Bernstein writes: "Actions taken by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state
are a major factor contributing to the waves of Central Americans, mostly
Hondurans, coming north to the US, according to a highly respected Latino
human rights activist and several distinguished scholars who have studied
the situation and spent extensive time in the country."
Hillary Clinton. (photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)
The Deposer in Chief: Hillary in Honduras
By Dennis J. Bernstein, Reader Supported News
17 January 16
Actions taken by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state are a major factor
contributing to the waves of Central Americans, mostly Hondurans, coming
north to the US, according to a highly respected Latino human rights
activist and several distinguished scholars who have studied the situation
and spent extensive time in the country. They assert that Clinton played a
crucial and destructive role by keeping Manuel Zelaya out of the country
after the 2009 military coup, despite the fact that leaders of every state
in the region wanted him restored.
Adrienne Pine is an associate professor at American University, and a
Fulbright Scholar who has been researching in Honduras for nearly two
decades. She is the author of Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and
Survival in Honduras.
Hillary Clinton had a very central role in the coup against Zelaya, said
Pine in a January 12th interview, from orchestrating the negotiations which
insured that the coup government was recognized as a legitimate bargaining
partner, to assuring that military aid would continue to be sent to
Honduras, by designating the coup as a regular coup and not a military coup.
Which is a fictitious distinction that she created. Pine was in the country
before the coup and after.
One of Clintons closest colleagues and a former campaign director, her
friend from law school, Lanny Davis, said Pine, was directly representing
the parties that had financed the coup, CEAL, which is an economic business
group in Honduras. Davis was representing them here in Washington, and had
her ear at all times. And she was parroting exactly the same propaganda that
he was talking about, that he was promoting all over Washington. Hillary
Clinton indeed takes credit for preventing Manuel Zelaya from returning to
Honduras, as if that were a positive thing, in her book Hard Choices. So I
dont think there is really any ambiguity about her role in that coup.
We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras, Clinton writes,
and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and
legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.
Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research,
in Washington DC. He has studied and written extensively about Honduras
before and after the coup.
Weisbrot said Clintons troubling role in the coup should be explored
publicly, in terms of assessing what kind of leader she will be, but it has
been largely ignored by the mainstream media.
In a radio interview in the beginning of January, Weisbrot agreed with
Professor Pine that the Obama administration definitely supported the coup,
and may very well have taken part in the destabilizing of Zelaya. The Obama
administration made some noises some time after the coup to say that they
were opposed to it. But if you followed it carefully, you would see it was
very clear that the Obama administration supported that coup and may
actually have been involved in that. We dont have hard evidence for that.
But we do have a whole trail of evidence of how they helped support it.
The White House, according to their own admission, had advance notice of
the coup, said Weisbrot, and when it happened they did not, explicitly,
did not condemn the coup. All they did was say we call on all political and
social actors in Honduras to respect democracy. Well, this was a statement
every diplomat in Washington knew, at the time, was as close as you could
get to actually supporting a military coup against a democratically elected
government, he said. Then you had all these international bodies,
including the OAS and the United Nations General Assembly they all
responded by calling for the immediate and unconditional return of the
elected president. But no US official would ever use those words, and in
fact the day after the coup, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked if
restoring the constitutional order in Honduras meant returning Zelaya
himself, and she would not say yes to that. Then we find out later from her
book Hard Choices, said Weisbrot, and also more recently from her e-mails,
that she worked quite hard, behind the scenes ... very hard to make sure
that Zelaya wouldnt be returned to office.
According to Weisbrot and Pine, Clinton played a key role in preventing
Zelaya from returning, and thus guaranteed that the coup would be sustained.
One of the key things she did was to make sure that the locus of
negotiation for his return was moved out of the Organization of American
States, said Weisbrot, where all the left governments in the region and
everyone else were supporting Zelaya, to this special process that she set
up ... a mediation process with Oscar Arias, a former president of Costa
Rica and a close ally of the United States. Once shed got that done, I
think that was the biggest step toward making sure he would not return. And
thats where she actually talks about it in her book, where she acknowledges
that working with Arias she was able to remove the question of Zelayas
return, and make sure that that was no longer on the agenda.
