U.S. policies stoked the gang
violence Central American kids are fleeing.
As
the Department of Homeland Security tries to deliver busloads of Central
American children and families to places of temporary safety, shrieking
demonstrators in California, Arizona, and other states are barring the way and
demanding these kids be dumped over the border.
These
outbursts resemble the ugly mentality that, in 1939, prompted our government to
send a ship with more
than 900 German Jews aboard back to Europe where many were
eventually killed by the Nazis.
Like them, many of the Central American
children will be murdered if they are returned home.
That’s
what the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees concluded after interviewing
hundreds of these kids.
“I
was threatened by a gang. In El Salvador, they take young girls, rape them and
throw them in plastic bags,” said 15-year-old Maritza. Like Alfonso, she fled
to the United States.
Our
government has apprehended more than 50,000 children so far. Protestors
objecting to their arrival call them “invaders,” but these kids are refugees.
They travel here on their own out of desperation — to escape murder, rape and
conscription into gangs. And the United States bears much responsibility for
the violence they’re fleeing.
Most
of these kids are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, where the murder
rate is spiking. The U.S. rate is
4.7 murders per 100,000 people. The rates in El Salvador and Guatemala are
nearly 10 times as high, and in Honduras, 20 times — 90.4 killings
per 100,000.
Children
are in the crosshairs: More than a thousand young people were murdered in
Honduras last year, and murders of children under 17 are up 77 percent over
last year. One 13-year-old in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula was slain for
trying to quit a gang. His 7-year-old
brother was tortured and killed after he went to find him.
Why
is this our problem? For some of us, the fact that frightened children have
turned up on our doorstep is sufficient. If that’s not enough, how about
accepting responsibility for the problems our government created?
The gangs ravaging
Central America are the fruits of U.S. deportation policies,
America’s failed Drug War, and instability stoked by decades of U.S. military
intervention in Central America.
Even
after Nicaragua’s “contra” conflict and El Salvador’s civil war simmered down,
our government continued to destabilize the region. In the 1990s and early 2000s,
the U.S. deported thousands of
gang members convicted of various crimes “back” to the Central
American countries where they were born. Those youngsters had imbibed the gang
culture in the United States. But now, Uncle Sam told Honduras, El Salvador and
Guatemala, they’re your problem.
Many
of these young people had come here as toddlers. English was their primary
language, and they had no real ties to their supposed homelands. Their
prospects were dim: With few lawful skills, they unleashed their gang
activities in their new homelands, including the illegal drug trade.
The
war on drugs is a huge failure and hasn’t made a dent in U.S. illicit
drug use. But criminalizing U.S. drug use has meant staggering
profits — in excess of $4 billion each year — for Central American gangs. That
money finances the violence and corruption that overwhelm local governments,
and so the gangs of Central America have metastasized.
And
so, too, children are confronted by killers. “They asked me who was my father,”
16-year-old David told a UN interviewer.
“I told them my father was dead. They told me to say goodbye because I was
going to join my father.”
No
wonder Central American parents are willing to risk sending their children
alone to the United States.
Given
the major role our country played in creating this situation, we can’t tell
those mothers and fathers their kids aren’t our problem. Most of us in this
nation of 318 million people are the descendants of immigrants. We have room
for child refugees who fear for their lives.
Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney who lives in Northern
California. He supplements his work as a Silicon Valley intellectual property
lawyer with pro bono work on behalf of the underrepresented. Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)