“This is your moment.  Gather your friends and grab it!”

This fall has been stressful for everyone.  It is sinking in what it means to have an authoritarian in the While House whose heroes are murderous men like Duterte, Bolsonaro, and Mussolini.  He proposed a sexual predator for the Supreme Court and Congress shamefully acquiesces.  Climate change sets swaths of California on fire, thousands of people lose their homes, and our campus becomes a sunken bowl of toxic smoke until none of us can breathe and we must stay indoors as if we were under house arrest. And the President’s response is that California should rake the leaves off the forest floor—presumably after all the trees have been chopped down by his friends in the logging industry.  And now we see pictures of women and children running away from the teargas that the Border Patrol launched into Tijuana to prevent them from reaching the United States after walking weeks and thousands of miles from Honduras and other Central American countries.  (Editor’s note: Since this piece at least one 7 year old girl has died from lack of care in a detention facility and migrants on the Mexico side of the border now have numbers on their arms in the manner of the Nazi concentration camps)

What would make it worth leaving your home, your community, the country of your birth, and everything you have ever known?

Honduras has the highest murder rate in the Americas (and competes with other unfortunate countries for the highest in the world), at almost 30 people assassinated per day.

Honduras has 12,000 men and boys in maras, both the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and La 18 (M-18).  By comparison, only three cities in the entire United States have police forces that large (Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York).  The gangs force all small businesses to pay a “war tax” very week, sometimes US$200.  Workers in the maquiladoras, too, have to pay up to US$100 per week, leaving them with next to nothing to support themselves and their families.  The police, the military, and public officials get their cut from the extorsion racket, so they look the other way.  All of these groups, individuals, and agencies are involved in the drug trade.  The president’s brother was arrested in Miami about 10 days ago, in fact, for drug trafficking.  In a perverted sort of compulsory draft, the gangs force male children into their ranks; girls are subject to rape.

Under such circumstances, is it any wonder that Hondureños would be leaving by the thousands, like the Exodus of the Old Testament?

“These young men found a country wasted by war, high-caliber weapons by the truckload, and traffickers searching for partners”

How did this happen?  Let’s ask the historical question:  what are the origins of this horrific social decomposition and massive population flight? It goes back to the 1980s.  And it is all linked to American foreign policy.

In the 1980s, the US was involved in wars in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.  The motive was anti-Communism, as the US sought to destroy social movements, both armed and peaceful, that struggled against dictators, military governments, and tiny land-owning elites that monopolized power and wealth in all four countries.  The wars lasted anywhere from 10 to 40 years.  The US supported the status quo in each country, pumping millions of dollars daily to defeat all the social movements and revolutionary guerrillas to the point of genocide, for example, against the Maya people of Guatemala.  The wars destroyed all four countries.

In Honduras, specifically, the US built 12 military bases which were used for two purposes: to attack the revolutionary government in power in neighboring Nicaragua; and to traffic Colombian cocaine to the US with the complicity of the Central Intelligence Agency (that led to the crack epidemic in Los Angeles and from there the rest of the urban centers of the US).

In El Salvador, the war caused an early exodus of salvadoreños, thousands of whom ended up in Los Angeles.  There the children of refugees formed the MS-13 and the M-18 and learned the violence they would take back to El Salvador in 1996, when Bill Clinton began deporting gangsters.  These young men found a country wasted by war, high-caliber weapons by the truckload, and traffickers searching for partners to send cocaine to the United States—the largest drug market in the history of humanity.  A match made in hell.

In 2009 President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, supported a coup in Honduras that installed the right-wing faction back into power, at the same time that the dynamic duo put deportations into high gear.  By the time he left the White House, Obama had earned the nickname “deporter-in-chief” in the Latino community because he had deported more Latin Americans than any other president in history, 2.5 immigrants between 2009-2015.

The result is what we are witnessing today:  hondureños, salvadoreños, guatemaltecos fleeing for their lives to the country that, ironically enough, bears a great deal of responsibility for their misery and pain.

Yes, the US government laid the foundations for this Exodus.  The least it should do, therefore, is to welcome and take care of the victims it created.

And you?

On a college campus, your number one duty is to educate yourself about these issues.   Find the classes and the professors who will teach you about reality from a Liberal Arts perspective, so you may become excellent critical thinkers and don’t fall prey to lies from the White House, the Congress, the media, or Netflix!  So you learn from reliable sources rather than ideologically driven fiction. 

Your second duty is to use your liberal arts skills (evaluating information, making informed arguments) to convince all your friends to educate themselves too.  You are all active in student organizations:  persuade them to find those classes and those professors.  Banish ignorance among your peers! 

Third, become engaged locally.  The College is the real world.  Did you know that our mission-driven university that focuses on social justice and talks a lot about educating the poor is not, is not, is not a sanctuary campus (for undocumented students and staff)?

Fourth, become engaged more broadly.  California has a real chance to do the right thing.  We have a Democratic governor and a Democratic super majority in the State Assembly (including a Senator who is a graduate of Saint Mary’s College, Maria Elena Durazo).  Push them to do the right thing.  Don’t sit back and figure they will take care of something or another.  Push them to make the laws that we the citizens want and need:  stronger anti-gun laws; stronger laws against rape, sexual assault, and violence against women and LGBTQ people; education reform that really educates; incarceration reform that puts in the jail the true criminals; drug laws that really work to decrease addiction and provide people the services they need; better environmental laws that mitigate the effects of climate change; improved housing and health care laws that guarantee those basic human rights to everyone who lives in California regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, class, or national origin. 

This is your moment.  Gather your friends and grab it!  Utilize those liberal arts skills that you have been mastering: analyze the problems, figure out their roots and causes, and then unleash your creativity to solve them.  Enter to learn; leave to lead!  This is a historic opportunity:  show, from our corner of the country, that another world is possible.  You are not alone in this.  We are all right behind you!

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