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A Honduran immigrant entertains a fellow immigrant's child in front a map of Mexico showing train routes leading north at a shelter for undocumented Central American immigrants on September 14, 2014 in Tenosique, Mexico. The shelter, called La 72, is run by Fransiscan friars and is the first stop for thousands of Central American immigrants crossing north through Mexico to reach the United States. (Photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
The US Needs a Marshall Plan for Central America
How much longer will we watch the suffering and inhumanity before we agree that we need to do something big?
Jul 23, 2019
Imagine we're no longer battling Trump Administration abuse of asylum-seekers on our southern border and we have a chance to "do the right thing." What would we do? How about a Marshall Plan for Central America?
The original Marshall Plan (named for U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall) spent the equivalent of $100 billion in today's dollars to rebuild Western Europe following World War II. Many complex calculations went into spending that kind of money, yet today few would call it a mistake. But why would we consider a similar undertaking in the current circumstances? The answer requires a vision of the future, along with an understanding of the past extending beyond the headlines of the present.
In his 2013 book, "The Right to Stay Home," activist and journalist David Bacon wrote of Mexican farmers finding themselves considering the difficult and dangerous trek to El Norte, after their livelihoods were destroyed by the cheap American corn flooding their country as a result of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Bacon posed the question of whether there should be a "right not to migrate." Today's situation is more complex. Migrants now predominantly come from three separate countries--El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras--and for many violence has replaced poverty as the driving force. Yet the fundamental question remains the same: What would it take to make tomorrow's potential refugees decide staying home was a better option than giving their life savings to smugglers and risking their lives crossing deserts and rivers?
What also remains the same is deep U.S. involvement in the history of those countries--history that Central Americans know, and North Americans mostly don't. The longest-running U.S. intervention in the region has been in Guatemala, starting with the 1954 CIA-engineered overthrow of the country's democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz, continuing with using the country as staging ground for the 1960 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (putting down a local rebellion in the process), and involvement in the country's civil wars running into the 1990's.
The most expensive intervention may have been El Salvador where $4 billion (equivalent to $9-10 billion today) was invested in fighting insurgents in the 1980-1992 civil war (including a secret $1.4 million CIA investment in a presidential election.) The most recent intervention was the U.S. government's clandestine support of the 2009 overthrow of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, a country where we had also trained Contra soldiers to overthrow the Nicaraguan government in the 1980s. People flee these countries today because this history has produced three nations that have in this decade all recorded murder rates ranked in the top ten in the world.
As Bacon noted, while "proposals for human rights for migrants in the United States and Canada have won some attention ... proposals ... for alternatives to forced migration, have not." Certainly not in Washington which budgets $4 billion annually on border security--and about $180 million in foreign aid to the three countries.
So, is the situation driving the asylum-seekers our problem--in the sense of being something our government had a hand in creating? Yes. Is it something we need to spend large amounts of money on? We already do. As we know, when the threat of communism was the issue, we spent big. And if the issue in Central America were Islamic terrorism, ample funds from the nearly $6 trillion we've spent fighting that would certainly be available. Why not then find the funds to create alternatives to forced migration?
How exactly? Exactly, I don't know. But the Green New Deal has persuasively demonstrated that if we want to move a big idea politically, we need to agree on the nature and the magnitude of the problem before we fight about the details.
How much longer will we watch the suffering and inhumanity before we agree that we need to do something big, call it what we will--common sense, compassion, or a Marshall Plan for Central America?
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Tom Gallagher is a former Massachusetts State Representative and the author of 'The Primary Route: How the 99% Take On the Military Industrial Complex.' He lives in San Francisco.
Imagine we're no longer battling Trump Administration abuse of asylum-seekers on our southern border and we have a chance to "do the right thing." What would we do? How about a Marshall Plan for Central America?
The original Marshall Plan (named for U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall) spent the equivalent of $100 billion in today's dollars to rebuild Western Europe following World War II. Many complex calculations went into spending that kind of money, yet today few would call it a mistake. But why would we consider a similar undertaking in the current circumstances? The answer requires a vision of the future, along with an understanding of the past extending beyond the headlines of the present.
In his 2013 book, "The Right to Stay Home," activist and journalist David Bacon wrote of Mexican farmers finding themselves considering the difficult and dangerous trek to El Norte, after their livelihoods were destroyed by the cheap American corn flooding their country as a result of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Bacon posed the question of whether there should be a "right not to migrate." Today's situation is more complex. Migrants now predominantly come from three separate countries--El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras--and for many violence has replaced poverty as the driving force. Yet the fundamental question remains the same: What would it take to make tomorrow's potential refugees decide staying home was a better option than giving their life savings to smugglers and risking their lives crossing deserts and rivers?
