Rachel Ida Buff
Jacobin
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| Vice-presidente Kamala Harris na Guatemala em 7 de junho de 2021. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) |
No início deste mês, em sua primeira viagem internacional como vice-presidente, Kamala Harris viajou para a Guatemala. Lá, ela alertou os migrantes da América Central que fogem da violência e da pobreza da região a não buscarem asilo nos Estados Unidos. Falando em uma entrevista coletiva na Cidade da Guatemala após uma reunião com o presidente Alejandro Giammattei, Harris disse: "Quero enfatizar que o objetivo de nosso trabalho é ajudar os guatemaltecos a encontrarem esperança em casa. Ao mesmo tempo, quero deixar claro para as pessoas desta região que estão pensando em fazer aquela perigosa jornada para a fronteira dos Estados Unidos com o México: Não venham, não venham."
Harris defendeu um pacote de ajuda “humanitária” de US $ 310 milhões para a região anunciado no final de abril. Com o objetivo de conter o que o governo Biden descreveu como um “aumento” de migrantes na fronteira EUA-México, incluindo crianças centro-americanas que viajam desacompanhadas, este pacote inclui dinheiro para pandemia e alívio de desastres, bem como fundos para apoiar empregos e educação para mulheres e meninas. Em troca desses fundos, a administração Biden espera que Giammattei e outros líderes da região “combatam a corrupção” e implementem segurança de fronteira reforçada e militarizada para evitar a migração.
Combinar a chamada ajuda humanitária com exortações para endurecer o controle das fronteiras contra os civis que tentam atravessá-las é uma oferta básica na longa e brutal história da intervenção imperial dos EUA na América Central. Apesar de suas expressões de simpatia pelas pessoas motivadas a deixar suas casas - em sua primeira entrevista coletiva em março, Joe Biden falou sobre a viagem de seu avô à América do Norte em um navio-caixão, comparando esta fuga das agruras à situação dos migrantes contemporâneos - as suposições do governo Biden sobre as causas básicas da migração são perigosamente incorretas e a-históricas, forçando seus defensores a torcer e distorcer a linguagem.
Na tentativa de oferecer ao vice-presidente Harris um curso intensivo sobre as condições reais que criam a migração contemporânea da Guatemala, os manifestantes na sua aparição na Cidade da Guatemala traziam uma faixa onde se lia: "Kamala, eles estão mentindo para você! Há corrupção, presos políticos, desnutrição, crimes de ódio, feminicídios, exploração infantil, desemprego e pobreza. A Guatemala é um Narco-Estado. É por isso que há migração."
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| Pessoas seguram cartazes durante a visita da vice-presidente dos Estados Unidos Kamala Harris, em frente à Embaixada dos Estados Unidos na Cidade da Guatemala, em 7 de junho de 2021. (Orlando Estrada / AFP via Getty Images) |
Not referenced in this apt distillation was the bloody, almost seventy-year history of US support for murderous regimes in Guatemala, which has contributed mightily to the nation’s current straits. Can this administration truly be unaware of the deadly consequences of the long history of US intervention in Central America?
In her April essay in the Nation, Aviva Chomsky describes “The Biden Plan to Build Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of Central America” as linking the disastrous effects of twentieth-century US counterinsurgency operations in the region to current efforts to suppress migration. In Chomsky’s terms, the policy proclaimed by Harris in Guatemala City effectively functions to “kettle” migrants, trapping them between military and security forces hopped up on US dollars, on the one hand, and neoliberal economies beset by predatory foreign investment bent on resource extraction and brutal climate change, evidenced by the unusually destructive Hurricanes Eta and Iota last December, on the other.
Resource extraction and the environmental havoc it creates displace many, often destroying rural, indigenous, and Afro-descended, Garifuna communities. For example, after indigenous Xinca protested a mining license granted on their lands at Escobal by the Guatemalan government to the Canada-based international corporation Pan American Silver, Guatemala’s Supreme Court suspended it in 2018. On taking office in 2020, Giammattei appointed Juan José Cabrera Alonso, Guatemalan legal counsel for Pan American Silver, as special secretary to the vice president, signaling his administration’s support for the resumption of mining — despite suspicious murders of indigenous and environmental activists that have already taken place and the inevitable and permanent environmental degradation that will be a consequence of the mine.
