The Case Against Deporting 200,000 Salvadorans

By Erik Ching

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Co-author of Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2007), editor of Broadcasting the Civil War in El Salvador: A Memoir of Guerrilla Radio (2010), and author of Stories of Civil War in El Salvador: A Battle over Memory (UNC Press, 2016)

The United States's decision to revoke TPS (Temporary Protected Status) from some 200,000 Salvadorans living in the United States is morally repugnant. The gap between moral accountability and foreign policymaking is wide, even for a country like the United States, whose leaders’ idealistic rhetoric suggests otherwise. But if there was ever a country that owed another country something and one that should be held accountable to a moral standard, it is the United States in its historic relation with El Salvador.

The United States extended TPS to Salvadorans in 2001 after a series of devastating earthquakes. The Department of Homeland Security claims that the earthquake conditions that inspired TPS no longer apply, and thus Salvadorans can return home. Technically, that statement may be accurate, depending on how one chooses to define “earthquake conditions.” But the reality is that the situation in El Salvador has been deteriorating ever since, and the United States bears tremendous responsibility for creating those conditions. The United States has had a deep impact on El Salvador in pursuit of its own foreign policy needs going back to the 1970s, and its actions contributed not only to the historic flow of migrants out of El Salvador, but also to the current conditions of violence that prevail there.

The United States had an overwhelming presence in El Salvador in the 1980s. Under the Carter administration, but especially during the two terms of Reagan's presidency, U.S. 

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policy makers defined El Salvador as a foreign policy priority after the Sandinista victory in neighboring Nicaragua in 1979. Although the United States suspended military aid to El Salvador in December 1980, after four U.S. churchwomen were killed by governmental security forces, it reinstated aid in January 1981 in response to the guerrillas' first “Final Offensive,” which more or less formally launched the Salvadoran civil war. Under the successive Reagan administrations, U.S. aid and the role of the United States increased steadily, particularly in 1983 and 1984 when it appeared that the Salvadoran government was on the verge of losing to the guerrillas. Overall, the United States provided on average $1 million per day of aid to the Salvadoran government throughout the 1980s, much of it in the form of military aid.

The justification for these policies was to prevent the supposedly Marxist guerrillas (the FMLN) from coming into power in El Salvador, as the FSLN had done in neighboring Nicaragua. Therein, U.S. policy makers tended to define the situation in El Salvador through the highly circumscribed and deeply flawed prism of the cold war, i.e. that the Salvadoran guerrillas lacked popular support and were a front for Soviet, Cuban, and/or Nicaraguan expansionist designs. One of the most definitive policy statements in this regard was Reagan’s address to the nation in May 1984 to appeal for support in providing more aid to El Salvador. In its framing of the situation in El Salvador and in standing by the Salvadoran government/military as steadfastly as it did, the United States prolonged the war and helped contribute to the brutal human rights record that the Salvadoran military accrued throughout the years.

With the benefit of hindsight and evidence, we now know definitively that the overwhelming majority of killing and human-rights violations being perpetrated in El Salvador were done by the Salvadoran military and/or paramilitary organizations with close military ties. What we also know now, but which we also knew at the time, is the large extent to which the United States either tacitly supported or willfully ignored the actions and activities of its allies on the ground in El Salvador, notably in events like the massacre of El Mozote in December 1981 (portrayed so clearly by the journalism of Mark Danner) and the assassination of the six Jesuits in November 1989, to list just two examples of countless others. Admittedly, at various times throughout the war, U.S. policy makers tried to get Salvadoran military leaders to amend their ways in the face of growing U.S. domestic opposition to the war, such as when Vice President Bush arrived in December 1983 and delivered a rather stern directive to the generals about cleaning up their act. But both sides recognized that the U.S. had planted its flag with the Salvadoran military and that it was unable and/or unwilling to do anything to jeopardize its cold-war inspired foreign policy initiatives in El Salvador. The killings and the torture went on, only beginning to abate after 1983.

In addition to the history of U.S. involvement during the civil war in the 1980s, the United States’s subsequent immigration policies have had adverse impacts on El Salvador, namely the deportations of Salvadorans in the 1990s and 2000s. Many scholars see these various kinds of deportation as giving rise to, or significantly contributing to, the explosion of gang membership and gang-related violence in El Salvador by entities such as MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) and Calle 18. Those gangs have their origins in the United States, as young migrants who fled from the violence of the 1980s became subsequently caught up in the desperation of life in the United States thereafter. Although some of the people that the United States deported back to El Salvador were gang members involved in criminal activity, the United States also sent back many young people, some of whom did not even speak Spanish and had no record of gang participation or criminality. When thrust into the alien environment of El Salvador, some of these young people could only find refuge within gangs, exacerbating the problem.

