Ships Log: How borders dehumanize us
First hand observations from borderlands reporting in three countries over 7 years led me to one conclusion: borders kill
Borderlands in the modern era are inherently chaotic, violent and dehumanizing regions. Between 2018 and 2020, I lived on a particularly troubled one and it changed me. I spent the majority of my days talking to penniless refugees fleeing starvation and violence. I witnessed street protests devolve into a terrifying madness that resulted in hundreds of wounded.
I saw a bomb explode in a restaurant during the lunch-hour rush. I saw a teenager shot for trying to strip parts from an abandoned car. And I saw a lot of desperate people prepared to walk across a continent in search of a better life.
It feels strange to write these words, but it wasn’t shocking. It was just something that happened every day. It was my job.
One can become accustomed to anything.
Since then I have reported from the infamously dangerous Darien Gap, the impenetrable jungle crossing between Panama and Colombia that separates Central and South America. Controlled by armed criminal groups in both countries, the region has become part of the main migration corridor in Americas— one of the most dangerous in the world.
I watched the last Venezuelan migrant enter Ecuador before new visa restrictions demanding passports. I walked from Venezuela to the Colombian capital, Bogotá, at the height of the Venezuelan exodus— more than 7 million have now fled that country amid economic collapse and increasing authoritarianism.
And I have watched the southern border of my own country become fully militarized as the xenophobic and deadly border polices of Trump were continued, and even worsened, by the Biden administration.
Like all who spend time at borders, this work dehumanized me. When I first started on this beat, especially in Cúcuta in that time period, the only way I could deal with the horrors that borders create was to distance myself emotionally— to develop an armor of indifference as a survival strategy.
It was not an effective one.
Release
In 2019, on a trip to New York to visit family and tie up loose ends before committing to South America for good, the floodgate I had built against all of that trauma finally found release.
Thousands of miles from the border that had become my new home, I found myself crying in a bar with someone I had met 24 hours before— a near stranger. In a place where I no longer needed to keep my guard up, I finally began to face the darkness I had been documenting.
I was describing a teenager I saw shot by Venezuelan militia. I mentioned that it was one of the stories that didn’t generate much interest.
“No one wanted to publish the story of an unarmed teenager shot by Venezuelan militia?” my new friend asked me horrified.
“Well, no. It happened a lot.” I replied. “I mean, maybe it was mentioned in the local paper. But it’s not really a story the international community cares about.”
“Did he die?” she asked me.
“I don’t know. I didn’t really check.”
She looked at me silently. She was a very empathetic girl— sweet, affectionate and caring. I could see was shocked and saddened by my callousness, but she said nothing.
That’s when something broke in me. After everything I had seen, whether he had died or not had become a passing detail, almost an afterthought. Being with someone who didn’t think such a story was normal was an alien feeling, and it forced me to reexamine my reaction.
It shouldn’t be normal that unarmed youths are shot in cold blood. It is shocking and horrifying and vile and though of course I already knew that, I had forgotten. I had become callous. It was merely one more random, violent act among many, on a chaotic and bloody border.
Who mourned that nameless adolescent? Brothers? A mother? A girlfriend? Neighbors? Who had I become?
I finally took off the armor that I didn’t realize I was wearing. And to my surprise and embarrassment, I began to weep.
Loud sobs in a packed bar, in the company of a girl I had met the night before, I was suddenly reminded of what it means to be human. She was kind about it and hugged me. She told me not to be embarrassed.
Once I had recovered from the outburst I tried to joke about it, and apologized. But my thoughts kept returning to an often-quoted Nietzsche passage:
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. For if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Seeing that kid shot was far from the most dramatic event I have witnessed over the last two years- but the very fact that it had become merely another mundane detail of my time in Colombia was what bothered me the most.
Reporting on borders changed me, and not for the better.
The inherent chaos of borders
Borders are strange places. They dehumanize by definition. They are man-made constructs created to restrict the passage of people. They are gathering points for humans at their most desperate as well as magnets for miscreants seeking to exploit those who are at their most vulnerable.
Goods are trafficked across them by the ton every day- both legally and illicitly. They are populated by stern officials, travelers, refugees, scammers, thieves, merchants and smugglers.
Borders underline the human need to classify some people as others. They are the invisible walls we create between nations, the outer limits of the tribe.
They are also often where violence occurs between nations.
Living on a particularly violent one for six months and being a neighbor to a country in collapse accustomed me to the worst aspects of humanity. Refugees and cheap gasoline stream out of Venezuela, drugs, money, food and basic hygiene items flow in.
The official points are controlled by corrupt border officials- the unofficial ones are controlled by either Venezuelan militia, Colombian armed groups, or the narcotraffickers that operate in both regions. The border is not a pleasant place.
At the Darien gap, armed groups prey upon migrants headed north through extortion, robbery, sexual violence, and even murder. At every border between Colombia and the United States, migrants are victimized by both officials as well as criminals. They are dehumanized.
Most people from the U.S don’t have to deal much with land borders. The majority of us fly over them, when we bother to leave our country at all, and once we arrive, our passport insulates us from the majority of the discrimination that they impose upon the rest of the world.
Our own land borders are perhaps the most dehumanizing of all. Tragedies and reminders are everywhere, though many in the U.S choose to ignore them.
It may be apparent at this point that I dislike borders. I dislike what they do to people. I dislike the senses of tribalism and nationalism that they reinforce, and I dislike being on them.
But I believe it is very important to tell the stories that happen there. I am a walking example of how they can dehumanize and I didn’t even realize it had happened. I went to Cucuta passionate about telling the stories of the human dramas that happen daily there, and in doing so, the suffering and violence they create became normalized for me.
After that trip to New York I returned to my beat promising myself not to allow that to ever happen again. And I like to think I have largely honored that vow.
Borders instill skepticism in everyone who deals with them. They are where lives are decided and futures are gambled.
And as they dehumanize, create their own rationalizations for the violence they inflict. But we cannot ignore them, or the suffering they cause.
A global trend towards isolationism and increasingly draconian border policy is killing tens of thousands of people who have committed no crime. The U.S this year enacted the strictest border policy in the history of the country. Mexico is following suit. Just today, Colombia, Panama and the U.S announced a two month operation to “end irregular migration through the Darien”, presumably through militarization.
The invisible walls that keep millions trapped in cycles of poverty and violence are only growing stronger. We owe it to future generations to confront this reality.
These stories must be confronted if we are to recover our humanity, and prevent the tragedies they create. But as we do so, we must be careful to retain our empathy.
I invite you to gaze into the abyss with me. We can do so without losing our souls.
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