‘I was a prisoner of Mexico’s US-backed migrant detention regime’

 Al Jazeera English

On July 11, 2021, I arrived by car at Tapachula International Airport in the Mexican state of Chiapas – a grandiose title for the diminutive compound and runway plunked down amidst tropical vegetation just west of Mexico’s border with Guatemala – for what was meant to be my return flight to the neighbouring state of Oaxaca, where I had taken up accidental residence at the start of the pandemic the previous year.

I had come to Tapachula for four days with a vague plan to write something about migrants, of which there were plenty. During my initial excursion to the city centre, the woman who served me juice at a market stall reported that, out of every 10 people nowadays, five were Haitian, three were Cuban or something else, and two were chiapanecos (natives of Chiapas). Gesturing at the ground beyond the stall, she remarked: “Sometimes at night it seems like a hotel around here with people sleeping all over”. . .

Another of my interlocutors was a young Nicaraguan with “Juan 3:16” tattooed on the side of his neck – a reference, Google later informed me, to the Bible verse according to which “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”. This young man had worked in radio in Nicaragua, and, putting on a deep voice, performed a rapid-fire dedication “to Belén in Tapachula” as he accompanied me in search of the Coppel department store that I urgently needed to find.

Our stroll was briefly interrupted when Juan 3:16 had to chase down the Mexican youth who had relieved a distraught schoolgirl of her mobile phone. Upon his return, he recounted to me the highlights of hitchhiking through Honduras and Guatemala to Mexico, where he was promptly apprehended on a minibus by Mexican immigration officers. . . . [and] ended up imprisoned for 23 days in Tapachula’s notoriously overcrowded and abuse-ridden estación migratoria – “migration station” – which had thanks to the either witting or unwitting irony of a previous Mexican government been christened Siglo XXI, meaning “21st century”. . . .

As The Associated Press reported back in 2019, Siglo XXI – said to be Latin America’s largest immigration detention centre – is a “secretive place off-limits to public scrutiny where cellphones are confiscated and journalists aren’t allowed inside”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Who’s afraid of a Chinese balloon?

 Al Jazeera English

Sometimes on this planet of ours, militaries do silly things.

There was that time in 2021, for example, that the United States army accidentally stormed a sunflower oil factory in Bulgaria. That same year, the Italian armed forces erroneously blew up a chicken coop in northern Italy.

A bit farther back, in the Battle of Karansebes of 1788, the Austrian army accidentally attacked itself, resulting in some 10,000 casualties.

Now, another bizarre military stunt has been pulled on the world stage — but on purpose.

On February 4, a US fighter jet shot down what the United States insists was a Chinese “spy balloon” off the coast of South Carolina; according to China, it was merely a weather balloon that had blown off course. The airborne object was taken out with a Sidewinder missile — which, at $400,000 a pop, was also the weapon of choice a week later as the US military went about frenetically shooting up more unidentified stuff in the sky. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

Xenophobic delirium: The US’s race-making operation in Mexico

 Al Jazeera English

In the historic centre of the city of Tapachula, located in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas near the border with Guatemala, sits a golden statue of Benito Juárez, the first Mexican president of Indigenous origins, who died in 1872. Behind the statue is a wall featuring a quote from Juárez in capital letters, the English translation of which is: “Among individuals as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace”.

It is an ironic backdrop, to say the least, for the scene currently playing out in Tapachula. The city not only hosts Mexico’s largest immigration detention centre, where I myself was imprisoned for one night in July 2021, but also effectively serves as an open-air jail for countless refuge seekers from Haiti, Central America, and beyond – many of whom are endeavouring to reach the United States but find themselves trapped in indefinite limbo and extreme precarity in Chiapas.

Of course, many of those on the move have been forced to flee their homes thanks in good part to the US habit of inflicting political and economic suffering on its fellow nations. So much for “respect for the rights of others”.

Nor, to be sure, is it very respectful for the US to insist that Mexico perform its anti-migrant dirty work. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

When calamities strike, it is the poor who bear the brunt

 Al Jazeera English

On February 6, massive earthquakes struck southern Turkey and northern Syria, inflicting ghastly damage across a geographic region that has already borne a great deal of earthly devastation in recent decades. The ongoing war in Syria has produced millions of refugees, many of whom have now found themselves victims of seismic activity in the Turkish south.

The death toll from Monday’s quakes quickly jumped into the thousands and will no doubt soar to far more macabre heights. An untold number of people remain buried beneath the rubble. Traumatised survivors contend with frigid temperatures and aftershocks; refugees contend with the loss of any semblance of refuge.

The natural disaster has served to underscore what should hardly be earth-shattering news: that life for the global poor is extremely precarious and plagued by multiple, simultaneous crises from which recovery is often futile. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Netflix and Israel: Did ‘Farha’ sabotage a special relationship?

 Al Jazeera English

In January, the English-language website of the prominent Israel Hayom newspaper reported with satisfaction that Netflix had suddenly added an “unusually high number of Israeli-made films”. The paper speculated that this “special gesture” was perhaps an attempt to “lure back customers”, after a high number of Israelis had dramatically cancelled their Netflix subscriptions in response to an “anti-Israel film” that “portrays Israeli soldiers as murderers”.

The offending film in question is, of course, Farha – which Netflix released in December and which depicts the horrors of the Nakba in 1948, when Israel achieved so-called “independence” on Palestinian land by killing more than 10,000 Palestinians and destroying more than 500 villages. Fast forward 75 years and Israeli soldiers still do not need much help looking like murderers; just ask the family of 61-year-old grandmother Majida Obaid, who was fatally shot in the neck during the Israeli military’s January 26 rampage in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.

And yet Netflix’s decision to feature the likes of Farha as well as the 2022 series Mo constitutes a deviation from business as usual at the California-based streaming giant, by offering a glimpse of Palestinian reality and legitimate history that contests the dominant Israeli-fabricated narrative. To be sure, the company’s seemingly special relationship with the state of Israel has often rendered it indistinguishable from a Zionist public relations service. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.