THE 21ST-CENTURY BORDER
If you ask us what’s going to happen in the near future, we have no fucking idea. Sorry for using the word “idea.”
—Subcomandante Marcos (now known as Galeano), at a press conference.
Three Honduran men sit by the train tracks in the small, broiling town of Tenosique, Mexico. They wait where hundreds of Central Americans congregate each night in hopes of jumping on the freight train notoriously known as The Beast, as it chugs north to the United States. In the distance, across the tracks, an army truck rumbles by. In the back, two soldiers stand poised with assault rifles, their faces covered with black balaclavas. The shiny Dodge Ram contrasts against the rusted machinery scattered in the overgrown grass and cement. It is as if we are on the set of a movie somewhere between Children of Men, a film that depicts the United Kingdom as an ultra-militarized police state rounding up and incarcerating refugees, and The Road, a tale of a father and son who walk across a post-apocalyptic North America devastated by an unknown cataclysm.
The Honduran men’s names are Luis Carlos, Santos Fernando, and Ismael. They have been living by the tracks in a small shack built of corrugated metal for several days. When I ask Ismael where he is from, he pulls out the identification card that is warped and fraying at the edges, as if it has been pulled out one too many times. I am not there to look for “climate refugees.” I am there to investigate Mexico’s upsurge in border policing since 2014, known as Programa Frontera Sur. The soldiers across the tracks are moving away from us. I wonder, as I watch them monitoring the train yard, if they are among the many military, police, and immigration officials who have been trained by the United States.
Ismael tells me that he is 17 years old and a campesino, a subsistence farmer. He tells me that they are headed to the United States, a thousand miles away. When I ask them why they decided to leave Honduras, his answer is simple, and similar to the case of many other farmers across the world in the climate era: “No hubo lluvia.” There was no rain.
This is a border in the Anthropocene era: young unarmed farmers with failing harvests encountering expanding and highly privatized border regimes of surveillance, guns, and prisons. What I am witnessing is occurring in many places with many different manifestations—along the southern borders of Morocco or Libya, on the militarized divide between India and Bangladesh, between Syria and Turkey. Militarized borders are not only proliferating throughout the globe, they emanate from centers of power, such as the United States and the European Union, that fund border infrastructure and train the guards.
This is the 21st-century border that I examine in this chapter. It is a border that is not solely defined by an international boundary line, nor even the most imposing Trump-era wall, but rather by a multilayered enforcement apparatus covering a wide swath of territory, defined more by political and economic power than by national sovereignty. There are many components to this, including complex surveillance networks, biometrics and big data, militarized police agents, border policing strategies, and “consequence delivery systems,” to name a few elements of the totality of “border security.” Perhaps, there is no better way to explore the emergence of a 21st-century border system vis-à-vis climate upheavals, than with a Central American’s journey north. In many ways, and for many people, the imagined world of a degraded environment, combined with an authoritarian high-tech surveillance state, already exists. This is especially true if you are somebody traveling north from Honduras, without authorization to cross border lines.
Along the Mexico-Guatemala divide, expensive hardware such as underwater motion sensors, night-vision goggles, X-ray machines, and Black Hawk helicopters have come from the United States via a military aid package known as the Merida Initiative. U.S. Homeland Security agents have trained Mexican immigration authorities, police, and military in border policing. Customs and Border Protection agents from the United States are physically working in immigration detention centers along the Mexico-Guatemala border. Washington not only supports—but insists on—Mexico guarding its borders since the upsurge of northbound Central American immigration of the early 2010s. Where Luis Carlos, Ismael, and Santos Fernando sit on the train tracks, 1,000 miles away from Texas, I understand that they are, as the Merida Initiative’s third pillar indicates, just barely beginning their trek through the United States’ “21st-Century Border.”1
“WE’RE FACING AN UNPRECEDENTED CALAMITY”
In May 2015, many farmers throughout Central America sowed their seeds expecting rain that never came. It used to rain from May to November. People would take advantage of the first rains to plant corn, beans, and rice. In 2015 their seeds dried up in a drought that affected more than a million farmers spanning four countries—Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua—in the Central American “Dry Corridor.” Eleuterio Flores, one of the 400,000 farmers nailed by the drought in Honduras, told Agence France Press, “There is nothing to eat, the harvests are completely lost.”2 According to the Central American Agricultural Council, there was a loss of 80 percent of bean crops and 60 percent of corn. Where Flores lived, the small town of Texiguat, Honduras (population 12,000), 80 percent of the people live in acute poverty, 4 percent more than the national average; 54 percent of the people in Honduras live in severe poverty.
As 16-year-old Lesly Vasquez came to pick up a food packet that the Honduran government was distributing to the 82,000 families slammed by drought, she told AFP, “We’re here so somebody can help us, we have nothing to eat.” The 16-pound bags of corn flower, manteca (lard), pasta, coffee, reminded me of the 100-pound sacks of rice I had seen distributed to typhoon survivors in the Philippines. “We’re facing an unprecedented calamity,” said the mayor of Texiguat, Lindolfo Campos.3
Climate scientist Chris Castro told me that the Central American northern triangle, right where Texiguat is located, is “ground zero” for global warming’s impact in the Americas. One thing that is happening, according to Castro, is an “intensification of the mid-summer dry period.” The canícula—the farmers’ term for a “dip” in rainfall during the months of July and August, has intensified, “and that is critical for agricultural activities there, particularly for subsistence farmers.” According to the regionalized climate model Castro is using in Central America,4 the canícula is only predicted to get hotter and drier and could be devastating to agriculture and ecosystems attuned to the seasonal cycles of precipitation. “You might have threshold points where forests dry out, so they are more susceptible to fire, or where you reach drought conditions so that you can’t plant certain crops, or they affect water supplies, or you have precipitation extremes that exceed design parameters for a system, then translate that to a population” in vulnerable socioeconomic conditions, whose “livliehoods are tied to the ability to interface with the the natural environment.”
