The Shadow Pandemic

 By Amy Risley

In June 2020, the World Health Organization identified Latin America as an epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sadly, the region now risks becoming an epicenter of the “Shadow Pandemic,” the global surge in gender-based violence (UN Women 2020a). In Latin America, an estimated 20 million women and girls experience sexual and physical abuse each year. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, at least 3,529 women were victims of femicide in 2018 (Fumega 2020). Available data suggest a substantial increase in physical and sexual intimate partner violence across the region during the pandemic. 

Notwithstanding this spike, the structural, institutional, and cultural forces that create a permissive environment for such violence predate the arrival of coronavirus. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Central America and Mexico, where women activists and human rights defenders are insisting that the “crisis was already here” when the pandemic hit (IM-Defensoras 2020). Communities were already reeling from simultaneous social and political crises, militarized policing, and state-sponsored repression and criminal violence targeting activists who defend the environment and the rights of women, LGBTQ, indigenous, Afro-indigenous, and other communities. Neoliberal economic policies had exacerbated inequalities and undermined public health systems. This state of affairs underscores the need for feminist, intersectional research that examines how gender, class, ethnicity, race, and sexuality have shaped individuals’ experiences during the pandemic. 

Feminist researchers often search out seemingly “private” spaces, including the home, because they recognize that power is created and wielded, and legitimized there. Seven out of ten femicides in Argentina are committed in the victim’s home; the number is a tragic reminder that home can hardly be considered as a “refuge” for women (Fumega 2020). Confinement at home can be a necessary, life-saving measure during the pandemic, yet it also exacerbates the risk factors associated with gender-based violence. Not only are survivors in close quarters with their abusers; they are potentially cut off from crucial forms of support. These can include services provided by state agencies and non-governmental organizations as well as informal support networks comprising friends and family (UN Women 2020b). Offices close, and resources are diverted from support services to immediate COVID-19 relief (UN Women 2020a). 

In addition, confinement is creating economic pressures and exacerbating underlying risk factors associated with gender-based violence, such as unemployment, underemployment, and poverty. Pandemics may fuel harassment of and violence against female healthcare workers, migrant laborers, and domestic workers and heighten the risk of xenophobic violence. Women and girls with disabilities are sometimes subjected to sexual violence at greater rates. Individuals experience multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination that make them especially vulnerable (UN Women 2020b). Consider, moreover, the gendered roles of the “dutiful” wife, mother, and/or daughter and the added responsibilities that caregivers assume within their families and community during a pandemic. As the executive director of the United Nations Population Fund observes, the crisis “is compounding the no longer subterranean disparities that affect millions of women and girls” (Ford 2020).

Latin America is not immune from these global trends. Peru’s Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations reported higher numbers of gender violence cases following the implementation of quarantine (LAND 2020a). In July, the Ministry informed the public that 2,457 women had gone missing in the country during the lockdown; included in that figure were 1,720 minors. The authorities hastily added that many had already returned home, and they were working with some 400 local women’s emergency centers to locate the others (LAND 2020b). In Brazil’s state of São Paulo, cases of violence against women in which police were dispatched jumped 45 percent in March compared to the previous year (Sigal et al. 2020). In El Salvador, reports of violence against women rose 70 percent between March 17 and May 22 relative to 2019 (IM-Defensoras 2020). In Colombia, the government reported a 130 percent surge in call volume to a national women’s helpline for domestic violence in the first 18 days of quarantine (Sigal et al. 2020). Similarly, in Argentina, calls to domestic violence helplines grew 40 percent after the government implemented quarantine (Fumega 2020). The Chilean government likewise observed that calls to domestic abuse helplines increased 70 percent in the first weekend of quarantine alone (Sigal et al. 2020). 

The region has experienced unbearable increases in numbers of female murder victims. According to the Mexican government, murders of women committed in the first six months of 2020 rose 9.2 percent vis-à-vis the first half of 2019 (Associated Press 2020). As of April 13, “more women had been murdered (367) than had died due to COVID-19 (100) since the country’s first confirmed coronavirus case on February 28” (Prusa, García Nice and Soledad 2020). In Venezuela, femicides increased by 65 percent in April 2020 compared to April 2019 (International Rescue Committee 2020). Similarly, femicides in six Brazilian states increased 56 percent in March relative to the same period the previous year; in Argentina, 49 femicides were committed between March 20 and May 10 (Prusa, García Nice, and Soledad 2020). A shocking 83 femicides were documented in Honduras (IM-Defensoras 2020). 

Women in Mexico and Central America have assisted survivors of gender violence, organized feminist mutual care networks at the grassroots, mobilized relief efforts to deliver food, supplies, and health care to communities, denounced human rights violations, and participated in protests (IM-Defensoras 2020). The authorities have detained politically active women for violating quarantine, prompting concerns that such measures are being used as a pretext to stifle activism. In El Salvador, for example, police detained a member of the Network of Mesoamerican Women in Resistance while she was on her way to buy medicine for her three-year-old, hospitalized son. She was held for more than 30 days in unsanitary conditions; she was not provided a mask, hand sanitizer, or medicine for her diabetes (IM-Defensoras 2020). 

