Letters from Our Readers

This Week in the Americas

Which Side Are the Republicans On?
By Tom Barry

The anti-immigrant tide, stirred up by policy institutes like FAIR and Center for Immigration Studies and by right-wing populists like CNN’s Lou Dobbs, caught the Republican Party leadership unawares. A surge of restrictionism in the House of Representatives, led by Rep. Tom Tancredo, resulted in a harshly anti-immigrant House bill last year that threw down the gauntlet, essentially challenging Senate Republicans and the president to stand with the restrictionists or against them.

The GOP is taking the restrictionist resurgence seriously. Rather than confronting the complex reality of immigration as both a border control issue and a labor-market issue, the Republican Party—along with many Democrats—seems to have decided that appealing to fear and hate, whether about immigrants or terrorists, is the safest political option when talking to U.S. voters.

Tom Barry is Policy Director for the International Relations Center (IRC), online at www.irc-online.org.

Femicide on the Rise in Latin America
By Kent Paterson

On the eve of International Women's Day 2006, a delegation of Latin American women made an historic journey to Washington, DC. Rather than celebrating the gains women have made through their many struggles, the group arrived at the headquarters of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States with an alarming message: femicide, the murder of women, is spreading.

The group of grassroots delegates from Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, and other nations presented a report to the IACHR commissioners that sketched widespread violence against women, rampant failures in the procurement of justice for victims and relatives, the prevalence of impunity, and the absence of standard statistical-gathering and record-keeping methods to document gender violence.

In a globalized world, femicide is not a local horror. The social, economic, and political forces transforming the globe and expelling populations across borders likewise put their stamp on the killing of women. Femicides flourish in areas experiencing social upheavals marked by previous or current armed conflicts, violent rivalries between internationally organized criminal groups, the displacement of old economies in favor of new—often illicit—ones, and the corruption and weakening of traditional forms of state power.

Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist based in Albuquerque, NM, and a frequent contributor to the IRC Americas Program (online at http://americas.irc-online.org).

Collaboration Might Save What You Can’t See at Tulúm
By Talli Nauman

All indications are that the Riviera Maya stretching along the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo state is destined to become a Mexican national sacrifice area. The natural beauty of the area is being overrun by hair-brained commercial operations taking advantage of it. But maybe we can still do something to save it. A good place to start would be Tulúm, located on the coast south of Cancún near the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve. The area around the ancient Maya ruins there was designated as Tulúm National Park in the late 20th century. The Cancún-Tulúm Corridor Ecological Land Use Program took effect in 2001. The status of the natural protected area and the related restrictions provide a point of departure for controlling development to the benefit of the environment and residents.

Talli Nauman is the IRC Americas Program Associate, online at www.americaspolicy.org. This article first appeared in The Herald Mexico - El Universal.

Brazil and the Difficult Path to Multilateralism
By Raúl Zibechi

Brazil’s rise as a regional and world power that champions multilateralism is being met with domestic and international obstacles. In addition to the resistance of the United States, Brazil has left a bitter taste in the mouth of its own neighbors who feel its steamroller-like advances are creating a new disequilibrium on the subcontinent. The domestic problems of Brazil—a country that has won “the world championship of inequality”—are spilling over as the country aspires to become a major player on the international scene.

Raúl Zibechi, a member of the editorial board of the weekly Brecha de Montevideo, is a professor and researcher on social movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina and adviser to several grassroots organizations. He is a monthly contributor to the IRC Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org).

Letters from our Readers

Re: Bad Blood on the Border

Laura,

I want to say thanks for the article that I just saw on your website around the issue of the undocumented. I appreciate the concise way that you put the issue.

More than ever, after a month away, I've been trying to tie the issue of migration, undocumented human beings into a Tsunami globalization process that wreaks havoc on them and the planet. I'm trying to talk about hedge funds, derivatives, financial instruments that some called the crack cocaine of financial markets (Financial Times) and relate it to the lives of people that I met while along the U.S.-Mexican and Mexico-Guatemalan borders.

Fr. Cayetano Cabrera, a priest that I met in Agua Prieta, Mexico, across from Douglas, Arizona, who works with migrants says that the migration flows aren't going to decrease to the United States, if anything they are going to increase to unprecedented numbers. And he's right on that.

A lot churning in my body right now, especially after coming back from the border: I got a glimpse at the underbelly of globalization, human being effected/affected by it. I add on the affected by it because I had an interview with a fellow who was in the throws of trauma as a result of his journey to the U.S. al norte where he was grabbed and sent to Mexico.

He told me a story that I flash back to constantly, I suppose I always will, and that is part of taking the risk of going into parts of the world where most of the humiliated and pummeled by capital of the planet live. A Honduran exhibiting trauma as he spoke to me said that 19 of his friends from Honduras that met in El Salvador and started the journey to al norte never made it to the states. He was the only one to survive a two-and-a-half-month trip. The others: five shot to death by the Mara Salvatrucha, the gang that came about as a result of the war in El Salvador. Birthed in Los Angeles and spread to El Salvador, now the gang controls the trains headed to al norte in Guatemala and Mexico. Others couldn't stay awake when they jumped on trains, fell off, and died—one girl cut in half; others died of thirst crossing New Mexico's desert.