As Castro put it, “It’s a paradigm of the wet gets wetter, the dry gets drier, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Everything gets more extreme.”
In 2010, the American Security Project (of Brigadier General Stephen Cheney) issued a Latin America threat forecast in a report titled “Climate Change and Immigration: Warnings for America’s Southern Border” in 2010.5 Like the Department of Homeland Security’s 2014 Quadrennial Report, the 2010 assessment foresaw the future of the three men at the rails in Tenosique: the heat waves, flooding, drought, and superstorms impacting what the government analysts called “impoverished and politically unstable communities.” The pressure on “our southern neighbors to reach friendlier environments in the United States will grow stronger.” There will be storms, soil erosion, run-off, and food shortages. Millions of people will be affected as coastal areas flood, particularly on Caribbean islands, which, they write, are in jeopardy of being swallowed by the sea, “both partially and completely.”6
There will be an “environment ripe for migration.”7
And if that were not enough, even “more problematic,” according to author Lindsey Ross, are the “special interest aliens” that could be “potential terrorists from countries that are home to known networks.”8
Indeed, as predictions of increasing numbers of climate refugees fill forecasts, the United States isn’t planning to extend them any special status; rather, as the report stated, “climate migrants will place an additional burden on communities along the U.S. southern border. . . .”
PREVENTION THROUGH DETERRENCE
Increasing the speed of freight trains has been one of the many tactics the Mexican government has been using to deter unauthorized immigration, since the declaration of the 2014 Southern Border Program. A fast-moving train can create suction between the cars that can pull a person onto the tracks, where they are chewed up or crushed alive. The train has injured so many people that there is a shelter in Tapachula, Mexico, dedicated to helping the mutilated and dismembered. The night before I met them, Ismael, Luis Carlos, and Santos Fernando had tried to jump on a train, but it was moving too fast.
The train was an example of “Prevention Through Deterrence,” with the implicit threat of bodily harm or even death. This did, in fact, deter the three men. Remember, this was the strategy implemented on the U.S.-Mexico border that creates spaces of exception—in which the threat of the most terrible violence afflicts (and, according to policy makers, deters) migrants—and has been U.S. border policy since Gatekeeper-type operations started in the early 1990s. Now such a policy, whether explicitly stated or not, is in effect throughout Mexico. As Mexican analyst Marco Antonio Velázquez Navarrete put it, “The entire country of Mexico is now a border.”
Even if they had been fortunate enough to get on the train, a mile down the tracks Mexican authorities ordered the train to a screeching halt. Immigration agents, accompanied by armed police, searched the train with blinding flashlights (in Mexico immigration authorities are unarmed, so they often conduct joint operations with police or military) and arrested everyone they could catch. Fray Tomás González Castillo, director of the nearby shelter known as La 72, tells me it is almost “impossible” for people to go north. He says that there are “scandalous checkpoints” on the roads and that “organized crime” controls the trains.
As I talk to the Honduran men in the overgrown grass, I notice a train car with the graffiti, in Spanish, Por la dignidad de un viaje sin fronteras, “for the dignity of a journey without borders.” Unfortunately for them, nothing could be further from reality. They sit in the first enforcement cordon of a three-tiered border policing system. Patrolling soldiers, fast trains, and immigration operations are all part of the first tier. The second layer is a series of mega-enforcement facilites, or “super-checkpoints,”9 located on every highway headed into the interior of Mexico. They are each the size of a U.S.-style shopping mall. If you use public transportation, authorities force you off your vehicle and armed soldiers monitor you while you remove your belongings and submit them to an X-ray machine supplied by direct transfer from the United States government. Mexico also has backscatter vans with the controversial surveillance technology that can detect objects through walls and clothes, acquired through the 21st-Century Border program from the private company American Science and Engineering Inc.
Mexico has no walls with Guatemala and Belize, and people move easily over those borderlines. On the Suchiate River in Talismán or Ciudad Hidalgo, for example, people and merchandise freely cross back and forth on large rafts under the very eyes of the ever-modernizing official port of entry. I have crossed this slow, rippling river on a number of occasions, including once alongside a Guatemalan family on their way to the wake of a loved one in nearby Tapachula, Mexico. Since much of southern Mexico was once a part of Guatemala, just as much of the United States was part of Mexico, there are many cross-border family and community bonds.
In 2010, an alarmed U.S. embassy official wrote in a leaked cable that they saw as many people “crossing the border illegally as legally,”10 a sentiment that seemed to convey that the border is easy to cross. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Mexico’s third tier of border enforcement extends for hundreds of miles into the country’s interior. Checkpoint after checkpoint steadily halts all traffic going north, all the way to places close to Mexico City. Immigration agents, police, and military board buses and vans, interrogate people, and have the authority to remove passengers and detain them. I have seen this happen before my own eyes on multiple occasions. Every time since 2014 that I’ve traveled the 150 miles from Tapachula to Arriaga, I have counted more than 10 checkpoints. There are immigration agents who walk the aisles profiling passengers, soldiers who search through your bags. It has become a war zone where there is no war, a state of emergency where there is no invading army. Checkpoints have long existed in Chiapas, but now under the border logic they are the equivalent of a “wall” to be circumvented. Every single one of these checkpoints forces undocumented travelers off the roads and into dangerous areas such as La Arrocera, as documented by Óscar Martínez in The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, a network of 28 or so ranches where assault, rape, and killings of people moving through have become commonplace. Along the migrant trail, Central Americans speak of the “disappeared” with similar horror as they did during the counterinsurgency conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s.
