USA: Massacres of El Paso and Dayton
Xenophobia and alienation: two scourges generated by the Yankee ruling class. The murder of 22 people, mostly of Hispanic origin, in the town of El Paso in Texas, at the hands of a white supremacist has unleashed a wave of repudiation in the US and the world against Trump's racist and anti-immigrant policies. A few hours later a new massacre in Dayton, ohio state, ended up grating the nerves of the American people. The solution for Democrats and other opportunists is to control arms sales.
They hide the roots of the problem: the alienation generated by the deep contradictions that cross Yankee society and the racism historically encouraged by its dominant classes, now aggravated by the xenophobic tirades of its current president.
When the images of those murdered and injured at the Walmart supermarket in El Paso were still fresh by Patrick Crusius, a young white supremacist Trump admirer, that he had published a manifesto in which he expressed fear of a supposed “Latin invasion” that would replace the white Anglo-Saxon Yankees and that a sufficient number would then have to be killed to stop them., a raid practiced by ICE (United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement) stopped 680 undocumented workers at a Mississippi chicken processor.
This action by ICE, in compliance with Trump's order to carry out mass raids to expel undocumented migrants, unleashed tremendous despair among family members, colleagues and friends, and fundamentally in the small children of affected families, who today can see their parents expelled to their countries of origin.
Outrage against Trump after the massacres, prevented his visits to the cities where they occurred, with the excuse of accompanying the victims' families, served to hide their responsibility. Protests by relatives and residents of these two towns expressed opposition to their presence..
The violent massacres must be added to the clearly racist attack in El Paso, for just one week, in Dayton and at the California Food Fair. These strings of attacks have created a climate of fear and prevention in many Americans that led, for example, to that motorcycle exhaust in New York, will generate an episode of collective panic in Time Square, with cumshots and more 12 injured as a result of collisions among people who fled in terror in the belief that they could fall victim to a new shooting. The growth of extreme violence, the murders, the massacres, an important part of them caused by xenophobic reasons, They are indicators of the degrees of social tension that currently exist in Yankee society..
The racism
El Paso is a Texas town in which the majority of the population is of Hispanic origin (8 of the dead were Mexican immigrants). As Fernando García relates, Director and Founder of the Border Network for Human Rights in El Paso, Texas, In the interview conducted by DW on 06/08: “…it was an attack on what El Paso represents.” (…) “We have opened our houses, our churches, our community, to receive migrants. Because we are immigrants, 80% from El Paso are Hispanics of several generations.” (…) “…also because El Paso has resisted each of the racist and xenophobic attacks of this president. Here, in El Paso, children were separated from their parents, The program to return refugees to Mexico began here, and in each of them we have been resisting with great dignity.”
Reflecting that the problem comes from previous governments, but now it has gotten worse, Garcia continues: “We have had many administrations, we have a lot of problems in terms of border policy before Trump. But with Trump what we have seen is that the way immigrants are criminalized has expanded., how to name the migrant, we are called rapists, we are called criminals, we are told we are a threat to national security, border militarization expands. We have militias coming here. Precisely before this incident, a few months ago, We had armed white supremacist militias arriving here saying they were responding to Trump's call., saying that they were coming to stop the invasion. And that's what this shooter did. Responded to Trump's call. What happened yesterday was the result of racist and xenophobic politics, daughter of the President.” (1)
It wasn't just the reaction of a crazy man on the loose.. In the US, the sector of the bourgeoisie that Trump represents, uses the crisis that engulfs impoverished sectors of the Yankee people to use their desperation against immigrant workers. There is a clear connection between this armed attack and the race of undocumented workers at the Mississippi factory.
Decades ago, the bourgeoisie, in an effort to divide the Yankee working class, used hatred against blacks, who had to fight hard to win their civil rights and not to be treated as second-class citizens. That is why in the US the “Americans” are the white Anglo-Saxons, while black citizens or citizens of Hispanic origin are “African-American” or “Hispanic-American”.
A picture of great social tension
We are witnessing great social and political polarization, product of the serious economic crisis that in the 2008 ended the “American dream”. The growing increase in social inequality dominates political and social life. The rich concentrate the largest fortunes in history, They are an increasingly corrupt elite, with more and more money hoarded by many forms of financial crime in the face of important social sectors that will never recover the levels of well-being that their parents had.
This resulted in the questioning of the old political establishment of Democrats and Republicans. (Trump can be considered an outsider of this traditional staff) and growing political polarization to the right (Trump) and to the left (reflected by the emergence of millions of socialist millennials and distortedly by the rise of Sanders in the Democratic internal).
In this frame, Trump's attack on immigrants helps him encourage the vote of his electoral base, who buys the verse that immigrants come to take their jobs and that they long for their old privileges of the middle class and working sectors of an imperialist country, now impoverished by the economic crisis. It is also very useful to put in cash and continue exploiting the most precarious and exploited sector of the Yankee working class., Latino migrant workers, pressing downwards and precarious at the same time, to the rest of the Yankee workers, whose jobs have lost their historical quality despite the much-promoted “economic recovery”.
