Some people may disagree about whether the following post is an appropriate subject for a travel blog.

Although we have strong political opinions, we never blog about our views. We stick to non-controversial posts about our travels in Mexico and South America.

However, we were angry to learn about a U.S. war atrocity involving Central and South American countries during WW ll.

We will leave it up to you, readers, to decide whether to read further….

Japanese Americans were transported to U.S. Internment camps

We all know that during World War II the U.S. government rounded up Japanese Americans, forced them to leave their homes and imprisoned them in concentration camps in Texas and New Mexico. President Franklin Roosevelt ordered 120,000 innocent people of Japanese ancestry (men, women, and children), to be imprisoned. 62% of them were American citizens.

We learned about the internment of Japanese Americans in school. This internment from 1944 to 1946 was caused by racism rather than any security risk posed by Japanese Americans.  It is one of the darkest chapters of American history.

But there are still parts of this story that most Americans don’t know.

We were shocked to learn recently that the U.S. rounded up and transported over 2,200 Latin Americans of Japanese ancestry from 12 Latin American countries including Peru, Panama, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

As we toured Inca ruins in the Sacred Valley near Cusco, our guide mentioned offhandedly that the U.S. government was responsible for removing Peruvians from Peru and transporting them to U.S. Japanese internment camps during WWII. We didn’t know whether to believe him or not because we had never heard about this from our history professors. After some research, we confirmed that this terrible incident is true but not well known.

Most Americans are probably unaware, as we were, that the U.S. worked with Latin American leaders to aid it in its prejudice and fear. The dark side of our xenophobia was so strong that we ripped citizens from their homes in other countries with the cooperation of local governments.  We put them in our concentration camps for “hemispheric security.”

An internment camp in 1943

1,800 of the Latin Americans were Japanese Peruvians who were rounded up by police, turned over to American troops, forcibly removed from Peru on U.S. transport ships and sent to prison camps in Texas. They were incarcerated as “enemy aliens” in the U.S. until 1944.

The government tricked many of these Japanese Latin Americans into believing they were being repatriated to Japan. However, they were flown to the U.S. and detained on the false charge of trying to enter the country illegally, without a visa or passport.

News reports later revealed that the U.S. intended to trade these 2,264 Latin American captives as part of a hostage exchange program with Japan.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford proclaimed that the Japanese internment was “wrong”, and a “national mistake” which “shall never again be repeated”.

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A U.S. border camp in 2019

Today, Japanese Americans are vocal critics of President Trump’s 2017 travel ban limiting immigration from six Muslim-majority countries.

A majority of Americans see the ban as repeating the government-sanctioned discrimination of World War II. They believe that the U.S. is still continuing its practice of fear and prejudice against people from other countries.

After 1944, Americans asked, “Could it happen again”? “Would we ever allow our government to hold innocent people in detention camps again?”

Now, in 2020, we all need to ask ourselves “Why are we standing by and allowing it to happen again?”