The Arias negotiations, said Professor Pine, which were set up
unilaterally by the United States, by Hillary Clinton, to take place between
the usurping Honduran administration, the dictatorship, and the United
States with Manuel Zelaya, directly contradicted the unanimous resolution of
the Organization of American States just days previously, that there would
be no recognition of the usurping administration, and that the only
legitimate president of Honduras was the democratically elected one, Manuel
Zelaya. By overseeing the negotiations unilaterally, the United States, and
Hillary Clinton in particular, showed tremendous disdain for the
multilateral process that Obama had pledged to respect in the first Summit
of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, said Pine.
Honduras Post-Coup: Gunshots or Firecrackers?
Zelaya was elected in, and took office in January of 2006, said Weisbrot,
and he did accomplish a fair amount during his term. He raised the minimum
wage. There was a significant reduction in poverty. The economy did fairly
well, said the regional expert. So it is an example of a country the
second poorest country in Latin America that had a chance of changing its
future, and it was destroyed with a lot of help from the US government.
US policy in Honduras, said Professor Pine. did immeasurable damage to the
country and its people. The impacts of the Obama administrations policy
have indeed been just atrocious for Central Americans in particular, from
the northern triangle, she said. As a Fulbright Scholar who has been
studying Honduras for 20 years, Pine has extensive knowledge of the country,
its people, and in particular the political and economic climate in Honduras
before and after the US supported coup. Pine spent a year in the country
following the coup.
When I was living there in 2013-2014 in the capital city of Tegucigalpa, I
could hear gunshots every night from my house, said Professor Pine. I
learned to distinguish what a firecracker and a gunshot and a car backfiring
sounded like because I heard all three of them so much, from my apartment.
Its a terrifying situation to be in the midst of that kind of violence,
she said. And it was in 2010, I think, the first year that Honduras
achieved the level of most murderous country in the world, according to the
UN homicide statistics. Rather than responding by providing greater citizen
security, job opportunities, and education, what the Honduran administration
has done, post-coup, and with full US support, is to militarize the country
and put military police on every corner. This has had a terrorizing effect
on the population, and it doesnt do anything to increase peoples chances,
to increase peoples life chances. The people are living in terror. Almost
everybody I asked, when I would give lectures, I would always ask, How many
of you have lost a loved one or family member to homicide? I would
generally get between 70% and 100% of people raising their hand, Pine said.
So if you think about, not just the homicide rate but the impact that it
has on the population as a whole, which is all experiencing some kind of
trauma, its no surprise that so many people are desperate to come to the
United States, knowing full well that on that journey they could get maimed,
attacked, raped, or even killed. Because thats how bad the situation is
thanks to the US militarization, the US economic policy, and the US support
of the military coup in 2009.
Pine said there seems to be a common misconception about what is now the
root cause for everyday violence in Honduras. Pine maintains that most of
the violence is being triggered by the Honduran government with the full
support and knowledge of the US, and not renegade street gangs.
I think the popular talk that we often hear is that the gangs have gotten
out of control, said the Fulbright Scholar, but really, if you look at the
timing of the increase in violence, it corresponds directly with the 2009
coup and, in particular, with the impunity thats accorded to the state
agents who are carrying out violence: The military, the police and now the
military police as well. The impunity thats accorded them for their crimes
against humanity that they carried out following the coup, and which have
only really been exacerbated since then. I think in terms of analyzing the
violence thats going on in Honduras, she said, its perhaps even more
important to talk about the state violence than about the gang violence,
because there was a total breakdown of the legal and judicial system as a
result of the coup, which cleansed the whole system of any lawyers who had
opposed the coup. So with the breakdown of the judicial system, and with the
total impunity accorded to the military and police, they are actively
operating death squads within their ranks.
Dealing With the Flood of Central Americans
Presidential hopeful Donald Trump has promised, if elected, to build a big,
beautiful wall like the Great Wall of China along the 2,000-mile border
between the US and Mexico. Candidate Trump says he will deport all twelve
million if he has to purge the country of illegals. But while those directly
in the crosshairs of Trumps racist rhetoric find it frightening, they are
more concerned with the actual policies of the current administration, both
in its record-breaking number of deportations and, even more important and
less talked about, its pro-coup policies that have indeed led thousands of
men, women, and children to pull up roots and make the long and dangerous
journey north.
