Here is a an interesting article by Giovani Batz in NACLA on the domination of indigenous peoples by Ladino landowners in Guatemala as the root of the U.S.’s immigration problem. What I particularly think is important here is the critique of the Obama era Alliance for Progress, overseen by Joe Biden, which Biden wants to continue and pass on to Kamala Harris. The program is founded on the pillars of good governance, development and security, where development means the system of unequal land ownership and racial/class domination that emerged in Guatemala in conjunction with that country's integration into the world market as a primary goods producer. The Alliance for Progress is similar to Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative: both programs of militarized security that attempt to stabilize an imperialist model of development.
Here is Biden writing in the New York Times in 2015:
The economies of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras remain bogged down as the rest of the Americas surge forward. Inadequate education, institutional corruption, rampant crime and a lack of investment are holding these countries back. Six million young Central Americans are to enter the labor force in the next decade. If opportunity isn’t there for them, the entire Western Hemisphere will feel the consequences.
One will not see any indictment of the Central American model of development here. Biden formulated this agenda by consulting with the region’s governments as the Interamerican Development Bank reported in 2014. In other words, it is problem solving from the top down, not the bottom up. Note also that Batz calls attention to the Northern Triangle as part of the lexicon of top down security - a terminology that targets the region for foreign intervention in order to stem the manner in which its crisis tendencies destabilize the broader regional environment, including the United States itself. I am struck by the parallel one can draw between Central America and other conflict zones that have generated large scale migrations of people attempting to flee oppression. Perhaps another way to think about this is in terms of households attempting to reorganize their survival on a transnational basis through migration.
The United States closed the doors on the alternatives to oligarchic domination in Guatemala by fomenting the coup in 1954 that restored the power of the conservative landowning classes and their allies in the military and then the Kennedy administration reinforced these outcomes through its Alliance for Progress. Through all of this, from Eisenhower to Biden, the U.S. has maintained a kind of willful blindness regarding the structural violence that Guatemala's model of development produces, even as AID has produced reports that underscores this reality. U.S. immigration policy remains fixated, as Saskia Sassen argued back in the 1990s (see America’s Immigration Problem) on the figures of the migrant and the border. It is the migrant that must be controlled through greater border security. The change that has occurred within this policy framework is the expansion of the border, which now consists of Mexico and the Northern Triangle as a security perimeter in which migration control becomes outsources to Mexico’s national guard or to U.S. trained border security forces in the Northern Triangle. Batz writes that
During discussions of the root causes of migration, the U.S. government deliberately and strategically avoids discussing issues such as state-sponsored violence, the persecution of human rights defenders and activists, U.S. intervention, the negative effects of neoliberalism and megaprojects, and historical land inequality. The United States’ history of intervention and destabilization in Latin America and elsewhere, and its long-term effects, are well documented. Honduras, Bolivia, and Venezuela offer a few recent examples of U.S. backed coups and coup attempts. Biden continues to shamelessly finance the Honduran armed forces even after it was found that those involved in the planning and killing of Berta Cáceres were U.S.-trained Honduran military personnel.
What Guatemala and the rest of Central America needs is land reform. I think it is interesting and a little bit disturbing the way in which the topic of land reform is avoided, even in treatments of the issue that offer the sympathetic account of Central American migrants - see the Lustgarten, Where Will Everyone Go? Perhaps that don’t have to go anywhere if there were a more just redistribution of resources in the Northern Triangle Companies. But instead, there is U.S. support for the dominant classes in the region, which has been the historical pattern. Thus, for example, the U.S. suppressed popular insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala, preserved the outward development model of development. The conflicts created very partial democratic openings for opposition forces but no relaxation of external pressures to deepen a neoliberal pattern of development through more mega-projects, more austerity policy, more maquila zones. U.S. foreign policy has been intended, at every turn, to secure this model of development.
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