Cuba USA

What kind of walls are on the way? Westbank, Mexico........

By Iroel Sánchez

Source La Pupila Insomne

During a visit to Mexico a little after the Berlin Wall fell, a journalist asked Fidel what he thought about those events taking place 25 years ago. “I am against all walls, including this one here the United States is raising,” he responded in a flash - he who was then living his “Final Hour,” according to a very popular book of the time.

A decade later, the writer Eduardo Galeano called attention to big but invisible walls born after the one dividing the two Berlins was demolished: “Not much is heard of the wall the United States is putting up along the border with Mexico, and they don’t speak much of the wire fences around Ceuta and Melilla.”

“Almost nothing is spoken about the wall in the West Bank that perpetuates Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and will be 15 times longer than the Berlin Wall and nothing, nothing at all, is said about the Moroccan Wall that perpetuates the robbery of the Sahrawipeople’s homeland by the King of Morocco and measures 70 times longer than the Berlin Wall.”

The longest wall is here on this side, in Mexico. Furthermore, it’s one where more than 10,000 people have died in surrounding areas since its construction began in 1994. Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography reported on 121,683 violent deaths there between 2006 and 2012 alone.

They are victims of the synergy between politics and drug-trafficking that gained its darkest milestone in the monstrous events in Ayotzinapa. There, 43 young people learning to be rural teachers were “disappeared” by decision of the mayor and his wife who put the “United Warriors” cartel in charge of the executions. In the process of looking for these pedagogical students, 35 burial sites for massacres in Guerrero state have turned up. As explained by the writer Juan Villoro, “Digging up soil in Guerrero inevitably is a forensic matter.”

Nevertheless, what happened in Guerrero is not exceptional. An investigation shows that drug-trafficking is enmeshed in 72 percent of 2,440 municipalities in the country.

The apparent cause is war by everybody against everybody at the hands of politicians and narco-trafficking cartels in which the most destitute are bearing the brunt. But the truth is a little more complicated: proximity to the biggest drug market in the world, combined with the U.S. - Mexico Free Trade Treaty that has impoverished the Mexican countryside. Conditions have been created such that being a hired killer is a good job for young people; they have no other future than that of bearing arms in the service of money. Choosing the profession of teacher can cost their lives.

That phrase of Porfirio Diaz, “Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States,” comes back more and more as a painful reality. Mexico took on the destiny reserved by the North American mafia for Havana. They had allied with the dictator Batista in order to convert Cuba – another very close southern neighbor of the United States – into a drug and gambling capital. If the United States government and the mafia did agree to assassinate Fidel, it’s only because they had both lost a lot with the 1959 revolution.

One doesn’t have to be very imaginative to realize that a capitalist Cuba, inexorably tied to Washington, wouldn’t be the Norway or Holland of the Caribbean that some fool might dream of. Instead of offering benefits under the Cuban Adjustment Law that privileges Cuban migrants, the United States would be walled-off territory for residents of this Island. In Cuba, “charlatans and crooks,” mentioned by the New York Times a little while ago, would strike a deal with drug-traffickers and assassins to finish off anyone daring to challenge them.

Would one then be speaking of Cuban migrants? Or would Cubans be just as invisible as the victims of those barriers much larger than the Berlin Wall that Washington and its allies inflicted on Palestinians, Mexicans, Saharans, or Africans?

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