Report: US policy in Honduras causes migration

Abstract

The delegation’s report is unusually critical of US foreign and immigration policies a return in some ways to labour condemnation of US intervention during the civil wars in Central America INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 25 Volume 22 Issue 1 2015 Although the report doesn’t mention it, the head of the dockers’ union, Victor Crespo, was forced to flee Honduras after his father was killed and mother injured, and he himself received threats to his life. A support campaign by the US International Longshore and Warehouse Union helped save his life, and eventually won guarantees that allowed his safe return to Honduras. The AFL-CIO report condemns a plan to ‘reduce the wage bill’ in the public sector by cutting jobs and privatising public services, especially in electricity. It points out that this reflects the policies of the International Monetary Fund, which called for cutting the public sector from 7.5 percent of GDP to 2 percent in four years. The resulting job loss has a clear impact on increasing poverty, forcing many Hondurans to migrate in search of survival. The report makes the case that poverty in Honduras has been deepened by the impact of the Central American Free Trade Agreement: ‘today, Honduras is the most unequal country in Latin America’. Poverty rose from 60 to 64.5 percent from 2006 to 2013. By emphasising a policy that deregulated business and used low wages as an incentive to attract foreign investment, ‘CAFTA only exacerbated the desperation and instability in Honduras’, it charges. ‘Honduran workers identified the 2009 Honduran coup d’état and the subsequent militarisation of Honduran society, and the implementation of CAFTA and its impact on decent work and labour rights, as two essential elements to understanding the current crisis’. Backing up the increasing militarisation of Honduran society is US military aid, which reached $27 million in 2012. The report notes that both Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield and Commander John Kelly of the United States Southern Command praised Honduran ‘advances in security’. In the US media, General Kelly has demonised migration from Central America, calling the movement of families and children a national security threat and a ‘crime-terror convergence’. That migration, described in the AFL-CIO report, has grown sharply. More than 18,000 unaccompanied Honduran children arrived in the United States in 2014 alone. ‘In 1990, there were approximately 109,000 Honduran migrants in the world. In 2010, that number grew close to 523,000, with the vast majority living in the United States’, it says. ‘Today, migration is seen by many families as a means to escape violence or seek employment opportunity or reunite with family, while the government has embraced the remittances from migrants as a major economic resource’. Three quarters of those migrants, arriving in the I n the wake of the political crisis in the United States last year, caused by the migration of large numbers of children from Central America to the US/Mexico border, the AFL-CIO in November sent a delegation to Honduras, the country that sent the greatest number of unaccompanied minors. ‘What we witnessed’, reported Tefere Gebre AFL-CIO Executive Vice President, ‘was the intersection of our corporate-dominated trade policies with our broken immigration system, contributing to a state that fails workers and their families and forces them to live in fear’. The report, in fact, contains a frank assessment of the history of US foreign policy in Honduras, and draws out the disastrous consequences it has created in that country today. ‘The fate of Honduras long has been tied to that of the United States’, it charges. ‘Throughout the 20th century, Honduras was key to maintaining US military and economic interests on the isthmus. The US military intervened in Honduran politics throughout the early 20th century to protect the foreign investments of large US corporations like the United Fruit Co. Later, Honduras served as a base of operations during the US-supported 1954 coup in Guatemala, as well as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and during the years of civil war and Cold War proxy wars in Central America in the 1970s and ‘80s, the government provided support for the ‘Contra...