SEEING CENTRAL AMERICAN YOUTH AS HUMAN BEINGS

SEEING CENTRAL AMERICAN YOUTH AS HUMAN BEINGS

Book Review by David Bacon

Afterimage, Vol. 42, no. 2 

http://vsw.org/afterimage/issues/afterimage-vol-42-no-2/

Unsettled/Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs

Photographs by Donna De Cesare

University of Texas Press, 2013

164 pp./$65.00 (hb)

Today the tattooed faces and bodies of Salvadoran gang members are put on display for readers of US and European newspapers and magazines in much the same way that images of tattooed indigenous people in New Guinea were used to titillate readers of National Geographic at the dawn of photography more than a century ago.

Young Salvadorans are pictured behind bars or with guns, just as people labeled "savages" were once posed with spears. This is the dehumanization of the indigenous. Even the language accompanying the images carries the same flavor of the exotic, the dangerous, and the "other"-something to frighten comfortable middle-class viewers with what seems an inside look at an alien and violent world.

The people of New Guinea were described as bloodthirsty cannibals. Today National Geographic introduces the 2011 television documentary Gang War USA: El Salvadoran Gang Violence by alleging that "El Salvador is one of the most violent nations on Earth-with 10 times the murder rate of the US-and it's all thanks to imported gangs."

There is violence in Central America, as everywhere, much of it the consequence of social inequality and poverty. But violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras mushroomed because of the United States policy of sponsoring wars against popular movements for social change. Huge social dislocation and violence are today the legacy of those wars, not just in Central America, but in the US as well.

That violence is the subject of Donna De Cesare's book, Unsettled/Desasosiego. De Cesare spent two decades taking photographs of Salvadoran young people, documenting the impact of violence on their lives. Her work is as far from media stereotype as one can get. She clearly loves the Salvadoran people whose lives have intersected her own, and her involvement with and commitment to them extends over many years. Her concern is to show the humanity of what is now a Salvadoran binational community, as it tries to deal with the consequences of war and migration.

Unsettled/Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs contains 105 beautifully reproduced black-and-white images, and is divided into three parts. The first features images De Cesare took during the guerrilla war of the 1980s. The second documents the lives of young refugees as they were incorporated into the gang life of Los Angeles. The third travels back to El Salvador to examine the results of the massive deportation of young people to a country many hardly knew when they left as children.

De Cesare's images of the war are not battle scenes, but ones that show its impact on ordinary people. In one, a group flees down a San Salvador street waving white shirts and flags, presumably at government airplanes above, that are bombing their neighborhood during an guerrilla offensive. In another, a child cries in terror at an unseen helicopter. A stark portrait shows a child staring into the camera, holding a fragment of a mortar shell. Her subjects are not anonymous symbols, but people reacting individually with anger, terror, or determination.

The young people depicted here are not just victims of violence. A young man holds a taped-together rifle, his sympathies obviously with the guerrillas. This image doesn't simply critique the way war sweeps up the young, but shows its youthful subject taking sides in a conflict in which he knows the stakes. In another portrait, "Gustavo" sits in a forest camp, having joined the Farabundo MartÆ National Liberation Front (FMLN) after the army killed his parents.

Over two million mostly young people fled El Salvador during the war, the great bulk of them to LA. Most crossed the US/Mexican border without visas, in many cases walking all the way from Central America. They were not welcomed. This flood of refugees made obvious the real costs of a murderous policy-arming the Salvadoran military and supporting death squad governments in the name of fighting communism.

In LA, Salvadorans found work as street corner laborers and domestics in homes-the dirtiest and least secure jobs. Their children roamed the streets of poor neighborhoods like Ramparts, where police routinely lined them up against walls in the same kind of police and army lineups their families remembered from El Salvador. 

In one of the most telling photographs in the second part of De Cesare's book, "Immigration agents for the Violent Gang Task Force target immigrant youth whom they suspect may be gang involved for deportation", three young people, their backs to the camera, kneel in front of a wall. An immigration agent has his hand on the butt of his automatic. One youth has his hands above his head. Another's are manacled behind him. If the photo's caption didn't say it was taken on LA's Westside in 1994, you might think it was from Ilopango in 1984, during the war.

De Cesare doesn't hesitate to show the violence and drugs that have become part of the lives of young people in LA. But she doesn't demonize them, and instead seeks their humanity. In one haunting portrait, shooting from below, she captures Carlos Gonzalez holding a portrait of his mother, murdered by gangs in San Salvador.

In another, De Cesare looks from above down at Ivonne, a young woman lying on a bed with her child beside her, reading a letter from her boyfriend, just deported back to El Salvador. The handwriting on the page is stylized like the graffiti on urban walls (the following photograph shows LA-style graffiti as it begins to appear back in El Salvador). The image conveys the loneliness and pain of separation that underlies the Salvadoran migrant experience.