A group called the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement, composed of Central Americans searching for lost family members, claims that since 2006, approximately 70,000 people have disappeared while traveling through Mexico.11 Since the Mexican government does not keep records of foreigners who have disappeared, the number is difficult to verify. If the claim is even remotely close to being accurate, a silent human rights atrocity is being perpetrated with little remedy or outcry.
In her book Golden Gulag, geographer Ruthie Wilson Gilmore writes that “racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”12 In many ways, Gilmore captures the 21st-century border’s prevention through deterrence policy with precision.
Luis Carlos, the oldest in the group and the only one who has made the journey, says that he spent three months in a U.S. prison after he crossed the border a previous time. He has a distinct almost disfigured face, and reminds me of a Salvadoran man I interviewed at a migrant shelter the year before in Arriaga, Mexico, who had a deep purple bruises, dislocated fingers, and fresh stitches from being beaten with baseball bats and then thrown from a moving train.
With Luis Carlos, Ismael, and Santos Fernando I know I am catching the smallest glimpse of the colossal intersection of climate upheavals and the expanding zones of exclusion, what seems to be the coming future. These men, who can’t get their plants to grow, now face a 1,000-mile space of exception. They will travel over the unmarked graves of thousands before they even reach the towering border walls of the United States.
This state of exception, however, was at their doorsteps in Honduras before they even left.
HONDURAS: BETWEEN CLIMATE CHANGE AND ITS “SOLUTION”
Police agent Nuñez was no-nonsense when he got on the small, cranky bus that was traveling along the northern Honduran coast toward Tocoa. I was on my way to San Pedro Sula, often referred to as the most violent city in the world due to its homicide rate, to meet with one of Honduras’s top climate scientists, Leonardo Lenin Banegas Barahona. I was coming from the small town of Vallecito, inhabited by the Garífuna, a people who were in constant struggle, I learned, with police officers like Nuñez, who tended to protect large landowners and corporate-driven mega-projects. The gruff agent of the Honduran Investigative National Police, an agency that the United States helped establish and the Colombian National Police trained, carried himself as if he didn’t like anyone on the bus. This checkpoint was one of what seemed like dozens of roadside blockades throughout post-coup Honduras. Since former president Manuel Zelaya’s forced removal in 2009, the country has been fraught with spiking violence, human rights violations, economic despair, and migrations that—from places like the shelter in Tenosique, Mexico—seem like an exodus. Honduras has never been a bastion of human rights and equality. Now, however, combined with the above dynamics, Honduras has become one of the places across the globe that sharply exemplify where planetary warming and a global border enforcement regime overlap. At the checkpoints, if agents didn’t stop the vehicle, they would eye it as it slowed down over a speed bump. Nuñez barked, “¡Varones! Off the bus!” Forcing males off buses for extended interrogation followed a long tradition of counterinsurgency practices in Central America.
When I stepped off the bus into the humid air, the view from where I stood on the crackled concrete was of African palm plantations that went on and on forever in this northern coastal plain. This monoculture was a modern crop, crowding and usurping communities, and their water sources, in order to irrigate the endless rows of palms, standing like erect soldiers in salute, whose oil would be used for cooking oils and soap. It can also be processed into a biodiesel, and, according to the Sustainable Palm Oil Transparency-Toolkit (SPOTT), “significantly reduce emissions from cars and trucks and thereby mitigate global climate change.”13 On the other side of the palm plantations, the sea creeps in like a simmering monster, eroding the coast, ready to surge again with the next mammoth storm, like Hurricane Mitch, whose floods and landslides killed 7,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless in 1998.
And this National Police officer—at least partially funded by the U.S. Central American Security Initiative (CARSI), a security package from the United States to Central American countries worth approximately $1.7 billion14 since 2008—was there to keep “public order” in the midst of the powerful economic, ecological, and political dynamics driving displacement. As with the Merida Initiative’s 21st-Century Border, millions of dollars have been transferred to Central America from the United States in resources and training operations through CARSI. For example, U.S. Border Patrol’s Tactical Unit, known by the acronym BORTAC, have carried out trainings in Honduras. Perhaps even Nuñez was trained by the Special Forces component of U.S. border policing that regularly trains foreign law enforcement and military personnel. In 2014 Cindy Carcamo reported in the Los Angeles Times that during an operation called “Rescue Angels,” the Honduran National Police deployed roadside blockades in border areas to stop Honduran children from leaving their own country. As Carcamo reported, “Covered with bulletproof vests emblazoned with ‘Police’ and badges that read ‘BORTAC,’ the agents waved down a late-morning bus bound for Guatemala.”15
The night before, in Vallecito, a young Afro-Honduran man named César spoke to a group gathered in the small community. His message was urgent. More youth were leaving than any other time since the Garífuna began inhabiting the northern Honduran coast more than 200 years before. As he talked about displacement (happening at breathtaking rates in Honduras), the super-low wages paid to people working in palm plantations, the internal youth migration to places like San Pedro Sula, where they worked for cheap in one of 200 factories, I could hear the sharp crack of a rifle fire in the distance. Round after round echoed as the dusk turned to night and the wind off the coast picked up and flapped the tarps. The sound was ominous enough to cause some of the people gathered to turn and look toward where three soldiers were posted, about a quarter mile away. Earlier that day I had talked to the soldiers. One held an Israeli-made automatic rifle (a Tavor) in his hands. He had a distant look in his eyes, as though he didn’t want to talk. He muttered that they were there to “protect” the community. The younger one, cradling an M-16, was friendlier and more energetic. They were new to this post, having arrived just a couple of days before after completing a seven-week urban-warfare training at the nearby city of Ciudad Trujillo.
