Zócalo has awarded the $10,000 prize yearly since 2011 to the nonfiction book that best enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion. The 13 previous Zócalo Public Square Book Prize recipients include Heather McGhee, Michael Ignatieff, Danielle Allen, Jonathan Haidt, and most recently, Michelle Wilde Anderson.

Tobar is the author of six books, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and a professor at UC Irvine; he was born and raised in Los Angeles and is the son of Guatemalan immigrants. Our Migrant Souls blends personal, local, and global histories to explore what it means to be “Latino” today. (The quotation marks are Tobar’s, and they address the word’s capaciousness and its limits.)

Our Migrant Souls is “an essential read for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of race, identity, and the immigrant experience in America,” wrote one of our Book Prize judges. “Tobar’s exquisite use of the written word is a rare delight in and of itself,” noted another. Yet another concluded that the book “felt like a collage, or as the title says, a meditation. That felt just right as a way to show a sprawling, socially constructed identity.”

The annual Zócalo Book Prize event, featuring a lecture by Tobar, who will also be interviewed by USC historian and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Natalia Molina, will take place on June 13, 2024, at 7 p.m. PDT, both live in person in Los Angeles and streaming on YouTube. In addition, the program will honor the winner of this year’s Zócalo Poetry Prize. Zócalo’s 2024 Book and Poetry Prizes are generously sponsored by Tim Disney.

We asked Tobar about the connections between Latino identity and social cohesion, how Los Angeles shapes his work, and what books he recommends readers dive into after finishing Our Migrant Souls.

The post Héctor Tobar Wins the 2024 Zócalo Book Prize appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On May 28, 2023, the body of Martín Morales Martínez was found floating in the Gama River in Triunfo de la Cruz, Honduras. Morales Martínez was Garifuna—a people descended from enslaved Africans, Arawak, and Carib Indians. He was also a respected land rights activist who devoted his life to fighting the theft of Garifuna coastal lands by corporations, investors, and state authorities. His was the most recent in a series of murders of Black and Indigenous land defenders in the country that show how violence, economic development, and race are colliding there—and how little progress international efforts are making in building a more secure, equitable Latin America.

The Garifuna have a long history of insecurity and displacement in Honduras. Since the arrival of U.S.-owned fruit corporations in the 19th century, their communities have endured successive waves of resource extraction—from bananas to sumptuous beachside resorts—and have seen their rights, including collective property rights, increasingly eroded. In recent years, with the support of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), the Garifuna have turned to international courts to hold the country accountable. But despite significant judicial and electoral victories at a moment when the country’s human rights record should be improving, the violence against them has only worsened.

Murders of Black and Indigenous land defenders in Honduras started during the 1990s, after the country adopted economic policies designed to fuel development in tourism, industrial agriculture, and mining. The lush, water- and mineral-rich Caribbean coastline, which is home to 46 Garifuna communities, garnered the attention of investors in beach resorts and African palm plantations, including some of Honduras’s most prominent families. Land defenders fought back by retaking stolen lands and advocating, with surprising efficacy, for the legal recognition of their rights to the territory they have historically occupied. They achieved many successes, but even gaining title to their lands did not ensure they held them securely.

Tensions inflamed dramatically after the June 2009 coup d’état against President Manuel Zelaya, which thrust Honduras into a period of intensive, state-sanctioned resource plunder. Following his ouster, the government acted swiftly to overturn a moratorium on mining, passed legislation to hasten hydropower development, and in 2013 pushed through a law to incentivize foreign investment in the creation of semi-sovereign “start-up” cities in purportedly unpopulated areas of the country. Over the next decade, Honduras experienced widespread corruption at the highest levels of government and a rapid deterioration of human rights.

Amidst this political upheaval, two cases pertaining to Garifuna land rights disputes—one in Triunfo de la Cruz and the other in Punta Piedra—went to trial at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In both cases, Garifuna accused the government of violating property titles, failing to investigate and prosecute the political persecution of land defenders, and noncompliance with judicial decisions that established the communities’ prior claims over disputed lands.

In 2015, the court ruled in favor of the communities, affirming that the state had failed to protect Garifuna collective property rights. It called for several significant reparations, including returning illegally privatized land to the community and compensation for past harms. The communities were optimistic that justice would be served.

Yet the state has failed to comply with the court’s recommendations. Instead, the policies designed to foment investment and development remain largely intact. Violent attacks against land defenders have multiplied as well.

In 2019, at least 16 Garifuna people were murdered. In 2020, four community leaders from Triunfo de la Cruz were brutally abducted by men dressed in police uniform, leading many in the community to suspect direct state involvement. One of the disappeared men, Snider Centeno, was a member of OFRANEH and the acting president of the communal governing council. Meanwhile, the swelling violence and increasing death threats against activists further weakened the confidence of Garifuna in state institutions. Last year, two more land rights activists were killed in Triunfo de la Cruz—Morales Martínez and Ricardo Arnaúl Montero.

The election of left-wing president Xiomara Castro in 2021 was supposed to bring change. She ran on an anti-corruption and pro-democracy agenda that resonated among a large segment of the population—including many Black and Indigenous voters. But little has changed, underscoring the entrenched corruption within state institutions and the political and economic power of a handful of oligarchic families.

On August 29, 2023, the Inter-American Court again found Honduras responsible for the violation of Garifuna territorial rights in another significant victory. But like previous judgments, the court’s decision lacks an enforcement mechanism. Its implementation requires political will on the part of the Honduran government. That means it has not produced greater protections for Black and Indigenous Hondurans’ rights.

Due to their visible Blackness, the Garifuna people continue to be treated as non-native inhabitants without rightful claim to the lands they have resided on for hundreds of years. Change will not happen in Honduras until the state complies with the court rulings—and until the murders of Martín Morales Martínez and other Garifuna leaders are investigated and prosecuted.

The stakes are high, and global: Many Garifuna have fled to the U.S. searching for a stable future that is increasingly hard to imagine back home. Our thirst for infinite economic growth is not only fueling our climate and biodiversity crisis, but also the displacement of and violence against environmental defenders in Honduras, Latin America, and around the world. From Standing Rock to Triunfo de la Cruz, Black and Indigenous activists are often on the front lines of fights against the expansion of extractive industries and the destruction of ecosystems. The Garifuna peoples’ struggle to defend their territories is just one theater in a shared global struggle over the future of the planet and who gets to share in it.