The overwhelming majority of the 200,000 Salvadorans currently residing in the United States on TPS are law-abiding people working diligently to make a better life for themselves, and therein contributing to the collective good. Throwing them back into El Salvador would be a human rights disaster. They will struggle to find their footing, they will be targeted for extortion, and their needs will be an added burden to a nation already short on employment. In 1969, some 100,000 Salvadoran peasants, living across the border in Honduras, were forced by the Honduran government to return to El Salvador en masse. This action helped trigger a subsequent war with Honduras, and the sudden return of this mass of Salvadorans also had a destabilizing effect on the nation’s society and economy, contributing to the downward spiral that led to the outbreak of civil war in 1980. I fear that the mass return of 200,000 Salvadorans from the United States in 2018 would have a similarly destabilizing effect, to say nothing of the consequences for many U.S. citizens who will be separated from their loved ones and family members.

Erik Ching is a Professor of History at Furman University.

Further reading: Erik Ching was quoted in a recent New York Times article with Gene Palumbo as lead author titled, "El Salvador Again Feels the Hand of Washington Shaping Its Fate."

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Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Militarization in the Age of Trump

By Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera

The rapid growth of organized crime in Mexico and the government’s response to it have driven an unprecedented rise in violence and impelled major structural economic changes, including the recent passage of energy reform. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera’s new book, Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico, asserts that these phenomena are a direct and intended result of the emergence 

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of the brutal Zetas criminal organization and the corporate business model they have advanced in Mexico. Since the Zetas share some characteristics with legal transnational businesses that operate in the energy and private security industries, she also compares this criminal corporation with ExxonMobil, Halliburton, and Blackwater (renamed "Academi," and now a Constellis company).

Combining vivid interview commentary with in-depth analysis of organized crime as a transnational and corporate phenomenon, this book proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding the emerging face, new structure, and economic implications of organized crime in Mexico. Arguing that the armed conflict between criminal corporations (like the Zetas) and the Mexican state resembles a civil war, Correa-Cabrera identifies key beneficiaries of this war, including arms-producing companies, the international banking system, the US border economy, the US border security/military-industrial complex, and corporate capital, especially international oil and gas companies.

Dr. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (Brownsville campus) and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. We asked her to comment on the effects of President Trump’s border policy on what she identifies as the beneficiaries of organized crime in Mexico, mainly the US border security/military-industrial complex and corporations.

Criminal Corporations, Militarization, and Energy in the Age of Trump

Mexico’s so-called drug war can be characterized, in some way, as a modern war relating to the control of energy production. In the present context, it is possible to identify groups that seem to have benefited the most from a novel criminal scheme (directly or indirectly) introduced by the Zetas organization, the Mexican government’s reaction to it, and the resulting brutality. The primary (or potential) winners of this armed conflict appear to be “corporate actors in the energy sector, transnational financial companies, private security firms (including private prison companies), and the US border-security/military-industrial complex.”[1]

Moreover, Mexico’s violent spiral coincides with strengthened US border security and has had positive effects on the US border economy. Official numbers at the national level show that crime rates in US border counties are relatively low and have decreased in the past few years due to enhanced border enforcement. Similarly, forced displacements in Mexico have modified migration patterns from this country to the United States. Irregular migration flows from Mexico have declined and “a greater number of relatively more skilled and wealthier Mexicans have been legally emigrating from afflicted border areas in Mexico to the United States. Overall, the effects of the war on Mexico-US migration dynamics seem to be positive for the US economy.”

The main losers of Mexico’s new criminal model and severe armed conflict essentially seem to be the country’s most vulnerable people—those who did not have the resources to flee or defend themselves against extortion, kidnappings, and other forms of brutality carried out by criminal groups, paramilitaries, and government forces—and the national oil industry, represented by the once oil monopoly Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX). Their spaces are being (or will be) occupied by private companies, many of them transnational and often very powerful. In the recent years, “[f]orced displacements, massive disappearances, and militarization in key parts of the country have emptied strategic lands and left them available for future investments, mainly in the energy sector.”[2]

It is worth noting that disappearances, forced displacements, and depreciation of land values in key areas of Mexico have not halted investment in energy and commercial infrastructure. Energy contractors have not curbed their activities; “the expansion of large investment projects continues despite the high risk posed by organized crime and the large number of disappearances. It is also interesting to observe that while Los Zetas and groups following the same criminal paramilitary model have affected small and medium entrepreneurs [related to] the hydrocarbon industry as well as Pemex, they have hardly touched transnational interests.”

