How Americans fueled the border immigration crisis
One of the benefits of getting older is that we remember things, first-hand, that other people only discover if they stumble across obscure…
One of the benefits of getting older is that we remember things, first-hand, that other people only discover if they stumble across obscure history books.
One of those things that we remember is the U.S. evangelical movement’s genocidal war against Latin American Christians from the 1970s through the 1990s. That war, which was rationalized as a holy and patriotic war against so-called communism, is the source for much of the present-day border refugee problem — and still, nobody wants to remember it.
The genocide was committed by U.S.-armed and U.S.-funded “contras” and “death squads,” against Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, and Honduran Christians, as well as Guatemalan indigenous people. The conflict arose late in the Carter administration but gained full strength under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan.
As human rights violations mounted and the death toll grew, liberal U.S. Christians struggled to obstruct the genocide (and the conservative religious fervor behind it). They sought to educate the American public through mass media and protest. But they were vastly outfunded and outgunned by patriotic pro-war groups, military contractors, the private security industry, conservative business leaders in Central America, and evangelicals who viewed democratized Latin American Christianity as a threat to conservative authority.
The genocide was bookended, at both ends of the 1980s, by well-publicized far-right atrocities against Latin American Christians. First, in 1980, evangelical-funded far-right militias mass-raped and murdered American missionaries. (Tens of thousands of Salvadoran and Nicaraguan Christians were similarly abused, but the abuse of foreign nationals does not generate the same gravity of U.S. media interest.)
In 1989, the same evangelical militias, with additional U.S.-supplied weaponry and evangelical support, mass-slaughtered Jesuit priests.
Liberal U.S. political leaders at the time, including future President Biden, fought in Congress for an entire decade to slow and eventually stop the evangelical cultural momentum that drove the genocide.
The decade-long genocide did not occur in isolation. The U.S. far right, which today includes most white evangelicals, historically rejects democracy, human rights, self-determination, evidence-based policy, and grassroots community development. That sentiment is today stronger than in the past 70 years.
The genocide and war damage of the 1980s resulted in today’s now-chronic border refugee crisis, a problem that neither U.S. political party seriously attempts to solve due to the nature of the source problem. And that genocide was a signal to future Americans — us, today — of what U.S. white evangelicals and far rightists are capable of doing to fellow Americans, if given sufficient wealth, media control, and weapons. That day may be now.