In this condition, I wrote that damn article, “No Place for the Weak”, published on this website on March 28. Indeed. Yet, I had become weak. I staggered when I tried to walk, and had visions of death squads and lead poisoned children. I went to the doctor at a private hospital in San Salvador. He prescribed an intravenous dose of dramamine after diagnosing me with a migraine headache. As I watched the nurse deliver the bolus into the brachial vein of my right arm, I waited for a dramamine rush, some indication that relief was on the way. It did not come. Dramamine is a very useful drug, which has been the drug of choice for decades to relieve the vomiting of carsick children in the back seats of the Nashes and Chevrolet’s as they crossed the nauseating plains of North America. I waited for relief.

I was surprised to read that there was a potential for dramamine abuse, and that if one took a large enough dose, hallucinations and a kind of alternate reality might be presented. Successful dramamine trippers had benign, non-threatening hallucinations that have nonetheless been known to panic some adventurers. The other noted side effect is a feeling of having very heavy, “leaden” legs. After my initial loading dose at the hospital, I did maintain a certain dramamine level, in fear of the vomiting, more than in hopes of having a good dramamine trip. I caught my flights from San Salvador to Newark on April 1.

As I staggered through the endless security at Miami International Airport, weaving and staggering through the endless cattle lines waiting to be searched, I found myself walking like Hunter Thompson in the depths of an ether binge. I was further staggered when the youthful Transportation Safety Officer gave me a 15 minute lecture about how NEVER to carry any metal through the metal detector. He had me isolated in a glass booth, as he yelled “SEGUNDO, Assistance Needed!” I had set off the alarm twice. My shoes were off. The minutes dragged. It was an hallucinatory feeling, but at least I was not projectile vomitting, and I nodded as he talked on about the importance of not setting off the metal detectors. Where do they find these people? The kid looked a bit like Johnny Depp; I was hallucinating. I had, 58 years into my life, connected with dramamine at last. I had mainlined it, taken it orally, and what next, snorting crushed up lines on barroom tables in a “No Cover” Bar in San Salvador? To what depths could a man sink? The TSA Johnny Depp wanded me, ran his hands down my fly, ran his hands around the inseams of my pants, caressed my ass firmly as he looked for what? He waved me on, having had his way with me. I staggered off, looking for a place to buy a soda, and take another 100 milligrams of dramamine.

At least I was clear of that damned lead, those vicious death squads, or was I? A member of the oligarchy, Juan Carlos Sol, had written me an ominous email; he said he knew where I lived and that he was an ARENA Party supporter, because he HAD to live in El Salvador, whereas I could escape to Pennsylvania. I saw his face in my mind, leathery and reptilian, an old hardened visage similar to the one of Jose Napoleon Altimirano that appears in every issue of El Diario de Hoy. These people will never give up their power. They are as old and vicious as the flesh eating dinosaurs, and are holding on to their predatory position at the peak of society in any way they can.

The structures of the death squads of the 1980’s in El Salvador are still in place, with their connections to the National Police and the military. I made it out of El Salvador. but I am not yet out of Miami. Miami is the soul of the rightwing in the Americas. There are thousands of bitter Cubans here, thrown from their lives of power and privilege by the Castro/Guevara Cuban revolution, raising money to support terrorist attacks on Cuban soil, assaults on the red menace of Chavez, or funds for the terrorist Posado Carilles, who has been granted refuge on US soil.

A wave of nausea sweeps over me, seeming to emanate from my brain, trying to trigger an emetic response in my gut. I fight it off, trusting the dramamine to do its job. Larry King is on the airport TV screen, wondereing “Can Barack Obama draw the white, middle class working man vote?”

I make it to Newark, then get a ride into Pennsylvania with Tim and Sarah. I remain sick, however; the headaches persist, the nausea rises. I have to cancel a trip to San Francisco when I go to the doctor and find myself unable to move about without a vomit bag at my side. The Pennsylvania general practitioner decides I may have a toothache, he sees decay in my teeth. He prescribes amoxicillin, a gram of Tylenol every 6 hours, and, you guessed it, dramamine. I spend another weekend in hell, sick with headaches that are busting my skull, but the GP is resolute, “You’re a big guy, just keep loading up on the Tylenol.” I load up on dramamine and on Monday go to an emergency ward, where a CT scan is ordered, and a 2 inch tumor is visualized hanging behind my right eye. The surgeon appears, firm and confident, and tells me it has to come out, or it will kill me.

