Every year during the cooler seasons thousands of people leave Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras and start north towards Mexico and the United States in hope of a better life. Many won’t make it to Mexico because of the crime and corruption around the Mexican border. Some will be caught and sent back by Mexican border guards while others will decide to stay in Mexico for various reasons. Some will have enough money or indenture themselves to coyotes to transit Mexico and the U.S. border. Estimates are less than one-fourth of those who started will make it without being caught or die in the desert. Many will come as a group for protection.

Latin America’s mess is mostly our fault because of our government’s actions and American’s addition to cocaine and marijuana. We have corrupted their governments, economies, and peoples. My best friend from the fourth grade through Junior College was employed by an arm of the CIA building “schools” where they were built with thick concrete walls looking more like block houses on Honduras’s border. He spent most of the 1980s and 1990s going from one of the three to another depending on which our government was backing that day.

We are the reason why the drug trade has destroyed the national, district, and local governments. The narco-terrorists bribe or kill those who try to arrest them or seize their drugs. We have trained the National Police in the methods we used in South Vietnam where we moved people from villages, burned their homes, swept in at night picking up people who complain and “losing” them. The gangs just lop off heads in front of families. With the army, police, narco-terrorists, and the gangs harassing, extorting, blackmailing, and murdering both the rich and poor, it’s no wonder they want to come north for safety. The rich hop a plane and the poor walk.

How did the MS-13 and the Barrios-18 gangs get started in the three countries becoming so dominant? We deported them from Los Angeles in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. When they arrived in Honduras they quickly organized, spread out to other weakened countries, and with imported weapons became the dominate groups they are today.

No wonder those people want to come to a “safe” country instead of living in a country where torture, indiscriminate murder, kidnapping, extortion, and “losing” are common. The more a business grows the more it is “taxed”. If people don’t pay family members die. Pre-teens may have to join a gang to save a relative. We have no concept of the life these people are running away from and our country is the primary cause because of our drug habit and poor regional strategy. Isn’t that karma?