Yves here. We’re a bit heavy on foreign policy today, if nothing else to make up for a bit of neglect. But at this post stresses, US policy on migration at its southern border is very much tied up with our interventions in Central America….admittedly with a lag. As this article mentions, they’ve made things worse. Even rebuilding physical infrastructure won’t change the fundamentals if elite families and gangs still call the shots.
The article focuses on the Costa Rica counterexample. I would love to know the ins and outs of how Costa Rica managed to have solidly left-leaning policies and yet not get the Guatemala-Chile treatment. Was it staying away from government seizure of assets?
By Luis Guillermo Solis, Distinguished Professor, Director of the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center, Florida International University. Originally published at The Conversation
To stem migration from Central America, the Biden administration has a US$4 billion plan to “build security and prosperity” in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador – home to more than 85% of all Central American migrants who arrived in the U.S. over the last three years.
The U.S. seeks to address the “factors pushing people to leave their countries” – namely, violence, crime, chronic unemployment and lack of basic services – in a region of gross public corruption.
The Biden plan, which will be partially funded with money diverted from immigration detention and the border wall, is based on a sound analysis of Central America’s dismal socioeconomic conditions. As a former president of Costa Rica, I can attest to the dire situation facing people in neighboring nations.
As a historian of Central America, I also know money alone cannot build a viable democracy.
Failed Efforts
Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador comprise Central America’s “Northern Triangle” – a poor region with among the world’s highest murder rates.
These countries need education, housing and health systems that work. They need reliable economic structures that can attract foreign investment. And they need inclusive social systems and other crime-prevention strategies that allow people to live without fear.
No such transformation can happen without strong public institutions and politicians committed to the rule of law.
Biden’s aid to Central America comes with strict conditions, requiring the leaders of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to “undertake significant, concrete and verifiable reforms,” including with their own money.
But the U.S. has unsuccessfully tried to make change in Central America for decades. Every American president since the 1960s has launched initiatives there.
During the Cold War, the U.S. aimed to counter the spread of communism in the region, sometimes militarily. More recently U.S. aid has focused principally on strengthening democracy, by investing in everything from the judiciary reform and women’s education to agriculture and small businesses.
The Obama administration also spent millions on initiatives to fight illegal drugs and weaken the street gangs, called “maras,” whose brutal control over urban neighborhoods is one reason migrants say they flee.
Such multibillion-dollar efforts have done little to improve the region’s dysfunctions.
If anything, Central America’s problems have gotten worse. COVID-19 is raging across the region. Two Category 5 hurricanes hit Honduras within two weeks in late 2020, leaving more than 250,000 homeless.
Some experts have been calling for a “mini-Marshall Plan” to stabilize Central America, like the U.S. program that rebuilt Europe after World War II.
The Costa Rica Counterpoint
To imagine a way out of Central America’s problems, the history of Costa Rica – a democratic and stable Central American country– is illustrative.
Costa Rica’s path to success started soon after independence from Spain in 1821.
It developed a coffee economy that tied it early to the developing global capitalist economy. While other Central American countries fought prolonged civil wars, Costa Rica adopted a liberal constitution and invested in public education.
Costa Rican democracy strengthened in the 1940s with a constitutional amendment that established a minimum wage and protected women and children from labor abuses. It also established a national social security system, which today provides health care and pensions to all Costa Ricans.
These reforms triggered civil war. But the war’s end brought about positive transformations. In 1948, Costa Rica abolished its military. No spending in defense allows Costa Rica to invest in human development.
The country also created a credible electoral system to ensure the legitimacy of elected governments.
Over the next seven decades, consecutive Costa Rican governments expanded this welfare state, developing a large urban and rural middle class. Already a trusted U.S. ally when the Cold War began, Costa Rica was able to maintain progressive policies of the sort that, in other countries, the American government viewed as suspiciously “socialist.”
Today, Costa Rica invests nearly 30% of its annual budget in public education, from kindergarten to college. Health care represents around 14.8% of the budget.
The U.S. is not a draw for Costa Ricans. Instead, my country has itself received hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants.
Predatory Elites and Authoritarian Politics
The migrants are fleeing political systems that are broadly repressive and prone to militarism, autocracy and corruption. In large part, that’s because many Central American countries are dominated by small yet powerful economic and political elites, many dating back generations.
