(C) Center for Economic & Policy Research
This story was originally published by Center for Economic & Policy Research and is unaltered.
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The U.S. Created This Migration Crisis. Here’s How to Fix It. [1]
['Kate Aronoff', 'Ben Ehrenreich', 'Marion Renault', 'Heather Souvaine Horn', 'Liza Featherstone']
Date: 2023-05-15
Drought creates troubles with food security because there’s less food being grown locally but perhaps even more so because it endangers key export crops that provide income for people to buy other food. “Drought is a stressor,” says Rupert Russell, author of Price Wars: How the Commodities Markets Made Our Chaotic World. “You get these shocks, and you get these shocks. The question is always: What are the shock absorbers? Do you have welfare states? Do you have economies that are resilient and can absorb this?”
Latin America’s resilience or lack thereof, when it comes to rising temperatures, has a lot to do with U.S. policy. As just one example, a CIA-led coup of Guatemala’s progressive, democratically elected leader in 1954 helped usher in a 36-year civil war that only ended in 1996. U.S. support for the Guatemalan elite—including with military training and hardware—helped to empower repressive leaders like General Efraín Ríos Montt, who led a genocide against the Maya people. “Mayan campesinos continue to be treated as second-class citizens and lack sufficient land to meet their basic needs,” historian Catherine Nolan-Ferrell wrote in 2021 of life under the repressive presidency of Alejandro Giammattei. “Urban working classes continue to struggle to earn a living wage. The alliance between the traditional oligarchy and military remains strong.”
U.S. influence is obvious, as well, in the recent uptick of people migrating from Venezuela. The country has faced a series of sanctions since 2017, largely targeting its state-run oil sector and resulting in a $17 to $31 billion loss of revenue. Venezuela has seen the largest-ever documented economic contraction for a country outside of wartime and is unable to restructure its $170 billion of external debts as it lacks access to international bond markets. Total imports fell by 91 percent, while food imports—which feed the majority of the population—declined by 78 percent, according to a recent report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “It’s not surprising that we’ve seen a migration exodus,” says report author Francisco R. Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist who served as chief economic and financial adviser to the Venezuelan National Assembly from 2000 to 2004. He’s now a professor at University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies. “This exodus is driven by economic considerations. It’s driven by hunger, essentially. Living conditions have collapsed. Wages have fallen to absurd levels of $5 per month. Obviously people are going to try to do everything possible to leave.”
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[1] Url:
https://newrepublic.com:443/article/172704/title-42-migrants-border-climate
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