The post In Honduras, Defending Your Land Can Be Deadly appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2001, I made my first visit as an adult to Panama City, Panama. The city was both familiar and alien to me. My family migrated to the United States when I was 11, but our home—where my great-grandparents, cousins, and aunts and uncles resided, where I attended elementary school, and where I made my first best friends—had been in the province of Colón, on the Atlantic side of the isthmus. Still, I recognized the sounds, smells, and bustle of the city. I spotted the same type of diablos rojos that I would take from school to my great-grandmother’s house. But other things were new: multi-lane traffic, a bustling university campus, and more people per square mile than I had ever encountered as a child.

I was also returning to Panama as a college student with the explicit goal of learning more about this country that was my first home. I had my childhood memories, the stories known and retold in New York’s Panamanian diaspora, but I hungered for more. I wanted to understand how those who came before me had lived and understood their realities as Black Panamanians and learning about Panama City was an important part of the puzzle. By speaking with elders about their life histories and memories, I came to know not only the city’s present form, but its past as well.

My first meeting with Inés Sealy took place at the Museo Afroantillano de Panamá (the Afro-Antillean/West Indian Museum of Panama) in the predominantly Afro-descendant and working-class El Marañón, Calidonia neighborhood. The museum, inaugurated in 1980, is housed in a former mission chapel constructed in 1910. It offers visitors a capsule of the rich histories that Afro-Caribbean migrants and their descendants brought to Panama. It also feels like home, with bedspreads I recalled having seen as a child and images of Black women on the move that made me think of a regular day in Colón. But while the museum awed me, Sealy’s life story—which led me through multiple generations of Black migrants, entrepreneurs, and Canal Zone workers—stole the show.

Inés Virginia Sealy was born in Panama City on February 27, 1939. Her parents, both born in the British Caribbean, were among the nearly 200,000 migrants who arrived in Panama during the decade of the Panama Canal construction (1904-1914). Her maternal grandfather was among the 40,000 workers contracted by the U.S. government to build the canal, and her mother was just three months old when they made the journey from Saint Lucia in 1906. The choice to recruit from the British Caribbean was purposeful: these workers spoke English, but could be paid much less than U.S. citizens.

Sealy’s father also worked on the canal construction. He was 19 years old when he migrated from Barbados in 1909. He returned to Barbados after the completion of the canal—only to return to Panama five years later, as Sealy told me lightheartedly. Upon his return, he worked in the Canal Zone and in the military and civilian areas surrounding the canal, both “under his name and that of others.” After eventually formalizing his employment in the Zone, he worked there until Sealy graduated from high school, and then opened a car repair shop.

In 1938, he purchased the home in the Carrasquilla neighborhood of Panama City where Sealy was raised and where, in turn, she raised her own children. In Carrasquilla, Sealy developed close friendships with other Black Panamanians who, like her, spoke English learned from their Caribbean parents, despite being reprimanded for doing so at school.

Though both Sealy’s parents made Panama their permanent home, they chose to remain British colonial citizens instead of applying for Panamanian citizenship. Barbados and Saint Lucia remained British colonies until 1966 and 1979, respectively. There was a lot of “red tape” to becoming Panamanian citizens, including having to pass a citizenship test, Sealy recalled. Additionally, even if you obtained citizenship, it could be revoked. This happened to a contemporary of Sealy’s father, the Barbadian-born William Preston Stoute, who was one of the leaders of the largest labor strike to ever transpire in the Canal Zone.

When her 21st birthday came around, Sealy also had to consider the question of citizenship. According to the Panamanian Constitution of 1946, as someone with foreign-born parents, Sealy had to formally petition to have her birthright citizenship recognized. Applicants needed to prove their “spiritual and material incorporation” into the republic. “Had I known that it would be such a problem to become a Panamanian citizen, I would have applied for Barbadian citizenship,” she joked.

I was five months shy from my own 21st birthday when Sealy shared this experience. I wondered: Would I pass a “spiritual and material incorporation” test in Panama? Would I pass one in the United States? Sealy helped me understand that these processes were intended to exclude and make you question your belonging. Yet in time, that questioning made Sealy want to learn more about her family’s history.

Sealy visited Barbados four times. She did not find any living relatives—“When I was born my father was 48 years old; when I started looking I was 75 years old,” she recalled—she did find the plot where her paternal grandmother was buried. It was in the cemetery of Saint Christopher’s Church, which made a kind of cosmic sense to her, because, her father “when he attended church here [in Panama], did so at Saint Christopher’s Church.”

Sealy followed in her beloved father’s footsteps by working in the Canal Zone, where her English skills made her a desirable candidate. She began in a temporary position as a sales clerk in one of the commissaries, but tenaciously applied to every opening and job-skills test available. “All of us Black women [in the Zone],” she recounted, “were trying to move up in our job positions.” Eventually, she found a permanent post in the Zone library system, where she remained for 23 years. All the while, she continued to further her education, taking classes in library studies at the Universidad de Panamá.

But this education and training didn’t suffice in the face of the Zone’s entrenched race and citizenship hierarchy. Anti-Blackness shaped daily realities in the Panamanian Republic; in the Canal Zone white U.S. citizenship trumped all else. When her superiors promoted a white woman born in the United States—someone with less education than Sealy had—to effectively become Sealy’s boss, she decided she’d had enough. She retired at the age of 48, benefiting from changes in the Zone labor laws that allowed retirement after 23 years of service.

In her long retirement, Sealy became a certified Spanish and English translator, helped coordinate calypso shows (including one featuring Lord Cobra), and volunteered her time with organizations like the Society of Friends of the Museo Afroantillano de Panamá.

My last in-depth conversation with Inés Sealy was in August 2019, 18 years after our first meeting. There was an epic aguacero that day, with lightning, downpours, and the threat of the electricity giving out. But still, we spoke for hours. I had plans to spend more time in Panama in April 2020, but the pandemic changed everything. We chatted briefly on Zoom, and I told her I was applying for grants that would allow me to spend a full year in Panama starting in Fall 2022. Sealy urged me to come sooner. Our elders are leaving us, she warned.

I imagined that I had more time, at the very least with la Señora Sealy. In her 80s, she was still making moves all around Panama. I had to keep up with her. But then she passed away on June 5, 2022. It was just a month before I was finally able to make it back to her city—a city she had helped me understand and love.

