Colombia’s Brainz adds ex-Miniclip CTO to its board
▻http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-06-15-colombias-brainz-adds-ex-miniclip-cto-to-its-board
Camilo Marrugo, former Chief Technology Officer at Miniclip, joins board as Brainz works on new RTS, World War Doh
Cartografía del conflicto
Este mapa muestra las masacres que se han cometido en Colombia, discrimadas por grupos armados. Haga zoom sobre el mapa para obtener información más detallada sobre las masacres.
Watch The Movements Of Every Refugee On Earth Since The Year 2000
►https://www.fastcompany.com/40423720/watch-the-movements-of-every-refugee-on-earth-since-the-year-2000
IN MEXICO, THE PRICE OF AMERICA’S HUNGER FOR HEROIN
Story by Joshua Partlow
Photos by Michael Robinson Chavez
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/violence-is-soaring-in-the-mexican-towns-that-feed-americas-heroin-h
“Mexico provides more than 90 percent of America’s heroin, up from less than 10 percent in 2003, when Colombia was the main supplier. Poppy production has expanded by about 800 percent in a decade as U.S. demand has soared. The western state of Guerrero is the center of this business, producing more than half of Mexico’s opium poppies, the base ingredient for heroin. Guerrero also has become the most violent state in Mexico, with more than 2,200 killings last year.
“These groups have transformed themselves into a super-criminal power,” said Ricardo Mejia Berdeja, the head of the security committee in the Guerrero state congress. “The anchor for organized crime is heroin poppy.”
Guerrero has produced marijuana and poppies for decades. But organized crime used to be more organized, with one main cartel in the state quietly paying off police and officials and moving drugs. The booming heroin business has encouraged the rise of new gun-toting trafficking bands, which in turn has triggered the rise of citizen militias.”
Over 14,000 Children Die After Colombian Gov’t Sells Indigenous Peoples’ Drinking Water To Western Mining Corporations – Carib Flame
▻http://www.caribflame.com/2017/05/over-14000-children-die-after-colombian-govt-sells-indigenous-peoples-dr
On Colombia’s arid Guajira Peninsula a quiet effort to eradicate the Wayuú people, Colombia’s largest indigenous group, has entered its sixth year. The Colombian government and Western mining corporations are complicit in this attempt to wipe the group off of Colombia’s map. Apparently President Trump does not care at all that these “beautiful babies” are dying from an easily preventable situation.
Victims of a devastating, manufactured drought, the Wayuú are fighting for their very survival, as thousands of children die every year. The deaths of nearly 5,000 children due to thirst or malnutrition have been documented since 2011, though the Wayuú themselves claim that the figure tops 14,000, according to Mint Press News.
The Colombian government, as well as the Western media, blame the drought on climate change and weather patterns like El Niño. What they have tried to avoid acknowledging is the 2011 construction of the Cercado Dam, which diverted the Ranchería River from its natural course. The government claimed that building the dam would improve the lives of everyone in the region by supplying nine towns with a second source of drinking water, employing 1,000 workers and providing irrigation for 18,500 hectares of farmland.
But the Ranchería is the only river on the Guajira Peninsula, as well as the only source of drinking water for the Wayuú people. The consequences of the river’s disappearance have been catastrophic. Now, the Wayuú must walk more than three hours to draw drinking water from wells, with each person living off of less than 0.7 liters a day. What little water they do obtain is contaminated with bacteria and salt, which has caused severe diarrhea and cholera to run rampant among their quickly dwindling population.
#Colombie #sécheresse #climat #extraction #malnutrition #soif #eau #mort
#enfants #enfance #peuples_autochtones #Guajira #décès #Wayuú #mines #changement_climatique #El_Niño #barrage_hydroélectrique #Cercado (dam) #Ranchería (fleuve) #eau_potable
Colombia, el segundo con mayor pobreza extrema en la región
Aunque hasta el día de hoy, Colombia es el único que ha presentado cifras del año pasado, en términos de pobreza extrema (también llamada indigencia), el país se ubica como el segundo con el mayor porcentaje (8,5%) después de México (9,5%), muy lejos de la cifra de Chile, en donde solo 3,5% de la población vive en esa condición.
156 líderes sociales fueron asesinados en 14 meses en Colombia: Defensoría
Un total de 156 líderes sociales y defensores de derechos humanos fueron asesinados en los últimos catorce meses en Colombia, según informó este viernes la Defensoría del Pueblo.
▻http://m.elpais.com.co/colombia/registran-156-asesinatos-de-lideres-sociales-en-colombia-en-los-ultimos
Colombia Militias, Venezuela’s Dire Economy Fuel Growing Border Crisis
On the Colombia-Venezuela border, Joe Parkin Daniels reports on the increasing numbers of people fleeing both ways over the frequently closed border to escape humanitarian problems in each of the countries.
La crisi dei migranti sudamericana
La grave crisi politica ed economica del Venezuela ha creato un’ondata di emigrazione dal paese. Moltissime persone si dirigono verso la Colombia per poi raggiungere altri paesi sudamericani. Il servizio dalla frontiera della Radiotelevisione svizzera.
