From the Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico

Let’s Knock Down the Walls! Free Passage for Migrant Workers!

November 19, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Posted November 4, 2018, on the blog of the Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico (aurora-roja.blogspot.com). Translated by revcom.us.

To the cry of “We are not criminals, we are international workers!”, many thousands of Central Americans in the first of several caravans starting in October managed to overcome the teargas and clubs of hundreds of Mexican Federal Police to continue their march north. They flee from the hell of rampant criminal violence, hunger, and unemployment into which the current world system has turned their countries, and seek work and refuge from threats of death and rape. As one woman migrant explained to the press, “Look, if they deport us, they will disappear us.”

They are our sisters and brothers. They deserve the support that, in their passage through Mexico, many people are giving them, encouraging and supporting them with water, food, clothing, shoes, and transportation. We demand free passage and support for migrant workers and an end to repression, arrests, and deportations!

For the criminal U.S. government, they are, in the words of fascist President Trump, “well-seasoned criminals,” “terrorists,” “dangerous people,” “an invasion,” and “a national security emergency.” And the visit to Mexico City by Pompeo, U.S. secretary of state, demanding that Mexico stop the first caravan, was enough for the Mexican government to immediately send the Federal Police to the southern border to beat and attack the migrants with teargas. When the second caravan passed into Mexico, a 26-year-old Honduran migrant was killed by a rubber bullet in the head, shot either by the Mexican police or the Guatemalan police. This lamentable criminal servility towards U.S. imperialism is intolerable!

Big U.S. businessmen, in association with big Mexican capitalists, traverse the world with their capital without any hindrance to squeeze billions of dollars of profits at the price of the devastation, poverty, and rampant violence that have devastated countries like in Central America even more than Mexico. This is proclaimed as the supposed “free trade,” the freedom of the capitalists and imperialists to exploit people where, when, and how they want to. But if workers cross a border in search of employment and safety, they are branded as “illegals” and “criminals,” and viciously hunted down. Enough!

Migrants go to the United States because the U.S. capitalist-imperialists have fucked over other countries even more than their own country. All the horrors that impel the exodus of the oppressed from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador are direct results of the imperialist system that has dominated and exploited them for more than a century. In Central America, large banana and coffee plantations owned by U.S. agro-industrial monopolies super-exploit day laborers and tie these countries’ dependency to the world imperialist system. In sweatshops with hunger wages, people produce the clothes that are exported to the United States. The imperialist “free market,” endorsed by the 2005 Free Trade Agreement of Central America, has flooded these countries with basic grains and dairy products imported from the United States, devastating peasant production and causing big price increases. With the collusion between the local rulers and organized crime, a deadly situation has been created with a murder rate more than twice that of Mexico, where we have seen more than 240,000 murders in the last two six-year presidential terms. To maintain this “paradise of exploitation” and ensure its control of this region for strategic reasons for its global empire, the U.S. has imposed and propped up brutal regimes that protect its interests and subdue the people.

Honduras: The U.S. Army invaded this country seven times between 1903 and 1925. In the 1980s, it used the country as a base for the Contra counterinsurgency against Nicaragua. In 2009, the U.S. backed the military coup against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. In 2017, the fascist Trump/Pence regime endorsed the re-election of the current president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who viciously repressed numerous protests against electoral fraud. In recent years, they have killed 200 LGBT activists, 100 journalists, and at least a dozen environmental activists, including Berta Cáceres, a renowned indigenous fighter.

El Salvador: The U.S. Army and CIA have organized, armed, and advised the Salvadoran armed forces, police, and death squads since the 1950s, giving them lists of people they should kill. In the 1980s, the United States sponsored a bloody counterinsurgency war with at least 75,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to the north. Undocumented Salvadoran youth grew up in poor neighborhoods of the U.S., where the Mara gangs arose. These gangs ended up in El Salvador when many of those youth were deported in the 1990s.

Guatemala: The U.S. engineered a military coup in 1954 against President Jacobo Árbenz, who had nationalized uncultivated land owned by the U.S. monopoly United Fruit to distribute it to the peasants. In the 1980s, the U.S. backed another coup that installed, as president, General Ríos Montt, a Christian fascist pastor, who unleashed a genocidal war with arms, planes, and advice from the United States and Israel, systematically massacring more than 75,000 people, mainly in some 600 indigenous Mayan communities.

