How US foreign policy in Central America may have fueled the migrant crisis

WASHINGTON – As thousands of migrants seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, the Trump administration says it’s committed to promoting “a safer and more prosperous Central America” as a way to stem the tide of people fleeing poverty, violence and corruption in their home countries.

But that pledge – issued on Tuesday in a new State Department strategy toward Central America –  may ring hollow in places like El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua.

For one thing, President Donald Trump has threatened to cut assistance to those countries, not increase it, citing their governments’ inability to curb the desperate outflow of migrants. Trump also wants to end a decades-old humanitarian immigration program that would force tens of thousands of legal Central American immigrants to return to their countries.

But long before Trump took office, the U.S. has had a checkered history of involvement in Central America – and some say American foreign policy in the region has caused the instability and inequality at the root of the current crisis.

“The current debate … is almost totally about what to do about immigrants when they get here,” says Jeff Faux, a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “But the 800-pound gorilla that’s missing from the table is what we have been doing there that brings them here, that drives them here.”

Decades of U.S. intervention

From the perspective of Faux and others, the answer goes back decades. There was the CIA’s covert operation to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected president in 1954. And America’s intervention in El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s. And the Obama administration’s refusal in 2009 to label the ouster of Honduras’ president a military coup – even though soldiers dragged him out of bed in the middle of the night and sent him into exile in his pajamas.

“We’ve sent troops there, we’ve suborned governments there, and basically we have been supporting the elites who protect U.S. business interests,” Faux said.

The decades-long history of American intervention has left Central American governments weak and fragile, he argued, while empowering oligarchs and drug cartels, which has, in turn, fueled the corruption and gang violence that’s driving residents to flee.

“People are leaving because the corrupt governments (supported by the U.S.) have tolerated and encouraged the growth of these criminal organizations,” he said.

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