▻http://www.tvsvizzera.it/tvs/dalla-frontiera-venezuelana_la-crisi-dei-migranti-sudamericana/43489108
Colombie. Bogota durcit sa politique d’accueil des Vénézuéliens
Tout en renforçant l’aide humanitaire, la Colombie va cesser de délivrer les cartes d’accès temporaire qui permettent à nombre de Vénézuéliens de faire l’aller-retour pour acheter de la nourriture ou des médicaments.
Colombia, Brazil tighten borders as Venezuelan crisis deepens
Colombia and Brazil tightened border controls with Venezuela today as both nations grapple with a mounting influx of hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants fleeing a worsening economic crisis.
In a visit to the border region, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said he would impose stricter migratory controls, suspend new daily entry cards for Venezuelans and deploy 3,000 new security personnel along the frontier, including 2,120 more soldiers.
Speaking in Cucuta, a Colombian border city of about 670,000 inhabitants, Santos warned that his government would strictly prosecute any unlawful behaviour by Venezuelans, amid concerns over rising crime. He said Colombia was spending millions of dollars to support the migrants.
▻https://www.stabroeknews.com/2018/news/stories/02/08/colombia-brazil-tighten-borders-as-venezuelan-crisis-deepens
#Brésil
v. aussi la vidéo, signalée par @fil:
Why Colombia has taken in 1 million Venezuelans
How immigration detention compares around the world
The US has the highest number of incarcerated non-citizens in the world: a population which grew from around 240,000 in 2005 to 400,000 in 2010. Since 2009, there has been a congressional mandate to fill 34,000 immigration detention beds each night. More than half of these beds are placed in privately run detention facilities, run by companies such as CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America), who lobbied for the passing of this mandate.
The number of detainees, according to the latest numbers, has also been growing in many EU countries since the 1990s. The UK held 250 people in detention in 1993 and 32,163 in March 2016. France detained 28,220 in 2003 and 47,565 in 2015. Sweden placed 1,167 immigrants in detention in 2006 and 3,959 in 2015. In the past ten years or so Australia’s detainee population has fluctuated. In 2009, there were 375 detainees, a number that sharply rose to 5,697 in 2013, and then dropped to 1,807 in January 2016.
Statistics for Greece and Italy, the two main first countries of entry for asylum seekers to the EU, are not readily available. In 2015 Italy detained 5,242 people, while Greece had a detention capacity of 6,290 in 2013.
▻https://theconversation.com/how-immigration-detention-compares-around-the-world-76067
#détention_administrative #chiffres #statistiques #rétention #asile #migrations #réfugiés #monde #Europe #USA #Etats-Unis
¿Qué esperamos del futuro?: Detención migratoria y alternativas a la detención en las Américas
The study is the result of numerous efforts to collect and compare information on policy and practice related to immigration detention and alternatives to detention in 21 countries in the Americas region: Argentina, the Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and the United States. Although data collection and analysis are by no means exhaustive, the study does identify the main patterns of human rights violations related to the use of immigration detention, and also highlights key policy and practice that represent positive components of alternatives to detention
Pour télécharger le rapport: idcoalition.org/publication/download/informe_regional_americas_2017
War and Peace and War: The Untold Story of the Colombian Civil War and the Potential for Genuine Peace
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/war-and-peace-and-war-the-untold-story-of-the-colombian-civil-war-an
Bogota, Colombia – At the end of last year, the world celebrated what seemed to be the end one of history’s longest standing internal wars. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who had brokered...
First world survey finds 9,600 tree species risk extinction
▻https://phys.org/news/2017-04-world-survey-tree-species-extinction.html
The first ever global database of trees on Wednesday revealed that 9,600 tree species are threatened with extinction and identified a total of 60,065 in existence.
Brazil is the country with the most diverse tree population, with 8,715 species, according to the Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) group.
It also has the largest number of tree species—4,333—that only exist there.
In total 58 percent of trees are so-called single country endemics, with 2,991 species only found in Madagascar and 2,584 only found in Australia.
After Brazil, Colombia is the second most diverse country, with 5,776 different tree species, followed by Indonesia, with 5,142.
The London-based BGCI, which represents an estimated 2,500 botanic gardens around the world, used data from more than 500 published sources to create the list.
Plus de 60 000 espèces d’arbres recensées dans le monde
▻http://www.geo.fr/photos/reportages-geo/plus-de-60-000-especes-d-arbres-recensees-dans-le-monde-172708
Le monde compte plus de 60 000 espèces d’arbres différentes, dont 9 600 au moins sont menacées d’extinction, selon la première étude universelle sur les arbres publiée mercredi par le Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI),
The world’s most dangerous cities | The Economist
▻http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/03/daily-chart-23
COCAINE is grown primarily in South America, and trafficked to the world’s biggest market, the United States, via Central America and the Caribbean. The land routes originate mainly in Colombia, and pass through the small nations of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala before traversing Mexico. It is little wonder, then, that Latin America remains the world′s most violent region not at war. According to data from the Igarapé Institute, a Brazilian think-tank, 43 of the 50 most murderous cities in the world last year, and eight of the top ten countries, are in Latin America and the Caribbean. (War zones, where numbers are hard to verify, are excluded.) Conflicts between gangs, corruption and weak public institutions all contribute to the high levels of violence across the region.
