America Broke the Countries that Migrants in the Caravan Are Trying to Escape
The Trump administration should take them in to make amends, not spurn them
Trump is doing everything in his power to pull up the barricades against the advancing migrant caravan from Honduras, including threatening to call up the
military. He is also blaming everyone and everything around him, except the real culprit: The country he leads, I note in my column at The Week.
The fact of the matter is that since the heyday of the Cold War, American missteps have done much to turn these countries into living hellholes:
The United States and the Soviet Union turned these three countries into an ideological battlefield. Cuban dictator Fidel Castro started funneling Soviet weaponry and money to not just prop up Nicaragua's left-wing Sandinista regime, but also to use that country as a launching pad for a broader regional insurgency to topple the right-wing governments in its three neighbors, as University of Virginia's John Norton Moore has written. President Ronald Reagan, eager for a showdown with the Evil Empire, responded in kind, funding the Contra insurgency against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and paramilitary operations to prop up the U.S.-friendly regimes of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
The upshot was civil war and a complete social breakdown from which these countries have never recovered.
And then Obama came along and poured gasoline on the smoldering embers.
Go here to read how.
