Trump’s border war is a war on the indigenous | Opinion

Albert Bender | Guest Columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption 'Caged Jesus' used to protest Zero Tolerance An Indianapolis church is protesting President Donald Trump's border policies with a scene that shows Jesus, Mary and Joseph inside a caged fence. The church dean said "I'm shocked to see this in our country." (July 3)

The president is emulating Andrew Jackson by separating children from their families.

Albert Bender, a Cherokee activist, historian, author and grant writer, lives in Antioch.

Completely overlooked by the mainstream media in the border crisis is the fact that countless numbers or virtually the majority of the so-called immigrants crossing the southern border are indigenous or indigenous descended.

The indigenous peoples are ethnic Indians. So ethnic, in fact, that most do not speak any Spanish, but only their Indigenous languages.



I recently received by email that the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) was requesting transalaters “who speak Meso-American Indigenous languages (e.g. Zapotec, Nahua, Ma’am, Quich’e, Mixe, etc., -not Spanish).”

RAICES is a non-profit organization that promotes justice by providing free and low- cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families and refugees in Central and South Texas.

The countries that most refugees are fleeing from are El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Virtually all three countries have populations that, in the majority, are indigenous or of indigenous descent.

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In fact, Guatemala has an Indigenous majority.

Presently, most of the refugees are from that country and most migrating Guatemalans are Indigenous people from the rural areas. These are the people fleeing to this country in staggering numbers.

The president launches an 'inhuman campaign'

The point is that Trump’s inhuman campaign amounts to a war against the Native people of this hemisphere. I have been to Guatemala and that country alone has 20 different Maya languages spoken. In El Salvador, there are at least nine Indigenous ethnic populations. Honduras has at least six Indigenous ethnicities.

Ironically, Meso-American monolingual Indigenous speakers upon arriving in the U.S. often end up taking courses to learn Spanish because in this country they are so often mistaken for Spanish speakers.

In New York City, Mixtec speakers from the Mexican state of Oaxaca learn Spanish from their co-workers or result in a type of “linguistic isolation’ communicating only with their own tribal ethnicity.

As for Trump, whether he knows it or not, he is carrying on the grand tradition of Andrew Jackson in committing atrocities against this hemisphere’s Native peoples:

His separation of children from their families — kidnappings,

the removal of these children in many instances to the far eastern areas of the U.S., i.e., New York and New Jersey,

the imprisonment of these youngsters in animal cages with less than minimal food,

the loss of 1,500 children in the system,

immigrant children as young as 9 months old and in some cases even infants breast feeding have been taken from their parents.

This is an outrage and these are crimes against humanity, and in an international court of law the perpetrators can be held accountable.

Remember the Nuremberg Trials of Hitler’s Nazis. Their assertion that they were just following orders was no defense.

U.S. caused this mess

The flood of refugees across the southern border also falls on the shoulders of the imperialist U.S. government going back decades.

The American government has for years plundered the land and resources of Central America resulting in abject rates of poverty.

A good example is Guatemala where the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz and installed a fascist dictatorship.

Arbenz had instituted a land reform program that was returning land to the indigenous peoples and giving land to the indigenous descended poor.

He was taking land from the U.S. corporation, the United Fruit Company, which owned huge acreages of Guatemala for its products that were sold in Europe and the US.

Arbenz was overthrown at the behest of the UFC in 1954. The Guatemalan Civil War exploded in 1960 and continued non-stop until 1996. Ten of thousands of Indigenous were killed and the legacy of that horrific conflict is extant to this very day.

The U.S. is responsible for the outpouring of refugees into the this country and the victimized are being bestially punished for being victims.

They are not illegal. To take a quote from indigenous sentiment in this country “ No one is illegal on stolen land.”

Albert Bender, a Cherokee activist, historian, author and grant writer, lives in Antioch. Reach him at albertbender07@yahoo.com.