When I visit the Museo Afroantillano, I still imagine I will see Inés there. The way I understand and experience Panama City is indebted to the elders like her, who helped me travel from the past and into the present and allowed me to appreciate the ebbs and flows of the spaces that we end up calling home.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Seeing Panama City Through the Eyes of Elders appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The records are difficult to make out at first—blurred rows listing the names of slaveholders, enslaved individuals, and prices under the dim light of the microfilm reader. But once brought into focus, they reveal a harrowing moment: enslaved men and women being appraised for the last time in their lives, a valuation made with abolition in service of direct payments to their former owners. There’s the record listing the enslaved man Santiago Servacio, possessed by the mistress Tereza Castaño, whose value was set at 9,900 pesos. And there are those described as “Many without names” (Varios sin nombre) claimed by Placida Colón for 2,000 pesos—likely elderly given their low assessment. Thousands more like these are stored away, accumulating dust in Colombia’s national archive, in the capital.

We often think of the abolition of slavery as a single, triumphant moment. But in reality, across the Americas, it was a slow process that was rife with concessions for slaveowners. The documents in Bogotá are one example of this. They are what historians call “compensation records,” which guaranteed government payment to former slaveholders to make up for their “lost property” after abolition. According to economic historians Jorge Andrés Tovar Mora and Hermes Tovar Pinzón, the Colombian treasury invested nearly 2.5 million pesos in compensating the former owners of 16,468 enslaved people after the abolition of slavery in 1852. The records are proof of the great lengths that governments went to in order to appease slaveholders.

A page out of thousands of Colombia’s compensation records. Courtesy of Yesenia Barragan.

Compensation to slaveholders after the abolition of slavery was the political consensus among elite powerbrokers across the 19th-century Atlantic World. After 1838, when the British crown abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies, nearly 20 million British pounds were paid out to former masters. In Uruguay, which had a smaller enslaved population, an 1842 abolition law offered indemnification for owners. The French Revolution of 1848 terminated slavery in the country’s Caribbean colonies, again with compensation. Abolition with compensation swept the South American republics—Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Venezuela, and Peru—in the 1850s. The only exceptions to the rule were Brazil and the United States—save for Washington, D.C., which provided slaveholders loyal to the Union $300 for every enslaved person that was emancipated by the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of 1862, as historian Tera W. Hunter has shown.

But even before emancipation, compensation to slaveholders by other means had been taking place. Since the late 18th century, across the Americas, conversations about indemnifying slaveholders for their lost “property” were common when what were called “gradual abolition” or “gradual emancipation” laws started to be passed. “Gradual abolition” was a legislative approach to terminating chattel slavery through gradual, rather than immediate, means.

At the center of gradual emancipation legislation were what were called “Free Birth” or “Free Womb” laws, which sought to gradually end chattel slavery by terminating a long-standing cornerstone of slavery’s logic: partus sequitur ventrem, or the idea that a child’s status as slave or free derives from that of the mother. The Free Womb laws declared that the children of enslaved women born after a specific date would be freed either immediately or after serving their mother’s master for a particular period.

In 1780, the state of Pennsylvania was the first government in the Americas to adopt such a law—“An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” emancipated “Free Womb” children upon reaching the age of 28. It became the blueprint for future gradual emancipation models, followed by Connecticut and Rhode Island, which passed similar laws in 1784. During the Wars of Independence against Spain, the revolutionary governments of Chile and Argentina adopted gradual emancipation laws in 1811 and 1813, respectively. And when the newly christened Colombian republic approved its gradual emancipation law in 1821—in part inspired by these precedents—it legally “freed” the children of enslaved women born after the law’s promulgation, but it kept these children bonded to their mothers’ masters until the age of 18. This decision was the result of incredibly contentious debate, and the question of compensation to slaveholders was at its heart. Colombian statesmen struggled to come to an agreement about the length of bondage that would provide slaveholders with adequate recompense for their eventual loss of their human “assets.”

From late June to mid-July 1821, over 45 delegates from Colombia’s prosperous late-colonial elite debated the composition of the Free Womb law in what would become known as the Congress of Cúcuta. In his opening remarks to the congress, lawyer and author of the gradual emancipation law José Félix de Restrepo argued that Free Womb children’s labor could provide ample compensation to their owners if they were emancipated at age 16 or 18. As part of his argument, Restrepo presented an account of the “standard” life cycle of an enslaved person in their early years, a racial arithmetic that reflected the profoundly violent commodification of Free Womb children.

According to Restrepo, the first two years of an enslaved child’s life imposed little economic burden on the master. As the child aged and their expenses increased, so did their potential productivity. From ages 9 to 12, the enslaved child could perform small but important domestic tasks. Once they reached the age of 12, the youth was considered ready for hard labor, however defined by the individual master; this meant, Restrepo claimed, that masters could retrieve at least double their investment by the time the child reached the age of 14. From 14 to 18 years of age, the investment would quadruple. Slaveholders would consequently be handsomely indemnified for their eventually lost human “properties.”

Other congressional delegates disagreed with Restrepo’s assessments. Delegate Domingo Briceño y Briceño, who argued that the emancipation law would ultimately bring the republic’s downfall, used his own racial accounting to support extending the Free Womb children’s age of bondage. He claimed that masters expended nearly 400 pesos from the moment of an enslaved person’s birth to the age of 8, while they could only produce 144 pesos for their owner from ages 8 to 16, not even half the master’s investment.

After much deliberation, Colombia’s delegates voted 28-17 to set the age of emancipation for Free Womb children at 18. Their gradual emancipation law would serve as a model of white abolitionism with compensation to slaveholders across the continent. In 1824, for example, a few months after the Demerara Rebellion, a massive slave uprising that took place in Britain’s colony in present-day Guyana, Britain’s Marquess of Lansdowne petitioned the House of Lords to pass an abolitionist measure by calling attention to how, in Colombia’s “provisions for the gradual extinction of slavery[, …] care had been taken to secure to all parties compensation for loss.”

As though having benefited from human property for centuries were not enough, freedom for the enslaved people in the Americas came with compensation to slaveholders—first in the form of Free Womb laws, later in direct payouts. It forces us to understand the plentiful ways that slaveholders received reparations during the gradual and final abolition of slavery. The struggles of formerly enslaved people and the enduring stranglehold that slaveholders had over them make clear the need for reparative justice for people of African descent across the Americas. For the thousands of Free Womb children across Colombia and the Americas that were the test subjects of gradual abolition. And for the enslaved men like Santiago Servacio and the “Many without names” whose paper bodies fill the archives of abolition.

