Dear
All,
Over
the last few days I have sent out emails regarding the immigration of large
numbers of children coming from Latin American and crossing into America over our southern
border with Mexico.
In
those emails I have suggested that the large majority of the children are
coming into America seeking safety and refuge from the atrocities perpetrated by the Drug
Gangs, Cartels, and corrupt governments in their countries; while some have
tried to place the blame primarily on Obama’s immigration “Dream Act” policies.
Please
know that my intentions are not to exonerate Obama from responsibility for
what is happening at our southern border.
In
fact, I believe that Obama’s (and Hillary Clinton’s) feckless foreign policies
are greatly responsible for fostering the horrible conditions that have lead to
the human tragedy we are witnessing in Latin America today, and the huge surge of
illegal immigration coming across our southern border.
This
article by Michael Gonzales below will enlighten you to how a ineffective
president and secretary of state of the United States early on in his presidency
sowed the seeds of instability, creating what we are experiencing today.
Ronald
L. Kirkish, CDFC/IFBC/CALM
"A country-by-country survey of the Obama
administration’s actions in the Northern Triangle shows how the administration
has sown instability in Central America by siding with former guerrillas who
have ties to drug trafficking."
Chaos has erupted at the border with a sudden influx of
Central American children entering America—illegally and alone.
Initially, the Obama administration tried to blame the
exodus of adolescents on their desire to flee violence in their home countries.
Only lately has the White House bowed to reality and
finally conceded what Democrats in Congress, The Washington Post and even
Univision were already admitting that dreams of sanctuary under
the DREAM Act
had convinced
Central American families to hand their children over to coyote networks that
would take them across Mexico and the Rio Grande.
In other words, the administration had to admit that it
had contributed to the problem by appearing to promise that children who crossed
the border illegally would not be deported.
But the administration shouldn’t get a pass on the
violent hell that has been unleashed in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
The United States has great sway over what (in a
less-enlightened age) used to be called America’s backyard.
The Obama administration knows it, too, because it wields
that influence with gusto in Central America.
If it wanted to help quell the turmoil, it would pursue
policies aimed at alleviating the crisis.
Instead, the administration props up bad actors who have
always disliked America and beats up on long-standing
friends.
The Northern Triangle nations of Central America are
dangerous places.
· Honduras has
the highest murder rate in the world at 90.4 per 100,000 inhabitants;
· El Salvador is
No. 4 with a 41.22 rate and
· Guatemala is
No. 5 with 39.9.
These statistics don’t show a spike in violence; they are
largely unchanged from the numbers I discovered two years ago when researching a
book on Hispanics.
Still, they are alarmingly high.
By comparison, the U.S. rate—the
second highest in the thirty-four-member OECD—is “only” 5.2. (For wider context, France’s is
0.8; Britain’s is 0.3.)
And the flight of children isn’t new either.
The U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement told me in
January 2013 that some 2,179 unaccompanied minors from these three countries
were in U.S. custody.
Because of the DREAM Act incentive, however, those
numbers have become much worse this year.
More than 40,000 unaccompanied minors have come to the
United States since January; the vast majority came from Guatemala, Honduras and
El Salvador.
So, yes, the Northern Triangle is a desperate place.
A U.S. official, who recently visited
the main prison in Guatemala, described it as a huge compound run entirely by MS-13 and Calle 18, two transnational crime organizations
that can no longer simply be called gangs.
Each had its separate wing at the prison, prepared its
own food and ran its own children’s centers, replete with toys, for when sons
and daughters came to visit their fathers, he told me.
When they’re outside, they pressure Central Americans,
including children, to enlist in the gangs—“or else.”
The army is completely overwhelmed.
These two gangs alone have an estimated 85,000 members in
the three countries, compared with about 100,000 uniformed soldiers, many of
whom cannot be relied upon.
So no wonder so many Central Americans are making the
trek across Mexico to enter the United States, where they expect to get a
permiso (permit).
Central America is messy.
Its problems are not self-contained, either—they affect
us here at home.
It’s not just the question of minors flocking to our
border with Mexico; transnational criminal organizations are vertically
integrated in several criminal activities in cities throughout our country,
especially just a few miles from the White House and Congress, as Maryland and
Virginia have a high concentration of Central
Americans.
But the region has faced problems before, and previous
American presidents have stepped up.
Ronald Reagan, of course, comes to mind.
When the Soviets and the Cubans decided to make Central
America a test of America’s resolve, Reagan answered the call.
He supported the Contras fighting the Marxist Sandinistas
in Nicaragua.
