Inside the Imperial Residence – Canadian Dimension

An “imperial fucking waiting room.” That’s how Polo, a pseudonymous employee of an immigrant rights group, describes Siglo XXI, reportedly the largest immigrant detention center in Latin America. The facility is located in Tapachula, Mexico, near the border with Guatemala. According to the Geneva-based Global Detention Project, Siglo XXI stores migrants and provides inadequate access to food, medical care and clean drinking water. People have reportedly died and attempted suicide in the detention center. Journalists are not allowed inside Siglo XXI, but the Associated Press heard testimonies about life inside, according to which “women slept in the hallways or in the dining room among rats, cockroaches and pigeon droppings, while children cried, mothers reused diapers and guards treated everyone with contempt.”

Such circumstances are brought to life in Inside Siglo XXIthe fifth book by Belén Fernández, one of the few journalists to have set foot in the facility. Fernández, a Al Jazeera columnist and Jacobin guest editor, was granted access to the prison not because she had a press pass, but because she was incarcerated—thanks to an expired visa. The author used the ordeal to write an illuminating book that combines memoir and journalism to offer both compelling political analysis and a glimpse into some of the people locked up to escape poverty and violence—often caused or exacerbated by U.S. policy in the region.

In less capable hands, this book might have become a self-indulgent grotesquery: a book about migrant detention in Mexico, focused on the experience of an American. Fernández, however, handles the potential pitfalls of her story diligently. She is reflexive about her position as a “gringa” and the irony that the other prisoners are desperately trying to get to the same country where she wants to avoid deportation. Fernández also describes her concern about “using my fellow prisoners as my own personal prison population for journalistic exploitation. People who were already physically and emotionally exhausted on every level had no need for gringa running around and questioning them about their tragedies.”

Inside Siglo XXI‘s most heartfelt moments are about the ways in which prisoners support one another. Early in Fernández’s time in prison, she wanders alone in despair until a group of Honduran, Salvadoran, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Cuban women insist she join them, and their company cheers her up. Fernández and a Bangladeshi woman share a tender moment about the mental anguish the latter endured, particularly the despair she knew her incarceration was causing her mother back home. Such “emotional solidarity,” Fernández writes, constitutes “an anti-systemic ‘fuck you’ to U.S.-backed policies that play out on migrant bodies.”

The author places contemporary migration to the US in the context of the US’s economic, political, and military wars in Latin America and the Caribbean. Fernández describes the ways in which Washington’s devastating blockade of Cuba and its brutal sanctions against Venezuela have driven people to leave both countries in droves. She shows the relationship between Honduran flight to the US and the 2009 US-backed coup against the moderately leftist, democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. His ouster came coincidentally after he dared to raise the minimum wage, implement pro-peasant agrarian reforms, and question communities affected by industrial mining about their views on the practice. After the coup, the US expanded the number of military bases in the country and increased aid to Honduran security forces. During this period, the homicide rate rose dramatically, accompanied by a wave of killings targeting anti-coup journalists, teachers, environmental activists, farmershuman rights activists and LGBT+ organizers (and non-organizers).

When U.S.-funded death squads slaughtered thousands of people in El Salvador during the 1980-1992 civil war, large numbers of Salvadorans sought refuge in the U.S. Some in the Los Angeles area formed gangs, partly as a mechanism of communal self-defense, and when the war ended, the U.S. deported many of them, including those who had served time in U.S. prisons, back to El Salvador. There, U.S.-fostered inequality and extrajudicial killings created fertile ground for a rise in the murder rate and the proliferation of transnational criminal gangs such as MS-13, which in turn provided an ideological rationale for cracking down on migrants attempting to enter the U.S.

Haiti is another instructive case. The reparations that the tiny island nation was forced to pay to France for carrying out a successful anti-slavery uprising left the island bankrupt and forced to take out massive loans from global lenders. To ensure that these loans were repaid, U.S. Marines invaded Port-au-Prince and stole half of the country’s gold reserves from the central bank. U.S. Marines then occupied Haiti for nearly two decades, reintroducing forced, unpaid labor into the country. The U.S. then financed the Duvaliers, two coups against the democratically elected governments of Jean-Bertrand Aristide that sent Haitians seeking asylum to Guantanamo Bay, and the Obama administration’s plan to halt a 31-cent-an-hour increase in the minimum wage for Haitians working for U.S. garment manufacturers. Recently, we have seen the US step up the deportation of Haitians seeking a safer and more prosperous life than that offered by the US-allied Haitian ruling class and its undemocratic governments. As Fernández notes, “the purpose of US capitalism has never been to actually solve[humanitarian crises]but rather to find lucrative non-solutions to the problems they create.”

This is a highly readable and at times darkly funny book. The author paints a vivid picture of life in Siglo XXI, although some of her digressions into her personal experiences and observations in prison are less than engaging, especially compared to the bulk of the book. Still, in the midst of a US presidential election between Kamala “Don’t Come” Harris and Donald Trump, who plans to deport 15-20 million people, and in a context where the Latin American “pink tide” has been revived, Inside Siglo XXI is a valuable resource for understanding the current economic climate and the people whose lives are affected by it.

Greg Shupak is a fiction and political analysis writer and teaches Media Studies and English at the University of Guelph-Humber. He is the author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media. He writes a monthly column for Canadian Dimension and his work appears regularly in outlets including Electronic Intifada, FAIR, The Guardian, In These Times, Jacobin, and The Nation.