This section concludes with an image of Salvadorans protesting in defense of their rights as immigrants. They've fashioned a replica of a machine gun, not to glorify gang violence, but as a reminder of the state violence Salvadorans were fleeing by coming to the US.

Finally, De Cesare documents the consequences of the wholesale deportation of young Salvadorans  that began in the early 1990s and continues today. This has not only served to tear families even further apart, but some of the deported youth then reproduce LA's gang culture in El Salvador. Today's media images of the tattooed young men in Salvadoran prisons take this culture out of context. Young deportees were treated as criminals upon their arrival in El Salvador, by right wing governments hostile to youth and the poor. Their Mano Dura policy was developed with help from US law enforcement, exporting LA's anti-gang policies.

De Cesare's images show young people caught up in gang violence. But again the images refuse to demonize them. De Cesare doesn't believe that violence is somehow inherent to Salvadoran culture or the result of imaginary racial and personal defects. Instead, her images document the reality of communities fractured by this two-way forced migration.

A group of young people hang out in a crash pad in El Salvador, in an apartment left behind by a family who moved to LA. Members of a gang from LA find each other in San Salvador. A young man shows off a tattoo on his back memorializing the death of his brother, a custom popular in the US. Other images depict shirtless young men with tattoos beside smiling young women, but they seem natural rather than postured, violent, or sexualized. One shows a young man holding a baby, thinking, according to the caption, about how to find a job, a home, and a future.

This is not a Pollyannaish view of gangs. One young man lies in his own blood, dead on the sidewalk. Another image shows a man holding his hands above his head in the background, possibly awaiting execution, as a hand holds a revolver behind the back of a figure in the foreground. In a parallel with the LA image, a Guatemalan policeman holds two young men, shirts over their heads, up against a wall.

At its end, the book includes three images pointing to another possible future for these young people: a family ritual celebrating indigenous heritage; young women writing down their ideas for reducing violence; and a teacher helping a student learn computer skills at a community center.

De Cesare isn't trying to present an overview of all aspects of Salvadoran community life, in either country. She gives the reader a humanistic view of one aspect of the Salvadoran experience-how young people have been affected by war, violence, and deportation.

But it is unsettling that the book ends just before the FMLN is elected as El Salvador's government in 2009 (reelected this year). De Cesare's text cites Jesuit social psychologist Ignacio MartÆn-Barù, who holds that dealing with the impact of widespread violence requires not just alleviation of individual suffering, but the creation of a just society. If any nation of people has fought for such a vision, Salvadorans certainly have.

Today those who fought for this vision have some power to make it reality. And they are mostly young people, like those in De Cesare's photographs. Is there now an alternative to gang life and poverty, much as Gustavo might have dreamed as he sat in the forest? If people are being deported from the US in record numbers, can we see the faces of the young people in LA's barrios who now sit in acts of civil disobedience, in front of the buses carrying their friends to detention?

There are images of the work life of young Salvadorans in the book-one of kids picking coffee on the Usulutçn volcano, and another of Dora Alicia Alarcon, who organized a union for LA street vendors. They suggest that more documentation could deepen an understanding of how this community has not only survived, but has become one of the most important sources of labor activism in LA.

The book does full justice to the images, and in a huge step forward for photography books, has a fully bilingual text, making it accessible to the community De Cesare documents (and increasing its marketing potential significantly). It does, however, put the full photo captions in a group at the back. This deprives the images of important context, and depoliticizes some of them. Without captions, a boy with a taped-together rifle is almost just another child with a gun. Also, some of the images are run across two pages. This allows for larger images, but the gutter running through them makes it harder to see each image as a whole.

Unsettled/Desasosiego is a tremendous achievement, and shows the depth of understanding and documentation made possible through many years of work and commitment by a brilliant photographer.

David Bacon is a widely-published documentary photographer and writer in California, whose latest book is The Right to Stay Home (Beacon Press, 2013). 

IN BAJA CALIFORNIA I LEARNED THAT WORKERS HAVE RIGHTS

IN BAJA CALIFORNIA I LEARNED THAT WORKERS HAVE RIGHTS

The Story of Natalia Bautista

Told to David Bacon

The Journal of Transborder Studies, #2 Summer 2014

http://www.fronterismo.org/transfronterizos/issue-2-summer-2014/

Natalia Bautista was born in a Mixteco family that had migrated to north Mexico to work as farm laborers.  She became involved in the strikes that changed the conditions for workers in Baja California in the 1980s, and today lives in Santa Maria, where she is a community organizer.  She told the story of those strikes to David Bacon.

Natalia Bautista talks to a Mixtec family living in an apartment complex in Santa Maria.  In the spring and summer they work picking strawberries.

Well I am from Oaxaca.  I have always stated that because my mother is from Santiago Tiña and my father is from Rancho Diego Mixtepec.  But my parents left Oaxaca in the 70's.  They moved to Veracruz to work in the sugar cane fields and that is where I was born.

