How Miami hawks hijacked Trump's foreign policy

Juan David Rojas | UnHerd

 

In dealing with Venezuela, the second Trump administration for months oscillated between dealmaking and regime change. More recently, however, an unprecedented military buildup in the Caribbean appears to be aimed at toppling Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. The regime-change faction, in other words, has got the upper hand. But how? Blame the regime-change capital of the Americas, Miami, and its native son, Marco Rubio.

Early on, there was some hope that the White House would forgo the first term's amateur coup attempts and moralistic posturing against Maduro. Among his first acts in 2025, President Trump dispatched special envoy Richard "Ric" Grenell to broker an America First understanding with the Caracas regime.

Under the deal, Chevron could continue to export Venezuelan crude Stateside through the renewal of a Biden-era oil license. In exchange, Caracas agreed to accept deportation flights of its citizens — a vital priority given the subsequent suspension of Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Venezuelans in the US homeland. The administration thus made good on two campaign pledges: boosting fossil fuels and deporting illegal migrants.

Sadly, this understanding underwent a series of erratic twists in the ensuing months, a turn of events caused mostly by Miami's community of Right-wing Latin-American exiles.

Fly to Miami from the American heartland, and you'll find what can appear like a Right-wing foreign country, where Spanish prevails over English; and where denizens of Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and, especially, Cuban extraction pray at the altar of neoconservative ideology. This, even as they have recreated the clientelist politics of their homelands within the city council.

Drug trafficking, money laundering, as well as state- and nonstate-sponsored regime-change operations across the hemisphere form part of the city's past and present mythology. Influencers like Alexander Otaola grandstand in the form of three-hour, Castro-esque rants on YouTube, offering any and all justification for toppling regimes from Havana to Tehran.

Unsurprisingly, Trump's initial pragmatism on Venezuela didn't play well in Miami.  

 

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South American Shockwaves Bring the New Silk Road Into the Americas as Neo-Liberal Order Crumbles

Matthew Ehret
Strategic Culture

Over the past several years Latin America has become a strategic battleground which involves much more than merely “geopolitical power plays” between the USA vs China as many commentators are asserting. Of course this is not to say that there are no geopolitical battles occurring. The entire western sponsored regime change operation in Venezuela couldn’t be understood unless one realized that China and Russia see Venezuela as a strategic ally in the Americas and a future zone for Belt and Road projects which are sweeping across the world… but something more is happening.

Over the past three years, over 17 Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) nations have signed onto the new operating framework of the Belt and Road Initiative which extends far beyond the limited China-to-Europe corridor which many presumed it to be when it was announced in 2013. With its focus on long term planning and interconnectivity, China is already number one in vital infrastructure investments globally and while not number one in overall trade in the Americas, has now produced over six times more investment into Latin American energy infrastructure than the World Bank.

This new paradigm has been a breath of fresh air for many nations of the south that have been gripped by Western drug money laundering, poverty, debt slavery and organized crime which has been kept in place by over four decades of IMF-World Bank dictates enforced by London/Harvard trained economists positioned as local governors over the bodies of nationalist leaders.

In spite of the 17 nations on board the BRI, the big four powers (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia) have not yet joined, which has been a frustrating obstacle for the greater vision of integrated infrastructure to blossom. However, in the past few weeks, even this has begun to change.

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ICE agents confirm migrant 'child recycling' case in El Paso sector

Bob Price
Breitbart

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents helped confirm a migrant "child recycling" case in the El Paso Sector. They discovered child had been "recycled" in at least two prior instances, officials stated.

ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agents teamed up with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office of Field Operations (OFO) officers and Border Patrol agents under a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program targeting migrant "child recycling" and fraudulent familial claims made by Central American migrants. Border Patrol agents and CBP OFO officers processing large Central American migrant groups identified a possible fraudulent family migrant claim, according to information obtained from CBP officials. 

A CBP officer noticed several inconsistencies that led him to believe a child was not related to the alleged family member. Under continuing questioning from the OFO officer, Border Patrol agents, and the HSI agents, officials obtained enough evidence to determine the child had been "recycled" in at least two other occasions, officials stated.

"Child recycling" is a process where a migrant child who has made it into the U.S. is returned to Central America to be teamed up with a new "family member" for a return journey to the U.S. 

"The U.S. Border Patrol has continuously warned about the existence of this type of illicit activity and exploitation of minors," CBP officials said in a written statement. "Transnational criminal organizations continue to profit from individuals utilizing loopholes in our immigration system to commit fraud. These groups have no concern for the welfare or safety of the children and family groups being smuggled to the Southwest Border." 

