Health Inequities Stemming from US Imperialism

I know that this post will upset some people. It looks like I'm a bleeding heart liberal blaming the United States for the people seeking asylum along our southern border. I know that the US isn't the only player in this mess. We would not have been be able to do what we did, and are continuing to do, without the destruction of societies that began with the colonization of the Americas. It is a long arc to get where we are today and I'm only addressing events after World War II to current day. 

Summation of Actions and Ensuing Health Inequities

The United States has a long history of intervening in the affairs of other countries. The official message is that we are the world police, looking to restore order to these destitute places and preventing corrupt governments from swindling their people. In reality we are looking out for our own best interest. Maybe our best interest is in controlling the Panama Canal, taking care of obstacles for large corporations like United Fruit Company which benefits a few very powerful Americans. We fight for policies that lower the price of the consumer goods we purchase, that give our exports the best rates. We also cause our manufacturing jobs to migrate south in a race to the bottom – who is willing to work for the least amount of money and give the least amount of resistance? As manufacturing costs go down, profits for shareholders increases.

While we do have, at long term cost to job stability, benefits from NAFTA and CAFTA, we inflict great harm on Mexico and Central America and we also hurt ourselves by allowing manufacturing jobs to go off-shore.

Because of our many interventions and free trade agreements people are coming to our southern border who are fleeing violence and destitution that, while not 100% the fault of the US, we bear a great responsibility for the instability of our neighbors to the south.

For over one hundred years the US has been actively meddling in the politics of Latin American countries after they gained their independence from their colonizers. Instead of assisting the people in rebuilding their countries, we assist in the destabilization of their countries through our fear of the spread of communism, through our belief in Manifest Destiny, through our belief that we are better.

When these citizens of central American Countries flee the violence of their homes for which we laid the groundwork, they are met with open hostility at our borders. The Trump Administration is slowing the asylum seeking process which is causing a bottle neck at the checkpoints which leave migrants susceptible to criminal elements who prey on the vulnerable.

Immigrants who cross the border and detained are treated inhumanely. Children are torn from their parents. Parents are being tricked into signing away their right to be reunited with their children. Babies and toddlers have court hearings without legal representation. The chain of custody is broken and the link to the parents is lost – children are put in foster care and some are at risk of being adopted to American families.

The trauma of being separated from caregivers and being denied comforting touch causes a sequence of events to unfold that lead to many poor health outcomes. These traumas are called toxic stress. Toxic stress leads to increased inflammatory processes and immune system changes. These adverse childhood events (trekking hundreds of miles in a hostile environment, being separated from parents, being caged like animals) are all adverse childhood events which lead to a 3x risk for developing lung cancer, 3.5x risk for heart disease and up to a 20-year reduced life span.

To make matters worse, the children who experience these traumas and develop these diseases and suffer from poor mental health perpetuate the cycle when they pass on their trauma to their children.

As these groups of people are vilified in the media, by our leaders in government, it leads to strengthen structural racism against immigrants that further leads to their devaluation and poor treatment which further impacts social determinants of health that continue to drive inequality.

Primary Care Providers in Massachusetts noted an adverse effect of ICE on immigrant health and noticed that a theme of fear emerged. Fear of deportation impacted: emotional health, interrupted care, familial separation due to detention/deportation, and perceived barriers to access.

A 2017 study of detention centers in the New York City area found ICE denied medical treatment for serious conditions like dialysis. People needing surgery faced unreasonably long delays and requests for medical care stemming from serious health complaints were ignored. Denied and delayed care often led to greater interventions being taken later: delayed cancer diagnosis, emergency surgery for malfunctioning pacemaker and emergency surgery to take care of gallstones.

Government lawyers argue soap and toothbrushes  should not be mandatory for immigrants in detention facilities. In some detention facilities  that hold 300 children to one cell there are flu outbreaks, lice infestations, no diapers with children sleeping on the floor. The Customs and Border Patrol, who run detention facilities have no plans to administer flu vaccines. A group, Doctors for Camp Closures, offered to give the vaccines to the detainees free of charge  – there would be no cost to CBP – but were ignored.