My parents are farm workers.  They left their hometown due to economic problems, just like everyone else.  They first moved to Veracruz, and from there the moved to Sinaloa and stayed there for a while.  They then left to Sonora and eventually came to Baja California Norte.  When we arrived I was already six years old.  That is where I have my first memories of growing up and seeing my parents work.  I remember my father working at a ranch by the name of Rancho Caña.  That is where we grew up.

Cucumber pickers, migrant farm workers from Oaxaca, on the back of a pickup truck, waiting to be taken to the fields to work.

We first arrived in a little town named Vicente Guerrero.  My father rented a small house from a family from Jalisco.  He worked in the fields just outside the neighborhood.   My father then met the owner of the ranch and asked if we could live there.  I don't know the details, but that's where we ended up.  My father built a small house out of cardboard and covered it with plastic.

We stayed in that house for four years, as long as my father worked on that ranch.  We wouldn't have left if my father hadn't been fired.  I remember him coming home telling us we had to leave.  My father, my brother and other workers then refused to get out until they were compensated.  That is the first time I remember hearing that workers had rights and could organize.

A young boy getting ready to go into the field to pick tomatoes on the ranch of the Santa Cruz Packing Co., owned by the Castañeda family.

Those topics weren't covered in school.  In fact, I didn't attend school very much.  I only went up to third grade.  I remember not passing first grade on two occasions because I didn't speak Spanish.  Learning the alphabet was difficult for me. It was something completely foreign from what we spoke at home.  My parents were Mixteco, so we only spoke our language.  I began working when I was eight, picking brussels sprouts with my aunt and mother.

My father was fired after having organized the other workers.  I don't recall if it was my father or brother who first realized they had to organize.  I remember them traveling to Ensenada to seek support.  I would listen to them talk and I remember they said they'd met with a woman named Norma, from an organization that would support their efforts.  They held their meetings and completed the paperwork to ask for compensation.  The company finally paid them and my father and brother pooled their money to purchase a small plot of land.  That is where we grew up, in the Benito Juarez neighborhood.  The majority of those receiving compensation moved there.  My brother still lives there. 

Isabel Zaragoza and her infant daughter Lagoberta, live in a labor camp in Vicente Guerrero, a town in the San Quintin Valley.  She and her husband arrived a few months ago from Oaxaca.  They work as migrant farm workers in the fields, picking tomatoes.

As a kid, you just like being in the mix when adults are talking.  When you're young, you try to become involved in adult conversations, and it was interesting to me.  I remember my father and brother organizing.  That's when I learned that workers had rights, and you couldn't simply let them go and treat them like animals.  When my father told us that he had been compensated and we were moving, I remember thinking, "Wow, this works and it's a right."  I walked away thinking that we were humans.  The people who moved with us were like-minded folks, with similar ideas and goals. 

Later they all came together to fight for electricity and running water.  I learned you had to keep fighting and organizing in order to improve your living conditions.  When we first moved, we had to a walk long distance for clean water.  We would carry our clothing to wash it at the water source.  Everyone began to talk about the need for electricity and water.  Soon after, folks from Sinaloa who were familiar with organizing came to help.  They encouraged us to also think about our rights as farm workers.

Marcial Sayas Flores, a disabled farmworker, lives in a labor camp for migrants owned by a wealthy rancher, Don Daniel Gonzalez.

The organizers who came were from CIOAC [the Confederacion Independente de Obreros Agricolas y Campesinos - the Independent Confederation of Farm Workers and Farmers] -- the Garcia brothers, Benito and Fernando.  My father knew them because their parents were also from San Juan Mixtepec.  My father offered our house as a place to meet.  By then, they had already organized workers in various camps.  It seemed to happen so fast -- by the time I realized it, they were already painting signs, making banners and talking about a grand march.  It was very exciting. 

This happened around 1985.  I was young, probably 13 or 14 years old.  I really don't know how to explain it, but the next thing I knew there were lots of people from Ensenada and Tijuana coming over to the house.  Now that I analyze it as an adult, I realize the majority were from the Mexican Socialist Party.  I met a lot of them.  They came to offer support and help in any way they could.  They supported the workers in various ways, but it was basically a conversation of ideas.  I contributed by serving food and coffee. 

Celerino Garcia, the brother of Benito Garcia and the first Mixtec indigenous candidate, of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, for the Mexican Federal Chamber of Deputies from the Valle de San Quintin in Baja California. 

Finally the day of the march arrived.  We all participated and nobody worked.  The strike was very impressive.  It was huge and spread through the entire Vicente Guerrero neighborhood.  There were different labor camps involved.  It began with the workers from Rancho del Mar and then a neighboring ranch.  They agreed that nobody would show up for work, and if someone did, they would throw tomatoes at them until they stopped working.  Most elected to participate in the march, so I didn't see anyone pelted with tomatoes with my own eyes.  You had to participate because it was for your rights.  All the workers from the different companies met in the middle to form a large group.

