[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 43 (Monday, March 11, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1756-S1758]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Central America

  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, last month, just hours after Congress 
passed bipartisan legislation to fully fund our Federal Government, I 
was privileged to join with Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and four 
Members of the House of Representatives, including our at-large 
Congresswoman from Delaware, Lisa Blunt Rochester, to lead a 
congressional delegation to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador--three 
countries that are oftentimes collectively referred to as the Northern 
Triangle.
  Our delegation was on a factfinding mission. We wanted to drill down 
on the root causes of illegal immigration from Central America and 
assess the effectiveness of a new approach in recent years to help 
improve conditions on the ground in those three countries.
  On our flight to Guatemala, several of us watched as President 
Trump--in order to build his long-promised wall--declared a national 
emergency, even though while illegal immigration spiked in the last 
couple of months across our southern border, if you go back to 2001 
through the end of 2018, it has actually dropped by, believe it or not, 
80 percent.
  As former chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs 
Committee, I understand the need for secure borders, and I have 
supported efforts to enhance border security over the last two decades 
that I have served in this body.
  I have been down to Central America any number of times with people 
like Gen. John Kelly, when he was the SOUTHCOM commander, with Jeh 
Johnson, with Ron Johnson, both of whom served as chairman of the 
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and John McCain. 
We went into that part of the world and along our border with Mexico to 
better understand what our needs are for border security.
  Since 2003, the United States has spent, believe it or not, $263 
billion--that is almost one-quarter of a trillion dollars--on border 
security.
  We have doubled the number of border agents. We have deployed 
hundreds of miles of barriers and roads in places where they are most 
effective. We have funded highly sophisticated surveillance aircraft, 
equipment on drones and airplanes, helicopters, mile-high dirigibles, 
along with motion detectors, high-speed boats, tunnel detectors, and a 
lot more.
  The approach on border security at our border with Mexico needs to be 
multilayered, and it is. There are some places barriers do make sense--
a lot of places, in fact. There are some places that actually walls--
the kind President Trump has envisioned, think San Diego and maybe 
Juarez--make sense, but there are a lot of other places where different 
kinds of barriers make sense. In some places, roads alongside of 
barriers make sense.
  We have deployed aircraft. We have deployed fixed-wing aircraft. We 
have deployed helicopters. We have deployed drones. If you just put 
them out there by themselves, they are not going to do much good, but 
if you put highly sophisticated equipment on each of those platforms, 
they give us the ability to see from our border into Mexico as far as 
20, 25 miles in all kinds of weather--people as small as children who 
are approaching our border--and then we know where to deploy our Border 
Patrol to meet them and intercept them.
  We can put the same kind of sophisticated surveillance equipment on 
dirigibles that go up 5,000 feet, 10,000 feet into the air. We can put 
them on towers that are mobile, towers that are stationary along the 
border as well.
  We can put people on horseback. We can put, believe it or not, some 
of our Border Patrol officers on horseback. The reason we do that is, 
in areas with high vegetation, the Border Patrol officer on a horse--a 
big horse--can see over the vegetation and pick up people trying to 
come across the border illegally.
  In some places, boats make sense, high-speed boats. In other places, 
boat ramps make sense. If you don't have boat ramps, you can't put the 
boat in, and you don't have much mobility.
  Those are some of the things we have done in terms of providing 
better border security.
  The encouraging news is, a lot of it has worked. A lot of it has 
worked, but we could build a wall from the Gulf of Mexico to the 
Pacific Ocean, and if that is all we do, people are still going to come 
to this country--not so much from Mexico. People used to come in huge 
numbers from Mexico.
  If you look back in the history of the last especially 15 years, most 
of the folks who were coming here illegally were coming from Mexico 
across our borders. Today, it is quite different. There are more 
Mexicans going back into Mexico than there are Mexicans coming into the 
United States. Most of the illegal immigration is not coming from 
Mexico. It is coming from Guatemala. It is coming from Honduras. It is 
coming from El Salvador.
  The trek from the Northern Triangle--these countries right here--up 
through Mexico to our border is over 1,000 miles, probably closer to 
1,500 miles, depending on how you want to get there.