While the Biden administration refers to “corruption” as though it were a mild disorder to be purged from the civic body with well-intentioned financial support, the situation at Escobal is both endemic and indicative. Giammattei endorses the strong-arming and displacement of communities, and the extralegal murder of civil society leaders that goes along with it, because it creates the appearance of a productive business climate and generates lucrative kickbacks for government officials and contractors. This corruption is favored by both the conceptual support of the Biden Plan as well as on-the-ground financial backing by powerful Global North investors like Pan American Silver. Similarly, the complicity of the US Department of State with the ouster of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya in 2009 created the conditions leading to the assassination of Lenca environmental activist Berta Cáceres there in 2016.
Forced to leave their homes, migrants from rural areas often leave for nearby cities, where they encounter exploitative economies, neighborhoods controlled by narco-traffickers, and militarized police forces. Confronted with violence and poverty, many choose to continue their travels, seeking refuge and opportunity in the United States. While it has become common in political parlance to describe groups of migrants using the term “surge,” this military deployment is inaccurate. It conjures images of a concerted assault at the border, inflaming xenophobic fears, rather than describing groups of desperate people who seek to protect themselves and their relatives.
Although she spoke as if she was merely canceling a dinner party, Harris’s excoriation of migrants not to come flies in the face of international as well as US law certifying the rights of migrants to claim asylum. The United States is a signatory to the 1967 United Nations High Council on Human Rights Protocol, which certified the right to cross a border in order to seek asylum from persecution. But successive administrations, from Reagan to Trump to Biden, have restricted and curtailed its practice, implementing the detention of asylum seekers and delimiting the conditions that count as persecution. Under Attorney General Jefferson Davis Sessions III, for example, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that gang violence and domestic abuse did not constitute grounds for seeking asylum.
As US administrations have sought to, in Chomsky’s words, “outsource the border,” they have supplied arms and cash to regimes that emerged out of the US-backed counterinsurgency warfare of the 1970s and 1980s. Built on the displacement of rural communities, the savaging of unions and civil society groups, and the dispossession and murder of indigenous Central Americans, as transpired during Guatemala’s long civil war, these regimes continue to create the conditions illuminated by the Guatemala City banner. Salvadoran-American writer Roberto Lovato explains that the flow of guns and power produced by US-backed counterinsurgency efforts created the current conditions of corruption and narco-terrorism.
A policy truly in partnership with the people of Central America must reckon with the legacy of US involvement in the region. “Corruption” does not grow like mold, unbidden; it is the result of a violent history implemented by the School of the Americas, the CIA, and other US actors against the popular sovereignty of the Central American people. If US policy intends to invest in ending corruption, it must support local communities in their fights to stay home rather than migrating, combatting the deep pockets that support resource extraction and displacement; it must advocate for sovereignty on indigenous lands. Such a policy would benefit the region as well as the planet by curtailing destructive resource extraction.
Meanwhile, the thousands of asylum seekers fleeing the violence and poverty of Central America will continue to come, no matter what Biden or Harris or anyone else says. Their exemplary acts of endurance and courage, certified in national as well as international law, must earn them both refuge and respect.
Sobre o autor
Rachel Ida Buff é escritora e historiadora. Atualmente, ela está trabalhando em uma coleção de ensaios históricos, Thinking Like a Caravan, e em um romance, Holy Toledo.
In her April essay in the Nation, Aviva Chomsky describes “The Biden Plan to Build Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of Central America” as linking the disastrous effects of twentieth-century US counterinsurgency operations in the region to current efforts to suppress migration. In Chomsky’s terms, the policy proclaimed by Harris in Guatemala City effectively functions to “kettle” migrants, trapping them between military and security forces hopped up on US dollars, on the one hand, and neoliberal economies beset by predatory foreign investment bent on resource extraction and brutal climate change, evidenced by the unusually destructive Hurricanes Eta and Iota last December, on the other.