The post Why Did Governments Compensate Slaveholders for Abolition? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One survivor of the destruction living along the border of Honduras and Guatemala told a reporter that most of the rest of the people in his village had headed for the United States. “The sea took them out,” he said. They and thousands of other environmental refugees began trudging north through a gantlet of border patrols, human traffickers, narco-terrorists, and sexual predators in what came to be called the “Caravan of the Damned.”

Meanwhile, roughly 200 miles to the west, in the Dry Corridor that runs through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, rainfall has become unpredictable and sparse. Agriculture as it has been practiced there for hundreds of years—subsistence-level production of beans and maize—is no longer possible. Unlike the shocking blow meted out by a hurricane, the suffering in this zona seca has accumulated gradually, but relentlessly, in an example of what the eco-critic Rob Nixon has called “slow violence.” The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that 3.5 million people in the region now need humanitarian assistance. And things are almost certain to get worse. The Sixth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in early August, projects that most of Central America will become even hotter and drier in the coming decades.

Central Americans are paying the price for anthropogenic climate change they didn’t cause. Less than 1 percent of historical greenhouse gas emissions have been produced in Central America. But consider this: Since 1750, the U.S. has emitted almost twice as much as the rest of the world combined. Most of us learn as children the lesson that if you break something, you are responsible for fixing it—or, at the very least, for acknowledging what you did. More than any other nation on Earth, the U.S. is responsible for “breaking” the climate that has allowed human civilization as we know it to exist. When it comes to climate refugees—especially those from Central America—we have a special obligation to support and welcome them. Climate chaos has exacerbated the misery U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic policy has inflicted on the region for decades. “Climate change means either too little or too much water,” the author Todd Miller observed in his haunting, deeply reported 2017 book, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security, “and we are already experiencing both.” A more stable hemispheric future will depend on a combination of adapting to the reality of too much or too little water where that is possible, and reshaping policies regarding refugees to accommodate those who have to flee the places where it isn’t.

This dynamic of hydrological extremes has set in motion a massive movement of people around the globe. The World Bank estimates that by 2050, unless we take dramatic action to stem greenhouse gas emissions, 143 million people will become internal climate migrants. One and a half million of those each year will hail from the Western Hemisphere, and will surge toward the U.S. border with Mexico.

Central Americans are already fleeing floods and droughts of Biblical proportions, moving first within their own nations but eventually heading north. According to a recent analysis by the advocacy organization Franciscans International, 821 people per day seek the possibility of asylum in the U.S. A recent joint reporting project between ProPublica and the New York Times modeled climate-induced migration in the region. Every single simulation the team generated (supplemented by powerful visualizations to bring the point home) predicted massive, destabilizing internal and external migration.

During my own time researching grassroots climate resilience efforts in the zona seca of northern Nicaragua, I observed how the increasing unpredictability of the climate can thwart even the most determined and imaginative initiatives. The people of Sabana Grande have received international acclaim for their solar energy projects, their agro-ecological restoration efforts, and their experiments in forest farming—and for the ways that these projects have empowered marginalized members of the community, especially women. Yet for all of the economic and social uplift these projects have produced, the climate-induced precarity of subsistence agriculture pushes people away—to cities in Nicaragua, but also to Costa Rica, Spain, and, increasingly, the United States.

Climate-induced migration is a quintessential “wicked problem.” The term, originally coined to convey the complexities of social policy formulation, describes a tangle of interlocking, difficult-to-articulate challenges, which only have solutions that produce additional challenges. The climate itself is a complex system that, in becoming more unpredictable, produces challenges for agriculture, infrastructure, and public health. Each of these areas, in turn, is made more vexing in places like Central America by poor governance, social and economic inequality, and pre-existing environmental degradation.

And there’s another wicked dimension to the climate migration problem: Until very recently, the U.S. federal government has been slow to acknowledge either the existence of, or the need for, aggressive policy to deal with the growing climate emergency.

In July, the Biden administration released a plan to address the Central American migration crisis. Unfortunately, the report reduced the role of climate almost to a footnote, instead emphasizing internal factors such as corruption, gender inequality, and economic development. All of these contribute to migration, but the rapidly changing climate is the context for them all, exacerbating every other problem people in Central America face. By emphasizing internal problems and downplaying the role of climate change in migration, the U.S. attempts to evade responsibility for its outsized role in loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases.

The U.S. should be supporting Central American governments in decreasing corruption, tackling inequality by promoting economic growth, and reducing violence as a way to help vulnerable people stay in their homes. But the fact remains that millions of people in the coming decades will have to find new places to live. Some will try to come to the United States. Any national strategy addressing the migration crisis should acknowledge that reality by unilaterally designating those fleeing climate disasters as refugees, and by agreeing to become a refuge for some meaningful number of them.

At the moment, people fleeing climate disaster do not qualify for refugee status. The United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, written in the aftermath of World War II and revised in the 1960s, clearly delineates political or social traumas that might compel a person or groups of people to flee their homes—for example, potentially mortal threats due to civil war, religious persecution, or political oppression—but does not mention displacement due to environmental disasters. The rules need an update. As María Cristina García, a historian at Cornell University who has devoted her recent scholarship to the post-war history of refugees, puts it, “People have been displaced by climate for millennia, but we are now at a particular historical moment, facing a new type of environmentally driven migration that will be more fast and furious. It will require incredible adaptability and political will to keep up with the changes that are forecasted to happen.”

Of the many wicked dimensions to the problem of climate refugees is the current paucity of political will to do more than throw up walls—literal and legal—and hope that they keep the challenges at bay. But hope is not a strategy, especially in the face of geophysical reality.

Miller concludes Storming the Wall with an epilogue: excerpts from a letter he’d written in 2015 to his unborn son, to be opened in the year 2050. There are “hundreds of thousands of groups, individuals, communities and movements putting themselves on the line, putting themselves in peril in order to imagine something new,” Miller writes, as an offering of grace to a 35-year-old version of a person he’s not met yet. He’s thinking of people like Martín Zapil, the 20-something K’iche’ farmer who founded Sorel Granjas Ecológicas, a cooperative that supplies vegetables to urban markets, along with thousands of other activists and organizations that promote more widespread land ownership to keep Central Americans in their homes. But such resilience initiatives and reforms can only partially stem the tide of people being irrevocably pushed away from home by anthropogenic climate change. For those who cannot stay, the United States has an obligation to become home for as many as we can accommodate.