All of this happening in this millennium and bound to get worse. So much to tell, so much to bounce off the gospels (I come out of a liberation theology tradition) and discern power words like justice, peace, mercy, love in a world that excludes most humanity under the guise of the market: the undocumented are outside of it, but not totally; they're the source of profit of the immigration, los federales in Mexico, for the gangs, all of whom take their share of the remittances that are sent to them by family members to help them get to al norte. And the capitalists know that there are big profits to be made from these human beings uprooted from their homes by the hurricane of globalization worldwide, we're talking about $169 billion in remittances sent back to families in countries of origin, more than all of the foreign direct investment sent to third-world countries. Remittances to Mexico amount to more than $20 billion.

But when I am in the outskirts of the empire I get a chance to see some heavy stuff. I went to a shelter in Tapachula; there I stood before the crucified. I saw in the Shelter of the Good Shepherd young men missing legs, arms, and feet all because of the Iron Monster as one Salvadoran told me close to the tracks, dismembered them. One man recuperating from a broken back, a seventeen year-old without a foot: he was thrown off the train. A thirty-two year old, I get a photo of him lying on his bed, his left arm holding his head up as he poses for a picture with his right-arm stump clearly visible; he has a smile that could cover the planet. All the faces, that keep on flashing in my eyes as I walk, try to pray and do the work of walking in a world where systems have forgotten almost half of humanity.

Then hearing migrants speak with a smile about the American dream, El Sueno Norteamericano and hopefully being part of it, even willing to risk their lives to achieve that dream. And then for others how the Sueno turned into a nightmare. Migrants that cared to talk with me said some make it; others don't in the dangerous trip to experience El Sueno. And those who take the trip walk with nothing but the clothes they wear; some have a bag back. A Salvadoran who befriended me took me down to the tracks in Arriaga. Like so many others he had to walk six days and six nights to get to Arriaga to grab a train to al norte, the only transportation available to migrants, to the undocumented Central Americans; they can't take buses with road blocks peopled by immigration authorities.

But this is one of the most powerful of all the experiences: it's almost like a trope, the Greek word indicating a swerving off the main path, and this definitely was a swerve off the path that the market talks about in it prioritizing consumption, the self, the ego, the individual, and the hell with the rest of the world mentality. I don't know, perhaps I could call it a profound learning experience with the poor as my instructor but it's so challenging to be open to the learning the humiliated of the planet so freely share me in the classroom of life.

In this case the classroom was a sidewalk in front of a migrant shelter, called the Shelter of Mercy. I arrived at the classroom at almost 11 at night after taking a bus from Tapachula when I was told that if I wanted to get to where migrants grab trains I need to go five hours north to Arriaga and I was told there would be a shelter there filled with human beings resting, ready to jump on the trains.

The shelter was closed up tight, not a light lit in the place, not a sound, not a door open. I came across two men sleeping on the sidewalk in front the place that gave hospitality on the journey. I approach them, introduce myself, and tell them that I'm gringo. They both tell me to knock on the door of the shelter: I won't have any problem and I'll have a place to stay for the night. I share with them that I don't want to exercise gringo privilege and if it will be alright to sleep with them. They say yes. I lie down on the sidewalk next to them, my bag back as pillow and look up in the heavens lit with stars.

Soon those that I'm sleeping with get up and walk across the street, I check it out, realize that I'm alone and decide to go back to sleep. Perhaps an hour or so later, somebody nudges me. I look up and it's one of the men who slept next to me. He looks me square in the face, in his hand he has a huge container, somewhat like a yogurt container that's sealed and he offers it to me: it's a bowl of delicious soup. I offer to help pay for the soup: the man takes offense at it and invites me to eat it with him and his friend. So I get a chance over a container of delicious soup that they bought across the street to talk about the work that I'm doing. They tell me that they've been on the road for a near month; headed to al norte. We go back to sleep. I toss and turn with a cold north wind that came in, saying to myself that I miscalculated the weather and should have had a sweater.

At six, the door of the shelter opens and I get a chance to meet some of the forty or so people who rest there to get some more energy to move on in their three-weeks to a month journey to get to the Mexican-U.S. border.

Five Salvadorans invite me to have breakfast with them at the little restaurant right across the street where my two friends sleeping on the sidewalk bought me soup. And it's a repeat of the previous night. My Salvadoran friends wouldn't let me pay for the soup. Here it is, migrants feeding a gringo, and they have so little and they share it with me.

And here we have the United States, as you mention in your article, building a 700-mile wall.

Keep up the good work. Again thanks for taking the time to do the important research that you do.

Paz,

Jim Harney

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