More than 2,000 ‘undocumented’ children have been forcibly separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border in the last six weeks and are now being detained in camps – often no more than tent cities – by the US authorities. This has provoked a huge outcry in the USA, with the Trump administration trying to justify this monstrous policy. Here, Sean O’Torain, in Chicago, give some background to the surge of refugees and border crossings.
Firstly, a personal comment. I am originally from Ireland. I see that some creature with an Irish name is among the supporters on the Internet defending Trump and Sessions tearing the children from their families’ arms and putting them in cages.
To this person with the Irish name and to all who support the Trump cruelty, child abuse and kidnapping at the border, as a person born in Ireland I say this: Do you think they should have built a wall back in the mid 1800’s when hundreds of thousands of starving Irish peasants were landing on US shores? I am confident that the answer to this question would be a resounding “no”.
These people came here because Irish people were dying by the tens of thousands as food was exported to England by English landlords. In Ireland Before and After the Famine, (it is more accurate to call it the starvation), author Cormac O’Grada documents that in 1845, a year of mass starvation in Ireland, 3,251,907 quarters (8 bushels = 1 quarter)) of corn were exported from Ireland to Britain. That same year, 257,257 sheep were exported to Britain. In 1846, another starvation year, 480,827 swine, and 186,483 oxen were exported to Britain.
Linked to this is the tens of thousands of undocumented people from Ireland in the US today. None of the children of these immigrants are being seized and put in cages, not that they should be, but this shows the racism of what is going on.
Then there is this the most important and fundamental question. Any decent human being is disgusted by what is being done by the US capitalist government to the children and the families at the border. These are children; they are our children, the children of the working class, poor rural workers many of them. It is very good that so many people are correctly speaking out and demonstrating against this crime. But that is not enough. To have a chance to stop this brutality, the roots of this brutality must be understood. All the capitalist mass media in the US from right to left, from Fox News to MSNBC, from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal to the Los Angeles Times, all collude to prevent any discussion on what is at the root of this humanitarian crisis
US dominating Latin America for centuries
They collude to prevent any discussion of why it is that Latin America, Central America and Mexico are so violent and so poverty-stricken that people risk their lives to try and come to the US. What the US capitalist mass media does, is hide the reality that the reason that these areas are so violent and poverty-stricken is because of the policies of the US profit-addicted corporations, that is, US capitalism – US imperialism. US capitalism has dominated Latin and Central America and Mexico for centuries and continues to dominate the continent. See the book Open Veins of Latin Americaby Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. This was one of only two books Isabel Allende was able to take with her when she was driven out of Chile after the US-organized military coup orchestrated by US war criminals Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. The coup overthrew the elected socialist government of her husband Salvadore Allende, murdered him and tens of thousands of other Chilean trade unionists and socialists – people fighting for land reform and a more equal distribution of the wealth of the country.
See also the review of The century of US capitalism in Latin America by Thomas O’Brien. The review of this book, neither book or review written by left wingers, states: “Throughout the nineteenth century and up to the 1930s, American corporations stridently resisted local opposition as they secured what they wanted in Latin America, cheap labour, plentiful raw materials, and favourable business conditions.”
“Stridently resisted”. These writers, supporters of capitalism, are good with their euphemisms. This euphemism describes what were US-organized military coups and mass slaughter in Latin America. There were 200,000, mostly indigenous peasants massacred in Guatemala alone. A central organizing location for these operations is in the US, run by the US capitalist government and cynically called “The School of the Americas”.
Consider the statements of Smedley Butler, Major General in the US Marine Corps and one of the most decorated US soldiers in history. In his bookWar is a Racket, he wrote: “I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested…I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for National City bank to collect revenues…I spent most of my time (in the marines) being a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. I was a racketeer for capitalism”. From the horse’s mouth. It is no wonder there are not too many Hollywood epics about Butler as there are about Patton, Washington, and mediocre figures like Custer.
The role of NAFTA, the North American Free (Free!!!) Trade Agreement is also part of this. NAFTA allowed US capital to go where it liked and do what it likes in Mexico. There it has wiped out millions of subsistence farmers driving them from their land and into the cities where they could get no work. Many of these are the people and their children whom today are heading to the border to try and get work and something to eat. On top of that, the US provides the huge market for the drugs that are produced in Mexico and other Latin American countries and from which comes so much of the violence.
Many of these people displaced by market savagery are people in these countries who would be starving and instead get caught up in the drug business and cartels and the violence that accompanies it. It is estimated that 90% of the illegal guns in Mexico come from the US. US gun capitalists are arming the Mexican drug cartels just as they are arming about anybody who wants to be armed in the US.