It is a cruel irony that migrants have to risk their lives trying to reach the United States, the same country that is primarily responsible for the brutal poverty, gang violence, repression, and scarcity that does not allow them to work and live in their own countries. This is how this system works: precisely because the United States exploits, plunders, and dominates a big part of the world, the wealth is concentrated there that has been extracted from the labor of the workers and from the plundering of natural resources in the oppressed countries. And this is how it works throughout the world capitalist-imperialist system, with some 65 million migrants and refugees in the world, forced to flee their homes to try to survive misery, reactionary wars, widespread violence, and the destruction of the environment. A part of the wealth stolen by the imperialists makes possible a relatively better standard of living in the imperialist North American and European countries, among others. That is why the migrants go there: because the big capitalist-imperialists have fucked up much more the countries that they dominate than their own national territories.

All this is the product of a system, the world capitalist-imperialist system. Revolution is needed to overthrow this deadly system and create a new socialist economic and political system where people collectively work for the society and to advance the same revolution in other countries. Where this revolution wins, we will welcome and provide full citizenship to all migrants who want to contribute to transform society, and transform it into a base area for the world revolution, to end capitalism-imperialism and build a new communist world without borders or any form of exploitation and oppression. This revolution is possible: Trump’s racist frenzy is part of an extreme fascist response to very deep contradictions for the imperialist system that can only be resolved in the interests of the majority through communist revolution.

The real criminals are in the White House, inciting racism to try to impose their program of fascism and ethnic cleansing. This is NOT simply an electoral tactic. They are sending 7,000 to 15,000 soldiers to the border. There are currently 12,800 “unaccompanied,” underage migrants held in detention centers in the U.S. The U.S. is expanding its detention camps, where children have denounced the mistreatment of being locked in cages or in very cold rooms they call “freezers,” physical abuse, racist insults, and cruel punishments. Thus they criminalize migrants who apply for asylum. They have begun to take away the passports of Mexican or Central American people born in the U.S. whose birth certificates were signed by midwives instead of doctors, claiming that they were falsified. And Trump threatens to deny citizenship to those born in the United States of undocumented mothers.

Every fascist regime uses this method to demonize certain groups in order to stupefy and harden other people against them, and thus impose their program. The program of the Trump/Pence fascist regime includes the ethnic cleansing of immigrants as part of their goal of a white country, where non-white people have no rights, are treated blatantly as a “lower caste,” which could reach genocidal dimensions. This is a reactionary and fascist response to the real crisis of millions of refugees in the world, created by the operation of their own system.

The Mexican State is a guard dog of the imperialist U.S. and an accomplice of fascism. Although they usually do not dare to use the same racist and xenophobic invective as Trump, behind its “humanitarian” words, they act with the same viciousness as the U.S. Migra. After the beatings and gassing on the southern border, they have locked up people seeking refuge and have arrested and deported the people they have managed to isolate from the caravans, even pulling women by their hair and beating them, denying medical attention to two women with miscarriages, and making use of “all kinds of pressure, threats and direct actions,” according to the head of the Oaxaca human rights ombudsman’s office. The Mexican government has pressured bus companies not to rent buses, and also supportive people who offer transport, threatening to prosecute them for “human trafficking” if they provide transportation to migrants. In 2015, Mexican authorities carried out 70 percent of the arrests and deportations of Central American migrants, leaving only 30 percent to the U.S. Migra and police. As an example of their actions, in September 2018, agents of the Mexican National Immigration Institute and Federal Police attacked migrants in Juan Rodríguez Clara, Veracruz, with the toll of 47 detained, 15 injured and, according to the people, two dead. A young Honduran who escaped reported that he heard the police order, “Shoot to kill, they are dogs.” All this demonstrates once again that the Mexican government is a repressive apparatus in charge of maintaining the predominantly capitalist system under imperialist domination, mainly by the United States.

Support the migrants and fight for the revolution that will emancipate humanity. Migrants deserve the firm support of everybody. Let’s unite with them, denounce the brutal crimes against them by the Mexican, U.S., and Central American authorities, and prepare the liberating revolution that will put an end to all this cruelty.

Stop Detentions, Deportations and Racist Attacks!

Free the Migrants!

Drive out the real beasts: Trump, Pence and their Mexican lackeys!

 

Thousands of Central Americans in the first of several caravans that started in October. Photo courtesy of: Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico

“The Mexican State is a guard dog of the imperialist U.S. and an accomplice of fascism. Although they usually do not dare to use the same racist and xenophobic invective as Trump...they act with the same viciousness as the U.S. Migra.” Photo courtesy of: Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico

Central American migrants jumping the fence on the southern border of Mexico, October 19, 2018. Photo courtesy of: Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico

Central American migrants from the second caravan. Photo courtesy of: Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico