So. Trump says the U.S.-Mexico border is in a state of emergency.
People who live near the U.S.-Mexico border say it is not.
Those who are knowledgeable about the historical context and the current realities on the ground say the true emergency is actually in the Central American countries from which the majority of border-crossers are fleeing, like Honduras.
Last week I drove along the U.S.-Mexico border from El Paso to Antelope Wells to see with my own eyes the miles of remote desert where so many hundreds of these asylum seekers have crossed into our country in recent months. But that land is actually beside the point. Our national conversation is only fixated on the border because Trump has been banging his “wall” drum for the last few years as a way to rally his base.
If we really want to understand what’s going on in our borderlands—who’s trying to migrate to the U.S. and why—we should start at the beginning.
And the beginning is bananas and coffee. Because basically, for the last hundred and thirty years, we in the U.S. have been eating Honduras for breakfast.
How US policy in Honduras set the stage for today’s migration
Joseph Nevins
The Conversation
October 25, 2018 7.19am EDT
https://theconversation.com/how-us-policy-in-honduras-set-the-stage-for-todays-migration-65935
U.S. military presence in Honduras and the roots of Honduran migration to the United States are closely linked. It began in the late 1890s, when U.S.-based banana companies first became active there. […]
By 1914, U.S. banana interests owned almost 1 million acres of Honduras’ best land. These holdings grew through the 1920s to such an extent that, as LaFeber asserts, Honduran peasants “had no hope of access to their nation’s good soil.” Over a few decades, U.S. capital also came to dominate the country’s banking and mining sectors, a process facilitated by the weak state of Honduras’ domestic business sector. This was coupled with direct U.S. political and military interventions to protect U.S. interests in 1907 and 1911. […]
The Reagan administration also played a big role in restructuring the Honduran economy. It did so by strongly pushing for internal economic reforms, with a focus on exporting manufactured goods. It also helped deregulate and destabilize the global coffee trade, upon which Honduras heavily depended. These changes made Honduras more amenable to the interests of global capital. They disrupted traditional forms of agriculture and undermined an already weak social safety net.
These decades of U.S. involvement in Honduras set the stage for Honduran emigration to the United States, which began to markedly increase in the 1990s.
In the post-Reagan era, Honduras remained a country scarred by a heavy-handed military, significant human rights abuses and pervasive poverty. Still, liberalizing tendencies of successive governments and grassroots pressure provided openings for democratic forces. […]
The 2009 coup, more than any other development, explains the increase in Honduran migration across the southern U.S. border in the last few years. The Obama administration has played an important role in these developments. Although it officially decried Zelaya’s ouster, it equivocated on whether or not it constituted a coup, which would have required the U.S. to stop sending most aid to the country. […]
The Trump administration’s recognition, in December 2017, of President Juan Orlando Hernández’s re-election—after a process marked by deep irregularities, fraud and violence. This continues Washington’s longstanding willingness to overlook official corruption in Honduras as long as the country’s ruling elites serve what are defined as U.S. economic and geopolitical interests.
Organized crime, drug traffickers and the country’s police heavily overlap. The frequent politically motivated killings are rarely punished. In 2017, Global Witness, an international nongovernmental organization, found that Honduras was the world’s deadliest country for environmental activists.
Although its once sky-high murder rate has declined over the last few years, the continuing exodus of many youth demonstrates that violent gangs still plague urban neighborhoods. […]
What the Trump administration will ultimately do with those who arrive at the U.S. southern border is unclear. Regardless, the role played by the United States in shaping the causes of this migration raises ethical questions about its responsibility toward those now fleeing from the ravages its policies have helped to produce.