The post What Does the U.S. Owe Climate Refugees? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But, as someone who has been analyzing asylum since the 1980s, I look at these announcements and see continuity. Sessions’ policies fit a pattern, going back decades, of excluding asylum seekers from Central America from the human rights protections afforded by U.S. and international law.

Central America should not be singled out in this way. After all, asylum law is supposed to be politically neutral. But the reality for decades has been anything but. Concerns about admitting asylees from Central American countries that are close to us, and who are fleeing from regimes that the United States supports, have led to disparate outcomes for citizens of these nations.

Such exclusions began during the civil wars of the 1980s when Central Americans immigrated to the United States in increased numbers, fleeing political violence in their homelands. Because the United States supported repressive right-wing governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, accepting refugees from those countries threatened to undermine U.S. foreign policy.

In this process, politics trumped reality. Central American civil wars were actually fought over such issues as access to land, a more equitable distribution of resources, and political repression, but the United States saw these wars as part of a Cold War fight against communism. So, for example, the United States provided more than $1 million a day in military and economic assistance to El Salvador, despite its government committing widespread human rights abuses, including massacres of peasants and death squad activity.

In 1984, less than 3 percent of the asylum claims filed by Salvadorans and Guatemalans were granted, in contrast to approval rates in the range of 32 to 60 percent for applicants from Poland, Afghanistan, and Iran. U.S. detention centers also used coercive practices to pressure Salvadorans and Guatemalans to agree to depart the country voluntarily instead of filing asylum claims. Detainees generally were not informed of their right to apply for asylum, were threatened with lengthy detention, and were prevented from meeting with attorneys.

This discriminatory treatment gave rise to a community of advocates who, throughout the 1980s, pursued redress in the courts while also trying to sway public opinion. A class action suit, Orantes Hernandez v. Meese, resulted in a permanent injunction in 1988 preventing coercive tactics against detainees.

The process for Central Americans was so unfair that, beginning in the 1980s, religious congregations declared themselves to be “sanctuaries” for Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees in order to draw attention to the need for asylum while also challenging U.S. aid to the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments. Following the conviction of two priests, a minister, a nun and four layworkers on alien-smuggling and conspiracy charges, religious groups and Central American community organizations sued the U.S. government, charging that asylum processes were discriminatory.

This case, known as American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh or “ABC” was settled out of court, enabling these asylum seekers to file claims under rules designed to ensure fair consideration of their cases. At the same time, the 1990 Immigration Act created Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and designated Salvadorans as the first group to receive it.

By joining forces across political divides, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans were able to secure passage of the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) in 1997. To do so, they, their allies, and Central American leaders argued successfully that the U.S. government had granted these immigrants temporary documentation, and that they should be exempted from immigration restrictions adopted in 1996. Importantly, NACARA provides a precedent for creating a pathway to lawful permanent residency and eventually citizenship for TPS recipients.

During the post-war years, violence in Central American countries continued, but shifted from civil war to gangs and crime. The gang violence is the product of multiple factors: impunity granted to human rights abusers; an abundance of weapons; corruption; income inequality; the trauma of the war years; and the rise of drug cartels and U.S. deportation policies, which have sent U.S.-based gang members to Central American countries.

Central American families—particularly in the Northern triangle of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—experienced extreme insecurity including forcible gang recruitment, extortion, sexual violence, assault, and murder in the late 1990s and the 2000s. Yet, just as during the war years, the U.S. government is now arguing that the violence experienced by Central Americans is generally not grounds for political asylum. For example, in a 2008 Board of Immigration Appeals decision, three Salvadoran youth who had been beaten, harassed, and threatened with death and rape for refusing to join the MS-13 gang were denied asylum, despite widespread evidence of such abuses, including the shooting and killing of another youth in their neighborhood who had also refused to join.

While obtaining asylum remained restricted, immigrants living in the United States were increasingly treated as suspects, a process of criminalization that increased their risk of being deported. Immigration reforms adopted in 1996 expanded the range of criminal convictions that incurred immigration penalties, restricted avenues for immigrants to legalize their status, and made detention mandatory for many. Secure Communities, a program launched under President George W. Bush and expanded under President Obama, increased collaboration between police, prisons, and immigration authorities, with the result that for noncitizens, coming into contact with the criminal justice system could result in being deported from the United States.

Prosecution of immigration violations escalated to the point that these now comprise a significant portion of the federal docket. Individuals who had spent most of their lives in the United States and who may even have acquired lawful permanent residency were being removed permanently, resulting in devastating family separations. Latinos—particularly Mexicans and Central Americans—are disproportionately targeted in these enforcement practices.

The current administration’s policies toward Central Americans extend this history of criminalization and of restricting access to asylum—by defining the violence that is part of everyday lives as outside the boundaries of U.S. protection. President Trump has repeatedly associated Central Americans with crime and gangs, referring to their homelands as “shithole countries,” and suggesting that all who enter the country without authorization might be MS-13. Such statements fly in the fact of criminologists’ findings that the foreign-born commit fewer crimes on average than do people born in the United States.

Other Trump actions revisit the past. The administration rescinded TPS, or temporary protections, that had been issued to Salvadorans and Hondurans following natural disasters, despite ongoing violence in Honduras and El Salvador. Sessions also reversed progress that had been made in making the legal case for domestic violence and gang violence as a basis for asylum. It’s true that even before Sessions overruled these rationales, asylum cases based on such violence were very difficult to win, with 75 to 80 percent of such claims being denied. But one impact of Sessions’ ruling is that many asylum seekers will not even pass the first hurdle for asylum seekers—interviews at which they must demonstrate credible fear—and therefore will be unable to submit their claims.

Likewise, even though family separations have garnered attention since the Trump administration adopted a zero tolerance policy on unauthorized border crossings, immigrant families have had to contend with separations of various sorts for decades, if not longer. When legalization opportunities were restricted by the 1996 reforms, immigrant parents were unable to acquire lawful permanent residency, which would have enabled them to petition for children who were left behind in their countries of origin to immigrate legally. Temporary statuses such as TPS do not confer the right to leave the United States and reenter without permission from the U.S. government, so TPS recipients have been unable to visit family members in their countries of origin for years. Deportees are often separated from family members in the United States, and are unable to return legally for visits. Such separations are not as dramatic as those that have currently captured public attention, but they are nonetheless devastating. When I have interviewed immigrants who are seeking legalization opportunities, interviewees have broken down in tears describing their inability to visit their parents on their deathbeds to say goodbye.

