{"id":792,"date":"2019-05-06T16:31:20","date_gmt":"2019-05-06T16:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-geneseo-culturalanthropology\/?post_type=chapter&#038;p=792"},"modified":"2019-11-06T15:16:33","modified_gmt":"2019-11-06T15:16:33","slug":"im-migration-part-1-pushes-and-pulls","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-geneseo-culturalanthropology\/chapter\/im-migration-part-1-pushes-and-pulls\/","title":{"raw":"Im\/migration Part 1: Pushes and Pulls","rendered":"Im\/migration Part 1: Pushes and Pulls"},"content":{"raw":"<div class=\"page-detail-header\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<div class=\"text\">\r\n<div class=\"textbox learning-objectives\">\r\n<h3>Learning Objectives<\/h3>\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Student will be able to define the push and pull factors of im\/migration and distinguish between push and pull factors.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Students will be able to list and explain examples of push factors and examples of pull factors.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<h2>THE PUSHES AND PULLS OF IM\/MIGRATION<\/h2>\r\n<span style=\"color: #800000\">People's decision to leave their home countries for another country are complex and rarely simple. Their decison-making processes are informed by both push and pull factors. Put simply, <strong>push<\/strong>\u00a0factors are the circumstances in one's home country that make it necessary to leave. <strong>Pull<\/strong> factors are the factors that draw people to a particular destination country. The essays below are from the series\u00a0<a style=\"color: #800000\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/series\/behind-the-migrant-caravan-ethnographic-updates-from-central-america\"><em>Behind the Migrant Caravan: Ethnographic Updates from Central America<\/em><\/a>. Written by anthropologists and activists, they describe some of the reasons people are pushed out of their home countries and pulled towards another country, no matter how dangerous the journey nor how uncertain the outcome will be.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n<div class=\"text\">\r\n<h2>Introduction: Behind the Migrant Caravan b<em>y\u00a0Jennifer Burrell\u00a0and\u00a0Ellen Moodie<\/em><\/h2>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<figure>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_796\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"430\"]<img class=\"wp-image-796\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4511\/2019\/05\/06163452\/Behind-the-Migrant-Caravan-Thumbnail.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"430\" height=\"287\" \/> Photo by Whitney Godoy.[\/caption]<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\nIn November 2018, an immigration judge reprimanded one of us for taking too long to explain why the police cannot control violence in El Salvador. The judge cut off the expert. He then ordered deportation for a young woman who had been beaten, raped, and threatened with death in her own home. In courts across the United States,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2018\/05\/03\/world\/us-asylum-denial-rates-by-nationality\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">nearly 80 percent of Central Americans<\/a>\u00a0who apply for asylum are denied.\u00a0<span style=\"font-size: 1rem;text-align: initial\">At the border right now, many migrants are determined to wait for a\u00a0<\/span><a style=\"font-size: 1rem;text-align: initial\" href=\"https:\/\/www.immigrationjustice.us\/get-trained\/cfi-rfi\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u201ccredible fear\u201d interview<\/a><span style=\"font-size: 1rem;text-align: initial\">, in which an asylum officer determines whether an applicant fits the definition of <strong>refugee<\/strong>. A refugee cannot go home again because of persecution or fear of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.\u00a0They will likely wait months for this interview. U.S. border officials in Tijuana allow in forty to one hundred people a day\u2014and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/11\/30\/world\/americas\/caravan-migrants-tijuana-mexico.html%20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">more than five thousand were on the migrant-run wait list<\/a>\u00a0as of December 1, 2018. At more remote crossings, state agents have\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2018\/dec\/19\/us-mexico-border-migrants-claim-asylum-difficulties\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">illegally turned migrants away<\/a>.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_798\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"764\"]<img class=\"wp-image-798 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4511\/2019\/05\/06163811\/introduction-behind-migrant-caravan-fg_02.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"764\" height=\"510\" \/> Photo by Whitney Godoy.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\nWhat would we tell the <span style=\"color: #993300\">immigration<\/span> judge if we could? How could we make him understand what is driving this flight?\r\n\r\nAs anthropologists, we listen to stories, messy and confused\u2014not the coherent versions of victimhood that judges (and journalists and activists) crave. Still, we have tools to show how particular social groups live at risk in their societies. How the state is not only unable to protect citizens but is often complicit in their exposure, their injury, their pain. How even the hardiest workers struggle for livelihoods. How people endure political cleansing, massive extraction, state-sponsored killings.\r\n\r\nMany of us cringe at the cold language of court declarations, or the flashy hype of media soundbites, or even the formalities of academic presentation. We question our complicity in a global system of elites designed to deny refuge and to reaffirm \u201cimperial, racist, and gendered . . . associations\u201d (Rosas, forthcoming)\u2014to underscore\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2018\/01\/11\/politics\/immigrants-shithole-countries-trump\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the \u201cshithole\u201d status<\/a>\u00a0of Other places. We might prefer to collaborate in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ucpress.edu\/series\/crs\/critical-refugee-studies\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">what the Critical Refugee Studies collective calls<\/a>\u00a0\u201ccritiques . . . that make transparent processes of war, colonialism, and displacement.\u201d But we also know that our regional expertise can penetrate administrative spaces with the struggles of Central American migrants who make it to the U.S. border. Our knowledge can\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/blog.americananthro.org\/2018\/11\/05\/five-things-you-should-know-about-the-migrant-caravan\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">shift public opinion and push at ideologically cast legal limits<\/a>.\r\n\r\nThe <span style=\"color: #993300\">essay writers in<\/span> this series are social scientists of\u2014and many from\u2014Central America. Some are longtime ethnographers of the region, some are graduate students new to the field, and several are living in fear this minute. These <span style=\"color: #993300\">social scientists<\/span> are often in dialogue with human-rights activists and journalists. Collectively, we insist that the <span style=\"color: #993300\">source of migration<\/span> began centuries ago, with the arrival of Europeans and then Spanish colonialism. Or that it started with liberal trade expansion in the nineteenth century, when indigenous communal lands were cleared to make way for coffee crops or banana plantations. Or with the Cold War, when revolutionary movements arose and most of the region hosted proxy battles for global powers. Or with neoliberalism. Or the drug wars. Or the war on terror. Or climate change.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_799\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"764\"]<img class=\"wp-image-799 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4511\/2019\/05\/06163910\/introduction-behind-migrant-caravan-fg_03.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"764\" height=\"510\" \/> Photo by Whitney Godoy.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\nCentral America is again in the news as a region in crisis (see Burrell and Moodie 2013).\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2018\/dec\/19\/central-america-migrants-us-foreign-policy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">News articles<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Central_American_crisis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Wikipedia entries<\/a>, and Google search results confirm this imaginary.\u00a0Most accounts turn a blind eye to the theft of natural resources, the dismantling of economic and political structures, the eradication of dignity and hope. They ignore the United States\u2019s geopolitical complicity. Central Americans thus <span style=\"color: #993300\">are perceived as<\/span> hapless victims or protagonists of their own suffering, deserving of the crises that befall them, <span style=\"color: #993300\">rather than people who are living with the circumstances created for them by powerful actors and states.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"color: #077fab;font-size: 1.15em;font-weight: 600\">Bound Up in Each Other: Salvadoran LGBT Displacement <em>b<\/em><\/span><em style=\"color: #077fab;font-size: 1.15em;font-weight: 600\">y\u00a0Nicola Ch\u00e1vez Courtright<\/em>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\nAmanda sits on the red accent chair in her studio apartment, stroking the two long-haired Yorkies in her lap. The room is small, made even smaller by draping plants\u2014pothos or philodendron\u2014and tall metal birdcages for her cockatiels and parakeets. In the course of my interview with her, Amanda shares stories of loss in El Salvador and her thoughts on the trans rights movement\u2014caustic reflections from an exiled woman, as she calls herself. She leans back with sudden force, expelling clouds of exhausted air and focusing her gaze on the ceiling before she speaks.\r\n\r\nAmanda\u2019s wallet had been stolen less than a week ago. Since then, she has been constantly, teeth-grittingly nervous\u2014not over the inconvenience of the missing debit card and metro pass, but about her total lack of documentation. She knows that if she were to run into law enforcement, she could face deportation back to circumstances that threaten her life.\r\n\r\nI had last seen Amanda about two and a half years before, under very different circumstances. I had visited her at her family\u2019s home, nestled in the foothills of the San Salvador volcano. I met Amanda\u2019s mother and drank coffee, taking pictures of the beautiful plants growing in their backyard. This was months before the attack that would leave Amanda psychologically and physically decimated, a violent, premeditated kidnapping that was carried out as a warning for her activism. Nine days later, quickly and quietly, still terrified, still bruised, Amanda fled to the United States and filed for asylum.\r\n\r\nAmanda is one of a half-dozen prominent trans activists over the age of thirty that\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/cuadrivio.net\/seguimos-desapareciendo-las-trans\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">I have watched disappear from El Salvador<\/a>\u00a0since 2013. Even as trans and gay organizations have worked to document forced migration, to provide Salvadoran refugees in Mexico and the United States with documentation to support their asylum paperwork, and to condemn gender- and sexuality-based displacement through campaigns such as\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/sinetiquetas.org\/2015\/07\/15\/conoce-la-campana-contra-la-migracion-lgbti-centroamericana\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the sadly short-lived #SexiliosNuncaM\u00e1s<\/a>, this work was not enough to protect the safety and preserve the lives of key figures like Amanda. My research focuses on queer social movements and memory-making, not on LGBT displacement. But time and again, the fear that informants would not be around for long enough to tell me their stories has injected my project with urgency. The community keeps losing people.\r\n\r\nThe situation for LGBT Salvadorans living outside the mixed blessing of a media spotlight is often nightmarish. Normalized intrapersonal violence and sexism intersect with widely acceptable homophobia and transphobia, subjecting many to hostility and harm. Scholars have argued that violence in the country has historically hinged on and exacerbated rigid patriarchal gender roles, dating back to the Spanish suppression of fluid sexual practices and gender identities among the Nahua-Pip\u00edl through widespread wartime sexual violence in the twentieth century (Hume 2009; Lara-Mart\u00ednez 2012; Ar\u00e9valo 2017). Despite El Salvador\u2019s status as a lay state, prevailing Catholic and Evangelical mores limit considerations of queer personhood at the political level. As a result, the Salvadoran state has implemented shamefully few protections to counteract homophobia and transphobia, and those that are in place are rarely enforced. A handful of symbolic victories on the part of activists have been overshadowed by reports of gruesome targeted killings of trans femmes\u2014a phenomenon that demands the inclusion of transmisogyny in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.lawg.org\/action-center\/lawg-blog\/69-general\/2002-left-in-the-dark-violence-against-women-and-lgbti-persons-in-honduras-and-el-salvador\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">discussions of El Salvador\u2019s astronomically high rate of femicide<\/a>.\r\n\r\nThe factors pushing LGBT people out of El Salvador are, however, multifaceted and stretch beyond the cultural\/political dyad of homophobia\/transphobia and a failed state. Motivations for leaving are thorny, and, like thorns, tend to catch up additional matter. There is much to be said about how neoliberal reforms, centuries of extractive interventions, climate change\u2013related drought, and the legacy of a massive civil war have pushed close to one-third of a traumatized population below the poverty line. Economic precarity cannot be uncoupled from queer displacement and poses intersecting threats to LGBT people. LGBT migrants are overwhelmingly poor, often (further) limited by stigmatized identities from finishing school and securing meaningful employment. Those already marked as deviant thus are obligated to live their intimate and working lives in public. In comparison to urban middle-class gays, it is LGBT street vendors, sex workers, and laborers working odd jobs who face greater exposure to homophobic and transphobic violence as well as gang extortion and forced recruitment.\r\n\r\nRoderick Ferguson (2004, 15), in his analysis of poor queers of color as a surplus population, emphasizes that these bodies, which index multiple discriminations bound up in each other, are simultaneously \u201csuperfluous and indispensable\u201d to capital. Hypervisible yet ultimately disposable, these figures fall outside the bounds of state protection. Inhabiting this zone of exclusion forces gay and trans organizations in El Salvador to rely heavily on international aid money, which prioritizes HIV\/AIDS prevention projects, thereby limiting local capacity to focus on anti-LGBT violence research and advocacy, a movement priority.