How to make the challenges of human mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean visible?

Human mobility: global challenges for a way of communicating which is also human.

The place from where we make this contribution is Pressenza: an international press agency with a focus on peace and nonviolence. It’s a space open to the grassroots which gives visibility to news, initiatives, proposals and situations linked to peace, nonviolence, disarmament, human rights and the fight against all forms of discrimination. We put the human being as the central value and concern and we celebrate diversity. Therefore we propose an active and lucid journalism that respects this essential premise, aiming towards the resolution of social crises and conflicts in all latitudes. It gives priority to a Universalist Humanist focus.

When we were invited to this event located in this region to cover the challenges that journalists must confront in order to cover the issues of human mobility in this continent we understood that these challenges are not just for the journalists of this continent because human mobility is a global phenomenon. So we decided to give a contribution from this regard, a global regard that allows every journalist to establish relationships, to broaden connections, to go deeper in the dimensions and the complications of the processes of human mobility.

So, in this context we thought that it would be useful to start from the point that the challenges that migrants face are the same no matter where they are escaping from and where they are going to: namely the journey itself and the subsequent process of integration into a new culture and, possibly, learning a new language.

In this presentation we will use examples taken from Europe that will illustrate the ways that we have used in Pressenza to make these issues visible.

Europe is in the grip of the biggest wave of human migration since the Second World War. According to which reports you believe there are between 700,000 and 1 million human beings that will arrive in Europe this year in search of a better life.

The majority of these people come from Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea, but there are plenty of other countries represented in the masses of human beings: Kosovo, Mali, Albania, Gambia, Nigeria and Somalia among others.

The figures have been growing in recent years. In 2014 it is estimated that 280,000 crossed the borders of the European Union. Sadly, thousands of human beings have also died, and it is in these tragic cases when the mainstream media gives coverage to the issues raised. The European summer has seen a wave of human tragedies reported by the media:

• On the 27^th of August around 300 people died when two boats sank off the coast of Libya
• On the same day a van was discovered parked in Austria with 71 dead bodies inside.
• In April, 800 people died in a shipwreck off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa
• On the 2^nd of September the world was stunned by the image of a young Turkish boy lying face down on the beach, drowned.

You would think from the media coverage in the Western media that migration is only a problem that Europe is facing. However this coverage hides the fact that there are 2 million refugees in Turkey, 1 million in Lebanon and 600,000 in Jordan.

Globally there are 60 million people who are refugees from conflicts and there are many more who are escaping poverty.

No country in Europe is in the top 10 of countries hosting the most refugees.

What are the challenges in travelling?

In many cases a refugee is fleeing for his or her life. In the experiences in Europe this year the people are fleeing from situations of war where their houses and livelihoods have been destroyed.

One boy we interviewed for Pressenza was 14 and was running away with his cousin because his parents and elder brother had been killed by the Taliban. Another boy we met was running from the Taliban because he could speak English. In some cases entire families are migrating. We met families with small children and elderly relatives, some even travelling with wheelchairs.

The dangers on the road are many. The same 14 year old boy and his cousin travelled in a group from Afghanistan to Iran where they were captured by the police and some of the eldest were shot and killed. The youngest were allowed to continue their journey.

Travelling then through Turkey and into Bulgaria, the Bulgarian police caught the boys crossing the border and took anything of value they had. They had travelled ever since begging for food, and looking for help from strangers. One of the boys had marks all over his arms from a beating by the police.

There are many others who fall into the hands of trafficking gangs. They are forced to pay sums of money they can’t afford, to people who will “help” them get into Europe.

And yet, there are moments of relief for the travellers. Everyone who is travelling seems to know someone already in Europe from the same village or the same family. And information circulates quickly about where to buy the cheapest bread and water and where you can sleep safely for the night.

Then there is the unexpected kindness of strangers and this phenomenon has been increasing throughout the year, the more the media portrays a negative image of the refugees.