Amnesty | Colombie : Le conflit se poursuit, des centaines de personnes forcées à fuir par des paramilitaires
▻https://asile.ch/2017/03/20/amnesty-colombie-conflit-se-poursuit-centaines-de-personnes-forcees-a-fuir-par
Le déplacement forcé de 300 personnes d’une communauté du nord-ouest de la Colombie par un groupe paramilitaire est la preuve dramatique que le conflit armé est loin d’être terminé.
Increased internal displacement in Colombia
In #Caceres, Colombia, 1,484 people have been displaced as a result of violence between armed groups. The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) urgently calls for the protection of the indigenous and rural populations who have been seriously affected by the recent violence.
▻https://www.nrc.no/news/2018/february/increased-internal-displacement-in-colombia
Unfortunately, not everything is hope in Colombia
Africans Face Dead End After Death-Defying Odyssey to U.S.
The number of Africans crossing the Americas to seek refuge in the U.S. grew tenfold last year. Now survivors of that long, expensive and dangerous journey face shrinking prospects of reaching the U.S. and more hardships in Mexico amid Trump’s immigration crackdown.
In the Mexican border town of Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border, a 27-year-old Somali man made inquiries at a grotty inn called the Imperial Hotel. He had arrived in Mexico a day earlier.
Nadir C. fled Somalia several years ago after falling in love with a woman from a rival tribe. Pursued by her family, he escaped to Kenya, before traveling on to Uganda and South Sudan.
The New Coyote Trail : Refugees Head West to Bypass Fortress Europe
Europe’s closing borders and the death toll in the Mediterranean are forcing asylum seekers to look further afield. An investigation into the migration routes out of Latin America into the U.S. and Canada finds Africans, Afghans and Iraqis enduring great risks.
▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2017/12/19/the-new-coyote-trail-refugees-head-west-to-bypass-fortress-europe
#réfugiés_afghans #réfugiés_irakiens #Canada #Equateur
From Cameroon to US-Mexico border: ’We saw corpses along the way’
Kombo Yannick is one of the many African asylum seekers who are braving the longer Latin America route to the US.
More Migrants From Far-Flung Lands Crossing US-Mexico Border
The young man traversed Andean mountains, plains and cities in buses, took a harrowing boat ride in which five fellow migrants drowned, walked through thick jungle for days, and finally reached the U.S.-Mexico border.
Then Abdoulaye Camara, from the poor West African country of Mauritania, asked U.S. officials for asylum.
Camara’s arduous journey highlights how immigration to the United States through its southern border is evolving. Instead of being almost exclusively people from Latin America, the stream of migrants crossing the Mexican border these days includes many who come from the other side of the world.
Almost 3,000 citizens of India were apprehended entering the U.S. from Mexico last year. In 2007, only 76 were. The number of Nepalese rose from just four in 2007 to 647 last year. More people from Africa are also seeking to get into the United States, with hundreds having reached Mexican towns across the border from Texas in recent weeks, according to local news reports from both sides of the border.
Camara’s journey began more than a year ago in the small town of Toulel, in southern Mauritania. He left Mauritania, where slavery is illegal but still practiced, “because it’s a country that doesn’t know human rights,” he said.
Camara was one of 124 migrants who ended up in a federal prison in Oregon after being detained in the U.S. near the border with Mexico in May, the result of the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy.
He was released October 3, after he had passed his “credible fear” exam, the first step on obtaining asylum, and members of the community near the prison donated money for his bond. He was assisted by lawyers working pro bono.
“My heart is so gracious, and I am so happy. I really thank my lawyers who got me out of that detention,” Camara said in French as he rode in a car away from the prison.
Camara’s journey was epic, yet more people are making similar treks to reach the United States. It took him from his village on the edge of the Sahara desert to Morocco by plane and then a flight to Brazil. He stayed there 15 months, picking apples in orchards and saving his earnings as best he could. Finally he felt he had enough to make it to the United States.
All that lay between him and the U.S. border was 6,000 miles (9,700 kilometers).
“It was very, very difficult,” said Camara, 30. “I climbed mountains, I crossed rivers. I crossed many rivers, the sea.”
Camara learned Portuguese in Brazil and could understand a lot of Spanish, which is similar, but not speak it very well. He rode buses through Brazil, Peru and Colombia. Then he and others on the migrant trail faced the most serious obstacle: the Darien Gap, a 60-mile (97-kilometer) stretch of roadless jungle straddling the border of Colombia and Panama.
But first, he and other travelers who gathered in the town of Turbo, Colombia, had to cross the Gulf of Uraba, a long and wide inlet from the Caribbean Sea. Turbo, on its southeast shore, has become a major point on the migrant trail, where travelers can resupply and where human smugglers offer boat rides.
Camara and about 75 other people boarded a launch for Capurgana, a village next to the Panamanian border on the other end of the gulf.
While the slow-moving boat was far from shore, the seas got very rough.
“There was a wave that came and tipped over the canoe,” Camara said. “Five people fell into the water, and they couldn’t swim.”
They all drowned, he said. The survivors pushed on.
