Powerful reporting by Anne Lewis, on the Rag Blog. This is a difficult video to watch because of the sense of terror that it incites. The horror that these Central American families are being put through is beyond measure.

She interviews renowned lawyer and human rights activist, Jennifer Harbury, provides a credible analysis of how we've gotten to where we are that has resulted in the migration of so many from Central America to our southern U.S.-Mexico border.

As you can hear from the interview, there are plenty of political and policy levers that we have to address this crisis, but as Harbury points out, our misdeeds as a country are protected at the deeply troubling and shameful expense of these terrorized families and communities—only to meet horrific responses at the border despite their abundantly legitimate and indeed, legal claims to asylum.

I, too, agree with Harbury that we should legalize all drugs. We should opt toward "medicalizing," rather than criminalizing them. This would take the profit out of what leads to the systematic brutality that we're seeing in places like Mexico and Central America.

-Angela Valenzuela

Jennifer Harbury | See video here.

Asylum, Terror, and the Future #5 from military officer to drug lord Based on case stories of Jennifer Harbury

By Anne Lewis | The Rag Blog | July 27, 2019

• Read and watch the videos of the stories in this series here.

---

When people say that the current removals of workers and families, use of military force, concentration camps, denial of entrance for refugees, snatching of children from the arms of their mothers and fathers are new under the Trump Administration, they have little understanding of our history. It’s easy to find examples of all of these — based in the pervasive belief that white America is racially, ethically, and politically superior to other nations and peoples, both within our national boundaries and without.

This podcast explores with Jennifer Harbury why it is that so many refugees flee from Central America even though they know full well the danger of the journey with kidnapping, rape, and physical torment, and the potential for torture, imprisonment, and deportation across our border.

Documented CIA involvement in the countries of the Northern Triangle began in Guatemala in 1954 under President Eisenhower and continued through a UN-brokered peace in 1996. In the 1980s the Reagan Administration stationed thousands of U.S. troops to train right-wing rebels in Honduras. In El Salvador, the U.S. -trained and funded Atlacatl Battalion killed as many as 1,000 men, women, and children in a village, and the Reagan Administration under a Cold War containment policy ran a war in Guatemala that resulted in an estimated 150,000 civilian deaths, 85% committed by U.S. trained death squads.

For a century, the U.S. government has intervened on behalf of the United Fruit Company, coffee companies, mining companies, and right-wing dictators against efforts towards self-emancipation and liberation of the mainly indigenous population. The idea of Manifest Destiny (that the U.S. under God should spread democracy and capitalism across the continent) followed by Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 declaration that we are “the international police power” in Latin America, has provided a morally equivocal basis.

Why should we feel responsible for refugees with asylum claims from the Northern Triangle of Central American numbering in the hundreds of thousands?

Tamal refugee to Britain, A. Sivanandan, expressed this simply and well. “We are here because you were there.”

If we look towards the future, liberal ideas of inclusion and shared humanity, while ethical and correct, will not move us very far against the current administration. Economic programs like the new Marshall plan proposed by Julian Castro, although well intended, seems like a misunderstanding of post-World War II Western Europe and current conditions in the Northern Triangle. Add to that real skepticism about how much the U.S. should intervene in the economies of other nations and how much we can and will do to improve conditions for working people in those nations.

Harbury's and her late husband who was kidnapped,
tortured, and killed by military officials who were mostly
trained at the School of the Americas

Instead we could look towards solutions like the priest from Columbia during the Medellín cartel era who proposed legalizing narcotics, all narcotics; or efforts to transform trade deals like CAFTA into something that benefits agricultural workers in their home countries by setting international wage, benefit, and environmental standards; or support for international labor unions; or support for indigenous movements towards liberation and worker control; or even a true pledge that the U.S. military will not be involved in any capacity providing guns and money and training torturers and murderers — shut down the School of the Americas/WHINSEC this November in honor of the 30th Anniversary of the Central American University massacre.

The list of solutions could go on and on based on principles of self-determination, self-empowerment, and international law.

---

Jennifer Harbury is a lawyer and human rights activist.

---

[Anne Lewis is a documentary filmmaker whose films include On Our Own Land (DuPont-Columbia award), Fast Food Women (POV), Justice in the Coalfields (Gold Plaque, Intercom), and Morristown: in the air and sun about factory job loss and the rights of immigrants. Her latest film A Strike and an Uprising (in Texas) looks at the pecan shellers’ strike in San Antonio in the ’30s and the union uprising in Nacogdoches in the late ’80s (audience award, Hecho en Tejas, Cine Las Americas) She serves on the executive board of the Texas State Employees Union TSEU-CWA 6186 and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.]

---

• Read more by and about Anne Lewis on The Rag Blog.

Mexico's President Forced into a Corner

Politically speaking, things are not well either with Mexico or with President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico (see Huffington Post piece below).  This is all connects to the 43 "disappeared"—now feared dead—students of Ayotzinapa.  

They were all students of the Raul Isidro Burgos Normal Rural School of Ayotzinapa that you can read about here, although the Spanish Wikipedia version here is more complete.  

According to this piece, titled, "College of missing Mexican students vows to maintain revolutionary zeal, this school is "one of 16 institutions around Mexico that arose following Mexico’s revolution nearly a century ago with the aim of training teachers to raise literacy and standards of living among the rural poor."  

Their most famous alums were Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vasquez.  From 1962-63, Cabañas was elected Secretary General of Federación de Estudiantes Campesinos Socialistas de México (Federation of Socialistic Farm Worker Students of Mexico). Lucio Cabañas himself is an icon in Mexico similar to Che Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos. 

