https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/opinion/border-immigration-crisis-guatemala.html
Roger Cohen writes in the NY Times :
VADO, N.M. — Rigoberto Pablo ran out of hope. There was no work, no decent schooling for his children. Nothing in the dried-out streams, wilting coffee plants and wafting sewage of his village in the western highlands of Guatemala gave him reason to think his family’s suffering would end. So late last year, he crossed the nearby Mexican border, U.S.A.-bound.
Three months later, in February, I met him in this small New Mexico town, a timid man with a gentle smile. Pablo, age 37, is in American limbo, like hundreds of thousands of migrants. Seated on a sofa in the home of his hosts, he reached down, turned up the hem of his pants and revealed the electronic ankle monitor that Immigration and Customs Enforcement affixed when it released him. A green light confirmed he was being tracked. “If I take it off,” he said, “they’ll come after me.”
His 14-year-old son, Alex, who crossed the border with his father on Nov. 14 and is now in seventh grade at a nearby school, gazed at the device. His dad, he said, is “not a rapist or murderer. He wants to work and I want to study.”
If only it were that simple. Rigoberto and Alex Pablo are part of a vast influx. Already, the 460,294 migrants apprehended at the southern border this year outnumber those for all of 2018. Since October, 1 percent of Guatemala’s total population — more than 160,000 people — have crossed. Many are children. Almost a year after President Trump ended his cruel “zero tolerance” policy that ripped kids from their parents, children, most from Central America, are still pouring in — some 40,000 in April alone, almost 9,000 of them unaccompanied by a parent. Last month Juan de León Gutiérrez, 16 years old, became the third Guatemalan child to die in federal custody in five months. The others were 7 and 8.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement fitted Pablo with an ankle bracelet when it released him. Credit Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Mr. Pablo and his son Alex crossed into the United States from Guatemala together last year. Credit Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
This situation is unconscionable. Americans of all political stripes should be able to agree on that. The United States has to reconcile being a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws.
Yet our immigration policy is mired in shameful congressional paralysis, with the great diversion of Trump’s sea-to-shining-sea wall serving only to fire up his base and fan political differences. His policy zigzags, and his revolving-door appointments and his threats (including the construction of a “contingency” detention center for migrants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba) do nothing to address the root of the immigration crisis: the implosion of Central America.
“This crisis is about children, their safety and the future of our region,” said Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, this month. Nothing he or Mark Morgan, Trump’s nominee to head ICE, does will work until the collapse of the region is addressed.
Guatemala is led by a former TV star (sound familiar?) named Jimmy Morales, who ran in 2015 on a slogan of “Neither corrupt nor a thief.” That is now a joke. He has tried to expel the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, a United Nations-backed group. He wants to grant amnesty to the perpetrators of the 1980s genocide that killed hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, most of them indigenous people like the Pablo family. Meanwhile the state is failing to provide its people with basic food, health care, education and protection from narco-violence.
Trump says he wants to punish Guatemala and its neighbors for not doing enough to stop the migrants. “No money goes there anymore,” he said. But he has winked at Morales’s corruption, emboldening him to trash the rule of law that is Guatemalans’ only defense. State Department officers seethe at America’s abandonment of its values, but political appointees overrule them. Morales keeps Trump happy in various ways. Guatemala moved its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem immediately after the United States did.
A sign calling President Jimmy Morales a “national shame” at a rally in January in Guatemala City. Credit Moises Castillo/Associated Press
No wonder people like Pablo are fleeing. He is planning to petition for asylum, though gaining it will prove difficult; poverty alone isn’t a justification. Nonetheless, the backlog in immigration court means he’ll probably be able to remain for two to three years before his case is heard. In the meantime, he can’t legally work. He’s living with Aurelio and Maria Aranda, a family he met through the El Paso-based Border Network for Human Rights. His son is learning English, at least. Migrants bring children because it improves their chances of getting in, but also out of a fervid desire to give them a future.
Pablo told me about the hunger and fear on the weeklong road to the border. Meager rice and beans offered once a day. Being herded this way and that by coyotes — the smugglers he’d paid $5,000 in borrowed money. Running under a full moon, climbing eight-foot wire fences, passing babies beneath them and children over them, surrendering in the dawn to the United States Border Patrol.