  The spike in immigration we have seen in the last several months is 
mostly from Guatemala's mountainous highlands. They have a lot of 
indigenous people, and they don't have a very good lifestyle. They have 
a lot of malnourishment, a lot of stunted growth, and not a lot in 
terms of encouragement and economic opportunity. Let me tell you a 
quick story of the reason why these people are trying to get out of 
there.
  In the southern part of our State, Sussex County is our biggest 
county. We raise enormous numbers of chickens there. For every person 
that live in Delaware, there are 300 chickens. I know the Presiding 
Officer has a lot of chickens in his State, too. We have a lot of folks 
who come up, including from Guatemala, and work in poultry processing 
plants. They are good workers. They work hard.
  We have a nonprofit in southern Delaware, in Georgetown, DE, called 
La Esperanza, which means ``hope.'' They work with indigenous 
populations, illegal and legal migrants, who have come to southern 
Delaware. A couple years ago, I was visiting La Esperanza, and they 
told me the story about a young boy and his younger sister who fled 
Guatemala. They came to the United States and, ultimately, to Delaware.
  This is why they came. The 15-year-old boy in Guatemala was 
approached by gangs in his community. They said: We want you to join 
our gang.
  He said: Let me talk to my parents first before I do that.
  He knew his parents wouldn't be too excited with that. He talked to 
his parents, who said: You are not going to join a gang. We don't want 
you to do that. Just tell them no.
  He avoided the gang members for a while, but they finally caught him 
and said: Are you going to join our gang?
  He said: I talked to my parents, and they don't want me to do that, 
so not now. I am not going to do it now.
  They said: We have a message for you and your parents. If you don't 
join our gang, somebody in your family is going to die.
  He went home and told his parents, and their message to him was: Join 
the gang. Just don't do anything stupid.
  So he joined the gang. They have to go through an initiation ritual, 
and as part of that ritual, he was called on to rape his 13-year-old 
sister. He reported what was expected of him to his parents, and within 
a week he and his sister were on their way out of that country.
  The gangs in these countries, especially in Guatemala, are 
entrepreneurial. They may be involved in trafficking people. They may 
be involved in trafficking drugs. They are really good at extortion--
extorting money from small businesses and going to a business and 
saying: I want you to pay me protection money. If you provide 
protection money, I will see that you are not harmed.
  The merchant says: Who are you protecting me from?
  You are actually being protected from the guy who is trying to extort 
money from you, and if you don't pay the money, they will kill you. It 
is just like that. As for the rate of extortion in these three 
countries from gangs who do multiple kinds of crimes, that is one of 
their favorites.
  The reason why people live lives of misery has a lot to do with us--
because we are addicted to drugs. The drugs are trafficked through 
these three countries, and we are complicit in their misery.

[[Page S1757]]

  A Catholic priest testified before the Homeland Security Committee a 
couple of years ago. He described a situation where our drug addiction 
makes life miserable in these three countries. Then, when they try to 
get out, we make it difficult to impossible to get into our country.
  The priest who was our witness that day said: It is a little bit like 
the fire department visiting a house down here. The fire department 
goes into the house. There is no fire. The fire department goes into 
the house, and they start a fire. When the people try to run out of the 
house, the fire department leaves the house, locks the door, and drives 
away.
  That is really a pretty good example of what we have done in Central 
America. We have lit the fire. We have left the family in the house. We 
have locked the door and driven away. I think that is morally wrong, 
and we can do better than that.
  As it turns out, aside from spending $263 billion along the border 
for security in the last 18 years or so, someone has come up with a 
better idea. It is not a new idea. It is an idea based on something 
called Plan Colombia. Plan Colombia was developed 20 years ago, when in 
Bogota, the capital of Colombia, you had the FARC, the leftist 
guerillas trying to take down the government, and drug lords and drug 
gangs trying to take down the government of Colombia. One day, a bunch 
of gunmen rounded up the supreme court justices of Colombia, took them 
into a room, and shot them to death.
  Colombia was teetering, and there were questions: Are they going to 
be able to make it? Some very brave Colombian leaders stood up and 
said: We are not going to let this happen. We are not going to let 
these guys take down our country. Our President then, Bill Clinton, and 
a fellow who was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Joe 
Biden, found common cause with the leaders of Colombia. Basically, the 
Colombians developed a plan that would help to stabilize their 
government and enable them to restore order, rule of law, and economic 
prosperity, and we helped them. I will give one example of what we did.
