From Palestine Chronicle
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 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 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. "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 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 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 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 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, was the main reason behind the surge of refugees and migrants to Italy, en-route to Europe.
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