These elites benefit from the status quo. In the Northern Triangle, they have repeatedly proven unwilling to promote the structural transformations – from more equitable taxation and educational investment to agrarian reforms – that could end centuries of oppression and deprivation.
During the Cold War, they quashed popular revolutions pursuing such changes, often with U.S. support.
Biden’s Central America plan requires the active participation of this “predatory elite,” in the words of Biden adviser Juan Gonzalez.
Gonzales told NPR in March that the administration would take a “partnership-based approach” in Central America, using both “carrots and sticks” to push powerful people who may not share the U.S.‘s goals to help their own people. The U.S. will also enlist local human rights organizations and pro-democracy groups to aid their cause.
Its too early to know if the expected partnerships with Central American leaders will materialize.
The Salvadoran president recently refused to meet with Biden’s special envoy to the Northern Triangle. Honduras’ president is named in a U.S. criminal investigation into his brother’s alleged drug-smuggling ring.
Still, without the U.S. resources being offered, Central America’s troubles will persist. Money alone won’t solve them – but it is a necessary piece of an enormously complicated puzzle.
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The conclusion is fully consistent with my experience having family among the upper class of the Northern Triangle. The local elites of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador identify far more with the wealthy in the US and Europe than with the poor of their own countries, whom they view as incorrigibly lazy and irresponsible. There’s widespread fatalism about the future and apprehension that political or economic change could threaten their place at the head of the table. As a result the rich live with one foot out the door, ready to flee to Miami or LA on a moment’s notice and having prepared for that day by buying US real estate for themselves and US education for their children. As the author says, it’s hard to see how to bring change to a society when those in charge have already given up on their fellow citizens.
I always tell my Salvadoran friends that over the last fifty years the US has become much more like El Salvador than vice versa. As the educated elites in the US retreat into their gated communities, moralistic politics and general disdain for the uncouth and uninformed lower classes, I wonder whether we can see our own future in Central America.
Best way to stop migration is to help these countries become places where people want to live and can have hope in some good perspectives and this means stop trying to simply exploit their lands, their goods, livelihoods and resources on our behalf, promote true democracy and the rule of law. Stop abusing them.
Amazing we cannot realise how simple ideas work. Of course the same applies to African countries.
As far as I am concerned, countries would do well to avoid U.S. “help”. The best way America can help the South is to adopt an isolationist policy and stay away.
“Amazing we cannot realise how simple ideas work. Of course the same applies to African countries.”
Comrade Ignacio, I would amend your excellent comment as follows: “Amazing we cannot realise how simple ideas work. Of course the same applies to African countries and poor communities in every state of the U.S.A.”
Hidden away in the article is a sentence which perhaps provides the clue to the basic problem:
“Instead, my country has itself received hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants.”
Which is to say that, whilst the case the author is discussing is obviously exceptional, history shows that people will move to where they think there might be a better life, and have always done so. The US was built that way, if memory serves.
Staying in the same region, if you should ever find yourself in French Guyana, for example, you probably want to get out again quickly. It’s one of the most depressing places I’ve ever visited. But surprisingly enough, one of the main problems is immigration. Huge numbers of immigrants come from Surinam and Guyana, because French Guyana (Guyane) is, for all practical purposes, part of France, and conditions, grim as they are, are much better there. Likewise, the Ivory Coast may not strike you as an up-market tourist destination, but its relative (not absolute) prosperity drew large numbers of immigrants: so many, indeed, that concerns about national identity contributed to the crisis that produced the civil war. Immigration is not only (or perhaps even primarily) a first world problem: it seems to be inherent in the human condition.
I haven’t been there but I guess that part of it might be that it is not physically a nice play to live because mosquitoes, humidity and heat. For instance, the wetlands of Belize are hellish. You want to run away from it after the first 5 minutes. The wettable lowlands in Venezuela are very nice places to visit but very hard to live in.
In the other hand Guatemala is such a beautiful and liveable country if it wasn’t fot the political mess.
Last year, when I realized Gavin Newsome was going to be pursuing Herd Immunity with Polite Characteristics I started warning friends and family that there was almost certainly a hidden covid epidemic ongoing among the hispanic populations in our rural counties.
My son reported that his sometimes business partner, an EMT who had just been hired full-time with a neighboring county as part of their Covid response, said there was a literal “Motel 6 full of sick Guatemalans” who had tested positive but so far as he could tell weren’t being included in offical case counts. The ones at the motel were the ones too sick to make tracks out of there.