President Donald Trump being sworn in on January 20, 2017 at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. 

In January of the present year, Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. His electoral campaign was unique in the sense that it put Mexico, for the first time in history, at the center of the US electoral discourse and foreign policy agenda. Trump asserted that Mexican immigrants in the United States are, “in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” Therefore, he proposed to build a “big, beautiful, impenetrable” wall, bolster border enforcement significantly, and arrest and deport vast numbers of undocumented immigrants. Trump has pledged to get Mexico to pay for this wall—potentially, he has said, through tariffs. Indeed, the White House communicated that a 20 percent tax on imports from Mexico was being considered as a form of payment for the construction of the proposed southern border wall.

Imposing those border taxes would violate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as it is known today. It is also worth mentioning that Trump “ran a campaign somewhat based on NAFTA.” In his quest to “Make America Great Again” and for putting “America First,” Trump pledged in a statement to negotiate "tough and fair" trade agreements with the aim of further generating jobs for the American people. Under this new context, as soon as Trump assumed his role as President of the United States, he signed an order abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership: the largest regional trade accord in history that once involved the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations and represented roughly forty percent of the world’s economic output. Following this same logic, the new US President has set his sights on renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The Enduring Appeal of Gang Suppression in El Salvador

In 1992, at the end of a twelve-year civil war, El Salvador was poised for a transition to democracy. Yet, after longstanding dominance by a small oligarchy that continually used violence to repress popular resistance, El Salvador’s democracy has proven to be a fragile one, as social ills (poverty chief among them) have given rise to neighborhoods where gang activity now thrives. Dr. Sonja Wolf's new book Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador examines the ways

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in which the ruling ARENA party used gang violence to solidify political power in the hands of the elite—culminating in draconian “iron fist” antigang policies that undermine human rights while ultimately doing little to address the roots of gang membership.

Dr. Sonja Wolf is a CONACYT research fellow with the Drug Policy Program at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas. We asked her to comment on the 25th anniversary of the Chapultepec Peace Accords.

The Enduring Appeal of Gang Suppression in El Salvador
by Sonja Wolf

On January 16, 2017, El Salvador will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the peace settlement that ended the country’s twelve-year civil war. This conflict pitched the guerrilla forces of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) against the government army, propped up by billions of dollars in US military aid. While for the average citizen it is bound to be a day like any other, the administration of President Salvador Sánchez Cerén will mark the occasion with concerts and other festive events.

It has also announced, however, that it has asked the United Nations, mediator of the earlier peace negotiations, to help produce a new “National Accord”. This agreement is meant to unite all sectors of society, often at odds with each other, in order to tackle major challenges. The invitation comes at a critical time and, compared to the usual official rhetoric that the country is forging ahead, is a recognition that local actors have proved unable to create much-needed political consensus and public policies.

The somber climate stands in stark contrast to the optimism of the early nineties, when Salvadorans were hopeful that greater freedom and prosperity were laying ahead. The war, which had originated because peaceful social and political change was impossible, had left some 75,000 people dead and the economy shattered. The peace agreements mandated a series of constitutional, institutional, political, and socioeconomic reforms. While most transformations advanced only half-heartedly, the last of these never took off to begin with.

The FMLN and the ruling government of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), a conservative party that defended the interests and privileges of the economic elite, embraced fundamentally different views and expectations of their country. Whereas the left felt that a democracy had never existed in El Salvador, and the peace accords were a means to build it, the right considered that the guerrilla had attacked an actually existing democracy and the task ahead was to restore the status quo.

With a powerful part of the population committed to ending the war, but not to pursuing the vision enshrined in the treaty, the country’s future was always going to be uncertain. The peace accords remain a watershed for El Salvador, but their reluctant implementation lies at the root of the problems that have beset it since. To be sure, it was no small feat to terminate the political violence, incorporate the FMLN into the political system, hold democratic elections, and restructure the security sector. But state institutions and the rule of law remain weak, corruption flourishes, poverty and inequality persist, and criminal violence has surged.