By John McPhaul

President Donald Trump has declared that the United States has an emergency on its southern border.

In response to the emergency, one of the president’s tactics has been to cut off humanitarian and development assistance to the so-called northern triangle — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — alleging that the counties have done nothing to with the assistance to stem the tide of migrants braving the treacherous journey to the southern U.S. border.

I did a little research (https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/PAN) and found that the total U.S. aid to these countries for 2017 (the last year where complete data was available) was $555 million; $257 million for Guatemala, $180 million for Honduras and $118 for El Salvador. (About 12 percent of the assistance was military and counter-narcotics assistance).

If you add Costa Rica, $18 million, and Nicaragua, $4 million, all of Central America received $577 million.

If you add in all the rest of Latin America, the total number is $1.942 billion. As it turns out, U.S. aid for all of Latin America is more than a billion short of the $3.191 billion (99 percent military) the U.S. provided to Israel in 2017.

Adding in Canada, $35 million, Jamaica, $43 million and the other English-speaking Caribbean islands combined, $15 million, you get $2.085 billion for the entire Western Hemisphere; still short of a billion dollars of the U.S. largess to Israel.

And both the numbers of aid to Israel and aid to Latin America pale in comparison to the $10 billion border wall proposed by President Trump.

I’m not saying that the amount of assistance given by the U.S. to Israel is unwarranted. Certainly, Israel is surrounded by enemies and is an important, the most important, ally for the U.S. in a strategically vital part of the world. ($3.7 billion, 80 percent military and 20 percent economic went to war-torn Iraq).

But since the U.S. government has declared an emergency in this hemisphere, on our very doorstep, you would think that would warrant an effort to assist Central American countries on a comparable scale, in proportion to emergencies elsewhere.

This goes without pondering the consequences of leaving a vacuum in assistance in this hemisphere filled by China and Russia.

The former Costa Rican Foreign Minister, the late Rodrigo Madrigal Nieto, a great democrat, one of the principal architects of the Central American peace plan of the 1980s and no socialist, proposed a Marshall Plan for Central America during the Cold War to address the poverty at the root cause of the crisis then as now.

It may be true that corruption and impunity in the “northern triangle” prevent some of the humanitarian aid from reaching its intended beneficiaries.

But if we make aid to Latin American countries in general and Central American counties, in particular, a priority and not an after-thought, a major Marshall Plan-style effort could be carried out with the strictest of accountability built into it.

Maybe this “crisis” will convince the powers that be that the time has come for such an effort, though given this administration attitude toward anything emanating from south of the border, we apparently would have to wait for a change of administrations for its fruition.