In the context of Northern California farm labor I have the impression “Guatemalan” often means “Indio” rather than indicating nationality, but whatever their origin, it’s an example of the exploitation and powerlessness of migrants posing a threat to all of us.
Thanks for this, Raymond Sim, April 23, 2021 at 1:31 pm:
Indeed. I’ve long suspected that many who crossed the Central American border without a visa into Gavin Newsom’s Embrace Of All Immigrants™, too late realized it was a horrid trap, given the vast, and increasing impoverishment of California citizens alone. Ditto, countless H1-B workers and other non foreign investor type visas (work visas are only given to potential employees unable to walk across the borders). Investor type visas are a whole other sordid ball of wax, though they do intersect with those investors bringing much poorer relatives for ‘labor assistance.’
If I had the money, I’d donate it to Yasha Levine for a five volume book regarding the Billionaire/DOD (they go hand in hand) infested Empire of California alone, on his Immigrants As A Weapon project, so he could enlist others to share their realities (adding, as ambrit wisely and kindly notes in many comments: “be safe,” Yasha).
gotta run
“I would love to know the ins and outs of how Costa Rica managed to have solidly left-leaning policies and yet not get the Guatemala-Chile treatment.”
Costa Rica does not have a military.
It is true that Costa Rica does not have a military, and it is an exceptionally beautiful country with a great climate, populated by, as far as I could tell at least in the central and western regions, seemingly contented and friendly people, who enjoy universal healthcare of generally very high quality. However, I had the experience of going to a bank in a small town in Costa Rica and it was instructive. There were guards with large automatic weapons stationed both inside and outside. You entered an automatic door into a glass compartment, in which you were held for at least a minute and I’m sure photographed and maybe scanned, before being released into the bank itself to join a long line of people, heavily guarded, waiting to see tellers in fortified cages. This was in 2006. So, no military does not mean no armed presence…
Hopefully, the bank guards won’t be in a position to stage a coup in collaboration with the CIA. I hope they didn’t receive their training from the School of the Americas.
The chance Biden /his people will accomplish anything lasting or positive in these countries is zero, is it not?
Key paragraph:
“ These elites benefit from the status quo. In the Northern Triangle, they have repeatedly proven unwilling to promote the structural transformations – from more equitable taxation and educational investment to agrarian reforms – that could end centuries of oppression and deprivation.”
They will do anything but deal with agrarian reform.
(Land tax is basically non-existent, and most of the best lands are owned in huge farms of caballerías owned by the ruling class).
Costa Rica has had some success with moderate agrarian reform programs since the 1960’s
The article does not discuss the impacts of the CAFTA free trade agreement with the US that accelerated the destruction of local agriculture. CAFTA also imposed IP provisions, benefits for Pharma, free trade in services, removed barriers for investment and capital flows and ISDS. There are also impacts from the imports from east Asia. All were a gut punch in the past couple decades, on top of the US military interventions and insatiable appetite for drugs in the US. All these things are a huge push for immigration.
If all these drugs were legalized, America could make and produce all its own addictive drugs. It is not the insatiable appetite for the drugs which causes the problems in Mexico and Central America and elsewhere. It is the laws against the drugs which keep the prices high so that drug cartels can make the amounts of money needed for International Money-Laundry-Center Banks to make the money from laundering drug money to which they have become accustomed.
Just legalize all the illegal drugs and the “drug cartels” would lose that financial support. And the Drug Money Laundry Banks would lose their money-laundering profits.
In a way, the article is too kind. The U S of A has no interest in improving the situation in Honduras (or El Salvador). Also worth mentioning is the absence of Nicaragua from this article: Now what is especially the difference? Nicaragua wants no U.S. help.
In the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, the author doesn’t mince words about who caused problems:
https://harpers.org/archive/2021/05/narco-in-chief-how-america-enables-corruption-in-honduras/
And I am reminded from some recent postings here that the U S of A was involved in convicting Lula and Roussef in Brazil.
Brazil! The suffering of Honduras matters even less to the U.S. foreign policy “experts.”
When the rich rancher Zelaya sought to become ” the FDR” of Honduras, Obama was prepared to leave it alone and let that happen.
