Team Biden Works to Reignite Population Wars in Central America

by Gretchen Small

[Print version of this article]

May 30—The Biden-Harris strategy to resolve the immigration crisis at the southern U.S. border is not the humanitarian policy it is touted to be. It is simply the latest repackaging of the explicitly Malthusian depopulation policy elaborated five decades ago by those British-allied forces in the U.S. Establishment which today are decided upon finishing off the United States, and most of the rest of the planet, through the “Great Green Reset” fraud.

To judge this for yourself, start from what is needed:

The time has come for Central America to be freed from poverty and wars. With a high-speed rail line running through the region and intersecting (preferably) two large cross-isthmus canals, the seven countries of Central America are perfectly situated to become a modern agricultural, industrial and logistics hub of the global Belt and Road Initiative over the next decade or two. (See Figure 1.)

An explosion of literacy brigades, training programs for teachers, health professionals, skilled labor and modern agricultural techniques will be necessary to accomplish this. Young Central American engineers and skilled labor will have years of work in front of them to develop the region into a productive link between the continents of North and South America, and also between the Pacific and the Caribbean Basin. Countless roads and feeder rail lines are needed to connect the region’s towns and cities into the development corridor spreading out along both sides of the cross-continental railway. Dozens of new hospitals, hundreds of clinics, thousands of schools are needed. Water management and flood control expertise must be assembled to develop strategies to protect the region from the effects of the hurricanes which inevitably come Central America’s way.

This development will require many more people, but Central America has much room to grow. Its territory is over a third larger than that of Japan, which has a population two and a half times larger than that of Central America. Central America’s population is only now nearing 50 million people, since millions of Central Americans were forced to migrate over the last four decades to survive.

Central Americans are eager for such a change. Fed up with no infrastructure, no jobs, no future, bestial gangs and drug wars, they have noticed that China, once as impoverished and destroyed as they are still, has transformed itself into a world-class technological giant, eliminating poverty in the process. Panama, Costa Rica and El Salvador have accepted China’s offer to work on development together through the global Belt and Road infrastructure project; other Central American nations are considering doing the same. They want nothing more than the U.S. to join with China in helping them carry out this development.

From that standpoint, now look at what Biden-Harris are offering:

Transformation of the Central American economy is to be handed over to the rabid Malthusians of the World Economic Forum (the Davos group), while any government which refuses to play by the Anglo-American “rules-based order” or proposes to work with China on development will be subject to sanctions and well-known operations to effect regime change.

The latter is no idle threat: President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has already been labelled by Washington as an “authoritarian,” and his government is now under attack. Bukele was elected in 2019 on the promise to overthrow “politics as it has been,” put people first, resolve physical economic problems and provide security. The small steps he was able to take in his first two years of office won his “New Ideas” party a smashing victory in the February 2021 midterm elections.

It has also won him great popularity throughout the region. A group of seven Honduran mayors who turned to President Bukele personally to secure vaccines for their people, which the Biden administration has refused to yet release, described to Schiller Institute representatives last week the conditions of their impoverished towns. One mayor described how pregnant women in his town have no medical facilities whatsoever where they can safely give birth. The closest hospital is in Tegucigalpa, the nation’s capital, which is only 34 kilometers away, but there are no roads by which to reach the capital, so the women have to walk three-to-four hours by foot, before being able to catch a bus on which to reach the hospital.

Here we summarily identify the roots of such conditions still existing in the region that successive U.S. governments insist is “its backyard.” The roots extend back five decades to the period when Malthusian depopulation was established as U.S. national security policy in the wake of President Richard Nixon ending the Bretton Woods System on behalf of British interests in 1971. Depopulation was coupled with a policy of fomenting the drug trade across the Americas, on behalf of the otherwise bankrupt international banking system.

American statesman Lyndon LaRouche fought these policies tooth-and-nail at every step of the way. Central America would already be that booming part of the Belt and Road project if Henry Kissinger had not won the policy battle in the Reagan administration against LaRouche’s famous 1982 Operation Juárez strategy to replace debt usury with a series of such nested, great infrastructure development projects across the Americas.

Self-professed British agent Kissinger and cohorts within the permanent bureaucracy pushed population reduction and the British colonial “Hong Kong” model as the region’s future, and won the day. No American president has bucked that imperial program since then.

The thousands of unaccompanied Central American children arriving at the U.S. border are a result of that policy. So are the drugs and drug gangs seen across the United States. The time has come to root every last outpost of this Malthusian outlook out of our government.

