Trump’s “Alternative Facts” on Mexico (LIES) vs. the TRUTH

The U.S. Has Ripped Off and Bitterly Oppressed Mexico for Nearly 200 Years and Has No Right Whatsoever to Dictate to It

January 30, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

On Friday, January 27, a scheduled meeting between Donald Trump and Mexico’s president Enrique Peña Nieto collapsed. That same day, Trump tweeted: “Mexico has taken advantage of the U.S. for long enough. Massive trade deficits & little help on the very weak border must change, NOW!”

It would be difficult to pack more lies into 140 characters.

“Weak border”?!?

In 1846 the U.S. invaded Mexico and stole—yes, stole—about 55 percent of its territory. The U.S. Southwest from Texas to California and north to states like Nevada and Colorado was once part of Mexico.

The border between the two countries is one of the most heavily militarized zones in the world. The air is prowled by drones and surveillance aircraft; patrol boats scour the waters of the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico; the land crawls with tens of thousands of heavily armed “law enforcement” agents of every conceivable variety, hundreds of vigilantes, and contains several large military bases; the border itself is scarred with barbed wire, razor wire, and yes, walls.

All of it on one side—the U.S. side. All of it aimed at preventing impoverished immigrants seeking work from reaching the U.S. And those who do manage to get inside the U.S. encounter a landscape dotted with concentration camps called “detention centers,” where even children are subjected to what can only be called torture.

“Massive trade deficits”?!?

A cornerstone of U.S. wealth and global power has been ruthless domination of Mexico. For over a century some of the most profitable and powerful pillars of the U.S. economy—the great agricultural regions of California, the rich mines of the West and Southwest—developed on the backs of Mexicans and their descendants. For several decades now, bitter exploitation of Mexican and Central American immigrants in every corner of this country has been pivotal to the profitable development of U.S. capitalism. Immigrants work in key industries in every state of the country—in low-wage factory and field jobs, or driving a taxi or sweeping floors. All face rampant racist discrimination and insult in every sphere of their lives, and those who are undocumented live in fear every day that they will be fired because of their legal status, or rounded up by the immigration police.

“Mexico has taken advantage of the U.S.”?!?

U.S. capitalism-imperialism has sucked almost limitless wealth out of Mexico—its rich and varied agriculture; its oil production; the maquiladoras that line the border and subject young women to extreme, relentless exploitation and abuse. Most of all, it has forced millions of people to leave behind their families, their friends, their communities... and try to make a desperate journey across difficult terrain, past soldiers, border agents, and racists so they can hopefully find work at some shit job in the U.S. Imperialism is literally sucking the calcium out of the bones of farmworkers. If you think that’s exaggeration—learn something about the farmworkers of Guanajuato.

Now Trump is moving to greatly expand the number of people who will be deported, by declaring that virtually anyone picked up for any “offense” is a “criminal.” He says he will punish cities where police don’t go along with a federal mandate that they inquire about and turn over all immigration information they have to immigration authorities, so people can be put in detention and deported. Trump’s spokesman said, “We’re going to create more detention space for illegal immigrants along the southern border to make it easier and cheaper to detain them and return them to their country of origin.”

Renegotiating Exploitation

In 1994 the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico went into effect. This week Trump tweeted, “I will renegotiate NAFTA. If I can’t make a great deal, we’re going to tear it up.” Trump threatens that this will make “Mexico ... treat the United States fairly with respect.”

Another of Trump’s big lies is that NAFTA has victimized the U.S. and enriched Mexico. But who’s fucking over who here? As Laura Carlsen of the Center for International Policy wrote, “NAFTA has cut a path of destruction through Mexico.” Wages have plummeted, prices and unemployment have risen. One illustration of that—over two million Mexican farmers and their families have been driven from their land because massive imports of heavily subsidized U.S. grain have undercut their ability to make a living.

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U.S. capital has poured into Mexico, taking advantage of Mexico’s “cheap labor” (i.e., deeply exploited people) to cut their overall costs of production, while disrupting the development of Mexico’s overall economy. NAFTA has opened Mexico up to even more thorough and devastating imperialist plunder. It has helped impoverish millions of Mexican people and enrich U.S. imperialism.

But this is not enough for a fascist section of the U.S. ruling class coalesced around Trump, who are out to impose even more ruthless exploitation of immigrants in this country and unrestrained domination of Mexico. Trump is out to bring Mexico to its knees. Think about it. Who the hell is Trump or the U.S. to impose its will on the people of the world, and then demand “You better be nice to us”? The U.S. has no right to do this!

Trump demands to renegotiate NAFTA so that it is even more beneficial to the U.S. and squeezes even more out of Mexico’s people. This threat would greatly worsen the conditions of the Mexican people—more unemployment, more children living in poverty, a society already being torn apart by the murders and violence of drug cartels going to new levels of mayhem.

There Is No Immigration Problem; There Is a Capitalism Problem

Bob Avakian wrote:

There is nothing sacred to us about the USA, as it is presently constituted, or about the borders of the U.S. as they are presently constituted. Quite the opposite.
—BAsics 3:20

The U.S.-Mexico border was created through brutal conquest, and has served domination and exploitation since.

In the hall of mirrors that is Trumpworld, Mexico pushes around spineless America, and the border is a sieve letting in criminals who wreak havoc upon this country. In the real world, the border is a hyper militarized war zone that crushes the lives of countless people hoping for a chance to work. Mexico and its resources have been bled white by a century of U.S. imperialist domination, and millions of its people are suffering—living on the brink of starvation in a land rich in agricultural potential; scuffling for small change in a country that ships so much of its wealth to the U.S.

In this country, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is being beefed up for whole new levels of round-ups of immigrants. People are being forced into the shadows, living with the constant fear that their child, or parent, or loved one, will suddenly disappear. The federal program that lured tens of thousands of young people to turn their personal information in to federal authorities, thinking they would avoid deportation, instead put them on lists that can be handed over to immigration police, and be swept up at any time. If this sounds like what happened in Nazi Germany, that’s because it is. And it’s what these fascists are developing the ability to do here—if they are able to succeed.

What Trump is trying to unleash against Mexican and Central American immigrants, and against the country of Mexico, is not “a pendulum swing to the right.” It is an utterly illegitimate, fascist escalation of repression.

This must not be allowed to happen. It must be vigorously opposed and defeated as part of going up against the entire fascist program of Trump-Pence.

But more than that, we have to repeat the question Bob Avakian has repeatedly raised: why do we even have borders, and the divisions between people they enforce and concentrate? Why can’t we get beyond that into a freely living community of human beings everywhere on this planet? We can—by making REVOLUTION—and a big part of that revolution will be forging the links between the masses of people in Mexico, and their struggle against both imperialist domination and “their own” exploiters and oppressors, and the masses of people in the U.S., in a struggle to get rid of this imperialist system, once and for all.

 

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