Finally arriving in Capurgana after spending two nights on the boat, the migrants split into smaller groups to cross the infamous Darien Gap, a wild place that has tested the most seasoned of travelers. The thick jungle hides swamps that can swallow a man. Lost travelers have died, and been devoured, boots and all, by packs of wild boars, or have been found, half out of their minds.
Camara’s group consisted of 37 people, including women — two of them pregnant, one from Cameroon and one from Congo — and children.
“We walked seven days and climbed up into the mountains, into the forest,” Camara said. “When it was night, we slept on the ground. We just kept walking and sleeping, walking and sleeping. It was hard.”
One man, who was around 26 and from the African nation of Guinea, died, perhaps from exhaustion combined with thirst, Camara said.
By the sixth day, all the drinks the group had brought with them were gone. They drank water from a river. They came across a Panamanian man and his wife, who sold them some bananas for $5, Camara said.
Once he got out of the jungle, Camara went to Panamanian immigration officials who gave him travel documents enabling him to go on to Costa Rica, which he reached by bus. In Costa Rica, he repeated that process in hopes of going on to Nicaragua. But he heard authorities there were not so accommodating, so he and about 100 other migrants took a boat around Nicaragua, traveling at night along its Pacific coast.
“All we could see were the lights of Nicaragua,” he said. Then it was over land again, in cars, buses and sometimes on foot, across Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, all the way to the U.S. border at Tijuana. He was just about out of money and spent the night in a migrant shelter.
On May 20, he crossed into San Ysidro, south of San Diego.
“I said, `I came, I came. I’m from Africa. I want help,”’ he said.
He is going to stay with a brother in Philadelphia while he pursues his asylum request.
▻https://www.voanews.com/amp/more-migrants-far-flung-lands-crossing-us-mexico-border/4651770.html?__twitter_impression=true
#parcours_migratoire #nouvelle_Méditerranée
For African migrants trying, and dying, to reach north America, the Darién Gap is the “new Mediterranean”
By the time Basame Lonje made it out of the jungle, he was beyond exhausted. The 35-year-old from Cameroon had gone four days out of seven without food, surviving each day on a single biscuit. He drank from rivers flowing with debris and death, carrying the corpses of an unknown number of people who have perished in the Darién Gap, a remote stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama known as the most dangerous in the world. “I barely survived,” Basame says. “People had sores on the soles of their feet and they had nobody to carry them. They were left there. Do you know what it means to walk for days?”
As a result of tough migration policies in traditional destination countries in Europe, Basame is one of thousands of so-called‘extracontinental migrants’ taking the desperate decision to try and traverse the American continent in the hope of seeking asylum in the United States or Canada. In previous times this route was used almost exclusively by central American migrants. More recently it has seen a surge in migrants from African countries like Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Eritrea, Mauritania, Nigeria, Ghana and Burkina Faso, as well as people from Asian and Middle Eastern countries such as India, Pakistan, Syria and Nepal. Mexico authorities apprehended around 3,000 Africans and some 12,000 extracontinental migrants in total in 2018, according to the Migrant Policy Unit of Mexico’s Interior Ministry. Most are escaping a mix of conflict, political repression and crumbling economies.
They fly to visa-friendly countries such as Ecuador, Brazil and Guyana, before navigating their way up north to Mexico, sometimes with the help of smugglers, other times with the aid of social media posts of those who have gone before them. They spend thousands of dollars on flights and bus tickets for journeys that can take months.
Basame was a teacher back in Cameroon but says he fled the bloody conflict that has been raging in parts of his country since 2016 after he was abducted by armed groups fighting for the secession of the English-speaking parts of the country. His crime? Daring to hold classes.
New migration regulations have rolled out swiftly and unpredictably since Trump took office in January 2017. Military troops were deployed to the border in October 2018, when some 7,000 people from central America fleeing gang violence and poverty approached on foot. In January 2019, the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP), known as ‘Remain in Mexico’ went into effect: as a result, asylees that arrive in the US via Mexico are now sent back to wait while their cases are processed, instead of being released on parole in the US as prescribed by US law. Rights organisations point out that sending asylum seekers back to Mexico, where they often face deportation, is a violation of the 1951 Refugee Convention.
This February, Trump declared a state of emergency and accessed emergency funds to begin construction of a physical wall between the US and Mexico. He has also pursued agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras under which all migrants who pass through these countries must first seek refuge and be rejected in them before placing claims in the US. The agreement disregards the fact that not only do these countries lack the capacity to process large-scale asylum claims but that many people are fleeing violence and poverty from these same countries.
Cumulatively, these policies have seen thousands of people waiting in shelters in US-Mexico border towns like Tijuana and Matamoros where conditions are deteriorating. A ‘metering’ system sees US customs officials attend to about three people daily. Mexico’s northern towns are also notorious for violence, and migrants are vulnerable to exploitation by drug cartels and human traffickers.
Externalising borders
In July 2019, Mexico signed an agreement with the US after President Trump threatened to impose trade sanctions if migration flows were not brought to a minimum. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador agreed to deploy 6,000 troops from the newly-formed National Guard to police its borders, adopting the US border militarisation strategy and sealing Mexico’s fate as President Trump’s outer wall.
