Honestly, you couldn't have made it up, could you? I'm thinking about an American president intent on ensuring that Planet Earth will indeed burn to a crisp. And, of course, you know exactly who I mean and he's made no secret of it, has he? After all, he ran for a second term in office by swearing to immediately shut down wind power in this country. ("We are going to make sure that that ends on day one.")
And indeed on day one of that second term, Donald Trump released an executive order, "Unleashing American Energy," that said in part, "The calculation of the 'social cost of carbon' is marked by logical deficiencies, a poor basis in empirical science, politicization, and the absence of a foundation in legislation. Its abuse arbitrarily slows regulatory decisions and, by rendering the United States economy internationally uncompetitive, encourages a greater human impact on the environment by affording less efficient foreign energy producers a greater share of the global energy and natural resource market. Consequently, within 60 days of the date of this order, the Administrator of the EPA shall issue guidance to address these harmful and detrimental inadequacies, including consideration of eliminating the 'social cost of carbon' calculation from any Federal permitting or regulatory decision."
Really?
Yes, it's true, as president the second time around, Trump is a genuine climate-change nightmare. His focus has long been on "unleashing American energy" and by energy, you can bet he doesn't mean anything involving the sun or the wind. In early April, he typically issued another executive order -- "Protecting American Energy From State Overreach" -- that went after any state laws or other activities directed at turning down the flame on oil, coal, and natural gas production, especially by putting price tags on systems of carbon emission. Meanwhile, he's opened 1.3 billion acres of offshore waters to new oil and natural gas drilling. And, of course, that's just to start down a list from -- literally -- hell.
With that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon fill you in on just how, in these years, our country has been -- and yes, there's no other word that quite catches it -- exporting the ravages of climate change (among other ravages) to our neighbors in Central America. It's no exaggeration these days to say that we're in a world distinctly going to hell in a -- well, perhaps not handbasket -- but (at the moment) a Trump basket. And with that in mind, let Gordon fill you in on how this country exported both gang warfare and climate change south with an eerie passion. Think of it, in fact, as climate change (and gang) imperialism. Tom
Gangs and Climate Change, Born in the USA
Drive Migration and Autocracy in Central America
Recently, I had the opportunity to stand in a friend's kitchen eating pupusas, the Salvadoran national food, while listening to an update on conditions in Central America from Cristosal's Noah Bullock. Cristosal is a key Central American human rights organization engaged in legal advocacy, forensic investigation, and amplifying the voices of people who are experiencing -- and resisting -- repression in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Noah offered considerable detail on the conditions in those countries, but his basic message for us living so far away was simple: No matter how dark the road gets, we keep on walking. We know the sun will rise again.
So, while most of the world (and the media) is all too reasonably focused on the ever-evolving, increasingly disastrous conflicts in Iran and Lebanon, I found myself instead thinking about the countries to our south.
Benign Neglect?
During the years when our main political work involved opposing U.S. aggression in Latin America, my partner and I used to believe that the whole region would be better off if the imperial eye were focused on other parts of the world. Most Central American countries may be poor, but they're more likely to prosper during times when Washington isn't treating them as backyard gold mines, or pawns in a global conflict.
Take Nicaragua, for example. U.S. Marines first occupied that country early in the last century and, by the 1920s, had helped establish a dynastic dictatorship there that would last until 1979. During that time, U.S. companies profited endlessly from various forms of resource extraction, including the gold of the Las Minas (The Mines) area, comprised of the towns of Siuna, Rosita, and Bonanza; lumber from various parts of the country; and palm oil from its Atlantic coast.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States used its Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union as a pretext for directly meddling in the lives and politics of countries across Latin America. Bogus threats of a communist takeover, for instance, excused the CIA's 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Carlos Castillo Armas was then installed as president, the first of a long series of dictators, much to the satisfaction of that U.S. commercial giant, the United Fruit Company, which proceeded to treat the country as its own private orchard.
When Chilean President Salvador Allende supported nationalizing his country's two biggest copper mines, their U.S. owners benefited from a 1973 CIA-backed coup that overthrew him. The newly-installed dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet then launched a campaign of terror, torture, disappearances, and the murder of tens of thousands of Chileans over his 17 years in power.
Similarly, the United States supported right-wing, repressive governments in Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, and Uruguay during those Cold War decades. However, beginning with the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, most of those countries managed to rid themselves of their repressive rulers in the last two decades of the twentieth century.
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