Sometimes I really hate my trips down memory lane, and
the news this week brought back memories I certainly wish I didn’t have. No, I’m not talking about the shoot down of
MH17, or the never-ending conflicts between Hamas and Israel.
No, I’m talking about the looks of hatred on the faces of
the anti-immigrant protesters in Murietta, CA screaming at children to go home
after the children had risked life and limb to get here. These are children! What brought my memories to mind are some
events that have happened in the 1980’s up to the present centered around the
three Central American countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala where
these children are from.
I will only go back to 1980 shortly after Ronald Reagan
was elected President. He had not been
sworn into office yet in 1/1981, so don’t think we can blame him too much for
this. But on 12/2/1980, three Maryknoll
nuns and a lay woman, who were in El Salvador working with the poor of that
country were attacked, raped and murdered beside a road by soldiers who had
attended the School of the Americas, run by our country, where they had learned
the art of murder, rape, terror and torture as a political weapon. Although their names were well known, they
were never brought to justice. I quote
from an article from of all places, The Telegram-Tribune (forerunner of The
Tribune), reprinted from the Toronto Globe and Mail, 1/14/91.
“The worst fears of
El Salvador’s leftist political leaders came true during the week-end when a
San Salvador radio station broadcast a threat from two of the country’s death
squads to kill opposition and labor leaders, priests and intellectuals…The
statement reads, “At this time we are going to talk in all frankness about our
philosophical basis and the politics of our movement. This country’s society is divided into three
classes: a superior creative class composed essentially of specialists and
large landholders; a smaller class that tries to imitate this superior class;
and an inferior rustic class that is made up essentially of workers, poor
peasants, students and small businessmen.
Another group exists that we hold in low regard and consider very small
– the dangerous intellectual class that tries to contaminate the above
mentioned classes…The superior capitalist class in our country is naturally the
strongest, and its destiny, without question, is to govern and regulate the
inferior classes. And what is more, it
has a duty to exploit, dispose of, conquer and even exterminate elements of
these inferior classes when the benefits of capitalism require such…Our
adversaries, the subversives and the great inferior mass, must be exterminated,
or at least their leaders.”
The article goes on to quote the then Archbishop of San
Salvador Arturo Rivera y Damas lamenting during a sermon of the fear and
repression facing opposition parties: “Of course all of these negative aspects in
one way or another limit freedoms and these (groups) should not be found among
us. The death squads should not exist.” Archbishop Romero was assassinated during
Sunday Mass on March 24, 1980.
In 1985, Jeff Cohen from Fairness and Accuracy In
Reporting (FAIR), published in CommonDreams.org, 12/13/2004, an article about
Gary Webb, who, while a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, CA, wrote a
three-part series concerning the links between cocaine traffickers, the crack
epidemic in the Los Angeles area, and the CIA-organized right-wing Nicaragua
Contra army of that era. It was during
that time that Ronald Reagan called the Contra’s, “…the moral equivalent of our
Founding Fathers”. The article by Cohen
quoted from an article by Brain Parry/Brian Barger printed in the Associated
Press.
The sad ending to Gary Webb’s expose was that he was
monumentally attacked by the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los
Angeles Times. This was the time of the
Iran-Contra Scandal where White House aide Oliver North writes a memo outlining
plans to use $12 million in profit from drug sales in Los Angeles and from Iran
arms sales for Contra aid, and Ronald Reagan was flying high. He was nicknamed the “Teflon President”
because nothing stuck to him. But back
to Gary Webb. Gary Webb was forced to
leave the Mercury News, and had to endure the agony of these attacks. He was found shot to death on 12/10/04. He died of two gunshots to the head. It was called a suicide.
Printed on Saturday, 1/19/2013, in The Observer,
Guatemala’s President, Otto Perez Molina, announced the west’s “war on drugs”
has failed and continuing with prohibition will only cost more lives. “A
message should be sent to the leaders of the countries with the biggest drug
markets. They must think not only of…
the context of their country, but of what is happening in the world, in regions
such as Central America, where this destruction, this weakening of democracy,
is happening. They must be open to
recognizing that the struggle against drugs, in the way it has been conducted,
has failed.”
And so the violence in these little countries has
escalated to the point where parents are sending these children, most
unaccompanied, on this long and dangerous journey in the care of people who
are, because of their predatory nature, nicknamed ‘coyotes’. Think about your own children, for heaven‘s
sake. Think about how awful the human
environment must be that parents believe they must do this to keep their
children alive. It reminds me of someone
I knew who has since died who was Jewish and from Hungary. He and his family had made it to the border
before being apprehended, but at the last moment his father thrust his wife and
two children to safety, knowing he could never make it. We honor those people who fled from both the
Nazis and the Communists, but we scream and yell and shout obscenities at
children who are fleeing from similar conditions, but conditions that are of
our making!!
Why hasn’t the radical religious right risen up in
righteous wrath at this treatment of children.
The Bible is packed with references to justice, and taking care of
orphans, and doing good to those who may not have your best interests at
heart. One would think their cries could
be heard across the land. Or are they
like those who, in the King James version, Jesus called hypocrites, “…worse
than whitened sepulchers”. In other
words, full of rotting bones.
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