U.S. Imperialism Targets Children

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free….

For the 57,000 unaccompanied child migrants caught by the U.S. capitalists’ border patrol since last October, the Statue of Liberty is the world’s biggest liar.
U.S. rulers have powerful reasons to take a hard line against these vulnerable children. First, granting them refugee status could alienate their home countries’ regimes and further open the door to China, the U.S. bosses’ top imperialist rival and Latin America’s second-leading trade partner. In January, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) established a China-CELAC forum — a significant move in a region with historical ties to Taiwan. On May 17, as Agence France Press reported, Honduran Foreign Minister Mireya Aguero said her country was “open” to diplomatic relations with China, “a country of indisputable world importance.” On July 14, the new Honduran president blamed the migrant surge on U.S. neglect of his country in the “war on drugs” (Reuters). He and his regional counterparts appear to be open to the highest bidder.
Second, the child migrants — and the hundreds of thousands who might follow them — create more super-profits for U.S. capitalists back in their home countries. Under the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), companies like Chiquita, Dole, Nike, and Fruit of the Loom can pay Honduran workers $1.40 an hour or less to create exportable goods — and consume U.S. exports — with minimal tariffs. As Jeff Faux, the founder of the Economic Policy Institute (a finance capital think tank), explained:
Ninety-five percent of the children in this latest flood come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — nations that are virtual economic colonies of the United States….Their role in this system of crony capitalism is to provide the cheap labor to cut the sugar cane, haul the coffee and bananas, and slave in sweatshops and the kitchens of tourist resorts (Huffington Post, 6/24/14).
Immigrants Suffer from Capitalists’ Split
Finally, the migrant children pose a political threat to the rulers’ DREAM Act and ENLIST initiative, which to provide the cannon fodder for the next global war (see CHALLENGE, 7/2/14). Finance capital (represented by both liberal Democrats like Obama and mainstream Republicans) is fighting to beat back a challenge by other capitalists led by the Koch Brothers and the Tea Party.
With a minimal stake in multi-national banks and oil companies like ExxonMobil, and a shorter-term profit outlook, the Tea Party wing has little interest in funding grand-scale preparations for World War III.  Their isolationist, anti-interventionist foreign policy is consistent with their virulently racist anti-immigrant rhetoric. Seeing no need for a Dream Act carrot, they resort exclusively to the fascist stick: a fast-tracked expulsion of all undocumented immigrants. In a primary election in June, the previously unknown Tea Partier Dave Brat, an anti-immigration zealot, unseated powerful House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
The migrant children give the Tea Partiers more ammunition, and so the big bosses have decided they must go. On July 11, from a detention center in New Mexico, the first 40 Honduran women and children were sent home.
Bosses’ Child Abuse
As the rest await processing — and almost certain expulsion — by the bosses’ immigration judges, tens of thousands of children are being warehoused at military bases in Texas and California.  According to a coalition of advocacy groups, they have suffered “widespread and systematic” abuse, ranging from a lack of beds, food, and water to verbal, sexual, and physical abuse. Many have been painfully shackled or kept in ice-cold cells. In one case, a seven-year-old boy — who suffered from malnutrition and weighed only 25 pounds — was held by Border Patrol agents without medical treatment. “He was eventually hospitalized and underwent emergency surgery” (The Guardian, 6/11/14).
As the UN High Commissioner for Refugees noted, the detention of children can have a “devastating effect … on their emotional and psychological development, even if they are not separated from their families.”
In response, U.S. President Barack Obama asked Congress for $3.7 billion to fund more drone surveillance, beefed-up border security, additional detention facilities, and more judges to deport the children more efficiently. Emphasizing that he had “no major disagreement” on the issue with hard-line Texas Governor Rick Perry, Obama has deported a record two million-plus and counting. His relentless attacks on immigrants give cover to gutter racists like the mob in Murrieta, California, that recently blocked three busloads of mothers and children bound for processing at a local border patrol station (see article on front page). As the president sheds crocodile tears over this “urgent humanitarian situation,” he is following a long ruling-class history in using anti-immigrant racism to divide the international working class (see box, page 3).  
CIA Coup in Honduras
The traumatized Central American children, like millions of other refugees, have been pushed from their homes by the impoverishment and lethal horrors of U.S. imperialism. Most are from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, a region called a “corridor of violence” by the International Crisis Group (Counterpunch, 7/9/14). Honduras became more dangerous after the 2009 coup against President Manuel Zelaya, who had proposed a 60 percent increase in the minimum wage and the limited distribution of land to small farmers.
