[News] Who Killed Oscar and Valeria: The Inconvenient History of the Refugee Crisis

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/who-killed-oscar-and-valeria-the-inconvenient-history-of-the-refugee-crisis/ 



  Who Killed Oscar and Valeria: The Inconvenient History of the Refugee
  Crisis

July 17, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------

*By Ramzy Baroud <http://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/ramzy-baroud>*

History never truly retires. Every event of the past, however 
inconsequential, reverberates throughout and, to an extent, shapes our 
present, and our future as well

The haunting image 
<https://www.france24.com/en/20190626-photos-migrant-father-daughter-drowned-rio-grande-river-anguish-texas-mexico> of 
the bodies of Salvadoran father, Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 
daughter, Valeria, who were washed ashore at a riverbank on the 
Mexico-US border cannot be understood separately from El Salvador’s 
painful past.

Valeria’s arms were still wrapped around her father’s neck, even as both 
lay, face down, dead on the Mexican side of the river, ushering the end 
of their desperate and, ultimately, failed attempt at reaching the US. 
The little girl was only 23-months-old.

Following the release of the photo, media and political debates in the 
US focused partly on Donald Trump’s administration’s inhumane treatment 
of undocumented immigrants. For Democrats, it was a chance at scoring 
points against Trump, prior to the start of presidential election 
campaigning. Republicans, naturally, went on the defensive.

Aside from a few alternative media sources, little has been said about 
the US role in Oscar and Valeria’s deaths, starting with its funding of 
El Salvador’s “dirty war” in the 1980s. The outcome of that war 
continues to shape the present, thus the future of that poor South 
American nation.

Oscar and Valeria were merely escaping ‘violence’ and the drug war 
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-drug-war-and-the-caravan-1541969416>s 
in El Salvador, many US media sources reported, but little was said of 
the US government’s support of El Salvador’s brutal regimes in the past 
as they battled Marxist guerrillas. Massive amounts of US military aid 
was poured into a country that was in urgent need for true democracy, 
basic human rights and sustainable economic infrastructure.

Back then, the US “went well beyond remaining largely silent in the face 
of human-rights abuses in El Salvador,” wrote Raymond Bonner in 
the Nation 
<https://www.thenation.com/article/time-for-a-us-apology-to-el-salvador/>. 
“The State Department and White House often sought to cover up the 
brutality, to protect the perpetrators of even the most heinous crimes.”

These crimes, included the butchering 
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/12/el-mozote-massacre-waiting-justice-40-years-181210151727647.html> of 
700 innocent people, many of them children, by the US-trained Atlacatl 
Battalion in the village of El Mozote, in the northeastern part of the 
country. Leaving El Salvador teetering between organized criminal 
violence and the status of a failed state, the US continued to use the 
country as a vassal for its misguided foreign policy to this day. Top US 
diplomats, like Elliott Abrams, who channeled support to the Salvadoran 
regime in the 1980s carried on 
<https://therealnews.com/stories/elliott-abrams-the-war-criminal-running-us-policy-in-venezuela> with 
a successful political career, unhindered.

To understand the tragic death of Oscar and Valeria in any other way 
would be a dishonest interpretation of a historical tragedy.

The dominant discourse on the growing refugee crisis around the world 
has been shaped by this deception. Instead of honestly examining the 
roots of the global refugee crisis, many of us often oscillate between 
self-gratifying humanitarianism, jingoism or utter indifference. It is 
as if the story of Oscar and Valeria began the moment they decided to 
cross a river between Mexico and the US, not decades earlier. Every 
possible context before that decision is conveniently dropped.

The politics of many countries around the world have been shaped by the 
debate on refugees as if basic human rights should be subject to 
discussion. In Italy, the ever-opportunistic Interior Minister, Matteo 
Salvini, has successfully shaped a whole national conversation around 
refugees.

Like other far-right European politicians, Salvini continues to 
blatantly manipulate collective Italian fear and discontent regarding 
the state of their economy by framing all of the country’s troubles 
around the subject of African migrants and refugees. 52% of 
Italians believe <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48853050> that 
migrants and refugees are a burden to their country, according to a 
recent Pew Research Center study.

Those who subscribe to Salvini’s self-serving logic are blinded by 
far-right rhetoric and outright ignorance. To demonstrate this 
assertion, one only needs to examine the reality of Italian intervention 
<https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/how-france-and-italy-fuel-libyas-war-1.62004454> in 
Libya, as part of the NATO war on that country in March 2011.

Without a doubt, the war on Libya, justified on the basis of a flawed 
interpretation of United Nations Resolution 1973 
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12782972>, was the main reason 
behind the surge of refugees and migrants to Italy, en-route to Europe.

According to the Migration Policy Center 
<http://www.migrationpolicycentre.eu/docs/migration_profiles/Libya.pdf>, 
prior to the 2011 war, “outward migration was not an issue for the 
Libyan population.” This changed, following the lethal NATO war on 
Libya, which pushed the country straight into the status of failed states.

Between the start of the war on March 19 and June 8, 2011, 422,912 
Libyans and 768,372 foreign nationals fled 
<https://www.etf.europa.eu/sites/default/files/m/01BE9A2F283BC6B2C1257D1E0041161A_Employment%20policies_Libya.pdf> the 
country, according to the International Organization of Migration (IOM). 
Many of those refugees sought asylum in Europe. Salvini’s virulent 
anti-refugee discourse is bereft of any reference to that shameful, 
self-indicting reality.

In fact, Salvini’s own Lega party was a member of the Italian coalition 
which took part 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya/italys-berlusconi-exposes-nato-rifts-over-libya-idUSTRE7270JP20110707>in 
NATO’s war on Libya. Not only is Salvini refusing to acknowledge his 
country’s role in fostering the current refugee crisis, but he is 
designating as an ‘enemy’ 
<https://www.trtworld.com/europe/migrant-rescue-sailboat-defies-salvini-docks-in-italy-28042> humanitarian 
NGOs that are active in rescuing stranded refugees and migrants in the 
Mediterranean Sea.

According to the UN refugee agency (UNHRC), an estimated 
<https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean/location/5205> 2,275 
people drowned while attempting to cross to Europe in 2018 alone. 
Thousands of precious lives, like those of Oscar and Valeria, would have 
been spared, had NATO not intervened on the pretext of wanting to save 
lives in Libya in 2011.

According to UNHRC <https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html>, as 
of June 19, 2019, there are 70.8 million forcibly displaced people 
worldwide; of them, 41.3 million are internally displaced people, while 
25.9 million are refugees who crossed international borders.

Yet, despite the massive influx of refugees, and the obvious logic 
between political meddling (as in El Salvador) and military intervention 
(as in Libya), no western government is yet to accept any moral – let 
alone legal – accountability for the massive human suffering underway.

Italy, France, Britain, and other NATO members who took part in bombing 
Libya in 2013 are guilty of fueling today’s refugee crisis in the 
Mediterranean Sea. Similarly, the supposedly random ‘violence’ and drug 
wars in El Salvador must be seen within the political context of 
misguided American interventionism. Were it not for such violent 
interventions, Oscar, Valeria and millions of innocent people would have 
still been alive today.

/– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine 
Chronicle. His last book is ‘The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story’ (Pluto 
Press, London). Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the 
University of Exeter and was a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center 
for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa 
Barbara. His website is //www.ramzybaroud.net/ <http://www.ramzybaroud.net/>

-- 
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