\r\n\r\nPeople are struggling to stay in El Salvador, but they face an uphill battle. Although many have found ways to navigate their identities as LGBT people, they may lack the means to survive in a way that does not put them at risk of starvation, physical violence, or untenable overwork. Permanence remains elusive. Credible fear is what pushes people out, to use asylum parlance, but so does a chronic inability to thrive. Scores of LGBT Salvadorans have headed to the United States, where they have a vastly better chance of receiving asylum on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity\u2014with\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.americanprogress.org\/issues\/lgbt\/news\/2015\/06\/18\/115423\/interactive-the-countries-from-which-lgbt-people-are-seeking-asylum\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">an average of 80 percent acceptance for LGBT Central Americans<\/a>\u2014than most others traveling along the caravan. The rest face\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2018\/05\/03\/world\/us-asylum-denial-rates-by-nationality\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">close to an 80 percent rate of rejection<\/a>. Today, Amanda is in school, in therapy, in treatment for her injuries, and safely reunited with her documents. Her asylum case is still pending.\r\n<div class=\"page-detail-header\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<h2 class=\"text\">Ecological Crisis: The Blind Spot in Migration Discourse <em>by Julio Guti\u00e9rrez<\/em><\/h2>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\n\u201cThe next migrants are going to be climate migrants,\u201d\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/elmundo.sv\/cambio-climatico-aumentara-migracion-de-centroamericanos\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">declared Lina Pohl<\/a>, head of El Salvador\u2019s Environment and Natural Resources Ministry, at a conference in Panama in October 2018\u2014just as the multiple caravans of Central Americans were converging in Mexico on their way to Tijuana. Most public discourse around such displacements has been caught in a familiar rhetoric of Third World poverty and violence. Central America\u2019s ecological crisis remained in the background until mid-2018, when newspapers reported that more than 3 million people were being affected by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2018\/oct\/30\/migrant-caravan-causes-climate-change-central-america\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">severe droughts in the region<\/a>.\r\n\r\nWhen environmental conditions do enter debates about migration, it is often in isolation from economic and political factors. Rarely do the responsibilities of regional elites, or neocolonial relationships between the global North and South, figure in environmental analyses. The subordination of environmental to political and economic considerations, which are then framed by investors and governments in terms of development opportunities, not only sustains but also aggravates the vulnerability of Central American populations. Here, the case of El Salvador is revealing.\r\n\r\nIn the summer of 2018, I traveled to El Salvador to learn about urban development in Cordillera del B\u00e1lsamo, a mountainous region in the central-southern part of the country. The area I visited lies between the capital city, San Salvador, and the Pacific coast of La Libertad, a popular tourist destination. Its convenient location, pleasant scenery, and fresh breezes, combined with the decline of traditional agriculture in the area, have made the cordillera a coveted site for real estate developers. Although in recent years local authorities have boasted of the region\u2019s economic prosperity, a closer look reveals a very different picture. The arrival of developers and the construction of luxurious gated communities for the upper-middle classes have devastated local ecologies. Land concentration, labor precaritization, water appropriation, and toxic contamination have made the area a microcosm of old and new political conflicts. These processes not only dispossess populations of their land but also put them at high risk for climatological events like landslides driven by tropical storms during the rainy season.\r\n\r\nDespite various restrictions on urban development in an area with a history of water scarcity, private-sector groups have maneuvered within political institutions to get their way. An example is the FIHIDRO project, a public\u2013private partnership between the National Administration of Waterways and Drainage Systems and a group of sixteen developers intent on installing water supply systems for elite residential projects. Making use of longstanding patron-client networks and benefiting from the politics of decentralization promoted by the U.S. Agency for International Development, developers partnered with local authorities and presented the project as\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/elfaro.net\/es\/201509\/noticias\/17374\/Hay-un-oasis-en-el-desierto-de-La-Libertad.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a great opportunity for economic growth<\/a>\u00a0and a solution to the problem of water scarcity. Today, the reality is far from this claim. Testimonies of local people show that the project did not solve the water problem. To the contrary, the resulting real-estate boom has decreased water infiltration, boosted the demand for water in upper-class neighborhoods, and contaminated rivers that historically served as a primary water source for many people.\r\n\r\nWe can begin to grasp how environmental issues link to broader economic and political processes by identifying two sources of capital for the joint-stock companies behind the FIHIDRO urban development projects: first, extractive industries including sugarcane, associated with old agrarian elites; and second, finance capital, also linked to national elites through bank privatization and transnationalization over the past quarter-century. While the latter has been the driver of El Salvador\u2019s partial shift from an agrarian economy to third-sector activities such as financial services and commerce, the former sits at the heart of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/uca.edu.sv\/noticias\/texto-5501\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">national struggles over water privatization<\/a>. Furthermore, El Salvador\u2019s sugarcane industry, for which processing and commercialization is\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/sv.boell.org\/es\/2017\/11\/17\/elites-politicas-y-economicas-en-el-salvador-captura-de-estado\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">controlled by just six companies<\/a>, has been the source of both water scarcity and of health problems including\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2012\/oct\/14\/kidney-disease-killing-sugar-cane-workers-central-america\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">an epidemic of kidney disease<\/a>\u00a0now affecting many rural areas.\r\n\r\nAt the same time, the convergence of the oil crisis in the global North and industrial growth in China has led to industry expansion of both sugarcane and palm oil, which are used in the production of fossil-fuel alternatives. Under a global politics of liberalization, socioeconomic crises in places like El Salvador thus give leverage to transnational capital. As a result of this open-market policy, millions of dollars are invested every year in the development of gargantuan projects of logistics infrastructure, such as roads, ports, airports, and electric supply systems. The sheer proximity of these megaprojects in a relatively small Central American territory amplifies their socioenvironmental effects.\r\n\r\nIn a recent public forum at San Salvador\u2019s Central American University, the Salvadoran urbanist Sandra Guti\u00e9rrez clearly stated: \u201cEcological impacts know nothing of political borders. If the Lempa River is deviated in Guatemala or Honduras, life in El Salvador is done.\u201d Although a mere handful of Salvadorans enjoy the tangible benefits of new residential and infrastructural development projects, these projects are celebrated by authorities as synonymous with local prosperity and regional development. When environmental devastation is helping to drive migration, it is important to situate this devastation within the context of elite maneuvering\u2014and of ongoing neocolonial relationships between North and South.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<div class=\"page-detail-header\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<div class=\"text\">\r\n<h2>In\/Visibility in Migration: A Reflection on the Caravan <em>by Joseph Wiltberger<\/em><\/h2>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\nIn July 2007, at a shelter for migrants in southern Mexico, I sat down with a man in his mid-forties to find out why he had left El Salvador. He owned a small tailor shop in his hometown of Usulut\u00e1n, where his wife and five children remained. In a country where viable employment is hard to come by, his business was relatively profitable and so it drew the attention of local gang members, who demanded that he pay weekly \u201crents\u201d or extortion. \u201cI paid the rents over several years, but after a while I couldn\u2019t\u2014I didn\u2019t have enough,\u201d he told me. When he started receiving anonymous phone calls threatening his life, he knew that he needed to leave the country. \u201cYou can\u2019t tell the police. Nor can you tell your neighbor, your family\u2014you can\u2019t tell anyone,\u201d he continued, explaining why his family was unaware of his whereabouts. \u201cThe police are infiltrated. People file a police report and just after they file it, the next day, they are murdered.\u201d\r\n\r\nAt that time, I was not yet familiar with how gangs had begun to govern the daily lives, im\/possibilities, and im\/mobilities of Salvadorans and other Central Americans, and so I was surprised to learn that a hard-working father and humble small business owner could be the target of extortion and death threats. I had initially assumed that he was headed to the United States to find a job and send money home, an assumption based on my research on labor migration by Salvadorans following the civil war in their country between 1980 and 1992. But the former tailor instead planned to apply for asylum in Mexico and then bring his family there. Subsequent fieldwork visits to the shelter revealed more unsettling stories, often shared in a whisper.\r\n\r\nMore than a decade later, in November 2018, I navigated my way through the Ciudad Deportiva in Mexico City, where thousands of migrants were arriving to take shelter. Their faces and stories resembled those I had come to know at the migrant shelter further south. This time, instead of traveling in small groups as invisibly as possible, they came in a caravan originating in Honduras for the world to see. Upon receiving word of the caravan\u2019s pending arrival, scores of Mexico City volunteer teams spontaneously self-organized. Overnight, a stadium was turned into a relief site of the kind prepared for people displaced by a natural disaster: there were medical services stations, a kitchen, information booths, portable bathrooms, and enormous tents in which migrant families slept, closely lined up together, occupying virtually every square inch of space. UNICEF and Save the Children set up spaces for kids to play. Cameras and reporters flooded the grounds to photograph children and snap up caravan interviews. By then the object of an international media frenzy, the migrants were hypervisible and under scrutiny.\r\n\r\nThis spectacle was particularly conspicuous to the U.S. public amid the political theater surrounding the 2018 midterm elections. Framing the caravan as a threat to U.S. sovereignty and security, President Trump called it \u201can invasion,\u201d reminding the world of the dangers of the MS-13 gang (which actually originated in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 80s before taking root across North and Central America) and sending thousands of National Guard troops to the border. These actions expanded the discourse of a U.S.-Mexico \u201cborder crisis,\u201d an idea that first emerged in June 2014 when media attention turned to the crowded conditions of Central American children held in immigrant detention. The strategic deployment of the term\u00a0<em>crisis<\/em>\u00a0directs blame and attention toward migrants and away from the United States\u2019s role in producing the root causes of their migration: the devastating effects of decades of support for repressive military regimes, corrupt state forces that act with impunity, neoliberal economic policies that deepen inequalities, and hardline strategies that have escalated rather than reduced the everyday violence linked to the proliferation of U.S.-born gangs. These histories and patterns are rendered invisible by U.S. political discourses that foreground the so-called threat of Central American migration.\r\n\r\n<em>Crisis<\/em>\u00a0implies a particular moment in a time of danger, when problems coalesce to the point that they become unmanageable. For migrants, though, crises can travel. They sprawl across boundaries and reappear in new contexts, reigniting familiar traumas and fears. They are the shatterings that come, for example, when one must suddenly leave one\u2019s home and family to escape death threats, knowing the police cannot be trusted. \u201cThe war was hard,\u201d reflected the former tailor from Usulut\u00e1n. He should know: he was a former guerrilla combatant with a prosthetic leg. \u201cBut I\u2019d say the war was better,\u201d he continued. \u201cBetter than to be suffering like we are today, in silence.\u201d\r\n\r\nPolarized representations of the caravan convey either sympathy and credence or dismay and suspicion. Some suspect that a group so large must have been covertly organized. As such, these skeptics conclude, the migrants cannot be trusted; their claims are to be dismissed as disingenuous. Yet these critics fail to see that Central Americans\u2019 history of collective mobility is in fact a resource for survival. In 1987, more than eleven thousand Salvadoran refugees self-organized their return from Honduras to El Salvador despite the ongoing civil war there. Returning in the thousands offered them protection; they could depend on one another along the way, and their mass movement drew enough international attention to guarantee some protection against human-rights violations and state-inflicted violence. Today, the infamous migrant caravan is, tactically, a form of collective caretaking as well as a means of calling attention to the silenced stories that continue to characterize the lives of many Central Americans.\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<div class=\"page-detail-header\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<div class=\"text\">\r\n<h2>The Violent Landscapes of Sugar and Oil Palm <em>by Nicholas Copeland<\/em><\/h2>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\nTo understand the confluence of transnational and local forces that drive migration from Central America, it is necessary to take stock of the misery wrought by sugar and African palm monocultures.\r\n\r\nIn the early 1990s, an alliance of plantation owners, international capital, and state security forces\u2014encouraged by the U.S. government and the World Bank\u2014massively expanded export monocrop plantations in Guatemala. The political field had been cleared by a U.S.-backed counterinsurgency against a popular revolution focused on land reform. Planter elites proclaimed monocrop expansion as the ideal path to national development, the optimal use of land to maximize economic growth, and the foundation for multicultural democracy. Sacrificed in the process were maize production, the environment, and indigenous communities.\r\n\r\nIn the summer of 2018, I traveled to Guatemala\u2019s south coast to obtain water samples for testing in a lab at my university and to learn about what it meant to live with agrarian monocultures. My guide, Nicol\u00e1s Velasquez, a Quiche Mayan environmentalist and water defender who I met at a water-monitoring workshop, wanted to show me how the intensification of export-oriented agriculture has transformed local ecologies and inflicted immense environmental and political suffering on surrounding communities. As a result of revving up the capitalist monocrop economy, indigenous villagers confront a web of dispossession, exploitation, exposure, and harassment\u2014a series of assaults on their existence and dignity, whose periodic intensification pushes them past the breaking point.