Janine Jackson interviewed the Americas Program’s Laura Carlsen about Biden’s Central American policy for the June 25, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Human rights activists and historians have long pointed out that anti-immigrant fervor against people from Central America, in addition to its fundamental inhumanity, betrays an ignorance—or ignoring—of the main causes of migration from Central America, and the relationship of those causes to US actions in the region.
Now Biden administration officials are talking about “rooting out corruption” as part of a policy to discourage migration. And if you hold a vision of the US as valiant bringer of democracy and defender of human rights, that might sound plausible. But if you’re aware of the US’s actual historical and present-day role in Central America, it lands very differently.
Our next guest has just written about this. Laura Carlson is director of the Americas Program at the Center for International Policy. She joins us now by phone from Mexico City. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Laura Carlsen.
Laura Carlsen: Thank you, Janine, for the invitation.
JJ: Listeners may have heard that the Biden plan promises to promote “the rule of law, security and economic development” in Central America—explicitly tied to the idea that, as Vice President Harris put it recently, they “stay home.”
It seems as though it’s being packaged as a shift in course in response to some new humanitarian view of migrants, but hasn’t that always been the US claim for their interventions in Central America: law, security and economic development? And, then, what has that meant in reality?
LC: Yeah, historically, there has been the justification that the United States is helping Central America. And that’s what we want to challenge at this time. The basic idea behind the Biden plan is going to the root causes, and yet there’s no mention whatsoever of the numerous forms of intervention that have caused the deterioration in the rule of law, that have actually heightened corruption in the midst of what he calls his anti-corruption campaign, and that have made living conditions in so many of these countries, but especially in Honduras, so terrible that people are fleeing.
The point of going back to a lot of that history, and particularly looking at the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras (we’re about to see the 12th anniversary of that) is not necessarily to assign blame, although it’s important to understand that, but to really take into account how these forms of intervention have directly led to the conditions that migrants are fleeing in Central American countries and, again, particularly in Honduras.
JJ: Historian Aviva Chomsky was noting that the Biden plan includes specifically the idea of aid money going to “upgrading local military and police forces,” and that’s seen as somehow being part of the anti-corruption campaign. But we know the role that those military and police forces have played. And so, if I could just draw you out further on that aspect of it, and particularly with regard to Honduras.
LC: That’s right, Janine, and we do know the role, because there have been investigations, and there have been scandalous cases; particularly in the Ahuas case, where the DEA was in a helicopter on a supposed anti-drug mission and shot native people in Honduras. There have been abuses all the time, and it’s not just abuses that happen within the system: If you look at how the Honduran military and police work, the entire system is built on a high degree of corruption, of complicity and of abuse of human rights.
Supposedly, under Central American cooperation plans, over the last decade at least, there’s been a lot of US taxpayer money invested in training police in human rights, in training the military. And then many of these same military people who’ve been trained, at the School of Americas in the United States and other facilities, end up being the major violators of human rights, including extrajudicial executions, sexual abuse, a whole litany of abuses that later come out.
And they’re the same people that have been trained in the United States. So it’s kind of unfathomable that they expect to get a different outcome from this.
And that’s where you have to start wondering: What do they really expect? Are they trying to eliminate the “root causes of migration” and the problems with Central America, or are they generating contracts for intelligence and the military complex in the United States, which gets this aid money—Honduras doesn’t get it; Honduran organizations, generally speaking, don’t get it either—in order to continue this revolving door between the companies, and between the lobbyists, and between the campaign donations, and the politicians.
So there’s really a lot of skepticism within the United States, those of us who have worked in solidarity, but also within Central America, as to what the Biden administration really plans to do with this $4 billion package of aid.
Foreign Policy in Focus (6/21/21)
JJ: Let’s talk about the spotlight of your recent piece. First, I wanted to note, as you do, that Honduras is the source of the majority of Central American migrants to the US. So it’s notable that Vice President Harris, on her recent trip, didn’t go there, or “go there,” you might say, and that’s telling.
But many listeners will remember—we talked about it numerous times on this show—the 2016 murder of Honduran indigenous rights and environmental activist Berta Cáceres. Now there’s a case coming up involving the people behind the people who killed her. And you say that that kind of provides a test case for what Biden’s Central America policy and anti-corruption policy is really going to mean.
