CAFTA's Promise of Security Gives Central Americans the Chills

[struggle4progress]

Pacific News Service, Commentary, Roberto Lovato, Jul 29, 2005

NEW YORK--For people like Silvia Beltran who live the tragedy that is Central American history, the passage of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) inspires deepening dread.

Beltran, the head of Homies Unidos, a gang violence and prevention program with offices in Los Angeles and Central America, heard about the July 28 House vote while on a delegation to San Salvador the same day. As if she were a Central American Cassandra portending another catastrophe for the still-devastated region, the Salvadoran war survivor cried, "Oh my God!"

The bill is hailed by President Bush and other CAFTA supporters as critical for U.S. "national security." But Beltran, Homies Unidos and others of us who have spent time in the region know all too well how the double helix of economic policy and national security in Central America gives life to the endemic violence, poverty and war there -- and to spillover violence, poverty and migration here. <snip>

The best explanations of the relationship between economic hardship, violence and gang life come from gang members themselves. In the words of Mara Salvatrucha leader Ernesto Miranda, better known as "Smoky," "To be a marero (gang member) is to come from a family that is disintegrated; it is to be a victim of violence since childhood; it is to have to abandon school in order to work and to live without studying." <snip>

http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=d44e50a10f11ca33aea62418ec39a29e

[wli]

1. it's economic terrorism

The whole of Latin America has been savagely brutalized in an unfathomably cruel and enormous series of crimes against humanity. There were functioning and healthy democracies there before the US overthrew them, massacred millions, and committed atrocities in the open air of then South and Central American jungles comparable to Abu Ghraib but of far grander scales.

The wage arbitrage about to be perpetrated against the people of the US and Central America is almost a minor footnote to these, but entirely in the same spirit.