I agree to surgery to remove the tumor. I am shipped to an intensive care unit, where there is a 24/7 staff struggle to get control of the machines, the computers, the monitors that beep chime ring constantly, as the nurses ask each other what to do about this order, how do you do that, all night long it goes on, night after night, nobody kinew how anything worked….

But after a couple of days, they took the tumor in a six hour operation, and left behind, in my skull, a wafer of chemotherapy to attack the remainder of the cancer. It is a phase IV cancer, a glioblastoma multiforme with a propensity to recur, and now I am slated to undergo radiation and chemotherapy to kill the cancer cells not physically removed in the surgery. I lay back in the intensive care unit after the operation, the room was dark, the TV glowed above, with coverage of the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary race. Barack Obama appears on the screen, his hands compressing the air, and he starts to talk …

“The truth is that my foreign policy is actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush’s father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan, and it is George Bush that’s been naive and it’s people like John McCain and, unfortunately, some Democrats that have facilitated him acting in these naive ways that have caused us so much damage in our reputation around the world,” he said. “At a town hall event at a local high school gymnasium, Obama praised George H.W. Bush – father of the president — for the way he handled the Persian Gulf War: with a large coalition and carefully defined objectives.” (Devlin Barrett, AP 03.28.2008)

I saw Barack give this message, watching a TV while lying back in an intensive care unit bed post-surgery. I needed to read the press reports of it, as above, to confirm to myself that it happened.

I can’t believe this, it’s the dramamine, I am in a fog of benign hallucination. My understanding of the Gulf War of George H. W. Bush is as follows; first, that the State Department of George H. W. Bush told the government of Saddam Hussein, prior to the invasion, that the United States had no mutual security agreement with Kuwait, in a July 25, 1990 meeting with Saddam Hussein and his foreign minister Tariq Aziz, as capitulated by April Glaspie in this transcript from the meeting, “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.”

On August 2, 1990, the armies of Saddam invaded Kuwait. In the next three months, the United States mobilized the United Nations Security Council to authorize the use of force to dispel the armies of Iraq from Kuwait. Although many nations urged a diplomatic initiative to resolve the dispute without war, Bush and Baker moved inexorably to war.

By the end of 1990, the United States mobilized over a half million troops to Saudi Arabia and the area around Kuwait. On January 17, 1991, an air attack was unleashed on Iraq. In the next 42 days, 110,000 bombing sorties were conducted using cruise missiles and bombs. 88,500 tons of bombs were dropped. Over 150,000 people were killed. The civilian infrastructure of Iraq, including water reservoirs, water filtration systems, telecommunications, and food supply was destroyed. On February 27, 1991, George Bush ended the hostilities, after the coalition forces had swept effortlessly through Kuwait and rapidly defeated the Iraqi Army. After encouraging a Shi’ite uprising against Saddam, George H. W. Bush allowed Saddam the air space to slaughter those who rose against his tyranny.

A sanctions regime was imposed on Iraq, which limited the food, medicines and fuel available to the civilian population. The United Nations imposed sanctions were implemented through the remainder of the Bush administration and continued through the Clinton administration. They claimed the lives of over a half million Iraqi children, a fact that was acknowledged by Secretary of State Madeline Albright in a 1996 60 Minutes interview, when she said, “On balance, we think it’s worth it.” It was worth it to Saddam, who prospered in the corruption fostered by a sanctions program which allowed him to control the wealth and patronage of his office, as the people of Iraq starved.

While Desert Storm was a quick war, it was very costly to the US service people who served. The introduction of depleted uranium and other toxins to the battlefield by the coalition forces caused 183, 629 disability claims from the 696,628 US service people who went to the theater of Desert Storm. By 2000, over 9000 of these vets had died. Depleted uranium continues to kill, as it remains toxic for 4.5 billion years. No troops were warned prior to their service in the field of the dangers that faced them in this new, toxic, battlefield.

I am not a Democrat, and do not wish to argue with Barack Obama about his analysis of this history. His understanding is so stunted and so crippled it is not possible to really fairly encounter — there is no argument. However, I can only wonder at the support he is receiving from people whom I know truly want a change.

OK, I can understand the need to grasp for hope in the midst of a political panorama in which the candidate for change of the Democrats hearkens to the years of such wartime success as has been outlined above, and then, deeper, to the glorious communication skills of a Reagan who united the country in a foreign policy typified by war crimes against Nicaragua, a holocaust in Guatemala, support for mass murder in El Salvador, and the arming of Saddam Hussein.

