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Globalization
- Globalization creates the structural basis of one of the largest
migratory flows in the history of humanity. This stream goes from countries
in Latin America (the South impoverished by neoliberal exploitation)
to the United States and Canada (the North that enriches itself by an
extremely unequal system of commercial and labor relations).
•Globalization is neoliberalism on a planetary scale. Neoliberalism
proposes that state intervention is bad for the economy and proposes
policies of total deregulation. This ideology has been extended worldwide
through transnational corporations.
- Migrants are the excluded, the refugees of globalization. Migrants
are also pilgrims of dignity and bring resistance and survival. It is
our duty to globalize the excluded, obligating the global system to
include them with dignity and justice.
Migration
- We consider the right of mobility, to travel and change residency,
to be an irrevocable Human Right. This right permits all human beings
to freely seek opportunities to better their lives and those of their
families. In the scheme of globalization, only the elite of our societies
exercise this right.
- Capital can maintain selective control of labor, allowing legal
passage of those workers it needs and closing its borders when they
are no longer needed, creating a system of “borders within national
borders.” This phenomenon is materialized in the checkpoints of multiple
agencies in Mexico and the United States.
- The abuses on the border between Mexico and Guatemala and on
the U.S.-Mexico border are aggravated when the migrant is indigenous.
Indigenous peoples of the border zones also see their ancestral routes
of migration and their ability to attend ceremonies and rituals curtailed.
Finally, the Mexican ancestral population of the U.S.-Mexico border
finds itself constantly harassed by U.S. migratory agencies.
Militarization
- Militarization responds to the insecurity and anxiety caused
by economic integration and its many consequences, including the human
mobility it has caused.
- The roots of militarization are found in both Mexico and the
U.S. They include: a) growing social polarization; b) the idea that
civilians are potential enemies and that in a social conflict, the aim
is to destroy the enemy; c) the reorganization of the concept of “territory”;
and d) the reorganization of the ideology of the armed forces.
- Militarization leads to a serious crisis in human rights. The
militarization of civil society converts those marginalized into the
enemy and expands the scope of violence and impunity. Militarization
corrupts all of society by making it acceptable to attack any person
who is “strange” or “foreign.” This lays the basis for curtailing rights
and creates a “democracy of low intensity” that inhibits residents and
citizens from asserting their rights.
For a complete copy of the report from the “Encuentro de Fronteras,”
contact Fernando Garcia at El Paso ILEMP,
ilemp@hotmail.com or 915-577-0724. |