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John Pilger: Assange Arrest A Warning From History

John Pilger
Consortium News

The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.

That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.

But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi-fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.

Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.

The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sew the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilization.” The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.

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Escobar: Are The Neocons Ready For Their Tropical Vietnam?

Pepe Escobar
Strategic Culture Foundation

Cold War 2.0 has hit South America with a bang – pitting the US and expected minions against the four key pillars of in-progress Eurasia integration: Russia, China, Iran and Turkey.

It’s the oil, stupid. But there’s way more than meets the (oily) eye. 

Caracas has committed the ultimate cardinal sin in the eyes of Exceptionalistan; oil trading bypassing the US dollar or US-controlled exchanges.

Remember Iraq. Remember Libya. Yet Iran is also doing it. Turkey is doing it. Russia is – partially – on the way. And China will eventually trade all its energy in petroyuan.

With Venezuela adopting the petro crypto-currency and the sovereign bolivar, already last year the Trump administration had sanctioned Caracas off the international financial system.

No wonder Caracas is supported by China, Russia and Iran. They are the real hardcore troika – not psycho-killer John Bolton’s cartoonish “troika of tyranny” – fighting against the Trump administration’s energy dominance strategy, which consists essentially in aiming at the total lock down of oil trading in petrodollars, forever.

Venezuela is a key cog in the machine. Psycho killer Bolton admitted it on the record; “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.” It’s not a matter of just letting ExxonMobil take over Venezuela’s massive oil reserves – the largest on the planet. The key is to monopolize their exploitation in US dollars, benefitting a few Big Oil billionaires.

Once again, the curse of natural resources is in play. Venezuela must not be allowed to profit from its wealth on its own terms; thus, Exceptionalistan has ruled that the Venezuelan state must be shattered.

In the end, this is all about economic war. Cue to the US Treasury Department imposing new sanctions on PDVSA that amount to a de facto oil embargo against Venezuela. 

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The results of US 'regime change' in Latin America & the Caribbean

The Unz Review

As the US strives to overthrow the democratic and independent Venezuelan government, the historical record regarding the short, middle and long-term consequences are mixed.

We will proceed to examine the consequences and impact of US intervention in Venezuela over the past half century.

We will then turn to examine the success and failure of US 'regime changes' throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Venezuela: Results and Perspectives 1950-2019

During the post WWII decade, the US, working through the CIA and the Pentagon, brought to power authoritarian client regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, Peru, Chile, Guatemala, Brazil and several other countries.

In the case of Venezuela, the US backed a near decade long military dictatorship (Perez Jimenez ) roughly between 1951-58. The dictatorship was overthrown in 1958 and replaced by a left-center coalition during a brief interim period. Subsequently, the US reshuffled its policy, and embraced and promoted center-right regimes led by social and christian democrats which alternated rule for nearly forty years.

In the 1990's US client regimes riddled with corruption and facing a deepening socio-economic crises were voted out of power and replaced by the independent, anti-imperialist government led by President Chavez.

The free and democratic election of President Chavez withstood and defeated several US led 'regime changes' over the following two decades.

Following the election of President Maduro, under US direction,Washington mounted the political machinery for a new regime change. Washington launched, in full throttle, a coup by the winter of 2019.

 The record of US intervention in Venezuela is mixed: a middle term military coup lasted less than a decade; US directed electoral regimes were in power for forty years; its replacement by an elected anti-imperialist populist government has been in power for nearly 20 years. A virulent US directed coup is underfoot today.

The Venezuela experience with 'regime change' speaks to US capacity to consummate long-term control if it can reshuffle its power base from a military dictatorship into an electoral regime, financed through the pillage of oil, backed by a reliable military and 'legitimated' by alternating client political parties which accept submission to Washington.

US client regimes are ruled by oligarchic elites, with little entrepreneurial capacity, living off of state rents (oil revenues).

Tied closely to the US, the ruling elites are unable to secure popular loyalty. Client regimes depend on the military strength of the Pentagon -but that is also their weakness. 