LC: That’s right. The fact that she didn’t go to Honduras was for a pretty obvious reason, in that the president, Juan Orlando Hernández, is mired in corruption accusations, and a considerable amount of evidence: First, there was the stolen election, where he wasn’t even supposed to be allowed to run for reelection in the year 2017, and now, a series of cases in the New York district court, where his brother has already been sentenced to life for drug trafficking, and there was testimony that the profits from that drug trafficking actually went into Juan Orlando’s campaign. There’s a couple of other cases that are coming out now too.
So he’s a complete embarrassment. And the idea that you would launch an anti-corruption campaign with this person as your counterpart just wrecks credibility from the get-go.
Now, in the case of Berta Cáceres and the trial, all eyes are on this trial, because many people will recall that at the first trial, the hitmen, the murderers themselves who actually carried out the crime, were convicted. And they included people that worked for the hydroelectric company, DESA, that was building the dam that Berta and the Lenca people opposed on their land. And it also included former, and even active, military members. So just in that first trial, it became clear the kind of complicity that was going on between the state and the company to get rid of a movement and an individual who was standing in the way of their lucrative businesses—illegal businesses, in many cases.
Now, the family of Berta and the movement, COPINH, that she founded, that her daughters are now leading, have insisted all the way along that if there is to be real justice, there has to be a conviction for those who planned the crime, not just those who were hired to carry it out. There has to be a revelation of the interest behind this.
Because, otherwise, you have a situation that sends a very strong message that if a land defender gets in the way of a megaproject that has the backing of a corrupt state, they can be assassinated with impunity. They want justice in the case of Berta, but they also want to set a precedent that this cannot happen again, anywhere. And that’s why it’s so important on an international level as well.
David Castillo was the head of DESA, the hydroelectric company, at the time of the murder. They have presented overwhelming evidence that he was monitoring Berta’s actions, that he was in constant contact with the men who have been convicted of carrying out the murder. And there’s also been evidence presented that links him to criminal structures behind the imposition of these megaprojects.
So this trial is critical, not only because it goes to the mastermind behind this murder, but also because it opens the door to several other accusations and charges that have already been filed, that continue to go up the line and continue to look for the very powerful, and the so far untouchable, interests that led to this crime that affected so many people throughout the world.
JJ: Let me just ask you, finally: When Berta Cáceres was killed, there was—in the US media—there was outcry. They covered it, major media covered it. But in that coverage, we at FAIR found that almost no one mentioned that the regime, the leadership that was involved in that, none of them connected to the 2009 coup, or the fact that that coup was supported by the US under Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In other words, any potential involvement of the US in that crime was erased from the coverage.
What are your thoughts about what media could be doing? What are you concerned they might do during this upcoming trial? And I guess it’s just we’re hoping for them to make the connections that are there.
Laura Carlsen: ” $100 billion could make things worse, if you’re giving it to a system that’s fundamentally corrupt, and that has never been fully returned to a democratic state since the 2009 coup.” (image: Emergencia Mx)
LC: Definitely the connection has to be made, and this is a good time to do it as well, because it’s the anniversary of the coup. The coup is not just something that happened in the past in Honduras; it has basically destroyed, practically, the democratic institutions in the country, and placed the country on a progressively authoritarian track that includes these high levels of corruption and impunity.
The exercise you did is really important. It’s important that people understand that, because, as I said, this historical blindness, it’s not just a problem of not recognizing the responsibility of the United States. It’s a problem that if we don’t recognize that responsibility, if we don’t recognize that history, and how things got as bad as they are now, there’s no way that it can be fixed. $4 billion won’t do the trick. $8 billion won’t do the trick. You know, $100 billion could make things worse, if you’re giving it to a system that’s fundamentally corrupt, and that has never been fully returned to a democratic state since the 2009 coup. And you could go back and look at a number of factors in the earlier dirty wars and US interventions that contributed to it as well.
So we have to thoroughly analyze that history, we have to thoroughly take into account mistakes that were made, powerful interests that have overwritten democracy and have overridden human rights, and have made massacres of land defenders—not just Berta Cáceres, but scores of land defenders in Honduras—possible, and led to the extreme rate of violence and poverty that we’re seeing today, that of course has been now exacerbated by the pandemic and the hurricanes. To just blithely say, “We’re going to go in now as if nothing happened before, and we’re going to help these people without taking responsibility,” is going to have a terrible outcome for the Honduran people, and for the cause of justice on a global basis.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas Program at the Center for International Policy. Her article, “The Trial for Berta Cáceres’s Murder Will Test Biden’s Central America Policy,” appeared recently in Foreign Policy and Focus, among other outlets. Thank you so much, Laura Carlsen, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
LC: Thank you.
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