This history of exclusion has not prevented immigration. On the contrary, a study by the Pew Research Center found that between 2007 and 2015, the U.S. immigrant population from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras rose by 25 percent, at a time when the immigrant population from Mexico declined by 6 percent. Perhaps this is because immigration is driven less by U.S. policies than by conditions in immigrants’ countries of origin. If so, what is being accomplished by exclusionary policies?

Ending the repeated exclusion of Central American asylum seekers would require bringing asylum policies into alignment with the forms of violence that actually occur in the communities these individuals are fleeing. Then, protections must be zealously enforced, for example, by creating meaningful opportunities for individuals to apply for asylum, providing those who pass credible “fear interviews” with temporary permission to remain in the country instead of placing them in detention, allowing parents and children to remain together; in short, caring for victims of persecution instead of punishing them. Doing so would promote family integrity, support human rights, and alter the dynamics of the historic relationship between the United States and Central American nations.

The post Why the U.S. Is So Unfair to Central American Refugees appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“The government has made a disaster,” he says. “You can’t go in and sell here, because it’s privatized.”

To his chagrin, construction of new attractions continues for a mile along the lakefront. He sells a bag of chips to a brown-uniformed guard at the gate of a building site. Behind the gate, leveled earth stretches along the lake to where Julio squatted in a sheet metal shanty before a 2010 flood displaced him and his partner, Aryeri.

“The tragedy,” he calls the flood.

In his memory, their lakefront home remains an oasis. He recalls the plants that grew in Aryeri’s garden as if saying their names could bring them back: olives, ten o’clock flowers, papayas, passion fruit, mango, hog plum, chili peppers.

At the gate, Julio convinces the guard to let him walk across the construction site. “What a disaster!” he says when he enters the site. Heaps of brush are piled around the few trees that remain. Potable water from a broken pipe streams toward the lake. The square outlines of house walls mark the bare, burnt-umber soil blazed with bulldozer tracks. A crumpled yellow T-shirt, a pair of underwear, and a shredded green plastic cup top a mound of dirt.

There’s nothing else left of the barrio that Julio haunted when he lived on the lakefront. In October 2014, civil defense forces forcibly evacuated about 300 families from the site, though they weren’t in imminent danger. Some wanted to leave, some didn’t. They were all taken to a nearby emergency shelter, ostensibly because of the barrio’s vulnerability to flooding. Many claim that the government cleared the barrio only to develop the lakefront, repeating a process of sacrificing poor people’s homes for profit that happens all too often around the world. But in Managua, most of the nearly 30,000 people displaced between 2010 and 2014 were voluntarily evacuated, fleeing floods, landslides, and crumbling earthquake ruins.

Julio Baldelomar vending on the lakefront in Managua. Photo by Douglas Haynes.

Next to the stream pouring from the broken pipe, a girl wearing baggy black shorts and a black T-shirt many sizes too big pounds a sledgehammer at a slab of concrete. Her curly, dark hair is flecked with crud, and the bridge of her nose bears a dirty scab. Her feet barely cling to green plastic sandals with holes in both heels.

Julio approaches the girl, grabs her sledgehammer, and starts swinging it at the concrete. It’s about a foot thick and deeply entrenched in the soft earth next to the stream. The job is too big for the nine-year-old girl, who is only twice the height of the sledgehammer.

Julio heaves and swings the hammer over and over. His green canvas backpack sways as the head hits the concrete with the full force of his considerable girth. Gradually, the concrete breaks into smaller pieces, revealing several long pieces of rebar. But the steel the girl is seeking to sell for scrap is stuck in the ground. He’s about to give up. Sweat glosses his bronze forehead and drips from his nose. He grabs a white rag out of his pocket and wipes his face. He sets the sledgehammer down, plants his boots firmly, and tugs and tugs on the rebar. He almost falls into the stream. The earth won’t loose the steel.

Then something miraculous happens. A bulldozer driver steers his machine over to Julio and opens the cab door to buy a bag of chips. Then he motions for Julio and the girl to get out of the way. The driver lowers the blade into the soil below the concrete and pushes the slab into the air. But the ground still doesn’t let the steel go.

As the bulldozer backs away, a digger with a bucket loader drives over and takes a swipe at the concrete. It only needs two swipes to loosen the concrete and long rebar from the earth. Julio whacks the sledgehammer at the remaining bits of concrete clinging to the rebar. Within minutes, he has removed nearly all of it. The girl beams.

Julio sees himself in the girl. He used to forage the city for scrap metal as a child, too. The girl will get 20 or 30 córdobas for the rebar, enough to quell her hunger with some tortillas and a soda.

Julio lopes away in his ripped jeans toward the neoclassical towers of Managua’s old cathedral, hollowed out in a 1972 earthquake that killed at least 11,000 people, left hundreds of thousands homeless, and leveled 10 square miles of the city’s heart. Managua has never recovered. Squatter settlements sprang up in the ruins of what was once Central America’s most cosmopolitan downtown. Tons of rubble were dumped in the lake where today’s recreation areas are being built and squatters are being swamped. One disaster has covered another. Despite decades of grandiose plans for urban revitalization, the poor still scrape the city’s margins for the dregs of Nicaragua’s stuttering economy.

On the other side of the cathedral, in the shady Parque Central, Julio washes his arms and hands under a tap in a fountain. He sells a few bags of chips, asking each customer if they want hot sauce. Dusk dims the park. Parakeets roost in the treetops.

After dark, he gets a bus home and walks through the blue door of the new concrete house he shares with Aryeri. It’s the first home either of them has ever had with a legal title, a bathroom, and a floor that isn’t dirt. When the flood drove them from the lakefront, they lived 16 months in an emergency shelter’s dark cubicle. Then the Nicaraguan government gave them this furnished, three-room house in a community for flood refugees. Julio bought plants for Aryeri, and now she tends a new garden, lush with ferns and a red-flowering living fence.