In those times, they were asking for a salary increase and better working conditions.  They also asked for better treatment from the foremen, a set lunch period and for buckets that weren't so heavy.  The most important request was for a salary increase.  Back then they were asking for 1,500 pesos.  That was before the devaluation of the peso.  The strike won higher wages and transportation for the workers.  They were first transported in the large tomato containers, but after the strike they were transported in buses. 

Beatriz Chavez, a farm worker organizer for CIOAC, cheers at the last rally of of Celerino Garcia's election campaign.  She was later imprisoned for her activity defending the housing rights of farm workers.

The CIOAC organization set up shop there permanently as a labor union.  They fought for labor rights of farm workers. And the union received support from the political party leaders.  The political party established itself with the workers after the strike.  It became a partnership, where workers felt they could be part of the union that helped protect their rights, and also affiliate themselves with the party.

In those days, I think both the union and political party were fundamental.  The party wasn't there solely for your vote.  It was a party that worked in support of the workers and the union.  If there was a work stoppage having to do with labor, the party was there to help.  Party leaders were intimately involved.  You have a right to organize, but you need a labor group to back up your ideas.

Celedonio Marcelo Raja, a farm worker, at, the last rally of of Celerino Garcia's election campaign.  Marcelo said he was 102 years old, and remembered the events of the Mexican Revolution.

When they met with large groups of workers, they spoke more about labor rights.  At the organization level, then they talked more about ideas.  Party leaders would speak to the workers about the government system and talked about struggles around the world, like the labor struggles in Russia and Nicaragua.  I remember being in awe after hearing them speak.  I felt that they understood what was happening in the world, and that my ideas were important.  I was very impressed.  Party leaders spoke of changing the system and establishing a new and different government.  I imagined a marvelous place, but we're still waiting for that.

The CIOAC activists that helped organize came up from Sinaloa, Sonora and San Quentin.  But they were originally from Mixtepec in Oaxaca. In Oaxaca people have had their own struggles.  Two years ago I accompanied my father to Oaxaca and asked him how the town's school was built.  He said it was a community struggle.  After so many people started migrating, they encountered a different world with different rules and structure. 

Hieronyma Hernandez picks strawberries in a crew of indigenous Oaxacan farm workers, in a field near Santa Maria.  Many members of the crew are Mixtec migrants from San Vincente in Oaxaca. Mexico.  The earth in the beds is covered in plastic, while in between the workers walk in sand and mud.

I think that is where the idea of change came about.  Benito and Fernando say that idea began in Sinaloa.  They worked in the fields and experienced what all workers faced.  They met people involved in the party with the same ideas, who were already trying to mobilize workers.  That is how they became involved in the movement in Sinaloa, and eventually in Baja California.

After the strike I got married.  I fell in love with the movement, the ideology and everything else.  Two years after meeting him, I married Benito.  He continued his participation in the party.  I still held on to the dream of a large labor union that was able to improve the lives and working conditions of workers. 

Natalia Bautista in her home in Santa Maria, surrounded by paintings by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.

Fernando and I still have that dream, but he did the hard work.  He was one of the most influential people of that time and movement.  He gets little recognition, but he did all the work.  He would give his life for the movement, and is the one who wouldn't sleep so that he could reach the most isolated camps.  He kept the idea of organizing the workers alive and would constantly remind them that they had rights.  The brothers split up after a few years because Fernando returned to Sinaloa and Benito stayed in Baja. 

I supported my partner, whether it was a march, meeting, campaign or the presidential campaign of Cuauhtémoc Cardenas.  That was the first time we thought we were going to have real change in this country.  It wasn't going to be total change, but a real movement forward.  He was our hope, because all of the groups aligned with him.  We really thought we were going to do it.  My children and I helped spread his message.  We tried.  We won.  We actually won.  But those in power didn't permit the change. The people still resist and want a different government.

MIKE HONDA - THE UN-TITAN

MIKE HONDA - THE UN-TITAN

By David Bacon

The editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle thinks a Silicon Valley Congressman should speak for the billionaires who have a voice and want an even louder one. 

Perhaps thanks are due the board for making the choice between Mike Honda and Ro Khanna so clear.  If we want a Congress member, it argues, who will be a voice for "those high-tech titans (Eric Schmidt of Google, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo among them)" we should follow its recommendation and dump Mike Honda, and install Ro Khanna.

The board goes further.  "The word among tech executives [who have graciously passed it on to the board] who are supporting Khanna is that incumbent Honda generally has been supportive of their positions.  They just want more.  They want -- and this district deserves -- a stronger voice in Washington."