The Biden-Harris Regime-Change ‘Migration Plan’

Since the presidential campaign, the Biden-Harris team has been promising that it will launch a four-year, $4 billion strategy to address “the Root Causes of Irregular Migration” from Mexico and the three countries of Central America which Washington, D.C. has taken to calling the “Northern Triangle:” Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

No economic aid program has been rolled out. There has been no export of Covid-19 vaccines—that is still coming “any day now.” What has gotten well underway, instead, is the drive for sanctions and regime change as the cutting edge of Team Biden’s “Root Causes Strategy.”

President Biden’s February 2 “Executive Order on Creating a Comprehensive Regional Framework to Address the Causes of Migration…” identifies “combatting corruption, strengthening democratic governance, and advancing the rule of law” as the first of five priorities. “Addressing economic insecurity and inequality” comes last on the list—and it does not exist at all when it comes to concrete action.

“Rule of law” and “anti-corruption” are the mantra of the day. U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala, William Popp, managed in his quite brief remarks to a May 27 Atlantic Council “Northern Triangle” policy forum to name “rule of law” as the key to stopping migration perhaps a dozen times, with “fighting corruption” a close second.

The first known even nominal discussion of “economic insecurity” finally came on May 27, when Vice President Kamala Harris, in charge of the Biden administration’s strategy to reduce migration from the region, called a meeting at the White House with twelve private companies and organizations active in the region. It was billed as a “Call to Action to the Private Sector to Deepen Investment in the Northern Triangle.”

The discussion was an insult to Central American intelligence. When Chinese representatives meet with governments across Ibero-America and the Caribbean, they discuss how China can help build and finance major physical economic projects, set up advanced railroad engineering institutes, and offer medical assistance. In this White House meeting, not even U.S. assistance for something so mundane as improving existing roads was on the agenda. Attendees included the likes of two Colombian banks, Mastercard, Microsoft, a couple of non-profits specializing in “microfinance,” “microbusinesses” for women, and “Tents for Refugees,” a coffee and a yogurt producer, “apps” for education—and the financiers’ “Great Reset”-pushing World Economic Forum.

The White House agenda was big on discussing how to create a “business-enabling environment” in the region, so private companies could provide “digital and financial inclusion,” “climate-smart agriculture,” and “clean energy.” The agenda did at least name improving health access as a “focus area,” and recognized that to do so would require “support[ing] clean access to clean water and sanitation.” The Harvard Chan School of Public Health did participate in the meeting, although so far, its mandate appears to be more concerned with improving health data management systems than much actual medical assistance.

What is clear, despite the gobbledygook verbiage in Harris’s “Call to Action,” is that the Malthusian World Economic Forum has been assigned the central role in coordinating the whole program for the region. No leap to a modern industrial and agricultural economy is in store for Central America, so long as the WEF is in charge of convening the “committed actors,” running the discussions between governments, civil society, business, etc., and lining up the “long-term, sustainable investment” to remake the region as it envisages it.

Target El Salvador, Take Two

The line that President Bukele is an “authoritarian” who does not respect the “rule of law” has been building up for some time. When he was elected, many in Washington were confident that he would stay on the “rightwing” side of the ideological game, and especially, that he would break the relations with the People’s Republic of China which the preceding government had established in the last months of its administration—ending decades of diplomatic ties with Taiwan, rather than Beijing.

Not only did Bukele not reestablish relations with Taiwan, as wished by Washington, but he travelled to China in December 2019, and signed an agreement for China to build four projects in El Salvador. Furthermore, Bukele established a warm relationship with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also labelled a “populist authoritarian” by the financier interests.

Things got nasty, however, when Bukele’s “New Ideas” party, used its overwhelming majority in El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly, on May 1 to replace the Attorney General and the members of the Supreme Court, who were owned by the opposition. They did so, following the procedure specified in El Salvador’s Constitution, and they had the power to do so because in February’s midterm elections, “New Ideas” won a smashing majority, winning 56 seats, two-thirds of the legislature’s 84 seats.

The two parties which had ruled the country between 1992 and 2019 had been crushed: the hard-right ARENA party having won only 12% of the votes in the midterm elections; the former leftwing guerrilla FMLN party, only 6%.

U.S. Vice President Harris tweeted on May 2 her “deep concerns about El Salvador’s democracy,” warning that “an independent judiciary is critical … to a strong economy.” Secretary of State Tony Blinken called up Bukele to remind him that ousted Attorney General Raúl Melara was a U.S. man (“an effective partner” in “fighting corruption and impunity”). Biden’s Latin American Affairs Advisor Juan Gonzalez tweeted that “this is not how things are done in a democratic state.”