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US-Led Efforts to Overthrow Maduro Spurred by Business Interests, Not Democracy

Eva Barlett
In Gaza

“Maduro is not a dictator. He is the elected head of a government confronting a genuine national emergency engineered by hostile foreign powers. Measures taken by the government to defend its citizens against the determination of the United States to impose on Venezuela policies which cater to the interests of corporate America at Venezuelans’ expense are wholly legitimate; they represent the actions of a democracy against a US-led international tyranny.
It is important to remember that Maduro’s government, like Chavez’s, has sought to put the interests of ordinary Venezuelans ahead of those of US investors. As a result, it has provoked Washington’s enmity.”

what's left

January 24, 2019
By Stephen Gowans

The US-led and coordinated intervention to overthrow Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro by recognizing Juan Guaidó, the leader of Venezuela’s National Assembly as the interim president, has nothing whatever to do with restoring democracy in Venezuela (which was never overturned) and everything to do with promoting US business interests.

Washington’s imperial arrogance in effectively appointing Guaidó as president, attempting to go over the heads of Venezuelans—who alone have the right to decide who their leaders are—is motivated by the same concerns that have motivated other US interventions around the world: toppling governments that put their citizens’ interests above those of US investors.

That Washington has a propensity to engage in destabilization operations against leftwing governments is hardly a secret. From 1898 to 2004, the US government undertook 41 successful regime change interventions in Latin America, an average of one every two-and-a-half years. And that

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Latin America Embraces BDS as Chilean City Becomes First to Join Boycott of Israel

Whitney Webb
Mint Press News

ALDIVIA, CHILE – Last Tuesday, in the wake of recent victories for the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement elsewhere in Latin America, Valdivia, a relatively small city in southern Chile, became the first city in all of Latin America to officially join the boycott against Israel for its apartheid policies, military occupation of the West Bank and illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip. The vote to adopt the boycott at the city level was taken unanimously by the local government after the initiative was personally introduced by the city’s mayor, Omar Sabat, who is of Palestinian descent.
 
The measure adopted by the city specifically declares the municipality as an “Apartheid Free Zone” and prohibits the city from working with any business that benefits or is linked to Israel’s occupation of Palestine and/or Israel’s apartheid policy that targets Palestinians. According to the text of the declaration, the ban on working with such businesses will remain in effect until Israel ends its occupation of Palestine and dismantles the border wall; until Palestinians are granted fundamental human rights by the Israeli state and are treated as equals under Israeli law; and until the right of return of Palestinian refugees is granted, as stipulated by UN Resolution 194.

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Obama Administration facilitated Child Sex Traffickers, Senate Report Says

NWO Report

The Obama administration quietly handed thousands of Central American children to child sex traffickers, according to a bombshell Senate investigation. 

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, refused to do background checks of adults who took the children, and allowed criminals and pedophiles to take custody of vulnerable minors, according to a 56-page investigative report released in 2016.

Washingtonpost.com reports: And once the children left federally funded shelters, the report said, the agency permitted their adult sponsors to prevent caseworkers from providing them post-release services.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) initiated the six-month investigation after several Guatemalan teens were found in a dilapidated trailer park near Marion, Ohio, where they were being held captive by traffickers and forced to work at a local egg farm. The boys were among more than 125,000 unaccompanied minors who have surged into the United States since 2011, fleeing violence and unrest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” Portman said in a written statement. “What makes the Marion cases even more alarming is that a U.S. government agency was responsible for delivering some of the victims into the hands of their abusers.”

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Chile: Sex Change No Longer Required To Alter Gender Identity

TeleSur 

The supreme court ruled that the rights of transgender people need to be respected and they don't need an operation to prove their gender identity.

Chile's Supreme Court has ruled 4-1 that transgender citizens can change their name and sex on state registries without needing a sex-change operation to prove their gender identity.

The ruling said that Chile is part of several international human rights accords, including the American Convention of Human Rights and the International Pact of Civil and Political Rights, which obligates the state to "guarantee the human rights of all without discrimination based on race, color, sex, language, religion, political opinions… or any other social condition."

With these agreements as precedents, the judges ruled that "transgender people, they must always be treated with full respect and guarantees to their human rights enshrined in the various international instruments."

The ruling, released Wednesday, reads that "any change of name must respect the reality that serves the (person's) parameters." 

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Russian bank helps Venezuela defy US sanctions on cryptocurrency

RT 

The world’s first state-backed digital currency ‘el petro’ launched by Venezuela this year to circumvent US sanctions is reportedly getting help from a Russian bank.

According to Associated Press, Russia’s Evrofinance Mosnarbank has become the first international financial institution so far willing to back the petro after US authorities warned potential investors over related risks.

