The largest immigrant detention facility in Latin America built in Tapachula, Chiapas with U.S. funding under the Southern Border Plan (Photo by Laura Weiss)

In my conversation with a Trump supporter recently, he tried to defend construction of the wall on the Mexican border by claiming that Mexico was in the process of building a wall of its own at the border with Guatemala. While there is absolutely no evidence to support the man’s claim, like much of the “fake news” generated to prop up the Trump presidency, it reflects what many in his “base” would like to believe and see come true.

In fact, as the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) continues to report, the U.S. IS arming and training immigration authorities and security personnel in discouraging and stemming the flow of Central American migrants through Mexico. Nicholas Greven in the Winter 2017 issue of NACLA’s Report tells us, “Increased security and militarization has exacerbated dangers for Central American asylum-seekers traveling through Mexico- and it’s about to get worse” under the Trump administration.

As former head of the U.S. Southern Command (for Central and South America) Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly has long advocated greater militarization of border security and the drug war in Mexico. In his 2017 Senate confirmation hearing prior to becoming head of U.S. Homeland Security, Kelly denounced “fears related to militarizing the counter-illicit trafficking effort” despite the widely acknowledged figure of more than 160,000 people killed in the U.S. financed Mexican “drug war” since 2006.

As for border security, from the U.S. government’s perspective, the child migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border during the summer of 2014 increased the urgency of stopping Central America migrants before they could reach the United States. While no wall is in the works, funding and implementation of the Southern Border Plan by Congress in 2014 has made passage of migrants through the Mexican states bordering Guatemala much more difficult and dangerous. NACLA writer Greven interviewed migrants in shelters near the border who “had been assaulted, extorted, robbed, or all three, as they have been forced to embark on less-traveled, more dangerous migration trails in regions often controlled by organized crime”.

The director of one of the migrant shelters near the Guatemalan border told Greven that “the first enforcement operations deployed under the rubric of the SBP were a series of raids on ‘the Beast,’ the famous cargo train that was the principal mode of transportation for migrants crossing Mexico until 2014”. Another source reported that “starting in 2014 the speed of the train was increased, and metal bars added to of it in order to make it more difficult and dangerous to climb aboard while in transit”. Other results of the U.S. push to reduce the crossing of migrants at the southern Mexican border are increased deportation and a steady increase in Central Americans applying for refugee asylum in Mexico.

By 2016 immigration officers in Mexico had deported twice as many migrants as just three years before. Since the SBP brought about tighter enforcement of the Mexican immigration laws, by 2016 three times as many Central Americans had applied to remain in Mexico. In 2017 the UN Refugee Commission estimated Mexico would receive up to 20,000 asylum applications.

“Trump lights the fires of resistance of the people” reads a mural at La 72 Migrant Shelter in Tenosique, Tabasco (Photo by Nicholas Greven)

Alongside the predictable U.S. emphasis on more gadgetry, weapons and training for Mexican immigration authorities, it is important to take account of what the U.S. policy makers have opted not to do. In sum, they have not defended democratic rule and basic human rights in the “Northern Triangle” of Central America, especially in Honduras recently.

Shelters in Mexico and deportation statistics of U.S. immigration officials confirm that the vast majority of Central Americans fleeing their country are from Honduras. The U.S. supported the Honduran military’s ouster of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. The Obama administration later backed another term for a President who violated the country’s constitution by running in the 2014 election and then turned a blind eye to widespread reports of fraud in that candidate’s election which has resulted in the current turmoil and political instability. To gauge the wisdom and outcomes of U.S. policy in Central America it suffices to consider how many migrants to the U.S. you know or have heard about who hail from Costa Rica.
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N.B.: The above draws on the research of NACLA writers John Lindsay-Poland and Laura Weiss for “Re-arming the Drug War in Mexico and Central America” in the Summer 2017 issue and Nicholas Greven “The Southern Border Plan on the Ground in the Trump Era” in the Winter 2017 issue.

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