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.

‘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.

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.