Since then, Mexican immigration officials have stopped issuing exit permits to extracontinental migrants arriving at the southern border, trapping many like Basame in a country they have no desire to stay in. With fewer people able to reach the US, Mexico – a transit country – is becoming an unintentional final destination. Although Mexico has refused to sign a third safe country agreement with the US, it has been forced to field over 60,000 asylum claims – double the number received last year. It has been estimated that 60 per cent of these applications are made in Tapachula.
With no work permit, and even if he had one, with few opportunities available to him as an African migrant and a non-Spanish speaker, Basame is clear about his options: “Mexico can’t give me that.”
But Mexico’s immigration agency has denied his application for a visitor’s visa that would help him move north. Officials are only issuing permanent residency cards, a document that he fears will affect his asylum claim in the US.
By 09.00, hundreds of men and women from over two dozen countries were waiting in the blistering sun. Their voices were a cacophony of languages – Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, Tigrinya and Haitian Creole – clashing with the wails of hot, hungry children hanging from their parents. Migrants of Asian origin are mostly absent from these daily crowds: since Mexico deported 310 Indian migrants in an “unprecedented” move this October, they have been keeping a low profile for fear of suffering a similar fate.
An immigration officer appeared behind the gate, looked at the crowd and shook his head in frustration. A fight broke out when the gates opened as people rushed to get in. Despite his punctuality, Basame was not seen that day.
“My friends died there”
Narrating his long, treacherous journey from Cameroon to Mexico, Basame tells Equal Times that after fleeing the captivity of armed rebels this March, he headed to Nigeria before deciding to try to reach the safety of the US. He wanted better opportunities than Nigeria could offer and feared the rebels could easily reach him there. First, he took a flight to Ecuador, then by bus he moved through Colombia. In the north-western town of Capurgana on the Colombian-Panamanian border, he met fellow Cameroonian migrants, as well as Haitians and Cubans. As they prepared to enter the Darién, villagers living at the mouth of the jungle warned them: “If you start this journey, you must finish it, otherwise it is bad news,” alluding to the dangers of the wild animals, poisonous insects and armed kidnappers marauding inside the impenetrable rainforest that breaks up the Pan-American Highway.
Basame spent seven days in the dense thickness of the Darién, battling the rain and cold, moving from morning until nightfall with nothing but a bag of clothes and some snacks. “You do not stop in the Darién. You keep moving,” he says. He walked with a group of other migrants. Many didn’t make it out of the jungle due to exhaustion. Others were swept away in the fast-moving rivers. “My friends died there,” Basame remembers soberly. One of his worst memories is of walking past the corpse of a dead baby left in a backpack.
Basame is one of the lucky ones. After reaching Panama, exhausted and starving, he regained his strength before moving up through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. After crossing the Suchiate River into Mexico by raft, he arrived in Tapachula in July. He spent a week at an immigration detention centre there before he was given an exit permit to leave the country.
It wasn’t until he got pulled from a bus to Tijuana by the National Guard that he realised that he could not legally leave Tapachula unless he was heading south, back to Guatemala. The US-Mexico deal took effect on 10 July and he was amongst the first people stranded by Mexico’s new regulations. Basame’s permit would force him back through the jungle of death he had barely survived.
Death and disease in Mexico
Judeline Romelus sits with her friends in Tapachula’s main square watching as they braid the hair of her 10-year-old daughter, Mariska. Nearby, Ghanaian and Guinean flags announce African food at restaurants, alongside Mexican and Honduran colours. Haitians and Africans give locals a trim in makeshift barbershops.
But the general atmosphere of warmth masks the apprehension many locals feel. Despite being in one of the country’s poorest regions, Tapachula has tried to bear the weight of its new migrant population but some people are concerned that government agencies and NGOs are focusing their attention on these new arrivals when the needs of the locals are also many.
Like Basame, Judeline and Mariska are stranded. Judeline applied for a humanitarian visa so that she can travel north with her daughter, but she must wait for her appointment in February 2020. The 28-year-old mother packed her bags and left Haiti three months ago. Economic stagnation and recent political unrest have caused many to flee the small Caribbean nation. “There are no opportunities in Haiti and I cannot work,” she says, even with a diploma. Judeline says she is looking for a better life in the US where friends are waiting for them in Florida. She relies on their monthly remittances of US$50 to pay for the small room the mother and daughter share.
The unsanitary living conditions in overcrowded shelters such as these have caused a spike in health problems. “Women are presenting diseases related to sexual and reproductive health,” says Claudia León, regional head at Jesuits Refugee Service, a humanitarian non-profit providing legal and psychosocial assistance to refugees. Many were assaulted in the Darién. “The situation is critical. They have no clean water to wash with and those who are pregnant are at risk.”
Migrants of all nationalities are suffering from invisible illnesses too. A spokesperson for the medical humanitarian NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says it is dealing with many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and trauma. Poor living conditions coupled with the memories of the treacherous journey to Mexico and the general uncertainty is causing some to self-harm. “We are in an emergency,” says León. “I have seen people outside the immigration centre hurting themselves because they are in such extreme conditions.”
The desperation to get to the US has led to the exploration of dangerous alternative routes. A boat smuggling Cameroonian migrants capsized off the coast of Mexico in October, killing one man. “We knew him,” one migrant tells Equal Times at the restaurant where the deceased once frequented. But even as they recall his tragic passing, another man says that he is also considering taking the same route to the US.