In conclusion, Latin Americans were already enduring multiple and intersecting forms of gender-based violence when the coronavirus arrived. The violence has intensified since the outbreak. Is there a way out of the shadow pandemic? Most of the region’s governments have already enacted legal, policing, and relief measures designed to assist survivors of gender-based violence during COVID-19. Legal reforms have eased the prosecution of offenders (LAND 2020a). Although stepped-up responses are certainly necessary, feminist public health models extend well beyond individual-level, criminal justice interventions and short-term relief. Feminists also tackle the root causes of violence. We interrogate neoliberalism and the political economy of women’s (re)domestication and relegation to the private sphere. We continually reckon with the crushing inequalities that are literally matters of life or death, even in the absence of a pandemic. Feminist analyses, moreover, challenge militarization and authoritarianism while drawing connections between domestic and state-sponsored forms of violence. It was Chilean feminists who famously demanded “democracy in the home and in the country” in the final years of the country’s military dictatorship. Their words still resonate today. 

Amy E. Risley is a Professor of International Studies at Rhodes College

References:

Associated Press. 2020. “In Mexico, women's murders have spiked during coronavirus pandemic.” (July 21). Accessed July 2020.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/mexico-women-s-murders-have-spiked-during-coronavirus-pandemic-n1234451

Ford, Liz. 2020. “'Calamitous': domestic violence set to soar by 20% during global lockdown.” The Guardian, April 28. Accessed July 2020.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/apr/28/calamitous-domestic-violence-set-to-soar-by-20-during-global-lockdown-coronavirus

Fumega, Silvana. 2020. “Tracking Latin America’s Other Pandemic: Violence Against Women.” Americas Quarterly, April 13. Accessed July 2020.

https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/tracking-latin-americas-other-pandemic-violence-against-women/

IM-Defensoras (Iniciativa Mesoamericana de Mujeres Defensoras de Derechos Humanos). 2020. “La Crisis Ya Estaba Aquí.: Defensoras mesoamericanas ante COVID-19.” Accessed July 2020.

http://im-defensoras.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/La-crisis-ya-estaba-aqu%C3%AD-10062020.pdf

International Rescue Committee. 2020. “IRC data shows an increase in reports of gender-based violence across Latin America.” (June 9). Accessed July 2020.

 https://www.rescue.org/press-release/irc-data-shows-increase-reports-gender-based-violence-across-latin-america

LAND (Latin America News Dispatch). 2020a. Today in Latin America, April 30. Accessed July 2020. https://latindispatch.com/

LAND. 2020b. Today in Latin America, July 16. Accessed July 2020. https://latindispatch.com/

Prusa, Anya, Beatriz García Nice and Olivia Soledad. 2020. “Pandemic of Violence: Protecting Women during COVID-19.” Wilson Center, May 15. Accessed July 2020. 

dhttps://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/pandemic-violence-protecting-women-during-covid-19

Sigal, Lucila et al. 2020. “Another pandemic': In Latin America, domestic abuse rises amid lockdown.” Reuters, April 27. Accessed July 2020.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-latam-domesticviol/another-pandemic-in-latin-america-domestic-abuse-rises-amid-lockdown-idUSKCN2291JS

UN Women. 2020a. “The Shadow Pandemic: Violence against women during COVID-19.” Accessed July 2020.

https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/in-focus-gender-equality-in-covid-19-response/violence-against-women-during-covid-19

UN Women. 2020b. “Violence against women and girls: Data collection during COVID-19” (April 17). Accessed July 2020. https://www.unwomen.org/-/media/headquarters/attachments/sections/library/publications/2020/vawg-data-collection-during-covid-19-compressed.pdf?la=en&vs=2339

 

Political Report # 1410 The Government Relies on False "Evidence" Against Migrants

By Melissa del Bosque ProPublica

Laura Peña could see that her 36-year-old client was wasting away. Gaunt and haggard after nearly two months in jail, he ran his fingers through his hair and opened his hands to show her the clumps that were falling out. He was so distraught that his two young children had been taken from him at the border, he could barely speak without weeping. After Carlos requested political asylum, border and immigration agents had accused him of being a member of the notorious MS-13 gang in El Salvador - a criminal not fit to enter the United States. But as Peña looked at him, she saw none of the typical hallmarks of gang membership: the garish MS-13 tattoos or a criminal record back home. He was the sole caregiver for his 7-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter. He'd even brought an official letter from El Salvador's Justice Ministry certifying that he'd never been in jail. Something else about his case bothered her, too: She'd been peppering the government's lawyers with phone calls and emails for weeks and they'd yet to reveal any evidence to back up their accusation. Unlike most attorneys working pro bono to reunite families, Peña was familiar with MS-13, because she'd pursued the deportation of gang members as a trial attorney for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She understood how the system worked, because she'd been a part of it. Her long tumble of curly hair, which makes her look younger than her 37 years, is paired with a forthright-bordering-on-blunt manner of speaking forged from her years as a prosecutor on the front line of the immigration debate. She was empathetic toward the plight of clients like Carlos, whose last name is not being used for his protection. But she was also unwilling to give any of them false hope. If Carlos was a gang member, his chance for asylum was zero.