Children are being kept in squalid conditions in many facilities. Too little food that is not nutritious, lights on 24/7, sleeping on the ground in frigid temperatures with no blankets.

There are two policies aimed at deterring immigration. One was declared an official policy by Trump and his then Attorney General, Jeff Sessions: family separation. They asserted that by separating children from parents that parents would not make the dangerous journey to reach our southern border.

The other, unofficial policy to deter immigration appears to be standard operating procedure: keeping migrants, children and adults, in squalid living conditions.

We have a moral obligation to help people fleeing the violence and destitution because it is our imperialistic hands of interventions, our meddling, our trade agreements that helped to destabilize their homes. Our policies, official and otherwise, helped corrupt governments take hold. It was our fear of communism that lead to the scorched earth campaigns that played into the devastation of whole societies through guerilla warfare and civil wars.

We must face our role in the influx of asylum seekers. Until we see what led to this situation, we will continue policies that perpetuate corruption and power imbalances that leave the average citizen of these countries in dire circumstances, looking north to the land of opportunity for help. 

US Imperialism - "Free" Trade

The last post dealt with how the United States used its military to influence policies that benefitted its own political and economic interests. This post will look at how we used "Free" Trade to benefit US shareholders at the expense of our poorer partner countries and how the deleterious effects of the agreement were almost immediate, long lasting and devastating.

NAFTA – 1994

The North America Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, the United States and Canada was passed in 1994. It promised to reduce immigration from Mexico to the United States because wages would increase as tariffs between the countries would be reduced or eliminated.

For Mexico to be a party to the trade agreement they had to change part of their Constitution. After the Mexican Revolution, plots of land were given to farmers. The land could not be confiscated or sold to pay off debt. Mexico was made to change that provision. Going forward land would be able to be bought and sold, parceled together in large plots and be made available to purchase by large corporations.

NAFTA cut tariffs on Mexican corn, but the US maintained their subsidies on US grown corn which led to Mexican corn prices falling by 66%. This devastated small farmers. From 1993-2005, 1.1 million small farmers went out of business and 1.4 million jobs that depended on the small farm sector also went out of business. That’s 2.5 million jobs lost in one sector. Farm wages are a third of what they were pre-NAFTA. To add insult to injury, the cost of food increased. In the first 10 years of NAFTA the price of tortillas rose 279%. According the World Bank the number of Mexicans who could not afford a basic diet grew by 50% in the first 4 years of NAFTA.

Small farms folded and people moved to urban areas to fight for low paying jobs in manufacturing. Those jobs were short lived because those manufacturing jobs that paid around $5/hour moved to China after it entered the WTO (World Trade Agreement) in 2001 where hourly wages were $1/hour.

In the first 7 years of NAFTA migration to the United States increased 108%. In 1995 there were 2.9 million undocumented migrants in the United States. At the peak in 2007 there were 6.9 million undocumented people. It leveled off after the Great Recession.

CAFTA – 2006

Despite seeing how negatively NAFTA affected Mexico and ignoring the warnings and protestations of Central American advocacy groups and the prediction by Oxfam that 1.5 million livelihoods related to rice production would be lost, the US pushed forward to create another trade agreement. CAFTA was passed in Congress in the Spring 2006 by one vote.

Recently the CAFTA-DR, a free trade agreement between the US, Dominican Republic and 6 central American countries has worked to significantly deteriorate working conditions and wage stability for workers in central America.

Ben Beachy, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch said, “Under CAFTA, family farmers in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have not fared well, the economies have become dependent on short-lived apparel assembly jobs–many of which have vanished, and economic growth has actually slowed.”

