Aggressive deterrence does not address underlying causes of conflict, and is contributing to aggravate the dynamics of armed violence in the region, rather than attending to humanitarian needs for international protection.Have claimed to be affiliated with this institution:įind all publications of all authors listed below conveniently compiled on IDEAS.Īuthors with publications are listed below with.
This transnational policy response has fed into a repressive approach toward migrants, increased gang conflict, and moved further away from potential resolutions to violence.
government response emphasized a strategy of “aggressive deterrence” of immigrants, engaging Central American governments to take security measures to stop migrants at their own borders. Instead of considering the influx of refugees as a humanitarian crisis and addressing the root causes of out-migration from the Northern Triangle, the U.S. Indeed, in 2017, El Salvador and Honduras were among the countries with the highest rates of asylum-seekers in the world. At the same time, the hype served to shed light on the humanitarian crisis fed by chronic violence that had been building up in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. In the summer of 2014, an increase in the number of unaccompanied children migrating to the United States unleashed a media backlash against immigration from Central America and Mexico, despite illegal immigration to the country being at a historically low level. This paper argues that as the USA extends its border policing activities through time and space, it conceals its direct role in migration policing activities that violate human rights and fuel illicit activities, distracts from policy failures, and evades international obligations. A third component entails the significant stretching of US military presence throughout Latin America and the Caribbean through a variety of means. Another component is a vast international expansion of Department of Homeland Security networks aimed at detecting and intercepting the illicit mobility of people and things. One component is the development of security 'partnerships' with transit countries, through which the USA provides funding, equipment, and training for migrant interdiction. This article identifies several components critical to this transnational policing. In the last 30 years, the USA has constructed a complex architecture throughout Latin America aimed at stopping migrants in transit before they reach US borders.
Dividing the isthmus: Central American transnational histories, literatures and cultures. Put another way, a careful, if concise, read of history in the region teaches us that often it is foreign invasion and intervention imposed under the guises of development, security, and prosperity that create the very crises they claim to be solving. Regeneration from the North comes to Central America in the form of imperialism, (neo)colonialism and now neoliberalism” (2009: 200). Theoretically, this chapter shares Ana Patricia Rodríguez’s view that “the same devastating effects produced in the South by the North come to represent Central America as a natural(ized) site of decomposition and underdevelopment, which requires regeneration by outside forces. The combination of up-to-date information from activists, lawyers, and journalists on the ground with a historical overview of Central America aims to provide readers with a nuanced examination of issues often brushed over in mainstream media and buried in difficult to access academic literature on the region.
#LIBRE MARTA SANCHEZ SERIES#
Within this historical overview of events, I integrate a series of journalistic interviews carried out in Guatemala in the spring of 2016. Such an approach avoids falling into a shallow and self- serving reading of the current crisis that would suggest that the reasons for mass out-migration are based on local mismanagement of politics and the economy or on rumors and misinformation. A historical panorama helps establish a baseline of understanding that allows us to better interpret present- day events in the region. This chapter takes a long view of the overlapping crises of economic and coercive violence in Central America, which have been activated through colonization, nation-state formation, and the wars of the twentieth century.
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