Who is guilty in immigrant deaths?
By Heather Cottin
When 19 women, men and children died of asphyxiation,
hyperthermia and dehydration in a truck in southern Texas last
week, authorities were quick to blame the driver. They needed a
scapegoat, someone on whom to focus media attention while the
real perpetrators of this crime went free.
There is talk of the death penalty for driver Tyrone
Williams, who comes from Jamaica and lives in a working class
neigh borhood in Schenectady, N.Y. Williams was driving his own
rig. He is one of the thousands of independent truckers in the
U.S. who leave their families for long periods, traveling great
distances trying to make a buck. Williams's semi usually
transported milk from New York to Texas and watermelons from
Texas to New York. When he was approached by people who offered
him money to transport Latin American economic refugees through
Texas, he agreed.
Williams was offered $2,500 to transport what he was told
was a group of 16 people who were returning to the U.S. from
visiting their families in Mexico, or who were trying to get
work in the United States for the first time. (Newsday, May
19)
Only it wasn't 16 people, it was closer to 100. And they
came from several countries: Honduras, where 67 percent of the
population lives in poverty; the Domin ican Republic, where 60
percent of the people are poor and 20 percent survive on less
than $1 per day, according to a 1999 report by the Organization
of American States; and Mexico, where over 17 million people
subsist on less than $350 per person per year. Two-thirds of
Mexico's population of 34.1 million live below the poverty
level.
Refugees of this system of misery risk death trying to get
into the United States.
Williams's tractor trailer was just one of thousands of big
rigs that take on human cargoes in return for a few thousand
dollars. His truck was locked tight and the people inside were
trapped in the hot Texas sun for hours. One by one they died.
One was five-year-old Marco Antonio Villasenor Acuna of Mexico,
who was traveling with his father. By the time Williams
realized something was wrong, 17 people were already dead.
Others died later in Texas hospitals.
Williams and the Latino workers were all caught in the
growing economic crisis.
Mexico's economy has been in decline for some time. In the
1990s the government ended the right of millions of Mexicans to
own communal land. Priva tization by U.S. transnational
corporations forced millions off their land and into the
cities, where unemployment burgeoned. Then the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) encouraged the growth of the
maquiladoras--factories along the U.S. border that pay wages of
$3 to $5 per day while Wall Street benefits. To escape this
misery, thousands have tried to emigrate to the Southwest, a
region the U.S. took from Mexico in a war of aggression in
1848.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government and racist vigilantes
demonize and hunt down these refugees. Mexicans and Central
Amer icans are denied visas and called "illegal aliens."
Hundreds of right-wing racists prowl the southern region of the
United States in death squads, their mission to stop the
migration of Latin American people into the United States. In
October, a dozen Mexicans were shot and two were killed by
vigilantes in Arizona. (Washington Post, Oct. 19, 2002)
These racists work in concert with the Immi gration and
Natural i za tion Service, the Border Patrol, and now the
Depart ment of Home land Security. Anti-immigration activity is
not new. Two decades ago, border guards and racists hunted down
Central Americans who were fleeing U.S.-sponsored wars against
the peasants and workers in El Salvador, Guatemala and
Nicaragua.
U.S. wars against peasants
In the 1980s the U.S. backed fascist oligarchies in Central
America while organizing and paying for wars against
revolutionaries seeking land reform. In El Salvador, for
example, 14 families owned 80 percent of the land. In
Guatemala, the U.S. corporation United Brands, formerly United
Fruit, owned the majority of the arable land. In Nicaragua the
Sandinista revolutionaries tried to hold onto land reforms, but
the Pentagon and CIA waged a bloody war against them.
In the end, the "neoliberal" economic schemes backed by the
U.S. prevailed. NAFTA and the Free Trade Area of the Americas
have codified this iniquitous system.
NAFTA canceled tariffs on U.S. products sold in Mexico,
economically obliterating up to 80 percent of Mexican farmers,
who could not compete with U.S. agribusiness. As many as 10
million farmers will be forced off their land by 2004. (Jerry
Mander, "The Case Against the Global Economy," p. 126)
After NAFTA was signed, huge numbers of Mexican peasants
were forced off their ancestral lands. The transnationals have
turned these fertile regions into plantations where export
crops destined for the United States are grown. The trans na
tionals pay the workers starvation wages.
Land reforms have been reversed. Landless peasants have
flooded into the cities to compete for low-paying jobs in areas
where unemployment can be as high as 35 percent. The U.S.
enforces these conditions with money, militarism and
manipulation. Billions in profit go to United Brands, Domino
Sugar, Liz Claiborne, General Motors, Chrysler, Fisher Price,
U.S. banks and other trans nationals. They suck the resources
and lifeblood from these countries, destroying their economic
sovereignty. Their junior partners, the oligarchies of Central
Amer ica and Mexico, allow U.S. corporations to enslave and
impoverish their populations.
The policies of the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank have rendered Caribbean, Central American and
Mexican peasants and workers poorer than they were in 1980.
So, in the Southwest, there is a land-office trade
transporting people desperate to work into the United
States.
Independent truckers are vulnerable to the bribes of the
"coyotes," the people who smuggle Central Americans and
Mexicans into the U.S. These small businesses are on the ropes
and losing ground to the huge trucking conglomerates. They have
faced large price hikes in tolls, fuel oil and insurance.
Independent truckers and the people who run these smuggling
operations make a few thousand dollars at most. When the U.S.
government arrested four individuals, including Williams, for
the murder of the migrant workers in Texas, it targeted the
wrong criminals.
Those really responsible include the Bush administration,
which reneged on its promise to Mexican President Vicente Fox
to open the border to migration. Instead the Department of
Homeland Security is encouraging militia groups and border
guards to kill and imprison refugees of this cruel system.
Also culpable are the transnationals that employ 1 million
workers in the maquila dora towns along the U.S.-Mexican
border. And the U.S. agribusiness owners making billions from
the cheap labor and land stolen from poor peasants in Mexico,
the Caribbean and Central America.
The real criminals are the capitalists who make billions
from these arrangements, and the corrupt governments that
benefit from the economic plunder of the increasingly
impoverished people of these regions.
Reprinted from the May 29, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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