Today I woke up to images of asylum-seeking children & families being gassed by the border patrol at the US-Mexico border, no news out of the US surprise me anymore, but the mirror reactions to the migrant caravan from Mexicans were new to me. The Central American caravan is a moral challenge, the US has already failed, will Mexico pass?
I have the unique advantage -and disadvantage- of living in Portugal, far away from Mexico, so the news from home come filtered via four sources:
- News articles from regular media
- Phone/skype calls with family back home
- WhatsApp chat group conversations
- Facebook and Twitter posts
The news reports seem pretty factual and balanced; there is a caravan of approx. 8,000 migrants and potential asylum seekers, mostly from Honduras, slowly moving north, aiming for the Tijuana/San Diego border, a longer but marginally safer route. There is a cross-section of families and young adults making the journey, they have very limited means -basically what they can carry or push in strollers- and there are many reports of people along the way offering food, water, clothes, a ride, etc.
Judging from the response of the Mexican people during the last earthquake, the generosity and willingness to help of the people is no surprise, even the bottom-up self-organizing nature of the help we’ve come to take for granted in a country with notoriously weak institutions.
The Spark
But here is where the plot thickens, it turns out that Miriam Celaya, a Honduran migrant interviewed by Deutsche Welle en Español made the unfortunate statement that they were only being fed beans and that it wasn’t “fit for pigs”, the comment quickly went viral (1MM views just in DW) and resulted in her expulsion from the camp in Tijuana by her own fellow migrants and the bullying and derision with which the internet metes out shame and opprobrium. (Miriam later apologized to the Mexican people)
The Kindling
From one viral video, the meme machines got going, it began with labeling the migrants as ungrateful (first step: Generalize, not just one migrant, ALL the migrants were ungrateful), They should all go back home if they don’t like Mexican food. Then it morphed into clothing, they were rejecting shoes as well, it turns out they wanted name brand athletic wear, no cheap knock-offs, so please, send the Nikes and Adidas (Step two: Embellish and lie). Finally, they were like a plague, dirty and arrogant, leaving trash wherever they went and discarding everything they didn’t like (third step: make them the enemy). I witnessed this transformation in less than 5 days.
The Fire
Then videos of Hondurans mocking Mexicans started appearing in social media, one showed a guy with a Honduran accent saying that he was given a car by the government to make a living as an UBER driver, another was recounting his success in mugging gullible Mexicans, and today a photo of a captured Hondureñan convenience store robber and murderer circulated in FB. The videos were clearly fake, and the picture turned out to be a photo of Ruben Albarran, lead singer of Café Tacuba – a local band- that visited the migrants to offer support -BTW, it was also reported that the migrants offered him some food, an understandable mistake if you look at the picture)… but the damage was done, the comments quickly escalated to Kill them all! (Step four and five: Dehumanize and Eliminate). I won’t post more offending links to avoid fanning the flames.
The Fog
The accompanying fog of conspiracy theories also has picked up, either home brewed or echoes from the north, it could be George Soros, or the Democrats, or Trump, or Maduro … or it could be people who travel in groups to provide mutual protection in a dangerous journey. Not to add to the conspiracy theories, but, who wins by creating this new class of enemy for the Mexican people? It seems unlikely that it’s AMLO, the tropical messiah about to be sworn in; could it be someone jockeying to be the next one? …
The coming Moral challenge
I would disregard all this noise from social media as that, trolls making noise. But no, I see friends and family forwarding those same memes that call for the expulsion of migrants that will take Mexican jobs, I hear concern about the danger these migrants present; the same people that request “likes” for an image of Jesus/the Virgin Mary, demonize migrants on the next without the slightest sense of irony. And then there is the real danger that a humanitarian crises gestates as asylum seekers enter refugee limbo (for comparison, there are already 2.5MM in Turkey, 1.5MM in Pakistan, 1.0 in Lebanon, we are nowhere near those levels).
Will fear of the other win over love thy neighbor? Will Mexicans realize the hypocrisy of criticizing Trump followers while simultaneously mimicking their most deplorable behaviors?, What happened to mi casa es tu casa?
I’m in no position to issue moral judgments from my comfortable perch in a corner of the Iberian peninsula, but there is a need for leadership at the top and solidarity at the bottom in America (the continent). The migrants themselves have provided some answers by organizing into crews that clean-up and minimize community impact, that is a good sign. Nevertheless I have a very bad feeling about this, the last time a world leader was courageously generous on this front, she lost her head, and she was the leader of the free world!, Auf Wiedersehen, Angela!, and I’m afraid that between AMLO and Trump we’ll be hard pressed to find the courage contained in Angela Merkel’s left pinkie finger.
If anybody out there has a clearer view, please share it. The speed at which this situation is unfolding is dizzying
ExplorAlive 
Excellent!
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Compa buena chamba
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