And the deportations continue apace. According to credible reports,
thousands more victims lie naked on the anvil of American injustice, waiting
for the hammer of deportation to fall once again. On December 26, The
Washington Post reported in a piece titled Homeland Security Preparing
Trump Style Mass Deportation Raids that the Department of Homeland
Security has begun preparing for a series of raids that would target for
deportation hundreds of families who have flocked to the United States since
the start of last year, according to people familiar with the operation.
The reports of expanded ICE sweeps already have thousands of undocumented
people bracing for the worst. In an extended interview on January 6th, Pablo
Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network
(NDLON), addressed the impending crackdown and some of the root causes that
are driving so many to make the often futile and sometimes lethal journey
north. Alvarado is just back from a fact-finding tour to Honduras, where the
violence faced by everyday people, he said, is at least as bad if not worse
than what is going on in Iraq and Syria.
The crackdown doesnt come as a surprise to us, said Alvarado, recognized
by Time Magazine as one of the 25 Most Influential Hispanics in America. It
is consistent with the deportation policy of this administration. Very
consistent. The idea that you need to deport some to provide relief to
others. The idea that you need to deport first and then legalize later. The
idea that somehow deporting some people is necessary for others to get
relief has been the way the Obama administration has operated for the last
seven years, said the labor and human rights activist. And the intention
was that by being tough on immigrants, the xenophobes and the nativists
would actually support immigration reform.
Alvarado says the Obama/Clinton policy has been a dismal failure from start
to finish from its record-breaking deportations to its support for the
deposing of President Manuel Zelaya. Meanwhile, he says, the issue of true
immigration reform has been swallowed up by right-wing campaign rhetoric and
the meet-me-under-the-flagpole attitude among Republicans and many Democrats
as well, regarding who is going to be tougher on the floods of Central
Americans that keep heading north.
Central Americans are bracing for the worst, said Alvarado. Obamas
policy has definitely been a failed policy. Now this new wave of
deportations comes at the worst time. Deportations are bad at any time, but
at this time in particular were going into an electoral year, and the
sentiment that has been created by Donald Trump has essentially dominated
American politics. But Alvarado added, While Trump stigmatizes immigrants
with his derogatory and racist language, the president is deporting them. So
when we see what is happening, we feel there is no difference between what
the Republicans do and what the Democrats are doing, when it comes down to
deportations. And the worst thing is that there is no political gain that
the president can make by spearheading this new wave of deportations of
children and mothers. The only people benefitting from this type of
initiative are essentially the right wing. Its essentially the Republicans,
the xenophobes and the nativists. Which is exactly what they want.
National Security Deportations
Alvarado said it was downright dangerous for Homeland Security to
characterize the mass deportations of Central Americans as an issue of
national security, rather than an issue of human rights and people fleeing
for their lives. I mean, they treat the issue of refugee children and their
mothers as a matter of national security, he said, but we see it as a
matter of human rights, as a humanitarian crisis. The administration claims
that they have the situation under control, that the surge as they called
it, has ended and that the numbers of unaccompanied minors and their mothers
has decreased. However, what weve noticed is that the United States
government has invested a lot of money in a project called Frontera Surge.
According to Alvarado, the US is now spending millions in direct funds to
the Mexican government to cut off the flow of Central Americans coming to
the US, before they ever cross the southern border. And the Mexicans are
brutal, he says, in their enforcement of the surge against those fleeing
the violence and economic devastation resulting from US free trade and
pro-Honduras coup policies.
They are funding the Mexican government and its military, and its other
repressive bodies, said Alvarado, to actually apprehend Central Americans
on the southern border of Mexico. Now many folks still get to make it to the
US/Mexico border, but a significant number are apprehended in Mexico, and
deported from Mexico to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
If the Department of Homeland Security believes, said Alvarado, if the US
government believes that people are going to stop coming, they are wrong.
Because for as long as it is more dangerous to stay than to leave, people
will continue to leave their countries of origin, looking for better
horizons, particularly when the levels of violence are unbearable in those
places.