“The new Mediterranean”
All across the world, tough policies on migration are forcing the most vulnerable migrants and refugees to go underground and seek the services of smuggling gangs and human traffickers. Like the US, Europe has enforced stringent measures to stem migration flows. An increase in anti-immigrant sentiments from far-right, populist governments in the US and Europe in particular sees leaders like Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orban routinely employ rhetoric that fuels racist anxieties and emphasises the building of walls to prevent a ‘migrant invasion’.
In 2016, Turkey signed an agreement with the European Union and a bilateral agreement with Greece to keep some three million refugees fleeing the Syrian war from crossing the Aegean Sea into Greece. The agreement saw the European Union send back anyone who crossed without documents after 20 March 2016.
A similar agreement between Italy and Libya in 2017 was extended this November. Italy is training and funding the Libyan Coast Guard to stop African and Middle Eastern migrants on the Mediterranean and return them to Libya, a country at war.
Interception numbers have dropped from 181,000 in 2016 to only 8,000 this year, according to UNHCR. Thousands are held in detention centres run by armed factions battling for control since the Arab uprisings of 2011. African migrants have been enslaved, tortured and sold. They have also been caught in the crossfire of the battle for Tripoli. In July, a bomb fell on one detention centre, killing 44 people.
The number of asylum claims in Mexico keeps rising and is expected reach 80,000 by the end of the year. Although most Africans initially refused to seek asylum in Mexico, more people are applying, particularly from Cameroon. The number of asylum claims from Africa is currently around 500.
The influx of migrants and refugees has split Mexico politically, with many accusing President Obrador of yielding to President Trump and rescinding on human rights promises he made when he campaigned last year.
Human rights organisations condemn the US and Mexico’s strategies. “Those seeking safety want the same thing any of us would want if we were in their shoes,” says Isa Sanusi, of Amnesty International in Nigeria. “Mexico and the US must ensure that these migrants from Africa and other parts of the world are not denied the rights guaranteed to them by international law.”
For now, Basame is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Even if he had the money, it would be too dangerous for him to go home, and yet he currently has no way out of Mexico. As he struggles to stay afloat, his hopes are fading fast. “I’m running out of cash and I’m running out of patience. I’m sick and I don’t have anywhere to live,” he says. “How will I survive?”
▻https://www.equaltimes.org/for-migrants-trying-and-dying-to?lang=en
Es cosa suya: entanglements of border externalization and African transit migration in northern #Costa_Rica
Starting from the idea that border externalization – understood as the spatial and institutional stretching of borders – is enmeshed with the highly contextual humanitarian and securitarian dynamics of migrant trajectories, this article addresses the reach of border externalization tentacles in Costa Rica. Although Costa Rica does not formally engage in border externalization agreements, it is located in a region characterized by transit migration and transnational securitization pressures. Moreover, externalization efforts across the Atlantic have contributed to a relatively new presence of so-called extra-continental migrants. Given these circumstances, we aim to interrogate the ways in which border externalization plays a role in Costa Rica’s discourses, policies and practices of migration management. We do so by analysing a migrant reception centre in the northern Costa Rica border region, and by focusing on African transit migration. Our analysis is based on exploratory field research at the centre as well as on long-term migration research in Central America. Building on these empirical explorations and the theoretical notions of mobility regimes, transit and arterial borders, the article finds that Costa Rica’s identity as a ‘humanitarian transit country’ – as enacted in the migrant reception centre – both reproduces and challenges border externalization. While moving towards increased securitization of migration and an internalization of its border, Costa Rica also distinguishes itself from neighbouring countries by emphasizing the care it extends to African migrants, in practice enabling these migrants to move further north. Based on these findings, the article argues for a deeper appreciation of the role of local-regional histories, perceptions, rivalries, linkages and strategies of migration management. This allows for a better grip of the scope and shape of border externalization across a diversity of migration landscapes.
▻https://comparativemigrationstudies.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40878-019-0131-9
New contested borderlands: Senegalese migrants en route to Argentina
This article sheds novel, light on how Senegalese men and women adapt to European border governance by finding new ways to ‘look for life’ (chercher la vie) in Latin America, as an alternative to the perilous clandestine routes to Europe. The article follows how Senegalese migrants’ mobility to Argentina has evolved over the last two decades. It particularly focuses on the migrants’ journey to Argentina and explores the migrants’ accounts of their experiences en route and compares them to how different intersecting state-driven national and supranational migration policies become entangled in their mobility. By analytically focusing on the changing migration infrastructure and the different forms of friction the migrants encounter and respond to while moving, the article shows how the risk and uncertainty along the journey increasingly mirror the struggles which African migrants face at EU–African borderlands, and thus how similar features of global mobility regimes seem to be reproduced along this new route from West Africa to Latin America. In this way the politics and hierarchies of mobility are brought to the fore. Yet the article also points to how migrants find new openings and ways to contest the hindrances that aims to stop them as they move through these newly traversed borderlands.
