America's hot neighborhood

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 30/01/2024

According to The Economist, the missile that will sink Mr. Biden in the November elections is one coming from Latin America: the unstoppable flow of human beings who descend daily on the southern border of the United States, risking lives and property to be able to live in freedom.

This overwhelming flow will be unstoppable as long as Latin America remains the political/economic chaos of the last decade. That chaos like champagne has been decanted over centuries of repression of freedom. Thanks to the functioning of medieval structures in the region that extends from the Rio Grande to Patagonia, there is a significant proportion of the regional population that does not have access to property or stable jobs. It also does not have health or security coverage. Under these conditions, the population has decided to seek a better destiny in the only country that is a child of the Enlightenment where the rule of law prevails and people are free to create their own destiny.

But the nation of destiny is today shaken by an internal tidal wave in which a significant portion of its population does not understand how the jobs that allowed them to lead a middle-class life and educate their children so that they would have a better destiny have vanished. . They also do not understand why new jobs require skills that they were not taught in school. To this we must add the constant increase in prices and the failures of the health system to understand the anger of the 30% of Americans who represent the base of the social pyramid. And those Americans do not want a single more migrant in their territory. And they are willing to fight by any means, including violence, to prevent what they call “the silent invasion” from continuing. The majority of this population segment has been mobilized by Donald Trump who promises to deport 10 million undocumented foreigners and put an immense padlock on the southern border. We all know that this is impossible but Donald Trump's followers do not believe it and want to support the possibility of preventing the entry of foreigners whom they blame for their unemployment and the deterioration of public services.

Meanwhile, in Latin America, regimes dominate that have discovered a way to use the exodus of their population as a weapon to hurt the United States and as a monumental business through pacts with human traffickers within the hierarchies of transnational organized crime. Furthermore, they are linked to transnational organized crime by participating in the main source of income, which is drug trafficking. The drug routes, despite their diversification, are concentrated in the Andean Crescent (Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela) and the Central American isthmus. Those countries except Costa Rica and Ecuador - where an unequal battle is still being fought against transnational organized crime - are engulfed by transnational organized crime. And between the interest of attacking the United States and that of maximizing income from drug trafficking, violence is rampant and as long as there is violence there will be an exodus.

Therefore, as long as the neighborhood burns, the internal dilemmas in the United States will be exacerbated and the probabilities that that country will create mechanisms of distancing itself from Latin America are high. And to the extent that isolationism grows, the less likely it will be that the region will create bridges to participate in the new industrial redeployment in which the largest economy in the world will go from feeding its growth in manufacturing to consolidating a service plant in which the infrastructure Digital is the backbone.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».