Letter from a mass grave in Mexico

 All Jazeera English

The municipal cemetery of Tapachula in the Mexican state of Chiapas is a sprawling expanse overflowing with graves in colourful disrepair. Tombstones from centuries past crack and crumble, and the clutter is so extreme that, to reach certain parts of the graveyard, you must resign yourself to stepping on the dead.

Some of the newer graves still host the remains of the Day of the Dead celebration in November – death being far more, well, lively in Mexico than in most other places on the planet. The country becomes awash in the cempasúchil flower – or Mexican marigold – and mariachis descend upon cemeteries for all-night festivities with music, food, and libations.

Lying close to the Mexican border with Guatemala, Tapachula has achieved notoriety as a “jail-city” for refugees from Central America, Haiti, Africa and beyond who are effectively trapped there by the Mexican government – which is continuously bullied by the United States into curbing northbound “migrant flows.” And inevitably, some of these refugees perish in limbo. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Biden presidency at two years: Halfway point of a forever war

 Al Jazeera English

In 2020, during his campaign for president of the United States, Joe Biden pledged to make Roe v Wade “the law of the land”. While the 1973 landmark ruling that legalised abortion nationwide was of course technically already the law of the land, its protections had been successively sabotaged in accordance with the national predilection for trampling on human rights.

Fast forward to June 2022, a year and a half into the Biden presidency, and the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade – a move that disproportionately harmed poor minority women and effectively aborted any pretences to progressivism on the domestic landscape.

Then in October, Biden promised to push to codify Roe into law if Democrats retained both houses of Congress in the November midterm elections.

Oops. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Three Amigos and the US war on asylum seekers in Mexico

 Al Jazeera English

For his first international foray of 2023, United States President Joe Biden has swung down to Mexico City to attend the latest iteration of the North American Leaders’ Summit, charmingly dubbed the “Three Amigos Summit”.

The meeting is kicking off on January 9 with a bilateral encounter between Biden and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known as AMLO. The third “amigo” is Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

One major topic for friendly discussion between Biden and AMLO will inevitably be migration, as the US continues to battle a “migrant crisis” of unprecedented proportions – a crisis that would hardly be so critical if the US simply refrained from messing up other people’s countries in the first place.

As of the end of the fiscal year on September 30, 2022, there had been no fewer than 2.38 million apprehensions of undocumented people on the US-Mexico border, an increase of 37 percent from the previous year. Between September 2021 and June 2022, meanwhile, Mexico detained a record 345,584 people transiting its territory, most of them en route to the US.

As the long-dead Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz is said to have once observed: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States” – a proximity that in recent decades has meant that Mexico gets to perform the anti-migrant dirty work of its northern neighbour, self-appointed proprietor of the world’s number-one Very Important Border. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Searching for Oman: Towards a disconnected 2023

 Al Jazeera English

Back in 2013, I went camping for three nights in a remote area of Oman at the invitation of some Arab friends living in Dubai. They had overestimated my hiking abilities, but made sure I did not fall off of any precipices.

We slept by a stream five hours away from where we had left my friends’ cars. There was no mobile phone reception, and a lone Omani shepherd was the only other human we encountered over the course of our stay. I spent the days watching the stream, wandering around some boulders and small caves, and eating a lot of nuts and canned tuna.

With no digital stimuli keeping me unnaturally alert at night, I slept an unprecedented 10-plus hours under the stars. My seemingly eternal state of agitation dissipated, and life became magically surreal in its simplicity. Then the nuts and tuna ran out, and it was time to drive back to Dubai, the internet, and everything else that is wrong with the world.

In the decade that has elapsed since then, the Oman camping excursion has attained an almost mythical status in my mind, with the stream symbolising a sort of pre-technological Eden where it is possible to clock 10 glorious hours of slumber on three consecutive nights – a feat that, post-Oman, I never managed to replicate. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.