Resource extraction and the environmental havoc it creates displace many, often destroying rural, indigenous, and Afro-descended, Garifuna communities. For example, after indigenous Xinca protested a mining license granted on their lands at Escobal by the Guatemalan government to the Canada-based international corporation Pan American Silver, Guatemala’s Supreme Court suspended it in 2018. On taking office in 2020, Giammattei appointed Juan José Cabrera Alonso, Guatemalan legal counsel for Pan American Silver, as special secretary to the vice president, signaling his administration’s support for the resumption of mining — despite suspicious murders of indigenous and environmental activists that have already taken place and the inevitable and permanent environmental degradation that will be a consequence of the mine.
While the Biden administration refers to “corruption” as though it were a mild disorder to be purged from the civic body with well-intentioned financial support, the situation at Escobal is both endemic and indicative. Giammattei endorses the strong-arming and displacement of communities, and the extralegal murder of civil society leaders that goes along with it, because it creates the appearance of a productive business climate and generates lucrative kickbacks for government officials and contractors. This corruption is favored by both the conceptual support of the Biden Plan as well as on-the-ground financial backing by powerful Global North investors like Pan American Silver. Similarly, the complicity of the US Department of State with the ouster of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya in 2009 created the conditions leading to the assassination of Lenca environmental activist Berta Cáceres there in 2016.
Forced to leave their homes, migrants from rural areas often leave for nearby cities, where they encounter exploitative economies, neighborhoods controlled by narco-traffickers, and militarized police forces. Confronted with violence and poverty, many choose to continue their travels, seeking refuge and opportunity in the United States. While it has become common in political parlance to describe groups of migrants using the term “surge,” this military deployment is inaccurate. It conjures images of a concerted assault at the border, inflaming xenophobic fears, rather than describing groups of desperate people who seek to protect themselves and their relatives.
Although she spoke as if she was merely canceling a dinner party, Harris’s excoriation of migrants not to come flies in the face of international as well as US law certifying the rights of migrants to claim asylum. The United States is a signatory to the 1967 United Nations High Council on Human Rights Protocol, which certified the right to cross a border in order to seek asylum from persecution. But successive administrations, from Reagan to Trump to Biden, have restricted and curtailed its practice, implementing the detention of asylum seekers and delimiting the conditions that count as persecution. Under Attorney General Jefferson Davis Sessions III, for example, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that gang violence and domestic abuse did not constitute grounds for seeking asylum.
As US administrations have sought to, in Chomsky’s words, “outsource the border,” they have supplied arms and cash to regimes that emerged out of the US-backed counterinsurgency warfare of the 1970s and 1980s. Built on the displacement of rural communities, the savaging of unions and civil society groups, and the dispossession and murder of indigenous Central Americans, as transpired during Guatemala’s long civil war, these regimes continue to create the conditions illuminated by the Guatemala City banner. Salvadoran-American writer Roberto Lovato explains that the flow of guns and power produced by US-backed counterinsurgency efforts created the current conditions of corruption and narco-terrorism.
A policy truly in partnership with the people of Central America must reckon with the legacy of US involvement in the region. “Corruption” does not grow like mold, unbidden; it is the result of a violent history implemented by the School of the Americas, the CIA, and other US actors against the popular sovereignty of the Central American people. If US policy intends to invest in ending corruption, it must support local communities in their fights to stay home rather than migrating, combatting the deep pockets that support resource extraction and displacement; it must advocate for sovereignty on indigenous lands. Such a policy would benefit the region as well as the planet by curtailing destructive resource extraction.
Meanwhile, the thousands of asylum seekers fleeing the violence and poverty of Central America will continue to come, no matter what Biden or Harris or anyone else says. Their exemplary acts of endurance and courage, certified in national as well as international law, must earn them both refuge and respect.
Sobre o autor
Rachel Ida Buff é escritora e historiadora. Atualmente, ela está trabalhando em uma coleção de ensaios históricos, Thinking Like a Caravan, e em um romance, Holy Toledo.
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