The very country that today complains about thousands of Colombians entering its land during the current migrant influx needs to account for its own involvement in a century of violence committed against Colombians. At a minimum, this means assisting the many that have crossed the border to gain job permits, as well as allowing children to have access to public education and access to humane housing.
As a Colombian Chicago High School public educator in Back of the Yards, I’ve witnessed a drastic increase in the number of Colombians arriving at my school since last August when Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott started to bus immigrants to Chicago. Indeed, before 2022 there weren’t any Colombians registered in our school at all. Five were bused in last school year, the same number registered during the first semester of this school year making it 10 Colombian students at the school and they keep coming.
Our EL (English Language Learner) program has 120 students in a school of 279 in total where 100% of the ELL population are Latinos. We are struggling to keep up with the influx of students that need translations as a minimum resource for their education, but many also need mental health services, access to full hygiene standards, decent housing and job opportunities for their parents. For many of these students, what they’ve been through—and what they’re currently going through— is deeply traumatizing.
The realization that the American dream was accompanied by a many times incredibly dehumanizing trip to arrive to Chicago’s cold police station floors, to a neighborhood full of gangs and street violence is not something that the news back home would talk about and prepare people for. What most of them are not aware of, however, is how the very country where they’ve arrived is guilty of impoverishing the homeland they had to flee from. Latino immigrants are painted in the news as people who simply want free aid or “handouts.” But all across Latin America, the US has taken away land, resources, and lives at the same time that it has done immense damage to working conditions, wages, and health.
Instead of complaining that immigrants need too much in the way of aid, the U.S. government should repay the very people it has pillaged and stolen from. In what follows, I’d like to look carefully at this history in order to contextualize the recent influx of people from Latin America into the U.S.
A Brief History of U.S. Imperialism in Latin America
For at least the last 100 years, Latin America has more or less been divided in two: on the one hand, there are governments that follow Washington’s elitist, pro-capitalist, corporate agenda—and, on the other hand, there are left-oriented governments that reject this. Many of the left-oriented governments are supported by social movements fighting for better living conditions, for increased investment in public services, for agrarian reform so small farmers can own land, and so on.
As a rule, the United States government typically tries to destroy any individual, group, law or government that assimilates left-oriented beliefs. So far as U.S. imperialism has been concerned, no defiance of empire is permitted and no genuine independence from Washington is allowed.The investments of U.S.-based corporations must always come first.
This way this has played out in Colombia over the last one hundred years is striking. To see what I mean, consider the following historical examples.
In 1928 Colombian workers at the US-owned United Fruit Company (today called Chiquita Brands International) revolted and went out on strike. Pressed by the company, the Colombian government sent its police to break the strike. According to the Colombian government, only 12 people were killed. The CIA, however, later reported one thousand killed—and Gabriel García Marquez wrote in his famous book “100 Years of Solitude” that the real number was closer to three thousand.. This event—the “Bananeras massacre”— is among the most shameful moments in all of Colombian history.
Resistance from Below and La Época de la Violencia
Shortly thereafter, Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, a pro-worker lawyer known as”el caudillo del pueblo” investigated the massacre and presented to parliament proof of killings of workers and violence at the hands of the Colombian military protecting the interests of the North American company. Moreover, Gaitán was running for president of Colombia and his chances of getting elected were palpable—and this was threatening to the Colombian elite, the United States companies’ interest in workers’ exploitation and the conservative government then in power. As a result, with the help of the CIA, these forces had Gaitán murdered in front of his office in Bogotá. The populace, in deep anger, took to the streets of Bogotá to protest and burn it down in a day that came to be known as El Bogotazo. The entire city and country collapsed and the political divisions became more clear than ever.
