@RaulRomero_mx
10/15/2021
In recent weeks, two videos portraying racism and xenophobia have circulated widely on social media and in the press in Mexico. The first one records the moment in southern Mexico, in the state of Chiapas, when National Guard and immigration agents attempt to violently detain a large group of migrants. The most atrocious moment occurs when, on at least two occasions, a migration agent steps on the head of a person lying on the ground. The second video captures similar events in the U.S. state of Texas. There, you can see several border agents on horseback, chasing and throwing migrants.
We have seen similar and worse scenes in recent years: migrant children being caged and separated from their families, gunshots or dog chases against people who leave their places of origin tired of poverty and violence, and venture out in search of a better life.
The most contradictory thing is that the United States is a country made up of migrants and that lives off the work that those people do in that country. Mexico, for its part, has as its main source of income the money that millions of Mexicans send from the United States.
Pablo González Casanova, Latin America's most prominent living sociologist, recently asserted that in the world there is a confrontation between those who understand freedom as the freedom of the great monopolies of capital to dominate the world and exploit the peoples and those who understand freedom as the way in which all of humanity has freed itself from all forms of exploitation and domination. These two projects also define who and what can cross borders: while big capital reforms laws to guarantee the free flow of goods, governments build walls and create police to block the passage of impoverished people. While the big monopolies expand all over the world and invade every sector of the planet, governments militarize police forces and expel people without papers from "their" countries.
In today's world, the project that calls for freedom for goods and oppression and borders for people is gaining ground. But also, in today's world, there are people in solidarity who reach out to each other, who open shelters, who help people who have been forced to leave their place of origin. We need this world, the world of people in solidarity who fight for the freedom of people and humanity, to continue to grow.
You may be interested in: America has been and will be a nation of immigrants.