  The Presiding Officer spent a lot of time in the military. One of the 
things we did is that we provided helicopters so that the military of 
Colombia and the police of Colombia had mobility. They could go over 
the mountainous rivers and country and track down the bad guys. That is 
what they did with our help.
  We helped them to figure out how to collect revenues. They didn't 
collect many revenues, and the wealthy people of that country didn't 
pay much taxes at all. We taught them how to do a better job in 
revenues and to use that to help to develop their government 
institutions. The people in Colombia did the heavy lifting. We helped. 
It is like they say in Home Depot: You can do it; we can help.

  The Presiding Officer has heard me say many times in the Environment 
and Public Works Committee: Find out what works, and do more of that.
  Plan Colombia worked. It took a long time. I am an old Navy guy. It 
reminds me of trying to change the course of an aircraft carrier. You 
stick with it, and you can make sure to change the course of an 
aircraft carrier. It doesn't happen fast. Plan Colombia has taken years 
to work, but it has worked.
  About 3 or 4 years ago, when we were starting to see a real surge--
again, not from Mexican immigration illegally into our country but from 
these three countries--President Obama called on Joe Biden to take off-
the-shelf Plan Colombia, and see if it might be possible to develop a 
Central American version of Plan Colombia. The idea would be to focus 
on three or four areas. We would provide some of the money, but these 
countries would provide a lot more because it is their country. It is 
not our country, but we are complicit in their misery. So we have an 
obligation to help them--a moral obligation.
  These are the three areas of focus of the Alliance for Prosperity--
the modern-day, Central American version of Plan Colombia. One is 
economic hope and economic opportunity. That is one. That is one of the 
major drivers of people getting out of there--lack of economic 
opportunity. Two is violence and the lack of rule of law. Three is just 
corruption. Corruption is endemic in their Federal government--the 
national government--in State and local governments, and in business. 
It is just endemic. Those are the three buckets that the Alliance for 
Prosperity was designed to address. We put up some of the money. The 
other countries put up a good deal more.
  One example is El Salvador. For every dollar we put up, they put up 
$7. We used that money in El Salvador to, among other things, target 
the cities with the most crime. We used some of our resources but a lot 
more of their resources. The crime in those 50 cities is down 
dramatically in the last couple of years.
  In Honduras the murder rate is down by about 35 percent. These three 
countries vie for murder capital of the world and have for some time. 
The murder rate in Honduras is down by 35 percent or 40 percent. The 
murder rates in Guatemala and El Salvador over the last 3 years are 
down by half. Would we still feel comfortable in those neighborhoods? 
Probably not, but it is better than what it was.
  In Honduras, one of the things they did is basically that they fired 
one-third of their police officers and replaced them with vetted units. 
With that in mind, they did a much better job on extortion. They did a 
much better job on kidnapping and actually bringing to trial and 
sentencing the folks who are committing the crimes.
  USAID is working down there in San Salvador, the capital of El 
Salvador, and in the capital of Guatemala, creating almost like tech 
centers where young entrepreneurs can start their own businesses. They 
get some help from us and some coaching from us, and they are starting 
to lead an economic recovery.
  These are beautiful countries--lush and with beautiful beaches in 
some places. So they are attractive for tourism. They have, for the 
most part, very fertile soil, and with the right kind of help, 
coaching, and mentoring, they can do a much better job feeding 
themselves and exporting a lot of what they raise.
  Things are starting to happen. Again, it is like that aircraft 
carrier I talked about. It is slow at first and, then, more perceptible 
as time goes by.
  In San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, we used Federal--
American--money in order to leverage the Howard G. Buffett Foundation 
to go--literally, in the middle of the city--into 17 acres of what used 
to be a beautiful park and was later riddled with crime, and to clean 
it up and make it beautiful again for the people of that city.
  One multinational company has come down into one of these countries 
and put millions of dollars into creating a DNA facility to help in 
solving crimes.
  Little by little, things are getting better. There are still problems 
in Guatemala and among the highlands indigenous people who are still 
trying to get out of there. Ninety percent of the immigration right now 
is out of that part of Guatemala.