Ciudad Trujillo was near the Honduran naval base in Puerto Castilla, where four U.S. Marines and one Naval officer were based and were assisting the Honduran military to form “professional military training centers.” The six-month U.S. military deployment of 280 Marines to the Soto Cano air base in Honduras in May 2015, according to an article in Military Times, was designed to ready the soldiers to “assist with any humanitarian crises that emerged during the hurricane season.” They also said they helped with infrastructure projects such as new schools for children. However, it was these “professional military schoolhouses” in which they were “definitely pioneers,” according to Captain Juan Díaz. “We helped establish and start up an institution of sorts in this country.”16
When I asked the young Honduran soldier how the Urban Combat training went, he described how awful it felt to receive a full plate of food only to have it be taken away just before he could take his first bite.
“But,” he concluded, “I would die for my country.”
Back in Vallecito, as rifle fire continued to crackle and echo into the night, César talked about his community being unable to fish because multinationals were drilling oil off the coast, and how there were fewer places to plant yucca and corn because the mining companies had taken over huge areas inland. Seeing that I kept looking toward the distant rifle shots, someone from the group finally said it was probably just soldiers, bored, doing target practice. I imagined a soldier firing his M-16 into the African palm plantation located near their small outpost, run by a company of the late Miguel Facusse, the biofuel magnate who was known for hiring private security forces that continually attacked campesinos throughout the very region where I stood on the northern coast. When people uttered the name Facusse in Vallecito, they almost spat it out, as if they couldn’t stand to have the word in their mouth. Facusse’s armed forces, associated with his company Grupo Dinant, worked alongside Honduran police and military who have been used directly to expel communities.
According to Jennifer Kennedy, writing for Corpwatch, Facusse joined the biofuel rush, backed by bilateral and multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, to meet demand “by governments who want industry to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels like coal and petroleum in order to meet international obligations to mitigate global warming under the Climate Change convention.”17 Enriched by heavy subsidies, Facusse’s company rose to the top in Honduras, clear-cutting and then commanding 22,000 acres of land.
Indeed, while most U.S. news continued to give uncontextualized depictions of gang violence in Latin America, the thugs I was hearing about on the Honduran northern coast were more of the corporate variety, including those who aimed to profit from climate change. As César spoke, he simply reinforced what dozens of other community leaders from the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) were expressing: they were facing the constant threat of compulsive eviction by state forces that were also working, in their own way, to reduce emissions.
The Garífuna people, descendants of Caribbean Native Arawak as well as Central and Western African people forcibly brought to this hemisphere by white enslavers, have a long history of resistance to European imperialism, a defiance so vexing that the British forcibly deported them from the Caribbean to the northern coast of Honduras in the late 18th century. Garífuna resistance has continued to this day against imperialism’s various attempts at “systemic removal,” as many in Vallecito described their situation. There was not only the advancement of African palm, but also mega-projects of commercial fishing, mining, drilling, and tourism (such as the resorts of Canadian Randy Jorgensen, who stood trial in November of 2015 for allegations of illegally seizing land in Garífuna territories).
The Garífuna talked about Economic Development Zones, or ciudades modelos, “model cities.” These were the officially named Special Economic Development and Employment Zones, known as ZEDEs in Spanish.
Yilian Maribel David, one of the organizers for OFRANEH, said that the Economic Development Zones were like “a country within a country” where the state of Honduras no longer governed.
I had to ask for clarification to make sure I was understanding her correctly.
The ZEDEs—which are still in creation (and up for approval by the international Committee for the Adoption of Best Practices, according to an expert I talked to)—are conceived to be autonomous zones run by a technical secretary appointed by a committee that is in many ways separate from the sovereign country from which it was carved. Although committee members are appointed by the president of Honduras and confirmed by the Honduran congress, it acts almost independently. The zones each have their own laws and judicial systems, and their own government, serving the principles of free-market capitalism. Only the Honduran military has jurisdiction in the ZEDEs. Overseeing the creation and management of these zones is a 21-person committee that has included Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Mark Skousen of the Foundation for Economic Education. Mark Klugmann, another member of the committee (and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush), wrote that “Central America could soon become—as southern China has been—the fastest-growing economic region in the world.”18
Anthropologist Beth Geglia told me, “In short, the ZEDE is seen as an “exit” from the constraints of the Honduran nation-state for Honduran land-owning elites and foreign investors to practice new models of unchecked hypercapitalist growth.” And like a supercharged trade agreement, it could be used for a wide range of “exploitative activities”—ranging from agribusiness to oil extraction—biodiesel meets fossil fuel.
Back in Vallecito, César, under the flapping tarp where I could smell—faintly—the sea air less than a mile away, turned to what was to come for the coastal Garífuna: intensifying annual storm surges, flooding, and mass erosion. The sky was starting to darken; occasional distant gunshots still vibrated in the air. Like every other country on the Central American isthmus—places in the tight financial grip of neo-liberal economics from years of structural adjustment programs via the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Central American Free Trade Agreement—Honduras is prone to just about every climate hazard.
When I asked a man from Vallecito named Guillermo, who was part of the OFRANEH gathering, about climate change in his country, he told me that the weather was changing the northern coast. And he could explain it in terms of the food supply.