I would encourage Democrats and Republicans to reclaim their parties, to demand policies of justice in both domestic and foreign policy from their candidates, if I believed that the political hacks and opportunists that run these criminal enterprises would have a profound religious experience that would enable their humanity — if I believed in miracles. A vote for McCain, Clinton, or Obama, is a vote for a member of a club that will never represent democracy or justice: the election of 2008, another travesty of democracy.

Tell me it’s the dramamine, the fog of the benign hallucination — not another Bush lite truimph of the mundane, the grins of Clinton and McCain, the compression of the air between the empty hands of Obama… tell me it’s the dramamine…

In 1998 – 1999 Beterías de El Salvador received a $2 million dollar loan from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a funding entity of the World Bank. This is the IFC statement of purpose: “Our vision, values, and purpose promote sustainable private sector investment in developing countries, helping to reduce poverty and improve people’s lives.”

As Lacayo was receiving this financing from the World Bank, he was also maneuvering within the Saca government to obtain preferential trade status for his battery recycling project. He managed to achieve an emergency trade status for Record that released all tariffs from the import of the used batteries, and all of the Value Added Taxes (IVA) from his products. The amounts saved were considerable: tens of thousands of dollar in both customs duties and IVA. (Elaine Freedman, in an article in “Envio”, “Batiendo Récords con la Irresponsibilidad Empresarial, Gubermental” (Breaking Records with Business and Governmental Irresponsibility, November, 2007). Lacayo achieved a free trade status for his company, before the free trade treaty was signed. Miguel Lacayo signed the Central America Free Trade Agreement as the signator of El Salvador on May 28, 2004.

The batteries flowed from the Americas to the furnaces of the Record plant in the barrio of Sitio de Niños, San Juan Opico, a small community just west of San Salvador. The lead products flowed out. In 2004 alone, the Lacayo family took in $62 million from this operation. The net worth of Miguel Lacayo became the subject of some concern in El Salvador. A government investigation revealed that Miguel’s net worth rose $3,766,398 during his tenure as Minister of the Economy. He claimed that this could be explained by stocks donated by his father, and no action was taken.

In Sitio de Niños, and San Juan Opico, the wind often blows hard, and hot, and dusty. When people sickened, the community organized and pressured the local government and the national government. With the help of the office of the National Human Rights Ombudsman, the newly formed group Movimiento Sin Plomo (MSP, Movement for no Lead) achieved government help to have lead testing done in the community by the Atlanta-based Center for Disease Control (CDC). The tests showed that of 370 workers at the plant, 10% had a maximum, or level IV, level of contamination, 14% had a level a little better , in a level III range, 42% showed the presence of lead poisoning, level II, and only 35% had a level of lead in their blood termed acceptable by CDC standards.

The lead has reached the population. Children, whose ability to thrive, learn and grow is devastated by lead poisoning, have been poisoned in San Juan Opico. In 2007, more than 40 children had to leave the school Centro Escolar Comunidad Rural in Sitio del Niño, San Juan Opico. Their lead levels were over 30 micrograms per deciliter. Anything over 10 is toxic. The school is 400 meters from the Record operation. (9-27-2007, “Large Population, Many Children Suffer Lead Poisoning, El Salvador Shuts Down Major Battery Factory” Goliath: Business on Demand). Dr. Ricardo Navarro has noted, in an article “El Chernobil Salvadoreño” (The Salvadoran Chernobyl) that over 500 people have already had blood tests that show elevated lead levels and that there are 15,000 people at risk, which is the population within 8 kilometers of the plant. (“El Independiente”, March 3, 2008)

In September of 2007, the Salvadoran government, through the Ministry of Public Health and Social Assistance, ordered the plant closed. The factory, in fact, did cease operations shortly thereafter, but the abrupt cessation did not include a proper remediation of the hazardous lead wastes on the site, and today, the lead waste in the slag heaps left behind continues to blow over the landscape through San Juan Opico. This remedy, the closing, may indeed by worse than the cure. The abrupt closing of the plant may make the Salvadoran State liable for damages from Baterías de El Salvador under CAFTA treaty obligations. The plant is closed, but the case is very much open. MSP has also brought a case before the Interamerican Court of Human Rights, asking for international support for remediation and reparation. (“Escoria Estatal”, El Proceso, 2-13-2008).

