banana republics – tora42's nonsensne

chamerionwrites:

It’s maybe not immediately apparent to USAmericans under the age of thirty, because of the way human beings (myself included when I’m not careful) tend to parse anything they can’t personally remember as “history.” But anytime you read about the government deporting Central Americans who have lived in this country for 20 or 30 years, it’s important to recognize that you are reading about refugees from wars that the United States funded.

This history is exceedingly recent. Anyone in the region over the age of about 35 has clear memories; people in their mid-to-late 40s were adults when the wars ended (early 1990s); folks in their late 50s lived through arguably the bloodiest years of state terrorism in the early ‘80s, when atrocities like El Mozote or Dos Erres were being committed on a regular basis (cw: everything you’d expect when discussing stomach-turning war crimes). Odds are quite high that they personally know at least one person who was tortured or raped or murdered or disappeared – or that they have experienced or witnessed or been threatened with this kind of violence themselves.

Central American justice systems are only just managing to prosecute some of the people who orchestrated the death squads now. Forensic anthropologists are still exhuming mass graves. Efraín Ríos Montt died weeks ago, before he could be re-convicted of genocide after the initial guilty verdict (the first time a head of state has been convicted of genocide in his own country, iirc) was overturned on a technicality. Military and government leaders who were actively involved in committing and/or covering up human rights abuses are still very much a part of the power structure in these countries and in our own. (One suggestive example: Jose Rodriguez – the CIA’s deputy director for operations post-9/11, who infamously destroyed videotapes of interrogations and remains defiantly unapologetic about torture – joined the CIA in 1976 and spent virtually all of his career in Latin America.)

A lot of otherwise well-meaning and informative journalism fails to contextualize this. A disappointing amount of immigration activism fails to contextualize this. And it’s REALLY IMPORTANT CONTEXT. You can draw a pretty direct line between the US government’s refusal to grant asylum to refugees fleeing right-wing dictatorships during the 1980s – because doing so would have required them to acknowledge that their allies were indeed committing human rights abuses, and thus (at least theoretically) to cut off funding to them – and the question of who does and does not have legal immigration status today.