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| This is why people come to the US. A product of US foreign policy |
Richard
Mellor
Afscme
Local 444, retired
In a video I posted last week, I pointed out what is not being stressed in the capitalist mass media about Trump’s decision to cut aid to three Central American countries, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Trump recognizes that cutting the dismal amount of aid the US sends to these poverty stricken countries will exacerbate the cause of migration northward, poverty, hunger, violence, feed his bloodthirsty xenophobic, racist base and boost his call for a border wall.
In a video I posted last week, I pointed out what is not being stressed in the capitalist mass media about Trump’s decision to cut aid to three Central American countries, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Trump recognizes that cutting the dismal amount of aid the US sends to these poverty stricken countries will exacerbate the cause of migration northward, poverty, hunger, violence, feed his bloodthirsty xenophobic, racist base and boost his call for a border wall.
US imperialism does not send aid to any country on an egalitarian basis, the vast majority of funds the US war machine exports abroad is for military or other means aimed at subjugating nations that resist imperialist aggression.
And what level of funding are we talking about for these three poverty stricken Central American nations? Not much by US capitalism’s standards. According to the Washington Office On Latin America (WOLA), U.S. funding for these three countries in question has fallen to less than $530 million from form $750 million in 2016. WSJ 4-1-19.
This can be put in perspective when we consider that California, where I live, has the highest population of billionaires in the United States. 124 of them live in the state and have a total net worth of $532.4 billion. The US has some 640 billionaires worth an estimated $3.2trillion. and there are now more billionaires in the world than ever before.
But
let's look at a bit of history between the US and El Salvador for instance. In
1932, shortly after seizing power, Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez slaughtered
some 30,000 Pipil Indians who had revolted against the giant landowners. With
U.S. support he banned all Unions and ruled in the interests of the ruling
elite until 1944. The coffee magnates that he and subsequent regimes supported
with U.S. help took over so many small farms that the number of landless
peasants in El Salvador quadrupled between 1961 and 1975. Hundreds of thousands
left the country looking for work. Where do you think many of them went?
Supported by El Salvadore’s Catholic Church, a movement toward democracy developed in the late 60's and 70's that gave El Salvadorians some hope for a better future. But the more this movement developed the more repressive the oligarchy and its military dictatorship became. A civil war erupted in 1979 after an army coup aborted the results of a democratic election. During the next two years right wing death squads supported by the U.S. hunted down any dissidents; more than 8,000 trade unionists were murdered or abducted during this period.
Siding with the El Salvadorian oligarchy, the U.S. government provided them with $3.7bn in aid from 1981-89, 70% of this money was for weapons and war assistance. Such was the terror in El Salvador that thousands of people fled north to the U.S. to escape death or torture.The Catholic Archbishop Romero was nor so fortunate along with nuns sympathetic to the poor, they were murdered.
Supported by El Salvadore’s Catholic Church, a movement toward democracy developed in the late 60's and 70's that gave El Salvadorians some hope for a better future. But the more this movement developed the more repressive the oligarchy and its military dictatorship became. A civil war erupted in 1979 after an army coup aborted the results of a democratic election. During the next two years right wing death squads supported by the U.S. hunted down any dissidents; more than 8,000 trade unionists were murdered or abducted during this period.
Siding with the El Salvadorian oligarchy, the U.S. government provided them with $3.7bn in aid from 1981-89, 70% of this money was for weapons and war assistance. Such was the terror in El Salvador that thousands of people fled north to the U.S. to escape death or torture.The Catholic Archbishop Romero was nor so fortunate along with nuns sympathetic to the poor, they were murdered.
Guatemala is similar. In 1954 a CIA sponsored coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz on behalf of the United Fruit Co. and other big landowners. Arbenz had introduced land reforms that threatened the domination of the United Fruit Company over Guatemalan society. Only 2% of landowners owned 72% of the arable land, much of it unused. United fruit alone held 600,000 acres of mostly unused land. The Guatemalan colonel that the CIA selected to replace Arbenz immediately outlawed trade unions and returned more than 1.5 million acres to United fruit Co.
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Instrumental in planning the coup were the Dulles brothers, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen Dulles who was director of the CIA. These two also helped orchestrate the CIA coup that overthrew the secular democratic government of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and replaced him with the murderous Shah.
They were former partners of United Fruit’s main law firm in Washington. By 1985 some 75,000 people were dead or had disappeared at the hands of the Guatemalan dictatorship; a huge amount in this tiny country. Some 150,000 Indians fled to Mexico and beyond. Many of the brothers and sisters we see on the streets as day laborers are from this area.
As for Honduras, the US led by Hilary Clinton’s charge, supported the right wing military coup that overthrew Honduras’ democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya in 2009:
“The leader of the coup, Honduran General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, was a graduate of the notorious School of the Americas, a U.S. Army training program nicknamed “School of Assassins” for the sizable number of graduates who have engaged in coups, as well as the torture and murder of political opponents.”