I was in Honduras a few months ago, and I met four young men who had been
deported from New Orleans, said Alvarado. These men left Honduras in the
first place to come to the United States for few years because they were
forced to grow African palm, but they couldnt compete in the market, so
these new policies displaced them, took away their subsistence farming, and
they were forced to come north. And then they come north, they produce, they
help reconstruct New Orleans, and then they are sent back. So these are the
victims workers, impoverished communities, poor people are the ones who
are the victims of these policies. Obviously, you know the aristocrats in
Honduras, you know, the powerful families, they continue to profit from
those trade agreements, said Alvarado, and of course, this free trade
policy is something that Hillary Clinton promoted as secretary of state,
after she supported that coup détat against President Zelaya. And the US
role with Clinton as secretary of state has had catastrophic consequences.
Before President Zelaya was deposed, he was trying to bring a sense of
equality, bring some kind of justice to impoverished communities, said
Alvarado. For instance, he was trying to increase the minimum wage for
workers, which is precisely why people leave, because wages and working
conditions are not the best in our countries of origin. So people tend to
migrate. So these were some of the changes that President Zelaya was trying
to do. Now the US government comes in and supports a coup détat against
President Zelaya. And right immediately after the coup, you could see the
levels of violence skyrocketing. And San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa are
becoming some of the most violent cities in the planet.
Alvarado said there is now a great deal of fear in the undocumented
communities regarding the reports of expanded raids and deportation led by
ICE and DHL. And it affects almost every family and every undocumented
person in the US. Now its happening every single day. I have a cousin who
migrated a few months ago. She was caught at the US/Mexico border. She
happened to be a police officer in El Salvador, and she was investigating a
case of extortion. And it turned out that some of the other officers were
the ones who were involved in the crime. When she reported that, she began
being persecuted. She was deported a few months ago from the US because she
didnt qualify for political asylum.
Alvarado said he is working with friends, colleagues, and supporters to
prepare for the new wave of deportations, even as he continues to fight for
the right of undocumented workers and for humane immigration reform. Well
do what every vulnerable community under siege has done in the past, said
the human rights activist. The first and most important thing is that
migrants have to resist the fear that these raids are instilling in their
lives, you know? And the way to do that is by making sure that migrants know
their rights, and how to exercise them, and particularly when a deportation
agent comes knocking on their door.
________________________________________
Dennis J. Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on
Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as
a journalist whistleblower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed:
Voices from a Hidden Classroom.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Hillary Clinton. (photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)
http://readersupportednews.org/http://readersupportednews.org/
The Deposer in Chief: Hillary in Honduras
By Dennis J. Bernstein, Reader Supported News
17 January 16
ctions taken by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state are a major factor
contributing to the waves of Central Americans, mostly Hondurans, coming
north to the US, according to a highly respected Latino human rights
activist and several distinguished scholars who have studied the situation
and spent extensive time in the country. They assert that Clinton played a
crucial and destructive role by keeping Manuel Zelaya out of the country
after the 2009 military coup, despite the fact that leaders of every state
in the region wanted him restored.
Adrienne Pine is an associate professor at American University, and a
Fulbright Scholar who has been researching in Honduras for nearly two
decades. She is the author of Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and
Survival in Honduras.
Hillary Clinton had a very central role in the coup against Zelaya, said
Pine in a January 12th interview, from orchestrating the negotiations which
insured that the coup government was recognized as a legitimate bargaining
partner, to assuring that military aid would continue to be sent to
Honduras, by designating the coup as a regular coup and not a military coup.
Which is a fictitious distinction that she created. Pine was in the country
before the coup and after.
One of Clintons closest colleagues and a former campaign director, her
friend from law school, Lanny Davis, said Pine, was directly representing
the parties that had financed the coup, CEAL, which is an economic business
group in Honduras. Davis was representing them here in Washington, and had
her ear at all times. And she was parroting exactly the same propaganda that
he was talking about, that he was promoting all over Washington. Hillary
Clinton indeed takes credit for preventing Manuel Zelaya from returning to
Honduras, as if that were a positive thing, in her book Hard Choices. So I
dont think there is really any ambiguity about her role in that coup.
We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras, Clinton writes,
and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and
legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.
Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research,
in Washington DC. He has studied and written extensively about Honduras
before and after the coup.
Weisbrot said Clintons troubling role in the coup should be explored
publicly, in terms of assessing what kind of leader she will be, but it has
been largely ignored by the mainstream media.
