The Migrant Caravan: Made in USA

Roberto SavianoMarch 7, 2019 Issue

 

Hondurans living at the Iglesia Embajadores de Jesus shelter in Tijuana while waiting for their US asylum applications to be processed, December 2018

The link in the title above will take you to an article in the new issue of the New York Review of Books. United States history in regard to Latin American has largely been patronizing and ham-fisted throughout it’s long, turbulent course. In this article, Saviano has done an excellent job of illustrating that the law of what-goes-around-comes-around is alive and well in our current troubles with our neighbors to the South.

I’ve followed our often inept relationship with Mexico and other, mostly, Central American, countries since I was in high school, and years later I wrote about the Guatemalan troubles of the late 1980s and early 1990s in my novel Body of Truth. Unfortunately, those troubles are still with us today. The circumstances have changed–a little–but the human suffering remains the same.

I wish we had the national will to take our relationship with these countries more seriously. It’s a national failing that we haven’t and don’t. I hope that will change.