\r\n\r\nNicol\u00e1s explained that sugarcane and African palm growers previously rented land to villagers to plant maize for domestic consumption. That stopped when production expanded to meet rising demand due to free-trade agreements and the global market for biofuels, turning villagers into a captive surplus labor force. Scarce cane jobs pay a modest, locally coveted wage. But these jobs are taxing, often extremely unpleasant, and they expose workers to toxins.\r\n\r\nIn a water-rich ecosystem striated by rivers charged with mountain runoff, water pollution and access are acute concerns for downstream communities. Cane and palm are incredibly thirsty crops, which lower the water table. To extend the growing season, planters divert rivers to irrigate their fields, cutting off downstream communities. Extended drought connected to global warming aggravates water shortages and threatens maize production throughout the region. During the rainy season, waterways are contaminated with agricultural runoff.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_803\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"764\"]<img class=\"wp-image-803 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4511\/2019\/05\/06165542\/photo-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"764\" height=\"573\" \/> Ingenio Tulul\u00e1 behind a cane field, seen through power lines. Photo by Nicholas Copeland.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\n<em>Ingenios<\/em>\u00a0(sugar refineries) fertilize cane fields with vinasse, a liquid byproduct of cane alcohol production that is mixed with human and animal waste, as well as chemical fertilizers. They spray with a cocktail of pesticides and maturing agents like CONUR, 4D, and glyphosate.\r\n\r\nNicol\u00e1s organized meetings in communities surrounding the\u00a0<em>ingenio<\/em>\u00a0Tulul\u00e1. At one such meeting, a group of villagers told me that the concentrated stench from the vinasse is so piercing that it can wake them from their sleep like a slap in the face. It also attracts swarms of flies and mosquitoes. The operators of ingenios burn the cane fields before harvesting, creating thick clouds of smoke and causing flies to descend into villages. I noticed that local women carry small towels on their laps, which they use to swat away flies and mosquitos. One man showed me a nauseating photo of a bowl of soup on a tabletop, crawling with flies.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_802\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"764\"]<img class=\"wp-image-802 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4511\/2019\/05\/06165538\/2-ladies.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"764\" height=\"573\" \/> Two women sitting at desks and smiling, holding up the blue hand towels they use to swat flies. Photo by Nicholas Copeland.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\nDownstream villagers use dirty river water for laundry and, when desperate, to cook and bathe. It is hard to stop children from playing in the river. A young mother showed me her toddler\u2019s torso, covered with a painful rash. Cane workers suffer from chronic kidney disease at high rates, but local health centers withhold the statistics.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_801\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"764\"]<img class=\"size-full wp-image-801\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4511\/2019\/05\/06165529\/baby.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"764\" height=\"573\" \/> Close-up of a toddler\u2019s face and torso with a speckled red rash. Photo by Nicholas Copeland.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\nIn addition to usurping the place of maize, spraying chokes native fruits. Coconuts grow smaller with a brown ring around the center. Villagers remember rivers teeming with fish, shrimp, and crabs\u2014now completely gone, to the detriment of both nutrition and foodways. Villagers plant trees on nearly every inch of community land for fuel and shade, and to break the monotonous expanse of cane.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_800\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"764\"]<img class=\"size-full wp-image-800\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4511\/2019\/05\/06165525\/fruit.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"764\" height=\"573\" \/> A yellow coconut, with a dark brown ring around the middle, sits on a table. Photo by Nicholas Copeland.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\nCommunity complaints trigger aggressive responses. When one village protested the installation of a wastewater ditch, company representatives advised them to form an organization. They did, and the company immediately denounced the leaders for incitement. They were assessed fines and arrest warrants were issued. The\u00a0<em>ingenio<\/em>\u00a0also pressured a neighboring village to restrict the troublemakers\u2019 water access to two hours a day, pitting the communities against each other. Nicol\u00e1s has taught himself relevant legal frameworks and helped to coordinate local complaints as president of the community development council. He testified in The Hague against the direct dumping of vinasse into rivers, forcing companies to install pipes and comply with periodic monitoring. He also helped the Guatemalan leftist political magazine,\u00a0<em>Plaza Publica<\/em>, to create a short documentary called\u00a0<em>Desierto Verde<\/em>\u00a0(Green Desert). He has been threatened and defamed for his efforts.\r\n\r\nSugar companies combine threats with public relations campaigns and social programs distributed through their corporate social responsibilty arm, Fundazucar. Meanwhile, they hide their profits in offshore tax havens. Nicol\u00e1s says that these gifts function as tax write-offs, with the consent of the authorities, who get paid off. Villagers feel powerless up against these entities, which corrupt the state to their own purposes. Leaders who fought to halt Tulul\u00e1\u2019s methane production were blacklisted, bribed by the departmental governor, and threatened. One retired soldier went so far as to accuse the company of counterinsurgency tactics. \u201cThe war never ended,\u201d he told me.\r\n\r\nVillagers inhabit a toxic, filthy, smoky, pestilent landscape that extracts and debases people and nature to benefit fatted elites and their government cronies. This is what some participants in the migrant caravan leave behind. This is why they walk thousands of dangerous miles to the land where Central American elites vacation and hobnob with U.S. officials\u2014and where sugar and palm oil is traded and consumed.\r\n\r\nGrassroots organizations throughout Guatemala denounce the excessive and illegal use of water for monocultures and other extractive industries, like mining and hydroelectric dams. They are working to defend indigenous territories and restore traditional food systems to achieve food sovereignty. Thousands joined the March for Water, Mother Earth, Territory, and Life in 2016. If these struggles prevail against the transnational network that oppresses them, as justice demands, they will do so by initiating a radical democratic restructuring from below.\r\n<div class=\"page-detail-header\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<div class=\"text\">\r\n<h2>Gender-Based Violence and the Plight of Guatemalan Refugees <em>by M. Gabriela Torres<\/em><\/h2>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\nThe work that now brings me to the crowded waiting room of a federal immigration court in the United States began in Guatemalan refugee camps in the 1990s. In the room with me, women in indigenous dress, fidgeting young men, and the occasional advocate mingle together with overdressed attorneys towing roller bags stuffed with fat files of white papers. There are too many little girls with sparkles: sparkly cat ears, gleaming silver backpacks, sparkle heart backpacks, and one sparkling \u201chappy\u201d emblazoned on the T-shirt of a six-year-old who is constantly scanning the room while clutching her mother\u2019s hand. Armed guards from a private security firm circulate, uselessly asking people to stop blocking the doors to the courtrooms. Worry is palpable in the wringing hands, blank stares, and tired shifting of those who have opted to stand in the middle of the room, hoping for a seat to open on the wooden benches along the walls.\r\n\r\nBack in the refugee camps sponsored by the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Mayan women spoke with me about the genocide orchestrated by the Guatemalan armed forces in the early 1980s, but also about how they had built new vibrant communities in preparation for their return to highland villages after ten years in exile. Today, much of my anthropological work is done waiting, accompanying, observing, and giving testimony on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.unhcr.org\/publications\/operations\/5630f24c6\/women-run.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">what drives women and their children<\/a>\u00a0to seek refuge in the United States despite\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/cgrs.uchastings.edu\/matter-b\/backgrounder-and-briefing-matter-b\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">new barriers to their asylum claims<\/a>. Knowledge of how culture works is fundamental to making the legal claim for asylum. It is key to understanding how\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bostonglobe.com\/opinion\/2018\/12\/05\/how-femicide-drove-caravan\/5lktZE3HNESy7AwLksW5LJ\/story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">femicide and violence against women creates refugees<\/a>\u00a0and compels families to leave all that they know to risk their lives on a northward journey, to sit (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2018\/08\/28\/642738732\/a-toddlers-death-adds-to-concerns-about-migrant-detention\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">and sometimes die<\/a>) in detention out of the earnest hope of having a chance at a life.\r\n\r\nGender violence in Guatemala has become utterly naturalized (see Menj\u00edvar 2011). The rate of femicide, the socially supported murder of women, is astounding. Based on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ine.gob.gt\/index.php\/estadisticas-continuas\/violencia-contra-la-mujer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">figures from the country\u2019s National Institute of Statistics<\/a>, between January 2000 and May 2018 more than eleven thousand women and girls were murdered in Guatemala. Guatemala has\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/lac.unwomen.org\/en\/donde-estamos\/guatemala\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">one of the highest rates<\/a>of violent deaths among women worldwide. The prevalence of gender-based violence is not, however, a result of Guatemalans having an inherently violent nature. Countering the tendency to resort to cultural essentialism, anthropology tells us that\u2014in Guatemala and elsewhere\u2014such violence is a result of particular historical processes that have enabled state authority to rest on misogyny.\r\n\r\nWartime practices leveraged and amplified preexisting violence against women. Sexual violence was wielded as a systematic tool of governance, laying a foundation for the\u00a0<em>mano dura<\/em>\u00a0(firm hand or iron fist) forms of authority that sustain politicians today. Throughout the last century, gender-based violence was entrenched by a state that regularly employed sexual violence in the cause of genocide. During the Guatemalan genocide, the armed forces used gang rape in the massacres of entire indigenous communities in the highlands. Concurrently in urban areas, state agents, including police and paramilitary organizations, violated, mutilated, and publicly displayed women\u2019s bodies (Carey and Torres 2005), encouraging the participation of the press in a display of sexualized and gendered violence that has now become commonplace in both mainstream newspapers and the yellow press (England 2018).\r\n\r\nWomen\u2019s lives continue to be disposable, as demonstrated by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/news-desk\/the-story-behind-the-fire-that-killed-forty-teen-age-girls-in-a-guatemalan-childrens-home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the deaths of forty-one teenaged girls<\/a>\u00a0from a state-run orphanage in 2017. Corruption, officially sanctioned sexual assault, and the abandonment of women\u2019s and children\u2019s rights rendered the state unable and unwilling to safeguard the lives of women and girls, who have limited access to judicial redress. The process of seeking justice for gender-based violence is broken, despite\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/news-desk\/the-story-behind-the-fire-that-killed-forty-teen-age-girls-in-a-guatemalan-childrens-home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">comparatively strong laws against femicide and family violence<\/a>. Laws are limited in their efficacy because misogyny takes place in everyday life\u2014in which laws are applied and when, in how violence against women is sidelined or exploited, in the acceptance of the social suffering of rape, and in the display of machismo as an emblem of political power.\r\n\r\nThe misogynist bias of Guatemalan institutions and their agents, today as in the past, has costs. State-supported misogyny underpins the violence enacted by organized crime groups. Transnational gangs and other territorial crime organizations that have arisen amid the postconflict dissolution of local economies and authority structures have embraced\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.insightcrime.org\/news\/analysis\/why-does-latin-america-have-the-world-s-highest-female-murder-rates\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the systemic use of sexual violence<\/a>\u00a0to exert control and to justify hypermacho authority. Gangs enact public executions, monitor and delimit the mobility of persons and goods through their territories, and demand payments from businesses. According to\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.unodc.org\/toc\/en\/reports\/TOCTACentralAmerica-Caribbean.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime<\/a>, large areas of the country have been deemed ungovernable. All of this begets the tragedy that we see in the groups of starving people maligned and dying while seeking refuge at the U.S. border.\r\n\r\nGender-based violence in a country of origin is part of a continuum of violence faced by refugee populations the world over. Gender-based violence too often continues in the host countries that refugees traverse (Buckley-Zistel and Krause 2017). The current moral panic in the United States with respect to Guatemalans and other Central Americans at the border is adding to migrants\u2019 vulnerability. Emergent humanitarian crises of human trafficking and sexual violence in detention centers loom as we engage in a national debate on the discretionary rights of persons. This is what gets decided in the federal immigration court where I began this story, and why the work of anthropology is as important today as it was in the refugee camps where I began this work more than twenty-five years ago.\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\n<span style=\"color: #077fab;font-size: 1.15em;font-weight: 600\">The Role of the State in Hondurans Fleeing from Violence<\/span><em style=\"color: #077fab;font-size: 1.15em;font-weight: 600\"> by Lirio Guti\u00e9rrez<\/em>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\nHonduran migration to the United States is not new, but in recent decades it has increased. Violence by criminal groups,\u00a0<em>maras<\/em>\u00a0(gangs), and gender-based violence (domestic violence and rape) form dominant narratives explaining the massive flight of Hondurans. My research and work as an expert witness for Honduran asylum-seekers indicate that violence and insecurity are indeed factors behind their leaving; however, the main reason that Hondurans flee their country is the state\u2019s inability and unwillingness to protect them from violence.