What also remains the same is deep U.S. involvement in the history of those countries--history that Central Americans know, and North Americans mostly don't. The longest-running U.S. intervention in the region has been in Guatemala, starting with the 1954 CIA-engineered overthrow of the country's democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz, continuing with using the country as staging ground for the 1960 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (putting down a local rebellion in the process), and involvement in the country's civil wars running into the 1990's.
The most expensive intervention may have been El Salvador where $4 billion (equivalent to $9-10 billion today) was invested in fighting insurgents in the 1980-1992 civil war (including a secret $1.4 million CIA investment in a presidential election.) The most recent intervention was the U.S. government's clandestine support of the 2009 overthrow of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, a country where we had also trained Contra soldiers to overthrow the Nicaraguan government in the 1980s. People flee these countries today because this history has produced three nations that have in this decade all recorded murder rates ranked in the top ten in the world.
As Bacon noted, while "proposals for human rights for migrants in the United States and Canada have won some attention ... proposals ... for alternatives to forced migration, have not." Certainly not in Washington which budgets $4 billion annually on border security--and about $180 million in foreign aid to the three countries.
So, is the situation driving the asylum-seekers our problem--in the sense of being something our government had a hand in creating? Yes. Is it something we need to spend large amounts of money on? We already do. As we know, when the threat of communism was the issue, we spent big. And if the issue in Central America were Islamic terrorism, ample funds from the nearly $6 trillion we've spent fighting that would certainly be available. Why not then find the funds to create alternatives to forced migration?
How exactly? Exactly, I don't know. But the Green New Deal has persuasively demonstrated that if we want to move a big idea politically, we need to agree on the nature and the magnitude of the problem before we fight about the details.
How much longer will we watch the suffering and inhumanity before we agree that we need to do something big, call it what we will--common sense, compassion, or a Marshall Plan for Central America?
Tom Gallagher
Tom Gallagher is a former Massachusetts State Representative and the author of 'The Primary Route: How the 99% Take On the Military Industrial Complex.' He lives in San Francisco.
Imagine we're no longer battling Trump Administration abuse of asylum-seekers on our southern border and we have a chance to "do the right thing." What would we do? How about a Marshall Plan for Central America?
The original Marshall Plan (named for U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall) spent the equivalent of $100 billion in today's dollars to rebuild Western Europe following World War II. Many complex calculations went into spending that kind of money, yet today few would call it a mistake. But why would we consider a similar undertaking in the current circumstances? The answer requires a vision of the future, along with an understanding of the past extending beyond the headlines of the present.
In his 2013 book, "The Right to Stay Home," activist and journalist David Bacon wrote of Mexican farmers finding themselves considering the difficult and dangerous trek to El Norte, after their livelihoods were destroyed by the cheap American corn flooding their country as a result of the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Bacon posed the question of whether there should be a "right not to migrate." Today's situation is more complex. Migrants now predominantly come from three separate countries--El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras--and for many violence has replaced poverty as the driving force. Yet the fundamental question remains the same: What would it take to make tomorrow's potential refugees decide staying home was a better option than giving their life savings to smugglers and risking their lives crossing deserts and rivers?
What also remains the same is deep U.S. involvement in the history of those countries--history that Central Americans know, and North Americans mostly don't. The longest-running U.S. intervention in the region has been in Guatemala, starting with the 1954 CIA-engineered overthrow of the country's democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz, continuing with using the country as staging ground for the 1960 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (putting down a local rebellion in the process), and involvement in the country's civil wars running into the 1990's.
The most expensive intervention may have been El Salvador where $4 billion (equivalent to $9-10 billion today) was invested in fighting insurgents in the 1980-1992 civil war (including a secret $1.4 million CIA investment in a presidential election.) The most recent intervention was the U.S. government's clandestine support of the 2009 overthrow of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, a country where we had also trained Contra soldiers to overthrow the Nicaraguan government in the 1980s. People flee these countries today because this history has produced three nations that have in this decade all recorded murder rates ranked in the top ten in the world.
As Bacon noted, while "proposals for human rights for migrants in the United States and Canada have won some attention ... proposals ... for alternatives to forced migration, have not." Certainly not in Washington which budgets $4 billion annually on border security--and about $180 million in foreign aid to the three countries.