London’s The Economist argued “an economic squeeze” is the best option to crack Bukele, because that would deny Bukele the funds to carry through on infrastructure and social programs which are the basis of his support. It is being talked up that the U.S. will block an IMF loan now being negotiated, and former President Obama’s Ambassador to El Salvador, Mari Carmen Aponte, reports that restricting the remittances sent back home to El Salvador is under discussions, which would financially strangle the country: remittances from Salvadorans living abroad (mostly in the U.S.) make up 20% of El Salvador’s GDP, a third of the income of Salvadoran households generally, and up to 50% of rural households’ income.

Bukele called a meeting on May 3 to explain to the diplomatic corps posted to San Salvador why the Legislative Assembly’s actions were taken and were constitutional. All the heads of the embassies attended, except the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires. Bukele described to the diplomats the corruption of the past Legislative Assembly, as well as that of the ousted judges and Attorney General. Government for 30 years has been based on an “obscene partisan dividing up of the spoils.”

“You built your country,” he answered one ambassador. “You should let us build our own. It is very difficult if you want to tie us to a past which you know was not good for us. If you continue subjecting us to the things which have kept us in underdevelopment, we are never going to develop.”

He reported that he himself was surprised by how young many members of the new assembly there are. These are “young people who want to change their country.… So, I am asking you, let them do it. Let them change the country…. If you tie us [to the past], we are always going to be a poor country, underdeveloped, in which our people are going to have to go to the United States, or Canada to work, because they can’t get a productive job here…. Let us develop ourselves…. Good friends let their friends develop, too.”

Team Biden delivered its first move against the Bukele government on May 18, when the State Department included two top officials of Bukele’s administration on the list of “Corrupt Officials in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador” sent to the U.S. Congress under the infamous “Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act,” which arrogates to the U.S. government the right to sanction anybody in any country it chooses.

The State Department report itself admits that it uses “media reporting … or allegations,” as well as “credible information” to draw up the list. Bukele’s Chief of Staff, Carolina Recinos, is accused of engaging in “significant acts of corruption during her term in office” (no further details), while his Minister of Security and Justice Rogelio Rivas’s alleged “significant acts of corruption,” even if true, in no way touch any vital U.S. interest. (He is alleged to have “awarded his own private construction company several noncompetitive and unadvertised contracts to build police stations and other buildings that fall under his official capacity and inflated the cost of materials.”)

The list was released by Rep. Norma Torres (D-CA), head of the Central American Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives and a close ally of Kamala Harris, who warned that she expects the Biden administration “to use all levers at our disposal, including sanctions, visa restrictions, withholding support to deter future acts of corruption, and dismantling the systems that allow corruption to occur,” to punish the designated offenders.

That was followed up on May 21, when the State Department’s Agency for International Development (AID) announced that AID will be “redirecting assistance away” from El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly, the Supreme Court, and the National Civilian Police, to instead fund the efforts of “local civil society and human rights organizations,” to ensure so-called “democratic governance.” The announcement was made personally by U.S. AID administrator Samantha Power, notorious as one of the most important architects of Obama’s regime-change policy which destroyed Southwest Asia.

President Bukele called out the fraud of this move, in a May 21 tweet:

If you ask ANY Salvadoran at the United States border what is the reason they fled their country, 99.9% of them will answer: 1. Lack of a job. 2. Insecurity. It’s very revealing that USAID chose to stop funding.... SECURITY! Is the real plan to create more immigration.

Malthusianism Is the Real ‘Root Cause of Migration’

Addressing an EIR conference on May 16, 1982, Lyndon LaRouche warned that a new military doctrine of “Third World population war” was underway. “The proposed new policy, manufactured in Britain and sometimes called a ‘population war’ policy, is to gear USA and NATO forces for ‘conventional warfare’ against populations of developing-sector nations,” he charged.

LaRouche pointed to two Carter administration documents, Global 2000 and Global Futures,

[which] define the principal strategic threat of the 1980s to be not the Soviet military forces, but the size of the population of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. They assert that the excessive numbers of black, brown and yellow-hued peoples are consuming altogether too much of the natural resources of the territories they inhabit, natural resources which the Anglo-Saxon race must conserve for its own future needs….

The purpose is not to reduce the populations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia simply by U.S., British and French soldiers’ shooting down the civilian population, rather, the scourge of war in these regions of the world is intended to destroy large portions of the basic economic infrastructure of the targeted nations. The purpose is to create the conditions of famine, epidemic disease and pestilences which will be sufficient to cause the desired increases in the death rate.

