3/10/21
By Camilo Perez-Bustillo
Root Causes and the Right to Migrate
One of the key ways in which the Biden-Harris administration could take innovative, decisive steps to dismantle Trump’s devastating legacy as to immigration and border policy is through its reiterated commitments to address the “root causes” of continuing mass migration from the Mesoamerican region (Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico) and beyond (Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, among other possible examples).
In all of these cases key factors include the devastating, lingering effects of U.S military and political interventions historically and especially since the 1980s. The driving forces of these migration flows include the combined effects of the continuing historical legacies of these interventions, and of current U.S policies related to free trade and economic development, the drug war, climate change, and national security, plus the still unfolding impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes continuing U.S support for authoritarian, corrupt régimes in contexts like Honduras, Guatemala, and Haiti, and it’s ineffective efforts to isolate governments that have been considered hostile in cases like Cuba and Venezuela, as if the “Cold War” had never ended.
The Biden administration’s approach to the issue of “root causes” reflects many of the same limitations and hesitations as its initial steps to restore the right to seek asylum at the U.S-Mexico border and to diminish the detention of migrant families and children. Much of what it is proposing ($4 billion of targeted aid to countries in Central America) has been tried and failed before, under Biden’s leadership as Vice President under Obama, due to corruption and the persistence of top down approaches to development which favor dominant elites. All of this is further exacerbated by the Biden administration’s insistence on deepening cooperation to “manage” migration issues with governments like Mexico’s and those of Guatemala and Honduras.
In practice what this means is the extension (or “externalization”) of the most repressive aspects of U.S migration policy (“prevention through deterrence”) to Mexican territory, all the way to that country’s southern border with Guatemala, and beyond, through regional “containment” efforts. This includes explicit continuing U.S support for Mexico’s persecution and harassment of migrants in transit (including a recent raid by Mexico’s equivalent of the Border Patrol at the entrance to the bridge between Matamoros and Brownsville), and Guatemalan military and police’s violent repression of the most recent migrant caravan on January 19th, with dozens of migrants—many of them women and children—being beaten and gassed for seeking to exercise their right to freedom of movement. Ultimately such policies increase profits and market opportunities for human smugglers and traffickers who benefit from the desperation of migrants seeking protection, safety, and a better life for their families and home communities, and redirect migrant flows towards the most dangerous routes.
The tragic, predictable, and preventable results include the most recent massacre of migrants in Camargo, Tamaulipas, 15 minutes from the U.S border, on January 22d, whose victims included 16 young women and men from one of Guatemala’s most impoverished indigenous communities in the Maya Mam region of San Marcos, at the hands of the combined forces of at least 12 Mexican State Police agents—from a U.S-trained unit—and local drug gangs, in complicity with Mexican border patrol agents. These migrants died dreaming of a better life.
Any meaningful measures to address the “root causes” of such suffering must include full recognition of the right to a dignified life in contexts throughout Latin America and beyond, such as San Marcos, and of the right to migrate wherever structural forms of violence impede and undermine such conditions. We will stand with migrants in defense of these rights, on both sides of the U.S-Mexican border.