Of course, most people who live in this district are not billionaires.  In fact, according to Working Partnerships' report on economic polarization in Silicon Valley, Life in the Valley Economy (http://www.wpusa.org/Publication/#LIVE12), the number of households with incomes under $10K (inflation-adjusted) more than doubled  - up 127.7% (from 11,556 in 2000 to 26,310 in 2010).  The number of households making $50,000 to $199,000 dropped from 62% to 55%.

"Whereas in the hourglass economy of the 1990s," its report said in 2010, "the Valley saw a shrinking middle class with some middle class families falling down and others rising up, the real income distribution trend is now shaped less like an hourglass and more like an old-fashioned Victorian gown: small on the top, squeezed ever tighter in the middle, and ballooning out at the bottom."

In 2012, in the middle of the Valley's "economic recovery," it added, "From 2000 to 2010, real median household income in the Valley has fallen by 19% - more than three times the national decline.  It's not that the region has stopped producing wealth. Total personal income flowing into Silicon Valley increased, as did per capita earnings for workers. But a disproportionate share of this growth is flowing to a small segment of highly compensated individuals - leaving the majority of working families struggling to get by on reduced incomes."

In other words, creating a good business environment for the "high-tech titans" benefitted them, but didn't benefit the vast majority of people.  The "commitment to meritocracy" lauded by the editorial as its reason for supporting Ro Khanna, is actually a commitment to the welfare of the wealthiest 1% of Silicon Valley.  Perhaps Mr. Khanna is committed to the welfare of more than the titans.  It doesn't seem likely, though, given that those titans are financing his race, and that according to the Chronicle, he condemns "ideological protest votes or budgets."

It is to Mike Honda's credit that he has been concerned, throughout his political career, with the welfare of the Valley's working families, especially middle and low-income families.  The editorial does recognize Honda's "unwavering commitment to civil rights."  That commitment was shown last year, when he supported immigrant workers who were losing their jobs as a result of the overzealous application of immigration "silent raids" at local worksites.  These were the ordinary working people of the Valley -- construction workers, cafeteria workers and the people who process our recycling.

Mr. Khanna, who worked on trade policy at the Department of Commerce, supports the "more competitive, free and fair trade [that] grows the economies of participating nation [from his website:  http://www.rokhanna.com/economy]."  These are the trade policies like NAFTA, and now the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership, that displace millions of farmers and workers in countries like Mexico, plunging them into poverty and giving them no alternative other than migrating in search of work, including to the U.S.  He calls for allowing U.S. corporations (Silicon Valley giants prominent among them) to repatriate the enormous profits they've kept outside the country in order to avoid paying taxes on them.

It's a familiar idea -- support industry with subsidies, tax credits and political clout, and industry will create jobs.  Unfortunately, the record of the Valley titans is that they've taken the subsidies over the years, and then relocated tens of thousands of jobs out of the Valley, searching for low wages and even bigger subsidies. 

Silicon Valley industry has a long record of hating unions, of chemical contamination of the environment, of avoiding the social costs of industrial expansion, and of using the wealth generated in our community to try to bend politics its way.  In California we've had two decades of experience with industrial titans who want to buy their way into office, to better serve the interests of those already at the top of our society. 

Most people in Silicon Valley recognize that Mike Honda, a former schoolteacher, is not one of them.  Thanks to the Chronicle editorial board for pointing that out.

8 REASONS U.S. TRADE AND IMMIGRATION POLICIES--NOT "LAX IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT"--HAVE CAUSED MIGRATION FROM CENTRAL AMERICA

8 REASONS U.S. TRADE AND IMMIGRATION POLICIES--NOT "LAX IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT"--HAVE CAUSED MIGRATION FROM CENTRAL AMERICA 

By David Bacon
In These Times, web edition, July 8, 2014
http://inthesetimes.com/article/16919/8_reasons_u.s._trade_and_immigration_policies_have_caused_migration_from_ce




In front of Oakland's Federal Building young people from immigrant youth groups protest against the detention and deportation of young migrants and families on the U.S. border, and especially against President Obama's decision to increase border enforcement and deport them more quickly. 

The mass migration of children from Central America has been at the center of a political firestorm over the past few weeks. The mainstream media has run dozens of stories blaming families, especially mothers, for sending or bringing their children north from Central America. The president himself lectured them, as though they were simply bad parents. "Do not send your children to the borders," Obama said last week. "If they do make it, they'll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it."

Meanwhile, the story is being manipulated by the Tea Party and conservative Republicans to attack Obama's executive action deferring the deportation of young people, along with any possibility he might expand it╤the demand of many immigrant rights advocates. More broadly, the Right wants to shut down any immigration reform that includes legalization, and instead is gunning for harsher enforcement measures. Even Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, commander of U.S. Southern Command, has sought to frame migration as a national security threat, calling it a "crime-terror convergence," and describing it as "an incredibly efficient network along which anything - hundreds of tons of drugs, people, terrorists, potentially weapons of mass destruction or children - can travel, so long as they can pay the fare."