In a radio interview in the beginning of January, Weisbrot agreed with
Professor Pine that the Obama administration definitely supported the coup,
and may very well have taken part in the destabilizing of Zelaya. The Obama
administration made some noises some time after the coup to say that they
were opposed to it. But if you followed it carefully, you would see it was
very clear that the Obama administration supported that coup and may
actually have been involved in that. We dont have hard evidence for that.
But we do have a whole trail of evidence of how they helped support it.
The White House, according to their own admission, had advance notice of
the coup, said Weisbrot, and when it happened they did not, explicitly,
did not condemn the coup. All they did was say we call on all political and
social actors in Honduras to respect democracy. Well, this was a statement
every diplomat in Washington knew, at the time, was as close as you could
get to actually supporting a military coup against a democratically elected
government, he said. Then you had all these international bodies,
including the OAS and the United Nations General Assembly they all
responded by calling for the immediate and unconditional return of the
elected president. But no US official would ever use those words, and in
fact the day after the coup, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked if
restoring the constitutional order in Honduras meant returning Zelaya
himself, and she would not say yes to that. Then we find out later from her
book Hard Choices, said Weisbrot, and also more recently from her e-mails,
that she worked quite hard, behind the scenes ... very hard to make sure
that Zelaya wouldnt be returned to office.
According to Weisbrot and Pine, Clinton played a key role in preventing
Zelaya from returning, and thus guaranteed that the coup would be sustained.
One of the key things she did was to make sure that the locus of
negotiation for his return was moved out of the Organization of American
States, said Weisbrot, where all the left governments in the region and
everyone else were supporting Zelaya, to this special process that she set
up ... a mediation process with Oscar Arias, a former president of Costa
Rica and a close ally of the United States. Once shed got that done, I
think that was the biggest step toward making sure he would not return. And
thats where she actually talks about it in her book, where she acknowledges
that working with Arias she was able to remove the question of Zelayas
return, and make sure that that was no longer on the agenda.
The Arias negotiations, said Professor Pine, which were set up
unilaterally by the United States, by Hillary Clinton, to take place between
the usurping Honduran administration, the dictatorship, and the United
States with Manuel Zelaya, directly contradicted the unanimous resolution of
the Organization of American States just days previously, that there would
be no recognition of the usurping administration, and that the only
legitimate president of Honduras was the democratically elected one, Manuel
Zelaya. By overseeing the negotiations unilaterally, the United States, and
Hillary Clinton in particular, showed tremendous disdain for the
multilateral process that Obama had pledged to respect in the first Summit
of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, said Pine.
Honduras Post-Coup: Gunshots or Firecrackers?
Zelaya was elected in, and took office in January of 2006, said Weisbrot,
and he did accomplish a fair amount during his term. He raised the minimum
wage. There was a significant reduction in poverty. The economy did fairly
well, said the regional expert. So it is an example of a country the
second poorest country in Latin America that had a chance of changing its
future, and it was destroyed with a lot of help from the US government.
US policy in Honduras, said Professor Pine. did immeasurable damage to the
country and its people. The impacts of the Obama administrations policy
have indeed been just atrocious for Central Americans in particular, from
the northern triangle, she said. As a Fulbright Scholar who has been
studying Honduras for 20 years, Pine has extensive knowledge of the country,
its people, and in particular the political and economic climate in Honduras
before and after the US supported coup. Pine spent a year in the country
following the coup.
When I was living there in 2013-2014 in the capital city of Tegucigalpa, I
could hear gunshots every night from my house, said Professor Pine. I
learned to distinguish what a firecracker and a gunshot and a car backfiring
sounded like because I heard all three of them so much, from my apartment.
Its a terrifying situation to be in the midst of that kind of violence,
she said. And it was in 2010, I think, the first year that Honduras
achieved the level of most murderous country in the world, according to the
UN homicide statistics. Rather than responding by providing greater citizen
security, job opportunities, and education, what the Honduran administration
has done, post-coup, and with full US support, is to militarize the country
and put military police on every corner. This has had a terrorizing effect
on the population, and it doesnt do anything to increase peoples chances,
to increase peoples life chances. The people are living in terror. Almost
everybody I asked, when I would give lectures, I would always ask, How many
of you have lost a loved one or family member to homicide? I would
generally get between 70% and 100% of people raising their hand, Pine said.