Investors who registered with Venezuela's government and downloaded the petro's wallet software were invited to buy the cryptocurrency by wiring a minimum of €1,000 to a Venezuelan government account at Evrofinance. The wallet software is available in Spanish, English and Russian.

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Haley, Pence Convey US Message on Venezuela: Only Election Worth Holding is One that Results in Regime Change

Eliot Gabriel
Mint Press News

As aggressive neoconservatives increasingly take the helm of the United States foreign policy establishment, Washington’s appetite for “regime change” has only grown.
 
The reinvigorated mood for intervening in the internal affairs of nations who don’t adhere to Washington’s dictates was on full display Tuesday as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley issued the demand that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro step down from office and refrain from holding elections May 20 that he is widely expected to win.

“The systematic oppression of the Venezuelan people has become an active threat to the entire region. For the safety and security of all peoples in Latin America, it is time for Maduro to go,” Haley told a conference of the neoliberal Council of the Americas at the State Department.

Following the speech, Haley pontificated about how the U.S. and its junior regional partners must redouble their efforts to force the Venezuelan leader’s abdication from office:

I am not sure how we will make that happen but I know that we can’t stop … We have to continue to isolate Maduro until he gives in.”

Broadening her fire to include the other leftist governments of Latin America, Haley described the progressive nationalist and socialist models of Cuba and Nicaragua as proven “to be a complete and total failure,” requiring that U.S.-aligned governments work with Washington to ensure that “the last few surviving authoritarians” not be permitted to “drag down the hemisphere.”

Haley had shown no such concerns about authoritarianism in February when she visited the capital of Honduras, Tegucigalpa, to drum up support for the scandalous re-election of President Juan Orlando Hernandez and to thank him for his decision to move the Honduran Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. For around two months, mass demonstrations and unrest in response to fraud allegations blanketed the Central American nation. All the while, Washington backed the right-wing, pro-U.S. incumbent to the hilt as he suspended civilian law and carried out a campaign of what local human rights monitors described as blatant “state terrorism.” 

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Venezuela Offers India 30% Discount On Oil...If It Pays In Cryptocurrency

Oil Price 

Venezuela has offered India a 30-percent discount on crude oil purchases, but only if India agrees to pay in El Petro, the cryptocurrency that Venezuela is touting as the first national digital currency backed by crude oil reserves, the Indian outlet Business Standard reports.
Venezuelan blockchain department experts visited India in March and struck an agreement with Delhi-based Bitcoin trading firm Coinsecure to sell the Venezuelan cryptocurrency Petro in India, Business Standard reported, quoting multiple sources.

Maduro’s propaganda machine is touting the digital coin as a ‘ground-breaking’ first-ever national crypto currency, El Petro—backed by 5 billion barrels of oil reserves in Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt. But most observers see this crypto issuance as a desperate attempt to skirt U.S. financial sanctions.

In March 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump banned U.S. purchases, transactions, and dealings of any digital coin or token issued for or by the government of Venezuela.

Now Venezuela wants to add the Petro as a cryptocurrency on Coinsecure to trade Petro against Bitcoin and the Indian rupee, according to Coinsecure CEO Mohit Kalra quoted by Business Standard.

“They are going to different countries and making offers. The offer that they have given to the Indian government is: you buy Petro and we will give you a 30 per cent discount on oil purchases,” Kalra told Business Standard.

Earlier this month, Coinsecure said that US$3.5 million worth of Bitcoins had been stolen from the exchange and blamed for this its Chief Security Officer (CSO) Amitabh Saxena. Investigation is still under way, Coinsecure said on Sunday.

Meanwhile, India’s crude imports from Venezuela—whose oil industry is collapsing rapidly—dropped to around 300,000 bpd between November 2017 and February 2018, down by 20 percent on the year, to the lowest level since 2012, Reuters reported in March, citing data from shipping and industry sources.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

Venezuela arrests two Chevron executives in ongoing anti-corruption probe

venezuelanalysis.com

Two Chevron employees were arrested in the Venezuelan city of Puerto La Cruz on Monday, as part of the Bolivarian government’s ongoing anti-corruption drive.

Begun last September, Venezuela’s hardline campaign against corruption and influence peddling has led to legal action against dozens of employees and executives in the state oil sector, but these are the first arrests targeting personnel from a private foreign company.

According to sources interviewed by Reuters, agents of the Bolivarian Intelligence Services (SEBIN) raided PetroPiar’s Puerto la Cruz offices, located in the northeastern Venezuelan state of Anzoategui, to make the arrests.