“We used to have a place—a warehouse—to store the community’s food.”
“Our parents,” he said, “had calculated quite well when to plant the seeds.” The community, like so many across the world, had a sort of internal Farmer’s Almanac; they knew when it would rain with precision. “We had corn, we had rice, and after the summer rains and harvest,” when winter came, “everybody would be in their homes, relaxed, with plenty of food.” Summer was work; winter was relaxation.
“But now. . . .” He paused for dramatic effect: “We don’t have summer or winter!”
Honduras has been besieged by extreme weather for years. According to a report by the organization Germanwatch, from 1995 to 2014 Honduras was indeed ground zero, the country most impacted by severe weather.19 During those 19 years, Hondurans endured 73 extreme weather events and an average of 302 climate-related deaths per year. Other countries in the top 10 of this long-term climate risk index were Myanmar, Haiti, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Pakistan, Thailand, and Guatemala, a list that often overlaps with the roster of border enforcement flashpoints. During the same period there were approximately 15,000 extreme weather events, according to its figures, that killed 525,000 people worldwide.
The Central American isthmus is a bridge between North and South America, bordered by two oceans. The region has demonstrated how vulnerable it has been to hurricanes and droughts. Over the last three decades Honduras has experienced a temperature rise of 0.7 to 1 degree Celsius, and rainfall patterns, Guillermo explained, have decreased. “Agriculture is very dependent on stable climate conditions,”20 Germanwatch wrote. Like climate scientist Chris Castro, Germanwatch predicts ongoing severe conditions due to climate change in Honduras and beyond.
The 48 Garífuna communities on the northern coast of Honduras are caught between massive climate disruption, the “catastrophic convergence” of economic, political, and ecological forces, and the border. In April 2016 Miriam Miranda, the coordinator of OFRANEH, told journalist Heather Gies that “Hurricane Mitch demonstrated the vulnerability of the Central American Caribbean coast, especially in Honduras, a country where systematic deforestation destroyed watersheds. Now, 18 years since Mitch, we can say that the situation is tragic in the absence of climate change mitigation and adaptation plans.”21 According to Germanwatch, people “were resettled into the same vulnerable areas” after Mitch. The underlying warning: it is only a matter of time before another super-cyclone smashes up the country.
In this, Miranda foresees the real climate adaptation plan in the Western Hemisphere as one exclusively benefiting the rich and powerful. Lacking the political and economic will to truly fight the impact of global warming, she argued, leaders are “preparing to avoid and control human displacement as a result of catastrophes” through, as her interviewer summarized, “ramped-up militarization and the so-called war on drugs in indigenous territories.”22 Add in the increased and increasing border controls in Central America, on the Mexican divide, and the ever-fortified U.S. border enforcement regime, and Miranda’s analysis becomes as prescient as it gets.
She understood, as do officials and generals across the world, that displacement caused by intensifying environmental destabilization—or anything else—will be met with militarized borders, armed guards, surveillance, incarceration, and forced expulsions.
The next day, back at the checkpoint where Honduran Federal Police agent Nuñez ordered all the men off the bus, I wasn’t sure I’d make it to a meeting I’d set up with Barahona, the climate scientist in San Pedro Sula. When Nuñez aggressively questioned me, I feigned that I didn’t understand Spanish. But the people I was traveling with, journalist Jeff Abbott and a Garífuna man named Marcos, told Nuñez that we were journalists in a valiant attempt to appease the gruff police agent. “Let me see your credentials,” Nuñez barked. Abbott showed Nuñez his international press credentials. With a gruff gesture, he signaled to Abbott to get back on. Then he trained his eyes on me. He signaled for me to show him the identification papers that I did not have. He ordered me to stand off to the side, while he continued to interrogate the other men.
I knew that Honduras, since the 2009 military coup, had become an increasingly dangerous place for journalists, activists, and the LGBTQ community. In 2015, Honduras was ranked the second most lethal country in the Western hemisphere for journalists, after Mexico. In her book Drug War Capitalism, journalist Dawn Paley writes that “violence in Honduras is sometimes presented as random and wanton, or something involving drugs, but it can’t be separated from the acute poverty imposed on the country’s majority.”23 The country has also become one of the most dangerous places for environmental and human rights activists such as Bertha Caceres, who was gunned down in her home on March 3, 2016.
At the checkpoint, Nuñez wanted to know what I was planning to write about. I told him that I was looking at climate change and migration. He looked at me much the way an immigration agent might look at someone at the border saying there was no rain for the harvest: with a blank face. From the perspective of the border enforcement regime, it’s immaterial whether or not there is a drought, whether or not there is a harvest, or whether or not there is sufficient food. Droughts do not matter. Persistent storm surges and sea-level rise do not matter. To the on-the-ground immigration authorities, when it comes to interdiction, incarceration, and deportation, it means nothing that a new era of climate instability has begun. All that matters is whether or not a person has the proper documents.
First, Nuñez checked my backpack. Then he pulled out one of my journals, and moved through my notes with such deliberation that I thought he might have understood English. I wondered what he was looking for, if there was a particular thought, idea, or reference that would trigger further interrogation. I realized that I was near Puerto Castilla, where the four U.S. Marines were stationed to “assist” Honduras when the next hurricane hits. I thought about U.S. regional presence backing brutal right-wing death squads during the 1980s, and William Walker marauding through Honduras before declaring himself king of Nicaragua in the 19th century. Finally, after scrutinizing my passport, Nuñez handed me my backpack. My experience pales, of course, in comparison to other horrific stories at checkpoints, but I felt a profound sense of humiliation and violation.