So if you think about, not just the homicide rate but the impact that it
has on the population as a whole, which is all experiencing some kind of
trauma, its no surprise that so many people are desperate to come to the
United States, knowing full well that on that journey they could get maimed,
attacked, raped, or even killed. Because thats how bad the situation is
thanks to the US militarization, the US economic policy, and the US support
of the military coup in 2009.
Pine said there seems to be a common misconception about what is now the
root cause for everyday violence in Honduras. Pine maintains that most of
the violence is being triggered by the Honduran government with the full
support and knowledge of the US, and not renegade street gangs.
I think the popular talk that we often hear is that the gangs have gotten
out of control, said the Fulbright Scholar, but really, if you look at the
timing of the increase in violence, it corresponds directly with the 2009
coup and, in particular, with the impunity thats accorded to the state
agents who are carrying out violence: The military, the police and now the
military police as well. The impunity thats accorded them for their crimes
against humanity that they carried out following the coup, and which have
only really been exacerbated since then. I think in terms of analyzing the
violence thats going on in Honduras, she said, its perhaps even more
important to talk about the state violence than about the gang violence,
because there was a total breakdown of the legal and judicial system as a
result of the coup, which cleansed the whole system of any lawyers who had
opposed the coup. So with the breakdown of the judicial system, and with the
total impunity accorded to the military and police, they are actively
operating death squads within their ranks.
Dealing With the Flood of Central Americans
Presidential hopeful Donald Trump has promised, if elected, to build a big,
beautiful wall like the Great Wall of China along the 2,000-mile border
between the US and Mexico. Candidate Trump says he will deport all twelve
million if he has to purge the country of illegals. But while those directly
in the crosshairs of Trumps racist rhetoric find it frightening, they are
more concerned with the actual policies of the current administration, both
in its record-breaking number of deportations and, even more important and
less talked about, its pro-coup policies that have indeed led thousands of
men, women, and children to pull up roots and make the long and dangerous
journey north.
And the deportations continue apace. According to credible reports,
thousands more victims lie naked on the anvil of American injustice, waiting
for the hammer of deportation to fall once again. On December 26, The
Washington Post reported in a piece titled Homeland Security Preparing
Trump Style Mass Deportation Raids that the Department of Homeland
Security has begun preparing for a series of raids that would target for
deportation hundreds of families who have flocked to the United States since
the start of last year, according to people familiar with the operation.
The reports of expanded ICE sweeps already have thousands of undocumented
people bracing for the worst. In an extended interview on January 6th, Pablo
Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network
(NDLON), addressed the impending crackdown and some of the root causes that
are driving so many to make the often futile and sometimes lethal journey
north. Alvarado is just back from a fact-finding tour to Honduras, where the
violence faced by everyday people, he said, is at least as bad if not worse
than what is going on in Iraq and Syria.
The crackdown doesnt come as a surprise to us, said Alvarado, recognized
by Time Magazine as one of the 25 Most Influential Hispanics in America. It
is consistent with the deportation policy of this administration. Very
consistent. The idea that you need to deport some to provide relief to
others. The idea that you need to deport first and then legalize later. The
idea that somehow deporting some people is necessary for others to get
relief has been the way the Obama administration has operated for the last
seven years, said the labor and human rights activist. And the intention
was that by being tough on immigrants, the xenophobes and the nativists
would actually support immigration reform.
Alvarado says the Obama/Clinton policy has been a dismal failure from start
to finish from its record-breaking deportations to its support for the
deposing of President Manuel Zelaya. Meanwhile, he says, the issue of true
immigration reform has been swallowed up by right-wing campaign rhetoric and
the meet-me-under-the-flagpole attitude among Republicans and many Democrats
as well, regarding who is going to be tougher on the floods of Central
Americans that keep heading north.
