A Bush Abroad: George Does America Latina
by C.L. Cook
 Though little noticed, or made least note of in North America's press, those prison camps constructed across the United States, tendered to the tune of billions to Halliburton, are filling up fast; filling up with "illegal" aliens.
While most of the new concentration camp families held (they are imprisoning whole families: Mom, Pop, and the kids) are from south of the Rio Grande, some are from other offending nations; nations like Canada.
Last month, security mad Americans nabbed a family including Canadian citizens
who had the misfortune of having their Canada-bound plane diverted to
an U.S. airport (the moot American "State" of Puerto Rico in this case) due to a
medical emergency on board. Once on the ground, the passengers were
deplaned, and passed through customs and immigration; this though none
planned to stay in, or travel anywhere through America, save perhaps a
trip to the airport restaurant, or restrooms.
In a Maher Arar-like twist of
fate, they now find themselves imprisoned for no reason, with little
recourse to avoid deportation to a third country, making pleas to a
toothless Canadian government that seems to wish these troublesome
"foreigners" would just either stay in one place, or go away
altogether.
Arar and Away
Arar you may recall was the Montrealer who found his journey home
rudely interrupted by a side-trip to a barely better than coffin-sized
dungeon in Syria; and he discovered other tortures there too. He's
"Canadian" within the bracketed context Stephen Harper's ruling
Conservative party place other, less than snowbird-white Canadians who
spend their time visiting the old country rather than Florida or
Arizona; like the ones finding themselves below the bombs of Israel's
famed IDF Air Force in Lebanon in the summer of 2006.
At that time, rather than raise protest to Israel, or demand a cease to
the blitzkrieg at least until Canadian civilians caught in the
cross-fire could get out, Harper's people instead questioned the
Canadianess of the dusky Lebanese immigrants, suggesting in a sleazy,
passive-aggressive way, the people being strafed by F-16's as they fled
the full-blown war erupting were second-class citizens who should have
known better than to risk vacationing so near Israel. (I go too far
there: Harper's government would never suggest there were anything
wrong with Israel; merely advise against visiting its enemies).
Like Arar, and the dark-hearted Levantines, the family
incarcerated in Hutto prison, (the infamous for-profit, private
Hell-hole, specializing in warehousing "illegals,") the sin is not in
their stars, but in the pigment of their skin.
And, likewise they should have known better than to fly anywhere near
America while not white. Even if their flight plan was direct to
Canada, they might have foreseen the eventuality of an unexpected
diversion into U.S. airspace, and known what it might mean, and so
taken precautions that would have spared the New Government of Canada
taking any politically inexpedient steps, vis a vis questioning
American authority.
But no! Having offered them refuge from a torturing, repressive,
fascist country once, now Canada's government is expected to get them
out of the shit again! (To be fair to the fair-skinned majority in the
minority government; their diplomatic presence overseas isn't huge,
though there is a rather prominent Canadian Embassy in Washington,
D.C.)
It Smells Like Sulphur in Here!
 George
W. Bush didn't travel much before being ordained president, the story
goes; but he's on the road now, touring South-y Meric-er. Luckily, he
speaks a bit of Mexican [sic] from his old dayz, "crossin' tha buddah
fa fawhn!" Difference is: Today, it don't seem the waiters down there
are content to wait. The American promise of freedom, justice, and
equality for all esta bueno, but no-one seems willing to bide the
short- comings of the status quo for those mercies to be passed as
promised on from beneficent Northern hands.
Furthermore; many south of the Rio Grande has or have heard of
friends and relations being trapped and shipped off to the same
concentration camps in America where our Canadian family languishes;
and unlike Stephen Harper, they're troubled by it.
In a word that deserves to be its own sentence, Venezuelan Presidente,
Hugo Chavez Frias said recently, while standing on the vacated site of
a George W. Bush address to the United Nations, "Sulfuro!"
"Sulphur," element most identified in Western culture with Hades, the Underworld,
he said, waving his hand under his nose slightly, as if fanning away
the fumes. Standing at the podium, just hours after George had, Hugo asked
the gathered U.N. personages, "Can't you smell the Sulfuro?"
Hellbound Train
In 1986, my hoser friend and me launched an expedition to Mexico; a
couple of Winter months roaming round the south, gettin' drunk, and
learning Mexican [sic]. Down we went, our too pale pallor telling of
cooler days past, we youngsters, seeking a first foreign adventure,
hungry and naive set forth cross-country. But, we ended up in
Guatemala, deep in the jungle, high in the mountains, where the
guerrillas run free. Or so the government's story went.
