Children of the Monroe Doctrine: The Militarized Roots of America's Border Calamity

by Arturo J. Viscarra and Michael Prentice

- The border crisis can't be solved without the U.S. coming to terms with its role in creating the awful conditions refugees are fleeing.

"[I]n the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States . . . to the exercise of an international police power.” --Theodore Roosevelt, 1904.

photo credit: Matthew Cole/Shutterstock.com

It’s impossible to understand the root causes of the current wave of Central Americans arriving in the United States, and therefore the appropriate U.S. response, without acknowledging the historical relationship between the U.S. and Central America. Unfortunately, the debate in Congress and in the mainstream media has not considered altering our foreign policy as it focuses on whether or not the U.S. has new obligations under international law or a moral duty to treat non-citizen children with compassion. Vice President Biden recently referred to them as “our kids”, stressing the importance of due process for the children's asylum claims, but he simultaneously called for a reiteration of the failed, militarized "Plan Colombia" in Central America. Before rushing into more Drug War militarization, the U.S. needs to accept its share of the responsibility in creating the current political, social, and economic conditions refugees are fleeing.

The 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which declared the U.S. the sole power in the Western Hemisphere, set the stage for continuing U.S. control in Central America through military interventions or the financing, arming, and training of pro-U.S. local elites and their armed forces.  By the 1880s, many Central American and Caribbean republics were reduced to “protectorates or in effect client states” of the U.S., according to historian John Coatsworth. During the Banana Wars, the U.S. military intervened in Honduras seven times in twelve years. The 1954 CIA-orchestrated Guatemalan coup sparked a civil war that lasted until 1996. In the 1980s, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala were inundated with U.S. military aid and advisers, resulting in mass carnage and mass migration to the U.S. The “Banana Republic” of Honduras became a staging ground for U.S.-trained armed forces fighting leftists in the three countries it borders, earning the nickname “U.S.S. Honduras.”

The School of the Americas (SOA), established in 1946, embodies the U.S.’ traditional policy towards Central America: applying military solutions to social and economic problems. Graduates of the SOA include the most notorious Central American human rights violators: members of the Battalion 316 in Honduras; the murderers of Archbishop Oscar Romero, four U.S. churchwomen, and over 900 civilians in El Salvador; and former and current Presidents of Guatemala connected to genocidal military campaigns. Despite the Pentagon’s claims of change and transparency, it has refused to release the names of SOA graduates for the last 10 years. Be it Cold War or Drug War, the SOA continues to enable U.S. allies to commit human rights violations in the name of democracy.

June 28, 2015 marked the sixth anniversary of the SOA graduate-led military coup that ousted democratically-elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya. Thousands of coup opponents have been threatened, beaten, tortured, disappeared, or killed.  Meanwhile, the U.S. worked diligently to guarantee that the coup regime remained in power, and quickly recognized the results of the two tainted elections that put Porfirio Lobo and Juan Orlando Hernandez in power. Post-coup Honduran security forces have received increased U.S. military aid and training despite their well-known record of human rights violations and infiltration by the drug cartels they ostensibly combat. The Pentagon has built at least three new U.S. military installations in Honduras since the coup, revealing a U.S. motive in its illogical actions: its attachment to the “U.S.S. Honduras.”

It should be no surprise that Honduras, accounting for 29% of unaccompanied minors who surrendered to Border Patrol in 2014, has for the first time become the number one source of Central American migration when the U.S.-backed Honduran regimes have exacerbated lawlessness, violence, and economic alienation over the last five years. In all of its dealings in Central America, the U.S. collaborates militarily with local oligarchies to enforce unequal political and economic status quos. The current wave of children and adults fleeing Central America is at least partly due to the continuation of the supremacy of Pentagon whim over the basic needs of the poor majority of Central America.

photo credit: Getty Images

It is imperative to consider why Nicaraguans are not migrating en masse despite facing similar historical, economic, and imperialist obstacles as other Central American countries. After decades of brutal U.S.-backed governments, the current Nicaraguan government has been able to escape a large degree of U.S. control and form its own security policies.  The results are Nicaragua’s far lower levels of violence and forced migration than its neighbors, despite similar levels of poverty. The U.S. can learn from Nicaragua’s success in areas such as policing, to help solve the child migrant crisis, but only with a fundamental change from the U.S.-promoted culture of the security forces in neighboring countries.

Since 2008, the U.S. has spent over $800 million in security aid to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador through the “Central American Regional Security Initiative” (CARSI) as well as millions more in bilateral military and police aid to each country where it fights the Drug War. But when that money goes to the likes of Honduras’s cartel-infiltrated politicians and brutal state security forces, is it surprising that the rule of law further deteriorates? Central American adults are risking their lives and those of their children to escape the historical and current system of violence that the U.S. refuses to recognize its role in creating. Who is more irresponsible, the parents or the Pentagon? Who is more rational, the parents or the U.S. Congress?

