Mass Immigration and U.S. Foreign Policy
Lidia Perez
In the 1980s, a family member of mine was attending college at the Universidad de San Carlos De Guatemala, in Guatemala City. Rolando was a vibrant 18-year-old studying to be an engineer. And while he may not have been as excited about his studies as he had been about his many friends, being a good son, he was giving college a try. Although not a friendship, one relationship he made was with a professor whom he admired. This relationship, however, ended when that professor was disappeared, making him one of among 200,000 individuals who according to a UN report were killed during the 36 year Guatemalan civil war. These individuals, the vast majority being a part of Guatemala’s large Mayan community, were regular people who were simply brave enough to defend against countless human rights violations that began this bloody war.
Although the war began in 1960, Rolando doesn’t remember being fully aware of the gravity of the situation until he was 15-years-old, in 1981. Growing up in a loving middle class home, with enough Spanish ancestry to be considered white in Guatemala, he was not among the elite but was certainly among the privileged. He even claims that the political circumstances didn’t seem to have any effect on his childhood at the time. “I didn’t know any better, I had a good life,” he recounts.
Despite his happy childhood, however, as I continued to talk to Rolando, I realized that while he had a large detachment from the war compared to other Guatemalans, his life was certainly impacted in a way I could never fathom, having grown up an American citizen. Most notably, for him, this was through education. Rolando recalls being scared to go to school every day. “The army was against education,” he said, and it makes sense why they would be. The war’s origin lies in a 1954 CIA-backed coup overthrowing democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, from office.
One reform Arbenz had put in place was granting the right to vote to illiterate individuals. The new U.S. approved autocratic ruler, Carlos Castillo Armas, withdrew this right. Therefore, the more people he deprived of an education, the less of a voting population he had to control in order to maintain his power. The U.S., subsequently, maintained theirs as well.
It seems counterintuitive that a country that requires public education of children by law would play any part in depriving children in a foreign country of theirs. However, it was actually quite a convenient human rights violation as far as the CIA was concerned. If keeping the population illiterate meant Carlos Castillo Armas remained an autocratic ruler, it also meant he could continue to be a puppet for the U.S. government. This was in the best interest of the United Fruit Company.
Now going by the name “Chiquita,” this American brand of bananas developed the business model of buying up vast areas of land at a ridiculously cheap price in Latin American countries, then using the citizens as exploited workers to control all means of production and become filthy rich in U.S. dollars. The exploited countries — Guatemala being one of them — have been coined “Banana Republics.”
While Rolando claims this greedy war played no part in his decision to leave Guatemala, it undoubtedly left the country destabilized and resulted in many less privileged individuals torn between the choice that is really no choice at all — remaining in their beloved homeland or heading North and possibly surviving. The story of the Guatemalan civil war is tragic, but it is not unique amongst Latin American countries. Name almost any one of these countries whose citizens the U.S. is trying to keep out today, and you will find a tragic story of destabilization at least partially at the hands of the U.S. This makes all the reform currently happening to our immigration laws not only completely disturbing and involving many human rights violations of its own, but also stupidly ironic.
Rolando, a U.S. citizen, didn’t want his real name disclosed in this article because of the dangers of our current immigration policy. Many today act like it’s a great burden to owe Latin American immigrants anything. But even if that were the case, if someone who has gone through the trouble of becoming an American citizen can still feel not completely safe in a country responsible for destabilizing his own, we certainly are not even giving them the bare minimum.