At the root of all of this and its driving force is the drive for profits of the US corporations. It is the offensive of the US corporations that is, US capitalism and its government and military machine.
Resources looted
A friend once asked me why these governments of Latin America did not help themselves. This made me think. Every time the working peoples of Latin America have tried to help themselves, have elected governments and built movements which tried to bring about land reform, which tried to stop the mostly foreign corporations from looting their resources, which tried to improve the lives of their peoples, US capitalism intervened to overthrow these governments and put these movements down. And when necessary the US did this with extreme violence.
The nightmare of poverty and violence in Central and Latin America and Mexico is because of the policies of US imperialism and their boot-lickers in the region. A few names make this clear: Mexico, Chile, Grenada, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Columbia, Cuba, Panama and on and on. Look them up. See how US imperialism intervened again and again; and all for profit. So much for the whining, lying hypocrisy of US capitalism/US imperialism, and its mouthpieces from its extreme right to its liberal wing about its great support for democracy.
One thing that all the media outlets and politicians of US capitalism have in common, from the Republicans to the Democrats, from Fox News to MSNBC, from Trump to Sanders, is that they always refuse to deal with the responsibility of US capitalism, of the US corporations, of the US profit system, for the monstrous suffering of the peoples of the world, the destruction of the environment and in this case the cruelty against the children and families at the border.
Trade union “leaders” complicit
US Imperialism and its drive for profit is responsible for creating the conditions in Latin and Central America which drives people to try and get something to eat and a job in the US. Just like US and European imperialism created the conditions in the Middle East and North Africa which drive the people from these areas to seek something to eat and a job in the more economically wealthy imperialist countries in Europe. Of course, part of the reason these countries are more economically wealthy is that they looted and continue to loot the countries of the Middle East, just as the US is economically wealthier, partly because it looted and continues to loot Latin America. Imperialism impoverishes the countries it dominates. Hence the wars and the people fleeing to get a job and something to eat and to escape the violence that imperialism causes. For every action there is a reaction.
People in the US who defend the grotesque cruelty on the borders are apologists for creatures like Sessions and Trump and the US corporations which loot Latin and Central America and Mexico and at the same time live off the backs of the US working class and poison the air, the water, the food on which the US people have to live.
The leaders of the 14 million strong US trade union movement sit quiet as usual; cowed as they are by US capitalism, supporters as they are of US capitalism, living high off the hog as a reward for preventing their members from confronting the US corporations and US capitalism. These so-called “leaders” also have responsibility for the barbarous cruelty being suffered by the children and families on the border, they too have blood on their hands.
The big forces that are responsible for this cruelty must be identified and opposed. It is the case that a mass movement must be built but there is also individual responsibility. The cops and border guards and the people who are imprisoning these children should look at what they are doing and refuse to go along. Most of them are organized in some sort of union and they should collectively organize and refuse to seize and imprison the children. Once more the union leaders, the leaders of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations disgrace themselves and betray all working people not only in the US but in Latin America. They more than betray. See the role of many of these leaders in the so called American Institute of Free labor Development (AIFLD). Through AIFLD many of these leaders actually cooperated with the US government, corporations and CIA to help put down workers and peasants’ movements in Latin and Central America over the decades.
There is also the responsibility of church-goers. Sessions and Trump and co are quoting the Bible to justify their crimes and cruelty against the children and families. There are tens of thousands of churches in the US. Most of these claim the Bible as the foundation of their belief system. There are tens of millions of members of these churches. These people also have a responsibility, as do members of other religious organizations. They should organize in their churches to stand up, speak out and demand that their churches openly state that their Bible does not justify these crimes. And if their churches do not do this then they should take action. They should fight to change their organizations, their churches, from the inside or if necessary leave those churches that refuse to condemn what its going on in the name of the bible and either join a church that will condemn this or rethink their belief system.
Flipping through the channels yesterday I stopped at a megachurch service and the preacher was talking about some guy telling his brother something completely irrelevant from a text that cannot be verified in any way at all. And this as children are being ripped from their parents and thrown into jails all around him and this in the name of the bible upon which he bases himself and his church. What sort of religion is this?
The Sessions clan has a long association with Southern racists. What Christian can support what Sessions, Trump and anyone else that doesn’t act, are doing to these families?
US working class people must raise their voices not only against this cruelty at the borders, but against the corporate capitalist system that causes this and which at the same time exploits the US working class. Working people in the US must build a movement against the US corporations and link with working people in Latin America, Central America and Mexico to end capitalism which is a catastrophe for all the working people of the Americas and for the environment of the Americas.
June 19, 2018