There are three members of the board of directors of Record on trial in El Salvador before a San Juan Opico Judge, for the the aggravated damage to the health of the residents around their plant. They have left the country, and are, to date, beyond the reach of justice, although their arrests have been ordered by the Judge. They are Ronald Antonio Lacayo Arguello, Jose Ofilio Guardián Lacayo and Sandra Cecilia Lacayo Escapini. They have purged many of their assets here in El Salvador, and could well be the recipients of damages from the State, as noted above. Furthermore, the Salvadoran government, the Salvadoran population, will have to pay for the social and health cost damages caused by this irresponsible, criminal enterprise.

The story of Record Battery and its contamination of El Salvador is a story of Free Trade. This company was granted license to accept the waste of other, more industrialized nations and convert it to economic value. In the United States, it is very difficult to site a battery recycling facility. It is very expensive to operate, under the regulations of OSHA, the EPA, the various State agencies and citizens’ groups that would be monitoring the operation of a plant, if you could get it approved. In El Salvador, the Lacayo family, with its political and social connections, had no problems finding a place to start a lead recycling operation, and no problems operating one. They are also able to walk away with their accumulated profits, winners in the game of global networking. They are winners because they have walked away with their money, with their lives, and without consequence.

The losers are clear. The residents of San Juan Opico, members of Movement for no Lead, show up at the trial of the Record Battery directors, looking for justice, reparations, remediation, healthcare, and getting nothing. The Flores administration, the Saca administration, the political, judicial, and police structure of El Salvador are not in the business of meeting social needs.

El Salvador is in the initial stages of the 2009 municipal, legislative and presidential elections. The major media outlets of the nation are lining up for the right wing candidate, security force magnate and ex-Director of the National Police Rodrigo Avila. When he accepted the nomination of the ARENA Party, he said, “the legacy of Major Roberto D’Aubuisson and those that followed him in defense of liberty inspires me”.

Rodrigo is the owner of SERSAPRO, the largest private security firm in El Salvador, a country where armed guards abound, and homicides run at epidemic levels. He became a millionaire providing guards to businesses, and by providing cash transfer services to the big banks. SERSAPRO obtained a contract to service passports and visas handed out by the US embassy. While running his private security empire, he was also the Director of the National Police. This is not a conflict of interest in El Salvador. It does make Avila a very powerful man, with control over both public and private security forces throughout El Salvador. ARENA has won every presidential election since 1989. As the ARENA candidate, Avila believes he will be the next in line to rule.

His immediate imprecation to the ghost of the death squad founder and intellectual author of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, Roberto D’Aubuisson is a chilling reminder that the structure of power in El Salvador will not give up their privilege, their position in the seats of government easily.

Yesterday, in the lead daily of El Salvador, “El Diario de Hoy”, the lead editorial announced, “Any candidate of the right is one thousand times preferable to the best that the violent left can offer, who will not hesitate to plunge our country into war. In the present situation, the right is not only our guarantee to protect real liberties of life in democracy, but also to save employment.”

“El Salvador is not provided with natural resources with which to overcome the economic collapse that a red victory would trigger. The total illiquidity of the financial system, the cessation or reduction of economic activity, a dramatic drop in employment, the paralysis of investments, are the immediate effect that would arise. How families are going to be able to feed themselves is not stated; the communist “change” will be the change for the worst, the change to not eat, to lose what little you have, to remain at the mercy of the extortions of the violent and of the communist of the barrio or the town. We have to take extreme care not to place our nation in hands stained with blood, in failed individuals that never generated employment and that have looted the municipalities that they control.” (El Diario de Hoy, 3-24-2008)

Napoleon Viera Altimirano began publishing El Diario de Hoy in 1936. It has always been fervently anti-communist, always warning of the red menace. El Diario de Hoy (referred to affectionately by this writer as “El Diablo de Hoy”) is a propaganda arm of the rightwing oligarchy, and of ARENA since its inception. It continues to be published by the Altimirano family. The words in the editorial of March 24 are threats, because the writer and his-her readers know that the oligarchy can bring down hell on the Salvadoran people, with their control of commodities, of the police, of security, of the banks. The Altimirano’s support the lineage of D’Aubuisson to Sol to Cristiani to Flores to Saca to Avila. The details of hazardous waste disasters and private security conflicts of interest are meaningless when “employment” is at stake, in this busted country of unemployment, inflated prices for basic goods, mass migration and unchecked crime.