Political Report # 1405 Mexico’s Crackdown Is Making the Migrant Crisis Worse

By John Washington The Nation

Amid all the urgent and much-deserved coverage of the family separation policy, the migrant detention centers, and predatory Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, it has been easy to miss the fact that Mexican security forces aren’t treating migrants much better. Partly armed and trained by the United States, Mexico’s police and immigration authorities are carrying out a campaign of fear and violence against migrants-with impunity. Just last week, Mexican police shot and killed a Honduran migrant in front of his 8-year-old daughter in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila. The details are still unclear, but the man was shot near a migrant shelter where he was staying with his daughter. And in June a 19-year-old woman was shot and killed after the truck she was in ran through a Mexican police checkpoint. Both shootings came on the heels of the Trump administration’s pressuring Mexico to crack down on northward US-bound migration. Given the track record of Mexican security forces-the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa in 2014, the execution-style killing of 22 other people the same year, the recent arrest of migrant rights activists, the thousands of migrants who have gone missing during their transit through Mexico in recent years-it’s hard not to expect anything but more violence. And it’s not just rogue cops or the unfortunate and inevitable outcome of policing migration. It’s worse than that. The border has long been a site of violence, but its cruelty extends well beyond the borderlands. Border violence reaches south into Mexico and other countries, and it seeps into the interior of the United States; we witnessed the logic of bordering play out in the mass shooting in El Paso last weekend.

Political Report # 1392 The Epidemic of Debt Plaguing Central American Migrants

By Jonathan Blitzer,   The New Yorker

When Elias López decided to leave his home in the western highlands of Guatemala for the United States, in 2014, the going rate to hire a smuggler was ninety thousand quetzales, or about twelve thousand dollars. López, who was eighteen, worked two jobs at the time, one in construction and the other as a day laborer harvesting vegetables, and the combined pay was barely enough to cover his living expenses. A lending coöperative, essentially a small local bank, offered loans at a low interest rate, but with one condition: López would need to offer collateral. In exchange for a loan of fifty-five thousand quetzales, he opted to mortgage the plot of land where his family grew their food. "I would pay off the loan once I made it to the United States," he recalls thinking. In recent years, the rise of criminal cartels in Mexico and the newly aggressive posture of state authorities have made it much more difficult to reach the U.S. Beginning in 2014, at the urging of the Obama Administration, Mexican authorities increased their apprehension rate of Central Americans by eighty-five per cent. Even before Donald Trump took office, the U.S. government developed a new battery of measures-termed the "Consequence Delivery System," which included prolonged detention, criminal charges, and deliberate deportation of migrants to remote locations in their home countries-to make crossing the border so gruelling that people would decide to abandon the trip altogether. Nevertheless, the number of Central Americans coming to the U.S. has continued to rise, as has the pace of apprehensions: of the more than three hundred Guatemalans who leave for the U.S. each day, two-thirds are arrested and deported by Mexican and American immigration agents. One outgrowth of increased enforcement at the border is that the price many migrants are forced to pay smugglers has surged.

Political Report # 1388 The Second Implosion of Central America

By William I. Robinson NACLA William I. Robinson is also a LAP Editor

The decline of global capitalism points to another total economic collapse of Central America, reminiscent of the regional upheaval of the 1970s and 80s. Some three decades after the wars of revolution and counterinsurgency came to an end in Central America, the region is once again on the brink of implosion. The Isthmus has been gripped by renewed mass struggle and state repression, the cracking of fragile political systems, unprecedented corruption, drug violence, and the displacement and forced migration of millions of workers and peasants. The backdrop to this second implosion of Central America, reflecting the spiraling crisis of global capitalism itself, is the exhaustion of a new round of capitalist development in recent years to the same drumbeat as the globalization that took place in the wake of the 1980s upheavals. Lost in the headlines on Central American refugees fleeing to the United States is both the historical context that has sparked the exodus and the structural transformations through capitalist globalization that has brought the region to where it is today. The mass revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s did manage to dislodge entrenched military-civilian dictatorships and open up political systems to electoral competition, but they were unable to achieve any substantial social justice or democratization of the socioeconomic order. Capitalist globalization in the Isthmus in the wake of pacification unleashed a new cycle of modernization and accumulation. It transformed the old oligarchic class structures, generated new transnationally oriented elites and capitalists and high-consumption middle classes even as it displaced millions, aggravated poverty, inequality, and social exclusion, and wreaked havoc on the environment, triggering waves of outmigration and new rounds of mass mobilization among those who stayed behind. Hence the very conditions that gave rise to the conflict in the first place were aggravated by capitalist globalization.

