Speak Out for Immigrant Rights and Against US Imperialism
Speech by Autumn Lake, member of the Anti-War Committee, at Solidarity Without Borders for Migrants & Asylum Seekers on March 23, 2019
The Trump administration and the politicians and pundits that align with it have been trying to convince people living in the United States that there is an immigration crisis. They’ve been trying to convince us that this is a crisis of criminals, drugs, and national security.
We in the people’s progressive movements understand that this is an outright lie. Absolutely, there is a crisis. But it is not a crisis of national security. The asylum seekers from Honduras represent a crisis of human need, of innocent people seeking safety and stability, and of families fleeing violence and political repression.
Just as heinous as these lies put forward by the right is their omission of one truth; that the conditions that refugees are fleeing were created or intensified by United States imperialism – not mere militarism, but active measures to shape the political and economic infrastructure of its victim nations in service of big business in the United States.
In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that the United States had the right to exercise an “international police power” in Latin America.
Only 7 years later, in 1911, the United States intervened in Honduras. Honduran President Miguel Davila was ousted in a US-aided coup that restored the previously deposed Manuel Bonilla to power. Not only was this coup aided by American entrepreneurs, the policies implemented by the US-backed President granted U.S. corporate interests access to Honduran natural resources and over million acres of Honduran land within a few years. This exploitative relationship that put Honduran resources into the hands of US capitalists was frequently insured through the deployment of US military forces.
Anyone who has a passing familiarity with Latin American history will notice that this story sounds strangely familiar. That isn’t a coincidence.
In 1909, the United States ousted Nicaraguan President Jose Santos Zelaya, who had proposed that American mining and fruit companies begin the “heinous” task of paying taxes and installed a US-friendly president in his place. In 1920, the US sent armed forces to Guatemala to ensure that their new president was friendly to U.S. corporate interests. In that same decade, oil was discovered in Venezuela, leading the infamous Standard Oil to descend upon the nation and nearly monopolize the nation’s exports.
These events marked only the beginnings of US interference in Latin America, and US imperialism has ravaged the region ever since.
Standing out among the actions that the United States has taken in Latin America are its responses to people’s democratic movements in the region. Any time that the people of a nation decided to chart their own destiny, have control over their economic and political processes, and ensure that working people had their basic needs met, the United States has used any means available to crush their movements. The simple fact is that freedom, democracy, and fairness in a Latin American country causes a reduction in profits and power for the US’s ruling class something that the US cannot allow.
We’ve seen this repeatedly since Roosevelt’s 1904 declaration. 1973: The CIA aids Augusto Pinochet in overthrowing the democratically elected Salvador Allende, causing the country to shift from a people’s democratic government that promised healthcare and education to a brutal and repressive military dictatorship. 1980-1992: The US gives military assistance to the military dictatorship in El Salvador in their efforts to crush the people’s democratic movement in the country; the US-backed government forces were responsible for 70,000 civilian deaths throughout the civil war.
Given this history of bloodshed and repression, it comes as no surprise that the crisis facing refugees from Honduras was also caused by US imperialism. The United States has taken every measure to ensure that Honduras remains subservient to US corporate interests and maintains an anti-worker neoliberal economic model.
Finally, in 2006 the people of Honduras were able to elect Manuel Zelaya as President. He pursued progressive polices that benefitted the working and marginalized peoples of Honduras, including increasing the minimum wage and standing with ALBA against the US’s free trade agenda in the region. This election represented the fact that the people of Honduras were charting their own path and determining their own destiny.
We’ve established that this is anathema to US interests. As surely as the will of the people was crushed with the aid the US in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Chile, so too did this fate befall Honduras.
In 2009, President Zelaya was exiled in a military coup led by Honduran General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez. The Honduran forces and Colombian mercenaries that were involved in the coup received training at the School of the Americas here in the US – the same training in counterinsurgency and repressive military tactics that had been given to repressive forces across Latin America. As always, the US’s involvement and enabling of these horrific events was justified by the false claim that the US sought to “restore democracy,” with Hillary Clinton’s state department leading the charge in enabling this coup.
The conditions that our brothers and sisters in the caravan have fled – the violence, the poverty, the use of rape as a means of political repression – were caused directly by US imperialism. The US ruined the lives of ordinary Hondurans, and now denies them the right to seek safety and security within our borders.
The focal point of imperialist intervention in Latin America has shifted since the 2009 coup in Honduras. The United States has been attempting to undermine the people’s democratic revolution in Venezuela since it took power in 1998 and has intensified this effort in recent months, with Trump’s recognition of the reactionary Juan Guaido as the interim ‘president’ of Venezuela, the imposition of additional economic sanctions, material support for the political opposition, and a coordinated attack that left the country without electrical power for nearly a week.
Imperialist intervention of this magnitude is not just limited to Latin America. This fate is familiar to all countries that found themselves the victim of US foreign policy. It’s familiar to Somalia. It’s familiar to Haiti. It’s familiar to Libya. Cuba. The Philippines. Korea. Iraq.
We’ve demonstrated that not only does the US not care for people’s democracies, it actively aids repressive forces in their efforts to crush indigenous people and progressive movements. No regime on Earth embodies this more than the Israeli apartheid regime. Israel receives more US military aid than any other country – aid which is used to brutally repress, disenfranchise, and kill the Palestinian people. Next Saturday, March 30th, is Land Day, the day of commemoration of an act of collective Palestinian national resistance that was met with the full force of the Israeli repressive apparatus. We should all remember that our cause of anti-imperialism extends to the struggle of the Palestinian people.
The movement for the rights of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers is, by necessity, a struggle against imperialism. I ask you all today to continue to stand in solidarity with victims of imperialism worldwide. The fate that befell our migrant brothers and sisters from Honduras is a constant threat to people all over the world.
Jose Maria Sison, a leader in the democratic people’s movement in the Philippines, stated in an interview that “The U.S. was using all kinds of military force in order to beat the Vietnamese people, but they could not succeed because the self-reliant struggle of the Vietnamese people was supported and augmented by the anti-imperialist and democratic mass movement in the U.S.”
The fight doesn’t end here today. We have a responsibility to keep going out in the streets and build the immigrants’ rights and anti-imperialist movements!
U.S. out of Latin America!
No war on Venezuela!
Free Palestine!
Hands off Honduras!