He has no idea what will happen now. “My wife and three other children are back in the village,” Pablo told me. “I miss them. My youngest son was sick. I could not afford the medicine.”
The candor of his gaze was almost unbearable. I decided I had to go to his village of Aldea Las Guacemayas to see for myself what had propelled him northward.
It takes over nine hours to drive the roughly 220 miles from Guatemala City northwest to Pablo’s home. Volcanic mountains soar, dense with vegetation, browned from lack of rain. Neglect is everywhere: Subsiding hillside terraces are barren of cultivation, half-finished houses point rebar at the sky, unkempt shrines commemorate lives tipped over a precipice. Straight-backed indigenous women in bright fabric bestride this wounded landscape.
Guatemala is a beautiful, traumatized country, marked by centuries of white Criollo racism toward the Mayans and other indigenous people. During the early 1980s, military-backed death squads rampaged through entire communities, justifying a scorched-earth policy on the spurious principle that “indigenous villages were the rivers in which the leftist guerrillas swam,” as Edgar Gutiérrez, a former foreign minister, put it to me. Leftist Sandinistas had triumphed in Nicaragua. The United States, determined to prevent this from happening in Guatemala, supported the paramilitary marauders.
Some 200,000 people were killed, including 40,000 who disappeared. This was the Guatemalan genocide, an indelible wound. President Morales has encouraged the slogan “There was no genocide” — a tip of the hat to the military who support him. That Trump has embraced this government, given the past American military support that President Bill Clinton acknowledged as a “mistake,” underscores this administration’s contempt for human rights.
Candelaria Sales Garcia, Pablo’s wife, in the courtyard of their home. Credit Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
Pablo’s wife, Candelaria Sales Garcia, greeted me outside the family’s hillside shack, where a duck pecked at a watermelon rind and a little dog called Dollar slept in the shade. In the kitchen, a wood fire heated beans in blackened pots.
Sales is a woman with a broad smile that can’t quite mask her obvious pain. Her husband and one son are gone to North America. Another son, 19-year-old Valdomero, struggles to find work. Her daughter, Gabriela, 12, sits idle because her schoolteachers are no-shows. Her youngest, an 8-year-old named Leo, has a cheek swollen from an intractable infection.
“I said nothing to my husband although he was leaving me behind here,” she told me. “Because I knew that there is nothing here.”
Nothing. I kept hearing the word. Nothing from the government, nothing to do — no water, no education, no health care, no jobs — “here there is nothing, nothing,” Valdomero declared, sweeping a hand across the sunbaked landscape. The state hardly bothers to collect taxes — they represent a smaller percentage of gross national product than remittances — and does little with them.
Listening to this bright, bilingual young man (he and his family speak the Mam dialect and Spanish), knowing that their brown skins make them invisible to their government, I was reminded of my South African father’s summation of why he could not stand apartheid and left: “The waste.”
Candelaria Sales Garcia with two of her children, Gabriela and Leo Pablo. Credit Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
A photo of Alex Pablo on his mother’s phone Credit Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
Valdomero does the work his father used to do. He unloads concrete building blocks from trucks. He stacks them. For a day of this, he says, he is paid about $8: Hardly enough to keep the family in tortillas. You do this and do this and do this — and then one day, you have to get out.
As dusk fell, the young man suggested we take a walk up the mountain. It has changed since he was a child. The streams where he played and drank are gone. The birds are gone. So are the coffee trees. The mountainous amphitheater, visible from a ridge, is no longer verdant. For three or four years now, it has been dry and hot.
Valdomero Pablo, right, on the mountains near his village. Credit Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
I have never been anywhere that conveyed such a palpable sense of the earth dying. President Trump thinks climate change is a joke. He should come here. He would understand another big migration driver .
The only sign of development is a couple of spindly red-and-white telecommunication towers on the ridges. A basic phone is cheap, and Guatemalans pay as they go: the 21st century’s bread and circuses for the masses.
The next morning, I drove into Mexico with Valdomero. White posts with an official stamp mark the frontier, but there is no control of any kind : no police, no customs or border agents, no barrier, nothing.