\r\n\r\nSince the 1990s, Honduras has been witnessing a new type of violence (see Salomon 1993; Koonings and Kruijt 2004). In contrast to the political violence that plagued Central America in the 1980s\u2014taking the form of military death squads persecuting so-called insurgents in Honduras\u2014the new violence is characterized by its mundane ubiquity: robbery, theft, fear of public space\u2014and the summoning of male youth to the\u00a0<em>maras<\/em>.\r\n\r\nThe Honduran government\u2019s 2001 introduction of\u00a0<em>mano dura<\/em>\u00a0(\u201ciron fist\u201d) laws, repressive and punitive policies aimed at reducing violence and crime, contributed to intensifying levels of violence among armed actors. The maras, street gangs with transnational roots in global organized crime as well as U.S. immigration restrictions that saw the deportation of thousands of gang members to their country of origin, began resembling criminal organizations (Cruz 2010). Members started participating in criminal activities such as extorting residents and local businesses in the areas they controlled, as well as kidnapping young women (Guti\u00e9rrez Rivera 2018). Other armed actors targeted residents in rural areas or were hired as hitmen to settle scores between families.\r\n\r\nGender-based violence, aimed primarily at women, has become more visible in recent years. Domestic violence, rape, and kidnapping for sex trafficking constitute primary reasons for why women leave the country. In conservative Honduras, women are expected to carry out traditional gender roles. Women are perceived to be inferior to men and viewed as property.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2014\/nov\/19\/miss-honduras-murder-sister-boyfriend-arrested-shocks-nation\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The 2014 murder of Miss Honduras<\/a>, Mar\u00eda Jos\u00e9 Alvarado Mu\u00f1oz, and her sister, Sof\u00eda Trinidad Alvarado Mu\u00f1oz, by Mar\u00eda Jos\u00e9\u2019s boyfriend after he saw her dancing with another man at a party exemplifies how women are viewed and treated in Honduras. The country is not a safe place for women. Currently, Honduras has one of the highest femicide rates in the world, climbing by more than 250 percent between 2005 and 2013;\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.globalcitizen.org\/fr\/content\/honduras-femicide-red-alert\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a woman there is murdered every fourteen hours<\/a>.\r\n\r\nIn court statements, Honduran asylum seekers describe experiencing forms of violence inflicted by\u00a0<em>maras<\/em>\u00a0and by male partners. Many tried to seek protection on their own. They may move to another neighborhood. Female victims of domestic violence may return to their parents\u2019 house. However, members of the gang or the male partner, in the case of domestic violence, usually find the victim and continue to threaten, harass, or physically attack them. Victims of domestic violence are then forced to return to their partner\u2019s home to face brutal punishment.\r\n\r\nLeaving the country is usually the last option for most Honduran asylum-seekers. They make the decision to leave only after attempts to seek protection from the state fail. Many Hondurans do call the police. They try filing a report. Yet, they say, \u201cnothing happens.\u201d Some try to follow up only to find that the paperwork is lost in state bureaucracy. They describe how authorities tell them that they have thousands of reports and cannot follow up on all of them. It can take years for authorities to investigate a case. State bureaucracy in Honduras is inefficient, but the real reason that these reports are not investigated is because such cases of violence are not a priority\u2014not compared to drug trafficking or the illicit work of large criminal organizations. State authorities may also discourage individuals from filing reports, especially with women victims of violence. Female asylum seekers describe how police officers would tell them that filing a report is useless because \u201cit\u2019s normal for a man to beat his wife.\u201d These examples show an unwillingness on the part of the state to address cases of violence (see Menjivar and Drysdale Walsh 2017).\r\n\r\nMore than being unwilling, though, the Honduran state is\u00a0<em>unable<\/em>\u00a0to protect Hondurans. A deficit of institutions, public policies, experts, and record-keeping hinder the state\u2019s ability to track the occurrence and consequences of violence and crime among different armed actors. State authorities simply do not know how many Hondurans have been internally displaced by violence and crime. Staff working at the United Nations High Commission on Refugees told me that experts on forced displacement and social violence had to be brought in from abroad as Honduras lacked experts who could design and implement public policies. Foreign experts pointed out further problems, such as poor coordination between state institutions involved in public policy and the absence of reliable information and data. Maps, censuses, and archives are either unavailable or inaccurate. But a consequence of the state\u2019s inability to produce standardized and reliable information and to coordinate among various institutions is an inability to prevent violence or to offer security to its victims.\r\n\r\nHondurans leave because Honduras is not safe. The Honduran state plays a central role in the exodus, as it is unable and unwilling to provide protection and security to victims of violence.\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<div class=\"page-detail-header\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<div class=\"text\"><\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<div class=\"page-detail-header\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n<div class=\"text\">\r\n<h2>Reflections from a Daughter of the Postwar <em>by Fiore Stella Bran Arag\u00f3n<\/em><\/h2>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\r\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\r\n\r\nAs a daughter of the postwar in Nicaragua, I never thought I would witness a brutal dictatorship like the one my parents and grandparents endured. But right now, for me, it is hard to breathe. I feel like\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amnesty.org\/en\/latest\/news\/2018\/05\/despite-bloody-state-repression-the-people-of-nicaragua-will-not-be-silenced\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u00c1lvaro Conrado<\/a>, one of the youngest victims of the protests in my country. I breathe in struggle and death. I\u2019ve been in the streets; I was out there, organizing. It is painful to think that I have the privilege to participate in creating strategy, to think, to write, to migrate, when some of my friends are imprisoned and others killed.\r\n\r\nMany reflections emerge in this terrible repetition of a history of dictatorship. Here, I offer a few.\r\n\r\nI am a daughter of the postwar period in Nicaragua, one of the millennials who those who fought in the Sandinista Revolution saw as apathetic, apolitical, \u201csocial media activists.\u201d They thought we didn\u2019t know how to go out and fight in the streets.\r\n\r\nOver the past eight months, my generation has demonstrated just the opposite. We took to the streets to fight against a dictatorship with little more than our Nicaraguan flags. We had little knowledge of how to organize a student movement, much less a political struggle, and we were especially unprepared to defend ourselves against government-sponsored killers.\r\n\r\nIn the last three months I have also learned how it feels to become a refugee, to lose almost everything, and also to feel solidarity and human love in a much deeper way.\r\n\r\nMy generation\u2019s lack of experience around political organizing comes from growing up in a postwar context. Since we were kids we have heard the stories of a failed revolution that stole the lives of so many young people, as well as the hope of a new Nicaragua. Depending on a family\u2019s political affiliation, the story varied in tone and substance, but it always shared the same conclusion: the Sandinista Revolution was the only chance for a nation-building project, a unique opportunity to achieve utopia. And it was lost.\r\n\r\nI began to ask questions about the Revolution in university classrooms and in activist circles. At home, I encountered an unbreakable silence about the Revolution and its aftermath, about those who died and those who migrated to get away from the disaster. It wasn\u2019t worth trying to talk about \u201cthat\u201d because it would mean touching an open wound, because it was already over, because this was a different Nicaragua, and because my parents did not believe that I would ever experience the same thing.\r\n\r\nWhen Daniel Ortega became president in 2006, I was in my last year of primary school. At that time I didn\u2019t understand basic political concepts. I had no idea that another dictatorship was emerging. Today I believe that reflections on our history are more important than ever, for while we may not know the microhistories of the Nicaragua of our mothers and fathers, ever since we took to the streets on April 18, 2018 we now carry the same history in our skin.\r\n\r\nWe are self-organized, with different identities and demands, but united by a sense of justice and freedom that goes beyond politics, economics, and education. For us, it is a matter of survival. This self-organized movement has taken on an impressive anarchic and collective character, but it has also posed challenges in terms of representation and influence in the traditional political spheres where many crucial decisions are made. After several months of struggle, we are not sure how to move forward. Even so, we continue resisting from wherever we can\u2014especially in the difficult space that is daily life, where the pain is felt deeply in the flesh.\r\n\r\nThat pain was particularly acute for me on August 25, 2018, when thirty of my colleagues and friends from the student movement were arrested and tortured. Now they face charges of being terrorists. That afternoon I was not with them. I was reviewing the final draft of my thesis, which I would defend the following week. That day changed everything: I went from a safe house into exile with almost nothing but a suitcase.\r\n\r\nI arrived in northern Mexico to work in a migrant shelter that adjoins\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/bostonreview.net\/literature-culture-global-justice\/valeria-luiselli-riding-la-bestia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">La Bestia<\/a>, the dreaded train that is the refuge and tomb of thousands of migrants fleeing terror in their own countries only to fall prey to organized crime and the Mexican authorities. La Bestia is a deep source of pain. In these months I have seen hundreds of migrants with their stories and their dreams, many of them scattered from the notorious caravan that fell apart en route. Some of these migrants are young Nicaraguans fleeing the Ortega regime. They ask me questions, and I ask them questions in turn; some questions we share and others are very different. I am grateful for these questions even as answers remain elusive.\r\n\r\nAfter eight months of resistance, solidarity, and exile, I have more questions than when we started: How much more can we resist? Will I go back to Nicaragua and have a home? When the official stories of this insurrection are written, will those of the young people who travel on La Bestia\u2014stories that go against the grain of the official history\u2014be included? How can we sustain an unarmed resistance against a murderous government and somehow avoid another war? Or, to add a question from the young refugees who, on December 21, 2018, turned themselves in to immigration authorities on the Brownsville-Matamoros Bridge: what will happen to us when the Trump administration does not believe us and deports us back to Nicaragua?\r\n<div class=\"textbox exercises\">\r\n<h3>Discussion Questions<\/h3>\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>What are the push factors described in these essays?\u00a0What are some push factors you can think of that aren't described in these essays?<\/li>\r\n \t<li>What are some pull factors described in these essays? What are some pull factors you can think of that aren't described in these essays?<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"<div class=\"page-detail-header\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div class=\"text\">\n<div class=\"textbox learning-objectives\">\n<h3>Learning Objectives<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Student will be able to define the push and pull factors of im\/migration and distinguish between push and pull factors.<\/li>\n<li>Students will be able to list and explain examples of push factors and examples of pull factors.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<h2>THE PUSHES AND PULLS OF IM\/MIGRATION<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000\">People&#8217;s decision to leave their home countries for another country are complex and rarely simple. Their decison-making processes are informed by both push and pull factors. Put simply, <strong>push<\/strong>\u00a0factors are the circumstances in one&#8217;s home country that make it necessary to leave. <strong>Pull<\/strong> factors are the factors that draw people to a particular destination country. The essays below are from the series\u00a0<a style=\"color: #800000\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/series\/behind-the-migrant-caravan-ethnographic-updates-from-central-america\"><em>Behind the Migrant Caravan: Ethnographic Updates from Central America<\/em><\/a>. Written by anthropologists and activists, they describe some of the reasons people are pushed out of their home countries and pulled towards another country, no matter how dangerous the journey nor how uncertain the outcome will be.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"text\">\n<h2>Introduction: Behind the Migrant Caravan b<em>y\u00a0Jennifer Burrell\u00a0and\u00a0Ellen Moodie<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<figure>\n<div id=\"attachment_796\" style=\"width: 440px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-796\" class=\"wp-image-796\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4511\/2019\/05\/06163452\/Behind-the-Migrant-Caravan-Thumbnail.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"430\" height=\"287\" \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-796\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by Whitney Godoy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p>In November 2018, an immigration judge reprimanded one of us for taking too long to explain why the police cannot control violence in El Salvador. The judge cut off the expert. He then ordered deportation for a young woman who had been beaten, raped, and threatened with death in her own home. In courts across the United States,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2018\/05\/03\/world\/us-asylum-denial-rates-by-nationality\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">nearly 80 percent of Central Americans<\/a>\u00a0who apply for asylum are denied.\u00a0<span style=\"font-size: 1rem;text-align: initial\">At the border right now, many migrants are determined to wait for a\u00a0<\/span><a style=\"font-size: 1rem;text-align: initial\" href=\"https:\/\/www.immigrationjustice.us\/get-trained\/cfi-rfi\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u201ccredible fear\u201d interview<\/a><span style=\"font-size: 1rem;text-align: initial\">, in which an asylum officer determines whether an applicant fits the definition of <strong>refugee<\/strong>. A refugee cannot go home again because of persecution or fear of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.\u00a0They will likely wait months for this interview. U.S. border officials in Tijuana allow in forty to one hundred people a day\u2014and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/11\/30\/world\/americas\/caravan-migrants-tijuana-mexico.html%20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">more than five thousand were on the migrant-run wait list<\/a>\u00a0as of December 1, 2018. At more remote crossings, state agents have\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2018\/dec\/19\/us-mexico-border-migrants-claim-asylum-difficulties\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">illegally turned migrants away<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div id=\"attachment_798\" style=\"width: 774px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-798\" class=\"wp-image-798 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4511\/2019\/05\/06163811\/introduction-behind-migrant-caravan-fg_02.