In 2013, after nearly 200 years, Secretary of State John Kerry declared the era of the Monroe Doctrine over. Still, it appears that business as usual continues for the Pentagon and its corrupt allies in Honduras and Guatemala. As record numbers of Central American refugees are detained at the border, the media and policy-makers need to admit that these children are the progeny of armed conflicts funded by U.S. taxpayers. Honest, bold, and research-based reevaluations of foreign policy towards the region must be conducted and implemented for conditions in Central America to improve any time soon.

Arturo J. Viscarra migrated to the U.S. from El Salvador during the civil war. He is an immigration attorney and the Advocacy Coordinator for School of the Americas Watch.

Michael Prentice is a student at Vassar College interning for SOA Watch. 

Join Michael, Arturo, and thousands of others for the 25th anniversary of the SOA Vigil this November: http://soaw.org/november.

"Our conflict is not internal, but imposed": Lessons from Colombia for U.S. aid to Central America

By Julia Duranti, Witness for Peace Colombia

In a January op-ed for the New York Times, Vice President Joe Biden called for $1 billion in aid to Central America to address the migration and human rights crisis, citing Colombia as a successful example of U.S. intervention in Latin America. More details on the State Department’s proposal for the Northern Triangle have since emerged, and it appears that social, economic and development aid programs comprise 80 percent of the requested funds—a perfect inversion of Plan Colombia’s counternarcotics and counterinsurgency aid approved 15 years ago. While deemphasizing military aid is a positive development, the current proposal from the Department of State would maintain military and security funding for Central America at current levels, in addition to the separate Department of Defense budgets for foreign military aid.

There is also troubling language about “trade promotion” and economic development that is code for Washington Consensus policies of free trade, privatization and foreign investment.  The current fraught reality in Colombia, a partial result of Plan Colombia and its successor programs and a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the U.S. implemented in 2012, demonstrates that throwing money at the related issues of organized crime, violence and forced displacement – instead of addressing how the same policies actually drive those phenomena – does not solve human rights crises in Latin America.

U.S. intervention in Colombia has been expensive, costing U.S. taxpayers over $9 billion since 2000, not to mention the enormous human cost of the militarization of Colombia’s countryside. Of the seven million victims of the conflict registered since 1954, 5.9 million victimizations have occurred since 2000, when U.S. funding began to support Colombian security forces already known for collaboration with brutal paramilitaries. While paramilitaries officially demobilized in 2005, many simply reformed into loosely organized criminal structures that the Colombian government calls BACRIM, or criminal gangs. The BACRIM act as guns-for-hire involved in drug trafficking, illegal mining, extortion, human trafficking, and protection services for wealthy land and business owners along with multinational corporations.

Now the biggest threat to citizen security, the BACRIM carry out threats, forced disappearances and assassinations against members of Colombian social movements. In January they were responsible for a wave of threats against Colombian journalists and human rights defenders, as well as the 2014 spike in death threats against more than 150 human rights workers, activists and politicians, dubbed “Black September.” The splintering and reclassification of the paramilitaries as BACRIM allows their activities to be painted as a “climate of lawlessness” that justifies U.S. intervention and support for the Colombian state—as if both states had not tacitly encouraged the creation of these groups in the first place via proxy financial support to corrupt armed forces and neoliberal economic policies that decimated economic opportunities outside the informal or illegal sectors.

At six million people, Colombia’s internally displaced population is the second largest in the world. Some are rural farmers driven from their land by Plan Colombia-funded militarization and aerial herbicide fumigations intended to eradicate coca crops. In other cases, powerful monoculture palm oil and banana operations have collaborated with legal and illegal armed actors to force communities off their land. Additional examples of this type of development include sugar cane production for ethanol that has all but replaced agriculture in southwestern Colombia, while the cut flower industry heavily promoted by USAID has devastated food security in the savannah region surrounding the capital of Bogotá.

Even as the U.S. government has promoted these industries in Colombia, it has protected U.S. corporate interests by privileging U.S. corn, ethanol and other agricultural exports to Colombia under the FTA. In the three years since the FTA was implemented, U.S. exports to Colombia have skyrocketed and Colombia has seen its trade surplus of $8.7 billion evaporate and balloon into a trade deficit of $2 billion. Unable to compete with the flood of subsidized U.S. imports, small-scale producers have been driven out of the market, prompting thousands of Colombians to take to the streets in protest of the FTA and related policies in 2013 and 2014.

Violent displacement, the proliferation of paramilitarism via BACRIM, some of the highest corruption in Latin America, widespread impunity for human rights violations and one of the largest gaps between rich and poor in the world continue to haunt Colombia as problems that Plan Colombia successor programs and the FTA failed to address, or even exacerbated. Implementing the same strategy in Central America — already reeling from high violence and crime along with its own FTA with the U.S., DR-CAFTA — is unlikely to lead to better results. If the Obama Administration wants to get serious about a plan for Central America, it should pressure Congress to fund policies that address the true drivers of organized crime and forced migration, like U.S. demand for drugs and harmful trade agreements that privilege large corporations and the wealthy elite at the expense of local economies and communities.