“In the subsequent six years, the horrific repression and
skyrocketing murder rate — now the highest in the world — has resulted in tens
of thousands of refugees fleeing for safety in the United States. Ironically,
as Secretary of State, Clinton rejected granting political asylum and supported their
deportation.” *
Perhaps the most widely known recent victim of US capitalism’s support of the Honduran military coup was Berta Cáceres, the Honduran indigenous activist assassinated outside her home in 2016. Since the US supported coup thousands of indigenous right activists, union leaders, environmental activists and others have been imprisoned, tortured and murdered.
US imperialism’s role in Nicaragua is well documented and its training arming and financing of the Contra’s caused untold misery and death for the Nicaraguan people. It should be remembered that the US also blockaded Managua’s harbor in violation of International law. One of many instances the US does this.
The role of US capitalism in this region has not changed. It considers this region to be its back yard and only US capitalism can play in it.
There has been some significant whining from some of the serial sexual abusers’ opponents. Some comment on how counterproductive the move is recognizing that it will feed the every crisis that is driving people north but they do not point to it being a tactical move on Trump’s part. “
What we need to do is focus on what’s happening in Central America, where three countries are disassembling before our eyes, and people are desperately coming to the United States. The president’s cutting off aid to these countries will not solve that problem.” Sen Dick Durbin told NBC Sunday. No mention of why the crisis exists.
“We will work with our colleagues in Congress to do everything in our power to push back on the president’s misguided approach to Central America,” Democrat Eliot Engel
Because both Democratic and Republican parties are responsible for the crises in Central America, these whiners cannot get to the heart of the issue and that is the plundering of this region by US imperialism. These states are also political and economic regions created from without, by colonizing forces as I pointed out in the video I posted about this last week with regard to Africa.
It is not possible to calculate the actual amount of wealth stolen from this region and these three countries by US capitalism and its corporations but it must be in the trillions, not to mention the labor power, death, disease and outright starvation. It is not possible for these countries to develop in to “healthy” capitalist economies in the image of the early nation states of Western Europe and the US. A recent study with regard to the British occupation of India estimates the amount stolen from that country to be around $42 trillion. I give some examples of the similar development in Africa in that video.
I see El Salvador’s president-elect, Nayib Bukele is calling for increased trade, economic growth, and job creation. In other words, like so many other capitalist politicians in former colonial countries he is calling for a capitalist solution to what is a global capitalist crisis. Where has this worked? It might work for a minute, Ireland (the Celtic Tiger) Ethiopia (the fastest growing economy in Africa for a moment) Argentina (the world’s 8th largest economy at one time). The only permanent aspect of capitalism is war, poverty, disease and starvation for the vast majority of the world’s population.
The mighty United States will not eradicate massive poverty among its own citizens, a fat chance for El Salvador. I write “will not” because obviously capitalism has the ability to do that, but it cannot change this situation politically.
The resources are there to end poverty and hunger there’s no doubt about it, there are presently 2754 billionaires in the world with a net worth over $9 trillion. But no ruling class commits mass suicide. And no social system leaves the arena of history as Marx pointed out, without exhausting all the potential within it. Capitalism has reached that point where it can no longer offer any future to the vast majority of the world's peoples. A tiny group of global elite have more wealth than half the world’s population and we are sliding towards the abyss with climate catastrophe leading the charge.
Part
of the solution in the transition from a mad, unplanned social system of
production like capitalism to a rational, planned democratic socialist
alternative, is the ownership control and management of the dominant means of
production. But key in this must be the emphasis on the financial industry in
all its forms. Capital is a weapon. It is not only crucial to production, and
the labor process, its allocation determines how we live, what is produced and
when. Capital is a collective product and its use and allocation must be a
collective, democratic decision by those whose labor power created it.
Trump is using all the tools at capitalism’s disposal for imposing its will on society, he is not subtle about it and that is a positive aspect of his presidency. He is the “whip of the counterrevolution” that is driving more and more in to activity.
Despite the shifting of the industrial working class to the east, and south east, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh etc. capitalism cannot be overthrown without the US working class settling accounts with the violent clique that runs this country.
Trump is using all the tools at capitalism’s disposal for imposing its will on society, he is not subtle about it and that is a positive aspect of his presidency. He is the “whip of the counterrevolution” that is driving more and more in to activity.
Despite the shifting of the industrial working class to the east, and south east, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh etc. capitalism cannot be overthrown without the US working class settling accounts with the violent clique that runs this country.
The great Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg said that our choices are socialism or barbarism. Barbarism is all around us, even here in the the US. The choice now is socialism or the end of life as we know it.
We're running out of time.
Note:
Some of the information in this post is from Harvest or Empire by Juan Gonzalez
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