This push for greater enforcement ignores the real reasons families take the desperate measure of leaving home and trying to cross the border.  Media coverage focuses on gang violence in Central America, as though it was spontaneous and unrelated to a history of U.S.-promoted wars and a policy of mass deportations.

U.S. foreign and immigration policy is responsible for much of the pressure causing this flow of people from Central America. These eight facts, ignored by the mainstream press and the president, document that culpability, and point out the need for change.

1. There is no "lax enforcement" on the U.S./Mexico border. There are over 20,000 members of the Border Patrol, the largest number in history. We have walls and a system of detention centers that didn't exist just 15 years ago. Now more than 350,000 people spend some time in an immigrant detention center every year. The U.S. spends more on immigration enforcement than all other enforcement activities of the federal government combined, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The growing numbers of people in detention╤young people as well as families and adults╤ is being used as a pretext by the anti-immigrant lobby in Washington, including the Tea Party and the Border Patrol itself, for demanding increases in the budget for enforcement. The Obama administration has given way before this pressure.

2. The migration of children and families didn╒t just start recently. It has been going on for a long time, although the numbers are increasing. The tide of migration from Central America goes back to wars that the U.S. promoted in the 1980s, in which we armed the forces, governments or contras, who were most opposed to progressive social change. Two million Salvadorans alone came to the U.S. during the late 1970s and 80s, to say nothing of Guatemalans and Nicaraguans. Whole families migrated, but so did parts of families, leaving loved ones behind with the hope that some day they'd be reunited.

3. The recent increase in the numbers of migrants is not just a response to gang violence, although this is virtually the only reason given in U.S. media coverage. Growing migration is as much or more a consequence of the increasing economic crisis for rural people in Central America and Mexico, as well as the failure of those economies to produce jobs. People are leaving because they can't survive where they are.

4. The failure of Central America's economies is mostly due to the North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements and their accompanying economic changes, including privatization of businesses, the displacement of communities by foreign mining projects and cuts in the social budget. The treaties allowed huge U.S. corporations to dump corn and other agricultural products in Mexico and Central America, forcing rural families off their lands when they could not compete.

5. When governments or people have resisted NAFTA and CAFTA, the United States has threatened reprisals. Right-wing Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) put forward a measure in 2004 to cut off the flow of remittances (money sent back to Salvadoran families from family members working in the U.S.) if people voted for a leftwing party, the FMLN, in El Salvador's national elections. Otto Reich, a violently anti-communist Cuban who was Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, said the U.S. government was "concerned about the impact that an FMLN victory could have on the commercial, economic, and migration-related relations of the U.S. with El Salvador." Salvadoran papers were full of the threat, especially those on the right, and the FMLN lost.  In 2009 a tiny wealthy elite in Honduras overthrew President Manuel Zelaya because he raised the minimum wage, gave subsidies to small farmers, cut interest rates and instituted free education. The Obama administration gave a de facto approval to the coup regime that followed. If social and political change had taken place in Honduras, we would see far fewer Hondurans trying to come to the U.S.

6. Gang violence in Central America has a U.S. origin. Over the past two decades, young people from Central America have arrived in L.A. and big U.S. cities, where many were recruited into gangs, a story eloquently told by photographer Donna De Cesare in the recent book Unsettled/Desasociego. The Maratrucha Salvadoreña gang, which today's newspaper stories hold responsible for the violence driving people from El Salvador, was organized in Los Angeles, not in Central America. U.S. law enforcement and immigration authorities responded to the rise of gang activity here with a huge program of deportations. Most of the kids in gangs in Central America were originally deportees from the U.S. The U.S. has been deporting 400,000 people per year, more than any other period since the Cold War.

7. And in Central America, U.S. policy has led to the growth of gang violence.  In El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, U.S. law enforcement assistance pressured local law enforcement to adopt a "mano dura" or hardline approach to gang members, leading to the incarceration of many young people deported from the U.S. almost as soon as they arrived. Prisons became schools for gang recruitment.  El Salvador, with a leftwing FMLN government, at least has a commitment to a policy of jobs and economic development to take young people off the street, and to providing an alternative to migration.  Even there, conservative police and military forces continue to support heavy enforcement. In Guatemala and Honduras, the U.S. is supporting very rightwing governments who only use a heavy enforcement approach. While punishing deportees and condemning migration, these two governments actually use the migration of people to the U.S. as a source of remittances to keep their economies afloat.

8. Kids looking for families here are looking for those who were already displaced by war and economic crisis. The separation of families is a cause of much of the current migration of young people. Young people fleeing the violence are reacting to the consequences of policies for which the U.S. government is largely responsible, in the only way open to them.

Two and three years ago we were hearing from the Pew Hispanic Trust and other sources that migration had "leveled off." No one is bothering to claim that anymore. Migration hasn't stopped because the forces causing it are more powerful than ever.

