If a body is undocumented, should we be surprised if the war against that body is undocumented too? The ugly truth of deportation is it is a war. An American war predicated on the same things as previous American wars: genocide, white supremacy, and body counts.
As was the case in Vietnam—and Iraq and Afghanistan—the most important thing for America is this metric of progress: their dead versus ours. A metric of territory lost and gained, of shock and awe, of humiliation and pain. And to those who might say, Well, if this is a war, there must be two sides.
It can’t just be America versus some vague idea, I’d point to American wars on other vague ideas: drugs, terrorism, socialism (and its “containment”). It wouldn’t be the first time America has pointed guns and resources at something without a standing army. And for those who might further ask, If this is a war, who are the American casualties?
I would respond: Who gets to say who is an American? The deported body removed from America is also an American body. I think about America’s Civil War, the war of all American wars, fought over the dignity and place of Black American bodies in the American fabric.
And America’s civil wars in countries like Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, and El Salvador. American interventions that helped spur the mass migrations we see today. The deaths of deportees are, in effect, part of America’s body count.
America’s involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War, for example, lasted from 1979 to 1992, during which time the United States supported a fascist military regime that ruled over a peasant class with torture, death squads, massacres, and forced disappearances that affected millions, fractured that country, and sent many refugees migrating north, largely toward cities like Houston and Los Angeles. It has been widely documented that American Green Berets trained Salvadoran military death squads throughout the 1980s at a facility today referred to as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The curriculum ran from executions to torture to extortion One Salvadoran special forces member trained by US Green Berets was Ernesto Deras.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
