We Will NOT Obey the Orders of the Fascist Trump Regime!

Which side are you on? With U.S. imperialism dominating and bleeding the peoples of Central America, Mexico and a large part of the world? Or with the migrants struggling to live and not be ground down?

July 8, 2019 | revcom.us

 

Editors note: The following leaflet from the Revolutionary Communist Organization, Mexico, was translated from Spanish by revcom.us; the original in Spanish can be found at aurora-roja.blogspot.com.

U.S. imperialism is waging a ruthless racist war against immigrants. By signing the “agreement” with the United States on June 7, faced with the threat of Trump applying tariffs, the“gobierno de la 4T”¹ agrees to reinforce its role as the executioner of the migrants and criminal accomplice of the fascist regime of Trump and Pence. The same United States that imposed its southern border with blood and fire through the war in 1848, stealing more than half of the territory of Mexico,² orders the Mexican state to “protect” this same “common” border by hunting down, locking up, torturing, deporting, and even killing migrants from Central America and other countries dominated and devastated by the world capitalist-imperialist system. This is totally unacceptable! No to capitulation and collusion with the fascist Trump/Pence regime!

A Ruthless Racist War to Make the United States a White Country

The U.S. has more than 80,000 immigrants in detention centers in inhumane conditions—locked in cages and “hieleras” (rooms kept at freezing temperatures), sleeping on concrete floors and suffering physical abuse, racist insults and cruel punishments. In the two and a half years of the Trump regime, at least 24 migrants detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) have died. Thousands of children have been ripped away from their parents, and it is not known how many have not been returned. Activists have exposed that this continues, despite a court order that prohibits it. In June, the Refugee Relocation Office announced that 1,400 minors who traveled alone will be prisoners at Ft. Sill, a military base used as a concentration camp for Japanese families during World War II, and previously for Apaches and other indigenous peoples. The Obama administration also locked up unaccompanied children there in 2014. Now the U.S. government says it is going to launch a new wave of massive raids as the beginning, according to Trump, of deporting “millions” of immigrants.

This is not simply due to Trump’s electoral strategy, as the mainstream media parrots. Rather this is due to the program of this fascist regime to recover the “greatness” (that is, wealth and domination) of the United States by reaffirming with a vengeance white supremacy, male supremacy and American supremacy. It incites the racism and chauvinism of “America First” for expelling, locking up or eliminating immigrants “of color. ” And the Mexican government is collaborating with this genocidal persecution, in the face of the threat of losing imperialist investment in Mexico and “free trade,” which the Mexican economy, subordinated to imperialism, depends on.

The very functioning of the capitalist-imperialist system has created the hell of poverty, destruction and rampant violence from which migrants are fleeing—many of whom run risk, when deported back to their countries of origin, of being murdered by organized crime in collusion with corrupt governments, as also happens in several parts of Mexico. As the Hondurans in a caravan detained by the Mexican migra [immigration agents] insisted, “They kill us if we don’t want to sell drugs.” The bitter fruits of the current world system, its wars, destruction of the environment, misery, social crisis and the relentless violence of state agents and organized crime have caused the desperate flight from the oppressed countries to the imperialist countries of North America and Europe that dominate them, with more than 250 million immigrants in the world (according to the UN in 2017). All the imperialist states respond with walls, concentration camps, clubs and bullets, because this system has no other answer.

The Criminal Collaboration of the Mexican Government in the War Against Migrants

As Salvador Lacruz, director of a human rights center in Tapachula, Chiapas, points out, the current government of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador [AMLO] is already“imposing in practice the most violent and repressive scenario against the refugees that we have seen, and this is no small matter, because former Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration was extremely violent.” Contrary to its hypocritical “work, health and human rights” discourse, the AMLO government arrested and deported more than 80,500 people between December 2018 and May 2019, 54% more than in the same months in the previous year. It deploys 6,000 National Guard troops on the border with Guatemala, conducts raids in the parks, hotels and streets of Tapachula, Chiapas [border city next to Guatemala], deports the vast majority of detainees, locks up and holds thousands of migrants incommunicado in their “estaciones migratorias” [migrant holding centers] which are more like prisons, with overcrowded and unhealthy conditions, and little and sometimes rotten food.

Since December 2018, the Mexican state has dispersed, many times with violence, all the caravans that have been created to protect migrants from kidnapping or death. Thus, the Mexican government seeks to reimpose what one researcher has called “one of the structural columns of the immigration system imposed by the U.S. and Mexican policy: the alliance of organized crime and group delinquency with the security forces.”

As in the U.S., the Mexican government also represses people who support the migrants, arresting the director of Pueblos Sin Fronteras [People Without Borders] and another activist who have accompanied the caravans, accusing them of “human trafficking.” They were released when it was proven that they were not at the place on the dates indicated in the false indictments, but the Attorney General of the Republic is trying to file charges against them again.

The checkpoints and detentions of immigrants multiply throughout Mexican territory. On June 14, agents of the Federal Police killed Emma Claritza Benavides Castellón, a 12-year-old Salvadoran, and wounded two more people, when opening fire on the truck in which they were travelling in Veracruz. On the northern border, the Mexican National Guard and state and municipal police detain migrants to prevent them from crossing into the United States, as if they were U.S. migra agents.

Since the end of December 2018, the United States has returned thousands of asylum seekers to Mexico under the called the “Permanecer en México” program [Stay in Mexico]. At least 15,000 applicants are already awaiting their proceedings in border cities, with no resources available to offer them work, health services or education. The Joint Declaration of June 7 between the U.S. and Mexican governments authorizes the return of many more migrants to Mexico. The “second agreement” of June 7, which initially was kept secret, clears the way for the full implementation of the “safe third country” policy whereby Mexico would assume more of the work that the U.S. migra is doing now. It establishes the negotiation of “a binding bilateral agreement” in which Mexico “would accept the return of migrants and the processing of their refugee status applications” “if the United States determines, at its discretion and after consulting with Mexico, after 45 days... that the measures adopted by the government of Mexico... have not produced sufficient results.”

The United States wants to finally eliminate completely the right to asylum in its territory. It bullies Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, and Panama to accept being “safe third countries” and to take charge of deporting, locking up or giving asylum to migrants who enter their territory first in their odyssey to the U.S. Appling for asylum in these countries would take away the right for migrants to apply for asylum in the U.S., while at the same time this would force these oppressed countries (which are by no means“safe”for migrants) to provide the walls, prisons and means to deport people who are denied refuge. The Mexican government is already collaborating with the U.S. to implement this plan, which will almost certainly be imposed in a matter of months.

Let’s tear down the walls! Let’s fight to free humanity from the inhuman capitalist system!

We will not defend the U.S. border nor will we accept that Mexico or other oppressed countries become concentration camps to “protect” the interests of the system that kills and oppresses people everywhere and is destroying life on the planet! We must resolutely fight against all the inhuman attacks by the U.S. and Mexican governments against immigrants, and make this struggle part of the struggle to overthrow the system of capitalism-imperialism that generates and perpetuates all this completely unnecessary suffering. Let’s unite with migrants and with exploited and oppressed people all over the world in the struggle for another future! We need revolution, communist revolution, to finally eliminate all forms of oppression, exploitation, poverty, and injustice and tear down all the walls and borders that separate one part of humanity from another.