We Remember US Intervention in Central America and Stand with the Caravan!

Meredith Aby-Keirstead spoke at the rally on 11/30/2018 to say “We welcome Honduran refugees!  No troops on the border!” organized by the MN Caravan Solidarity Coalition (which the Anti-War Committee is a part of).  

We are here today for many reasons.

We are here because we are outraged by the human rights crisis growing like a cancer at the US/Mexico border.

We are here because families are separated and children have been teargassed.

We are here because a transgender asylum seeker died in ICE custody after being beaten.

We are here because the US is responsible for the very violence and instability in Central America that these asylum seekers are fleeing.  Washington DC, under both Democrats and Republicans, has blood on its hands.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration funded, armed, and trained brutal right wing governments in Guatemala and El Salvador.  200,000 Guatemalans, 83% of whom were indigenous, died in the civil war that they US fueled. Similarly in El Salvador, more than 75,000 people died and ¼ of the population was displaced.  The US supported and funded right wing paramilitary death squads that terrorized the civilian population in these countries and many of them fled to the US.

When Central Americans came to the US they were not recognized as refugees or as asylees.  Many were pushed into the US underground economy and turned to US gans as a way to survive.

During the Clinton administration the US deported 50,000 immigrants to El Salvador alone for crimes in the U.S.  El Salvador had just survived a more than decade long civil war and the new government did not have the capacity to handle the influx of deportees.  The country was struggling economically and there were many guns from the over decade long US fueled war – which the deported members of MS 13 used to reconstitute their gang and become incredibly powerful.

The gang kidnapping and violence – including widespread sexual assault – that is pushing people out of Central America is a problem that the US exported and that the US caused.  Today in 2018 we are seeing directly the impact of US foreign policy from when I was in middle school.

Similarly next door in Honduras during the Obama administration then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported the military coup against democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya.  The US supported right wing government in Honduras has lead a crack down on progressive social movements and allowed gang activity to escalate out of control. The very people that the government has targeted are people just like us – people that protest and demand justice.

The world is looking at the US Mexico border in disgust because seeking safety is not a crime yet the Trump administration is treating asylees as criminals.

We, in the Anti-War Committee, like to make connections between US interventions.  Please join me in chanting “From Palestine to Mexico, Border Walls Have Got to Go!”

Meredith is a member of the Anti-War Committee and from 1994-1998 was a member of the Twin Cities Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES).  In 1993 she went to El Salvador and Mexico for her study abroad program.