The migrant “José González, described life in the strawberry fields. 'Long days, long hours in the scorching heat, no access to water, not even a bathroom', He said. González went to night school to learn English and managed to find work outside the fields. 'Not everyone is lucky', continuous. 'Some die trying to cross the border. Those who are lucky enough to do so have a hard time.. Some take advantage when they come to work and are paid below the minimum wage.'. 'They deceive us with immigration so as not to say anything, not fight for anything, they don't pay us'.
One study found that 34 percent of undocumented immigrant workers were denied minimum wage. Eighty-four percent do not receive their mandatory time and a half when working overtime. And that's just salaries: for undocumented immigrant workers, Poor working conditions are an almost universal reality. “(…) “Daniel Costa in the New York Times. 'This gives employers extraordinary power to exploit them and pay them less. When immigrants' wages are suppressed, “So do the wages of American workers competing for similar jobs.”. (Jacobin 08/07/2019) (2)
The complicity of Democrats and López Obrador
Analysts point out that Trump has been deepening his xenophobic discourse, some say “playing with fire”, since it would favor him among his voter base in this pre-election period. Democrats, for their part, use this to, while they endorse the core of their policies, appear by distancing itself from its most irritating features such as the construction of the wall or the separation of children from migrant parents. Nevertheless, The deportation figures during the Obama presidencies expose this lying discourse. The former Democratic president expelled in 7 years to 3 millions of migrants, something that Trump is still far from equaling, despite his anti-immigrant speech.
The other case of extreme cynicism is that of the current center-left Mexican president López Obrador, that he developed his political career with a nationalist and anti-imperialist discourse and that at the first serious squeeze from Trump, that threatened to tariff exports from Mexico to the US, He ran to deploy the Mexican National Guard to the border with Guatemala, to detain and deport Central Americans who necessarily cross Mexico to reach the United States. In the face of the current El Paso massacre, the only thing he asks for is the extradition of the terrorist to his country..
The campaign for “gun control”
The proliferation of “lone wolves”, some that, as we pointed out, they are not so lonely, since they are guided by official propaganda, has allowed the Democratic Party to relaunch its campaign against the free sale of weapons to Americans, demanding regulations that prevent it. In this they are accompanied by numerous bourgeois and petty bourgeois sectors., that after a “pseudo-pacifist” speech they prefer that the monopoly of weapons remain in the hands of the largest terrorist state in the world: the American state.
Trump himself has indicated that he is not against in principle convening Congress to debate greater control, but now he sees no “political appetite” to ban assault rifles. A statement that seems to have some degree of seriousness since immediately the North American National Rifle Association, the most important lobby in defense of the freedom to sell weapons, came out to criticize him.
Unfortunately, this objectively functional position to maintain control of weapons in the Yankee imperialist state has also infected leftist currents that, as Anticapitalists of Spain, on its Viento Sur website, publishes an article by Ryu Spaeth titled “Gun culture has always been the essence of white supremacy” in which he supports this pseudo-pacifist campaign. (3)
The origin of the constitutional right that every American can freely purchase weapons, It is a democratic right that dates back to the democratic struggles that gave rise to the North American nation..
That the North American imperialist bourgeois state does not have absolute control of weapons is a great achievement of the Yankee people.. Going against that right by supporting it with arguments “from the left” does a great favor to the imperialist bourgeois state., one of whose fundamental powers lies precisely in the possession of that weaponry. It is not access to weapons that causes massacres, It is the tremendous violence and alienation that Yankee society endures., responsibility for the policies of its imperialist ruling class and a xenophobic discourse launched from the very bowels of power.
To end racism, defeat xenophobia and capitalist exploitation
The fight for the democratic rights of migrants in the US and their rights as workers, It is a fight that must unite the working class and human rights defenders in the United States and the world..
It has a very great importance in the fights of the world working class against the imperialist capitalist regime., because it is a fight at the very heart of the imperial monster and its weakening favors the struggle of all the peoples of the world.
That is why there is a unity between the fight to defeat all the Yankee supremacist gangs, to his mentor President Trump, conquer the democratic and union rights that are denied to Latino workers and fight to overthrow the underlying cancer of North American society: the decadent capitalism of democrats and republicans.
Faced with attacks from the right, the struggle of women and for gender rights, of the migrants, teacher strikes, the phenomenon of “socialist millennials”, they fill us with great enthusiasm, to those of us who see in them a great source of raw material to create a political tool that fights for a different society, without racism or xenophobia, without oppression of migrants, to racial and gender minorities, women, Young, without capitalist exploitation for the majority and enormous wealth for a few, a socialist society.
Gustavo Giménez