Central Americans are bracing for the worst, said Alvarado. Obamas
policy has definitely been a failed policy. Now this new wave of
deportations comes at the worst time. Deportations are bad at any time, but
at this time in particular were going into an electoral year, and the
sentiment that has been created by Donald Trump has essentially dominated
American politics. But Alvarado added, While Trump stigmatizes immigrants
with his derogatory and racist language, the president is deporting them. So
when we see what is happening, we feel there is no difference between what
the Republicans do and what the Democrats are doing, when it comes down to
deportations. And the worst thing is that there is no political gain that
the president can make by spearheading this new wave of deportations of
children and mothers. The only people benefitting from this type of
initiative are essentially the right wing. Its essentially the Republicans,
the xenophobes and the nativists. Which is exactly what they want.
National Security Deportations
Alvarado said it was downright dangerous for Homeland Security to
characterize the mass deportations of Central Americans as an issue of
national security, rather than an issue of human rights and people fleeing
for their lives. I mean, they treat the issue of refugee children and their
mothers as a matter of national security, he said, but we see it as a
matter of human rights, as a humanitarian crisis. The administration claims
that they have the situation under control, that the surge as they called
it, has ended and that the numbers of unaccompanied minors and their mothers
has decreased. However, what weve noticed is that the United States
government has invested a lot of money in a project called Frontera Surge.
According to Alvarado, the US is now spending millions in direct funds to
the Mexican government to cut off the flow of Central Americans coming to
the US, before they ever cross the southern border. And the Mexicans are
brutal, he says, in their enforcement of the surge against those fleeing
the violence and economic devastation resulting from US free trade and
pro-Honduras coup policies.
They are funding the Mexican government and its military, and its other
repressive bodies, said Alvarado, to actually apprehend Central Americans
on the southern border of Mexico. Now many folks still get to make it to the
US/Mexico border, but a significant number are apprehended in Mexico, and
deported from Mexico to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
If the Department of Homeland Security believes, said Alvarado, if the US
government believes that people are going to stop coming, they are wrong.
Because for as long as it is more dangerous to stay than to leave, people
will continue to leave their countries of origin, looking for better
horizons, particularly when the levels of violence are unbearable in those
places.
I was in Honduras a few months ago, and I met four young men who had been
deported from New Orleans, said Alvarado. These men left Honduras in the
first place to come to the United States for few years because they were
forced to grow African palm, but they couldnt compete in the market, so
these new policies displaced them, took away their subsistence farming, and
they were forced to come north. And then they come north, they produce, they
help reconstruct New Orleans, and then they are sent back. So these are the
victims workers, impoverished communities, poor people are the ones who
are the victims of these policies. Obviously, you know the aristocrats in
Honduras, you know, the powerful families, they continue to profit from
those trade agreements, said Alvarado, and of course, this free trade
policy is something that Hillary Clinton promoted as secretary of state,
after she supported that coup détat against President Zelaya. And the US
role with Clinton as secretary of state has had catastrophic consequences.
Before President Zelaya was deposed, he was trying to bring a sense of
equality, bring some kind of justice to impoverished communities, said
Alvarado. For instance, he was trying to increase the minimum wage for
workers, which is precisely why people leave, because wages and working
conditions are not the best in our countries of origin. So people tend to
migrate. So these were some of the changes that President Zelaya was trying
to do. Now the US government comes in and supports a coup détat against
President Zelaya. And right immediately after the coup, you could see the
levels of violence skyrocketing. And San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa are
becoming some of the most violent cities in the planet.
Alvarado said there is now a great deal of fear in the undocumented
communities regarding the reports of expanded raids and deportation led by
ICE and DHL. And it affects almost every family and every undocumented
person in the US. Now its happening every single day. I have a cousin who
migrated a few months ago. She was caught at the US/Mexico border. She
happened to be a police officer in El Salvador, and she was investigating a
case of extortion. And it turned out that some of the other officers were
the ones who were involved in the crime. When she reported that, she began
being persecuted. She was deported a few months ago from the US because she
didnt qualify for political asylum.
Alvarado said he is working with friends, colleagues, and supporters to
prepare for the new wave of deportations, even as he continues to fight for
the right of undocumented workers and for humane immigration reform. Well
do what every vulnerable community under siege has done in the past, said
the human rights activist. The first and most important thing is that
migrants have to resist the fear that these raids are instilling in their
lives, you know? And the way to do that is by making sure that migrants know
their rights, and how to exercise them, and particularly when a deportation
agent comes knocking on their door.
Dennis J. Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on
Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as
a journalist whistleblower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed:
Voices from a Hidden Classroom.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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