PetroPiar is a 70/30 joint venture between state oil company PDVSA and Chevron, the largest US oil company operating in Venezuela today. One of the detained men, Carlos Agarra, is a chemical engineer recently relocated to Venezuela from Chevron’s Argentina operations, while the second detainee, Rene Vasquez, is a procurement advisor.

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Corporate Exploitation of Global Refugee Crisis Masked as Humanitarianism

Project Censored

According to a June 2015 United Nations report, sixty million people worldwide are now refugees due to conflict in their home nations. The UN report indicated that during 2014 one out of every 122 people was a refugee, internally displaced, or an asylum seeker; and over half of these refugees were children. (For previous Project Censored coverage of the global refugee crisis, see “Global Forced Displacement Tops Fifty Million,” Censored story #14 in Censored 2016: Media Freedom on the Line.)

While Syrian refugees account for the largest number (an estimated 11.5 million people), other places such as Colombia, parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia have large refugee populations that remain largely unreported. According António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees at the time of the report, “We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before.”

Although the extent of the global refugee crisis has been covered in the corporate media (including, for example, the New York Times and the Washington Post), the exploitation of refugees has been less well covered. In February 2016, Sarah Lazare published an article on AlterNet that warned of the World Bank’s private enterprise solution to the Syrian displacement crisis. “Under the guise of humanitarian aid,” Lazare wrote, “the World Bank is enticing Western companies to launch ‘new investments’ in Jordan in order to profit from the labor of stranded Syrian refugees. In a country where migrant workers have faced forced servitude, torture and wage theft, there is reason to be concerned that this capital-intensive ‘solution’ to the mounting crisis of displacement will establish sweatshops that specifically target war refugees for hyper-exploitation.”

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Starving Venezuelans Break Into Zoo And Eat Equally Starving Animals

Comment: The CIA coup wasn't successful the first time so they took a new approach. And this is what happens when those like Hugo Chavez buck the Western neo-liberal system. He was finally removed via cancer - probably induced - and replaced with a despotic incompetent. Once Chavez was out of the way they could begin breaking the country back it's slave status. From a more equitable and nourished nation Venezuela is now broken and back in the hands of the Anglo-American nation rapists. Tragic.


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True Activist

We can't decide what's sadder, the fact that the people and zoo animals are starving, or that the people are now eating the animals.

A food shortage plaguing Venezuela right now has thrown citizens into a frenzy in search for sustenance and they have resorted to breaking into zoos to butcher and eat the animals.

Last week, groups of intruders broke into Caricuao Zoo in Caracas, Venezuela, pulled a rare black stallion from its cage, and slaughtered him there on the spot. They left behind only his head and ribs, which zookeepers found in the morning when they entered to care for the lone horse.

Earlier this month, Vietnamese pigs and sheep that called the zoo their home were stolen by citizens for food as well.

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U.S. Military: More Counter-Narcotics Funding Will Help Stem Exodus of Children from Central America

Bill Conroy
Narco News

Critics Argue Drug-War Money is Part of the Problem, Not the Solution

Some 58,000 migrant children, mostly Central Americans, have made the treacherous journey to the U.S. southern border alone over the past 10 months, but actions being considered by U.S. officials to combat the problem with more military and drug-war aid to their countries, critics warn, may worsen the violence that provokes this unprecedented exodus.

The number of unaccompanied children that have arrived at the U.S. border so far this fiscal year is up 106 percent from the same period a year earlier — with the total expected to reach 90,000 before Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year.

To put that latter number in perspective, it is nearly five times larger than the number of Border Patrol agents now stationed along the entire southern border.

The Obama administration paints the crisis as a humanitarian issue sparked by poverty, violence and the tug of family bonds. Congressional Republicans point the finger at the Obama administration’s lax enforcement of immigration laws.

Seemingly lost among the fray of political talking points over the child-migrant flight, however, is the stance of the U.S. military — which, unlike the president or Congress, is openly talking about the drug war as being a primary driver of the exodus.

Jose Ruiz, spokesperson for the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), said the transnational criminal organizations now entrenched in Central America have created elaborate networks “capable of moving drugs, money, arms and people” around the world.

“Sadly, crime syndicates that profit from human smuggling prey on victims willing to put themselves and their loved ones at great risk by entrusting ruthless criminals with their safety,” he added.

Gen. John Kelly, commander of SOUTHCOM, recently penned an opinion piece for the military press that lays out the nexus he sees between the flight of unaccompanied children and the pervasive narco-trafficking networks in Central America — particularly in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, the major source nations for the child-migrant surge.