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"764\" height=\"510\" \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-798\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by Whitney Godoy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p>What would we tell the <span style=\"color: #993300\">immigration<\/span> judge if we could? How could we make him understand what is driving this flight?<\/p>\n<p>As anthropologists, we listen to stories, messy and confused\u2014not the coherent versions of victimhood that judges (and journalists and activists) crave. Still, we have tools to show how particular social groups live at risk in their societies. How the state is not only unable to protect citizens but is often complicit in their exposure, their injury, their pain. How even the hardiest workers struggle for livelihoods. How people endure political cleansing, massive extraction, state-sponsored killings.<\/p>\n<p>Many of us cringe at the cold language of court declarations, or the flashy hype of media soundbites, or even the formalities of academic presentation. We question our complicity in a global system of elites designed to deny refuge and to reaffirm \u201cimperial, racist, and gendered . . . associations\u201d (Rosas, forthcoming)\u2014to underscore\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2018\/01\/11\/politics\/immigrants-shithole-countries-trump\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the \u201cshithole\u201d status<\/a>\u00a0of Other places. We might prefer to collaborate in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ucpress.edu\/series\/crs\/critical-refugee-studies\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">what the Critical Refugee Studies collective calls<\/a>\u00a0\u201ccritiques . . . that make transparent processes of war, colonialism, and displacement.\u201d But we also know that our regional expertise can penetrate administrative spaces with the struggles of Central American migrants who make it to the U.S. border. Our knowledge can\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/blog.americananthro.org\/2018\/11\/05\/five-things-you-should-know-about-the-migrant-caravan\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">shift public opinion and push at ideologically cast legal limits<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The <span style=\"color: #993300\">essay writers in<\/span> this series are social scientists of\u2014and many from\u2014Central America. Some are longtime ethnographers of the region, some are graduate students new to the field, and several are living in fear this minute. These <span style=\"color: #993300\">social scientists<\/span> are often in dialogue with human-rights activists and journalists. Collectively, we insist that the <span style=\"color: #993300\">source of migration<\/span> began centuries ago, with the arrival of Europeans and then Spanish colonialism. Or that it started with liberal trade expansion in the nineteenth century, when indigenous communal lands were cleared to make way for coffee crops or banana plantations. Or with the Cold War, when revolutionary movements arose and most of the region hosted proxy battles for global powers. Or with neoliberalism. Or the drug wars. Or the war on terror. Or climate change.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_799\" style=\"width: 774px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-799\" class=\"wp-image-799 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4511\/2019\/05\/06163910\/introduction-behind-migrant-caravan-fg_03.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"764\" height=\"510\" \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-799\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by Whitney Godoy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p>Central America is again in the news as a region in crisis (see Burrell and Moodie 2013).\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2018\/dec\/19\/central-america-migrants-us-foreign-policy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">News articles<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Central_American_crisis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Wikipedia entries<\/a>, and Google search results confirm this imaginary.\u00a0Most accounts turn a blind eye to the theft of natural resources, the dismantling of economic and political structures, the eradication of dignity and hope. They ignore the United States\u2019s geopolitical complicity. Central Americans thus <span style=\"color: #993300\">are perceived as<\/span> hapless victims or protagonists of their own suffering, deserving of the crises that befall them, <span style=\"color: #993300\">rather than people who are living with the circumstances created for them by powerful actors and states.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #077fab;font-size: 1.15em;font-weight: 600\">Bound Up in Each Other: Salvadoran LGBT Displacement <em>b<\/em><\/span><em style=\"color: #077fab;font-size: 1.15em;font-weight: 600\">y\u00a0Nicola Ch\u00e1vez Courtright<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p>Amanda sits on the red accent chair in her studio apartment, stroking the two long-haired Yorkies in her lap. The room is small, made even smaller by draping plants\u2014pothos or philodendron\u2014and tall metal birdcages for her cockatiels and parakeets. In the course of my interview with her, Amanda shares stories of loss in El Salvador and her thoughts on the trans rights movement\u2014caustic reflections from an exiled woman, as she calls herself. She leans back with sudden force, expelling clouds of exhausted air and focusing her gaze on the ceiling before she speaks.<\/p>\n<p>Amanda\u2019s wallet had been stolen less than a week ago. Since then, she has been constantly, teeth-grittingly nervous\u2014not over the inconvenience of the missing debit card and metro pass, but about her total lack of documentation. She knows that if she were to run into law enforcement, she could face deportation back to circumstances that threaten her life.<\/p>\n<p>I had last seen Amanda about two and a half years before, under very different circumstances. I had visited her at her family\u2019s home, nestled in the foothills of the San Salvador volcano. I met Amanda\u2019s mother and drank coffee, taking pictures of the beautiful plants growing in their backyard. This was months before the attack that would leave Amanda psychologically and physically decimated, a violent, premeditated kidnapping that was carried out as a warning for her activism. Nine days later, quickly and quietly, still terrified, still bruised, Amanda fled to the United States and filed for asylum.<\/p>\n<p>Amanda is one of a half-dozen prominent trans activists over the age of thirty that\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/cuadrivio.net\/seguimos-desapareciendo-las-trans\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">I have watched disappear from El Salvador<\/a>\u00a0since 2013. Even as trans and gay organizations have worked to document forced migration, to provide Salvadoran refugees in Mexico and the United States with documentation to support their asylum paperwork, and to condemn gender- and sexuality-based displacement through campaigns such as\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/sinetiquetas.org\/2015\/07\/15\/conoce-la-campana-contra-la-migracion-lgbti-centroamericana\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the sadly short-lived #SexiliosNuncaM\u00e1s<\/a>, this work was not enough to protect the safety and preserve the lives of key figures like Amanda. My research focuses on queer social movements and memory-making, not on LGBT displacement. But time and again, the fear that informants would not be around for long enough to tell me their stories has injected my project with urgency. The community keeps losing people.<\/p>\n<p>The situation for LGBT Salvadorans living outside the mixed blessing of a media spotlight is often nightmarish. Normalized intrapersonal violence and sexism intersect with widely acceptable homophobia and transphobia, subjecting many to hostility and harm. Scholars have argued that violence in the country has historically hinged on and exacerbated rigid patriarchal gender roles, dating back to the Spanish suppression of fluid sexual practices and gender identities among the Nahua-Pip\u00edl through widespread wartime sexual violence in the twentieth century (Hume 2009; Lara-Mart\u00ednez 2012; Ar\u00e9valo 2017). Despite El Salvador\u2019s status as a lay state, prevailing Catholic and Evangelical mores limit considerations of queer personhood at the political level. As a result, the Salvadoran state has implemented shamefully few protections to counteract homophobia and transphobia, and those that are in place are rarely enforced. A handful of symbolic victories on the part of activists have been overshadowed by reports of gruesome targeted killings of trans femmes\u2014a phenomenon that demands the inclusion of transmisogyny in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.lawg.org\/action-center\/lawg-blog\/69-general\/2002-left-in-the-dark-violence-against-women-and-lgbti-persons-in-honduras-and-el-salvador\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">discussions of El Salvador\u2019s astronomically high rate of femicide<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The factors pushing LGBT people out of El Salvador are, however, multifaceted and stretch beyond the cultural\/political dyad of homophobia\/transphobia and a failed state. Motivations for leaving are thorny, and, like thorns, tend to catch up additional matter. There is much to be said about how neoliberal reforms, centuries of extractive interventions, climate change\u2013related drought, and the legacy of a massive civil war have pushed close to one-third of a traumatized population below the poverty line. Economic precarity cannot be uncoupled from queer displacement and poses intersecting threats to LGBT people. LGBT migrants are overwhelmingly poor, often (further) limited by stigmatized identities from finishing school and securing meaningful employment. Those already marked as deviant thus are obligated to live their intimate and working lives in public. In comparison to urban middle-class gays, it is LGBT street vendors, sex workers, and laborers working odd jobs who face greater exposure to homophobic and transphobic violence as well as gang extortion and forced recruitment.<\/p>\n<p>Roderick Ferguson (2004, 15), in his analysis of poor queers of color as a surplus population, emphasizes that these bodies, which index multiple discriminations bound up in each other, are simultaneously \u201csuperfluous and indispensable\u201d to capital. Hypervisible yet ultimately disposable, these figures fall outside the bounds of state protection. Inhabiting this zone of exclusion forces gay and trans organizations in El Salvador to rely heavily on international aid money, which prioritizes HIV\/AIDS prevention projects, thereby limiting local capacity to focus on anti-LGBT violence research and advocacy, a movement priority.<\/p>\n<p>People are struggling to stay in El Salvador, but they face an uphill battle. Although many have found ways to navigate their identities as LGBT people, they may lack the means to survive in a way that does not put them at risk of starvation, physical violence, or untenable overwork. Permanence remains elusive. Credible fear is what pushes people out, to use asylum parlance, but so does a chronic inability to thrive. Scores of LGBT Salvadorans have headed to the United States, where they have a vastly better chance of receiving asylum on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity\u2014with\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.americanprogress.org\/issues\/lgbt\/news\/2015\/06\/18\/115423\/interactive-the-countries-from-which-lgbt-people-are-seeking-asylum\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">an average of 80 percent acceptance for LGBT Central Americans<\/a>\u2014than most others traveling along the caravan. The rest face\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2018\/05\/03\/world\/us-asylum-denial-rates-by-nationality\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">close to an 80 percent rate of rejection<\/a>. Today, Amanda is in school, in therapy, in treatment for her injuries, and safely reunited with her documents. Her asylum case is still pending.<\/p>\n<div class=\"page-detail-header\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<h2 class=\"text\">Ecological Crisis: The Blind Spot in Migration Discourse <em>by Julio Guti\u00e9rrez<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p>\u201cThe next migrants are going to be climate migrants,\u201d\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/elmundo.sv\/cambio-climatico-aumentara-migracion-de-centroamericanos\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">declared Lina Pohl<\/a>, head of El Salvador\u2019s Environment and Natural Resources Ministry, at a conference in Panama in October 2018\u2014just as the multiple caravans of Central Americans were converging in Mexico on their way to Tijuana. Most public discourse around such displacements has been caught in a familiar rhetoric of Third World poverty and violence. Central America\u2019s ecological crisis remained in the background until mid-2018, when newspapers reported that more than 3 million people were being affected by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2018\/oct\/30\/migrant-caravan-causes-climate-change-central-america\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">severe droughts in the region<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>When environmental conditions do enter debates about migration, it is often in isolation from economic and political factors. Rarely do the responsibilities of regional elites, or neocolonial relationships between the global North and South, figure in environmental analyses. The subordination of environmental to political and economic considerations, which are then framed by investors and governments in terms of development opportunities, not only sustains but also aggravates the vulnerability of Central American populations. Here, the case of El Salvador is revealing.<\/p>\n<p>In the summer of 2018, I traveled to El Salvador to learn about urban development in Cordillera del B\u00e1lsamo, a mountainous region in the central-southern part of the country. The area I visited lies between the capital city, San Salvador, and the Pacific coast of La Libertad, a popular tourist destination. Its convenient location, pleasant scenery, and fresh breezes, combined with the decline of traditional agriculture in the area, have made the cordillera a coveted site for real estate developers. Although in recent years local authorities have boasted of the region\u2019s economic prosperity, a closer look reveals a very different picture. The arrival of developers and the construction of luxurious gated communities for the upper-middle classes have devastated local ecologies. Land concentration, labor precaritization, water appropriation, and toxic contamination have made the area a microcosm of old and new political conflicts. These processes not only dispossess populations of their land but also put them at high risk for climatological events like landslides driven by tropical storms during the rainy season.<\/p>\n<p>Despite various restrictions on urban development in an area with a history of water scarcity, private-sector groups have maneuvered within political institutions to get their way. An example is the FIHIDRO project, a public\u2013private partnership between the National Administration of Waterways and Drainage Systems and a group of sixteen developers intent on installing water supply systems for elite residential projects. Making use of longstanding patron-client networks and benefiting from the politics of decentralization promoted by the U.S. Agency for International Development, developers partnered with local authorities and presented the project as\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/elfaro.net\/es\/201509\/noticias\/17374\/Hay-un-oasis-en-el-desierto-de-La-Libertad.