An interesting anecdote comes from Hungary, a country with an extremely nationalist government and a poor economic situation. Hundreds of thousands of the country’s citizens have left the country to go further west in search of better money, including the best educated.

Back in the country a nasty president who blames everyone except the corruption of his own government for his country’s economic problems has been gradually taking control of the media and filling it with anti-refugee propaganda.

Earlier this year the government distributed a questionnaire asking the people what their top priorities were and not surprisingly, one of the top concerns was foreigners arriving in Hungary. This led the government to pay an incredible amount of money for a billboard campaign displaying such messages as “If you come to Hungary, you mustn’t take work away from Hungarians!” and “If you come to Hungary, you must respect our laws!” in Hungarian.

However, no one in the world, apart from Hungarians can understand Hungarian language. So this message was totally incomprehensible to any refugee arriving in the country.

The effect it did have though was to finally encourage a reaction from the country’s silent opposition. Within 3 days of the billboards going up, enough money had been raised through a website to pay for other billboards with messages like “Sorry about our President” and “If you come to Hungary, please don’t steal. The government can’t stand the competition.”

Then an even more unexpected response occurred. Hungarians started going to the train stations through which the refugees were passing and looked for those in need of help. These Hungarian volunteers would first go to the supermarket and buy bottles of water, fruit, toilet paper, toothbrushes and toys for children and then go and wait in the train stations.

It was extraordinary. A Facebook page was started and within two weeks thousands of people had joined. Without any formal organisation hundreds of volunteers were going to the train stations to help the new arrivals. This is how I met the boys I interviewed. Hungarians not only arrived with food and water, they came with documents in the languages that the refugees could read explaining their rights and how to move through Hungary to the camps they were supposed to attend. One man I met had a tooth ache. A message was put on Facebook and within 10 minutes a volunteer dentist sent his contact details and the refugee was treated for free.

It was an extraordinary experience to witness and it wasn’t just limited to Budapest, the same response started to appear all over Europe.

In Milan, our correspondents were having similar experiences and in Palermo, Sicily and along the Italian coast, people were going to the beaches to literally pull the refugees out of the water. Fishermen in their boats were doing the same and all of this was happening in the knowledge that in Italy if you are caught by the police helping refugees then you can be arrested.

These experiences: these human stories of the refugees and the experiences of the volunteers have been an important component of Pressenza’s coverage of the European refugee crisis this year.

The challenge of integration

The challenge for refugees doesn’t just end on arrival in the European Union though, because the host country faces the challenge of how to integrate all of these people. Germany has nearly 1 million refugees this year and is facing big problems.

• The buildings to put all these people while their applications for asylum are being processed.
• The food, water, beds to sleep in and clothes to keep them warm in the cold European winter.
• If they are to integrate and to find work then they need to learn to speak German.
• They need access to medical services in languages they speak.
• The youngest need access to education services.
• Many Germans don’t want the refugees to come. There are small minorities who are xenophobic and violent. Refugees need protection.

We have seen the difficulties of integrating ethnic minorities in many countries: in the UK, in France, there are entire neighbourhoods populated with ethnic minorities as a result of incoherent integration policies that forced the minority populations to live together in order to survive and protect themselves from those who discriminate against them. In the UK, if you have a name that sounds non-European then you have a lot less chance of getting a job. Some people have even gone to the extreme lengths of legally changing their names in order to at least get an interview.

Ethnic minorities are more likely to be victimised by the police, to be the victims of violence and to end up falling into a life of crime. All of which is a failure by the government to support ethnic minorities, many of whom do the worst and least paid jobs in society that many native people believe they are too good for.

If that wasn’t bad enough, ethnic minorities are then blamed by parties of the right-wing for all the problems of society.

In Pressenza we also give space to these issues which were recently highlighted in Uruguay when five Syrian families who had been living in South America for over a year decided that the best thing for them was to go back to the refugee camp in Lebanon.

“Queremos volver a Líbano, no más. El futuro para nosotros aquí es muy negro”, dijo Ibrahim uno de ellos. Tiene tres hijos menores de cinco años y no puede sobrevivir con su sueldo del $370 mensuales.