▻https://comparativemigrationstudies.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40878-018-0109-z
#migrants_sénégalais #Argentine #Sénégal
Documenting the consequences of palm oil production beyond Southeast Asia
▻https://news.mongabay.com/2017/02/documenting-the-consequences-of-palm-oil-production-beyond-southeast-
Oil palm plantations are rapidly mushrooming throughout the tropics.
A new film, Appetite for Destruction: The Palm Oil Diaries, looks at some of the consequences of that expansion.
This is an interview with the film’s director, #Michael_Dorgan.
Most of the attention around palm oil production has focused on where the crop has the largest footprint: Southeast Asia. Yet oil palm plantations are rapidly mushrooming throughout the tropics, from the species’ ancestral home in West and Central Africa to Pacific islands to Latin America. A new film, Appetite for Destruction: The Palm Oil Diaries, looks at some of the social and environmental impacts of that expansion, by visiting communities, forests, and plantations in Cameroon, #Guatemala, and Colombia.
Amazon Indigenous REDD+: an innovative approach to conserve Colombian forests?
▻https://news.mongabay.com/2017/01/amazon-indigenous-redd-an-innovative-approach-to-conserve-colombian-f
Some indigenous communities in South America have been working on a way to participate in #REDD+ (Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) on their own terms. In 2009, Colombia began to create the National Strategy for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (ENREDD+), an offshoot of REDD+. Currently 64 countries use REDD+ as a national strategy for climate change mitigation. It aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions caused by deforestation in developing countries by offering financial incentives in exchange for the protection of forest resources and their sustainable use.
The Queer Ecology of the Colombian Civil War - Issue 43: Heroes
▻http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/-the-queer-ecology-of-the-colombian-civil-war
The former Luis Guillermo Baptiste began her transformation into Brigitte in the mid 1990s, when she was part of a cadre of scientists helping to establish the Bogota-based Humboldt Institute, a hybrid public-private biodiversity research foundation. With her rainbow-dyed hair, tattoos, and willingness to entertain just about any question put to her, the landscape ecologist, now 53, is one of Colombia’s most visible transgender citizens. Her wide acceptance as a public intellectual—she is a national columnist, a frequently cited environmental authority and now head of the Humboldt Institute—seemed in keeping with an increasingly tolerant Colombia. When Baptiste arrived in New York this past summer, it was with the resolve of someone gearing up for the greatest challenge of her career. (...)
Más del 50% de la tierra productiva de América Latina está en manos de las grandes explotaciones
El último informe de #Oxfam Intermón explica por qué América Latina es la región más desigual del mundo en el reparto de la tierra y aporta datos contundentes de esta grave problemática.
Colombia es el caso extremo: sólo el 0,4% de las fincas concentran más del 67% de la tierra productiva.
▻http://www.oxfamintermon.org/es/sala-de-prensa/nota-de-prensa/mas-del-50-de-tierra-productiva-de-america-latina-esta-en-manos-de-gr
#terres #rapport #Amérique_latine #Colombie #inégalités #concentration_des_terres
Peculiar alliances
▻http://africasacountry.com/2016/10/peculiar-alliances
One of the most counterintuitive sights in the referendum on #Colombia’s historic peace agreement between the government and FARC rebels, was a coalition between #Human_Rights_Watch (HRW) and former President Álvaro Uribe in favor of a “no” vote. At the beginning of October, Colombian voters narrowly rejected a comprehensive historic peace agreement that would […]
On the brink of peace
▻http://africasacountry.com/2016/10/on-the-brink-of-peace
It seems as if Gabriel García Márquez, by divination, foresaw what would happen in #Colombia this month, when he wrote in his seminal work, One Hundred Years of Solitude: “It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent […]
Amazon land rights face greatest threat - Climate News NetworkClimate News Network
▻http://climatenewsnetwork.net/amazon-land-rights-threat
Ensuring forest people’s land rights in the Amazon region is a cheap and effective way of cutting both carbon emissions and deforestation, researchers say – but the obstacles are formidable.
A report from the World Resources Institute (WRI) offers new evidence that the modest investments needed to secure these rights will generate billions of dollars in returns – economically, socially and environmentally – for governments, investors and communities.
The report, Climate Benefits, Tenure Costs, quantifies the economic value of securing land rights for the indigenous communities who live in and protect forests, with a focus on Colombia, Brazil and Bolivia in South America, and implications for the rest of the world.
#amazonie #climat #peuples_autochtones #écologie #environnement merci @reka
▻http://www.wri.org/sites/default/files/styles/cover_shot/public/Climate_Benefits_Tenure_Costs.jpg?itok=PiMW4ec3
▻http://www.wri.org/publication/climate-benefits-tenure-costs
Repercussions in Colombia of the free trade agreement with the European Union after three years of implementation | Transnational Institute
▻https://www.tni.org/en/publication/repercussions-in-colombia-of-the-free-trade-agreement-with-the-european-union-a
Various points of interest emerged during the discussions around the negotiation and ratification of this Free Trade Agreement (FTA), and after three years of its provisional implementation, it is a good time to revisit these issues.