Agricultural imports to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras has increased 78% since CAFTA was enacted. Is it a coincidence that those three countries that are experiencing economic upheaval and instability are also suffering through great violence and migration?

Summation of Actions and Ensuing Health Inequities

The United States has a long history of intervening in the affairs of other countries. The official message is that we are the world police, looking to restore order to these destitute places and preventing corrupt governments from swindling their people. In reality we are looking out for our own best interest. Maybe our best interest is in controlling the Panama Canal, taking care of obstacles for large corporations like United Fruit Company which benefits a few very powerful Americans. We fight for policies that lower the price of the consumer goods we purchase, that give our exports the best rates. We also cause our manufacturing jobs to migrate south in a race to the bottom – who is willing to work for the least amount of money and give the least amount of resistance? As manufacturing costs go down, profits for shareholders increases.

While we do have a great many benefits from NAFTA and CAFTA, we inflict great harm on Mexico and Central America and we also hurt ourselves by allowing manufacturing jobs to go off-shore.

Because of our many interventions and free trade agreements people are coming to our southern border who are fleeing violence and destitution that, while not 100% the fault of the US, we bear a great responsibility for the instability of our neighbors to the south.

For over one hundred years the US has been actively meddling in the politics of Latin American countries after they gained their independence from their colonizers. Instead of assisting the people in rebuilding their countries, we assist in the destabilization of their countries through our fear of the spread of communism, through our belief in Manifest Destiny, through our belief that we are better.

US Imperialism - Military Forces

My final assignment in my Health Equity and Justice class is going to be a series of blog posts wherein I address US Imperialism in three Central American countries: Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. I will detail how the United States encroached on sovereign nations to further its own political and economic interests. These actions our government executed in the Cold War and beyond have lasting effects on Latin America and the United States to this day. It is my hope that I can connect the actions of our past to the current events affecting the influx of migrants to the US. I will also explore how our actions have led to great health inequities for the migrants coming to the United States. Laying the framework will take up the bulk of these writings. I think it is important to understand how we got where we are today if we are to have any hope of addressing the problems. If we do not understand why the migrants have come to the United States it is easy for our politicians to dismiss these destitute people as lazy opportunists looking for handouts at the expense of the hardworking American taxpayer.

I am looking at a couple of ways in which the US’ policies and actions have worked to undermine several countries in Latin American. After World War II the United States was fearful that communism would spread to our neighbors to the south. To prevent the spread of communism, any actions or ideologies that appeared to lean socialist was squashed. The United States was also interested in advancing its own economic interests. The advancement of economic interests was often supported by US corporations, like the United Fruit Company. More recently there has been the North America Free Trade Agreement and the even more recently, the CAFTA-DR that involved the US, Dominican Republic and six central American countries.

Guatemala

Guatemala held its first democratic elections in 1945 after a revolution ousted the military dictatorship of Jorge Ubico. The newly elected president, Juan Jose Arevalo, granted voting rights, instituted a minimum wage and built 6,000 public schools. In 1951 Guatemalans elected Jacobo Arbenz to succeed Arevalo. In a time of growing fear of communism, Arbenz allowed communists to participate in the political system; in the country of 3 million people, 4,000 registered as communist. This made the US very wary of Arbenz’s political ideology.

Arbenz proposed Decree 900 which would redistribute undeveloped lands held by large property owners to landless farmers, who at the time, comprised 90% of the population. He was looking to end what was essentially a system of feudalism and serfdom but to US eyes it looked suspiciously like socialism. By 1952, Arbenz appropriated 225,000 acres and gave it to 500,000 rural workers and farmers.  The Guatemalan government compensated the landowners from whom the land was appropriated based on the tax assessments of that year. This displeased the large landowners because they had been undervaluing their land to lessen their tax burden.

Up until that point in time, 72% of useable agrarian land was owned by 2% of all landowners. Of that 2% of land owners was the United Fruit Company, a US based business. The UFC controlled 42% of Guatemalan land and paid little to no taxes or import duties. 77% of UFC’s crops went to the US.

