by JANINE JACKSON
Undocumented immigrant families walk before being taken into custody by Border Patrol agents on July 21, 2014, near McAllen, Texas PHOTO/John Moore/Getty Images/The Intercept
CounterSpin interview with Suyapa Portillo on Central American deportees
Janine Jackson: “If you come from some place because someone wanted to kill you, if you go back they are going to kill you.” Disturbing words from a young woman explaining to Al Jazeera why she made the perilous trip from El Salvador to the US. After being kidnapped and assaulted at age 16 by armed men, she became one of tens of thousands of children coming into the US without a guardian from the three Central American countries—El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—known as the Northern Triangle. Most are fleeing a level of violence that’s hard to fathom, but the Obama administration is stepping up raids and deportations, which officials tell the New York Times are aimed mainly at Central American mothers and children.
What’s going on here, and what could journalists be asking about it besides what effect it might have on the election? Suyapa Portillo is assistant professor of Chicano/a- Latino/a transnational studies at Pitzer College. She joins us now by phone from California. Welcome to CounterSpin, Suyapa Portillo.
Suyapa Portillo: Thank you for having me.
JJ: Well, let’s talk about why people come from these Central American countries that are being targeted right now for deportation. It isn’t because the journey is easy or because life is easy once you get here. And, indeed, they aren’t mainly coming here, despite the impression one might get; they’re mainly trying to go to Belize or Costa Rica or Panama. But why do so many feel that they have to leave?
SP: Looking at the individual countries, they have such a different history, right? Guatemala and El Salvador saw a protracted conflict. In Guatemala since 1952, 1954, with over 200,000 murders, and many, many more disappeared by the state and by US collusion with the state. El Salvador saw over 70,000 murders by the military, again with US involvement, in the 1980s. And the peace accords were signed in 1996 for Guatemala, 1992 for El Salvador, so that was really recent. And then you see these countries go from that, thrust into neoliberal politics, export-processing zones… Peace meant a transition into this ultra-capitalist system.
What happens is, those people couldn’t find jobs, right, going from the war. Either they had to migrate because of death — so many of them lost family members and came in the 1980s; and so the kids now want to reunite with those people that came in the 1980s, their parents, right? So that’s one issue.
The other issue is, what are these graduates going to do, these people that were children in the 1980s that are now adults, where are they going to work? At a maquiladora, sort of a sweatshop, which does not respect labor rights? That is what I think is at the crux of this. Everybody else is talking about violence and all this stuff, but, you know, that is violence, when you go from an extreme authoritarian system into this free capital system. These countries haven’t had a chance to transition into any kind of peace, or any kind of normal functioning.
So when we think about why people are coming, well, people have been coming since the 1980s, it’s just that they were coming and living in the shadows in the 1980s to escape the violence. Over 97 percent of asylum claims in the 1980s were denied political asylum. And, you know, that continues today with Central America. So it seems like if the US were to acknowledge Central Americans, it’s almost like the State Department would [have to] acknowledge its complicity with the level of violence that has been happening, not just right now, but over a hundred years in the region.
JJ: I want to pull out a point that you made in the midst of that, which is that while the US was in the midst of the dirty wars in Central America under the Reagan administration, you said that over 97 percent of Central Americans were denied political asylum at that time.
SP: Exactly.
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting for more