The couple now worries less about Managua’s torrential rains drowning their home, though the rains’ growing intensity and the city’s rapid expansion cause the metropolis to regularly flood. They’ve left the community of squatters who make up about one-quarter of Managua’s residents. But Julio still prizes the camaraderie of street vendors and scavengers he grew up with, and the government’s takeover of the lakefront looms like another deluge for his income.

Before Julio had gone out vending in the morning, Aryeri sat down on his lap. He squeezed her with both arms. Their faces glowed. Julio’s black hair was slicked-back; Aryeri’s frizzed in every direction. She rubbed Julio’s round belly.

“Your cooking is how I got it,” he joked.

He doesn’t have to scavenge for scraps to survive anymore. But he still knows how to find them if need be.

The post Surviving Managua’s Government Crackdowns and Torrential Rains appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The two moments project what I believe is the Janus face of American patriotism: one celebrating our never-die spirit, the other revealing the dark current of xenophobia.

The upsurge of 240,000 migrants in recent months, 52,000 of them unaccompanied minors, has unleashed the same arguments we’ve witnessed in the endless debates about immigration. But once we consider the twin questions of “why is this happening?” and “how should we respond?”, it becomes clear that the current crisis is more of a humanitarian one than it is another chapter in our immigration debates.

The fact that many migrants have come from three countries—Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala—suggest that something is wrong there. Although critics of these refugees hate to admit it, the crisis exposes a legacy of flawed American policies in the region: from the CIA-inspired coup d’état in Guatemala (1954) and bribes of Honduran officials to suppress export taxes on bananas by U.S. agricultural conglomerate United Fruit (in the late 1960s and through the mid-1970s) to the U.S.-financed contra war in Nicaragua that consumed its neighbors and the CIA involvement in Guatemala’s civil war (the 1980s).

The current instability can more precisely be tracked to the recent drug wars in Latin America and the failure of U.S. immigration policy. Drug cartels filled the vacuum of governance created by suppressed democracy and arrested economic development in these countries. Members of these crime syndicates now rule the streets and carry out threats of murder against young people and their families if they don’t cooperate. U.S. drug consumption is the fuel that drives this not-so-underground economic engine. That one of the most murderous crime syndicates, Mara Salvatrucha, was born and raised in Los Angeles is a testament to the direct connection between failed U.S. drug enforcement policies and violence in the region today.

And then, instead of addressing the drug, immigration, and economic challenges at home and abroad, Washington passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996. This punitive legislation led to the deportation of many Salvadoran gang members, who became the shock troops of a new, more violent Central America.

We are not for want of evidence of this history. Sonia Nazario won a Pulitzer Prize for the Los Angeles Times in 2003 for her series of articles, “Enrique’s Journey,” about a 17-year-old Honduran boy trying to reunite with his mother in the United States. In 2010, the Academy Award-nominated documentary film Which Way Home shared the experience of many children making the trip northward through Mexico atop a cargo train known popularly as “The Beast.”

More recently, Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez accompanied minors on the train eight times and wrote a series of graphic and deeply disturbing reports for an online newspaper, ElFaro.net. These reports have since been assembled into a book and translated into English as The Beast. Documenting harrowing accounts of sacrifice and heartbreak, Martínez’s reporting reveals the unambiguous reason why migrants have been risking their lives to make the trip: the vast majority of these migrants are fleeing real threats of violence and death at home. Forget about the pursuit of the American dream, an American education, or an American job. They are simply trying to stay alive.

Plenty of nonprofit organizations and the United Nations have collected testimony from migrants that confirm these media representations. Leslie Vélez, senior protection officer for the U.N. High Commission on Refugees, recently reported that, of 404 immigrant children from Mexico and Central America who were interviewed, 58 percent of them were fleeing violence. She concluded: “We liken the situation very much to the situation of the recruitment of child soldiers on other continents. Children are particularly vulnerable, they are susceptible to harm, they are easily terrorized, and the very fact that they are children is the single factor in the harm that they are experiencing. They are specifically being target[ed] to be recruited. They are the ones who are being bullied.”

To blame the victims in this situation is not only dishonest; it is cruel and inconsistent with our nation’s promise to welcome the “tired” and “poor” of other countries, especially from hemispheric neighbors who are coping with conditions that are partially of our making. The accusation waged by many protesters that youthful migrants are diseased, and therefore, not “fit to be citizens” is a well-worn and specious claim that has been used against Asian and Latino immigrants for as long as they have been coming to our shores and through our borders. We need to strike a different chord, check such racist assumptions, and see the humanity in the people who are now coming to us in desperation.

In the face of such trauma, we need to treat these new arrivals as what they really are—refugees, not voluntary migrants. According to the 1951 United Nations Convention on the status of refugees, a refugee is “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” U.S. immigration policy—broken as it is—still maintains “temporary protected status” that should be extended to these migrants. Under such protection, a migrant is allowed to stay in the country for a year and a half, and have his or her case re-evaluated annually.

It isn’t yet clear what President Obama will do about this humanitarian crisis, and about the children themselves. He said Wednesday in Texas that this is a real “problem,” not political “theater” and is calling for more resources to secure the border. But the president hasn’t ruled out deporting many of these immigrants, in what would amount to another attempt to convince the American public that he can be both tough on border crossers and sympathetic to immigration reform. Such actions would be consistent with his unprecedented number of deportations to date. Playing politics with the fate of these children is inexcusable—doing so when immigration reform is dead in Congress anyway makes little sense, even from a cynical, Washington-centric perspective.

The sooner all Americans recognize that this is a humanitarian crisis and not fodder for tired old political debates, the sooner we can do the right thing and begin to reclaim the real meaning of “USA!” as it reverberates throughout the world and in our hemisphere.

The post What’s Happening at the Border Is a Humanitarian Crisis, Not a Political One appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The case is also an opportunity for Americans, who have generally failed to acknowledge our responsibilities for brutal Cold War-era repression in Central America, to reflect on a genocide in which the U.S. government was arguably complicit. Guatemala suffered one of the most brutal cases of government repression in the Western Hemisphere, a 34-year-long conflict whose goals were guided by U.S. foreign policy. The Guatemalan truth commission estimated that 200,000 people were killed, 50,000 of whom disappeared, while also concluding that the state committed genocide against the country’s indigenous peoples. Thousands of villages were razed, hundreds of massacres were committed, and torture, rape, and abuse were institutionalized through “scorched earth” policies that were most intense under Ríos Montt’s government.

