CounterSpin Interview
Photos releases by the right-wing Breitbart news service sparked widespread attention to the refugee crisis.
Barack Obama has declared the increase in child migrants arriving at the US’s southern border, unaccompanied by parents or guardians, an “urgent humanitarian situation.”
One line of coverage is exemplified by Investor’s Business Daily (12/26/13), which warned that the White House’s “de facto amnesty via the Dream Act” was “enabling young illegals to jump the immigration queue.” And the media’s version of an opposing viewpoint to that seems to be: not to worry, most of the children who have made the dangerous, frightening journey to the United States will be sent right back.
CounterSpin asked Laura Carlsen of the Americas Program of the Center of International Policy, who is based in Mexico City, what deeper coverage would add to this story in terms of context and history.
CounterSpin: Most media coverage seems to start with sympathy for the plight of children from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, who are coming through Mexico at tremendous danger of robbery, of exploitation. There’s been some good field reporting of the dangers of that journey, but what do you think makes US coverage, overall, inadequate to fully understanding what’s happening?
Laura Carlsen: First of all, this is a story that came out from political motivation. This story really starts in early June from a news syndicate called Breitbart, in the Texas office. The reporter, named Brandon Darby, brought out these pictures that had been leaked to him directly, apparently by Border Patrol, of children in these shelters, under the headline that says, “Leaked Images Reveal Children Warehoused in Crowded US Cells, Border Patrol Overwhelmed.”
So they begin this story with the interpretation already made, saying that the reason the children are leaving their home country is that they know they will not be turned away and they will be provided for. So the story comes out readymade to criticize Obama policies, make them look soft on immigration and ignite an anti-immigration backlash, which is unfortunately what happened, despite the fact that story is being couched as a humanitarian crisis.
The High Commissioner for Refugees issued a report with 400 interviews, and we’ve talked with the shelters here in Mexico, that are run by the Catholic Church, for the most part. The people that see hundreds of immigrants coming through a day and talk to them about the reasons that they leave are saying that almost no one is citing a perceived change in US immigration policy as the reason that they’re leaving their countries.
What almost everyone cites are the absolutely unendurable conditions in their home country. Some of the stories show this, but what they never talk about is the way that US policies have contributed to the deterioration and almost impossible conditions in Honduras, especially, but also in Guatemala and El Salvador.
CS: In the media, we see a push/pull argument going on. The White House is saying these people are coming because of the conditions in the home countries: violence, poverty. Republicans are saying, no, it’s a lax immigration policy. That frame assumes that US policy can only be the pull in this situation. There’s no room to see how US policy might act on the push side as well.
LC: That’s exactly it. And the push side is what the whole phenomenon is. It’s absolutely absurd to assume that a rumor that’s suddenly gone through Central America is the cause of this surge.
Alejandro Solalinde is one of the foremost activists of immigrant rights, especially Central Americans coming through Mexico. He describes it as sort of a chain of desperation. What he means by that is these are families who, first, perhaps several years ago, the fathers left the country because they couldn’t provide for their families. Then gradually older children, first boys and then girls, left the country. Then we were left with women and very young children. It became impossible for the women to support the younger children.
And more and more the issues of extreme violence started coming up. Whereas before you would hear people talking about extreme poverty, now what many of these mothers are saying, and the immigrants themselves—the children themselves—is that if they stayed in the country, the mothers would either see their children forcibly recruited into gangs, and the boys especially would face that forced recruitment, or retaliations from the gangs, in many of their cities. This is something that’s relatively recent as a push factor, and it’s been a direct result of the deterioration in these societies.
You take someplace like Honduras, which is this important case, because that’s where the surge has been the largest. There’s no way you can not relate that to the fact that there was a coup d’etat at the end of 2009. That government was allowed to remain, in a sense, through two elections—not government, really, a regime—with the support of the United States. There was never a process to punish the way that the constitutional rule was completely broken at the time of the military coup, or to purge society of many of those criminals.
So in that context of impunity for the coup, we saw a total breakdown of state institutions. That’s what’s reflected in the growth of the cartels now. The United States has to take some responsibility for that.
The L.A. Times finds that if you “press a little more deeply,” you can get sources to confirm your preconceptions.