On March 25, David Morales, an attorney working with the Tutela Legal of the Archdiocese of El Salvador, was interviewed on Mayavision Radio, 106.9 El Salvador on your radio dial. He spoke of the need for justice in the case of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980. He named actors in the crime, and cited links to the government and business elites of the ARENA Party to this crime against humanity. He has brought the Romero case before the Interamerican Court of Human Rights, which has called for El Salvador’s government to end the amnesty for the crimes against humanity of this case and the cases of tens of thousands of other victims of death squads and security forces that occurred during the US-financed dirty war that lasted till 1992. The structures of these death squads still exist in El Salvador, and they are supported by the same people that bring the environmental disaster caused by Record Battery, and allow the owners to flee with millions to their havens in Miami.

The candidate who opposes Rodrigo Avila and the murderous ARENA Party in 2009 is Mauricio Funes, a popular television journalist who has the best chance yet of achieving a victory in a presidential race for the Frente Faribundo Marti para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN). He has not been an ideologue and has won the right to represent the party, to carry the hopes for change in the country. For this, he is attacked by such as El Diario de Hoy in the editorial of March 24, “For the present campaign the reds, again, hide themselves behind promises, a pretense of moderation and an offer of “change”. Their platform turns out to be the easiest thing in the world for any politician, to promise all, and to smear the opposition and the democratic system. And now, they have placed at their head an “independent journalist”, that for twenty years pretended to have a some distance from the reds, the skin of megalomania with which he covers himself in 2009.” (El Diario de Hoy, March 24, 2008)

Shortly after Mauricio accepted the nomination to run for President, his son was murdered in Paris by someone identified only as a Moroccan, who ran from the scene. The crime is unsolved. In January, 2008, the FMLN Mayor of Alegría, Usulután,Wilber Moisés Funes (not related to Mauricio) and Zulma Jaqueline Rivera, one of his administration, were assassinated as they investigated the acts of the prior ARENA admiinistration, which had handed over a local lake to private interests. The crime is unsolved. Salvador Sanchez, a journalist who was investigating crime was murdered in September of 2007, and the FMLN supporters Manzaneres Monjares, were murdered in 2006. The Monjares were an elderly couple who lived in Suchitoto and were tortured and murdered in their home. The crimes are unsolved.

There is violence in the air. Democratic alternatives have been foreclosed. Amnesty has been granted to those who commit crimes against humanity. I have heard people in civil society predicting armed struggle if Funes loses. This is an impulse born of frustration, of living in a violent society with no public security. In recent polls, security is the number one concern of the population. Extortion rackets and common crimes besiege communities, and I have heard testimonies that tell of attacks and persecution by bands of assassins linked to the police. Crime is organized and is linked to police and security structures. In such an environment, fear is rampant, and “security” is big business, as Rodrigo Avila knows. It is no wonder that some will speak of armed struggle as a form of self defense against an organized assault on a civilian population, which is then taxed for the damages. El Diario de Hoy has raised the specter of extreme violence and dislocation if ARENA should lose, and of course, there will be some in the opposition who will meet on this low ground.

The movie “No Place for Old Men” is opening this week in El Salvador, bringing its grim message of inexorable human brutality in this epoch. The spanish language title is “Sin Lugar por Debiles”. This could be accurately translated as “No Place for the Weak”. With security strongman Avila running for President and major media outlets threatening the population with disaster if he doesn’t win, and the Lacayo family gloating over their winnings in the rigged global card game “Free Trade”, El Salvador may indeed be “No Place for the Weak” today, and in 2009.

The United States government of Bush has embraced El Salvador under the ARENA governments of Flores and Saca as a democracy. Bush has recently met with Saca, and the US has already tilted toward ARENA once again in the 2009 elections. See this article for details: “US Begins Interference in 2009 Salvadoran Elections”, Lehigh Valley Independent Press, 2-14-2008.

Since 1980, the United States has supported mass murder and economic subjugation in El Salvador. In return, it gets its batteries recycled, a steady stream of human rights refugees, absolute obedience from a slavish Salvadoran government that opposes Chávez and supports the US war in Iraq, and a police and military training site that is morphing into a School of Assassins. Recently, the solidarity organization CISPES has been attacked by the Justice Department for links to the Funes campaign. This is not a crime, can not be a crime. There can be no democracy without a change in government, and Funes represents a change that would be a chance for social justice and real democracy. Avila represents a murderous regime that has brought death squads, pollution and a policy of forced migration. Which side are you on? This is no time or place for the weak, the uncertain.