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14 facts that help explain America's child-migrant crisis

Comment: What a mess. Since the US created many of the economic problems over decades of destabilization within these countries in the first place, it's little wonder that these children are ending up searching for the fantasy of the "American Dream." They represent the new wave of immigration from a background of grinding poverty, most of whom are not being deported back to their country of origin. While this is a no-win situation for the migrants and the fact that this experience is something no child should have to undergo, it will be a disaster for the US which is already at breaking point at so many levels. Any huge inflow of immigrants can only mean an exacerbation of socio-econmic woe for all, and precisely what some factions at the top of this Elite pyramid are looking to engineer.

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vox.com

The flow of unaccompanied immigrant children across the US-Mexico border — mostly from Central America — is continuing to gain attention as a humanitarian crisis.

So here are 14 things you need to know to get a handle on what is actually going on along the border right now; what process the US has in place to deal with unaccompanied kids and families; and what the government wants to do now.

(For more on this story, see Vox's cardstack and storystream on the crisis.)

1)  The child-migrant "surge" began in 2011, but hit a crisis point this year

Border Patrol agents began reporting an increase in the number of unaccompanied children from Central America in the fall of 2011. Because fiscal year 2012 started in October 2011, the government's official numbers show an increase starting then — but anecdotal reports demonstrate that the surge began early that fiscal year, i.e. in 2011.

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Undocumented and Underage: The Crisis of Migrant Children

Comment: There is no doubt that the exploitation and chaos inflicted on Latin America by the West is coming home to roost. Similarly, the corruption has been encouraged to breed as a result of this destabilization which can only mean more immigration. There is a policy it seems, to further tip the balance of an already disintegrating society by stimulating massive immigration upon a society in terminal decline. Once again, those that are used as pawns in a wider social experiment are the children, whether from Mexico or Gaza, it is always the same: generations of children used as fodder for the Elite. 

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Between October 2013 and May 2014, authorities at the US-Mexico border began detaining underage migrants at an alarming, never-before-seen rate. During this period, thousands of underage migrants ended up in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention facilities along the border.

Capacity at CBP detention facilities was overwhelmed by the influx of migrants, who predominantly came from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. As overcrowding became more severe, conditions for the migrants worsened. Lacking proper installations and sufficient personnel at the facilities, Department of Homeland Security officials began to release underage migrants into the custody of family members in the US, and cited them to attend immigration hearings at a later date.

The situation is similar in Mexico. The flow of underage migrants in the border region has increased rapidly, and shelters for child migrants report that the Central American population they care for now outnumbers the population of Mexican children.

VICE News travelled to the border between Texas and Tamaulipas to speak to people who have been detained on both sides of the border. They told us about their reasons for crossing the border, how they were detained, what their stay was like inside the detention centers, their plans for the future, and their fears.

Now migrants have two options: return to their country, where they could be killed by gang-related violence, or attempt to enter the United States again, hoping that their luck will change, and they will achieve their American dream.

The Face of Empire in Latin America (Part 1)

New Eastern Outlook

In his landmark post-colonial work Culture and Imperialism, the world renowned public intellectual and critical theorist Edward Said wrote, “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”

Here, Said is highlighting a fundamental aspect of the hegemony of the Western imperial system in the late 20^th and early 21^st Centuries: the need for dominance over the physical, political, and discursive space. Specifically, Said argued correctly that contemporary imperialism seeks far more than simply control over land and resources – it seeks a monopoly on information, ideology, and language.

Nowhere is this fact more apparent than in what used to be considered the United States’ imperial backyard: Latin America. The untimely death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the great unifier of Latin America in the 21^st Century, did little to stem the tide of independence from US political and economic institutions. In fact, it seems that the independent-minded leaders of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and other countries in the region, have followed Chavez’s lead in retaking control over their nations’ futures. From the expulsion of US military and intelligence forces, to Latin American governments’ taking on powerful multinational corporations, indications that the region is more independent than ever before are now unmistakable.

And so, it is against this backdrop that Washington attempts to reassert its control either directly through its military, or indirectly through destabilizations using a vast array of weapons of “soft power.” It is precisely this “soft power” – the ability to influence events using non-military, non-coercive means – that is at the forefront of the US strategy to maintain hegemony in Latin America. Taken in tandem, Washington’s cocktail of hard and soft power is at the root of the US’s Latin American policy today.

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