Abstract, Creating Preemptive Suspects: National Security, Border Defense, and Immigration Policy, 1980–Present

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Creating Preemptive Suspects: National Security, Border Defense, and Immigration Policy, 1980–Present
by Lynn Stephen 


Analysis of U.S. immigration, border defense, and national security policies and their impact on individuals, families, and communities from Mexico and Central America who have migrated or fled to the United States as refugees since the mid-1980s suggests that through immigration programs such as Prevention through Deterrence, the United States has crafted a set of policies that creates “preemptive suspects”—categories of people from Central America and Mexico that may be systematically excluded as dangerous, criminal, undeserving, and less valuable than U.S. citizens.

Abstract, Prostitution and Migrant Smuggling Networks Operating between Central America, Mexico, and the United States

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Prostitution and Migrant Smuggling Networks Operating between Central America, Mexico, and the United States
by Simón Pedro Izcara Palacios


During the past five years, a process of specialization has taken place in migrant smuggling networks that has led to the strengthening of those focused on transporting women. The reasons are that migrant women have been less affected than men by the violence in Mexico and that the adult entertainment industry pays the highest prices for irregular migrants. In-depth interviews with procurers, smugglers, and women from Central America describe the operation of the networks for the smuggling of women for prostitution operating between Central America, Mexico, and the United States and indicate that the recruitment of women is usually not coercive and that the employment of minors is more frequent in the United States than in Mexico.

Abstract, Prostitution and Migrant Smuggling Networks Operating between Central America, Mexico, and the United States

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Prostitution and Migrant Smuggling Networks Operating between Central America, Mexico, and the United States
by Simón Pedro Izcara Palacios


During the past five years, a process of specialization has taken place in migrant smuggling networks that has led to the strengthening of those focused on transporting women. The reasons are that migrant women have been less affected than men by the violence in Mexico and that the adult entertainment industry pays the highest prices for irregular migrants. In-depth interviews with procurers, smugglers, and women from Central America describe the operation of the networks for the smuggling of women for prostitution operating between Central America, Mexico, and the United States and indicate that the recruitment of women is usually not coercive and that the employment of minors is more frequent in the United States than in Mexico.

Political Report # 1282 How Pentagon Officials May Have Encouraged a 2009 Coup in Honduras

By Jake Johnston,  The Intercept

FORT MCNAIR, ONE of the oldest U.S. military posts in the country, is nestled on an outcropping of land where the Anacostia and Potomac rivers meet in Washington, D.C. There, within the National Defense University, is the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, where hundreds of Hondurans took courses over the years. In mid-July 2009, Honduran military officials sought the center's help to solve a problem that had recently arisen. The Honduran military had just dispatched of its previous problem, President Manuel Zelaya, with a military coup. Now, the Central American military was facing international and regional condemnations for a brazen display of 1970s behavior in the 21st century. The military officials needed friends in the U.S. to rally behind it, but the Americans were wary of open shows of support. The U.S. had just revoked visas from top Honduran civilian and military officials, and suspended some security assistance. Two Honduran colonels were dispatched to Washington on a mission to convince the Americans that the Honduran military's involvement in the coup was in fact constitutional. The military had reached out to the CHDS's academic dean to get help for the delegation. Officially CHDS said no, Kenneth LaPlante, CHDS's then-deputy director, told me. However, according to Martin Andersen, a former CHDS communications director who became a whistleblower, Gen. John Thompson, the academic dean, had allegedly provided "behind-the-scenes assistance in Washington, D.C., to Honduran coup plotters." Andersen's allegation was made in a complaint being investigated by the Department of Defense Inspector General, which has taken no action.

Abstract, Making Absence Visible: The Caravan of Central American Mothers in Search of Disappeared Migrants

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Making Absence Visible: The Caravan of Central American Mothers in Search of Disappeared Migrants
by Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández

The touring model employed by the Caravan of Central American Mothers in search of disappeared migrants in transit through Mexico creates processes of political empowerment for poor, indigenous peasant women who have no previous experience as activists and human rights defenders. Interviews and participant observation with members and organizers of the ninth caravan (held in December 2013) reveal three key moments that anchor the mothers’ transformation into political subjects and human rights activists: the creation of a collective identity based on maternal activism, the forging of an alliance with transnational human rights networks, and the emergence of a budding politics of visibility based on public acts of grieving that candidly lament the vulnerability of migrants caught in the drug war and border securitization across the hemisphere.