Looking north from El Salvador, one quickly realizes that there is no stopping this tide. The latest United Nations figures indicate that 1,070 people every day are leaving El Salvador for the trip north. This human flow is not a flow that will be stopped; it has been institutionalized and constructed into the societies of El Salvador, and of the United States.

For example, in 2007, Salvadorans working in the United States sent $3.695 billion back to El Salvador to family members left behind. This represents 18% of the Gross Domestic Product of El Salvador. The latest census data indicates that the population in El Salvador is about 5.6 million people, which means that almost a third of the population is living and working in the US, given that well over 2 million are in the US.

The figures are similar for all the countries of Central America. Remittances are 25% of Honduras’ GNP, 12% in Nicaragua, and 11% in Guatemala. (Mexican workers send home $25 billion a year, about 3% of the GNP. Some regions of Mexico, however, are highly dependent on the cash flow home, such as Michoacan, which receives $2.5 billion, over $600 per capita, a 16% share of the regional economy.)

The trip north is made in many ways, depending on your resources. For $10,000, one can get a custom, first class journey north, by boat or plane. For those with no money, a very difficult train ride north, hopping freight trains through Mexico is a commonly used route. An often cited fee for an overland trip north with a guide, called a coyote, is $6,500. What these numbers mean is that every day, millions of dollars are spent on human traficking, on the monetization of migration from a weak, dominated economy to the largest consumer economy in the world.

And economically, El Salvador is hurting. Bean prices have gone from $.60 a pound in June of 2007 to $1.15 a pound throughout the country and as much as $1.25 a pound in the eastern part of the country. Bread and milk prices are rising rapidly; gasoline is at least $3.60 a gallon. There is high unemployment, and the jobs available do not pay enough to justify the work. The minimum wage in the countryside is $85 a month; in the city, $174 a month. If a family is not receiving remittances from a family member working in the US, it is very poor.

I have been volunteering with an organization here in San Salvador, the Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad (CIS) that works with communities to develop local economies, baking businesses, natural medicine projects, poultry businesses, artisan groups. When people from the US contribute money, it often goes for scholarships, so young people can get through high school. It costs $300 a year to send a student to high school, and if the family income is $85 a month, a scholarship is necessary. The promise, the industry, the will to learn and progress is there – you can see it in the effort people make to attend school, to send their children to school, but it is not a given in El Salvador. It is no mystery that so many are sucked into the gang life, when the society provides so little in terms of opportunity. We work with communities that are struggling to build schools, so that they can send their children to grades 1 through 3. A school is not a right in El Salvador.

So, rather than work for between one and five dollars a day, if you can find the work, people flee north by any means possible. For those without thousands of dollars to pay a coyote, it means robbery, rape, perhaps death at the hands of those who prey on the refugee flow, or death in the desert of Arizona. Last year, I saw a movie at a museum in San Salvador, the Museum of the Word and Image. The movie was called “Asalto al Sueño”, or “Assault to the Dream”. It was directed by Uli Steizner, who shot it with a handheld camera on the border between Guatemala and Mexico. He documents the human sacrifice involved in this traffic, the weeks of waiting, the arduous train rides, the limbs lost on the dangerous rails, the humiliation of arrest and failure as one is shipped back on a police bus.

NAFTA and CAFTA have succeeded for the large corporations that have been able to penetrate markets and exploit the labor of Mexico and Central America. These treaties have cost hundreds of thousands of farmers in the region their land and jobs. They have created a maquila system that provides jobs, but at exploitative wages and horrible working conditions. The societal pressures generated by the so-called “free trade” policies that have been codified in these agreements have also made necessary the migration north to jobs that will sustain life.

After decades of encouraging the flow of humanity north, and exploiting the labor, the United States has decided to recoil in revulsion from the immigrant cycle. But we cannot go back. We will have to find a solution, or we will cause a social conflagration. There are 12 million affected by these policies, trapped in a cycle created by specific policies that have benefitted US businesses and the US economy greatly. I propose that the US allow workers to pass freely back and forth between any countries that have ratified free trade agreements with the United States. If the United States would simply accept the documentation of people as they pass, as is done in the European Union, there would be a flow back to home countries and the migration cycle would be healthy and contained. Our more draconian immigration policy is only keeping people in the US and criminalizing a human condition, breaking families and communities in an enforced separation.

The migration issue in 2008 will be framed by power politics. The human costs are enormous for those caught in the cycle of poverty, desperation and migration. How the people of the United States respond to the cries for more enforcement, more walls, more criminalization will define us as a nation as surely as the vicious policies we are pursuing in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.