Walking to America

Al Jazeera English

The isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrow strip of land that separates the Gulf of Mexico from the Pacific Ocean in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, is known for its spectacularly fierce winds, which have toppled many a cargo truck navigating its thoroughfares. The isthmus is currently also playing host to mass human movement, as refuge seekers from Central America to Africa and beyond navigate the landscape in the hopes of eventually reaching the United States, still some 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles) to the north.

And for these thousands upon thousands of humans in precarious transit, overpowering winds are but one of myriad existential obstacles.

I recently spent a few days in the isthmian town of Juchitán and took a taxi out to the nearby village of Santo Domingo Ingenio, where I met up with a 10-member Venezuelan family whose acquaintance I had made in early November in the neighbouring state of Chiapas, which borders Guatemala. Driving up the highway from Juchitán, the taxi lurched in the wind as we passed staggered groups of people heading in the opposite direction, some carrying babies or pushing strollers, others shielding their faces from the punishing sun overhead.

The family had joined up with the latest northbound migrant caravan to form in Mexico – although the caravan has since largely dissolved in accordance with divide-and-conquer tactics of the Mexican government and mafia outfits, which jointly profit from the United States’s criminalisation of migration. Lacking any money for food – much less to avail themselves of mafia-organised transport options or the inflated “migrant prices” unofficially implemented by Mexican bus companies – this family belongs to the class of refuge seekers that has basically been reduced to walking to America. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

Dying without borders

 Al Jazeera English

On November 6 in the city of Tapachula in Mexico’s Chiapas state, just down the road from the border with Guatemala, a young woman lay face down on the pavement in front of one of the offices of COMAR, the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance. Generally speaking, “refugee assistance” means stymying the northward movement of desperate refugees at the behest of the United States.

I happened to be passing by the COMAR office on my way to the municipal cemetery of Tapachula, where earlier in the year I had visited a mass grave containing the unidentified remains of refugees who had perished in the city. As the policeman stationed in front of the office was busy staring into space, I stopped to ask bystanders what had befallen the prostrate woman.

“She suffers from high blood pressure,” was the response from Yessica, a Honduran woman holding a visibly ill infant in her arms as four other children ran in circles around her. Yessica had arrived in Tapachula 10 days earlier after travelling with her kids from the Honduran town of Tela through Guatemala, where, she said, they had been robbed of everything they had. They were now sleeping on the street trying to figure out how to proceed north in the face of “refugee assistance”.

In explaining why she had fled Honduras, Yessica cited a motive commonly invoked by refugees from the country: its spectacular levels of violence, which became even more so following the 2009 US-backed coup d’état when homicides and femicides surged. Yessica had another uniquely dreadful reason for needing to get to the US, however, which was that her son was buried there. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

How America’s bloodthirsty journalism cheers on Israel’s war on Gaza

 Al Jazeera English

In a recent segment on how Hamas “frames the civilian casualties” of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, CNN’s Jake Tapper starts out by acknowledging that we “do know that innocent civilians in Gaza continue to be killed by Israeli strikes”. It is impossible to “not be affected by these horrific images that we’re seeing”, he states, as the humanitarian crisis in the enclave grows “increasingly dire”.

What is the solution, then? In Tapper’s view, apparently, it is for Israel to continue killing innocent civilians and presiding over a humanitarian catastrophe, because it is all Hamas’s fault anyway.

Near the beginning of the segment, we are shown a clip of Queen Rania of Jordan responding to those who argue that a ceasefire will help Hamas – an argument she says amounts to “endorsing and justifying the death of thousands of civilians”.

Then it is back to Tapper, who calls Queen Rania’s remarks an “interesting turn of phrase” and goes on to wonder condescendingly whether it did not occur to Hamas, when the organisation undertook its operation on October 7, that Israel would “retaliate in a way that would cause innocent Palestinians in Gaza to die”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel’s psychological operation in Gaza

 Al Jazeera English

In 2014, nine years prior to Israel’s current annihilative efforts in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army undertook what it dubbed “Operation Protective Edge” in the same territory. The 51-day campaign extinguished 2,251 Palestinian lives, among them 551 children.

Not long after the 2014 killing spree, a psychoanalyst acquaintance of mine in Barcelona sent me some photographs that he had acquired from a colleague in Gaza. The photos were of drawings by children in the town of Khuzaa in the southern Gaza governorate of Khan Yunis, close to the border with Israel.

At first glance, many of the drawings appear to be your standard children’s artwork, featuring colourful houses, smiling stick figures, grass, clouds, sun and so forth. Stylistic similarities aside, however, the illustrations depict a troublingly distinct landscape – one in which missiles, tanks, bulldozers and jets have clearly come to occupy central positions in the respective universes of the young artists. . . .

The children who drew those drawings are now teenagers – provided, that is, that they have survived the latest ongoing round of Israeli-induced carnage in Gaza, which has killed close to 10,000 people including more than 4,800 children. There is not a single safe place in the entire territory, as Israel proceeds to target homes, schools and hospitals alike with abandon. Israeli military officers have admitted to dispensing with pretences to “surgical” precision. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.