International Relations

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The U.S. Has Deported More Than 30,000 Guatemalans This Year Alone

 

“Sometimes they have been sent back five, eight or even nine times,” said Rafael Amado, Communications Director at the Guatemalan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “The government has several initiatives to encourage them to stay, but it’s not enough.”

After a long trip with their ankles and hands tied down, and an unspecified amount time spent in detention before that, the returnees must face the very thing they left: A country where 54 percent of the population lives in poverty, where the rate of young children with chronic malnutrition is the fourth highest in the world, and where drug cartels and gangs rule the streets.

 

Source: time.com

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Zelaya’s Daughter Pichu Recalls the Honduran Military’s Brutal Kidnapping of Her Father in 2009

In the early morning hours of June 28, 2009, masked soldiers raided the Zelaya home in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. President Zelaya’s daughter Xiomara Hortensia “Pichu” Zelaya hid under the bed as soldiers fired shots into the home. Following the coup she went into exile and hadn’t seen her home until Saturday. “My dad, when he heard the gunshots, he went out of his room, and he went to my room, told me to get dressed up, because the military are coming,” Pichu Zelaya says. “And I heard the gunshots and everything. So he told me to hide, to find somewhere to hide.” [includes rush transcript]

Source: www.democracynow.org

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U.S. Secret Drug War in Honduras

 

FRIDAY, MAY 18, 2012

 

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has confirmed its agents were on board a U.S.-owned helicopter with Honduran police officers when four people were shot and killed on a boat earlier this week. Two of the victims were said to be pregnant women. The deadly incident has highlighted the centrality of Honduras in the U.S.-backed drug war.

 

Honduras is the hub for the U.S. military operations in Latin America, hosting at least three U.S. bases. We speak to Dana Frank, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. [includes rush transcript]

 

Source: www.democracynow.org

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U.S. Turns Back on Child Migrants After Its Policies in Guatemala, Honduras Sowed Seeds of Crisis – VIDEO – Democracy Now!

 

DANA FRANK:
Yeah, when we talk about the fleeing gangs and violence, it’s also this tremendous poverty. And poverty doesn’t just happen. It, itself, is a direct result of policies of both the Honduran government and the U.S. government, including privatizations, mass layoffs of government workers, and a new—in Honduras, a new law, that’s now made permanent, that breaks up full-time jobs and makes them part-time and ineligible for unionization, living wage and the national health service. And a lot of these economic policies are driven by U.S.-funded lending organizations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, which itself is funding the corrupt Honduran police. The Central American Free Trade Agreement is the other piece of this. Like NAFTA did for the U.S. and Mexico, it opens the door to this open competition between small producers in agriculture in Honduras, small manufacturers, and jobs are disappearing as a result of that.

So, with this poverty that we’re seeing that people are fleeing, it’s not like people are like, “Let’s go have the American dream.” There are almost no jobs for young people. Their parents know it. And we’re talking about starving to death—that’s the alternative—or being driven into gangs with tremendous sexual violence. And it’s a very, very tragic situation here. But it’s not like it tragically just happened. It’s a direct result of very conscious policies by the U.S. and Honduran governments.
Click through for VIDEO and transcript.

Source: www.democracynow.org

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57,000 Possible Cases of Asylum

 

Mr. Obama called the surge in children from Central America an “actual humanitarian crisis on the border,” and said it “only underscores the need to drop the politics and fix our immigration system once and for all.”

 

Source: www.nytimes.com

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The U.S. Roots of the Central American Immigrant Influx

Before dying of pneumonia at a Guatemala hospital in late May, the recently deported 21-year-old Gustavo Antonio Vásquez Chaj told his family that the U.S. Border Patrol had kept him, at some point, wet, stripped of a layer of clothing, and in a cold cell during several days in detention.
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The tragic journey of Vásquez Chaj and Tucux Chiché is one story among many of how harmful U.S. political and economic policies in Latin America violently intersect with a hardening and brutal system of U.S. immigration control. In their case, the young men’s voyage was first and foremost one of necessity rather than of choice. Vásquez Chaj and Tucux Chiché were economic migrants fleeing a country of wreck and ruin that decades of harmful U.S. foreign and economic policies have helped to bring about.

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It is indisputable that the United States shares significant responsibility for the genocide of tens of thousands of Guatemalans—mainly indigenous Mayans, including members of Gustavo and Maximiliano’s community, who comprised a majority of the (at least) 150,000 killed in the 1980s alone.
Click through for whole article.

Source: nacla.org

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Pope Francis: Migrant Children Must Be ‘Welcomed And Protected’

“This humanitarian emergency requires, as a first urgent measure, these children be welcomed and protected,” Pope Francis said.

Source: thinkprogress.org

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UN Pushes For Fleeing Central Americans To Be Treated As Refugees | VIDEO

 

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) — United Nations officials are pushing for many of the Central Americans fleeing to the U.S. to be treated as refugees displaced by armed conflict, a designation meant to increase pressure on the United States and Mexico…

 

The easiest way to have good records of who is entering and exiting the United States is to have easy ways of legal immigration. – Chris Wilson, Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center @Chris_E_Wilson

 

Click through for more and VIDEO

 

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com