Is Kamala Harris's mission to Guatemala and Mexico crashing and burning?
For some, the aircraft malfunction of Kamala Harris's jet on her first flight abroad as Joe Biden's vice president to get at all those root causes to "solve" the border surge was kind of an omen. After all, the jet malfunction could have gone undetected, or been put there by some Democrat insider, happening just as anonymous Democrat operatives are moaning aloud to the press about their dread of Harris becoming the next Democratic presidential candidate. One wonders if Harris recalls the aircraft accident that took down former Clinton commerce secretary Ron Brown. It's speculation, based on the miasma of events, none of it moored by fact. What it symbolizes, though, is far harder to deny: Kamala Harris's mission to Guatemala and Mexico is looking like a disaster. Let's take a gander at all that's come of it so far. First, as Harris touched down in Guatemala, the locals greeted her this way, according to The Floridian, which appears to have some original photos:  But after boarding a new plane and taking the four-and-a-half-hour flight to Guatemala, protesters were at the Guatemalan Air Force base waiting for the vice president with open arms and signs. Big signs. One sign simply stated, "Kamala, TRUMP WON," another told the vice president that "Guatemala is pro-life," and another wants to her to "go home." Here's a tweet:  Some of the other signs said "Kamala mind your own business," "Kamala go home," "Kamala Stop Funding Criminals," and the like. So much for all that "civil society" Kamala says she plans to meet on her trip  community organizers, NGOs, activists. So the press reports say. The protest signs are the civil society over there, and rest assured, they're not going to be on her list of people to meet. Imagine what the press would have been like if President Trump had been greeted by protesters of this variety. I spent well north of an hour looking for just which civil society community organizers she does plan to meet once she gets done with Guatemala's president, and thus far, the White House has released absolutely nothing. Nobody in the press got a leak, either. That suggests that maybe the list isn't quite ready yet, or that the White House would rather us not know just whom she plans to meet. A good guess from that would mean probably communists of some kind, people with ties to human-smuggling rackets, and political opponents of the current Guatemalan president, who is a conservative. One strong indicator that supports that is Harris's recent pre-trip meetings with two notorious Guatemalan far leftists who got themselves thrown out of power for trying to break Guatemalan law and now position themselves as "dissidents." According to Mary Anastasia O'Grady's valuable Wall Street Journal column today:  Guatemalan politics are highly charged, polarized and corrupt. One side, with backers in Washington, applauds land invasions, electricity theft and road blocks in the name of social justice. For the antidevelopment left, in Guatemala and in the American Democratic Party, the rule of law in the developing world is a nuisance. Ms. Harris showed her cards in Washington last month when she met with Guatemala's former Attorney General Thelma Aldana, despite Ms. Aldana's two outstanding Guatemalan arrest warrants on charges of corruption. She has said on Twitter that she is a victim of "dark forces." Former Guatemalan high-court judge Gloria Porras was at the same meeting, though there are scores of legal complaints against her at home for allegedly refusing to obey the constitution. These include complaints from a qualified majority of the association of representatives who drafted the constitution in the mid-1980s. Ms. Porras claims she was denied a third five-year term by an antidemocratic conspiracy. That's whom she's meeting with: two hideous leftists who've already tried to rig the rule of law in their favor and refuse to face justice for it. Apparently, no one's allowed to stop a leftist from breaking the law, in Kamala's world, which pretty well reflects the stance here. OK, so she met with that pair, and now she's off to meet with some unelected "community organizers" (you can just imagine), right after she meets with Guatemala's conservative president who was legitimately elected by the actual Guatemalan people, as well as some "entrepreneurs," who, as O'Grady notes near the top of her piece, aren't actually on board and, in fact, are holding back. It gets worse. She's vowing to throw U.S. taxpayer money at the leftist community organizers, millions and millions of it, the better to help them in their mission to get rid of Guatemala's duly elected president. According to USA Today, which has a deep dive report but no names of these community organizers Harris is set to meet:  As part of its fight against corruption and a broader diplomatic strategy in the region, the administration has proposed $4 billion in aid to tackle the root causes of migration. But the White House has been careful to ensure the funding would not only go to governments but also to NGOs and civil society groups  entities Beltrn [a very radical left-wing NGO functionary in Washington] said Guatemala is trying to undermine. Got that Jacobo Arbenz feel to it all over again. Arbenz, recall, was the elected president of Guatemala who in 1954 was overthrown, supposedly with U.S. complicity, and at the request of the United Fruit Company, for being a communist, a move that upset the global left for decades as they yelled and yelled about the evils of U.S. interventionism in banana republics. Kamala is signaling that she'd like to do an Arbenz in reverse  to get rid of a conservative by bankrolling his opposition with U.S. foreign aid in order to install a communist. The old Sorosian color-revolution "democracy" model is probably in operation already. And don't think that isn't the plan. It's already happening in Mexico. According to USA Today:  Elsewhere, the State Department's annual human rights report warned of Mexico's gang violence and limits on