El Salvador: A nation under hypnosis

 Al Jazeera English

In May, a 40-year-old woman – we’ll call her “Ana” – was arrested in downtown San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. She presided over a shabby bar and eatery in an area known as the Ex Biblioteca – or Ex-Library – a reference to the institution that had occupied the grounds prior to the devastating earthquake of October 1986.

Her family has not heard from her since.

Ana was detained for alleged gang ties, two months into the state of emergency that kicked off on March 27, 2022 in response to a spike in homicides occasioned by a collapse in negotiations between gangs and Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador and self-proclaimed “coolest dictator in the world”.

Over the past year, about 66,000 people have been imprisoned in accordance with the “emergency” – most of them condemned to indefinite detention and relieved of even the most basic rights. Many have nothing whatsoever to do with gangs aside from residing in a gang-saturated country. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Rape as a weapon in the war on asylum seekers

 Al Jazeera English

The first time I spoke with survivors of the Darién Gap – the notoriously deadly stretch of jungle on the border between Colombia and Panama – was in 2021 during my brief imprisonment in Siglo XXI, Mexico’s largest immigration detention centre, located in the Mexican state of Chiapas near the border with Guatemala.

I was the only detainee who hailed from the United States – the very country responsible for Mexico’s migration crackdown in the first place – and I had ended up in migrant jail purely on account of my own stupidity and laziness in renewing my tourist visa. My fellow inmates were facing rather more existential predicaments, and many of them – from Haiti, Cuba, Bangladesh, and beyond – had been forced to traverse the Darién Gap as they fled political and economic calamity in the hopes of eventually finding refuge in the US.

Within the walls of Siglo XXI, where dreams of refuge had been indefinitely put on hold, the Darién was a recurring topic of conversation – a sort of spontaneous exercise in group therapy, it seemed. Women recounted the numerous cadavers they had encountered during their journeys. Rape, it was clear, was rampant in the jungle – to the extent that even those who were not personally assaulted, were vicariously traumatised. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Travel under the influencers

 Al Jazeera English

Among the remaining bits of photographic evidence of a 2005 hitchhiking trip through Turkey is a shot of me lying in the back of the cab of a Turkish freight truck, clad in the same pink corduroy pants and blue sweater that I had been wearing for months. My hands are folded across my stomach, my eyebrows are raised, and the background is grey. The photo is blurry, having been taken while the truck was in motion by my hitchhiking companion Amelia, who had gotten the passenger’s seat for that portion of the trajectory.

It is not, in other words, a picture that would elicit any interest whatsoever in the current social media age – in which Instagram, Facebook, and the like have assumed the realm of reality and converted existence into a marketing competition to see whose life looks better on screen.

Travel influencers and other digital personalities expend all manner of time, resources, and photo-editing tools to produce images that are supposedly spontaneously and organically enchanting. Often, the images come accompanied by captions and hashtags underscoring the projected perfection of it all.

And yet that Turkish truck photo, despite its sparse plainness and lack of aesthetic appeal, does so much more for me personally than contemporary travel shots that are almost monotonous in their staged vibrancy. For one thing, it takes me back to a time when you could just see and do things without obsessing over how to properly curate the moment for diffusion on social media. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Biden’s asylum ban: The view from the Darién Gap

 Al Jazeera English

In November of last year, Jesús, a 33-year-old man from the Venezuelan state of Falcón, spent 10 days traversing the Darién Gap – the treacherous stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama – with his wife and two-year-old son. They were but three of the nearly 250,000 people who survived the crossing in 2022, most of them hoping to eventually reach the United States several thousand kilometres to the north.

I spoke with Jesús recently in the town of Metetí in Panama’s Darién province, where he is washing cars in an attempt to scrape together funds for his family’s onward journey. He recounted to me how, at one point in the jungle, he had been tumbling down a near-vertical hill of mud and had frantically grabbed what he thought was a tree root – but which turned out to be a hand belonging to a human corpse. He had been disconcerted at first, he said, but had then thought to himself: “That hand saved my life.”

The same cannot be said for US President Joe Biden, who, despite continuously promising to lend a helping hand to persons seeking refuge, is currently working to dismantle the very concept of asylum – in contravention of both international and domestic law. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.