Jalisco and the Refugee Crisis
Jalisco state in Mexico rings in the ears with mariachi music and brightly dressed dancers twirling, while onlookers toast glasses of tequila. Both this iconic music and the even more iconic drink fermented and distilled from the blue agave are said to have been born there. Nat King Cole and Elvis sang the praises of Guadalajara, Jalisco’s capital, and the beaches of Puerto Vallarata will undoubtedly tickle the memory circuits of many folks from Central Wisconsin. Colorful and inspiring, Jalisco is also home to one of Mexico’s brutal drug cartels and entered my consciousness recently in a story about a farm there now known locally as the Mexican Auschwitz, the Ranch of Horror, a place formally named Izaguirre Ranch. One of many “extermination centers” with it’s own “clandestine crematoriums,” Izaguirre Ranch is the latest of many gang training camps to be discovered by families of “disappeared” teenagers around Mexico.
The word I kept bumping into in reading about Jalisco, indeed, when reading about much of Mexico is silence. This silence is one of the keys to survival in a land plagued by gangs with guns. The rules of the game say keep what you see, what you know, what you suspect to yourself. Follow that one rule and you just might stay alive. Break it at your own risk. Complicating things even more is the fact that you don’t know if the authorities can be trusted. Two Sheriff’s Deputies have already been arrested for supporting the dark work of Izaguirre where innocent teens lured by offers of jobs underwent a kind of macabre brainwashing metamorphosis ending in their emergence as assassins for the gang.
It’s not hard to imagine someone, maybe a mom and a dad, with little money and little hope, trying to raise a family under these conditions. Their decision to leave and head north to the border, desperate with dreams for a brighter future, makes good sense to any parent. I can easily see myself making that very same decision for my children under those circumstances.
Whether it be gang violence in Jalisco, the violence of war elsewhere, or the violence of poverty, playing out in way too many countries in Central and South America, indeed, around the world, these are the forces driving refugee migration. So this leads me in several directions. Straightaway and foremost we must recognize that poverty is an abomination, and that poverty anywhere diminishes the quality of life and the human spirit everywhere. I hold the refugee crisis, and the resulting heartless nationalistic turtle shell we and other countries are indignantly adopting as proof. Donald Trump, whipping up angry people, adds to this tragic drama by calling “the poor, the tired, the hungry,” coming to our borders as all of us have, child killers, rapists and drug dealing gangsters. This lie incites the worst in us.
Contrary to what we hear from today’s White House, we in the U.S. have the largest economy in the entire world, and are the wealthiest. So says Global Citizen Solutions. But today that enormous wealth is concentrated in the top 20 percent, with the bulk concentrated in the top 1 percent. Most of us have very little of that wealth This is especially poignant after the political spending of that 1 percent in recent elections. The sight of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, attempting to buy our Supreme Court election so blatantly and publicly was a bridge way to far for most of us.
We used to believe there should be limits on wealth and we maintained a pretty much level economic playing field through taxation. As late as the 1960s wealth was quite evenly distributed. No longer even close to true today. Today the overwhelming majority of us have very little of our country’s wealth. Check out the Urban Institute Nine Charts about Wealth Inequality in America for some eye-popping proof.
The question left begging is how much is enough?
Instead of demonizing the world’s poor, and the victims of brutal wars and gangs, there is certainly wealth enough on this planet, in this country and others like it, to provide them with meaningful, purposeful and rewarding lives. All it takes is an open heart. Where our president wants us to see hateful invading thugs, we can see sisters and brothers suffering and crying out for help. Where we lead the world in billionaires and multi-millionaires, we could see enough money to end poverty and the cancer of strife that feeds on that poverty around the world. There can be no doubt that hands off capitalism, the unlimited pursuit of more and more personal wealth, deadens our humanity, our souls and leads to growing poverty and violence, an increasingly lifeless planet and disastrous climate change.
Most of us in this country, and in every other developed country, live more comfortably and have far more conveniences than past kings and queens. Instead of concentrating more and more excessive, pointless wealth in the hands of a tiny minority, the poverty threatening so many of our brothers and sisters cries out for real solutions that can only come as a result of a humane sharing of that excess and the development that must surely follow.