press freedom, and it criticized the country's prison and detention center conditions. Lopez Obrador slammed the U.S. for the annual report and for giving aid to an NGO that criticized his government. Funny how the left likes to play the games it's always accusing the right of doing. Apparently, AMLO, who is a leftist, but one who committed the cardinal sin of having a cordial working relationship with President Trump, and who was the foreign leader who first recognized the U.S. election fraud of 2020 because he knew the tricks and experienced the same funny business himself earlier, is kind of a problem to the Bidenites, so they're out bankrolling ACORN-style groups to get rid of him and calling it foreign aid to stem migration. It's foreign meddling, and Harris's plan is to bankroll opponents of the two presidents of migration nations that will still talk to her (two others  the presidents of Honduras and El Salvador  won't even speak to her). Latin American nations know this stuff when they see it, and it won't go down well. Now let's move on to the presidents Kamala Harris is meeting with to get at all those root causes. We already know how the president of Mexico feels about her, so let's now look at the president of Guatemala, from CBS News:  In their Zoom and telephone meetings so far, Harris "doesn't hold back, which is good. She is frank," Giammattei said. "We are not on the same side of the coin. It is obvious," he added, explaining later that "we are in agreement on the 'what'" of the immigration crisis, "which is something. We are in not agreement on the 'how.'" Translation: The talks were contentious, as the word "frank" is a diplomatic code word for "they were yelling at each other." The "how" that the Guatemalan president mentions is that overthrowing him with the aid of U.S. taxpayer money to NGOs with the aim of installing leftists isn't going to stop illegal migration to the states the way she claims it will. There's no such thing as a socialist paradise, Kams. People flee socialist countries; they don't go running to them. That sounds like a crash and burn right there. The Guatemalan president also brought up that Biden had started the problem, something Harris has thus far paid no attention to, given her failure to visit the border:  During a bilingual interview with CBS News conducted Friday at the nation's presidential house, [Guatemala's President Alejandro Giammattei] was asked if Guatemalans are leaving his country now that Mr. Biden is president and Donald Trump is out of office. He said the change in government led to a change in message: "The message changed to, 'We are going to reunite families and we are going to reunite children.'" When that happened, "The very next day the coyotes here were organizing groups of children to take them to the United States." Given the uptick in migration, "We asked the United States government to send more of a clear message to prevent more people from leaving," Giammattei said. Rest assured, that hard statement of fact will go in one ear and out the other as Kamala focuses on bankrolling community organizers with taxpayer money. Here's another problem with those presidential meetings: Harris doesn't know a word of Spanish, despite living in a border state and conducting prosecutions on more than a lot of Mexican nationals in California courtrooms. While she has spent the past few weeks trying to get up to speed quickly on a broad array of issues, she acknowledged last week that she hadn't had as much time as she would have liked to brush up on her Spanish before the trip. "One of my regrets is that I'm not fluent in Spanish," she said. "I will have my conversations in English so as not to embarrass myself." What baloney. Nobody ever embarrasses himself trying to speak another country's language. The effort, even if imperfect, is always appreciated. Kamala was just offering excuses for her laziness, and don't think the State Department, intelligence agencies, Voice of America, and other government agencies don't have top-notch speed-Spanish tutorial programs for their overseas operatives to get them up to speed on language very quickly before overseas assignments. They do. Kamala could have availed herself of one of those, but most likely, she was too lazy and incurious. It's odd stuff, given that she's from California, too. The prosecutors I know of in San Diego are either in Spanish classes for just this purpose (my community college classes in San Diego were filled with these people) or else know it by heritage. It's odd as heck that Harris doesn't know jack about Spanish, given her California background. Too much partying in Canada and posing for selfies, it seems. Well, look at the low expectations her media allies are creating for her. According to Politico's syrupy lede:  GUATEMALA CITY  The Biden administration is trying to manage expectations for Kamala Harris' first international trip as vice president. The goal for her two-day visit to Guatemala and Mexico isn't to roll out a massive plan to solve the problems driving thousands to flee the region, according to administration officials, people close to the White House and experts, but simply to show that the U.S. cares and isn't just looking for quick fixes. So she's off to meddle in the internal affairs of these countries. Locals are protesting her, but she's off to shovel cash to unelected NGOs and ACORN-style community organizers to topple the governments. The businesses remain absent, and not one of her group of twelve businesses is offering to create jobs in these countries, which really would get people to stay there. Meanwhile. she's fighting with the presidents of the migrant-exporting countries that will actually talk with her. And back home, the media are lowering expectations, taking their cues from the Biden White House itself, which doesn't want anyone to hold their breath. I'd call that a crash and burn. And it hasn't even happened yet. Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr (cropped), CC BY-SA 2.0. To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.