Political Report # 1278 Mexico Quake Victims Aided by Central American 'Migrant Brigade' as Government Fails

By Elliott Gabriel, teleSUR

As nearly three million people in Mexico struggle with the aftermath of last week's devastating 8.1 magnitude earthquake, impatience is growing in poverty-stricken communities. Instead of waiting for federal assistance that may never arrive, residents in the country's southern Oaxaca state are organizing to assist each other in a spirit of solidarity and mutual assistance. Among these groups is a brigade of nearly 50 migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, who are offering their unconditional support to communities in Oaxaca's poverty-blighted Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The brigade's tireless efforts have earned them the status of heroes in a country where they are usually faced with discrimination, distrust and abuse. Their orange shirts and red helmets covered in dust, the group of migrants have spent the past several days moving toppled street lamps and electrical poles, digging makeshift graves, providing medical aid to survivors and helping to clean up the piles of rubble and shattered glass in the cities hit hardest by the quake -- Juchitan and Asuncion Ixtaltepec, Oaxaca. The migrants live in nearby Ixtepec at the Hermanos en el Camino Hostel. The shelter was founded 11 years ago by Catholic priest and human rights defender Padre Alejandro Solalinde, who saw the need to protect refugees from police and criminals. When the massive quake struck, the shelter's residents immediately joined forces with the Humanitarian Peace Brigade Marabunta to begin addressing the most pressing problems faced by locals. "Sólo El Pueblo Salvará Al Pueblo" -- Only the People Can Save the People Longtime migrant justice advocate Hermano Jose Filiberto Velazquez Florencio, a member of Solalinde's mission, helped to coordinate the brigade's aid efforts. The clergyman has been an advocate for the poor and dispossessed for years, standing alongside the country's abused migrants and touring the country with relatives of the 43 disappeared students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College. Velazquez has even traveled to the United States to advocate for undocumented workers and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA, holders faced with possible deportation. Speaking to teleSUR from the neglected Séptima Sección or Seventh Section of Juchitan, Velazquez explained that the government's aid efforts have had little impact on the poorer communities within the city and along its outskirts. "Right now, the rain is starting and people aren't living in the houses because they are afraid of more earthquakes," Velazquez explained. Over 1,000 aftershocks swarmed the region following Thursday's quake, terrifying residents who choose to live outdoors and sleep in beds moved in front of their homes or in the streets. "There are shelters, but people don't want to leave their homes" due to thieves robbing the destroyed homes, he added. The displaced families are now spending their last bit of savings on expensive food sold by price-gouging merchants and cooking it outdoors using bits of wood taken from the rubble. "The government isn't giving them any support," Velazquez said. The state of Oaxaca suffered well over 5,000 destroyed homes and 76 of the 96 fatalities resulting nationwide from the quake. However, the multi-ethnic Indigenous people of the region have long been subject to the inequities of government neglect and a failure to properly develop the region. "Most of the houses were old, maybe more than 100 or 200 years old -- the materials were poor, the structures lacked steel and concrete," Velazquez explained. "This is the primary injustice of the earthquake -- these were poor people who didn't have the houses, the infrastructure, that could stand." In the meantime, local civil society groups and social movements such as the shelter and the Marabunta Brigade have mobilized their resources toward helping the people of the Isthmus, sparing no effort to prove that "sólo el pueblo salvará al pueblo" -- only the people can save the people. "We are hearing one voice from the mass media, but the reality is that independent organizations are the ones supporting the people here -- this is the reality that we on the ground can see, that we can hear, and that we can feel in our hands," the theologian notes. From Distrust to Unity Migrant Brigade members are no strangers to poverty and desperate conditions. Tens of thousands of Central Americans have fled their home countries in recent years due to a         combination of economic desperation and extreme violence committed by gangs and state security forces. "Most of these immigrants were on their way to the United States but after the new immigration policies were put in place by Donald Trump, they decided to stay for a bit longer in Mexico, in our shelter," Velazquez explained. The desperate refugees are hardly treated better in Mexico -- from 2013 to the present, the country's authorities have done much of Washington's dirty work of intercepting migrants intent on crossing the US border. Human rights are hardly a concern for Mexico's state security agencies. "They go through huge difficulties to avoid being deported by the Mexican Institute of Migration," Tijuana-based border activist and aid worker Hugo Castro told teleSUR. A coordinator for Border Angels and comrade of Father Solalinde, Castro has worked directly with countless migrants who've crossed the country and seen the worst it has to offer. "Police arrest them because they don't have identification, and then the officers torture them while demanding that the refugees name their country of origin, looking for a reason to hand them over to the Mexican migra," Castro explained, adding that poor treatment from citizens also plagues the refugees. "Business owners pay them less than average because they don't have working documents, and they also face discrimination by Mexicans who see them as potential criminals when they are actually victims of forced migration," Castro said. A recent study by the National Survey on Discrimination found that seven out of 10 Mexicans distrust or dislike refugees, providing an incentive for brigade members to prove themselves through their good deeds. The brigade has even helped to assist those who once targeted them, including police officers and the prosecutor for crimes against migrants in the region, Ana Maria Clavel. "Her house collapsed and we helped her find her belongings ... she was very surprised that the migrants helped her, because she has been so hard on them," fellow brigade coordinator Ernesto Castañeda told Sin Embargo. The migrant brigade is offering their assistance purely from a position of human empathy, Velazquez explained. "When you ask them why they are helping, their first answer is that it's because they are human beings whose first instinct is to help other humans who are suffering. They feel good when they see that they can help other people." The migrants plan on continuing their efforts until the job is done or they are no longer needed. However, the government's neglect and outright corruption could ruin any chances that the communities will actually see the recovery promised by officials. The Future: Corruption or Solidarity? Media outlets like Univision, TV Azteca and Televisa have largely focused on the "national unity" aspect of the tragedy, broadcasting mournful speeches and press conferences of politicians like President Enrique Peña Nieto and Oaxaca's governor, Alejandro Murat. Scant attention has been given to the disorganized and careless nature of the government's recovery efforts, which have amounted to a small handout -- simple rations and a blanket -- along with public relations stunts aimed at drumming up support for unpopular politicians hoping to improve their chances in next year's general elections. In many cases, Velazquez claims, the aid is intentionally being blocked for the sake of electoral fraud, a tradition with a long history in Mexican politics. "Food has been given to the cities but the political leaders are taking all of the aid and in the future they will use the food to buy votes, so the corruption of our leaders is a big problem -- the political parties are getting in the way of the people's needs," Velazquez laments. Hermano Velazquez and the migrant brigade are hoping that supporters throughout the country and the world will allow them to continue serving the needs of the people in the region. "The family we helped today are today are very grateful and they know that the people who helped them are immigrants," Velazquez said, gesturing toward a family gathered outside of their wrecked home. "Now they won't see them as strangers or criminals, but as humans when they pass through these cities." "The people need tents, they need water, they need food ... We need a lot of help here, a lot of hands to clean the houses, but also need donations of food through Hermanos en el Camino so that we can continue working for these people." Original article can be found here: https://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/Mexico-Quake-Victims-Aided-by-Central-American-Migrant-Brigade-as-Government-Fails-20170912-0005.html

