It is sincerely astounding how ignorant Americans are of history.

If you bother with X, the social media platform now owned by the richest man in the world, you would think what is happening in California is an “invasion” of “communist insurrectionists.” In fact, the truth of the matter is there are few communists involved in the protests, and the “invasion” of people from Latin America is largely the fault of the United States.

If you listen to Donald Trump, virtually all these people are criminals, murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and assorted riff-raft. In fact, most are impoverished people fleeing political violence and corruption. 

The largest number of immigrants crossing the border are from Mexico, followed by Guatemala, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, and Colombia. How is the United States responsible for this migration? Let’s begin with Mexico. 

Image: Díaz wearing the presidential sash (Public Domain)

Most Americans are ignorant of the US role in impoverishing Mexicans. In 1877, Porfirio Díaz became president of Mexico. He remained in office for 35 years. During that time, he waged a brutal war on his political enemies. He was lauded by Theodore Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur. Soon after assuming office, Díaz invited foreign investors into the country, including the “robber barons” of the day, primarily Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Guggenheim, and J.P. Morgan. These foreign investors bought up large tracts of Mexican land and were dominant in agriculture and mining. By 1910, around 27% of arable land in Mexico was owned by foreign interests, and 75% of all exports went to the United States. 

Foreign investment and domination of the Mexican economy displaced 98% of the rural population.

Millions of impoverished Mexicans flooded the cities in search of work. Those who remained on the land became virtual slaves to landowners. If Mexicans attempted to oppose what amounted to the theft of their food supply and natural resources, they were murdered or sent to prison. Due to this, over the ensuing decades, many Mexicans migrated north to the United States. Even so, they were widely discriminated against with “Juan Crow” laws and were forced to take low wages and remain in poverty. The Texas Rangers, for instance, engaged in La Matanza (“The Massacre” in Spanish), and reportedly murdered around 5,000 people. 

The United States supported the cruel leader Díaz, and eventually the Mexican people staged a revolt and overthrew him.

The United States did everything it could to subvert the revolution and continue its parasitical theft of Mexican resources. 

In short, Mexican poverty is due in large part to corporate interests in the United States stripping the country of its food and resources, and this resulted not only in staggering poverty, but also decades of migration into the US. 

It was not simply Mexico that was destroyed by US robber barons and later large corporations. The CIA as busy organizing coups in Guatemala, (British) Guyana, Cuba, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Nicaragua, Honduras, Grenada, El Salvador, Haiti, Panama, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, virtually the entirety of Latin America. 

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914,” wrote US Marine Corps officer Smedley Butler prior to the establishment of the CIA. “I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” 

Corporations, banks, and American foreign policy impoverished Latin America through economic dependence and debt. These economic ills have persisted for decades and continue today, as demonstrated by widespread protests in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, beginning in 2019. All these nations suffer from inequality, debt, inflation, and increased poverty. The economic crises in Latin America persist through the policies of international financial institutions and disproportionate trade. The result of these policies has been mass migration, primarily to the United States, where the impoverished believe they will find a better life. 

Now, as protests against ICE and the immigration policies of the Trump administration spread from Los Angeles to New Jersey and New York, with more promised in other cities in the near future, we hear zero about the sordid history of the United States and its destructive behavior in Mexico and Latin America. Instead, Republicans have tainted the argument with sordid stories of killer Mexicans, brutal rapists, human traffickers, drug and weapon smugglers, and other criminals, including Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13 (which originated in Los Angeles, not El Salvador). 

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California National Guard in Los Angeles. (Public Domain)

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It cannot be denied criminal elements, including drug cartels, are crossing the border (while having their illicit funds laundered by  large banks).

However, it can be pervasively argued a vast majority of “illegal immigrants” are not drug runners or criminal gang members, but rather impoverished Latin Americans seeking a better life and attempting to escape the pernicious fallout of more than a century of US policies that have largely decimated the economies and living standards of the above mentioned nations. 

Finally, the violence unfolding in Los Angeles perpetuated by a minority of troublemakers has provided reactionary MAGA politicians and millions of their followers with an excuse to deport millions of people who are not criminals or “communists,” as the rightwing media has characterized them (and going so far as to implicate China and Russia in the violence and property damage, as this fits the foreign policy objectives of extremist politicians such as Tom Cotton of Arkansas and the neocons that direct the foreign policy of Donald Trump). 

The vast majority of people protesting against ICE are normal citizens outraged by the behavior of ICE and the Trump Justice Department. Unfortunately, far too many Americans have embraced this deceptive narrative and support the deportation of immigrants in America, immigration due largely to more than a century of the rapacious behavior of the US government, bankers, and corporations. 

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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: California National Guard in front of protestors. (Public Domain)

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