Opinion: America has culpable role in why migrants mass at border

Martha Stephens | Opinion contributor

We know that people in Cincinnati and all over the country are frightened by what is happening at our borders. We learn that thousands of children, even very small children, have been suddenly taken away from a parent or parents and placed alone in strange detention cells around the country. For myself, I hear them in my dreams crying out in the night for mami or papi.

I want this horror to end.

I feel that what’s missing from our conversations today are explanations of why migrants mass at our borders, no matter how hard it is to get here, and what this mass migration has to do with the role we ourselves play in Central American countries.

Many of us in the Cincinnati area have friends in the large communities of Guatemalans here. I have a daughter who teaches English to school children arriving from that country. Some are from indigenous families and hardly speak Spanish. Imagine the grief this winter when working fathers were arrested in pre-dawn raids in Northern Kentucky and taken away in unmarked vans. Local groups of very kind people have been helping out with the families left behind.

We are seeing these awesome raids in Ohio as well. Battalions of guards have shown up at large workplaces and taken migrant workers away to detention in Michigan and Indiana. Mothers and dads don’t even have a chance to say goodbye to their children at home. These are people who have usually been here for years and might have been provided, as I see it, a path to citizenship.

There are many works by U. S. scholars that help explain what we do in Central America to keep people poor and in constant fear of crime and guns and the police. (Harvest of Empire, for instance, is a good recent study by Juan Gonzalez, and one can find it in the Hamilton County Library.)

Such works tell us that the U.S. has tried, over and over again, to strike down Central American attempts to form democratic governments. We use our vast reserves of wealth, and the power of U.S. corporations on the ground, to keep these countries in check. In Guatemala, the United Fruit Company, for instance, has been famous for its tremendous proprietary role in that country. It has taken over not only the banana plantations and other fruit fields, where very low wages for the workers have been the order of the day, but mounted large fleets of ships to the major port off the Atlantic coast, in order to control access to the country.

Mayan people in Guatemala have been driven out of their natural homelands in the north by U.S. developers, and almost erased from history.

Back in 1954, a new democratic government was led by Jacobo Arbenz, who attempted to provide Guatemalan farmers with more land and to raise wages, build schools, and so on. Yet after four years, the U.S. and its wealthy allies in the country threw him out of the country. In our time, a 36-year civil war has been led by the infamous Rios Montt, who was eventually found guilty in court of genocide against the Mayan population. This war and its aftermath, has made living unbearable for many, and a great exodus has ensued, mainly to our own shores. Today gangs and guns are everywhere, unemployment is huge, and rural farmers are lucky to bring home a few dollars a month.

A Mayan woman named Rigoberta Menchu was awarded the Noble Peace Prize in 1992 and has written about her life under the Guatemalan government and in exile in Mexico. Two years ago, another well-known Mayan activist, Berta Caceres, was murdered in her home.

In Honduras, we see the same story. Wealthy businessmen succeeded in 2009 in throwing out a popular president, Manuel Zelaya, who was addressing the needs of workers and peasants. Zelaya was waked up in the middle of the night and put on a plane to Costa Rica by the military. The U.S. did not come to his aid and continued to ship arms to the coup government. In the elections of 2018, voters were overjoyed that popular candidates had won, but the government ruled that the voting counts were wrong and that the new leaders had not succeeded.

Nicaragua is close to my heart. It is the poorest country in the hemisphere except for Haiti. Yet in the 1980s, this country had a people’s revolution. I and my family have visited there a good many times. My husband was an election advisor and testified to the validity of the win by the Sandinistas in 1984. Our son spent a year working with other U.S. young people there to support the revolution. He helped to cut the Nicaraguan coffee bean harvest on the Honduran border, where the Contras, with our support, were preparing to cross over and stop Nicaragua from breaking free of the U.S. hegemony.

A nurse friend we knew went out to the countryside every weekend on vaccination campaigns. Everybody got allotments of beans and rice and cooking oil. New textbooks were being written which told students the truth about their own history.

Yet, this revolution lasted only six years. When new elections came along, the U.S. swamped with cash the campaigns of officials friendlier to us, and the new government lost out. Ever since then, the gap between rich and poor has gotten larger and larger. Child labor is a famous issue there today, and many children do not even finish primary school.

An American organization called the Latin American Working Group was created in 1983 by U.S. churches and grassroots and policy teams. LAWG has worked for disaster relief and development aid for Central America. The group has also tried to protect the human rights of migrants to our border. It is more active than ever today, and one can hope that people of conscience in Cincinnati and elsewhere will become members of LAWG and help to improve everyday life in Central America. One has to assume that such efforts would also hold back the ever-rising tide of too many migrants to our borders.

Perhaps we all wish we had a kinder world where we and our Latino friends could all reside safely in our own countries and just visit each other in the normal way. Most people would say that there’s no use to hope for such a thing, but I feel we must keep on trying anyway.

Martha Stephens lives in Paddock Hills. She is retired from the English Department of the University of Cincinnati.