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a great opportunity for economic growth<\/a>\u00a0and a solution to the problem of water scarcity. Today, the reality is far from this claim. Testimonies of local people show that the project did not solve the water problem. To the contrary, the resulting real-estate boom has decreased water infiltration, boosted the demand for water in upper-class neighborhoods, and contaminated rivers that historically served as a primary water source for many people.<\/p>\n<p>We can begin to grasp how environmental issues link to broader economic and political processes by identifying two sources of capital for the joint-stock companies behind the FIHIDRO urban development projects: first, extractive industries including sugarcane, associated with old agrarian elites; and second, finance capital, also linked to national elites through bank privatization and transnationalization over the past quarter-century. While the latter has been the driver of El Salvador\u2019s partial shift from an agrarian economy to third-sector activities such as financial services and commerce, the former sits at the heart of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/uca.edu.sv\/noticias\/texto-5501\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">national struggles over water privatization<\/a>. Furthermore, El Salvador\u2019s sugarcane industry, for which processing and commercialization is\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/sv.boell.org\/es\/2017\/11\/17\/elites-politicas-y-economicas-en-el-salvador-captura-de-estado\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">controlled by just six companies<\/a>, has been the source of both water scarcity and of health problems including\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2012\/oct\/14\/kidney-disease-killing-sugar-cane-workers-central-america\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">an epidemic of kidney disease<\/a>\u00a0now affecting many rural areas.<\/p>\n<p>At the same time, the convergence of the oil crisis in the global North and industrial growth in China has led to industry expansion of both sugarcane and palm oil, which are used in the production of fossil-fuel alternatives. Under a global politics of liberalization, socioeconomic crises in places like El Salvador thus give leverage to transnational capital. As a result of this open-market policy, millions of dollars are invested every year in the development of gargantuan projects of logistics infrastructure, such as roads, ports, airports, and electric supply systems. The sheer proximity of these megaprojects in a relatively small Central American territory amplifies their socioenvironmental effects.<\/p>\n<p>In a recent public forum at San Salvador\u2019s Central American University, the Salvadoran urbanist Sandra Guti\u00e9rrez clearly stated: \u201cEcological impacts know nothing of political borders. If the Lempa River is deviated in Guatemala or Honduras, life in El Salvador is done.\u201d Although a mere handful of Salvadorans enjoy the tangible benefits of new residential and infrastructural development projects, these projects are celebrated by authorities as synonymous with local prosperity and regional development. When environmental devastation is helping to drive migration, it is important to situate this devastation within the context of elite maneuvering\u2014and of ongoing neocolonial relationships between North and South.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div class=\"page-detail-header\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div class=\"text\">\n<h2>In\/Visibility in Migration: A Reflection on the Caravan <em>by Joseph Wiltberger<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p>In July 2007, at a shelter for migrants in southern Mexico, I sat down with a man in his mid-forties to find out why he had left El Salvador. He owned a small tailor shop in his hometown of Usulut\u00e1n, where his wife and five children remained. In a country where viable employment is hard to come by, his business was relatively profitable and so it drew the attention of local gang members, who demanded that he pay weekly \u201crents\u201d or extortion. \u201cI paid the rents over several years, but after a while I couldn\u2019t\u2014I didn\u2019t have enough,\u201d he told me. When he started receiving anonymous phone calls threatening his life, he knew that he needed to leave the country. \u201cYou can\u2019t tell the police. Nor can you tell your neighbor, your family\u2014you can\u2019t tell anyone,\u201d he continued, explaining why his family was unaware of his whereabouts. \u201cThe police are infiltrated. People file a police report and just after they file it, the next day, they are murdered.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At that time, I was not yet familiar with how gangs had begun to govern the daily lives, im\/possibilities, and im\/mobilities of Salvadorans and other Central Americans, and so I was surprised to learn that a hard-working father and humble small business owner could be the target of extortion and death threats. I had initially assumed that he was headed to the United States to find a job and send money home, an assumption based on my research on labor migration by Salvadorans following the civil war in their country between 1980 and 1992. But the former tailor instead planned to apply for asylum in Mexico and then bring his family there. Subsequent fieldwork visits to the shelter revealed more unsettling stories, often shared in a whisper.<\/p>\n<p>More than a decade later, in November 2018, I navigated my way through the Ciudad Deportiva in Mexico City, where thousands of migrants were arriving to take shelter. Their faces and stories resembled those I had come to know at the migrant shelter further south. This time, instead of traveling in small groups as invisibly as possible, they came in a caravan originating in Honduras for the world to see. Upon receiving word of the caravan\u2019s pending arrival, scores of Mexico City volunteer teams spontaneously self-organized. Overnight, a stadium was turned into a relief site of the kind prepared for people displaced by a natural disaster: there were medical services stations, a kitchen, information booths, portable bathrooms, and enormous tents in which migrant families slept, closely lined up together, occupying virtually every square inch of space. UNICEF and Save the Children set up spaces for kids to play. Cameras and reporters flooded the grounds to photograph children and snap up caravan interviews. By then the object of an international media frenzy, the migrants were hypervisible and under scrutiny.<\/p>\n<p>This spectacle was particularly conspicuous to the U.S. public amid the political theater surrounding the 2018 midterm elections. Framing the caravan as a threat to U.S. sovereignty and security, President Trump called it \u201can invasion,\u201d reminding the world of the dangers of the MS-13 gang (which actually originated in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 80s before taking root across North and Central America) and sending thousands of National Guard troops to the border. These actions expanded the discourse of a U.S.-Mexico \u201cborder crisis,\u201d an idea that first emerged in June 2014 when media attention turned to the crowded conditions of Central American children held in immigrant detention. The strategic deployment of the term\u00a0<em>crisis<\/em>\u00a0directs blame and attention toward migrants and away from the United States\u2019s role in producing the root causes of their migration: the devastating effects of decades of support for repressive military regimes, corrupt state forces that act with impunity, neoliberal economic policies that deepen inequalities, and hardline strategies that have escalated rather than reduced the everyday violence linked to the proliferation of U.S.-born gangs. These histories and patterns are rendered invisible by U.S. political discourses that foreground the so-called threat of Central American migration.<\/p>\n<p><em>Crisis<\/em>\u00a0implies a particular moment in a time of danger, when problems coalesce to the point that they become unmanageable. For migrants, though, crises can travel. They sprawl across boundaries and reappear in new contexts, reigniting familiar traumas and fears. They are the shatterings that come, for example, when one must suddenly leave one\u2019s home and family to escape death threats, knowing the police cannot be trusted. \u201cThe war was hard,\u201d reflected the former tailor from Usulut\u00e1n. He should know: he was a former guerrilla combatant with a prosthetic leg. \u201cBut I\u2019d say the war was better,\u201d he continued. \u201cBetter than to be suffering like we are today, in silence.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Polarized representations of the caravan convey either sympathy and credence or dismay and suspicion. Some suspect that a group so large must have been covertly organized. As such, these skeptics conclude, the migrants cannot be trusted; their claims are to be dismissed as disingenuous. Yet these critics fail to see that Central Americans\u2019 history of collective mobility is in fact a resource for survival. In 1987, more than eleven thousand Salvadoran refugees self-organized their return from Honduras to El Salvador despite the ongoing civil war there. Returning in the thousands offered them protection; they could depend on one another along the way, and their mass movement drew enough international attention to guarantee some protection against human-rights violations and state-inflicted violence. Today, the infamous migrant caravan is, tactically, a form of collective caretaking as well as a means of calling attention to the silenced stories that continue to characterize the lives of many Central Americans.<\/p>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div class=\"page-detail-header\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div class=\"text\">\n<h2>The Violent Landscapes of Sugar and Oil Palm <em>by Nicholas Copeland<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p>To understand the confluence of transnational and local forces that drive migration from Central America, it is necessary to take stock of the misery wrought by sugar and African palm monocultures.<\/p>\n<p>In the early 1990s, an alliance of plantation owners, international capital, and state security forces\u2014encouraged by the U.S. government and the World Bank\u2014massively expanded export monocrop plantations in Guatemala. The political field had been cleared by a U.S.-backed counterinsurgency against a popular revolution focused on land reform. Planter elites proclaimed monocrop expansion as the ideal path to national development, the optimal use of land to maximize economic growth, and the foundation for multicultural democracy. Sacrificed in the process were maize production, the environment, and indigenous communities.<\/p>\n<p>In the summer of 2018, I traveled to Guatemala\u2019s south coast to obtain water samples for testing in a lab at my university and to learn about what it meant to live with agrarian monocultures. My guide, Nicol\u00e1s Velasquez, a Quiche Mayan environmentalist and water defender who I met at a water-monitoring workshop, wanted to show me how the intensification of export-oriented agriculture has transformed local ecologies and inflicted immense environmental and political suffering on surrounding communities. As a result of revving up the capitalist monocrop economy, indigenous villagers confront a web of dispossession, exploitation, exposure, and harassment\u2014a series of assaults on their existence and dignity, whose periodic intensification pushes them past the breaking point.<\/p>\n<p>Nicol\u00e1s explained that sugarcane and African palm growers previously rented land to villagers to plant maize for domestic consumption. That stopped when production expanded to meet rising demand due to free-trade agreements and the global market for biofuels, turning villagers into a captive surplus labor force. Scarce cane jobs pay a modest, locally coveted wage. But these jobs are taxing, often extremely unpleasant, and they expose workers to toxins.<\/p>\n<p>In a water-rich ecosystem striated by rivers charged with mountain runoff, water pollution and access are acute concerns for downstream communities. Cane and palm are incredibly thirsty crops, which lower the water table. To extend the growing season, planters divert rivers to irrigate their fields, cutting off downstream communities. Extended drought connected to global warming aggravates water shortages and threatens maize production throughout the region. During the rainy season, waterways are contaminated with agricultural runoff.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_803\" style=\"width: 774px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-803\" class=\"wp-image-803 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4511\/2019\/05\/06165542\/photo-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"764\" height=\"573\" \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-803\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Ingenio Tulul\u00e1 behind a cane field, seen through power lines. Photo by Nicholas Copeland.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p><em>Ingenios<\/em>\u00a0(sugar refineries) fertilize cane fields with vinasse, a liquid byproduct of cane alcohol production that is mixed with human and animal waste, as well as chemical fertilizers. They spray with a cocktail of pesticides and maturing agents like CONUR, 4D, and glyphosate.<\/p>\n<p>Nicol\u00e1s organized meetings in communities surrounding the\u00a0<em>ingenio<\/em>\u00a0Tulul\u00e1. At one such meeting, a group of villagers told me that the concentrated stench from the vinasse is so piercing that it can wake them from their sleep like a slap in the face. It also attracts swarms of flies and mosquitoes. The operators of ingenios burn the cane fields before harvesting, creating thick clouds of smoke and causing flies to descend into villages. I noticed that local women carry small towels on their laps, which they use to swat away flies and mosquitos. One man showed me a nauseating photo of a bowl of soup on a tabletop, crawling with flies.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_802\" style=\"width: 774px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-802\" class=\"wp-image-802 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4511\/2019\/05\/06165538\/2-ladies.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"764\" height=\"573\" \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-802\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Two women sitting at desks and smiling, holding up the blue hand towels they use to swat flies. Photo by Nicholas Copeland.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p>Downstream villagers use dirty river water for laundry and, when desperate, to cook and bathe. It is hard to stop children from playing in the river. A young mother showed me her toddler\u2019s torso, covered with a painful rash. Cane workers suffer from chronic kidney disease at high rates, but local health centers withhold the statistics.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_801\" style=\"width: 774px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-801\" class=\"size-full wp-image-801\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4511\/2019\/05\/06165529\/baby.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"764\" height=\"573\" \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-801\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Close-up of a toddler\u2019s face and torso with a speckled red rash. Photo by Nicholas Copeland.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p>In addition to usurping the place of maize, spraying chokes native fruits. Coconuts grow smaller with a brown ring around the center. Villagers remember rivers teeming with fish, shrimp, and crabs\u2014now completely gone, to the detriment of both nutrition and foodways. Villagers plant trees on nearly every inch of community land for fuel and shade, and to break the monotonous expanse of cane.