More enforcement will not deal with the causes of the migration from Central America. In fact, the deportation of more people back to their countries of origin will increase joblessness and economic desperation. This is the largest factor causing people to leave. Violence, which feeds on that desperation, will increase as well.

President Obama has proposed increasing the enforcement budget by $3.7 billion.  He has called for suspending a law passed in 2008, which requires minors to be transferred out of detention to centers where they can locate family members to care for them.  He instead proposes to deport them more rapidly.  Both ideas will cause more pain, violate basic rights and moral principles, and fail completely to stop migration.

NY Times writer Carl Hulse writes that the law transferring minors out of detention centers "is at the root of the potentially calamitous flow of unaccompanied minors to the nation╒s southern border." This report and others like it not only ignore history and paint a false picture of the reasons for migration, but provide the rationale for increased enforcement.

New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez picked up the cue, declaring "we must attack this problem from a foreign policy perspective, a humanitarian perspective, a criminal perspective, immigration perspective, and a national security perspective."  He called for increasing funding for the U.S. military's Southern Command and the State Department's Central American Regional Security Initiative.  Giving millions of dollars to some of the most violent and rightwing militaries in the western hemisphere, however, is a step back towards the military intervention policy that set the wave of forced migration into motion to begin with.

Instead, we need to help families reunite, treat immigrants with respect, and change the policies the U.S. has implemented in Central America, Mexico and elsewhere that have led to massive, forced migration. The two most effective measures would be ending the administration's mass detention and deportation program, and ending the free trade economic and interventionist military policies that are causing such desperation in the countries these children and families are fleeing.




Young people in Oakland protest the detention of children and families from Central America.

IMMIGRATION AND U.S. POLICY: MAKING THE CONNECTIONS

Immigration and U.S. Policy:  Making the Connections
By David L. Wilson, NACLA Report
Summer 2014
https://nacla.org/article/immigration-and-us-policy-making-connections

David Bacon's The Right to Stay Home explores how the United States pushes free trade agreements such as NAFTA that drive so many Mexicans out of their home countries. In response, more Mexican activists today are advocating for the right to not migrate.

Review:  The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration
By David Bacon
Beacon Press, 2013. Hardcover, 328 pages, $27.95.

U.S. journalist David Bacon's new book on immigration begins with stench. Since the 1990s the Granjas Carroll de México company has been raising literally millions of pigs in the Perote Valley in Mexico's Veracruz state. The smell is overwhelming. Some nights Fausto Limón and his family drive away from their farm and sleep in their old pickup to escape the fetid air from Granjas Carroll's facilities. The problem is more than just a bad smell. The family suffered from kidney ailments for three years as the pig farms expanded, and Fausto's mother eventually died of kidney failure. A doctor advised the family to stop drinking the water from their well; the kidney problems ended when they switched to bottled water.

As Bacon explains in this compelling book, the polluting pig farms of the Perote Valley are just one example of how NAFTA-the North American Free Trade Agreement-has affected Mexicans since its start in 1994

The Virginia-based corporation Smithfield Foods is a part owner of Granjas Carroll. NAFTA makes it highly profitable for Smithfield to site hog-raising operations in Mexico, taking advantage of lower wages and weaker environmental enforcement. NAFTA also lowers the cost of feeding the pigs, since "free trade" opens Mexico up to corn and soy from U.S. agricultural corporations. Mexico's family farmers can't compete with government-subsidized grain from north of the border; as a result, Mexico's corn imports quintupled between 2002 and 2010, from 2 million tons a year to 10.3 million.

Before NAFTA, farmers in the Perote Valley had been able to make a modest living from their crops and livestock. "Sometimes the price of a pig was enough to buy what we needed," former Perote resident David Ceja tells Bacon in the opening chapter, "but then it wasn't."

Fausto Limón and many other farmers have stayed in the valley, organizing with mixed results against Smithfield's environmental violations and struggling to get by from what they could grow. Others followed David Ceja's example: unable to make enough by raising pigs in Mexico, Ceja ended up butchering pigs in Tar Heel, North Carolina at a giant slaughterhouse owned by Smithfield.

"Now the boys I played with are all here," Ceja says. "I see them working in the plant."

Stories like Ceja's are the main focus of /The Right to Stay Home/, a title that reflects the growing emphasis among Mexican activists on what they call /el derecho de no migrar/, the right not to migrate.

For the past three decades the U.S. government and media have promoted "free trade" policies in Latin America and the Caribbean that inevitably drive large numbers of people out of their home countries. At the same time that the U.S. deprives these people of their right to stay home, it uses harsher and harsher anti-immigrant measures to deny them the right to migrate legally. The result is the more than 11 million immigrants now living in the United States without legal status.