What we saw was
terrorism. Riding the segundo buses, the fear was palpable whenever a
jeep, or roadblock appeared. These people were terrified regularly, and
on the occasions we encountered government forces, I wondered if
things would have turned out differently for those on the bus had not
we and our Canadian, American, British, (and not at all Australian)
passports been there.
The bus bounced us through torrential rains, along a pocked and winding
road that wound down the valley to the lake-shore of Atitlan the
magnificent. The tips and spills of the journey were so harsh, only the
drugged, or otherwise insensate could sleep, as the driver pressed
madly on, over the mountain. Down the precipices, one could
occasionally spot a glinting reflection of a piece of a mirror, or
windshield of a less fortunate segundo bus that had missed a turn, and
plunged into the gaping ravines below. But better not to look, and keep
hold, and hope for a safe arrival.
Nearing Gringo Tanango, a smart town
developed largely by European ex-pat hippies, a motorcycle passed the
bus, back-firing as it revved up to go by us. The elderly woman
standing in the aisle with the rest of us hit the deck!
It seemed,
along with the brutality of official government terror, there existed
too free-boot gangs of killers, murderers who had, we later learned, a
habit of spraying buses with machine-gun fire from the back of
motorcycles. Call it 'The Guatemala Option.'
A Final End to this Game
It seems an impossibly innocent time looking back, but only in
regarding the improbable and precipitous decline of standards
attending America's assumption as singular World power.
Ronald Reagan,
then in league with another George Bush, administered the most heinous
repression of a civilian population for the purpose of corporate and
political control the world had witnessed since Mussolini's fascists.
Hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, mainly the indigenous Maya
majority, were killed by Washington's puppet Rios government. By some
estimates, a third of the indigenous population killed, or displaced.
Despite reconciliation attempts made in Guatemala, the same supporters
of the death squads of the country's worst years still prosper in the
guise of legitimate businessmen and managers of trans-national
murderers like Coca Cola Inc. And, they are poised to seize Guatemalan
democracy now, as they did before.
 Fresh
from his Central Asian killing spree, George the Lesser will visit
Guatemala this weekend. His plans include a day trip to a sacred temple
site of the lost Mayan civilization. There, where indigenous activists
from across Latin America will meet in a couple weeks time to discuss
the new way coming, an el camino neo, George will entertain his hosts
with platitudes of friendship and his amor de la democracia.
For their
part, the priests of the ancient order promise they will perform a
ritual cleansing of the temple on George's departure.
This following the Bush visit to Colombia, ground zero of the Gringo
suppression of the region.
Fitting that he would arrive at week's end
at the beginning of America's dirty work in the south, Colombia. No-where
on Earth is the culmination of the American Project more perfectly
illustrated than in that sad country. Decades of civil war, an
intransigent kleptocracy, a thriving narco-terror regime, propped up
to serve the interests of the wafer thin elite within its borders and
the corpo raiders without; where the local indigenous population suffers
death squads and disappearings, and union and social activists are
gunned down in the streets with the complicity of the fair-skinned,
racist rulers.
Sunday, George will witness (though remotely) the
dissatifaction of Colombia's battered masses, and one can only hope; if
George W. Bush accomplishes nothing else in his time on this sad and
beautiful orb, his presence and all it represents will be enough of an
affront to the decent-minded people of Colombia to set in motion a
chain of events that will, at long last bring an end to the American
century of destruction, and forever extinguish its too long-lived
culture of death.
Resources from Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org
http://deletetheborder.org/node/2011
Democracy Now! Immigration Stories- Radio Reports
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/23/1532252
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jail in Texas where about 200 immigrant children, some only infants, are
being detained.
* "I Want To Be Free": 9-Year-Old Canadian Citizen Pleads From Texas
Immigration Jail
Majid and his nine-year old son Kevin are Iranian immigrants currently
being held at the Hutto detention center. They've been forcibly detained
since their plane was forced made an emergency landing in Puerto Rico as they made their way to Canada.
* Hundreds Protest NYU Republicans' "Find the Illegal Immigrant" Game
Hundreds of people gathered at New York University on Thursday to protest a game called "Find the Illegal Immigrant" organized by the school's Republican club.
* Raymondville: Inside the Largest Immigration Prison Camp in the US
The largest immigrant prison camp is in Raymondville, Texas. Some two
thousand undocumented immigrants are currently being held in the prison awaiting deportation.
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