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_800\" style=\"width: 774px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-800\" class=\"size-full wp-image-800\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4511\/2019\/05\/06165525\/fruit.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"764\" height=\"573\" \/><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-800\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A yellow coconut, with a dark brown ring around the middle, sits on a table. Photo by Nicholas Copeland.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p>Community complaints trigger aggressive responses. When one village protested the installation of a wastewater ditch, company representatives advised them to form an organization. They did, and the company immediately denounced the leaders for incitement. They were assessed fines and arrest warrants were issued. The\u00a0<em>ingenio<\/em>\u00a0also pressured a neighboring village to restrict the troublemakers\u2019 water access to two hours a day, pitting the communities against each other. Nicol\u00e1s has taught himself relevant legal frameworks and helped to coordinate local complaints as president of the community development council. He testified in The Hague against the direct dumping of vinasse into rivers, forcing companies to install pipes and comply with periodic monitoring. He also helped the Guatemalan leftist political magazine,\u00a0<em>Plaza Publica<\/em>, to create a short documentary called\u00a0<em>Desierto Verde<\/em>\u00a0(Green Desert). He has been threatened and defamed for his efforts.<\/p>\n<p>Sugar companies combine threats with public relations campaigns and social programs distributed through their corporate social responsibilty arm, Fundazucar. Meanwhile, they hide their profits in offshore tax havens. Nicol\u00e1s says that these gifts function as tax write-offs, with the consent of the authorities, who get paid off. Villagers feel powerless up against these entities, which corrupt the state to their own purposes. Leaders who fought to halt Tulul\u00e1\u2019s methane production were blacklisted, bribed by the departmental governor, and threatened. One retired soldier went so far as to accuse the company of counterinsurgency tactics. \u201cThe war never ended,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n<p>Villagers inhabit a toxic, filthy, smoky, pestilent landscape that extracts and debases people and nature to benefit fatted elites and their government cronies. This is what some participants in the migrant caravan leave behind. This is why they walk thousands of dangerous miles to the land where Central American elites vacation and hobnob with U.S. officials\u2014and where sugar and palm oil is traded and consumed.<\/p>\n<p>Grassroots organizations throughout Guatemala denounce the excessive and illegal use of water for monocultures and other extractive industries, like mining and hydroelectric dams. They are working to defend indigenous territories and restore traditional food systems to achieve food sovereignty. Thousands joined the March for Water, Mother Earth, Territory, and Life in 2016. If these struggles prevail against the transnational network that oppresses them, as justice demands, they will do so by initiating a radical democratic restructuring from below.<\/p>\n<div class=\"page-detail-header\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div class=\"text\">\n<h2>Gender-Based Violence and the Plight of Guatemalan Refugees <em>by M. Gabriela Torres<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p>The work that now brings me to the crowded waiting room of a federal immigration court in the United States began in Guatemalan refugee camps in the 1990s. In the room with me, women in indigenous dress, fidgeting young men, and the occasional advocate mingle together with overdressed attorneys towing roller bags stuffed with fat files of white papers. There are too many little girls with sparkles: sparkly cat ears, gleaming silver backpacks, sparkle heart backpacks, and one sparkling \u201chappy\u201d emblazoned on the T-shirt of a six-year-old who is constantly scanning the room while clutching her mother\u2019s hand. Armed guards from a private security firm circulate, uselessly asking people to stop blocking the doors to the courtrooms. Worry is palpable in the wringing hands, blank stares, and tired shifting of those who have opted to stand in the middle of the room, hoping for a seat to open on the wooden benches along the walls.<\/p>\n<p>Back in the refugee camps sponsored by the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Mayan women spoke with me about the genocide orchestrated by the Guatemalan armed forces in the early 1980s, but also about how they had built new vibrant communities in preparation for their return to highland villages after ten years in exile. Today, much of my anthropological work is done waiting, accompanying, observing, and giving testimony on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.unhcr.org\/publications\/operations\/5630f24c6\/women-run.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">what drives women and their children<\/a>\u00a0to seek refuge in the United States despite\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/cgrs.uchastings.edu\/matter-b\/backgrounder-and-briefing-matter-b\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">new barriers to their asylum claims<\/a>. Knowledge of how culture works is fundamental to making the legal claim for asylum. It is key to understanding how\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bostonglobe.com\/opinion\/2018\/12\/05\/how-femicide-drove-caravan\/5lktZE3HNESy7AwLksW5LJ\/story.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">femicide and violence against women creates refugees<\/a>\u00a0and compels families to leave all that they know to risk their lives on a northward journey, to sit (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2018\/08\/28\/642738732\/a-toddlers-death-adds-to-concerns-about-migrant-detention\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">and sometimes die<\/a>) in detention out of the earnest hope of having a chance at a life.<\/p>\n<p>Gender violence in Guatemala has become utterly naturalized (see Menj\u00edvar 2011). The rate of femicide, the socially supported murder of women, is astounding. Based on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ine.gob.gt\/index.php\/estadisticas-continuas\/violencia-contra-la-mujer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">figures from the country\u2019s National Institute of Statistics<\/a>, between January 2000 and May 2018 more than eleven thousand women and girls were murdered in Guatemala. Guatemala has\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/lac.unwomen.org\/en\/donde-estamos\/guatemala\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">one of the highest rates<\/a>of violent deaths among women worldwide. The prevalence of gender-based violence is not, however, a result of Guatemalans having an inherently violent nature. Countering the tendency to resort to cultural essentialism, anthropology tells us that\u2014in Guatemala and elsewhere\u2014such violence is a result of particular historical processes that have enabled state authority to rest on misogyny.<\/p>\n<p>Wartime practices leveraged and amplified preexisting violence against women. Sexual violence was wielded as a systematic tool of governance, laying a foundation for the\u00a0<em>mano dura<\/em>\u00a0(firm hand or iron fist) forms of authority that sustain politicians today. Throughout the last century, gender-based violence was entrenched by a state that regularly employed sexual violence in the cause of genocide. During the Guatemalan genocide, the armed forces used gang rape in the massacres of entire indigenous communities in the highlands. Concurrently in urban areas, state agents, including police and paramilitary organizations, violated, mutilated, and publicly displayed women\u2019s bodies (Carey and Torres 2005), encouraging the participation of the press in a display of sexualized and gendered violence that has now become commonplace in both mainstream newspapers and the yellow press (England 2018).<\/p>\n<p>Women\u2019s lives continue to be disposable, as demonstrated by\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/news-desk\/the-story-behind-the-fire-that-killed-forty-teen-age-girls-in-a-guatemalan-childrens-home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the deaths of forty-one teenaged girls<\/a>\u00a0from a state-run orphanage in 2017. Corruption, officially sanctioned sexual assault, and the abandonment of women\u2019s and children\u2019s rights rendered the state unable and unwilling to safeguard the lives of women and girls, who have limited access to judicial redress. The process of seeking justice for gender-based violence is broken, despite\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/news-desk\/the-story-behind-the-fire-that-killed-forty-teen-age-girls-in-a-guatemalan-childrens-home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">comparatively strong laws against femicide and family violence<\/a>. Laws are limited in their efficacy because misogyny takes place in everyday life\u2014in which laws are applied and when, in how violence against women is sidelined or exploited, in the acceptance of the social suffering of rape, and in the display of machismo as an emblem of political power.<\/p>\n<p>The misogynist bias of Guatemalan institutions and their agents, today as in the past, has costs. State-supported misogyny underpins the violence enacted by organized crime groups. Transnational gangs and other territorial crime organizations that have arisen amid the postconflict dissolution of local economies and authority structures have embraced\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.insightcrime.org\/news\/analysis\/why-does-latin-america-have-the-world-s-highest-female-murder-rates\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the systemic use of sexual violence<\/a>\u00a0to exert control and to justify hypermacho authority. Gangs enact public executions, monitor and delimit the mobility of persons and goods through their territories, and demand payments from businesses. According to\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.unodc.org\/toc\/en\/reports\/TOCTACentralAmerica-Caribbean.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime<\/a>, large areas of the country have been deemed ungovernable. All of this begets the tragedy that we see in the groups of starving people maligned and dying while seeking refuge at the U.S. border.<\/p>\n<p>Gender-based violence in a country of origin is part of a continuum of violence faced by refugee populations the world over. Gender-based violence too often continues in the host countries that refugees traverse (Buckley-Zistel and Krause 2017). The current moral panic in the United States with respect to Guatemalans and other Central Americans at the border is adding to migrants\u2019 vulnerability. Emergent humanitarian crises of human trafficking and sexual violence in detention centers loom as we engage in a national debate on the discretionary rights of persons. This is what gets decided in the federal immigration court where I began this story, and why the work of anthropology is as important today as it was in the refugee camps where I began this work more than twenty-five years ago.<\/p>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p><span style=\"color: #077fab;font-size: 1.15em;font-weight: 600\">The Role of the State in Hondurans Fleeing from Violence<\/span><em style=\"color: #077fab;font-size: 1.15em;font-weight: 600\"> by Lirio Guti\u00e9rrez<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p>Honduran migration to the United States is not new, but in recent decades it has increased. Violence by criminal groups,\u00a0<em>maras<\/em>\u00a0(gangs), and gender-based violence (domestic violence and rape) form dominant narratives explaining the massive flight of Hondurans. My research and work as an expert witness for Honduran asylum-seekers indicate that violence and insecurity are indeed factors behind their leaving; however, the main reason that Hondurans flee their country is the state\u2019s inability and unwillingness to protect them from violence.<\/p>\n<p>Since the 1990s, Honduras has been witnessing a new type of violence (see Salomon 1993; Koonings and Kruijt 2004). In contrast to the political violence that plagued Central America in the 1980s\u2014taking the form of military death squads persecuting so-called insurgents in Honduras\u2014the new violence is characterized by its mundane ubiquity: robbery, theft, fear of public space\u2014and the summoning of male youth to the\u00a0<em>maras<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The Honduran government\u2019s 2001 introduction of\u00a0<em>mano dura<\/em>\u00a0(\u201ciron fist\u201d) laws, repressive and punitive policies aimed at reducing violence and crime, contributed to intensifying levels of violence among armed actors. The maras, street gangs with transnational roots in global organized crime as well as U.S. immigration restrictions that saw the deportation of thousands of gang members to their country of origin, began resembling criminal organizations (Cruz 2010). Members started participating in criminal activities such as extorting residents and local businesses in the areas they controlled, as well as kidnapping young women (Guti\u00e9rrez Rivera 2018). Other armed actors targeted residents in rural areas or were hired as hitmen to settle scores between families.<\/p>\n<p>Gender-based violence, aimed primarily at women, has become more visible in recent years. Domestic violence, rape, and kidnapping for sex trafficking constitute primary reasons for why women leave the country. In conservative Honduras, women are expected to carry out traditional gender roles. Women are perceived to be inferior to men and viewed as property.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2014\/nov\/19\/miss-honduras-murder-sister-boyfriend-arrested-shocks-nation\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The 2014 murder of Miss Honduras<\/a>, Mar\u00eda Jos\u00e9 Alvarado Mu\u00f1oz, and her sister, Sof\u00eda Trinidad Alvarado Mu\u00f1oz, by Mar\u00eda Jos\u00e9\u2019s boyfriend after he saw her dancing with another man at a party exemplifies how women are viewed and treated in Honduras. The country is not a safe place for women. Currently, Honduras has one of the highest femicide rates in the world, climbing by more than 250 percent between 2005 and 2013;\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.globalcitizen.org\/fr\/content\/honduras-femicide-red-alert\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a woman there is murdered every fourteen hours<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In court statements, Honduran asylum seekers describe experiencing forms of violence inflicted by\u00a0<em>maras<\/em>\u00a0and by male partners. Many tried to seek protection on their own. They may move to another neighborhood. Female victims of domestic violence may return to their parents\u2019 house. However, members of the gang or the male partner, in the case of domestic violence, usually find the victim and continue to threaten, harass, or physically attack them. Victims of domestic violence are then forced to return to their partner\u2019s home to face brutal punishment.<\/p>\n<p>Leaving the country is usually the last option for most Honduran asylum-seekers. They make the decision to leave only after attempts to seek protection from the state fail. Many Hondurans do call the police. They try filing a report. Yet, they say, \u201cnothing happens.