  The last thing I will say is this. They just had an election in El 
Salvador 4 weeks ago. The current President is a 75-year-old guerilla 
leader who was a close friend of Venezuela's leader and was at Maduro's 
inauguration a month or so ago. He is friendly with the Chinese and 
friendly with the Cubans. He is leaving. He is stepping down as the 
President of that country in a couple of months.
  Who is going to succeed him? It is the 38-year-old mayor of San 
Salvador, who gets economic development. He is free of corruption. He 
is someone who has a good relationship with our embassy there, and he 
is highly regarded by our folks. He is an honest guy, full of energy. 
In his campaign, he was the first candidate for President in the 
history of the country who has gotten over 50 percent. It didn't have 
to go to a runoff. It is an amazing development. He harnessed social 
media to get elected.
  Meanwhile, there is going to be a Presidential election in Guatemala 
in June. Jimmy Morales is the President there. He is somebody whom Vice 
President Biden and I tried to mentor. Initially, it started out very 
promising. Then, more recently, there are real concerns about 
corruption involving his family. His time as President will expire 
about the middle of this year, but in Guatemala the three frontrunners 
to run for president are

[[Page S1758]]

all women. The person who is believed to be the frontrunner of them all 
is a woman named Thelma Aldana, who is the immediate past Attorney 
General. She is tough on crime and tough on corruption. She has been in 
this country some this month and had the opportunity to talk with Vice 
President Biden to get some encouragement from him.
  Joe Biden is beloved in Delaware and in some other places around the 
country, but they really love him there because he has been interested 
in root causes--not just in treating the symptoms of the problems and 
challenges on the border but actually helping to address the root 
causes.
  The fellow who has just been elected President of El Salvador is a 
38-year-old millennial. His social media people have now started to 
help the former Attorney General who is running for President of 
Guatemala.
  As the Presiding Officer and my colleagues know, the most important 
ingredient in the success of any organization I have ever seen is 
leadership. It is leadership.
  We are seeing a changing of the guard not only in terms of age but 
also in terms of just where they come from, on a scale of 1 to 100.
  The last thing I want to mention--if I could find my spot here in my 
notes--is that none of this is easy, but it basically says that we have 
a moral obligation to the folks down here. We make their lives 
miserable because of our drug addiction, and we ought to help them. 
They have to do most of the work, but we have to help them. We can't 
just help them for a couple of weeks or a couple of months or a couple 
of years, as we found out in Colombia; we have to stick with this a 
good deal longer to help change the culture of these countries.
  I am encouraged to say that change is happening, and we should keep 
it going. There is a sense of optimism that is beginning to emerge in 
these countries. I think there are some reasons to be encouraged that a 
plan modeled after Plan Colombia and tailored especially for this part 
of the world can actually succeed. If we don't give up and especially 
if they don't give up, it very well will.
  P.S. The cost of actually capturing somebody on our border who is 
starting to come in illegally, detaining them, putting them in a 
holding camp or a detention center, feeding them, providing healthcare, 
and eventually deporting them and sending them back down to wherever 
they came from, I am told is $27,000 a person--$27,000 a person.
  These people love their countries, and given a chance, they would 
much rather stay down there. They would much rather stay down there. 
They might like to come up to visit and maybe do some work sometime and 
go back home. But they want to have a decent life. Frankly, if we will 
help them realize that, they will stay down there. They may come up as 
tourists, and maybe we can go down there as tourists. We heard that 
over and over.
  The last thing we heard down there is that they love America. They 
love America. They are mindful of what we are trying to do to help 
them. They are grateful for the help we are providing. I know a bunch 
of them. I met a lot of them down there. Some of them live in my State. 
For the most part, they are good and decent people. They deserve our 
help. I am proud of the support this Congress has provided for the last 
4 years for their lives and prosperity. My hope is that we will 
continue to do that and continue to use that money to leverage a lot of 
good work not only for those countries but for nonprofits, NGOs, 
foundations, and private companies, and that together we will get the 
job done. I am encouraged.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  I really want to say to my friend, Senator Jeff Merkley, who went 
down to this part of the world any number of times as a young man and 
went back again last month still as a young man, that he has provided a 
lot of great insight. It has been a joy going with him and now working 
with him on this as we go forward.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. BOOZMAN. Mr. President.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sullivan). The Senator from Arkansas.