NAFTA is probably the most devastating of the US-promoted policies for Mexicans, especially in its effect on farming. Bacon cites the dramatic fall of agricultural employment as the trade agreement kicked in. Farm sector jobs declined from 10.7 million to 8.6 million just from 2001 to 2008, according to Jonathan Fox of the University of California at Santa Cruz. The United States lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs to Mexico, as noted in a 2011 report <http://epi.3cdn.net/fdade52b876e04793b_7fm6ivz2y.pdf> from the Economic Policy Institute, but these weren't nearly enough to offset the millions of jobs Mexico lost through competition from U.S. agricultural corporations and through other NAFTA effects, such as the intrusion of US corporations into the retail sector. After displacing thousands of small stores, Walmart is now Mexico's largest private employer.

NAFTA has turned out to be exactly the opposite of the "win-win" the politicians promised working people on both sides of the border 20 years ago.  Other U.S.-promoted neoliberal economic policies have had similar consequences. Bacon shows, for example, how the breaking of militant unions by a series of U.S.-backed Mexican presidents has made emigration an appealing option for formerly well-paid miners and electricians. When former president Felipe Calderón Hinojoso assaulted the powerful Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) in October 2009 by closing down a government-owned power utility-to cheers from the /Wall Street Journal/-he cynically offered the 44,000 laid-off workers a severance package that included English lessons.

David Bacon has decades of experience as a reporter and photographer covering the struggles of Mexican workers, both here and in Mexico. In striking contrast to the U.S. media, /The Right to Stay Home /lets us hear the thoughts and opinions of the workers themselves-their own explanations of why they would leave their homes and risk their lives crossing mountains and deserts to face the challenges of living in the U.S. as unauthorized immigrants.

Teresa Mina, an immigrant from Veracruz, describes the desperation that motivates some immigrants. "After my children's father abandoned us, I decided to come to the U.S.," she says. "There's just no money to survive. We couldn't continue to live that way. We all felt horrible when I decided to leave."

Not all immigrants share Mina's sense of desperation. David Ceja, the Perote Valley resident who ended up at Smithfield's Tar Heel plant, doesn't talk about survival but about a declining standard of living. After NAFTA, he says, "we couldn't pay for electricity-we'd just use candles at home. But when you see your parents don't have any money, that's when you decide to come, to help them." Other immigrants are simply trying to move their families into a better situation. "In our case, we wanted to provide our child with an education," immigrant Miguel Huerta tells Bacon. "He came to us when he was 17 years old and asked if we were able to send him to college.... But we didn't have the money in Veracruz to send him to college. So I came to the United States."

Ceja is clear on the factors that drive immigration: "The free trade agreement was the cause of our problems... It's the poverty that recruits us. We all had to leave Veracruz because of it. Otherwise, we wouldn't do something so hard."

The workers have equally strong opinions about this country's anti-immigrant measures. "This law is very unjust," Teresa Mina tells Bacon. She lost her job as a janitor in San Francisco after immigration authorities ran a check on workers' documents at her company. "We're doing jobs that are heavy and dirty. We work day and night to help our children have a better life, or just to eat. My work is the only support for my family. Now my children won't have what they need."

"I don't believe it's the people of the United States who are aggressive toward Mexico,' Aldo González, an indigenous community leader in Oaxaca, tells Bacon. The problem is a lack of awareness, he says. "Many policies of the U.S. government don't just affect people who are in the United States. They have very harmful consequences for people all over the world. It's important for people in the United States to realize and be conscious of that."

Bacon points to promising efforts to help U.S. citizens understand these realities. Some North American unions have started developing stronger ties with Mexican unions. Bacon notes that this sort of cross-border organizing was effective in the struggles of the Wobblies during the early 1900s and again in the creation of industrial unions during the 1930s. In a parallel development, some local union leaders have joined with grassroots immigrant rights activists in the Dignity Campaign, which promotes a real "comprehensive immigration reform"-one that addresses the causes of immigration instead of punishing the immigrants.

But these are still relatively small-scale efforts, mostly carried out by immigrants without broad support from other sectors of the population. The organizers face powerful opposition: a political class and a media establishment that do their best to obscure the connections between policy and immigration. Even native-born progressives and the larger pro-immigrant policy organizations have shied away from these issues. Throughout 2013 they expended crucial resources, both cash and the hard work of dedicated activists, in the drive to get an immigration bill through Congress-a bill which does nothing to address the underlying causes of immigration and, according to Bacon and many grassroots activists, only offers limited benefits to some unauthorized immigrants while actively making the situation worse for many others.

U.S. progressives have for the most part ignored the appeal that the "right not to migrate" analysis could have for a broad section of the U.S. population. After all, policies like NAFTA are wildly unpopular here, and it's not at all difficult to explain the connection with immigration; anyone who has tried can testify to how quickly people, especially young people, grasp the argument. Thousands of activists spent 2013 lobbying politicians around a flawed immigration bill. What would have happened if instead they'd been reaching out to the 99 percent with the ideas presented in Bacon's book?