Onward to San Pedro Sula. By this point, my perspective had slightly shifted. I became hyper-aware of all the checkpoints, police, army, and private security guards that we passed along the way. It was almost as if I were traveling through the future: the coast line was ravaged; African palm, guns, and surveillance everywhere. At a gas station I watched an older security guard amble around with an automatic assault rifle almost as long as his body, while the driver filled the idling vehicle with gas. At one point, when the guard shifted his position, the gun’s barrel was pointed right at the bus, in fact, it seemed like it was pointing directly at me. An hour later, at the San Pedro Sula bus station, military police armed with machine guns patrolled the area, but nobody gave them a second look.
As we moved through San Pedro Sula’s congested streets for the meeting with Barahona, another uniformed private security guard ran out of a fabric store with his finger poised on the trigger of his assault rifle. I had no idea who he was pointing the weapon at, because everything around us seemed so normal, especially pedestrians, who were walking by in a relaxed manner. As we continued, I knew, too, that San Pedro Sula had invested in a hyper-surveillance system, with plans to install 1,500 high-tech cameras throughout the city now so infamous for its lethal violence. The project is called Ciudad Inteligente, Smart City, and it’s giving the city the feel of a privatized border zone. Ten years ago, such a program would have seemed outrageous. Today it is normal. In fact, San Pedro Sula just might become a model for a city of the future. Blame the poor. Blame the marginalized. Protect the Facusses.
In the Hotel Sula, where we had to pass through security guards to get to a sort of “Green Zone,” the friendly, well-versed Barahona told me about the “desertification” in the central and western parts of Honduras. Of course, I remembered Ismael, Santos Fernando, and Luis Carlos in the Tenosique train yard. “This is having a tremendous impact on agriculture and on people’s lives,” he said, “forcing migrations from the countryside to the city.”
And on the Atlantic coast where we sat in San Pedro Sula, and where we were with the Garífuna, there has been a “massive increase” of precipitation. “Small farmers lose their livelihoods. So people decide to look for better opportunities and they go to the bigger cities. They go to San Pedro Sula. They go to Tegucigalpa.” And then maybe they go to the United States. At the end of the interview Barahona said that, according to studies, today’s gang problems in the city—the very gangs talked about consistently in U.S. security discourse—are tied to Hurricane Fifi’s devastating impacts in Honduras in 1974.
THE REFUGEE MOVEMENT IS THE MOVEMENT OF TODAY
Before 2005, when Oxford ecologist Norman Myers announced that there would be 25 million climate-fleeing migrants by 2012, there wasn’t the research to back it up. There was a steadily increasing stream of reports, sure, but according to what Koko Warner of the United Nations University and lead writer of several of those reports told me, there wasn’t “the scientific methodological research that there is today.”
As Barahona told me that day in San Pedro Sula, today’s research confirms that massive migration—combined, as always, with a multitude of other effects—will be an inevitable consequence of global warming. Glacier melts are going to affect water flows and impact food production and migration. Heat and drought will also impact food production and migration. Environmental disasters are a major driver of short-term displacement and migration (though other studies have found that it is the gradual environmental degradation that causes movement in the long term). Saltwater intrusions, inundations, storm surges, and erosion from sea-level rise—all issues facing northern Honduras—will continue to impel ever larger numbers of people to move. “There is strong evidence that the impacts of climate change will devastate subsistence and commercial agriculture on many small islands.”24 Warner et al. report that the Ganges, Mekong, and Nile River Delta are places where sea-level rise of one meter could affect 235 million people and reduce landmass by 1.5 million hectares. An additional 10.8 million people would be directly impacted by two meters of sea-level rise, which climate models now have to contemplate, given recent reports about feedback triggers and the accelerating disintegration of polar ice sheets. They report that “millions of people will leave their homes”25 in the years ahead.
Serious impacts of climate change are already happening and can be projected into the future with certainty. There is now a lot of empirical research that melds climate with migration. In Satkhira, the coastal district of Bangladesh, 81 percent of the people reported a high level of salinity in their soil in 2012, compared to just 2 percent two decades earlier. Farmers planted a saline-resistant variety of rice when Cyclone Aila surged in 2009, but the increase of salt in the soil has been drastic. “Almost all farmers lost their complete harvests that year.”26 According to the United Nations University Loss and Damage report, while many farmers kept to salt-tolerant varieties, 29 percent decided to migrate. Remember, if they dare cross into India, they encounter a steel barrier and Indian border guards who have shot and killed more than 1,000 Bangladeshi people. In Kenya, researchers arrived after the 2011 floods, which followed a pattern of increased precipitation over past decades, washing crops away, drowning livestock, severely damaging houses, and causing an outbreak of waterborne diseases. Aid came, but it was not enough. Sixty-four percent of people migrated or moved to camps. The drought in the north bank of Gambia in 2011 affected 98 percent of 373 households interviewed, many of which lost entire harvests. People also attempted to find alternative income to buy food. They sold things in the informal economy, and borrowed money. Still, displacement or migration impacted 23 percent of the region’s inhabitants. And although many people prefer to stay as close to home after displacement and do not cross an international border, the tales of people from many countries in Africa facing the European border enforcement regime, often referred to as Fortress Europe, are virtually endless.
As I wrote earlier, current estimates for climate refugees are wide-ranging, and go as high as one billion people displaced by 2050. No matter what the final number may be, it is worth remembering that most of those making projections say that human migration in the 21st century will be “staggering.” The International Organization on Migration keeps their estimate around 200 million. The American Association for the Advancement of Science foresees 50 million mobilizing to escape their environment by 2020. As things stand, Honduras, and many countries in the global South, will contribute to those numbers significantly.
