The Root Cause of Latin American Immigration: 5 Centuries of Pillage

Today’s newsletter will be unusually long. These are unusual times. I’d like to use my voice to offer a perspective on Latin American immigration that few politicians or media channels will touch.

I Will Not Repeat Any Typical Immigration Talking Points

Today I will not talk about the real challenges mass immigration brings and who bears those challenges. I will not debate whose jobs are or are not being taken, whose communities do and do not suffer. I will not talk about the inhumanity of Trumpian policies. I will not get into who looks to profit off of this (private prison companies) or who’s currently investing in those companies (Republican members of Congress.) I will not get into how the terror has been bipartisan (it has). I will not break down the massive amounts of public money (our money!) Trump wants to spend to detain and deport millions.

All of this is being covered and debated elsewhere. The question I want to address is…

Why Have Millions of People Fled Their Homes in The First Place?

Part of my political philosophy is what I call, “Root Cause Politics.”

Until we understand the root causes, any policy is a band-aid. No amount of prisons, ICE agents, border patrol, walls, and drones will stop it because none of these address why Latin Americans flee their homes.

I’ve traveled to five countries in Latin America. Since I graduated high school, I’ve spent three extended stints in my dad’s home country, El Salvador. ~1.4 million native Salvadorans live in the U.S. and ~6.5 million live in El Salvador, making it an ideal case study of Latin American immigration and what led to it.

I was 8 years old the first time I went. I remember when I arrived at the beach, where my uncle had a beach house with an orange Pacific sunset view, a pool, and a staff of five handing us ceviche and preparing dinner.

I remember I stepped out of the open home and onto the beach. I saw a boy alone with a soccer ball. He had the same short brown hair as me, the same dark eyes. He was more tan. We could have passed for brothers. I saw him kick the soccer ball up and it landed on his ankle bone. He grimaced in pain and even fell down onto the sand, rolling gracefully onto his back.

I came over. I saw his foot was red. I hoped it was just a blister. Looking back, I fear it was worse. I didn’t speak Spanish. I gave a thumbs up and looked at him as if to say, “Are you okay?” He lightly nodded his head and looked away from me. I got the sense that he was taught not to talk to people like me, with new flip flops and an unstained t-shirt even if we wore our swim trunks in the same baggy style.

What was the difference between us? Jacob Rilis wrote, “One half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” This was my first glimpse of it in my otherwise sheltered life. I wondered why my family got waited on while other young boys went with their dads and a machete to practice opening coconuts. Later they would sell them on the side of the road near beach towns, hoping to scrape a living by.

“How easily could that have been me?” I wondered.

I went to El Salvador again as a teenager. Now I started to ask questions. Why did my grandpa live in a three-bedroom apartment and have a maid come to cook us breakfast, do the laundry, and make our beds? Why was he able to move to the United States with his family and live a comfortable, upper-middle-class life? How come we were able to immigrate “the right way” and avoid the bloody Salvadoran Civil War?

Meanwhile, I learned about the Latin Americans who risked their lives to ride freight trains through Mexico and cross the desert on foot to the U.S.—Mexico border. From what I saw in El Salvador, I understood why.

While my grandfather’s apartment was up on a hill with cool nights and a 24/7 doorman, just a few hundred feet down the slope, I saw homes with sheet metals for a roof and palm leaves around the gaps to block the rain. Maybe they had running water and maybe a cement floor. Maybe.

Already, Donald Trump was extolling how people like this were destroying America. Really? These ladies who I bought plantains from on the street?

By now I had learned Spanish, and I asked my grandpa why he thought there was so much poverty in El Salvador. He worked at the United Nations in New York during the Salvador Civil War. “Recursos, recursos, y recursos. El país no tiene recursos,” he told me. (The country has no resources.)

The next day, we were in the supermarket in El Salvador. He picked up a pineapple. “Even this,” he told me, “comes from Costa Rica. We have the same climate for pineapples, but we don’t grow them.”

Today, El Salvador’s minimum wage is $365, yet most goods get imported from other countries. Even pineapples cost the same or more as in the U.S.

Yet, I saw the country’s gorgeous volcanoes, lush forests, and ample fruit trees, from mangos to avocados, that sprouted in backyards. It was no desert. Why doesn’t Latin America reap the wealth it has underneath its feet? Why instead do millions flee to the United States for a better life?

That is when I started to learn more about the continent’s history. Eduardo Galeano’s 1971 classic, Open Veins of Latin American: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent is the best overview of this I’ve come across. I will draw on Galeano.