Political Report # 1248 How Unaccompanied Youth Become Exploited Workers in the US

By Stephanie L. Canizales,  The Conversation

The Trump administration has released a series of executive orders targeting immigration at the U.S. southern border. Central American families and children traveling alone represent nearly half of all unauthorized migrants apprehended by Customs and Border Protection. The criminalization of immigrants at the U.S. southern border disproportionately affects Central American children and youth. Nearly 153,000 unaccompanied Mexican and Central American children have been apprehended at the U.S. southern border since 2014. Of those detained by Customs and Border Protection and processed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 60 percent have been reunited with a sponsor, typically a parent. The other 40 percent are placed with a nonparent sponsor. With the guidance of a parent or guardian, these youths might obtain financial, legal, health and social support. Others who enter without detection and remain unaccompanied when they arrive in the U.S. are financially independent and may never gain access to formal resettlement services. Recent orders by the Trump administration that prioritize unaccompanied child migrants for deportation heighten the vulnerability of immigrant children in the U.S. Since 2012, I have conducted in-depth observations and interviews with undocumented immigrant youth who arrived in Los Angeles, California as unaccompanied minors and have remained without a parent throughout their settlement in the U.S. I use pseudonyms for confidentiality as research participants are migrant youth living and working in the U.S. without authorization.

Political Report # 1211 Obama keeps on deporting Central American teens. What will Trump do?

rotesters hold signs as they march in opposition to the election of President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday, Nov. 13, 2016, in St. Louis. AP Photo/Jeff Roberson. All rights reserved. By Donica Jorden, openDemocracy

