Originally posted by Bajahowodd
| Quote: | Originally posted by BajaGringo
From that bastion of left wing thinking, the Wall Street Journal...
WHAT REALLY DROVE THE CHILDREN NORTH
By Mary Anastasia O'Grady | The Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, July 29, 2014 at 1:00 pm
In a nation where it is not uncommon to hear the other side of the Rio Grande referred to as “South America,” it is amusing to observe the recent wave
of self-anointed experts in the U.S. opining authoritatively on the causes of child migration from Central America.
Some of these are talking heads of conservative punditry who seem to know zip about the region and show no interest in learning. They wing it,
presumably because they believe their viewers and listeners will never know the truth and don’t care. What matters is proving that the large number of
unaccompanied minors piling up at the border is President Barack Obama’s fault for somehow signaling that they would not be turned back. The origins
of the problem are deemed unimportant, and the fate of the children gets even less attention.
Thank heaven for four-star Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, who knows something about war and failed states and now heads the U.S. military’s Southern
Command, which keeps an eye on the region. He has spent time studying the issue and is speaking up. Conservatives might not like his conclusions, in
which the U.S. bears significant responsibility, but it is hard to accuse a four-star of a “blame America first” attitude.
To make the “Obama did it” hypothesis work, it is necessary to defeat the claim that the migrants are fleeing intolerable violence. This has given
rise to the oft-repeated line that “those countries” have always been very violent.
That is patently untrue. Central America is significantly more dangerous than it was before it became a magnet for rich, powerful drug capos. Back in
the early 1990s, drugs from South America flowed through the Caribbean to the U.S. But when a U.S. interdiction strategy in the Caribbean raised
costs, trafficking shifted to land routes up the Central American isthmus and through Mexico. With Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s war on the
cartels, launched in 2007, the underworld gradually slithered toward the poorer, weaker neighboring countries. Venezuela, under Hugo Chávez, began
facilitating the movement of cocaine from producing countries in the Andes to the U.S., also via Central America.
In a July 8 essay in the Military Times headlined “Central America Drug War a Dire Threat to U.S. National Security,” Gen. Kelly explained that he has
spent 19 months “observing the transnational organized crime networks” in the region. His conclusion: “Drug cartels and associated street gang
activity in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, which respectively have the world’s number one, four and five highest homicide rates, have left
near-broken societies in their wake.” He noted that while he works on this problem throughout the region, these three countries, also known as the
Northern Triangle, are “far and away the worst off.”
With a homicide rate of 90 per 100,000 in Honduras and 40 per 100,000 in Guatemala, life in the region is decidedly rougher than “declared combat
zones” like Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the general says the rate is 28 per 100,000.
How did the region become a killing field? His diagnosis is that big profits from the illicit drug trade have been used to corrupt public institutions
in these fragile democracies, thereby destroying the rule of law. In a “culture of impunity,” the state loses its legitimacy and sovereignty is
undermined. Criminals have the financial power to overwhelm the law “due to the insatiable U.S. demand for drugs, particularly cocaine, heroin and now
methamphetamines, all produced in Latin America and smuggled into the U.S.”
Gen. Kelly agreed that not all violence in the region is linked to the drug trade with the U.S., but “perhaps 80% of it is.” That’s because of the
insidiousness of the vast resources of kingpins. It’s “the malignant effects of immense drug trafficking through these non-consumer nations that is
responsible for accelerating the breakdown in their national institutions . . . and eventually their entire society as evidenced today by the flow of
children north and out of the conflictive transit zone.”
That migrant children are drawn to the U.S. when they decide to flee might very well have to do with the fact that they believe they will be able to
stay because of an asylum law for children passed in 2008 during the presidency of George W. Bush. But refugees from the Northern Triangle are seeking
other havens as well. Marc Rosenblum of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington reports that, from 2008 to 2013, Honduran, Guatemalan and
Salvadoran applications for asylum in neighboring countries — mostly Mexico and Costa Rica — are up 712 percent.
Gen. Kelly wrote that the children are “a leading indicator of the negative second- and third-order impacts on our national interests.” Whether the
problem can be solved by working harder to bottle up supply, as the general suggested, or requires rethinking prohibition, this crisis was born of
American self-indulgence. Solving it starts with taking responsibility for the demand for drugs that fuels criminality.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady is a columnist with the Wall Street Journal, where this appeared July 21. |
Left bastion? Sorry Ron, but last I knew Rupert Murdoch owned the WSJ. You obviously know how left leaning Fox is.
That said, this is a very good read. |