Events like this, among other things, inaugurated a tragic era between 1948-58 in Colombian history known as La época de la violencia. Some define it as a time of civil war between both main political parties of Colombia; the conservatives and the liberals. In reality, it was mainly a campaign of violence and land seizure committed againsts poor and left-oriented people at the hands of the leaders of the conservative political party by means of the police and the military forces of Colombia. The violence suffered by the farmers far from the big cities reached inhumane proportions, so as a result they began to arm themselves.
The National Front (1958-74) was put in place as a “solution” to the violence.The dictator Rojas Pinilla (1953-57) imposed this government composed of conservative and liberal politicians to “share” power, excluding all other political parties. An oligarchy was now the sole ruler and the people were getting poorer with no improvements in working conditions, salaries, nor life expectancy in the countryside.
It is in response to this intolerable situation that armed left-wing organizations such as the ELN (1964), FARC (1964) and later M-19 (1970; an urban guerilla that became a political party in late 1980’s) were born. Today’s Colombian president Gustavo Petro was a member of M-19. Though these groups had admirable goals in the beginning, some of them ended up committing horrific crimes against the very people they had been created to protect.
In response, the big landowners–the terratenientes—formed a paramilitary organization called the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) to protect their investments from the guerrillas. Coca-Cola has been proven to have hired the AUC to kill union leaders between 1990 and 2002. Chiquita Brands International was proven to have also paid AUC more than $1.7 million and support the expansion of President Uribe’s covert support of the right-wing terrorist group. Chiquita Brands International has been protected by the government and its legal (Colombian military and police) and illegal armed forces (the paramilitaries) for more than a hundred years in their killing of workers who dare to ask for better working conditions. The AUC and other paramilitary groups also started trafficking drugs in order to finance their weapons and financial needs.
More Recent Examples of U.S. Imperialism in Colombia
As a result of this turmoil in the countryside, there is a massive internal displacement of people that reached (5.6 million) in 2021, second only to Syria. While the people flee, the territories left behind become land stolen by big landowners known as terratenientes and bought by transnational companies.
As if the people living in the countryside weren’t suffering enough, the United States has intervened economically and militarily to make things worse. A striking example is Plan Colombia (2000-2015), which was ostensibly waged as part of the so-called “War on Drugs.” The U.S supplied in large quantities the herbicide Glyphosate, which was sprayed from airplanes in rural areas in order to kill coca plants. The herbicide, of course, killed not only coca but all crops, created ecological damage, and led people to develop health problems such as cancer. Glyphosate is such a dangerous chemical to human health as well as the environment that it has been banned from various countries including France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Thailand and Argentina to name a few. Neither the United States and the Colombian government took responsibility for this catastrophe until years later.
The United States also sent billions of dollars in military aid to Colombia, much of which has been funneled to the political right in its quest to exterminate the left.The School of the Americas, for example,has been documented as a place that trained dictators (such as Manuel Noriega of Panama), countless generals, military, paramilitary leaders and officers serving under numerous dictatorships, as well as assassins on how to kill and torture and commit the most horrific human rights crimes against the citizens of Latin America.
Corruption and Murder: Falsos Positivos
To make sure that US military aid was tied to a specific goal, a system of monetary reward was created for killing guerrilla fighters. This system led to some of the most horrific massacres in the country’s history. In 2008, 6,402 civilians were killed at the hands of the Colombian military forces on the grounds that they were allegedly “guerrilla soldiers killed in combat.” But this wasn’t true. The scandal became known as Falsos Positivos (False Positives).
President Alvaro Uribe, who has long supported right-wing paramilitary violence, justified the killings of these civilians by stating on the news that they were not good young men. “They were not going to pick up coffee” he said. His government’s armed forces were proven to have gone into poor neighborhoods and rural areas in Colombia to offer jobs to young men and then kill them after they were taken away from their homes. The Colombian armed forces kidnapped these young men to later force them to dress in guerrilla uniforms so they could be presented as guerrillas killed in combat and later disappeared their bodies in mass graves.