A Toyota Hilux roared up from the Mexican side but its driver, seeing a gringo, spun around. “Narcos,” Valdomero said. We continued some 15 miles into Mexico without being asked for a passport or papers.
Coffee, gasoline, corn, chickens and coffee are openly smuggled back and forth on that road. So are people and drugs, mainly cocaine. Only a tiny fraction of the estimated 1,400 tons of cocaine transiting the country annually is interdicted. Congressmen, mayors and police officers have been paid off by the cartels. Morales will soon be term-limited out; for the presidential election next month, his party has put forward a new candidate, Estuardo Galdámez, who recently posed for a photograph with a convicted drug trafficker.
The border between Guatemala and Mexico, near Pablo’s home. Credit Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
Guatemala is sliding backward at an alarming rate. The passage from national trauma toward democratic decency is never easy. Here it began with the peace accords of 1996. For a dozen years now, democracy has been buttressed by the efforts of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or Cicig, established through a treaty between the United Nations and Guatemala.
Cicig is central to Guatemala’s efforts to establish an independent justice system. Morales’s two predecessors were jailed on charges of corruption. The United States last month arrested and charged Mario Estrada, a presidential candidate close to Morales, with conspiracy to import cocaine. Morales himself is being investigated in Guatemala for campaign finance irregularities, and his brother and son face fraud charges. Some of the country’s richest families are being investigated for the illegal financing of Morales’s political party.
Now President Morales has turned on Cicig, ordering its expulsion and unilaterally terminating its mission. He has banned Iván Velásquez, its head and a former Colombian prosecutor, from re-entering the country — all to scarcely a whimper from a Trump administration notoriously hostile to the United Nations and multilateralism.
Guatemala’s Constitutional Court has ruled Morales’s measures illegal. The president has said its judgment means nothing: So much for the rule of law. Cicig continues its work, with Velásquez leading it from abroad, but stripped of any police protection for its personnel, the organization is “in intensive care,” as one American official put it to me. When I visited its headquarters in Guatemala City, a ghostly air prevailed.
American support for Cicig had been critical. In 2013, Stephen Rapp, the State Department’s ambassador at large for war crimes, visited the courtroom where Efraín Ríos Montt, the former dictator, was tried. Montt was convicted through the bravery of survivors and Cicig-backed prosecutors, though the verdict was later vacated on a technicality. The message could not have been clearer: The United States is resolute in its support of an independent judicial process and Guatemala’s nascent rule of law.
No longer. Trump’s America has gone AWOL.
“Cicig has mounted a system of terror where it persecutes those who think differently,” Morales declared grotesquely to the United Nations General Assembly last September. Earlier that month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had tweeted, “We greatly appreciate Guatemala’s efforts in counternarcotics and security.” That was it.
The State Department, through its deputy spokesman but not Pompeo himself, has declared that the United States is “deeply concerned” by Morales’s recent efforts to pass a bill that would grant amnesty to, and free, those convicted of gross human rights violations during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war. But this mild protest was dismissed in Guatemala City as the murmurings of a third-tier bureaucrat — in effect, tacit authorization. The government operates on the basis that it has a green light from the White House.
Many in the State Department are troubled. One officer told me: “It’s a strange and disturbing thing. The arguments we make to political appointees are not heard. We have a State Department that basically stood by while Jimmy Morales dismantled the mechanisms put in place to confront impunity.”
Luis Arreaga, the United States ambassador in Guatemala, is a career diplomat who has tried to stand up for American principles. For this he has been dismissed in local media as an Obama holdover, called the “worst ambassador in the world” and accused of being both on George Soros’s payroll (of course) and an agent of Cuba or Venezuela.
All this is consistent with an elaborate Guatemalan lobbying operation in Washington that has sought to portray Cicig as a bunch of Soros-backed liberal lefties. Several Republicans, including Representative Rick Crawford of Arkansas and Senator Mike Lee of Utah, have proved receptive.
In January, Crawford tweeted in support of the expulsion of Cicig, saying Guatemalans were “entitled to their own sovereignty.” In March, Lee tweeted: “Free and fair elections of a nation’s representatives, chosen by and for the people, is the foundation of republican government. Our friends in Guatemala should be able to exercise this right, free from foreign influence by the U.S. State Department.”