Reagan won both those fights and Nicaraguans and
Salvadorans electorally supported the sides he had picked, throwing out the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua and voting for Duarte in El
Salvador.
Many of us have long been warning the Obama administration to step up and support those in
the region who have been our allies for years,
who have been inspired by American values and who want to emulate the American
experiment.
It is those people
precisely that the Obama administration has punished, while supporting
those factions and individuals who have long loathed the American “Yankee.”
A country-by-country survey of the Obama administration’s
actions in the Northern Triangle shows how the administration has sown instability in
Central America by siding with former guerrillas who have ties to
drug trafficking.
Honduras
Honduras presented the new Obama administration with one
of its first foreign-policy tests.
On June 28, only six months after President Obama had
come into office, the Honduran Congress and the Supreme Court issued a warrant
for the arrest of President Manuel
Zelaya and asked
the Armed Forces to physically remove him from the country.
President Obama, it is now fair to
say, botched that first test of Central American
policy.
Zelaya had close ties to Hugo Chavez, the then president
of Venezuela (a transit point for the drug shipments).
He was also an ally of every anti-American actor in Latin
America and beyond (most notably, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and the Castro
brothers in Cuba).
Zelaya had tried to subvert Honduras’s constitution and
stay in power, and when the country’s other legal institutions refused to budge,
he tried to exploit fissures between the rich and the poor, calling mobs of his
supporters to the streets.
The country was destabilized.
The Honduran Congress and high court acted entirely
constitutionally.
So did the Armed Forces, which showed they did not lust
for power by immediately handing power to a civilian interim president, who
himself handed power to a popularly elected successor later that year.
The Supreme Court’s vote had been a unanimous 15-0, with
eight of those fifteen votes coming from members of Zelaya’s own
party.
But President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton called the action a military coup and terminated a broad range of
assistance programs toward the impoverished country.
It also connived with the socialist Secretary General of
the Organization of American States (OAS), Jose Miguel Insulza, to expel
Honduras from the OAS.
(This is the same OAS that is now insisting that Cuba,
under a fifty-five-year undemocratic communist dictatorship, must now be given
membership.)
The Obama administration did recognize the free elections
held in November 2009.
But when I went to Honduras a few months later, our
friends there still wondered what had caused the administration to act in this
manner.
Guatemala
In Guatemala, too, the Obama administration has played an activist
role, again fighting a country’s own institutions and again propping up
Marxists who have never liked the United States.
In this colorful country, where a twenty-first-century
visitor can still see a Mayan past, the Obama administration seems to be
relitigating Reagan’s legacy.
During that time, the country was fighting a Cuban- and
Soviet-supported Marxist insurgency, to which Rios Montt dealt severe setbacks.
He was tried in Guatemala in 2013 for “genocide” and
found guilty, but the Constitutional Court annulled the conviction and set a
retrial for next year.
The Court did so because the presiding judge, Yassmin
Barrios, had removed Rios Montt’s lawyer during the trial and appointed two
others to replace him without consulting with her defendant, violating his
constitutional rights.
The problem is, Barrios and Paz are favorites of Mrs.
Clinton and First Lady Michelle Obama.
Earlier this year, Barrios received the State
Department’s International Women of Courage Award in Washington, from none other
than the First Lady, for her performance in the Rios Montt’s trial—the same
performance that had moved the high court in Guatemala to throw out the
conviction and the Guatemalan Bar Association to suspend Barrios for a year.
U.S.
Ambassador Arnold
Chacon cut a
video in Spanish in which he said it had been “a privilege for my government to
count on a partner like Dr. Paz y Paz.”
In fact, our embassy in Guatemala has interfered in the
whole process from the start, issuing statements in Spanish only—in
contravention of the usual practice that all statements from our embassies must
be also in English, so we can know what’s going on back home—and making it clear
that it wanted a guilty verdict for the eighty-one-year-old Rios Montt.
After Barrios and Paz were sanctioned, our embassy issued this
statement: "For the proper functioning of democracies, independent and
capable public servants are essential.
If judges are subject to threats and intimidation,
justice will suffer."
The Bar Association canceled Barrios suspension after
that, proving once again that the United States has plenty of influence in the
country.
Unfortunately, this administration uses its influence for
purposes that do not always seem to support U.S. interests.