The Rise of the Narco State (2018-2022)
Under the government of Iván Duque with the support of Ex-President Alvaro Uribe the country was run by a toxic nexus between the state, drug cartels and paramilitary groups. Duque was elected in 2018 with the alleged help of a drug trafficking organization, granting an increasing amount of power to family members and representatives of notorious organized crime figures. His party was wiretapped discussing vote-buying or illegal campaign donations. Duque following his predecessor Alvaro Uribe supports the neoliberal ideologies of privatization of public entities such as in education, health and natural resources.
Mining is unprecedented as it is now widely taking place in stolen land. Farmers, indigenous people and afro-descendant communities were (and continue to be) massively displaced while the country’s environment is deeply affected by the catastrophic mining techniques. The environmental effects that such companies have left behind have left the communities around such areas poor, hungry, sick and dead. The Colombian government’s support of US companies continues by maintaining low wages, anti-union practices, and killing protestors and social justice activists. The war against activists (people with left ideals asking for social equality) continues and is now more bloody than ever before. Colombia consistently ranks among the highest with the most environmental activists killed along with México. In 2020, Colombia had 65 compared to 30 in Mexico. In 2021 Mexico reported 54 assassinations while Colombia had 33.
A Turning Point?
100 years of collaboration between the Colombian ruling class and U.S. imperialism has left the country devastated. By the end of 2020, 37.5% of the population lived below the poverty line. Only three men owned more than 10% of the country’s GDP while 15 million Colombians missed one meal a day or were near starvation. In 2021, wealth inequality in Colombia was the highest among all members of the organization for economic cooperation and development (OECD). According to the United Nations, the poverty rate was the highest in South América.
These appalling conditions led to a major political shift in 2023, when former M-19 guerilla member Gustavo Petro and black environmental activist Francia Marquez were elected President and Vice President of Colombia. For the first time in history, Colombia is run by a government that doesn’t bow before U.S. imperialism or the domestic elite.
Nonetheless, Colombians are fleeing the country in mass numbers. Indeed, 547,000 Colombian nationals emigrated in 2022, a historical figure according to many that represents 2.7 times the annual average since 2012. The media, owned by the country’s wealthy elite, has tried to blame this migration on the new left-oriented president and his policies.
The reality is that this exodus is the consequence of the history of injustice outlined above, much of it directly caused by U.S. corporations and the U.S. government. People are fleeing economic turmoil that has resulted from a hundred years of exploitation and violence.
Certainly, inflation is among the immediate causes of the exodus. In 2022, the Colombian peso was one of the most devalued currencies in the world $1 USD = $5.000 COP. A consequence of this has been how many people travel to work in the US either for a couple of months or stay permanently to send money home. Inflation last January was a historic rate of 13.25%. Basic products became too expensive compared with the salaries earned. The minimum monthly salary $1,160,000 COP is the equivalent of $270 USD (At the time of writing this article the exchange rate was $1 USD to $4,289 COP). The 5th lowest in Latin America. The constant recession propaganda that is on the news against Petro makes people with little money be told that it will be worse and to not spend, which causes the recession to continue on. Finally, the influx of migrants to an already poor country is also deeply affecting the economy. Many Venezuelans as a result of the US sanctions are fleeing Venezuela and entering Colombia and the country has more people with fewer opportunities to find employment. It is easier to go to Colombia than to the US when you focus on the language, location and cost of travel.
What is to be done?
The historical relationship between the United States and its influence in Colombia in terms of maintaining low salaries, leading military interventions, giving economic and military support to right-wing individuals and armed groups, and supporting economic neoliberal policies have made possible and maintained the constant migrant crisis from Latin America.
This is not a crisis started in 2023 because of an elected leftist president and his policies but instead the culmination of a century of US intervention in Colombia. It is the responsibility of the United States to, at a minimum, offer help with job permits, and guarantee high-quality education and humane housing conditions for the very immigrants that imperialism has pushed out of their homeland.