Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
How Trump Helps MS-13
Source: New York Times
How Trump Helps MS-13
The U.S. doesn’t need a big, beautiful border wall. It needs a real foreign policy.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
May 10, 2019
-snip-
To read Ahmed’s story is to understand the crisis at the border. Those Central American caravans, about which Trump tries to inspire so much panic and bigotry? They are the caravans of the terrorized and desperate. The MS-13 killers supposedly marching toward our streets like some barbaric horde? We are doing more to harm their innocent victims than we are doing to defeat their victimizers.
Many people are generally aware of the crime wave sweeping Latin America and the Caribbean. Few have accurately reckoned the scale: more than 2.5 million people murdered so far this century — “more people,” Ahmed notes, “than the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen combined.”
Another remarkable fact: The United States has not had an ambassador in Honduras for nearly two years.
In this case, the fault does not lie strictly with the Trump administration, which had nominated career diplomat Francisco Palmieri to the job, but with Senator Marco Rubio, who blocked Palmieri’s appointment because he wants a political appointee. But the absence of an ambassador reflects the administration’s broader failure to have anything resembling a policy anywhere in Latin America, other than for Venezuela.
If anything, we have an anti-policy. As of March, the State Department has been carrying out Trump’s instructions to cease foreign assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — the so-called Northern Triangle that has some of the worst violence and the highest migration rates.
-snip-
The U.S. doesn’t need a big, beautiful border wall. It needs a real foreign policy.
By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
May 10, 2019
-snip-
To read Ahmed’s story is to understand the crisis at the border. Those Central American caravans, about which Trump tries to inspire so much panic and bigotry? They are the caravans of the terrorized and desperate. The MS-13 killers supposedly marching toward our streets like some barbaric horde? We are doing more to harm their innocent victims than we are doing to defeat their victimizers.
Many people are generally aware of the crime wave sweeping Latin America and the Caribbean. Few have accurately reckoned the scale: more than 2.5 million people murdered so far this century — “more people,” Ahmed notes, “than the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen combined.”
Another remarkable fact: The United States has not had an ambassador in Honduras for nearly two years.
In this case, the fault does not lie strictly with the Trump administration, which had nominated career diplomat Francisco Palmieri to the job, but with Senator Marco Rubio, who blocked Palmieri’s appointment because he wants a political appointee. But the absence of an ambassador reflects the administration’s broader failure to have anything resembling a policy anywhere in Latin America, other than for Venezuela.
If anything, we have an anti-policy. As of March, the State Department has been carrying out Trump’s instructions to cease foreign assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — the so-called Northern Triangle that has some of the worst violence and the highest migration rates.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/opinion/trump-central-america-border.html