UFC had powerful connections to the Eisenhower Administration. The Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, was an attorney whose law firm represented the UFC. The Secretary of State’s brother, Allen Dulles, was the CIA director, on the UFC Board of Trustees and a shareholder in the company. Ed Whitman, the husband of the president’s private secretary, produced a film, “Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas,” which depicted UFC as fighting communism. A result of that film, many journalists went to Guatemala, an expense that UFC paid for, and wrote pieces that showed UFC as fighters on the front lines against communism. Those articles were circulated in the US press.

In the wake of the redistribution of land, Eisenhower feared Guatemala would succumb to communism so Eisenhower used the newly formed CIA to back a coup, which was partially funded by the UFC, in Guatemala in June 1954. The CIA broadcast propaganda and jammed the airwaves. American pilots bombed portions of Guatemala City. The goal was to give the appearance a major invasion was going to take place even though the number of operatives was relatively small. Ten days after the assault began the democratically elected Arbenz stepped down. The CIA installed the dictator Carlos Castillo Armas.

This ushered in a civil war that was fought along the old Colonialism lines that pitted the poor majority of indigenous Mayans against the smaller faction of rich Guatemalans of mixed European and Mayan descent. The civil war started with the exiled remnants of the Arevalo/Arbenz governments who fled to the mountains to start a guerilla insurgency. As the government’s responses to the insurgency became more brutal, the more Mayans joined the fight and the further left they moved. Guatemala received millions of dollars from the United States during this period and tens of thousands of people died. When oil was discovered in Guatemala, efforts to remove Mayans from their land increased. Cattle ranching (primarily exported to the United States) increased, too, which placed further demand on Mayan lands.

The US had a scorched earth policy when it came to rooting out communism. By mid-80s over 150,000 civilians had been murdered in acts labeled genocide by a UN commission. For a detailed timeline of Guatemala through the years please follow this link.

El Salvador

In the continuing effort to root out communism, the United States provided the Salvadoran military support in the form of advisors and hundreds of millions of dollars to their army and other forms of military aid to help fight their Civil war in the 1980s. The war pitted leftist revolutionaries vs oligarchs and US backed generals. US provided training for the Atlacatl Battalion at the United States’ School of the Americas in Panama for 3 months. When the battalion returned, they massacred over 1200 men, women and children in El Mozote in December 1981. Of the 75,000 people killed during the war from 1980 to 1992, 85% was attributed to the US backed Salvadoran government. The US was so focused on stopping the spread of communism that it encouraged or looked the other way at human rights abuses. The Reagan administration denied involvement and tried to cover up the atrocities committed by the Salvadoran government.

Honduras

In 2009, democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya was forced out in a coup. Zelaya angered powerful elites in Honduras by pushing to settle land disputes. The United States turned a blind eye to the ouster of Zelaya, whom they viewed as a leftist in line with Hugo Chavez, and instead of trying to re-install him, they pushed for new elections. In the months leading up to a new election, protesters were silenced through torture, disappearances and murder. After the elections, the new government sold off natural resources and over 100 environmentalist activists were murdered. The Honduran economy plummeted as curfews were put in place, murder rates skyrocketed, and the cocaine trade saw as much as 80% of the smuggling flights pass through Honduras.

US Backed Alliance of Dictators

Another stain on Latin America and the United states is Operation Condor  which was described by Al Jazeera as the Argentinian base of “a U.S.-organized alliance between the dictatorships of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, created in 1975 and operational until around 1980.” The United States provided military training, financial assistance and intelligence briefings to the involved countries in its effort to stop the feared spread of communism. This alliance led to the disappearance and murder of up to 80,000 of dissidents and civilians.

This post examined the primarily military aspects of US interventions in Central and Latin America. My next post will look at the ways in which trade agreements led to the current crisis of thousands of people seeking asylum in the US.