It was entirely Hillary Clinton who exerted herself to harangue and brain-beatdown Obama into submitting to her twisted evil desire to overthrow the Zelaya government and install the drug cartel government of her evil choosing. So lets give Hillary Clinton the credit she personally and especially deserves for causing the situation in Honduras today.
This is just one of the many evil acts for which Clinton’s millions of Pink Pussy Hat worshippers, like Riverdaughter of The Confluence blog, worship Hillary Clinton as their own personal goddess upon earth.
No mention at all of how the US overthrew democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz, and then helped the dictatorship they installed rape, torture, and murder half a million Guatemalans?
When I was in Guatemala the Guatemalans I talked to told me about a former president they had who was not corrupt and was improving peoples lives – but because he was passing laws that were raising taxes on US corporations in the country the US arrested him on money laundering charges and put him in prison.
It appears that the problems facing these nations would improve under more populist rule. The author argues that the current strife of the people is at least in part due to U.S. interventions that have assisted the elite oligarchs to defeat populist rebellions over and over again, turning the people’s zeal for reform into an imperative to flee. Clearly, it is past time to stop intervening. Perhaps if the U.S. would let both the governments and potential revolutionaries know that it would not interfere in a popular uprising, reform would suddenly be possible. Perhaps it is time for the elite oligarchs to feel a bit of fear.
Also, under the surface here are the land and labor interest of U.S. corporations and the insane militancy of the drug war. There is no winning the drug war, and certainly no winning it on foreign soil, so it is time to stop training their military police to be torturing and killing machines. It is creating a refugee problem.
Oh, frack me. This article severely understates the American responsibility for the horror that is Central America.
Lets start with William Walker in the 1850s to turning Honduras into to the original banana republic by using mercenaries, overthrowing every honest or reformist government in the 20th century using mercenaries, marines, special forces, or the CIA, funding death squads, turning much of El Salvador and Guatemala military into a massive death squad, the Mayan Genocide, and the School of the Americas.
All this under the rubric of any reforms, enforcing rule of law, fighting poverty, or especially land reform was actually the Dreaded, Godless Communism to justify murder, bribery, and sometimes outright military invasion to aid the local oligarchies and American business elites.
And I am juuust warming up. Over 160 years of blood and excrement as the United States’ government was still doing this at least into the Obama Administration. I will be taking a Himalaya pile of salt with any statements about new efforts to ostensibly “help” those poor, sorry Central Americans. These latest efforts are almost certain to be more of same.
Yes. As I was reading the article, I kept thinking, “it’s not Central America that needs regime change, it’s the US”.
There was Jack Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in the early 1960s that was supposed to remedy all of this. But an assassination and the Vietnam War intervened. The money went to the connected.
The USA has been at war uninterrupted since Desert Storm – thirty years ago – intentionally.
This article states:
“These countries need education, housing and health systems that work. They need reliable economic structures that can attract foreign investment. And they need inclusive social systems and other crime-prevention strategies that allow people to live without fear.”
“No such transformation can happen without strong public institutions and politicians committed to the rule of law.”
This is just as applicable to the USA as Central America. Oliver Stone’s 1986 movie “Salvador” is the best movie I’ve seen of hopping in a convertible in San Francisco and driving south into a war zone. Nothing has changed. The rich get richer off of chaos and the rest of mankind survives the best they can. Even if it means enriching coyotes who drop their children off the border wall into the USA. Migration and exploitation will only get worse. Unrest will spread throughout the Americas unless the forever wars stop, public health is restored, and the economic depression ended.
Had it in mind from climate change studies that the northern triangle of Central America will see increasing droughts, and expected increased out migration as a result. This is greatly aggravated by social and political problems. I assume that Costa Rica, which has done such an amazing job of protecting its ecosystems, will eventually be subject to encroachments from its neighbors who do have military forces and will also have rapidly degrading ecosystems. If things get bad.
Don’t know if the US will police the area or not, if the capability will still exist at that point. All down the road, but not as far away as I used to think.
The military and political attacks have continued literally for centuries, since the Monroe doctrine told the Old World that our southern neighbors were no longer their colonies, they were ours. (The U.S. is responsible for 41 changes of government south of its borders between 1798 and 1994).
Oddly, no mention of the effect of (bipartisan!) NAFTA on Mexico in the article. NAFTA lifted capital controls, so the U.S. had to come up with a $20 billion loan to bail out both Mexican and U.S. banks doing business in Mexico whose solvency was impaired by capital flight.