In public statements and publicity material, both the Colombian government and the European Commission asserted, for example, that the FTA was going to help to diversify the Colombian economy. They stated that the objective was to support sustainable development, that it was going to provide a legal basis on which to promote an improvement in the human rights situation, and that a road map would be agreed with the Colombian government for that purpose. At the same time, warnings were sounded about risks such as tax evasion and money laundering. This report looks at developments in some of these issues over the three years of provisional implementation of the agreement, and offers some suggestions for effective follow-up and monitoring.
Did Human Rights Watch Sabotage Colombia’s Peace Agreement? | The Nation
▻https://www.thenation.com/article/did-human-rights-watch-sabotage-colombias-peace-agreement
“No” won because the right wing, led by former President Álvaro Uribe, was able to turn a vote that was supposed to be on peace into a vote on the FARC. The geographic breakdown of the referendum indicates that “no” won in areas where Uribe and his political party have their support. Take a look especially at the department of Antioquia, where Uribe got his political start as a champion of paramilitary death squads. Sixty-two percent of Antioquia’s voters cast “no.” In the department’s capital, Medellín, a city that has been sold in the United States as a neoliberal success story—Modern! Urbane! Fun! Come visit!—63 percent of voters said “no” (for Medellín’s neoliberal “makeover,” see this essay by Forrest Hylton).
Uribe served as president from 2002 to 2010. He is best thought of as a Colombian Andrew Jackson, riding to the top office of his country on the wings of mass murder, rural ressentiment, and financial speculation. As an ex-president, he has been toxic, doing everything he could to keep the war going.
The Colombian elite, especially the retrograde sector Uribe represents, has much to lose with peace: The end of fighting would create a space in which the country’s many social conflicts—having to do with land, labor, and resource extraction—could be dealt with on their own terms, rather than distorted through counterinsurgent politics. And peace would be costly for some sectors, especially for all those Colombians in the “security” business who for years have fed off the Plan Colombia trough.
Polls show that a majority of Colombians favor peace. But Uribe and his allies in the media and congress lied, obfuscated, and scared. They managed to convince a small minority (the 54,000-vote victory margin for “no” is about a quarter of the number of civilians killed or disappeared by the state since the start of the civil war) that the agreement was a giveaway to the FARC and that Santos was “delivering the country to terrorism.” The Times identifies Uribe and the “far right” as the “biggest winner.” The former president “had argued that the agreement was too lenient on the rebels, who he said should be prosecuted as murderers and drug traffickers. ‘Peace is an illusion, the Havana agreement deceptive,’ Mr. Uribe wrote on Twitter on Sunday after casting his ‘no’ vote.” Thus Uribe has forced himself on the bargaining table, with Santos saying, as paraphrased by the Times, that he would be “reaching out to opposition leaders in the Colombian Congress like former President Álvaro Uribe,” with the Times adding that “experts predicted a potentially tortured process in which Mr. Uribe and others would seek harsher punishments for FARC members, especially those who had participated in the drug trade.”
The campaign to keep Colombia’s war going had an unlikely ally: Human Rights Watch. José Miguel Vivanco, the head of HRW’s Americas Watch division, emerged as an unexpected player in Colombian politics when he came out strongly against the “justice” provisions of the peace agreement. Vivanco agreed with Uribe by offering the most dire reading of the agreement possible, saying that perpetrators—in the FARC and the military—of human-rights violations would receive immunity. Vivanco was all over the press in Colombia, with his comments used to build opposition to the accords. Once it became clear that he was lining up too closely with Uribe, he staged a mock public dispute with the former para-president, even while continuing to basically support Uribe’s position (h/t Alejandro Velasco).
Et au Brésil: Is Human Rights Watch Too Closely Aligned with US Foreign Policy?
▻http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/is-human-rights-watch-too-closely-aligned-with-us-foreign-policy
Part of that right-wing agenda is a close alliance with the United States and its Cold War strategy of “containment” and “rollback” with respect to the left governments in Latin America. And that is where Human Rights Watch, the most prominent US-based human-rights organization — its Americas Division in particular — comes in. HRW abstained from offering the slightest criticism of the impeachment process; even worse, the executive director of its Americas Division, José Miguel Vivanco, was quoted in the Brazilian media — on the day that the Brazilian Senate voted to permanently oust the president — saying Brazilians “should be proud of the example they are giving the world.” He also praised the “independence of the judiciary” in Brazil. Sérgio Moro, the judge investigating the political corruption cases, has been far from independent. He had to apologize in March for leaking wiretapped conversations to the press between former president Lula da Silva and Dilma; Lula and his attorney; and between Lula’s wife and their children.
Ça m’avait échappé : le Liban avait participé à la proposition de no-fly zone sur la Libye ?
►http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmfaff/119/119.pdf
17. France, Lebanon and the UK proposed Resolution 1973 in the United Nations Security Council with the support of the United States. On 17 March 2011, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Gabon, Lebanon, Nigeria, Portugal, South Africa and permanent Security Council members France, the UK and the United States voted in favour of the resolution. Brazil, Germany, India and permanent Security Council members China and Russia abstained. No Security Council member state opposed the resolution.40 Resolution 1973 authorised member states to establish and enforce a no- y zone over Libya and to use “all necessary measures” to prevent attacks on civilians.41 It neither explicitly authorised the deployment of ground forces nor addressed the questions of regime change and of post-con ict reconstruction.