Harsha Walia wrote that “patterns of displacement and migration reveal the unequal relations between rich and poor, between North and South, between whiteness and racialized others.”27 And while visiting a refugee-occupied school in Germany in May 2015, renowned human rights advocate Angela Y. Davis said that “the refugee movement is the movement of the 21st century. It’s the movement that is challenging the effects of global capitalism, and it’s the movement that is calling for civil rights for all human beings.”28 And it is, dare I add, the movement that will challenge fossil fuel consumption and its contamination of the living biosphere. It may be in refugees, and their experience, where the answer lies.
Michael Gerrard of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law told climate journalist Eric Holthaus: “I think the countries of the world need to start thinking seriously about how many people they’re going to take in. The current horrific situation in Europe is a fraction of what’s going to be caused by climate change.”29 Gerrard argued in an op-ed for the Washington Post that countries should take in people in proportion to the greenhouse gas emissions they pollute. For example, since between 1850 and 2011 the United States was responsible for 27 percent of the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions, the European Union 25 percent, China 11 percent, Russia 8 percent—so each country should be obligated to take in an equal percentage of climate refugees.
Instead, these are the places with the largest military budgets. And these are the countries that today are erecting towering border walls.
“SUSTAINABLE” BORDER MILITARIZATION
If Ismael, Luis Carlos, and Santos Fernando ever reach the border of the United States, the world’s largest greenhouse polluter, they will come face to face with the world’s largest border enforcement apparatus. Walls of different shapes and sizes stand waiting for them in urban border areas such as Nogales or San Ysidro or El Paso, places poised to become even more barricaded during Donald Trump’s presidency. Also there to meet them are an army of Border Patrol agents in roving patrols on horseback, in Blackhawk helicopters, in fixed-wing aircraft, and at the controls of Predator B aerial surveillance systems. Depending on where they attempt to cross, they might encounter tethered surveillance balloons or any of hundreds of remote or mobile video surveillance systems strategically positioned to alert Border Patrol agents of their movements.
If they cross into the United States, they most likely will do so through a region much like Organ Pipe National Monument, a remote area in in southwestern Arizona where I stood talking to a U.S. Border Patrol agent. As the agent and I talked, we were surrounded by protected wilderness badly scarred with tire tracks by roving Homeland Security trucks whose national security mission trumps environmental protection.
The agent, who wished to remain anonymous, knew nothing about climate change becoming a greater planning priority for both the U.S. military and the Department of Homeland Security. He did know, however, about how border enforcement looks from ground level at a Forward Operating Base. Like those deployed in U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the strategy of a Forward Operating Base is to seize ground and maintain a presence in isolated areas and territories. There are now dozens of such bases in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
When I met with the agent I was with students of a border studies class from Prescott College. The agent was off-duty, wearing a blue shirt, a little bit out of breath because he had been jogging.
When we asked the agent what duties are performed at the desolate base his response was: “Depends how busy we are. Sometimes we’re busy finding bodies.” He paused.
“We found five just this week.”
“Did you find any bodies yourself?” I asked.
“I found one,” the agent said, then looked at his shoes. Besides the more than 6,000 remains found along the U.S. Mexico border since the 1990s, the Colibri Center for Human Rights has records of 2,500 additional missing people last seen crossing through the region.
“It’s silly,” the agent continued, “they keep walking until they don’t have any food or water, and then they die.”
As geographer Joseph Nevins points out in the book Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid, there are many reasons given, in the general broad analysis, why so many people die attempting to enter the United States. “To state what should be obvious,” Nevins writes, “if migrants were allowed to freely cross the divide—and, by extension, to reside and work within the United States without fear of arrest and deportation due to immigration status—there would be no migrant deaths.”30 Nevins describes a system of exclusion that now extends well beyond the context of the United States. It is a system where the super-rich have luxurious enclaves on the world’s sinking islands, able to jet there and claim, “It’s so close!,” while the world’s impoverished majority, confronting more and more cataclysmic environmental changes, face constant impediments to their mobility. One person’s “close” is many people’s “never.”
In the climate era, coexisting worlds of luxury living and impoverished desperation will only be magnified and compounded. On one side are not only the super-rich who will want to continue to consume, possess, and waste without limits. There are those of the middle class, too, who populate U.S. suburbs and cities and live unsustainable consumer lifestyles.
On the other side are millions like Ismael, Luis Carlos, and Santos Fernando, deprived of the resources they need for subsistence living in their home communities. In the middle are the militarized border zones that, as Nevins writes, reinforce “an unjust world order.”31
Behind the Border Patrol agent are solar panels that supply energy to this small base, part of Customs and Border Protection’s effort to cut down greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent, a practice that has continued under the Trump administration. Where we stood, the whole place seemed like it could be part of an active war zone in Iraq or Afghanistan, with the Forward Operating Base threatening to pounce—as Captain Goudreau put it at the Washington climate change national security conference—with the “lethality” of green energy.
The Department of Homeland Security’s overall mandate, per an executive action by the Obama administration in 2009, is to reduce its massive carbon footprint by 25 percent. According to 2011 numbers, the DHS owns 50,000 vehicles (and leases another 8,000), more than the 48,500 FedEx vehicles used throughout the world. This environmentally efficient Forward Operating Base is one of close to 12,000 facilities owned by Homeland Security (with another approximately 2,000 leased), operating both in and outside of the United States. The combined number of facilities was equal to the number of McDonald’s restaurants that were operating in the United States in 2012—approximately 14,157. Reducing the degree of environmental degradation inflicted by such a massive department, with presence in places seen and unseen across the United States and the globe, is a monumental task.