The 5-Step Imperial Plan

Step 1: Steal The Land

Latin America has metals ranging from gold to tin to copper, some of the world’s largest oil reserves, and fertile lands for crops like coffee and sugarcane. The continent has an abundance of natural wealth.

To get access to the raw materials, foreign powers first had to control the land. In the time of the Spanish and Portuguese, guns, germs, and steel allowed Europeans to bring down indigenous empires, as Jared Diamond informs us in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same title.

By stealing the land, they took away the people’s power to live how they wanted and eat what they could grow.

Step 2: Destroy The Land

Now that they had taken away their land, the next step to creating a cycle of dependence was to destroy it.

“The mines required the great displacement of people and dislocated agricultural communities; they not only took countless lives through forced labor, but also indirectly destroyed the collective farming system,” Galeano wrote.

Of sugarcane in Brazil he said, “The land was devastated by this selfish plant which invaded the New World, felling forests, squandering natural fertility, and destroying accumulated soil humus.”

From those centuries into today, the descendants of indigenous campesinos (or descendants of slaves brought from Africa), continue in this cycle.

To survive, they must work on the land stolen from them, which now is only suited to produce resources they can not survive off of.

Step 3: Extract the Resources

At first, the land was controlled by descendants of Europeans, the small number of land-owning latifundio families. After World War II, North American corporations, whether for bananas, copper, or rubber, invaded, buying up land or bulldozing through indigenous communities in places like the Amazon Rainforest. They would extract the resources and use them to build their own wealth.

Referring to gold and silver, Galeano argues, “The metals taken from the new colonial dominions not only stimulated Europe’s economic development; one may say that they made it possible.”

The same was true for the crops. “The sugar of tropical Latin America gave powerful impetus to the accumulation of capital for English, French, Dutch, and U.S. industrial development.” He continues, “while at the same time mutilating the economy of the Caribbean islands.”

The United States reached for the skies of global power on the back of Latin American campesinos.

Salvadoran coffee, Ecuadorian bananas, Bolivian tin, Dominican sugar, Brazilian rubber, Chilean copper (and now lithium) made and makes the U.S. economy go. Galeano even argued, “The United States depends on foreign sources for most of the minerals it needs to maintain its ability to wage war.”

To break the cycle of exploitation, country after country sought reform.

Step 4: Cry out “Communism!” to Justify Bloodshed

Revolución has a certain ring in Spanish to me that it lacks in English. When I think of the word, I’m reminded of a unique yet similar history to nearly every Latin American country. How could they not seek revolution? They work for slave wages and can’t afford a home with a roof that keeps out rain.

When Latin Americans sought reform of their government, the playbook of the U.S. rhymed every time.

To justify interfering in other countries’ elections, the U.S. painted workers as communists. In Guatemala, a democratically elected government introduced an agrarian reform law. The law required (only unused) land owned by the United Fruit Company to be sold to campesinos.

The U.S. headline read, “The Iron Curtain is falling over Guatemala.” Later, Eisenhower testified, “We had to get rid of a Communist government which had taken over,” admitting that the U.S. staged a coup d’etat of a sovereign nation. The CIA funded and supported a “liberating operation.” Any move against the banana monopoly would have to be dealt with. Democracy impeded U.S. interests, so it had to go.

In El Salvador, the story was about the control of the coffee. The campesinos-turned-guerrilleros fought against a military dictatorship backed by the United States. As Augustine Sedgewick reports in his book on El Salvador, Coffeeland, “For more than a decade [they] fought the Salvadoran military, which was funded by $6 billion in aid.”

The U.S. sent on average one million dollars a day to my dad’s home country for years on end, but not for homes, schools, or their own industry. The money was for guns to be used against Salvadorans.

The U.S. needed its cheap coffee, and that required cheap, abundant labor. How did they justify it? They said it was to stomp out Bolshevism. One journalist who Sedgewick quotes wrote at the time, “It is very doubtful if the Indians who took part in the revolution knew what Bolshevism meant.”

Country after country, the U.S. threw its military behind dictators who promised to maintain U.S. economic interests, regardless of the number of Latin Americans who got slaughtered or the millions more who’d live stuck in poverty.

They justified it all with the single word, “Communism!”

(Notice how Donald Trump and the Republican Party continue to call anybody a Marxist or communist, even Kamala Harris, who is a centrist, establishment politician. They draw from the same propaganda playbook.)