So, is the situation driving the asylum-seekers our problem--in the sense of being something our government had a hand in creating? Yes. Is it something we need to spend large amounts of money on? We already do. As we know, when the threat of communism was the issue, we spent big. And if the issue in Central America were Islamic terrorism, ample funds from the nearly $6 trillion we've spent fighting that would certainly be available. Why not then find the funds to create alternatives to forced migration?
How exactly? Exactly, I don't know. But the Green New Deal has persuasively demonstrated that if we want to move a big idea politically, we need to agree on the nature and the magnitude of the problem before we fight about the details.
How much longer will we watch the suffering and inhumanity before we agree that we need to do something big, call it what we will--common sense, compassion, or a Marshall Plan for Central America?
We've had enough. The 1% own and operate the corporate media. They are doing everything they can to defend the status quo, squash dissent and protect the wealthy and the powerful. The Common Dreams media model is different. We cover the news that matters to the 99%. Our mission? To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. How? Nonprofit. Independent. Reader-supported. Free to read. Free to republish. Free to share. With no advertising. No paywalls. No selling of your data. Thousands of small donations fund our newsroom and allow us to continue publishing. Can you chip in? We can't do it without you. Thank you.
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Sep 04, 2025
Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Delia Ramirez on Thursday strongly condemned the Trump administration's deadly attack on a boat allegedly trafficking cocaine off the coast of Venezuela as "lawless and reckless," while urging the White House to respect lawmakers' "clear constitutional authority on matters of war and peace."
"Congress has not declared war on Venezuela, or Tren de Aragua, and the mere designation of a group as a terrorist organization does not give any president carte blanche," said Omar (D-Minn.), referring to President Donald Trump's day one executive order designating drug cartels including the Venezuela-based group as foreign terrorist organizations.
Trump—who reportedly signed a secret order directing the Pentagon to use military force to combat cartels abroad—said that Tuesday's US strike in international waters killed 11 people. The attack sparked fears of renewed US aggression in a region that has endured well over 100 US interventions over the past 200 years, and against a country that has suffered US meddling since the late 19th century.
"It appears that US forces that were recently sent to the region in an escalatory and provocative manner were under no threat from the boat they attacked," Omar cotended. "There is no conceivable legal justification for this use of force. Unless compelling evidence emerges that they were acting in self-defense, that makes the strike a clear violation of international law."
Omar continued:
They're now using the failed War on Drugs to justify their egregious violation of international law. The US posture towards the eradication of drugs has caused immeasurable damage across our hemisphere. It has led to massive forced displacement, environmental devastation, violence, and human rights violations. What it has not done is any damage whatsoever to narcotrafficking or to the cartels. It has been a dramatic, profound failure at every level. In Latin America, even right-wing presidents acknowledge this is true.
The congresswoman's remarks came on the same day that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated a pair of Ecuadorean drug gangs as terrorist organizations while visiting the South American nation. This, after Rubio said that US attacks on suspected drug traffickers "will happen again."
"Trump and Rubio's apparent solution" to the failed drug war, said Omar, is "to make it even more militarized," an effort that "is doomed to fail."
"Worse, it risks spiraling into the exact type of endless, pointless conflict that Trump supposedly opposes," she added.
Echoing critics including former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, who called Tuesday's strike a "summary execution," Ramirez (D-Ill.) said Thursday on social media that "Trump and the Pentagon executed 11 people in the Caribbean, 1,500 miles away from the United States, without a legal rationale."
"From Iran to Venezuela, to DC, LA, and Chicago, Trump continues to abuse our military power, undermine the rule of law, and erode our constitutional boundaries in political spectacles," Ramirez added, referring to the president's ordering of strikes on Iran and National Guard deployments to Los Angeles, the nation's capital, and likely beyond.
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In a Thursday statement, Florida Immigrant Coalition deputy director Renata Bozzetto said that "the 11th Circuit is allowing atrocities to happen by reversing the injunction that helped to paralyze something that has been functioning as an extrajudicial site in our own state! The Everglades Detention Camp isn't just an environmental threat; it is also a huge human rights crisis."
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Salespeople for the Cigna-owned company EviCore, which insurers hire to review claims, have even boasted that they help companies reduce their costs by increasing denials by 15%, part of a model that ProPublica has called the "denials for dollars business." Their investigation in 2024 found that insurers have used EviCore to evaluate whether to pay for coverage for over 100 million people.
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