This amounted to a thinly veiled attack on Arreaga, whom Guatemalan media have attempted to portray as backing the presidential candidacy of Thelma Aldana , a tough former attorney general behind several anti-corruption cases. She now faces an arrest warrant for alleged embezzlement as Morales maneuvers desperately to block her candidacy. She has taken refuge in El Salvador.
In line with the nationalist playbook at work in Hungary and Poland, Morales has also gone after the independent judiciary relentlessly. Judges are regularly branded as “terrorists.”
I went to see Gloria Porras, one of the five justices on the Constitutional Court, Guatemala’s last bastion of the rule of law. She is a woman of great poise and dignity, under constant attack.
“Every time we uphold a case of corruption,” she told me, we make it possible for “public money to be spent on the basic problems we have.” The government says that public money is not sufficient for medicine, education and roads. “I believe it is sufficient but not used in the right way,” she said.
Porras and other colleagues have been threatened with removal from the court. This month there was a bomb threat that forced the court’s evacuation. She looked at me with defiant pride.
“They assault my dignity,” she said, “because I have zero tolerance for narcotics trafficking and I am independent in my positions. The traffic of drugs to the United States is, as musicians say, in crescendo. The traffic is tied to corruption. Whatever the risks, whatever the attacks, I will do my work. It is a question of legality. It is also a question of honor.”
“Every time I make the right decision,” she continued, “I contribute to the creation of hope that my country can change.”
Every anti-corruption decision by an independent justice, in other words, fosters a Guatemala where Pablo and his family do not have to leave in desperation, because they might just have a future.
Before I left Rigoberto Pablo’s village, I spoke to his daughter, Gabriela. School had been canceled. She was bored and frustrated. “I want to go to America, I want to study there with my brother,” she said. “And I want to see Papa.”
Gabriela Pablo doing homework in the courtyard of her family’s home. Credit Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
No wall will stop the flow of migrants. No raging about rapists or threats to separate families will stop it. No racism against brown people or fear of demographic change in 21st-century America will stop it. A broken American immigration system certainly won’t stop it. Not as long as Central Americans are desperate.
Trump doesn’t believe in multilateral diplomacy. If he were serious, he would involve Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico in diplomacy on practical steps. He would explore fair and efficient in-country asylum processing. He would stop talking about a wall and slashing foreign aid and start talking about Central American development, a possible Marshall Plan for the region. Mexican migration has declined as Mexican standards of living have risen. There’s a lesson there, if Trump were interested.
He would pursue ways to make the Guatemalan-Mexican border something more than a joke, to combat corruption and narcotics trafficking, to fight impunity and establish the rule of law in Central America, to give Guatemalans some belief in their government, to empower the likes of Gloria Porras, to restore American values, to protect human rights and to match migrants with jobs. And he would declare, “We cannot tolerate the death on our watch of ONE MORE child!”
The unique energy of America’s churn is indivisible from the renewal new immigrants bring.
Pablo in New Mexico. Credit Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
At the same time, if generosity breeds lawlessness, it defeats itself. Somewhere between those truths lie possible compromises on immigration that Republicans and Democrats could agree on — if Trump had not reduced politics to partisan war.
My journey to the border and on to Guatemala left me with a familiar feeling: Trump’s America is betraying itself. What brought Rigoberto Pablo and his child here is an old and honorable idea of the United States: “I came to this country to make money and to improve my life,” he told me when we spoke this month. His ankle bracelet had been removed a few weeks before, and in August he will appear in court to apply for asylum. He is a decent, honest man with a decent, honest family. He deserves better than Jimmy Morales’s lawlessness and Donald Trump’s posturing.
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Desperate people do desperate things! Duh! That’s what one of my colleagues told me my first week on the bench in Arlington. Too bad that Trump and the incompetents who work for him don’t take the time to understand the basics of human migration and conduct themselves lives like human beings and responsible public officials.
America deserves someone better than Donald Trump and his cowardly sycophantic GOP. Both Guatemala and the U.S appear to be “governed” by kakistocracies!
We diminish ourselves as a nation with each day that Trump is in office. But, that won’t stop human migration. It’s going top take folks much smarter, more humane, and more competent that Trump and his toadies to successfully address today’s immigraton issues.
PWS
05-11-19
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