The blueprint established under the Obama administration to deport Central American teenagers soon after they reach the age of majority continues to operate unabated. Despite the intercession of public officials and a pending appeal in Federal Immigration Court, North Carolina teenager Pedro Arturo Salmerón was deported from the United States to El Salvador on Saturday, November 12, just days after Donald Trump was elected president. The deportation marks the continuation of a policy begun last year under the Obama government to respond to an unprecedented number of minors and mothers with small children who arrived at the US/Mexican border from the northern Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras during the summer of 2014. In the wake of an escalation in violence that rendered those countries the most dangerous places on earth and set off the mass migration, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a directive in December 2015 taking aim at the young and vulnerable asylum seekers as soon as they aged out of protected status. Though DHS and President Obama insisted that they were only targeting dangerous criminals for arrest and deportation, in reality the opposite seems to be true. It appears that innocent applicants for asylum and relief, who are easily identifiable and located as they faithfully offer all their personal information, are at the highest risk. Then 17, Pedro fled El Salvador to rejoin his family in Charlotte, NC in June 2014, following the brutal murder and decapitation of his cousin by gang members. The gang, his family says, was also threatening his life. But his time with mother Carmen and other family members was abruptly cut short. Pedro immediately applied for humanitarian asylum and the opportunity to live with his family in North Carolina upon arriving in the United States, and the family tirelessly pursued his case, spending thousands of dollars. The Vance High School student was arrested by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the police arm of the DHS) agents on his way to school on January 26, 2016. Able to play several instruments and with dreams of a career in music, Pedro also excelled in sciences and literature at Vance. After his arrest, he was mainly held for the last 10 months at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, 400 miles (640 km) from his family and supporters in North Carolina, in an atmosphere he described as one of "disappointment and despair." The slight and soft-spoken youth, who wears his hair in long, glossy curls down his back, was first slated to be transported to Houston, Texas, on Saturday when the plane he was to take was deemed unable to fly. This was the third time that Pedro and his family had to endure a false start to removal proceedings. At 1 am on July 31, he was moved out of Stewart for imminent deportation, only to be returned to Georgia the next day. The same thing had happened twice earlier that week. Pedro's lawyer said he believed that it was "in retaliation" for having lodged a complaint about a previous move to a facility in Louisiana. Congresswoman Alma S. Adams, representing the 12th congressional district in North Carolina, has been speaking out and supporting Pedro and the Salmeron family all year, including travelling to Stewart to see him. Pedro also was counting on the support of three other congresspersons, Representatives John Lewis (D-GA), Hank Johnson (D-GA), and G.K. Butterfield (D-NC), who with Adams wrote a letter to DHS director Jeh Johnson requesting a "humane solution" for the youthful immigrants. But attitudes to these young immigrants do not fall strictly along party lines. Kay Hagen, Democratic Party senator who represented North Carolina in Washington DC from 2009-2015, was vehemently opposed to the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors ).  "Dreamers" are undocumented students who were born in other countries but raised and educated in the United States, and the act allows them to continue their studies in the US In 2010, Hagen was one of only five Democratic senators who opposed the act. Meanwhile, across the aisle, Lindsay Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, is currently working on legislation with Senator Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) to extend President Obama's 2012 initiative known as DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Under DACA, DHS is supposed to refrain from deporting undocumented persons who came to the United States as children, were educated here, and have no criminal histories. These undocumented immigrants are then granted temporary visas to live and work, which must be renewed every two years. The files of 750,000 DACA applicants and a million DREAMers may prove too tempting for President-Elect Donald Trump, who vociferously declared his intention to deport millions of undocumented immigrants on many occasions during his campaign. After years of scapegoating immigrants and convincing his followers, if not a large part of the American public, that immigrants are "rapists and murderers," it would be easy to demonize the entire immigrant population in order to justify refugee and student deportations and more easily achieve his promised numbers. Bring it on, declares immigrant advocate Viridiana Martínez, one of the founders of NC Dream Team and Alerta Migratoria NC. "Obama told us the right things, but he did the wrong ones," Martinez said. But under Trump, "I am glad the cards are now on the table and there is not a hidden agenda. Because then we can fight accordingly." Original article and sources can be found here: https://www.opendemocracy.net/democraciaabierta/danica-jorden/obama-keeps-on-deporting-central-american-teens-what-will-trump-do

Book, "Mobilizing Democracy: Globalization and Citizen Protest" by Paul Almeida

Mobilizing Democracy: Globalization and Citizen Protest

Paul Almeida’s comparative study of the largest social movement campaigns that existed between 1980 and 2013 in every Central American country (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama) provides a granular examination of the forces that spark mass mobilizations against state economic policy, whether those factors are electricity rate hikes or water and health care privatization. Many scholars have explained connections between global economic changes and local economic conditions, but most of the research has remained at the macro level. Mobilizing Democracy contributes to our knowledge about the protest groups "on the ground" and what makes some localities successful at mobilizing and others less successful. His work enhances our understanding of what ingredients contribute to effective protest movements as well as how multiple protagonists—labor unions, students, teachers, indigenous groups, nongovernmental organizations, women’s groups, environmental organizations, and oppositional political parties—coalesce to make protest more likely to win major concessions.

Political Report # 1181 The Alliance for Prosperity: Solution to the Central American Migrant Crisis or Déjà Vu?

Migrants crouch out of sight on the side of the road, waiting for a smuggler's signal that it is safe to cross, near Los Corazones, Mexico, November 8, 2015. The US Senate passed the Alliance for Prosperity Plan as a means to curtail the reasons for migration from the northern triangle of Central America. However, many fear the social component of the plan will be lost to the question of security, contributing to the militarization of the region.   (Photo: Daniel Berehulak / The New York Times) By Jeff Abbott, Thruthout

This year Guatemala inaugurated a new president: Jimmy Morales, a former comedian known for a racist television show in which he regularly performed in blackface and mocked Guatemala's indigenous populations. Morales, who took office on January 14, had positioned himself as a political outsider who was able to ride the wave of popular discontent to the office. But before his inauguration, Morales was paid a special visit by US Vice President Joseph Biden, whose late arrival disrupted the events planned for the day. Biden privately met with the new president in an upscale hotel in Guatemala's wealthy Zone 10. Guatemala's daily newspaper reports that the two discussed the importance of Washington's latest plan to curb northern migration, the Alliance for Prosperity. A month prior, the US Senate passed the controversial Alliance for Prosperity Plan as part of the 2016 budget on December 18, 2015, in a vote of 66 to 33. The plan includes $750 million to improve governance, strengthen security and promote the economic integration of the northern triangle countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. In late 2015, Mexico and Nicaragua were both added to the plan, with each country receiving nearly $120 million of the funds made available to secure their borders. In a New York Times op-ed, Biden called for the plan following the migration crisis of 2015, and proposed the plan as a means to curtail the reasons for migration from the northern triangle of Central America. "The economies of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras remain bogged down as the rest of the Americas surge forward," Biden wrote, emphasizing the reasons for this plan. "Inadequate education, institutional corruption, rampant crime and a lack of investment are holding these countries back."

