Mes: julio 2017

The legacies of that conflict persist amidst the current wave of re-militarization in Guatemala. Even as the Trump administration threatens to cut different types of economic assistance, the bolstering of police and military to Central America is poised not only to continue, but to drastically increase under his regime, if the $54 billion USD proposed increase to the Pentagon’s already bloated 2018 budget is any indication. Under Trump, in Guatemala, it just might be that the past meets the present with even more force. And the Guatemalan past, as the presence of the Kaibil commander shows, still haunts everyday life. Indeed, the very military base in Zacapa where the Chorti border task force finished its trial operation was one of those places where many human rights violations committed by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan military happened. Former Guatemalan president Manuel Arana Osorio was even dubbed the “Butcher of Zacapa” for running brutal counterinsurgency operations in the region in the late 1960s, killing as many as 15,000 people.

So, it really shouldn’t have been a surprise that during the training that there was a U.S. military advisor—a major—on base, in a year-long detail to support the Chorti border patrol. Only now classic counterinsurgency has a new twenty-first century form: border militarization. As DHS Secretary John Kelly offered to the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee in February 2017, the U.S. has a “great opportunity in Central America to capitalize on the region’s growing political will to combat criminal networks and control hemispheric migration.” Kelly contended that “leaders in many of our partner nations recognize the magnitude of the tasks ahead and are prepared to address them, but they need our support. As we learned in Colombia, sustained engagement by the United States can make a real and lasting difference.”

Back in Zacapa, after they finish up their checkpoint exercise, the soldiers and police of the Chorti task force talk about how they are separated from their families for weeks at a time to do the work of guarding Guatemala’s border from, according to their mission, the smuggling of narcotics and people heading north, most likely to the United States. Considering that more than 60 percent of the Guatemalan population live below the poverty line, there is no doubt that some of these agents have attempted to go north themselves. According to 2013 numbers, close to one million Guatemalans live in the United States.

In fact, the uniformed U.S. major, who made it quite clear right from the start that he wasn’t talking on behalf of the Embassy nor the military, indicated that he himself was from the U.S.-Mexico border region— more precisely, the city of Brownsville, Texas. On that military base, deep in Guatemala, he explained that his family had to make a choice in the late 1980s when the Reagan administration began to fortify the border: whether to stay in Mexico or move to the United States. He told of how the border had crossed his family: they moved to the United States from Mexico, and shortly thereafter, he joined the U.S. Army. Even as he did his job supporting the Chorti border force, with the blessing of DHS secretary John Kelly, he knew that every time his force drew a militarized boundary they were dividing families, friends, and entire communities.

As the major talked on that hot day at the Zacapa base, we could see the parched mountains surrounding where the Chorti force enacted their border exercise. Not only were we in the middle of the extending U.S. border regime, we were in the middle of the Central American dry corridor that extends through El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. According to climate scientist Chris Castro, the northern triangle of Central America is “ground zero” in Latin America for ecological upheavals in a changing and destabilizing climate. The thirsty mountains around us were one indication of a drought that was pushing parts of Guatemala into famine. In 2015, hundreds of thousands of people across Central America were pushed to the brink when the annual rains never arrived and harvests failed. Add to the mix the destructive superstorms and hurricanes that have battered the region and the northern triangle region represents a “catastrophic convergence,” to use the term of sociologist Christian Parenti, of political, economic, and ecological issues—all of which are compounding one another. At a global level, the United Nations predicts that by 2050, 250 million people will be displaced because of ecological disasters due to climate change.

The Trump administration will not only be deepening the violence and economic despair that propels people north from places like Guatemala through its border policies; through its embrace of climate change denialism and policies that will only increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, it will also be aiding a regional ecological crisis in Central America. And instead of stopping migration, such policies are likely to accelerate the forced displacement of possibly millions.

Where is the Wall?

As founder of the Global Detention Project Michael Flynn (not the Trump administration’s former national security advisor) described in a 2003 article published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and entitled “Donde está la frontera?” (Where is the Border?), the outward expansion of the U.S. border enforcement apparatus gives new meaning to the concept of a “wall.” According to Flynn, a wall is much more than a physical barrier. “U.S. border control efforts,” he argued, “have undergone a dramatic metamorphosis in recent years as the United States has attempted to implement practices aimed at stopping migrants long before they reach U.S. shores.”

These efforts manifest themselves not only in Guatemala, of course. They are present in many countries around the world. Agents from the special forces BORTAC unit have, according to CBP, “global response capability.” Agents from the unit have travelled to countries like Peru, Panama, Belize, Mexico, Honduras, and Ecuador to first provide a “diagnosis” of those countries’ respective borders, and then offer a “prescription” of training and resources to solve border “woes.” BORTAC has done this not only throughout Latin America, but also in other parts of the globe, including Iraq, where it trained border police and its tactical unit from 2006 to 2011.

As part of its own effort to spread “hard” borders across the globe, the U.S. State Department has also run training programs in countries that include Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Turkey. These efforts are part of an initiative known as the Export Control & Related Border Security Program (EXBS). In addition to conducting trainings, EXBS has provided, as the State Department gushes, “state-of-the-art detection equipment and equipment training” to U.S. allies.

Since 2003, CBP has opened offices abroad, starting in Mexico City, Brussels, and Ottawa. Presently, there are 21 such CBP outposts in cities ranging from Panama City to Johannesburg to Cairo. Homeland Security has even set up “preclearance” sites in the airports of Shannon, Ireland and Vancouver, Canada. It was in this last city where, this past November, U.S. agents blocked Canadian journalist Ed Ou from boarding a flight headed to North Dakota. Ou was on his way to cover the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) stand-off at Standing Rock when CBP detained him for more than seven hours after he declined to give border agents the password to his phone. What Ou experienced in Canada was one small manifestation of an expensive and expansive regime of control and exclusion that will cost U.S. taxpayers approximately $20 billion USD in 2017, if you combine the budgets of both CBP and ICE. This constitutes a mammoth increase of approximately $1.5 billion USD over the annual budgets of the early 1990s.

It is on this already gargantuan budget that the Trump administration seeks to bestow even more largesse. According to the proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2018, Trump has a little over $2.5 billion USD designated for “tactical infrastructure” and other surveillance technology on the border, including money to “plan, design and begin building the wall.” This would amount to just a fraction of the total cost to construct what he promised during his campaign. Regardless, the physical wall that Trump envisions in the U.S.- Mexico borderlands is and should be a concern. As Verlon Jose, tribal chairman for the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose reservation in southern Arizona borders Mexico, declared in November 2016: “Over my dead body will a wall be built.” This sentiment resonates with many border residents along the 2,000-mile divide, who have voiced opposition.

While the U.S.-Mexico border wall may be the most xenophobic of symbols, it is just a small part of a policing apparatus that is spreading far beyond formal U.S. borders on waves of ever-increasing budgets for U.S. border and immigration control. As the pursuit of what is now called, in official parlance, “homeland security” has shown time and time again, such monies exact high human costs—from migrant deaths and divided families to myriad civil and human rights violations, and ecological degradation. It is this larger “prize” upon which we must focus, and that we must resist and ultimately eradicate.

Additional author information:

Todd Miller
Todd Miller is a journalist who lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security (City Lights Books, 2014) and the forthcoming Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (City Lights, 2017).

Joseph Nevins
Joseph Nevins teaches geography at Vassar College. Among his books are Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books, 2008), and Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War on “Illegals” and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge, 2010).

In: tandfonline.com