According to the U.S. Green Building Council, the nearby Ajo Border Patrol station was one of the most energy efficient when it was built in 2014 with a “reduced light pollution” system and a “heat island effect” roof and parking canopies, intended to “minimize impacts on microclimates and human and wildlife habitats.”32 The “water use reduction” system creates a much lower flow of water, though it probably hardly matters in this station in the west Arizona desert that has increased from 50 to 500 agents in a very short period of time.
This is sustainable border militarization.
“Uncertain and unsustainable supplies of energy, water, and other resources, and the unpredictability of natural disasters and terrorism have a major impact on national security,”33 a DHS document explains. And despite the enormous amount of greenhouse-accelerating pollution its operations dump into the atmosphere, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security presents itself as a setting “the paradigm for a sustainable, secure, and resilient future by demonstrating how efficiency and sustainability will enhance America’s national security.”34
Behind the agent at the Forward Operating Base were rows of solar panels, and farther on, a tall surveillance tower, also powered by solar energy. Approximately 25 miles away from this simulated war zone was the international boundary where the Ground-Based Operation Surveillance Systems known as G-Boss, made by Raytheon company, gawk into Mexico through an 80-foot tower. From where I stood I heard not only the sounds of the desert, the distant rumbles of a monsoon thunderstorm that would bring with it the deep smell of creosote, but also the constant noise of sustainable militarization, including the distant buzz of another all-terrain vehicle.
All around were what conservationist Cyndi Tuell of the Sierra Club’s Borderlands project calls “assaults on the landscape.” This project has worked for years to advocate for borderlands ecosystems and against environmental destruction in the name of national security. One such assault, in front of my eyes, was a series of chained-together tires, discarded in front of the chain-link fence topped with swirling razor wire that encircled the Forward Operating Base. This was only one bit of evidence of the 12,000 miles of wildcat routes that have trampled the cryptobiotic soil—a thin cover that both holds dirt down and provides fertile ground for the ecosystem—in both the Organ Pipe National Monument and the adjacent Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge in the name of national, and now, we have to say, climate security. This environmental degradation of a U.S. national treasure is facilitated by the fact that the Department of Homeland Security can issue waivers to key environmental and cultural laws in order to install walls, roads, and surveillance technology.
For unwanted border-crossers, this once pristine desert now fits the classic definition of dystopia: degraded, totalitarian, futuristic, filled with the sophisticated, and most likely privatized, surveillance gizmos of the state. “If we dare to approach this frightening geopolitical space,” anthropologist Jason De León writes in The Land of Open Graves, “we can see how America’s internal surveillance gaze functions.”35
To this expanding surveillance state, as with my experience with Nuñez at the Honduran checkpoint, your story does not matter. The reasons you might arrive there do not matter. If Santos Fernando, Ismael, and Luis Carlos are ever caught there, the forms they fill out will not ask about clean water, food, or rain, though Homeland Security itself recognizes that droughts will displace people. If they get caught there, unlike a European tourist out for a hike in the desert, they will be transported by privatized Border Patrol agents working for the high-rolling U.K. company G4S. Their destination will be a short-term detention facility not unlike those used by the U.S. military in war zones. As researcher Blake Gentry writes, it’s “deprivation, not deterrence.”36 Many will then be brought in shackles to a federal courthouse, where they will appear before a magistrate judge.
It doesn’t matter whether the forces motivating them are ecological, economic, or political, the people walk in groups of five or eight, heads slightly bowed as if forced into a submissive pose. All of these people in the Operation Streamline proceedings in Tucson have been in the Sonoran desert, some near Douglas, some near Nogales, some near Sasabe, and some near the Forward Operating Base on Organ Pipe National Monument, and all have been caught by the U.S. Border Patrol. Operation Streamline represents a zero-tolerance mass sentencing of undocumented border-crossers, and it is poised to become even harsher under the mandate of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Unasked is the individual story of any of these people. If there are climate refugees in the bunch, you would never know. They have faces, but are faceless. All you see is their chained bodies shuffling up to the judges, the shackles clanking as they go; the only information that matters is where they entered the United States and whether their entry was properly authorized or not.
At one proceeding I attended in April 2016 at the Tucson Federal Courthouse, a man named Ignacio Sarabia broke the script and told magistrate judge Jacqueline Rateau exactly why he crossed the line without authorization:
“My infant is four months old and is a U.S. citizen,” he told her. He was born with a heart condition. They had to operate. “This,” he said, “is the reason I’m here before you.” The man tried to gesture with his words but the shackles and chains restrained him from doing so. The magistrate judge responded that she was sorry for his predicament. She told him that he couldn’t just come back here “illegally” and that he had to find a legal way to enter the country. “Your son, when he gets better, and his mother can visit you where you are, in Mexico,” said the judge. “Otherwise he’ll be visiting you in prison. You’ll see how it will be for him—growing up visiting his father in a prison, where he will be locked away for a very long time.” Then she sentenced him, along with the rest of the eight men standing side by side in front of her, to prison terms ranging from 60 to 180 days.
Throughout the whole interchange it never left my mind, not even for a second, that his child, the one with the heart condition, was born the same exact month, and maybe even the same exact date, as my own child. His fate is that of the climate refugee, and as predictable as the Category 6 storms of displacement. He will be separated from his family in distress and locked up behind the razor wire of the Corrections Corporation of America—a privatized prison—that will earn $124 per day from his incarceration.