Identifying the root of the problem

But for Pressenza it is not enough to report about the human tragedy and solidarity involved in the process of migration and the difficulties of integration. In Pressenza we are interested in targeting the roots of the problem and it is here that we have most difficulty being heard because we are operating in a system that doesn’t want light to fall on the roots of the problem. Nevertheless we give this analysis because it is coherent and because we fortunately don’t need to worry about upsetting anyone because as a volunteer network of journalists, photographers, translators, editors and IT specialists, we don’t rely on money in order to keep on publishing our point of view.

And our analysis is this:

We live in a world where the Human Being is not the central value. Money is more important than human life, prestige is more important, even sex is more important than human life and it is this inverted, anti-humanist scale of values that is at the root of all the social problems we see today on the planet. The same thing goes for the environment, so human beings and the planet are subject to the desires of an increasingly small number of bankers, arms traders, industrialists, media moguls and politicians whose incessant desire for money and power at all costs has driven the world to the situation it faces today.

The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and all other parts of the world cannot be justified by the argument that these wars were to defend the human rights of the population and bring democracy. The previous regimes in control of those countries may not have been very nice and undemocratic and they may not have respected human rights, but what exists now in those countries, is much, much worse than the previous situation and it is clear when you look at the geographical situation, the international trading relationships and the natural resources of those countries where there has been war that human rights and democracy were a smoke screen for a bigger agenda that the media doesn’t discuss.

Why does a discourse of democracy and human rights serve to “explain” war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Bashar al-Assad in Syria, while at the same time, alliances and agreements are made with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, whose democracies and respect for human rights are clearly doubtful? Evidently, democracy and human rights are not respected through war: the most anti-democratic and human-rights-abusive measure that human beings have ever invented to “resolve conflicts”. But also, evidently, the reasons for war have never been and are not now linked to democracy or human rights.

Pressenza denounces all of this incoherence. We point our fingers at the real perpetrators of the violence, from their offices in banks, in their parliament buildings, in their media towers and we use the spaces we are given and the resources we have to denounce this system and its anti-humanist system of values.

Instead we give space to everything that is a demonstration effect of a better world that can be: a world that we suspect is on the horizon even if we cannot quite see it yet.

Conclusion

The challenges for the media to give visibility to human mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean therefore becomes a challenge of how to inform our readers, viewers and listeners about what are the real causes of this human mobility.

It is not enough, in our opinion, to simply report on the humanitarian crisis, even if a human-focused organisation like Pressenza prides itself on giving a humanist perspective on the news by telling the stories of the refugees and those who react with help and solidarity, what is needed in addition is a strong clarification of who is responsible for the flow of human beings.

We know that the planet has all the resources needed for every human being to live in security in their place of birth. The planet is capable of generating the food needed for its 8 billion residents. The human beings on the planet are capable of building the infrastructure and providing the public services required for every human being to live a dignified life, with a dignified job, providing a dignified leisure time, until finally dying a dignified death.

But there are a small minority in the world for whom such a situation is not convenient and as long as the media refuses to talk about it the longer this sorry state of things will continue. And the most serious thing about this moment is that these idiots have nuclear weapons and hold in their hands the serious and real possibility that they could destroy this embryonic and unequal human civilization that we worked so hard to achieve as a human race.

But, it’s not all bad news, because we know from even our very own recent history that historical processes don’t move in straight lines. We know that one day something as permanent as the Berlin Wall can come down in one night.

We can see in our younger generations that a new sensibility is being born: a sensibility that is internationalist, that is non-discriminatory and one that rejects violence in all its forms.

So, although in Pressenza we don’t see the current situation in the world in a very positive way if we look at the system, at the establishment; in the younger generations and in all those actions of solidarity and active nonviolence we see the seeds of Universal Human Nation that will happen, maybe when we least expect it, and this is something very inspiring for us.

Thank you.