Counterpunch | U.S. pundits and politicians just discovered, it seems, that Washington’s decisions harm Central American families. For the New York Times, “separating families…is something new and malicious,”
reflecting Trump’s “heartlessness” and violating “fundamental American
values.” “This, apparently, is how you turn off the idea of America,”
Alex Wagner (The Atlantic) added. The Los Angeles Times thinks
“the administration’s cold-hearted approach to enforcement has crossed
the line into abject inhumanity,” departing– so we’re to believe– from
past practice.
These are half-accurate charges: Trump’s policy is malicious,
heartless, cold-hearted. But it isn’t new. Both in Central America and
along its Mexican border, Washington has helped rip apart families for
decades, forcing children to endure a world without their parents,
mothers to cope with their children’s sickening ends. Abject inhumanity,
in other words, is a U.S. foreign policy hallmark.
Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras– review their histories.
You’ll be crushed by evidence revealing which values shape Washington’s
conduct, which norms govern its behavior in a region where it enjoys
immense influence. And you’ll begin to understand why many had to flee
these countries. Start with Guatemala. Ríos Montt, the dictator the U.S.
funded, armed, and encouraged, oversaw the Mayan genocide there. In one episode, on April 3, 1982, the Guatemalan army overran
the village of Chel, slaughtering its residents and orphaning Pedro
Pacheco Bop, whose great-grandfather, parents, and five siblings (aged
two to 14) were all murdered, their blood draining into the Chel River
where the troops hurled the dead. Tomas Chávez Brito was two years old
when the army fell upon his village, Sajsibán, seven months later, torching
his home with his mother, sisters, and other family members inside. In
the mountains, where Tomas hid for the following year eating plants to
survive, one can only imagine how the idea of orphanhood, his new
reality, settled in his mind. Margarita Rivera Ceto de Guzmán’s family
separation was quicker. Soldiers knifed her in the stomach, killing her unborn child.
Egla Martínez Salazar, addressing this genocide, explains
that assaults on Maya households conveyed “the message that Mayas did
not live in ‘real’ families, but rather in ‘living arrangements’ that
constituted breeding spaces for ‘international communist
indoctrination.’” Erasing these spaces required
“the mass murder of children,” plus “the forced transfer of surviving
Maya children to military and paramilitary families,” tactics Salvadoran
forces also adopted in the 1980s. Apart from killing most of the 75,000 slain there from 1980-1992– the stretch when Carter, Reagan, and Bush I funneled $6 billion into the country– “soldiers [also] abducted children in what an international court says was a ‘systematic pattern of forced disappearances.’”
