Leaving Unsaid

THE LADY CAME FROM MEXICO twenty years ago, illegally. She married a naturalized American citizen, also from Mexico, and stayed home to raise a family of two daughters, while her husband pursued a career in the U.S. Marine Corps. he did three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her illegal entry preclude, she feared, any hope of obtaining legal status. Then came a traffic stop, exposure, and summary Trumpian deportation, and a broken, bereaved family. She chose to accept rather than fight deportation, thus sparing her family a useless, stressful struggle. The children, ages eight and sixteen, are or course naturally American citizens, fully assimilated into American Floridian culture. A thorough canvass of the American public would doubtless produce not a single supporter of Donald trump who finds these circumstances repugnant. According to our president, children torn from their parents at the border "are not innocent", and "aren't people", but rather, are "animals". They are therefore locked in cages in abandoned Wal Mart buildings in southern Texas, while a federal judge in San Diego admonishes the government go get about the business of reuniting families. Left unsaid is that poverty and political chaos in Mexico and Central America is largely the by product of several decades of American foreign policy, the central component of which is enforced economic neo-liberalism, coupled with a policy of 'facilitating" the overthrow of duly elected governments which seek to redistribute national wealth and which reject American corporate exploitation. One of many examples is the collaboration of the CIA and the American Fruit company in the overthrow of the left wing Arbenz government if Guatemala in 1954, which, like all other American interventions in Latin America during the past two centuries, produced thousands of dislocated peasants, poverty, violence, and chaos. Left unsaid is that Texas, California, new Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado were stolen from Mexico in President's Polk's great imperialistic adventure, the Mexican War of 1846-1848. Traditionally, this region has been referred to in Mexico as "the occupied territories". In the United States of America, much is left unsaid.