The “population war” policy was an expansion of the genocide policy against the developing sector which LaRouche had denounced in his first half-hour U.S. national television broadcast as a presidential candidate. We publish the text of that explosive broadcast, delivered in the last days of the 1976 election campaign, elsewhere in this issue of EIR.

LaRouche did not know then, nor when he gave his “population war” warning in 1982, that in December 1974, the National Security Council, then headed by Henry Kissinger (serving simultaneously as Secretary of State!), had issued National Security Study Memorandum 200, a 250-page study titled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” NSSM 200 declared population growth, particularly in the developing sector, a national security threat to the United States requiring U.S. action to reduce it. That memo and the series of memoranda implementing the policy which followed, including those under Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, remained classified until 1989, and were only released to the public via the National Archives in 1990.

The memos led to the buildup of a policy planning apparatus dedicated to producing Malthusian measures, which was established in the U.S. “permanent bureaucracy” (otherwise known as the military-industrial complex). The Ad Hoc Group on Population Policy in the National Security Council, and the Office of Population Affairs (OPA) at State, jointly put together the 1980 Global 2000 report cited by LaRouche, which openly declared a goal of reducing the world’s population by two billion people.

Target: El Salvador, the First Round

In 1981, EIR published a series of explosive reports documenting how these interests were prepared to accomplish their goal by any means necessary.

One of the most horrifying, was what these ghouls were planning for El Salvador, a nation small in population (some 4.5 million people in 1980), singled out as a testing ground for strategies for generating maximum death.

Several countries in Central America by that time had been drawn into guerrilla wars, fomented by external forces playing upon local inequalities and injustices, and providing weapons to all sides to develop “bargaining chips” for broader geopolitical games. (As one Salvadoran Bishop put it at the time: “The great powers provide the arms, El Salvador provides the corpses.”)

Civil war began in El Salvador in 1979. By 1992, when that war was formally ended, more than 75,000 lives had been lost, not counting those dying from the consequences of destroyed infrastructure and ruined farmlands.

In the accompanying article, “Malthusians Have Targeted El Salvador for Depopulation War for Decades,” the reader will read how two key Malthusians assigned to the Salvadoran case brazenly discussed their goals: a Latin American case officer at State Department’s OPA, Thomas Ferguson; and William Paddock, an agronomist who worked for many years in Central America for United Fruit’s flagship “research center,” notorious as a depopulation fanatic since the 1967 publication of the book he co-authored with his brother Paul, with the chilling title, Famine 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive?

Pay attention to their common insistence on the necessity of fomenting perpetual war “to do the job” of reducing population, as Ferguson put it. Ferguson argued that “if the war were to go on for 30 or 40 years, then you would really accomplish something,” the key problem he posed being to ensure “continuous political violence” for all that time.

In a public forum around the same time, Paddock proposed that U.S. policymakers could ensure “continuous violence” by backing both “sides” of the civil war simultaneously. He urged the Reagan administration to continue to back the military government then in power in El Salvador, but to immediately start working with the guerrilla opposition as well, to then turn around and start working with “the opposition to the opposition,” a chain without end, indifferent to what fighting force is supported, as long as the fight continues to kill people.

A policy which anyone familiar with the history of U.S. policy towards El Salvador over the recent decades which followed, will recognize has been dutifully implemented.

From the Hong Kong Model …

LaRouche proposed repeatedly to President Reagan in the 1980s that the United States must work with the Contadora Group formed by four larger nations of the region for the purpose of bringing an end to the conflicts in Central America, both by cooperating to cut the number of weapons flooding into the area and beginning work on the “great projects” required to develop the transportation, energy, and agro-industrial infrastructure of Central America.

But in a surprise turn in July 1983, President Reagan appointed Henry Kissinger—who Reagan had long identified as the flagbearer for U.S. foreign policy failures—to head a “National Bipartisan Commission on Central America” which was to draw up the administration’s policy for the region.

That decision officially closed the door on any serious discussion of LaRouche’s insistence that it was in the U.S. strategic interest that it reverse its policy toward the Americas of austerity and debt collection, in favor of one in coherence with the Hamiltonian American System of Economics, of large-scale exports of U.S. capital goods and technological aid to the region.

The final report of the Kissinger Commission, as it became known, issued in January 1984, was specifically premised on the Malthusian lie that “overpopulation presents a serious threat to the development and health of that region,” requiring “a sustained reduction in population growth rates” as a goal.

