Members of the caravan of migrants and asylum seekers from Central America are revealing why people are getting up and walking out of their countries, and heading for the United States. They are starving in Guatemala. They are leaving Honduras because they have been run out of business, lost their jobs or land and seek a better life.
They are leaving because there is mass violence and it is no longer safe for women or for raising children. They are coming up here because United States corporations have been down there wreaking havoc.
Each year, improved technologies make it possible for U.S.companies to produce more goods and service with fewer workers. How do corporations solve the problem of selling more, when there are fewer buyers? They transfer that problem to Latin America by dumping their cheap , subsidized commodities on Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador Tariff free, wiping out their local producers and ruining their economies. The corporate need for maximum profits stands in stark opposition to democracy and human rights. To enhance one is to diminish the other.
Corporations can sue whole governments under CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and recover billions of dollars in lost profits even if the corporations illegally stole land, polluted the environment and cause injury or death. To guarantee rulings in favor of corporations, these Investor State Settlement Dispute, suit take place in secret tribunals hosted by the World Bank, unaccountable to any democratic institution. Thus corporate private property rights Central Americans have to life or liberty.
If legal measures like CAFTA aren't enough, extralegal ones are used. According to a study by Global Witness. Nowhere are you more likely to be killed for standing up to companies that grab land and trashed the environment than in Honduras. Anyone opposing corporations is assassinated or disappeared. If democratically elected government governments attempt to intervene on behalf of their, they are overthrow with a coup. Life has become so unbearable for human beings that they have no choice, but to in mass get up and leave for fear of losing their lives. While human life attempting to survive encounters borders every step of the way, there are no borders that U.S. corporate profits is bound to respect.
When this caravan made up of women, children, and families reaches our southern border, will they again be in fear for their lives, met by bayonets and machine guns? or shall we as Americans , remember that it is the corporations who have lowered our wages here , foreclosed on our homes,
closed our schools, denied us heath care, polluted our water, made us homeless , suppressed our votes, and backed it all up with police terror.
In case any of us have forgotten , let this caravan of humanity be our reminder that all human beings, as a birthright, must have access to the tree of life and any corporation or corporate run government, who denies access must be replace. said Joseph Peery of the People Tribune.
