Accounts of Central American children crossing our southern national boundary in enormous numbers are certainly interesting and worthy of our vigilant attention as U.S. citizens, but properly understanding this onrush of desperate Latin American asylum seekers requires placing their actions in historical context.
These people, in large measure, constitute “blowback” from decades of support by the U.S. national security state for right-wing feudal structures in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. These countries are burdened by socio-economic situations foisted on them by centuries of monumentally unjust land distribution. In its paranoid vigilance against any and all manifestations of “leftist infiltration” throughout the Central American isthmus, Washington, D.C., bears at least some blame for this negative turn of events.
From our 1954 CIA-sponsored coup in Guatemala on United Fruit Company’s behalf to our 1980s upholding of right-wing regimes in Guatemala City, Guatemala; San Salvador, El Salvador; and Tegucigalpa, Honduras, the North American role in these places has been a decidedly negative one.
The mess at our southern extremity, with innumerable displaced peasants coming across, is really just one more manifestation of a foreign affairs apparatus in ruins.