Free trade, money-first economics was the name of the game. Like the Biden-Harris plan, the Commission insisted economic growth comes only to “open and free economies” which provide “improved investment conditions” for private initiative. Private enterprise, not governments, must be the “engines for growth,” and that with an emphasis on sweat-shop “assembly” plants (maquiladoras) and other low-tech, labor-intensive, no-future jobs.

There is little doubt that the drug trade which was then spreading across the region was also to be included as a central part of Central America’s “free and open economies.”

One “private initiative” named in the report was that of United Brands. Infamous for its colonial plantations, according to Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) officials speaking to EIR, United Brands ships from Central America were bringing in around 20% of all cocaine coming into the United States by the late 1970s. This was the company the Kissinger Commission report went out of its way to whitewash as a reformed “model citizen and model employer.”

Hong Kong, at the time still a British Crown colony, was likewise held up as a model, under the heading of “Improved Investment Conditions.” Hong Kong’s role as the coordinating center and transshipment point for South East Asia’s booming opium and heroin traffic was also a well-known fact.

… To the Mara Salvatrucha

Even before Kissinger sold his drug economy model to the Reagan administration, Vice President George H. W. Bush’s networks within the Reagan administration —with U.S. Ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte, would-be “Marshal” Elliott Abrams, and Lt. Col. Oliver North at the lead—were personally overseeing the Nicaraguan mercenary force known as the “Contras” and its cocaine trafficking by which it financed its operation. Even the U.S. airfield in Ilopango, El Salvador, was used for trafficking.

On August 18-20, 1996, the San Jose Mercury News broke the story that the traffickers who had introduced cheap, instantly-addictive crack cocaine into the poor neighborhoods of Los Angeles as early as 1983, were part of that U.S.-government-led Contra operation. In 1985, in the few short weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, crack cocaine was then introduced simultaneously onto the streets of a dozen other U.S. cities, in what the DEA called one of the most organized drug operations ever seen. According to the San Jose Mercury News report, the same “Contra” networks soon opened a weapons pipeline to the now-addicted, nationwide crack cocaine distribution networks.[fn_1]

Crack cocaine is a killer, and it lends itself to creating killers out of children abandoned by their society. Crack users are prone to violence, paranoia and wild mood swings. Easy enough to manufacture, the franchise to produce and market crack was handed over to young, poor, black and Hispanic street gangs. The gangs caught up in the operation were transformed from young street fighters into bestial terrorist operators, whose ranks were filled largely by children dehumanized by drugs and induced murder.

This was the genesis of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and similar drug gangs, first formed in the United States out of George Bush’s “secret government” crack cocaine operation. When U.S. governments decided that they could reduce their U.S. drug gang problem in the early 1990s by deporting Central American gang members back to their countries, the Mara gangs exploded across El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, terrorizing the people of these nations and destroying their economies to this day. Their lives threatened at home, millions of Central Americans were driven to risk their lives trying to migrate to the United States. Some of them made it.

Deportation in no way ended the problem for the United States, either. The same gangs expanded across United States, and continue to terrorize American communities.

Time to End the Cycle of Continuous Violence

Remember Ferguson and Paddock’s insistence that reducing the population would require minimally 30 to 40 years of war, who was killing whom being of no importance?

In the same timeframe as the creation of the Maras, et al., a “peace accord” ending the 12 years-plus of civil war in El Salvador between forces around the rightwing ARENA party government and the leftwing Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas was reached in 1992. It is a matter of public record that it was arranged by the administration of by that time, President George H.W. Bush. (Not to be forgotten: this “Salvadoran model” was used to formulate Colombia’s later “peace accord” with the narco-terrorists of the FARC.)

The accord stopped the shooting from that war, but it made no pretense of being a Westphalian commitment to end the strife on behalf of building a better future for the country. It did not provide for the economic development required to consolidate a real peace. It was an arrangement to divvy up the spoils, premised on the continuation of a “free and open economy” which guaranteed only the rights of “private investors.”

But by the time the 1992 “peace accord” ended one form of war, the Mara drug gangs were being built up in Central America, deployed (unbeknownst to them) as a new form of population warfare, even more bestial than the warfare seen in the region before.

This is the apparatus which President Bukele, with the backing of a strong majority of the Salvadoran people, living both in El Salvador and in the United States, is taking on.

In 2004, on October 24, LaRouche put the responsibility where it belonged:

This is a New Dark Ages phenomenon. And it was done by the U.S. government. This is not just an operation. This is a policy. The policy is to destroy the nation-state, to destroy the idea of the nation-state. The intention is to plunge the whole planet into a New Dark Age. You are not going to get solutions, unless you change the situation in the United States.

---