There's a story on view at Counterpunch today about how parents in Honduras are sending children as young as seven years old off on a hopeless journey in hopes of gaining entry to the USA.
The Farm Manager and I, who have five children between us, sat under the apple tree and tried to fathom what scale of desperation would have to envelope us before we thought sending a seven year old off on an unaccompanied illegal road trip of thousands of miles would be a good idea.
It is unfathomable.
Yet those Honduran children keep showing up at the US border, only to be clapped into squalid camps and eventually sent back to Honduras.
While this is going on, Messrs Harper and Baird continue to suck up to the government of Honduras, an illegal government that seized power from the democratically elected Zelaya in 2009. Not only do we suck up to them, we legitimize them with free trade deals.
Why?
Well, when our foreign policy isn't being dictated by the Likudniks, it's being dictated by Canada's "extractive sector". Yessiree, there's a few Canadian mining conglomerates, or more properly, international mining conglomerates registered on Canadian stock exchanges, who stand to do well exploiting resources in Honduras.
So the fact that post-Zelaya Honduras is such a hell-hole that parents voluntarily submit their seven year old children for an illegal ride to Texas means nothing in the big picture.
After all, some "Canadian" mining conglomerates stand to make a fortune there...
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