AMLO Regime in Mexico: The Phony Socialist Who Does Trump’s Dirty Work

October 28, 2019 | revcom.us

 

Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO), president of Mexico, masquerades as a progressive socialist-minded leader. But ever since coming into office in December 2018, he has been collaborating with the fascist Trump/Pence regime’s vicious attacks on migrants from Central America and elsewhere. In June, under threat of punishing tariffs, AMLO agreed to measures to ensure that more refugees seeking asylum in the U.S.—which the refugees are clearly entitled to do under international law—will be sent back to Mexico or prevented from going over the border at all while they wait for their claims to be processed in U.S. courts.

Trump has threatened the caravans of hundreds of Central American refugees traveling north through Mexico by calling them an “invasion” filled with “criminals.”

The AMLO government has helped turn the threats into actual action. The Revolutionary Communist Organization (OCR), Mexico, pointed out over the summer: “Since December 2018, the Mexican state has dispersed, many times with violence, all the caravans that have been created to protect migrants from kidnapping or death.... The checkpoints and detentions of immigrants multiply throughout Mexican territory. On June 14, agents of the Federal Police killed Emma Claritza Benavides Castellón, a 12-year-old Salvadoran, and wounded two more people, when opening fire on the truck in which they were travelling in Veracruz. On the northern border, the Mexican National Guard and state and municipal police detain migrants to prevent them from crossing into the United States, as if they were U.S. migra agents.” (For the full article from the OCR, see: “We Will NOT Obey the Orders of the Fascist Trump Regime!”)

In recent months, the AMLO administration’s collaboration with Trump/Pence against Central American refugees has continued, causing further suffering and death for migrants:

* AMLO has sent forces from the Army and the Guardia Nacional (GN, a national police force newly formed under AMLO) to the southern border with Guatemala and the northern border with the U.S. This has intensified the militarization of the border regions. The GN is continuing the dispersal of caravans coming from Central America, and corralling migrants at the northern and southern borders. For example, tens of thousands of migrants from all over the world are trapped in Tapachula and other crossing points in the southern state of Chiapas, held in overcrowded detention centers or living in improvised encampments on the streets.

* The AMLO government has cut the budget for the INM (National Immigration Institute) by 23 percent. This means even less funds for migrants. Those held in detention centers are forced to sleep on the ground and suffer from extreme heat; poor and insufficient food; lack of drinking water, medical care, and bathing facilities for weeks; bedbug infestations; and overflowing toilets. In Reynosa on the U.S./Texas border, one detention center with a capacity for 50 holds 210 people, and in Palenque, Chiapas, the center holds 210, double its capacity. For the past three months, hundreds of African migrants have been camping outside of the official detention center in Tapachula, and have risen up against these conditions.

* In addition to the attacks on the caravans, the GN and soldiers have stopped migrants from traveling north by the usual means used in the past—such as riding on top of “La Bestia” (freight trains from the southern to northern border of Mexico) or using local bus and van transportation from town to town. Now, migrants are forced to take the much more dangerous sea routes or trek through the mountainous regions of Oaxaca and Veracruz. On October 11, a boat with 17 migrants, 11 of them Africans, sank—four are confirmed dead and one is missing. In the state of Oaxaca, fishermen report that for weeks, they have been seeing small motorboats packed with migrants along the Pacific coast.

* From January to August 2019, Mexican authorities detained 144,591 migrants, 43,027 of them children, and deported 94,970. As a result of the Mexican authorities holding back waves of migrants, the number of Guatemalans crossing into the U.S. has dropped 80 percent, Hondurans 63 percent and Salvadorans 62 percent from May to August 2019.

The reality is that Donald Trump has gotten much of his “border wall” through AMLO’s stepped-up anti-immigrant actions on Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala and the northern border with the U.S. The reality is the lives of many tens of thousands of refugees and migrants are in even greater jeopardy because of this. This is the handiwork of U.S. imperialism under the Trump/Pence regime, with the collaboration of the Mexican AMLO government.

The Demonization, Criminalization and Deportations of Immigrants

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