While more than 90 percent of serious violations were committed by the state, Guatemalan courts have pursued only a handful of prosecutions. The case against Ríos Montt and co-defendant José Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, his former intelligence director (who was acquitted), represents both the first time the country has brought a case against high-ranking leaders and the first time it has indicted anyone for genocide.

The genocide charge, conviction, and subsequent annulment have polarized Guatemalan society. Many people, including representatives of indigenous groups and human rights advocates, see the case—which focused on specific abuses against the Ixil people, one of the country’s many indigenous groups—as the most significant challenge ever to Guatemala’s culture of impunity. It is both an official vindication of the value of decades of heroic struggles to document mass killings and a sign that society may finally be ready to address the criminal and moral responsibility for what is known in the country as “La Violencia.” Following the Constitutional Court’s annulment of the Rios Montt conviction, Guatemalan civil society instituted a nationwide campaign, “ ¡Sí hubo genocidio!”—“Yes, there was genocide!”

For those on the right—conservative politicians, retired military personnel, and the business elite—the court’s judgment is understood as a profound miscarriage of justice, the result of outside manipulation or pandering to the international community. Among these critics is Guatemala’s current president, himself a former general, who has denied that genocide was committed. “When I say that here in Guatemala there is no genocide, I say it from my experiences,” he said in an interview with CNN after the Ríos Montt ruling, referring to his deployment as an officer in the same region and at the same time reviewed by the court, and perhaps revealing a fear that the conviction of the former head of state might lead to further prosecutions against other former military leaders.

There are few legal concepts that carry the weight and power of the term genocide. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the subject has called it “the ultimate crime and the gravest violation of human rights it is possible to commit.” The Genocide Convention, created in the wake of the devastation of World War II, was the first international human rights treaty of the postwar era. It entered into force in 1951, a full quarter century before the major conventions that define the foundation of international human rights law, and has been ratified by more than 140 states (including the United States, which has a generally poor record of accepting human rights treaties). Yet it is only in the last two decades—with the creation of various new courts such as the ad-hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Court, and the Iraq High Tribunal—that the commitments enshrined in the genocide convention have been put to practical use. The first international genocide conviction was not until 1998, a half-century after the convention was drafted, and the Ríos Montt case represents one of only a handful of genocide prosecutions.

The crime of genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Convention as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such” through one or more of five destructive acts. This definition is remarkably consistent throughout the world, with the language copied word for word in the various domestic and international bodies where it is used. But despite the widespread acceptance of the definition, each element presents intricate interpretive and evidentiary issues, and the infrequency with which the charge has been brought means that many ambiguities remain unresolved. How does one understand the meaning of “intent” and then prove that “intent” existed in a particular case? What level of violence is required to meet the definition of the destruction of a group “in part”? What sort of targeting must occur for the group to be identified “as such”? What proof is necessary for determining the existence of “a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group,” and how is membership in this group defined?

The evolving jurisprudence on genocide may provide guidance on these questions, but existing court decisions in one system have no necessary authority for cases processed in a different system. More significantly, the legal proof for a case of genocide often conflicts with popular, morally motivated understandings of the term. For example, the plain language of the Convention allows an individual to be found guilty of genocide without the death of a single individual if there is a clear policy of “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Conversely, look to the case of Cambodia, popularly referenced as one of the most significant cases of genocide since the Holocaust, in which as many as 2 million people died under the terror of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. However, these mass killings, horrific as they clearly are, may not meet the definition of genocide because the vast majority of victims were from the same national, ethnic, and religious group as the perpetrators, but were targeted for political reasons. This has created a surprising outcome in current trials in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, where charges of genocide only apply to specific subgroups of the vast victim population—the Cham, an ethnic minority, and Vietnamese, a national group, rather than applying the crime to the brutal mass slaughter of millions—formalizing a stark division between the specific legal application of the term and the popular understanding of its descriptive power.

The debate over the Ríos Montt case also highlights the tensions between genocide’s status as a complex crime whose meaning in practice is steadily evolving and its longstanding status as the most significant mode of moral condemnation for atrocities. Those who deny the genocide claim against General Ríos Montt assert that government repression, severe as it may have been, was part of a legitimate counter-insurgency effort where the lines between civilians and combatants were blurred. They argue that the state’s intent was not to target the Ixil people for destruction but to stamp out a leftist insurgency rooted in the countryside and in areas with high concentrations of indigenous people. Those supporting the genocide claim draw attention to the targeted assassination of indigenous leaders, mass resettlement programs, and the identification of the Ixil, in general, as enemies of the state. They point to the killing of thousands of unarmed indigenous villagers—coupled with systematic rape and torture and the targeting of women, children, infants, and the elderly—and assert that such actions define the state as responsible for genocide.

As heated, threatening, and potentially dangerous as discussion over these issues may be, the Ríos Montt conviction has forced Guatemala to confront its past in a way that no other action has done, not even the 1999 truth commission report that made similar claims. And herein lies the complex power of the term genocide: Its profound condemnatory nature through specific prosecutions demands a response and requires an engagement with the substance of the claim in a way that is unique among serious crimes.

Only a few years ago, defenders of the military’s action during the country’s civil war routinely denied that massacres, disappearances, torture, rape, and other human rights violations were ever committed by the state. Yet now, confronted with the public airing of detailed records of violence committed under the Ríos Montt regime, there are few critics left who dispute some level of official responsibility for brutal atrocities. Even those denying the genocide charge have barely criticized Ríos Montt’s conviction for “crimes against humanity,” which refers to severe acts of violence committed in a widespread and systematic manner and was one of the core crimes developed in the Nuremburg prosecutions against high-ranking Nazi leaders.

The ongoing legal procedures in the Ríos Montt case, from the recent annulment of the judgment to whatever comes next, is part of a process in Guatemala and around the world through which we are all learning about the meaning of genocide. This involves finding a balance between the specificity of the term’s technical application and its broad social and moral authority, with an understanding that both are core elements of what genocide is and must be.

Regardless of whether the conviction is sustained (or whether Ríos Montt, who is 86, passes away before the process reaches completion), two irreversible feats have been accomplished by this case. The Guatemalan leader was convicted of genocide by a legitimate court respecting due process protections. And, by focusing on the core issue at stake—genocide—the case has forced Guatemalan society to reckon more seriously with its brutal, tragic history, opening the space for a debate has served the goals of truth and accountability.

The post Genocide in Our Hemisphere appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.