Don’t ignore history in ‘blowback’ of immigration ills
Do events occur outside of history, or does the past affect what happens in the present? Trying to understand an event independent of historical context is no different than trying to understand a book from a random paragraph. To make sense of the tragedy playing out on our southern border, then, we must consider what caused it. But as Gore Vidal once quipped, “We live in the United States of Amnesia; we don’t remember anything before Monday morning.”
In his book “Blowback,” former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson detailed how dozens of U.S. interventions in other countries were causing all sorts of repercussions which the CIA calls “blowback.” Johnson provides many examples, like when the U.S. and U.K. arranged to overthrow Iranian prime minister Mossadegh in 1953 because he decided that Iran, not Britain, should benefit from the sale of its own oil. So after nationalizing the oil fields, MI6 and the CIA organized a coup d’etat against this democratically elected leader to install the Shah.
The CIA’s “after action report” noted there would be blowback. And how. The Shah’s brutally repressive 25-year regime was the direct cause of the Islamic Revolution in 1978 and, thus, the 444-day hostage ordeal that curiously ended a minute after Reagan’s inauguration. Very few Americans were able to put the blowback in context because the backstory was secret. Who knew the CIA and Kermit Roosevelt were behind the coup or that the ruthless Shah was our puppet? Those who called for an invasion in 1979 were as ignorant of this history as those now calling for war with Iran, which under Mossadegh had become a more progressive, modern democracy.
Our interference into other countries’ affairs has taken many forms: bribery, assasination, bombing, or invasion, by either proxy or our troops. As John Perkins wrote in “Confessions of an Economic Hitman,” it usually begins by bribing a few prominent families to do our bidding. If silver doesn’t persuade, we use lead. We “send in the jackals,” as Perkins calls them: the fomenters of rebellion or assassins. Gaining access to a country’s economy sometimes involves getting corrupted foreign officials to take on huge loans to benefit some American corporation. In order to pay back the enormous debt, we insist they institute “structural adjustments” entailing privatizing public entities, enforcing “austerity” measures, and slashing public employment and subsidies thereby markedly increasing poverty.
Our military bases around the world exist to facilitate our interference in other nations. It’s hard to name a country whose governments we haven’t bribed, robbed of an election, meddled with, or overthrown. We’ve even interfered in the affairs of our friends (Australia, et al.) as the book “Falcon and the Snowman” revealed. Yet nowhere have our escapades created more blowback for us than in our own hemisphere where our involvement in dozens of dictatorships is one key cause of our immigration crisis. Whether it was “Operation Condor” in South America (with murderous dictatorships shilling for U.S. corporations), or coup d’etats in Central America so U.S. corporations like United Fruit (now Chiquita) and Vaccaro Brothers (now Dole) could get control of vast swaths of peasant land, our interventions have had disastrous consequences for the region. Our so-called “liberal” media could have shed light on these crimes; instead, the truth usually slipped down the memory hole.
Most refugees at our border are coming from three countries: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, where our interference has been particularly egregious. Former State Department official William Blum, described in “Killing Hope” how the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 for committing offenses like returning confiscated peasant land previously handed over to United Fruit. CIA director at the time Allen Dulles – also a board director for United Fruit – cited “communist containment” as the reason for this coup, but the real reason was capitalism with the U.S. providing the muscle. That country’s economy and government have been rigged ever since for the benefit of everyone but the people who actually live there (excepting prominent families).
Through corrupt dealings, U.S. fruit corporations would eventually come to own millions of acres of Central America’s best land, and whenever protests erupted to oppose these thefts, U.S. military forces or our vicious proxies would crush rebellions. It wasn’t Russians who killed Archbishop Romero on his altar in 1980. It wasn’t Iranians who raped and murdered the four American nuns who were opposing our interference in El Salvador. It was thugs trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. Most recently in 2009, we overthrew the elected Honduran president Zelaya, who sinned by raising the minimum wage and subsidizing public transportation. A few years prior, our man, president Joest, signed Honduras up for CAFTA, the “free” trade agreement that pitted giant American agribusiness against hundreds of thousands of poor farmers, transforming Honduras into a net importer of food and triggering mass rural migration, another component of our immigration crisis.
Another contributing factor to the crisis is the multi-year drought afflicting the region. While the compromised governments there are ill equipped to cope with it, the U.S. has even suspended most foreign aid. For a century, we have lived high on the hog, contributing vastly disproportionate CO2 emissions to our thin atmosphere. The concomitant food crisis disproportionately hitting countries like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala represents our ultimate interference even as we refuse to transition away from fossil fuels.
We are all born from the past and borne by history. Understanding this is to know why tens of thousands of refugees are fleeing their countries to the United States, the ultimate cause of their suffering. The chickens have come home to roost and this tragedy is our long overdue blowback.