Political Report # 1125 ICE's War on Refugees By Nick Tabor, Jacobin

A protest against ICE in 2013. Bonnie Gutierrez / Flickr By Nick Tabor, Jacobin

From the time that she fled from El Salvador and was picked up at the US border, Ana Silvia Orellana Urias wore an ankle monitor so the immigration police could track her between check-in dates. On January 2, when immigration agents surrounded her house and she awoke to them banging on the door, she was living just outside Atlanta with her four children. The agents said they'd only come because of her ankle monitor. She was confused - she'd just changed the batteries. When she tried to call her lawyer, an agent reportedly seized her phone. Then they rounded up Urias and her children and sent them to a jail in south Texas, where she said an agent tried to make her sign a paper agreeing to be deported. Hers is one of twenty-eight families the federal government arrested over New Year's weekend, in a series of deportation raids intended to scare off other would-be asylum seekers from Central America. News of similar arrests has trickled in since, and the secretary of homeland security has pledged to keep them up indefinitely. In reaction to the roundups, activists across the country have launched a social media campaign, "Know Your Rights" workshops, and street protests in at least ten cities. On the legal front, attorneys have set up a makeshift bureau in the Texas jail where deportees are being housed and halted the deportation of a dozen families. Other attorneys are investigating possible civil rights abuses during the raids.

Political Report # 1109 The Salvadoran Dream Is Now Survival Even if It Means Illegal Migration to the US By Carolina Campos and Andrew Stefan

The sister of Alberto Hernández Escalante mourns over the body of her brother, found in a clandestine grave near Caserio el Chumpe, El Salvador. Killings spiked by nearly 70 percent in the country in 2015.  (photo: Manu Brabo/AP) By Carolina Campos and Andrew Stefan, Reader Supported News

For many in the United States, the growing number of Central American immigrants crossing into the US is an issue of major concern. Whether we consider Donald Trump's presidential aspirations to implement a national program of mass deportation, ongoing citizen attacks on Latin Americans, or the Obama administration's latest campaign of anti-immigrant raids, the message is clear: people in the US are frightened and lashing out at those who migrate here. While immigration is a staple topic of the US news media, what's typically missing from the discussion is context - an understanding of the conditions that fuel mass migration to the US from Central America and Mexico. What's rarely reported is that, at present, thousands of Central Americans are being forced to flee from their countries by escalating levels of violence. The gravest example of this phenomenon is currently playing out in El Salvador, where the motivations underlying migration extend beyond the pursuit of personal fulfillment or economic mobility. For many, migration is the only option for survival. On a hot, sunny day in San Salvador, heading to the home of Carmen López, we arrive at the heart of one of the country's "red zone" neighborhoods - the designation indicates an extremely high level of gang violence. Some of the houses are made of concrete. Others are constructed from sheets, complete with colored patchwork walls. Despite the ever-looming threat of gang attacks, the people of the community are friendly and greet us with hellos. Children play on the narrow streets and somehow dare to smile. However, the pavement, we notice, is unmistakably stained by blood.

Political Report # 1106 Migration Is Not a Crime By Federico Barahona, NACLA

Clementina Murcia González, from Honduras, holds up the pictures of her two missing sons, Jorge Orlando Funes Murcia and Mauro Orlando Funes. (photo: Federico Barahona) By Federico Barahona, NACLA

The first one left at 17, with her blessing. The second didn't ask if he could go, he just went. Both went missing, lost in transit, somewhere in Mexico, as they made their way to the United States from Honduras. On a cold December morning, Clementina Murcia González walked the streets of Coatzacoalcos, a port city in the southern part of the Mexican state of Veracruz, searching for her two sons, Jorge and Mauro, their pictures on her chest, her hands trembling. "We are worth nothing," she said. "For many people, we are worth nothing." She was one of some 40 Central American mothers that took part in a caravan travelling through southern Mexico, visiting prisons, shelters, as well as other spots along the migrant route, looking for missing sons and daughters. Priscila Rodríguez Cartagena, a grandmother from Honduras, searched for her daughter, Yesenia Marleni, who disappeared in 2008, when she was 19. "She lives in my heart," she told me. "If she can hear me, I want her to know that I love her, that I miss her, that I will not have peace until I find her. When I look after my family, I think of her. I wonder, is she eating, or not eating? Is she alive?" While attention is focused on the thousands fleeing Syria, Libya, and Iraq, the United Nations refugee agency has warned that a new refugee crisis is taking shape in Central America. The UN reports a nearly fivefold increase, since 2008, in asylum-seekers arriving to the United States from the Northern Triangle region of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, which has the world's highest murder rates.