Writing in May, Armando de la Torre from Guatemala’s
renowned Francisco Marroquin University and Steve Hecht
said:
The Obama administration’s blatant support for the
ex-guerrillas of Guatemala shows the unvarnished Obama agenda. The U.S. embassy
and its friends mercilessly oppose, with callous disregard for the facts, those
Guatemalans who faithfully execute their duties. . .people who really do support
the rule of law, and thereby threaten the leftist
agenda.
El Salvador
If the Obama administration has been activist in Honduras
and Guatemala, in El Salvador it has been strangely quiescent.
Our ambassador there—Mari Carmen Aponte, a leftist Obama
appointee [1]—never lifted a finger to bring attention to the ties between the
drug gangs and the man who was elected president in February, Salvador Sánchez
Cerén.
Sánchez Cerén is in a class by himself.
A former Marxist guerrilla leader who has admitted to
taking part in brutal killings, he is fiercely anti-American.
On September 11, 2001, he led a mob down San Salvador
streets and burned the American flag in celebration of the terrorist attacks in
New York and Washington.
Would action by Mrs. Aponte have made a difference in
this year’s elections?
It might have; Sánchez Cerén was elected by a whisker,
garnering 50.1 percent of the vote against 49.9 percent for his
opponent.
Mrs. Aponte had plenty to work with had she wanted to
request law enforcement sanctions against Sánchez Cerén and his cronies.
His FMLN party has well known links to MS-13 and Calle
18.
A close ally of Sánchez Cerén, José Luis Merino, is the
well-documented connection between the FMLN, the FARC (the Colombian drug and
terror group) and the Italian Mafia.
…documents [which] show that the FARC has
an international support network stretching from Madrid to Mexico City, Buenos
Aires to Bern. Merino, the documents suggest, is a key link in that
international chain, the FARC’s man in El Salvador, and one of the architects of
an arms deal that includes everything from sniper rifles to ground-to-air
missiles.
What to Do
Clearly, the Obama administration policy in Central
America is not working.
We’re seeing the results not just at the border, but in
the streets of our inner cities.
Equally clear is the way forward.
My colleague at The Heritage Foundation, Ana Quintana,
offers the following steps:
- Remove withholding
requirements on foreign assistance to Honduras: Under the Obama administration, the United States
has directly contributed to the country’s descent. Following Honduras’s
constitutional crisis of 2009, the United States suspended critical aid and
joint military operations, largely in the form of counternarcotics assistance.
Land, sea and air counternarcotics operations along the Caribbean coast virtually halted, and they were weakened
elsewhere. Drug trafficking organizations quickly filled the security vacuum.
Since FY2012, Congress has withheld a minimum of 20 percent of security
assistance. It maintained this provision in FY2013 and in FY2014, increased the
hold to 35 percent, despite the country making great strides in both human
rights and democratic governance. Congressional appropriators should ensure the
FY2015 budget stops suppressing the U.S. security
engagement.
- Let Honduras repair
its fleet of F-5 jet fighters. Congress recently blocked Israel from taking a
contract to repair a fleet of Cold War-era F-5 jet fighters provided by the
United States in the 1980s. Despite Honduras’ membership in the F-5
Technical Operation Group, the quality of the fleet leaves much to be desired.
The Obama administration must recognize that repairing the fleet is a critical
component in the country’s efforts to arrest both inbound and outbound drug
flights. Honduras is currently the transit point for an estimated 79 percent of
northbound South American drug flights, and this number is expected to increase.
The repair of this fleet would support the country’s much-needed expansions in
aeronautical radar technology.
- Recognize Guatemala’s
critical position and relieve burdensome legislative restrictions: Congressional restrictions on Foreign
Military Financing (FMF) and International Military Education and Training
(IMET) for Guatemala continue to undermine regional-security efforts. It hinders
the promotion of human rights and reduces our ability to promote democratic
values and professional military education. In 2013, U.S. Southern Command
supported the new Guatemalan Interagency Task Force, which provides
infrastructure and operational antitrafficking support along the
Mexican-Guatemalan border. Yet FMF and IMET restrictions impede strengthening
this cooperation. Guatemala shares a 600-mile border with
Mexico and is the final Central American destination for individuals traveling
from Honduras and El Salvador. Despite the long border, there are only eight
formal points of entry. With the surge in unlawful border crossings, an
estimated 350 informal crossings have been created. The United States should
support Guatemala’s efforts to secure this
border.
These simple steps would do a lot more for our country’s
security than relitigating the 1980s.
[1] Note: Aponte’s nomination was held up in 2010 by then
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). DeMint is now president of my employer, The Heritage
Foundation.
Dr.Nora Volkow, Director of NIDA