A famous racist often exclaims that hordes of murderers and rapists are coming to our southern border. As with a great many of his claims, this one is 180 degrees off, that is, the truth is the exact opposite and the people coming to our border are often fleeing murderers and rapists. But truth is an inconvenience to be ignored by our famous racist when he shouts his sky-is-falling claims to rouse the barnyard birds.
Far too many politicians have eagerly joined the Sky-Is-Falling School, and far too many journalists, writers, and investigators have enrolled in its sister college, the If-It-Bleeds-It-Ledes School, while the 5 W’s Institute of higher learning has seen a distinct decline in enrollment. This lamentable tendency leads to a focus on symptoms rather than cause. Far too many politicians shout that they don’t want to hear about root cause(s). They want action. Like snake oil or Ivermectin salesmen they join our famous racist in shouting all the louder when confronted with inconvenient truths. In the case of the murderers and rapists, many will find the truth to be highly inconvenient: If we concede that the people coming to our border are fleeing murderers and rapists, we might be required to let them in. Better then, to shout that they are murderers and rapists, and we have to keep them out. We have to stop this invasion, this tsunami, this falling sky. Pronto. To hell with your root causes. We have to protect ourselves and our 1950’s Norman Rockwell way of life.
If journalists, writers, and investigators even thought that the people at our southern border were fleeing murderers and rapists, they might feel obligated to at least pretend to attend to the 5 W’s. Recalcitrant journalists, writers, and investigators will argue that people don’t have the time or patience to read or listen to long explanations. Possibly another inconvenient truth. They will argue that if-it-bleeds-it-ledes is more profitable, a truly troubling truth. But let’s, for brevity’s sake, simply ask WHY and let the other 4 W’s tag along.
The first gentle wave of this tsunami of immigrants lapped at our shores in the early 1980’s and consisted mainly of Salvadorans fleeing the terrible civil war in their country. At the same time a tidal wave of indigenous Guatemalans fleeing the most recent genocide in the Americas, struck the shores of Mexico in Chiapas and the Yucatán peninsula. That particular genocide killed around a quarter of a million people. Another quarter of a million fled to Mexico, and yet another quarter were internally displaced. The vast majority were Maya. This in a country the size of Tennessee, where the largest city, Memphis, had a population at that time of under 650,000. I suspect that the inhabitants of Louisville would suddenly find life in Ohio a lot more attractive if all the inhabitants of Memphis and a good portion of its suburbs were murdered or disappeared.
As the Maya had systematically been denied education, they had little knowledge of geography or the United States and remained in Mexico where they put up with the evil they knew, working on the large plantations for near starvation wages. As they were not made completely welcome in Mexico, especially in the racist state of Chiapas, a few trickled north and gradually others followed. Another tributary flowed from Honduras and another from Nicaragua.
In those early days, the compassionate Reagan administration refrained from calling the immigrants murderers and rapist, but claimed they were all economic refugees and as such did not qualify for asylum in the U.S. In the ABC Settlement Agreement, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was forced to acknowledge the inconvenient truth that those immigrants were indeed fleeing from rapists and murderers supported by the Reagan and Bush administrations. A corollary to that inconvenient truth is the awkward fact that the more support ($$, training, equipment) military groups got, they more they raped and murdered. The Kaibiles in Guatemala, the Atlcatl Battalion in El Salvador, Battalion 316 in Honduras, and the Contras in Nicaragua were the elite rapists and murderers and always earned top grades in the School of the Americas. With the immoral support of the US government and the economic support of US dollars, they cemented the shithole status of their countries.
Our famous racist also shouted about shithole countries. He and his party (and it is his party) can’t be bothered to ask WHAT makes a country a shithole and WHY. That might lead to inconvenient truths. Their only concern is to keep people from shithole countries out.
Our support of the murderers and rapist was in a good cause, the fight against communism, and well, it was all so last century, the screamers will argue. But another inconvenient truth is that we still support corrupt militaries and businesses (maquilas) in tariff-free zones in the Northern Triangle of Central America. Those militaries no longer make a killing off their valiant struggle against communist boogeymen, and, to make up for lost income, they have invested heavily in the drug trade (also a tariff-free business). Rampant corruption has metastasized and the three countries of the Northern Triangle are only marginally functional and among the most violent countries in the world. If the situation in Tennessee were to similarly evolve, even more Tennesseans would hightail it to Ohio, swimming if they had to.
Once we accept the inconvenient truths that what is happening at our southern border is blowback from decades (centuries, really) of our explosive support of rapists and murderers, we might just feel a very slight urge to do something other than build an enormous wall. We tell our children to clean up their messes. Well, we made a mess in Central America. Shouldn’t we help clean it up? Or should we just throw childish tantrums and stamp our feet and scream that the sky is falling.
PS1. I apologize particularly to Haitians for not including them.
PS2. None of this takes into account the blowback for our part in climate change
Confessions of a 77-year-old white man 