One might also guess that sending a bunch of subsidized Iowa corn to Mexico would at least impair Mexican corn farmers income–and sure enough the treaty compensated the large farmers.
Corn is arguably the most important food crop in the world, and the little subsistence corn farmers were only keeping the disease-resistance and diversity of the corn genome alive with the varieties they grew…but they weren’t making any money for Monsanto!
…So Mexican real, median income declined 34% in the wake of NAFTA, a figure not seen since the Great Depression in the U.S.
Imagine the depression-era Okies arriving in California to do menial jobs, then get caged and separated from their families, and finally deported back to Oklahoma where they could live miserable lives if they didn’t starve to death.
That’s U.S. policy: persecute the immigrants it creates…(and don’t forget! Be self-righteous about it!)
Who could even imagine making up such a bizarre, cruel scenario?
There are still some Mexican farmers growing the Old Corns. I do not know if there is a rising cultural movement of culinary nationalism on the part of middle-class-and-above Mexicans to buy and eat corn foods made specifically with the Old Corns. If there were, that would help keep a few Mexican farmers farming in Mexico and preserving the Old Corns till the arrival of better days.
I have read that it is even possible to buy small amounts of the Old Corn in America, if you know where to go. There is a small Los Angeles based company called Masienda which has partnerships with some particular individual farmers in Mexico to buy from them the Old Corn varieties which they grow and re-sell small retail amounts of the Old Corns to culinarily interested American customers. Here is a link to their homepage.
https://masienda.com/
And here is their ” shop Masienda” listings of what they will sell you and send you, including some varieties of the Old Corns.
https://masienda.com/shop/
And here is just one example of what I mean by ” the Old Corns” which they sell.
https://masienda.com/shop/heirloom-xocoyul-rosado/
Every time an interested American buys some of this corn, some clean-genes FrankenFree Shinola Corn reaches America and some money reaches a Mexican farmer and helps him keep standing on the land.
Nothing changes the fact that it is better for your neighbors to have their own homes. There is what is practical and what is not. It is the criminals who do not want to see the status quo changed either. Liberal America embodied in Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton has had every opportunity to help Haitians. If what has been done in Haiti by the US and the UN is all the aid institutions know how to do, we are not given much reason to have hopes the Biden Administration will be successful in reducing reasons for flight from nations poor and corrupt.
The goal is to fix nations whose people flee to the US. The nation Costa Rica is mentioned as being itself a destination. Further South there is Uruguay. What led to Uruguay becoming as it has become is probably most illustrative. But I don’t work for the White House, USAID, the CIA or the State Department. Nor am I an ambassador from the US to one of these nations. It is common that the US Professional Foreign Service Officers have clearly told our executive branch the truth of what can realistically be expected from decisions about how to treat neighbors to the South of the US.
When FDR was told that to support Zionism in Palestine would result in conflict with strategic partners there for the foreseeable future he was said to have left the issue to Elenor and the UN and died 3 weeks later.
For the US to become or keep hold of its position as the most powerful empire and world government it has done what it could to prevent the UN from doing jobs it was intended to do. It is so bad now that we may have to invent an entirely new and different UN more perfectly engineered to moderate crime, corruption & financial system failures of nations with so few resources in the hands of honest officials committed to goals we recognize as civilization.
My offer has been to build on the precedents airports represent. Build out from where things go well. The Frankfurt based airport management company Fraport is well positioned now to facilitate working this way.
Thank you for attempting to understand my views. If you know of an editor who would hire me to write in an arena where I might be taken more to heart, I believe Yves can find me.
Thanks for this Yves – and to former President Solis as well. Would love to see the deeper analysis for Costa Rica versus the Northern Triangle. Especially focused on land policy reforms – or the lack of them. This takes the discussion into Thomas Piketty’s home turf, especially his latest book, “Capital and Ideology,” how hard it has been to achieve wealth and property reforms even in the Western democracies.
Our contemporary American discussion leaves out so much that is relevant: American business needs and interests in the status quo, and the histories of the countries that are driving the immigrants out.
I think Mexico needs to be part of the discussion.
While the social and criminal concerns are very significant, the farmers in part of that area are still in a multi-year drought. They have nothing to eat and no place to work. They migrate to eat.
Thank you all for the comments, especially from those familiar with the History of US relations in the Southern Hemisphere.