with Latin America. They contributed to the enormous damage done
to Honduras. In the years following the coup, economic growth has stalled,
while poverty and income inequality have risen significantly. Violence has
spiraled out of control. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has increased
military assistance to Honduras, despite alarming reports of killings and
human rights abuses by increasingly militarized Honduran security forces.
Many Congressional Democrats have asked for a complete suspension of
security assistance while human rights violations continue with impunity.
But neither the Clinton nor Kerry State Departments have heeded their call.
Clintons role in the Honduras coup alone should be sufficient to show that
she is no friend of the Latinx immigrant community, but in the last
Democratic presidential debate, on Feb. 11 in Milwaukee, she went even
further to dismiss the humanity of migrant children caught up in the violent
aftermath of the regime change she encouraged and partially engineered. Here
is the pivotal exchange between Clinton and Bernie Sanders:
SANDERS: Secretary Clinton, I do have a disagreement here. If my memory is
correct, I think when we saw children coming from these horrendous,
horrendously violent areas of Honduras and neighboring countries, people who
are fleeing drug violence and cartel violence, I thought it was a good idea
to allow those children to stay in this country. That was not, as I
understand it, the secretarys position. ...
CLINTON: ... Two quick responses. One, with respect to the Central American
children, I made it very clear that those children needed to be processed
appropriately, but we also had to send a message to families and communities
in Central America not to send their children on this dangerous journey in
the hands of smugglers.
SANDERS: ... But in terms of the children, I dont know to whom youre
sending a message. Who are you sending a message to? These are children who
are leaving countries and neighborhoods where their lives are at stake. That
was the fact. I dont think we use them to send a message. I think we
welcome them into this country and do the best we can to help them get their
lives together.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: Well, that just wasntthat just wasnt the fact, senator. The fact
is that there was a great effort made by the Obama administration and others
to really send a clear message, because we knew that so many of these
children were being abused, being treated terribly while they tried to get
to our border.
Once again, like a Freudian slip, Clintons hawkish attitude undermines her
attempt to claim the mantle of humanitarianism, and I was a little
disappointed that Sanders in that moment did not go further to press her
about her role in creating and maintaining the violence in Honduras that
families were desperate to send their children away from.
For her part, Clinton seemed completely uninterested in why children were
trying to get to our border; she insisted twice that her refusal to allow
child refugees into the U.S. was to send a message to familiesthe message
being, apparently, to accept their childrens fates at the hands of
U.S.-backed military thugs. Clinton remains utterly unrepentant about her
actions in Honduras. And with her old mentor Kissinger at her side, it seems
reasonable to expect more of the same as other Latin American countries sink
deeper into economic recession, political uncertainty and pervasive
violence.
Bloody coups aside, perhaps the biggest single action that transformed
immigration into the problem we face today was President Bill Clintons
implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. NAFTA
opened the floodgates to transnational corporate profitmaking by removing
the barriers that the U.S.-Mexico border posed to the free flow of
investment. But instead of being a magic wand that, as Bill Clinton
contended, would bring economic prosperity for all and fix undocumented
immigration to the United States, the impacts of the free-trade agreement on
the Mexican economy actually increased the number of undocumented immigrants
in the United States by 185 percent.
How did NAFTA and CAFTA (the Central America Free Trade Agreement) propel
undocumented immigration? In academia, we can spend years counting all the
ways. But in large part, it was because of the absolute devastation free
trade brought to these countries family-based agricultural economies.
Peasants who had supplied themselves and their communities with staple foods
for centuries could not compete when thrust into a global market against a
flood of cheap corn and wheat produced by the U.S. government-subsidized
agricultural industry. This, and the opening of collectively held lands for
sale on the private market, left millions of peasant families broke and
landless, with no choice but to go north. Here is a vivid description of
what that meant for communities on the ground:
A number of formerly vibrant places are now ghost towns, all their able
adults having gone abroad; about one-third of all Mexican municipalities
have lost population during the last decade, some by half or more. The
counterpart of this hollowing out of the Mexican countryside is the growth
of the Mexican migrant population in the U.S., much of it undocumented.
At the same time, manufacturers fled the U.S., eviscerating the American job
market, and set up low-wage maquilas south of the border with minimal
government regulations or labor standards. The 1.3 million jobs created in
Mexicos manufacturing sector as a result could not keep up with the loss of
employment in agriculture, and over the years these jobs too dried up as the
globalized race to the bottom motivated multinational corporations (such
as Wal-Mart, where Hillary Clinton was on the board of directors) to
outsource to China and other countries willing to submit to ever greater
terms of exploitation.
Twenty-two years after NAFTA went into effect, contemporary Mexico is an
economic and political basket case, where economic growth barely tops 2.5
percent per year and is propped up by three major sources of income: drugs,
oil, and migrant remittances (which in 2015 overtook oil as Mexicos No. 1
source of revenue.) The vicious drug war that has raged throughout Mexico
and spread to parts of Central America over the last decadeclaiming a
staggering 164,000 lives in Mexico aloneis a direct product of the economic
devastation caused by NAFTA and is also a major cause of immigration to the
U.S. without legal permission.
At best, Hillary Clinton has an inconsistent record on free trade: An
accounting of her flip-flops on NAFTA, CAFTA and other free-trade agreements
over the years can be found here. It must be said, however, that she has
been a staunch defender of her husbands legacy on NAFTA. And though she
very recently came to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement,
as secretary of state she was its chief advocate during the major part of
its formationin fact, as David Axelrod put it, she owned the TPP.
Although she says she would fight for protections, there is logically no
reason to believe she would truly reverse course on free-trade
agreementsand theres no sign of her even making the connections between
the trade policies she supported, the gutting of Latin American economies
and increased immigration to the U.S.
Among the Latinx community leaders who backed Hillary Clinton on Thursday
was legendary civil rights leader Dolores Huerta. But she and other movement
luminaries of color, such as John Lewis, seem compelled to accompany their
endorsements with vicious attacks on Bernie Sanders progressive
credentials. On a conference call with reporters, Huerta asked: Bernie,
where have you been?
Granted, Vermont is a very small and very white state, and Sanders may not
have had much opportunity to advocate in a broad way for the Latinx
community and for immigration reform (although we do know how steadfast he
is as an advocate for workers rights in general). We may not know where
Sanders has been, but we do know where Clinton has been, on both sides of
the borderand her record doesnt bode well for immigrants, their families
or their communities back home.
Meleiza Figueroa is a Ph.D. candidate in geography at the University of
California at Berkeley and a producer at KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles. She
was head researcher on the 2005 film Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
and has been a longtime social justice activist and organizer in Los Angeles
and the Bay Area.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hillary_clinton_cries_crocodile_tears_fo
r_latin_american_immigrants_2016021/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hillary_clinton_cries_crocodile_tears_fo
r_latin_american_immigrants_2016021/
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r_latin_american_immigrants_2016021/
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