AOC Is Right: Vice President Delivers Her Message Exactly The Wrong Way
Harris’ comments failed to take responsibility for decades of destabilizing US foreign policy
I’m sorry: I’m generally a happy Democrat, pleased to support the Biden administration.
But, when it came to Vice President Kamala Harris' visit this week to Central America — and her joint appearance with Guatemala’s president, Alejandro Giammattei, in particular — I think that Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was rather generously muted in her public criticism.
She tweeted that it was “disappointing to see.”
I say that the event was a disorganized bomb.
Here’s why.
First of all, Ocasio-Cortez is absolutely right to point the finger for mass-migration from Central America — particularly the Northern Triangle nations of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — back at the United States.
The United States illegally interfered in the affairs of a number of Central American nations for decades, often overthrowing legitimately elected governments and backing right-wing dictatorships and death squads with little to no regard for the civil rights, or even the basic welfare, of their own people.
President Ronald Reagan fueled this cruel, misguided foreign policy — remember the Contras! — and set it on steroids, causing much of the destabilization, vicious crime and abject poverty which remains in the region and have become significant drivers of migration-at-all-costs.
(I can say all of this with some authority, as I spent a number of years as a student activist on the other side of the immoral and disastrous US policy, fighting against Reagan foreign policy, especially in El Salvador.)
We, as Americans, morally, have two choices today, given that we bear responsibility for the conditions.
We can welcome these migrants with open arms as the refugees they are.
Or we can help rebuild the region in a constructive, responsible fashion.
(There’s also really Option Number Three — which is the answer that will get you extra credit — which would be to simultaneously embrace both options above.)
But the idea of US leadership to take responsibility to clean up our mess isn’t new.
In fact, former Obama administration Cabinet official Julian Castro made his “21st century Marshall Plan” for Central America a centerpiece of his proposed foreign policy when he ran for the Democratic 2020 presidential nomination.
And President Biden wisely cribbed a bit of that idea himself, when on his first day in office, with a $4 billion plan to address the root causes of migration.
And yet, when Vice President Harris stood next to her host, Guatemala’s president Giammattei, all she did was desperately beg his people, “I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come. Do not come.”
Poorly prepared trip
Really? You send the vice president of the United States to deliver that?
This is the vice president of the United States. She has — or at least should have — access to the best staff on the planet.
Whomever prepped this trip did an amazingly — just blazingly — incompetent job.
What Harris bleated out there, basically begging Guatemalans — and, by extension, other Central Americans — to stay home, not only made her look weak, defensive and small, and therefore, the United States look weak, defensive and small.
It made Harris — and by extension, the United States — look clueless and heartless, as well.
Ocasio-Cortez is again 100-percent correct when she said, “We can’t help set someone’s house on fire and then blame them for fleeing.”
And that’s precisely what Kamala Harris did with her ill-spoken comments at the Palacio Nacional de la Cultura in Guatemala City.
She could have delivered the same meaning — but much more humanely — if she had told Guatemalans that they shouldn’t have to feel like they have to undertake the arduous trip north by not only reminding them about President Biden’s earlier commitment to address the root causes of migration — but coming with something tangible in hand to demonstrate good faith.
To find this something tangible to aid Guatemalans — who also recently have been devastated by hurricanes — all it would have taken was a little bit of smart staff work ahead of time to essentially scour the federal government’s couch cushions to find some unspent foreign policy “loose change.” Add up enough of that, package it smartly into a new “initiative” and the Biden administration would have looked incredibly humanitarian, forward-thinking and pro-active.
Instead, it looks like they’re just tired of getting beaten up by Fox News for a made-up “border crisis.”