CS: And yet I see the New York Times [7/9/14] manages to come close to talking about what might be driving migration from Honduras in particular—to talk about the violence, and yet somehow never mention the coup.
I was struck also by a particular story in the L.A. Times (6/21/14) by Tracy Wilkinson in which she talked about interviewing child migrants. She said:
Asked why they would take such risks, the answers…are nearly uniform: gang violence at home, poverty, no jobs. But press a little more deeply and many acknowledged having been told…that it can be easier these days to cross into the United States and stay, especially if you are carting kids.
I’m struck by that and the way that it drives home the idea that the first answer you receive is a kind of false front, and the underlying one is the real one. Given the nature of the real problem, what do you make of the US’s response? You know, sending Joe Biden down to Central America to dispel rumors and all of that?
LC: That’s an excellent example, first, because it does reveal that many of these anecdotal proofs that the rumors are causing the migration are heavily induced by reporters, which again makes you wonder what kind of a line they’re receiving. The Obama administration and others are talking about interpreting the solution to this crisis [as] more enforcement. It seems like, no matter what kind of crisis we have, whether it’s an economic crisis or whether it’s a so-called humanitarian crisis, the response—because of the way that US politics seems to work—always ends up being more enforcement.
But our analysis after years is that it’s precisely these enforcement policies—the Mérida Initiative in Mexico and the Central American Regional Security Initiative—that have militarized these societies and have increased the violence, both the violence of organized crime and state violence from many of these armed forces and corrupt police that consistently violate human rights among the population of these countries.
So it’s been really very frustrating to see that the plight of these children is being used to justify more border security that further criminalizes these flows, more aid for their countries that goes to these corrupt police forces, or to plans like USAID building new outreach centers, and these kind of things, that there’s no proven evidence whatsoever that they work.
On the other hand, the kind of policies that caused it—the militarization, the support for militarization under the drug war, and the free trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA that displace so many small farmers and workers—aren’t even being mentioned as culprits in the whole debate. There’s no mention whatsoever of taking a look at how those policies that were basically imposed in large from the United States have contributed to this crisis.
SIDEBAR
President Ronald Reagan thought genocidal dictators like Guatemala’s Efraín Ríos Montt (left) got a “bum rap.”
A ‘Border Crisis’ of Our Own Making
In “Fleeing Gangs, Children Head to US Border” (7/9/14), New York Times reporter Frances Robles reported on the root causes of a refugee crisis that could see 90,000 reaching the US border by the end of this year. Violence, gangs and poverty are mentioned, and that’s good, as far as it goes, but such stories don’t ask some obvious questions. Like, why are almost all the children from three Central American countries? The largest number of child refugees are from Honduras, with El Salvador and Guatemala accounting for almost all others.
Why aren’t children streaming out of Nicaragua, which suffers from “staggering poverty, but not a pervasive gang culture or a record-breaking murder rate,” as the Times’ Robles notes, but does not attempt to explain?
Veteran Latin American correspondent James North writes in The Nation (7/9/14) that the White House is “showing little concern for international law, and none at all for Washington’s own historic responsibility in Central America,” which he traces to the US government funding “murderous right-wing dictatorships in Central America back in the 1980s”:
The Reagan administration’s violent and immoral policy included $5 billion in aid to the military/ landowner alliance in El Salvador, which prolonged an awful conflict in which some 75,000 people died—a toll proportionally equivalent to the casualty rate in the American Civil War. But once shaky peace agreements were signed in the 1990s, the United States walked away, leaving the shattered region to rebuild on its own.
This history is virtually never mentioned in reports on the refugee crisis. In addition to the loss of blood and treasure caused by the US during the Reagan era, the US-supported governments of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras targeted popular democratic organizers and institutions, flooded those nations with guns, and interrupted political and social development. The three countries sending almost all of the refugee children abroad are the same three in which death squads flourished and where US policy became most deeply embedded in the political culture.
Nicaragua, whose political development has taken a different trajectory—seldom in lockstep with Washington, its agencies and military advisers—is not experiencing astronomical crime rates. It’s still very poor, but far less violent.
But there is virtually no media discussion of how “our border crisis” might be somewhat of our own making–“blowback” resulting from US policy going back to the 1980s.
—From “All They Will Call You Will Be Detainees,” by Steve Rendall (FAIR Blog, 7/14/14)
