The American Government’s Lies About Immigrants from South of the Border

Typical was Kamala Harris’s saying, on 8 June 2021, during her trip to Guatemala (starting at 0:55 into the interview, and ending at 2:25):
The reason that I am in Guatemala is to address the reasons people leave home, flee, knowing that the people who are here for generations are, know that the history of Guatemala, for centuries. They want to stay. They don’t want to leave. But they need opportunity. They need assistance. They need support. [Then the interviewer Lester Holt interrupted her and she continued:] Well, we have to deal with what is happening at the border. There is no question about that. That’s not a debatable point. But we have to understand that there is a reason why people are arriving at our border. And what is that reason, and identify the problem so we can fix it. [Another interruption by Holt.] I don’t think that Americans want people to be exposed to harm, if they can avoid it. They are taking the trek from the place that they know that they want to stay. So, I am here in Guatemala to say what can we do to support people, to give them a sense of hope, that help is on the way.
The truth of this matter is that the U.S. Government protected dictatorships in Guatemala because America’s United Fruit Company controlled that policy, and that policy caused the very heavy emigration northward. This policy was to keep wages down so that profits of the American corporations that were hiring there would be kept as high as possible. Protesting workers were killed by the Government’s and employers’ death squads, and police looked the other way. As Wikipedia’s article on General Jorge Ubico, who was the worst of these dictators, says, he was the dictator who served as the president of Guatemala from 1931 to 1944.
A general in the Guatemalan military, he was elected to the presidency in 1931, in an election where he was the only candidate. He continued his predecessors’ policies of giving massive concessions to the United Fruit Company and wealthy landowners, as well as supporting their harsh labor practices.Ubico has been described as “one of the most oppressive tyrants Guatemala has ever known” who compared himself to Adolf Hitler. He was removed by a pro-democracy uprising in 1944, which led to the ten-year Guatemalan Revolution.
That “Revolution,” or period of democracy in Guatemala, ended in 1954, with the CIA’s coup terminating it. The chief spur behind the coup was the land reform bill passed on 17 June 1952. Land reform was desperately needed by the population, but extremely opposed by the super-rich investors in U.S. and Guatemala.
Before Guatemala got a new Constitution in 1945 right after the 1944 democratic revolution, the prior 1879 Constitution excluded the indigenous population, the primary workforce in Guatemala, from citizenship; and, so, virtually the only work they coud get was agricultural. In 1944, merely 2% of the population owned 72% of Guatemala’s arable land, but two-thirds of the population were farmers. Meanwhile 88% of the land wasn’t even under cultivation. Furthermore, even as-of 2007, less than 1 percent of landowners held 75 percent of the best agricultural land, and 90 percent of rural inhabitants lived in poverty. So: there has been little progress, if any. Almost all of the profits from Guatemala have gone to investors in the U.S.
The U.S. regime ended the ten-year democracy in Guatemala. Following it were the 6 “Military Governments (1954-1958)”, and then, after those four years and its 6 Presidents, came the “Period of the Civil War (1958-1996) ”, eight years with 12 Presidents, all of whom likewise were brutal U.S. stooge regimes — each one lasting an average of 1.5 years. And, then, came what Wikipedia calls the “Contemporary (1996–present)” period, 9 Presidents during this 28-year time-span. That period actually effectively ended on 15 July 2023 when the U.S. Government quit imposing dictatorships there. The two Chairmen of the two Foreign Affairs Committees (a Republican in the House and a Democrat in the Senate) “asked the American president, Joe Biden, to sanction Guatemalan officials for threats to democracy in the framework of the general elections of June 25” in Guatemala, and thus allowed the son of Guatemala’s first democratically elected (1945) President to become inauguated as Guatemala’s new President in January 2024. What had happened to allow this was that United Fruit Company became Chiquita Brands International in 1984, and that company pled guilty in 2007 to aiding and abetting a terrorist organization in order to silence union organizers and intimidate farmers. And, “so, for the time being, Chiquita Brands International avoided a catastrophic scandal, and instead walked away with a humiliating defeat in court and eight of its employees fired.” As always, the corporate owners and their chosen executives suffered no penalty, but a few people lower on the totem pole — people who had been hired by them — did. (They lost their jobs, but when Guatemala requested the U.S. regime to extradite them so that they could be prosecuted, the regime said no.) Chiquita Brands had hired “right-wing death squads that have killed thousands”. In an extraordinary article that somehow slipped through the censors or “editors” at TIME magazine, Jack Werner headlined on 18 June 2024, “The Deep Roots of the Chiquita Verdict” and even reported that, “Globally, activist groups have tried to hold U.S. corporations, from Coca-Cola to Chevron, accountable for their role in violent conduct occurring outside of the United States. Many, if not most, of these cases have been decided in favor of U.S. corporate power.” However, Chiquita Brands Guatemala operations were sold off to Del Monte in 1972 (“Del Monte’s chairman Alfred Eames mused banana trees ‘are like money trees. I wish I had more of them’”), though the 1945 Guatemalan Constitution required it to be sold ONLY to Guatemalans. What does even the Constitution mean in such a country? Not much. Then, on 29 October 1999, Jack Delorme headlined “Anti-Union Bananas” and reported that On the evening of the 13th [of October], 200 armed men burst into the trade unionists’ premises. The five members of the SITRABI Executive Committee had been brought there by force. At gunpoint, the trade union leaders were forced to sign their resignations. Two of them were then taken to local radio stations to read out a press release stating that agreement had been reached between the trade union and the company, and that the call for action the next day was unfounded. Threatened with execution, beaten and humiliated by the paramilitaries, the trade unionists were released in the middle of the night with orders to disappear from the region. Finally they found refuge – along with their families – with MINUGUA, the UN agency tasked with controlling the application of the peace agreements in Guatemala.
Kamala Harris said “we have to understand that there is a reason why people are arriving at our border. And what is that reason, and identify the problem so we can fix it.” That reason is U.S.-and-allied billionaires, many of whom are probably donating to her campaign, and many of whom are probably donating alsso to Trump’s campaign. But, if that’s the problem, then those candidates won’t fix it — they won’t even identify it. Neither candidate does. Instead, they simply evade and lie.
If the U.S. Government will allow democracy in the countries that it controls south of the border, then that democracy will enormously reduce the problem Kamala Harris was talking about on 8 June 2021. However, given how feudal Guatemala is, the U.S. Government would need to demand an end to that feudal, pre-fascist, system, by actively assisting the new, pro-democracy, Guatemalan President, to force through the radical changes there that would be needed — and to hell with what the investors want. That’s what would be needed. Kamala Harris gives no indication that it is something she as President would do.
Here is why it’s needed: Those dictatorial Governments are controlled by U.S.-and-allied billionaires who control their Governments and extract so heavily from the workers there so that education, health care, and even police protection there, are abysmal (most of the wealth extracted there goes to those billionaires), and so the young people become employed heavily in the drug gangs, which makes life hell for the locals, many of whom try to escape northward. If America’s Government turns away such individuals who have tried to escape a hell that it had largely created, would that be a solution, or instead a final ‘solution’ to the problem? Are such individuals not refugees? If they are, then what country has the biggest moral obligation to allow them in? Or is, instead, the country that creates the majority of these problems, simply to turn them away at its border?
Instead, the public tends to blame the victims. The public certainly doesn’t blame the investors who live luxuriously off of international corporate murder, mass-murder, death squads, etc. That’s the gravy-train, which many investors want to clamber onto. And most of the general public think that this system is okay, and is The American Way. And yet — at the same time — they insist that the victims of this ‘American Way’ in Guatemala have no right to be accepted into America.