\u201d Some try to follow up only to find that the paperwork is lost in state bureaucracy. They describe how authorities tell them that they have thousands of reports and cannot follow up on all of them. It can take years for authorities to investigate a case. State bureaucracy in Honduras is inefficient, but the real reason that these reports are not investigated is because such cases of violence are not a priority\u2014not compared to drug trafficking or the illicit work of large criminal organizations. State authorities may also discourage individuals from filing reports, especially with women victims of violence. Female asylum seekers describe how police officers would tell them that filing a report is useless because \u201cit\u2019s normal for a man to beat his wife.\u201d These examples show an unwillingness on the part of the state to address cases of violence (see Menjivar and Drysdale Walsh 2017).<\/p>\n<p>More than being unwilling, though, the Honduran state is\u00a0<em>unable<\/em>\u00a0to protect Hondurans. A deficit of institutions, public policies, experts, and record-keeping hinder the state\u2019s ability to track the occurrence and consequences of violence and crime among different armed actors. State authorities simply do not know how many Hondurans have been internally displaced by violence and crime. Staff working at the United Nations High Commission on Refugees told me that experts on forced displacement and social violence had to be brought in from abroad as Honduras lacked experts who could design and implement public policies. Foreign experts pointed out further problems, such as poor coordination between state institutions involved in public policy and the absence of reliable information and data. Maps, censuses, and archives are either unavailable or inaccurate. But a consequence of the state\u2019s inability to produce standardized and reliable information and to coordinate among various institutions is an inability to prevent violence or to offer security to its victims.<\/p>\n<p>Hondurans leave because Honduras is not safe. The Honduran state plays a central role in the exodus, as it is unable and unwilling to provide protection and security to victims of violence.<\/p>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div class=\"page-detail-header\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div class=\"text\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div class=\"page-detail-header\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<div class=\"text\">\n<h2>Reflections from a Daughter of the Postwar <em>by Fiore Stella Bran Arag\u00f3n<\/em><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"block-wysiwyg underlined\">\n<div class=\"wrapper cleared\">\n<p>As a daughter of the postwar in Nicaragua, I never thought I would witness a brutal dictatorship like the one my parents and grandparents endured. But right now, for me, it is hard to breathe. I feel like\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amnesty.org\/en\/latest\/news\/2018\/05\/despite-bloody-state-repression-the-people-of-nicaragua-will-not-be-silenced\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u00c1lvaro Conrado<\/a>, one of the youngest victims of the protests in my country. I breathe in struggle and death. I\u2019ve been in the streets; I was out there, organizing. It is painful to think that I have the privilege to participate in creating strategy, to think, to write, to migrate, when some of my friends are imprisoned and others killed.<\/p>\n<p>Many reflections emerge in this terrible repetition of a history of dictatorship. Here, I offer a few.<\/p>\n<p>I am a daughter of the postwar period in Nicaragua, one of the millennials who those who fought in the Sandinista Revolution saw as apathetic, apolitical, \u201csocial media activists.\u201d They thought we didn\u2019t know how to go out and fight in the streets.<\/p>\n<p>Over the past eight months, my generation has demonstrated just the opposite. We took to the streets to fight against a dictatorship with little more than our Nicaraguan flags. We had little knowledge of how to organize a student movement, much less a political struggle, and we were especially unprepared to defend ourselves against government-sponsored killers.<\/p>\n<p>In the last three months I have also learned how it feels to become a refugee, to lose almost everything, and also to feel solidarity and human love in a much deeper way.<\/p>\n<p>My generation\u2019s lack of experience around political organizing comes from growing up in a postwar context. Since we were kids we have heard the stories of a failed revolution that stole the lives of so many young people, as well as the hope of a new Nicaragua. Depending on a family\u2019s political affiliation, the story varied in tone and substance, but it always shared the same conclusion: the Sandinista Revolution was the only chance for a nation-building project, a unique opportunity to achieve utopia. And it was lost.<\/p>\n<p>I began to ask questions about the Revolution in university classrooms and in activist circles. At home, I encountered an unbreakable silence about the Revolution and its aftermath, about those who died and those who migrated to get away from the disaster. It wasn\u2019t worth trying to talk about \u201cthat\u201d because it would mean touching an open wound, because it was already over, because this was a different Nicaragua, and because my parents did not believe that I would ever experience the same thing.<\/p>\n<p>When Daniel Ortega became president in 2006, I was in my last year of primary school. At that time I didn\u2019t understand basic political concepts. I had no idea that another dictatorship was emerging. Today I believe that reflections on our history are more important than ever, for while we may not know the microhistories of the Nicaragua of our mothers and fathers, ever since we took to the streets on April 18, 2018 we now carry the same history in our skin.<\/p>\n<p>We are self-organized, with different identities and demands, but united by a sense of justice and freedom that goes beyond politics, economics, and education. For us, it is a matter of survival. This self-organized movement has taken on an impressive anarchic and collective character, but it has also posed challenges in terms of representation and influence in the traditional political spheres where many crucial decisions are made. After several months of struggle, we are not sure how to move forward. Even so, we continue resisting from wherever we can\u2014especially in the difficult space that is daily life, where the pain is felt deeply in the flesh.<\/p>\n<p>That pain was particularly acute for me on August 25, 2018, when thirty of my colleagues and friends from the student movement were arrested and tortured. Now they face charges of being terrorists. That afternoon I was not with them. I was reviewing the final draft of my thesis, which I would defend the following week. That day changed everything: I went from a safe house into exile with almost nothing but a suitcase.<\/p>\n<p>I arrived in northern Mexico to work in a migrant shelter that adjoins\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/bostonreview.net\/literature-culture-global-justice\/valeria-luiselli-riding-la-bestia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">La Bestia<\/a>, the dreaded train that is the refuge and tomb of thousands of migrants fleeing terror in their own countries only to fall prey to organized crime and the Mexican authorities. La Bestia is a deep source of pain. In these months I have seen hundreds of migrants with their stories and their dreams, many of them scattered from the notorious caravan that fell apart en route. Some of these migrants are young Nicaraguans fleeing the Ortega regime. They ask me questions, and I ask them questions in turn; some questions we share and others are very different. I am grateful for these questions even as answers remain elusive.<\/p>\n<p>After eight months of resistance, solidarity, and exile, I have more questions than when we started: How much more can we resist? Will I go back to Nicaragua and have a home? When the official stories of this insurrection are written, will those of the young people who travel on La Bestia\u2014stories that go against the grain of the official history\u2014be included? How can we sustain an unarmed resistance against a murderous government and somehow avoid another war? Or, to add a question from the young refugees who, on December 21, 2018, turned themselves in to immigration authorities on the Brownsville-Matamoros Bridge: what will happen to us when the Trump administration does not believe us and deports us back to Nicaragua?<\/p>\n<div class=\"textbox exercises\">\n<h3>Discussion Questions<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>What are the push factors described in these essays?\u00a0What are some push factors you can think of that aren&#8217;t described in these essays?<\/li>\n<li>What are some pull factors described in these essays? What are some pull factors you can think of that aren&#8217;t described in these essays?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t <section class=\"citations-section\" role=\"contentinfo\">\n\t\t\t <h3>Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t <div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t <div id=\"citation-list-792\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t <div class=\"licensing\"><div class=\"license-attribution-dropdown-subheading\">CC licensed content, Shared previously<\/div><ul class=\"citation-list\"><li>Introduction: Behind the Migrant Caravan. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Jennifer Burrell, and Ellen Moodie. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/introduction-behind-the-migrant-caravan\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/introduction-behind-the-migrant-caravan<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>Bound up in Each Other: Salvadoran LGBT Displacement. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Nicola Chu00e1vez Courtright. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/bound-up-in-each-other-salvadoran-lgbt-displacement\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/bound-up-in-each-other-salvadoran-lgbt-displacement<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>Ecological Crisis: The Blind Spot in Migration Discourse. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Julio Gutiu00e9rrez. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/ecological-crisis-the-blind-spot-in-migration-discourse\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/ecological-crisis-the-blind-spot-in-migration-discourse<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>Estu00e1 Bien Recordar: Stories of the 1.5 Insurgent Generation. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Irina Carlota Silber. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/est%C3%A1-bien-recordar-stories-of-the-1-5-insurgent-generation\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/est%C3%A1-bien-recordar-stories-of-the-1-5-insurgent-generation<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>In\/Visibility in Migration: A Reflection on the Caravan.. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Joseph Wiltberger. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/in-visibility-in-migration-a-reflection-on-the-caravan\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/in-visibility-in-migration-a-reflection-on-the-caravan<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>Alliance for Prosperity?. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Giovanni Batz . <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/alliance-for-prosperity\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/alliance-for-prosperity<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>Corruption, Waiting, Exhaustion. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Jennifer Burrell, and Mounia El Kotni. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/corruption-waiting-exhaustion\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/corruption-waiting-exhaustion<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>The Violent Landscapes of Sugar and Oil Palm. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Nicholas Copeland. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/the-violent-landscapes-of-sugar-and-oil-palm\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/the-violent-landscapes-of-sugar-and-oil-palm<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>Gender-Based Violence and the Plight of Guatemalan Refugees. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: M. Gabriela Torres. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/gender-based-violence-and-the-plight-of-guatemalan-refugees\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/gender-based-violence-and-the-plight-of-guatemalan-refugees<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>Revolution Betrayed. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Jon Carter. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/revolution-betrayed\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/revolution-betrayed<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>Leave or Die: Neoextractivism and the Garifuna Experience in Honduras. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Rony L. Castillo. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/leave-or-die-neoextractivism-and-the-garifuna-experience-in-honduras\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/leave-or-die-neoextractivism-and-the-garifuna-experience-in-honduras<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>The Caravan is Honduras: Hope and Death at the Border. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Amelia Frank-Vitale. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/the-caravan-is-honduras-hope-and-death-at-the-border\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/the-caravan-is-honduras-hope-and-death-at-the-border<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>The Role of the State in Hondurans Fleeing from Violence. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Lirio Gutiu00e9rrez Rivera. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/the-role-of-the-state-in-hondurans-fleeing-from-violence\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/the-role-of-the-state-in-hondurans-fleeing-from-violence<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>A Crisis Foretold: On the Origins of the Migrant Caravan. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Christopher Loperena. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/a-crisis-foretold-on-the-origins-of-the-migrant-caravan\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/a-crisis-foretold-on-the-origins-of-the-migrant-caravan<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>The New Terrorist Type in Nicaragua. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Jennifer Goett. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/the-new-terrorist-type-in-nicaragua\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/the-new-terrorist-type-in-nicaragua<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>The April Civic Uprising and Its Sandinista Roots. Hot Spots. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Luciana Chamorro. <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights. <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/the-april-civic-uprising-and-its-sandinista-roots\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/the-april-civic-uprising-and-its-sandinista-roots<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><li>Reflections from a Daughter of the Postwar. <strong>Authored by<\/strong>: Fiore Stella Bran Aragu00f3n . <strong>Provided by<\/strong>: Fieldsights . <strong>Located at<\/strong>: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/reflections-from-a-daughter-of-the-postwar\">https:\/\/culanth.org\/fieldsights\/reflections-from-a-daughter-of-the-postwar<\/a>. <strong>License<\/strong>: <em><a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"license\" href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-sa\/4.0\/\">CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike<\/a><\/em><\/li><\/ul><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t <\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t <\/div>\n\t\t\t <\/section>","protected":false},"author":44985,"menu_order":10,"template":"","meta":{"_candela_citation":"[{\"type\":\"cc\",\"description\":\"Introduction: Behind the Migrant Caravan. 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