ECONOMY: US Approves Aid for Central American Countries

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, May 21 1999 (IPS) - The United States is delivering on its pledges of aid and an easing of immigration rules to help Central American nations savaged by last year’s Hurricane Mitch.

The US Senate has approved a 16 billion-dollar supplemental appropriations bill which includes almost one billion dollars in relief and reconstruction assistance to Central America.

The administration of President bill Clinton also announced Thursday a plan which should permit some 300,000 immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala, who entered the United States illegally before October 1990, to remain here permanently.

Under the plan, Salvadoreans and Guatemalans who have a family, a job, and ties to the community here will be presumed eligible by immigration authorities for permanent residency in the United States and no longer will have to worry about possible deportation.

Administration officials stressed that the move was designed to meet concerns that new deportations to Central America would increase already staggering levels of unemployment, fuel a rising crime wave, and put untenable pressure on government budgets still struggling with the impact of Hurricane Mitch.

Approval of the aid bill and the easing of the immigration rules came before a meeting in Stockholm next week of Central America’s major donors.

The purpose of the meeting, to be chaired by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), will be to follow up with concrete plans for pledges made last December totaling 6.2 billion dollars in humanitarian aid, concessional credits, and debt relief.

Mitch did the greatest damage to Central America’s poorest countries, Honduras and Nicaragua, and has been described by senior US officials as the most destructive storm to hit the Americas in recorded history.

More than 9,000 people were killed in the two countries, and hundreds of thousands made homless when the storm struck in October. Damage to infrastructure and agricultural production has been estimated as high as 8.5 billion dollars for the region.

After a slow start, Washington sent some 300 million dollars in emergency aid, including some 6,000 troops, into the region in what one top official called “the largest relief effort directed at any natural disaster” in US history.

On a trip through the region in February, First Lady Hilary Clinton announced that the administration wanted 956 million dollars more for hurricane relief and reconstruction for Central America and Caribbean countries – mainly Haiti – hit hard by Mitch and an earlier hurricane, Georges.

Clinton pushed Congress to approve that request quickly, in time for his own scheduled tour of Central America in early March but the package became bogged down in partisan wrangling and was further delayed by new requests to fund the costs of the US contribution to the NATO air war against Yugoslavia.

About two-thirds of the package – or 673 million dollars – is earmarked for the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Of that total, 50 million dollars is to be spent on reconstruction in Haiti and the Eastern Caribbean, and 10 million dollars more for Colombia, which suffered a devastating earthquake.

Most of the USAID funding is for water, sanitation, and public health projects; the rebuilding of schools, housing, bridges and roads, and for rural development and environmental protection.

“The challenge is in the on-the-ground decisions on how the money is spent – to empower civil society and local communities or simply to go through unresponsive government bureaucracies,” said Geoffrey Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

In addition, the USAID funding includes a 25 million dollar contribution to help cover debt-service payments owed by Honduras and Nicaragua to the multilateral banks, and 16 million dollars in bilateral debt relief.

About 154 million dollars of the rest of the aid package will be used to re-imburse the Pentagon for some of the costs it incurred during the emergency phase last Fall.

More controversially, some 57 million dollars will be used by joint US-Central American military training exercises – including “civic action,” such as road-building – to be carried out over the next year, and 80 million dollars for the INS to be used to detain undocumented immigrants from the region.

Central American leaders greeted the announcement of the aid package with enthusiasm when Clinton presented it last March. They also pushed for the immigration relief and a trade bill which would grant Central American exports to the United States the same preferences as Mexico receives under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Most analysts have concluded however that, given splits over trade policy within both the Democratic and Republican parties, a “NAFTA-parity” bill is one item which Clinton will not be able to deliver, at least this year.

But Thursday’s announcement of the easing of immigration rules for Salvadorans and Guatemalans was depicted as a direct response to the pleas of Central American leaders.

A law passed in November 1997 granted amnesty to about 155,000 Nicaraguans and Cubans who entered the United States illegally during the 1980s and early 1990s but was much less generous toward Salvadoreans and Guatemalans. Under existing rules, they had to prove on a case-by-case basis that they would suffer “extreme hardship” if deported.

With a Republican majority in Congress, administration strategists felt it would be impossible to gain a new dispensation for the excluded groups. So Clinton used the executive’s discretion to shift the burden of proof so that “extreme hardship” would be presumed in cases brought before the INS and that permanent residence would be denied only if the INS proved that no such hardship would result.

“It’s not amnesty, but it’s the closest thing to amnesty that these people have ever had,” said a local immigration activist here. Along with Los Angeles and New York, Washington has one of the largest Central American immigrant population.

“Consistent with the commitment that President Clinton made when he visited Central America in March,” said Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) Commissioner Doris Meissner, “the new programme is the culmination of the administration’s efforts to create as accessible and straightforward a process as the law permits.”