Interviewed by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, Zelaya’s minister of culture, said, “I know for a fact that CIA operatives and military personnel of the United States were in direct contact with the conspirators of the coup d’état and aided the conspirators of the coup d’état” (6/01/11). In the run-up to the ouster and kidnapping of Zelaya, two major U.S. companies, Chiquita and Dole, harshly criticized his minimum wage proposal for cutting into corporate profits. A few years earlier, Chiquita was defended by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, then a partner in the Washington law firm Covington and Burling, after the company was accused of hiring “assassination squads” in Colombia (MSNBC, 7/24/09). (Chiquita lost the case and paid a $25 million fine.)
The leader of the Honduran coup was General Romeo Vasquez, “an alumnus of the United States’ School of the Americas … best known for producing Latin American officers who have committed major human rights abuses, including military coups” (Los Angeles Times, 7/23/09). According to the Guardian, one of the top advisors to the Honduran coup government is Lanny Davis, “an influential lobbyist who was a personal lawyer for President Bill Clinton and also campaigned for Hillary [Clinton]” (7/23/09).
Murder Capital of the World
After the coup, the old guard eliminated any remaining threats to the capitalist status quo. Palm oil king and known drug trafficker Miguel Facusse used the Honduran military and police, “which receive generous funding from the United States to fight the war on drugs in the region,” to help his private army murder dozens of small farmer activists (The Nation, 10/21/11). As the bulk of the U.S.-bound cocaine trade shifted from Mexico and Colombia into Honduras, the drug cartels and gang leaders effectively took over the country.
Honduran workers paid the price, and children most of all. Since January 2013, more than 400 children have been murdered in a nation of fewer than eight million people (New York Times, 7/9/14). San Pedro Sula, the country’s second largest city, had a 2011 murder rate of 169 per 100,000 people—the highest in the world (Business Insider, 12/6/13). As Obama scolded Central American parents “not to put their children in harm’s way” by sending them to the U.S., the New York Times reporter painted a horrific picture:
During a recent late-night visit to the San Pedro Sula morgue, more than 60 bodies, all victims of violence, were piled in a heap, each wrapped in a brown plastic bag. While picking bullets out of a 15-year-old boy shot 15 times, technicians discussed how they regularly received corpses of children under 10, and sometimes as young as 2. Last week, in nearby Santa Barbara, an 11-year-old had his throat slit by other children, because he did not pay a 50-cent extortion fee.
Between January and May 2014, more than 2,200 children from San Pedro Sula arrived in the U.S. — far more than from any other Central American city. As Manuel Orozco, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue, noted: “The parents see gang membership around the corner. Once your child is forced to join, the chances of being killed or going to prison is pretty high. Why wait until that happens?” (NYT, 7/9/14).
The situation is not much better in El Savador, where murders of children 17 and under are up 77 percent from a year ago (NYT, 7/12/14). After interviewing 322 children there, a Fulbright fellow named Elizabeth Kennedy explained why so many were fleeing: “[O]ver and over again, I have heard that ‘there is no childhood here’ and that ‘it is a crime to be young in El Salvador today.’” Nearly half the children had at least one gang in their neighborhood, “and about half of these live in a contested gang territory. They report hearing gunshots nightly and are often afraid to walk even two or three blocks from their home” (NYT, 7/11/14).
Obama’s Response: Death Sentence for Kids
A United Nations spokesperson declared that the Central American child migrants should be treated as refugees and not forced to return home: “They are fleeing an environment of transnational organized crime” (npr.com, 7/8/14). Even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to a document obtained by the Pew Research Center, acknowledged that “Salvadoran and Honduran children … come from extremely violent regions where they probably perceive the risk of traveling alone to the U.S. preferable to remaining at home” (NYT, 7/9/14).
In the face of all this evidence, Obama is seeking more “flexibility” to get around a 2008 law against human trafficking passed under George W. Bush. His goal is to deport the children within ten days of their initial screening, rather than waiting months for a full-fledged asylum hearing by a backed-up immigration court system. Obama, the ACLU protested, “is mishandling a humanitarian crisis by proposing an inadequate speedy removal process that only further jeopardizes vulnerable children fleeing violence and persecution in Central America.” In many cases, the children’s expulsion will mean a death sentence.
On Sunday, July 13, more than fifty members of Progressive Labor Party held a rally in Murrieta, where a local anti-racist supported us in standing up against the recent racist attack there (see front page). Our main point: The international working class needs to fight for a world with no borders or fences. Workers have no nation. We have something much better, a communist world to win.