Let’s get real | Courthouse News Service

Raul is a U.S. citizen who was born in Mexico. He runs his own landscaping service and has done good work for me and friends to whom I introduced him. All of his crews are Latinos, mostly from Mexico. I don’t know if they’re here legally, and I don’t care.

From what I’ve seen they’re great guys who work their butts off to feed themselves and their families. A lot of them are going to head down south without being deported, because of what they’ve found here.

Anywhere you go in Denver when you see crews working in yards, or trimming trees, or re-shingling houses, you can bet that most of them are Mexican. I see nothing wrong with that.

When Raul told me about his cousin, I didn’t bother to ask whether anyone had been arrested. No one is arrested for murder in Mexico — maybe 2% of them — because most of the murders are committed by the cartels, who run the country, or by people on the cartels’ payrolls: municipal cops, state and federal judicial police.

I know this from years working and living on the border and in Mexico, as a journalist and would-be historian, and long acquaintance with police and legal officials on both sides. I’ve met many Mexican cops I came to like, and yok it up with, though I knew what they did.

A couple of years ago, one of the cartels went to Raul’s father’s house, in Michoacán, and told him he had a week to get out of there, because the cartel “needed” it.

Raul’s father built that house. Raul grew up in it. But of course, his parents abandoned it, because the cartels rule Mexico.

Anyone who doubts that is willfully ignorant, or hasn’t been paying attention. That includes virtually every member of the U.S. Congress and every president I’ve lived under since the cartels captured Mexico in the 1980s.

Why am I telling you this? I’m saying it because the cartel that recently gained control of our own federal government beats us daily about our heads and ears about how horrible Mexicans are. Our homegrown cartel has been doing this for years.

Our reelected Fűhrer has told us, time and again, that Mexicans are criminals, rapists and “vermin,” and that Mexico and other Latin American countries “send” them here to vote illegally for Democrats.

Well, as Carlos Lozada wrote in the Oct. 13 issue of The New York Times, in a superlative essay on immigration, Latin American countries do not “send” anyone here. (OK, maybe a few diplomats.) Mexicans, Venezuelans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans come here to escape their home countries — the rapes and homicides of the cartels and police forces, and the political corruption that allows cartels to flourish.

It’s long past time for me to ask our own politicians to be honest, but it is shameful, conscienceless, willfully ignorant, to blame refugees for the oppression they are fleeing. And no, they are not “migrants.” They are refugees.

That’s like blaming Jews for forcing the Nazis to “send” them here.

Look, I know I’m whistling into the wind. Ever since the sainted Monroe Doctrine, the United States has supported and encouraged Fascism in the Western Hemisphere, even before Fascism was invented. Hell, we helped invent it.

Read the names: Duvalier, Trujillo, Pinochet, Batista, Somoza, Torrijos, D’Aubuisson, Noriega, Stroessner. Our Republicans are not the only ones with blood on their delicately scented, manicured hands.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped turn Honduras into a narcostate by supporting the military coup that deposed cleanly elected President Manuel Zelaya in June 2009, enabling the eight-year reign of President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was sentenced in June this year to 45 years in U.S. prison for conspiring to import and distribute more than 400 tons of cocaine in the United States. His brother, Juan Antonio Hernández Alvarado, a former congressman in Honduras, is doing life in prison here on allied charges.

Thanks, Hillary! Are you ignorant, or just bought off? What do you think today about what you did?

Now, as a typical yanqui, I suppose we could excuse Hillary and the entire U.S. Congress for their colossal ignorance, but seeing as Hillary was secretary of state, and Congress is Congress, I don’t think we can excuse them on those grounds. The only conclusion I see is that for hundreds of years, the United States has been bribing Latin American strongmen into repressing and murdering their own people — just to keep on the good side of Uncle Sam.

Whatever side that is.

OK, this has become a tirade. Let me close where we began, with me and Raul on my front steps.

Raul is thinking of moving back to Michoacán with his wife and kids, because it’s too expensive to live in Denver.

“But, Raul,” I said, “they just killed your cousin. You said he was not involved in anything.”

So Raul explained how it is in Michoacán (where now the cartels demand, and receive, a healthy cut from avocado exports).

“You just stay in your hometown,” Raul said. “Don’t go to the next town, cause they don’t know who you are. So they figure you’re a spy from the other cartel, so they kill you.”

Raul’s not a criminal. He came here to escape criminals.

Look: If the average U.S. citizen found a homeless kitty or puppy in her front yard, I believe she would try to help it, maybe adopt it. So if homeless cats and dogs are worth saving, why not human beings?

(Porfirio Dỉaz, the dictator who was ousted in the Revolution of 1910-1917, is credited with saying, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.”)