Step 4.5: Block Trade When Violence Fails

When revolutions succeeded, and Latin America even warded off the U.S. military involvement, they turned to a new playbook: tariffs and blocks from the international trade market. Cuba’s struggles today are synonymous with communism. What’s left out is what the U.S. did to ensure that suffering would follow Cuba’s revolution.

Let’s take one example. In 1960, Eisenhower stopped buying Cuban sugarcane to put their economy into ruin. So Castro turned to the USSR for trade: Cuban sugar for Soviet petroleum. But U.S. oil companies in Cuba like Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil) and Shell refused to refine Soviet petroleum. These U.S. corporations owned the refinement sites in Cuba.

Cuba responded by nationalizing the refineries in Cuba, taking them from U.S. corporations. “The corporations began a blockade, first boycotting qualified personnel, then machinery replacement parts, then transportation,” Galeano reports.

Cuba, strangled by the tentacles of U.S. power that had wrapped themselves around Cuba’s neck, fell further into poverty.¹

None of the United States’ direct role in extracting the wealth from Latin America or overthrowing democratically-elected regimes is hidden or conspiratorial. You can read the now-released CIA documents and the Congressional Record.

Step 5: Cry Out “Illegals!” and Justify Criminalization

The U.S. has succeeded in imposing its will on Latin America and its people. The people have tried protesting. They have tried electing their own leaders. They have tried taking their land back peacefully with reform laws, and not peacefully with revolución (a losing battle when it turned out the opponent was bankrolled by the U.S.) They have continued to live in perpetual poverty. The history of this has created more tentacles of conflict: gangs grabbing power voids left behind, violent drug cartels, and widespread government corruption.

So what have millions decided to do? They have fled to where their wealth went: the United States.

The U.S. has again used propaganda to justify an extreme response. They are called “illegal aliens,” literally marking them with an inhuman term.²

They are “criminals,” even if their only crime is crossing a border out of a war zone created by the same nation that drew the border. They are convenient scapegoats for real problems.

Under this rhetoric, the government requests more border patrol, more weapons, and more agents to find and deport people. The current regime threatens to accelerate all of this to a horrific level and seems oddly proud of it.

The United States Owes Its Wealth and Prosperity to Latin America

The U.S. would not have developed into the superpower it is without plundering Latin America. Sound immigration policy begins first by understanding this story.

Police, Militarized Borders, and Prisons Are Expensive Band-Aids

What if instead of money going to drones to monitor the border, we used that to encourage true fair trade, where Latin American workers got a comfortable living wage and sound conditions for growing the banana, coffee, and sugar we buy?

What if international “economic development” in Latin America wasn’t about U.S. and European banks making profits, but instead helped them build and own industry?

What if instead of arming ICE with more advanced weapons, we armed Latin American children with schools, wifi, and air conditioning?³

Maybe we don’t need to do anything other than pressure the U.S.-based multinational corporations to pay their workers fairly and allow them a greater stake in the profits.

The only real solutions to immigration involve returning their power.

Domestically, This Looks The Same

What if instead of building more prisons, we built more homes, schools, and workforce programs here?

Of course, programs have a cost. But given the changing world, these are investments we need to make for everybody’s benefit.

This Discussion is More Important Than Ever Because Climate Catastrophes Will Accelerate Immigration

Whether Republicans admit it or not, climate change is here. Land in Latin America is becoming harder to farm. Droughts and floods will become more common, wiping out homes and crops. Bananas and coffee are at a very high risk.

Losing work in the countryside, people will flee to their cities, where there won’t be enough jobs. From there, they will flee north. Latin America will see more mass migration due to climate catastrophe.

When immigration accelerates, the next wave of the Trumpian right will call them criminals, say it’s their fault, demand more resources for militarization, and send them back to lands ravaged by environmental devastation of which the U.S. is the #1 historical contributor.

Once again, this will be a crisis in Latin America caused by the United States and Europe.

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Footnotes

I’m not here to defend Castro’s regime, although he wrote that aligning with the USSR was not his first choice. He saw it as necessary, otherwise the U.S. would have ensured the revolution’s defeat. He was probably right. ↩︎
Modern Republicans began using this term after a 2005 Republican strategist memo by Frank Luntz, who I’ve written about before. ↩︎
China knows this and is already doing it. They gifted El Salvador a new state-of-the-art national library and a fleet of zero-emissions buses. Salvadorans have told me, “The U.S. brings bombs, China brings schools.” I’m inclined to think this isn’t because of the goodwill of China’s regime, but because it’s a good political strategy. ↩︎

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