Waking Up to the U.S. Role in Central America's Crisis | Commentary
Waking Up to the U.S. Role in Central America's Crisis | Commentary
By Ismael Moreno and Kathleen Erickson
Dec. 3, 2014, 5 a.m.
What does a military training school in Georgia have to do with our immigration crisis — in particular the flood of young people, mothers and infants who crossed our southwest border into the United States from Central America over the summer? And why does Congress continue to fund such an institution?
About 100 miles outside of Atlanta sits the School of the Americas (since 2001 called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), a Pentagon-run training ground for Latin American military and law enforcement personnel. Despite the name change, it is essentially the same School of the Americas that trained the uniformed Salvadoran military officials who killed six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in their shared residence on a university campus in San Salvador 25 years ago this month. Although that event opened the eyes of many around the hemisphere to the dangers created by U.S. support for undemocratic military governments, this dark legacy continues.
Americans were shocked over the summer by the arrival of thousands of mothers with infants, and even unaccompanied children, traveling hundreds of dangerous miles from their home countries to the U.S. border. Many began asking why this was happening, completely unaware of the violence in Mexico and Central America led by corrupt military officers and law enforcement officials who graduated from the School of the Americas. Most of the immigrants came from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala by way of Mexico. Each country has a long history of violence, exploitation by businesses that provide us with goods and contribute to poverty, corruption and military dominance. U.S. consumers have benefited from this status quo for far too long.
In 2009, the Honduran army led by Gen. Romeo Orlando Vasquez Velasquez, twice-trained at the School of the Americas, overthrew the elected government of Honduras in a coup that has had disastrous consequences. While the coup leaders created a militarized state that was condemned by most other nations, the U.S. government turned a blind eye and contributed to the devastation, continuing to provide training and aid to the Honduran dictatorship and the rigged elections that followed.
More:
http://www.rollcall.com/news/waking_up_to_the_us_role_in_central_americas_crisis_commentary-238332-1.html
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