This interview also provides some interesting detail, too:

Outrage: Drug Cartels Kill 43 Students in Mexico

Eery ending to this piece:

Perhaps he [President Enrique Peña Nieto} should have remembered the words often attributed to Porfirio Díaz, the president who after 30 years in power resigned in 1911 at the start of the revolution: "In Mexico nothing ever happens -- until it happens."

-Angela

 

Mexico's President Forced into a Corner

Posted: 11/21/2014 8:31 pm EST Updated: 11/21/2014 8:59 pm EST

MEXICO CITY -- It was a sweet, prolonged honeymoon. During his first 18 months in office President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico signed a political agreement with the country's top three political parties, something unheard of in a country known for its acrimonious, highly partisan politics. He proceeded to get 11 major reforms approved by a divided Congress. Peña Nieto moved Mexico from the crime sections to the business pages of international newspapers. His energy reform opened up Mexico's oil, gas and electricity industries to private investment. The telecommunications reform has tackled powerful local business empires. In his annual state of the union report, on Sept. 1, a confident Peña Nieto claimed that, after a long paralysis, "Mexico [is] on the move."

 

MEXICO WAS MOVING
But the movement has turned into an earthquake. On the evening of Sept. 26 a group of first-year students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College arrived in Iguala, a city in the southern state of Guerrero. They had been ordered by their school "Struggle Committee," the radical leftist group that rules life at the college, to disrupt a celebration organized by María de los Ángeles Pineda, the wife of Iguala's mayor, José Luis Abarca, who had plans to succeed her husband.
The students had stolen buses. Mayor Abarca ordered the Iguala police to "stop" the students. When the police intercepted them, the students apparently threw stones at the police, who then reportedly responded with live bullets. According to eyewitness accounts, three students were killed right there. Forty-four others were taken away by the police. The others are presumed to have been taken to Cocula, a small town, and handed over to a drug organization known as Guerreros Unidos or United Warriors. The drug traffickers allegedly killed them and burned their bodies. The government claims the mayor and his wife had links with this drug organization.

Mexico is used to violence. President Felipe Calderón, Peña Nieto's predecessor, launched a war against drugs in 2006 and saw an increase in murders from 8 per 100,000 people in 2007 to 24 in 2011. A slow decline in homicides began in 2012. In 2013, the first year of President Peña Nieto's government, there were 19 homicides per 100,000 people. The reduction prompted Peña Nieto to promote the idea that violence was a thing of the past.
No more. The disappearance and apparent murder of the Ayotzinapa students has horrified Mexico and the world. Other acts of violence have also become public knowledge. When searching for the Ayotzinapa students, government investigators uncovered a number of clandestine burial sites in the state of Guerrero. They thought at first they were the Ayotzinapa students, but were proven wrong. Dozens of bodies have been recovered and are now painfully and slowly being identified.

CHE STILL HERO OF THE STUDENTS
The Iguala affair has turned into a political crisis for President Peña Nieto. The Ayotzinapa school is known for its Marxist bent. Instead of having pictures of the nation's heroes, it is decorated with portraits of Che Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos. Its classes are used for indoctrinating students on revolutionary struggle. Lucio Cabañas, a famous guerrilla fighter of the 1970s, was a graduate of the college -- and remains the most admired alumnus.
Dozens of left-wing organizations have now joined the Ayotzinapa Struggle Committee in a movement that openly seeks the resignation of Peña Nieto. This would appear strange. Neither the president nor his party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, had anything to do with the events in Iguala. The mayor was a member of the moderate leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution.
Peña Nieto's attorney general has pretty much solved the crime, which is unusual in a country with a 98 percent impunity rate, and has detained more than 70 people, including the mayor and his wife. Many of the accused have confessed to the mass kidnapping and the executions of the students. Still, the leaders of the movement claim that this was "a state crime" and thus the head of the Mexican state must resign.
The president's public image has been further tarnished by information that his wife owns a $7 million residential compound in Mexico City's posh Lomas district. Images of the luxurious home have circulated widely. A former successful television soap opera star, Angélica Rivera issued an emotional video explaining that she purchased the property with her own resources. Part of the compound, however, was bought on credit from a government contractor. The first lady claims that she is repaying the loan with interest.
On Nov. 20, the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, thousands of people demonstrated in the streets of Mexico City demanding Peña Nieto's resignation. At this point there is no indication that the president is even considering the move. His administration is constitutionally scheduled to end in November 2018.
But the government is now afraid to use public force to prevent demonstrators from blockading roads and streets, stealing buses and trucks, ransacking supermarkets and torching government buildings. President Peña Nieto has claimed that his patience has limits, but so far the Ayotzinapa movement appears to have forced him into a corner.

REMEMBERING A VIOLENT REVOLUTION
Many of the demonstrators on Revolution Day threatened President Peña Nieto with a revolution if he does not resign. Paradoxically, Peña Nieto said on that very same day, in a ceremony to commemorate the 1910 Revolution, that violence is not acceptable. Apparently he was not aware of the fact that the Mexican Revolution was a violent affair that cost the lives of perhaps 1 million Mexicans, one tenth of the population at the time. Perhaps he should have remembered the words often attributed to Porfirio Díaz, the president who after 30 years in power resigned in 1911 at the start of the revolution: "In Mexico nothing ever happens -- until it happens."
Sergio Sarmiento is a columnist for the Mexican daily Reforma and a TV and radio commentator.