El Sur También Existe: Imagining futures

Introduction

In June 2018, I traveled to Cuba to present at the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) conference. While exploring the art and photographs on the lower floor of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, I encountered a large paneled sign announcing a meeting of the Escuela Científica Internacional de la UNESCO. The sign optimistically announced the agenda: “construyendo sociedades resilientes mediante el vínculo de la investigación con la reducción del riesgo de desastres y la adaptación al cambio climatico en el Caribe” [building resilient societies through the link of research with disaster risk reduction and adaptation to climate change in the Caribbean] (Ministerio de Relaciones Exterior de Cuba, 2018). I later read that there were delegates from 12 member countries of Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and a representative from Puerto Rico in attendance. The sign stayed with me. Just a few days and a mile away at the CSA conference at the Habana Libre Hotel, I would be presenting as part of a panel introducing a new volume on Guantánamo, and discussing troubling indications that the United States planned to use their naval base there as a site for warehousing climate refugees from the Caribbean in the case of future (and inevitable) mass migration “events” (Walicek and Adams, 2017).

Most of the population of the Caribbean lives in a coastal zone, and many others live in low-lying areas. Temperature, sea level, and occurrences of extreme weather events are rising. Under the Obama administration, the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), issued by the Pentagon, had introduced strategic policies concerned with assessment and mitigation of, as well as responses to, global climate change (Department of Defense, 2010). The 2014 QDR maintained those policies, but in March 2017, all climate-related federal actions put in place by the Obama administration were reversed by President Trump, including the Department of Defense’s (DoD) 2014 Climate Change Roadmap (Copp, 2017; DoD, 2014a; DoD, 2014b). The summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy issued by current Secretary of Defense James Mattis—in place of a full QDR—excises all mention of climate change (DoD, 2018d). Unlike the publicly available QDRs issued by the Obama administration, the Trump administration offered only a brief version of the full report, but the summary is telling: funding is not directed toward mitigating the underlying issues contributing to climate change or toward proactive humane initiatives, but rather focused on modeling, tracking, and managing the bodies potentially on the move because of conditions that track back to climate change. The priority is funding to build more infrastructures to imprison refugees fleeing climate change.

Reframing climate change migration

The Cuban government, in particular, has been focused on problems of environment and climate for some time. In the face of successive and increasingly severe and frequent hurricanes, droughts, and forest fires, Cuba has aggressively increased the percentage of environmental protection funding and emphasized environmental education and research over the past two decades (Alonso and Clark, 2015: 12). The island nation ranks high on the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Index, and its social policies provide some measure of protections when compared to other developing countries. Scientists in the Global North are also studying the impact of climate change on the islands of the Caribbean and the coastal nations. A 2008 report from Tufts University scientists emphasized “the costs of inaction” making the argument that “money that could have been used for poverty alleviation and other social services, or for economic development, will instead be diverted to efforts to recover from the impacts of climate change. The unwelcome costs of climate change, imposed by the actions of higher income nations, may make development unaffordable to the people of the Caribbean” (Bueno et al., 2008: 8–9).

The people of the Global South—and especially the poor—will be disproportionately affected by the rise in temperature and sea levels, though they bear less responsibility for the drivers of climate change and have fewer resources at their disposal. While the wealthiest individuals worldwide direct resources toward personal survival, the poor and working classes cannot easily fund their own reliable rescue or exit strategy, nor reliably count on governments or international bodies. Illustrating this profound inequity are a spate of articles such as “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires are prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand” (O’Connell, 2018) and “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich” (Osnos, 2017) which point toward futures where income inequality will inform who survives and who does not.

More alarming is the fact that as climate refugees approach or cross US borders by land or over Caribbean waters—waters often dubbed “the third border”—they are framed as invasive and threatening hordes. This reality is not lost on the activists, academics, and policy makers of the Global South. At the CSA conference in Havana in June 2018, discussion of climate change implications for the littoral peoples of the region was ever-present among scholars who live in, or work on, issues related to the Caribbean basin. Many of the panels were organized around themes of diaspora, migration, return, climate change, resilience, imperialism, power, and disaster. Militarization, violence, and neo-coloniality were often woven through as substantive subtext. Discussion turned specifically on the extent to which, in the militaristic responses to climate change and migration, the people of El Sur (the Global South) are not acknowledged as agential and affected peoples who exist and have the right to exist every bit as fully as their counterparts in North America or Europe. Their bodies and movements are calculated as potential threat factors that demand a defensive posture and mechanisms of surveillance and control.

Proof of this is born out in the organization of the US military, which has extended to policing migration, as well as the military’s own climate footprint. The US military has six geographical command units that divide the entirety of the planet, and an additional four functional combatant command units (and now Space Force). I propose a slow moment to take that information in, and to think about the acceptance of this audacity and overreach that claims default dominion over earth and sea and space as ordinary and normative. Of these various “commands,” it is the US Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) which oversees US military operations in Central and South America and the Caribbean, more than 16 million miles of territory, including the Guantánamo Joint Task Force Military Base (Ferdinando, 2016), which, as will soon be made clear, is being developed to accommodate prisons for climate refugees. The US DoD is also the largest employer in the United States and indeed, in the world (Taylor, 2015). Its budget is the largest military budget in world history by far (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2018). The US military is also a major source of CO₂ emissions. The DoD is the largest institutional consumer of oil in the world (The Union of Concerned Scientists, 2018; Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment, 2010). The environmental impact of US bases, training exercises, jet fuel, weapons, and of US wars around the planet are catastrophic, yet CO₂ emissions from the US military are routinely left off the table when global restrictions are negotiated.

The United States is not alone in its hypocritical approaches to climate change. An independent report commissioned by the G7 nations in 2015 is neutrally—or perhaps deceptively—titled “A New Climate for Peace: Taking Action on Climate and Fragility Risks.” The language of the report emphasizes the language of resilience but is ultimately concerned with how the risks to stability in poorer countries will impact wealthier countries. The two-page summary opens as follows: “Climate change is a global threat to security in the 21st century. We must act now to limit future risks to the planet we share and the peace we seek” (Adelphi, 2015). The website associated with the report, “A New Climate for Peace,” offers coded statements such as “climate change is the ultimate threat multiplier.” In other words, while keeping global peace and preserving human life may include incremental changes to environmental policies, it also includes military readiness to respond to threats to the integrity of state borders and other national investments. In a decidedly less-coded framing, President Donald Trump explicitly made the connection between migration and terrorism in his tweet about unknown Middle Easterners in a migrant caravan from Central America (Darcy, 2018). Walter Benjamin (1978) defined militarism “as the compulsory, universal use of violence as a means to the ends of the state.” This framing of refugees—economic, political, and climate-related—as potential terrorists who require a defensive response is militarism by any measure.

Ransan-Cooper et al (2015) also draw attention to the framings of environmental migrants. They identify four distinct frames: victim, security threat, adaptive agent, and political subject. The military uses the frames of security threat and (non-US/EU) political subject. Nations in the Global North see the threat of refugee bodies as an area for aligned and cooperative defensive strategies. Those defensive strategies are imposed on actors within the Global South, through a strong-arming of non-cooperative partners and the cultivation of cooperative agents in South America.

An evolving continuum

The discursive practice of framing migrants as threats to national security which justify a military response is connected to a broader US policy of conflating the environmental and economic with the military, especially in neighboring countries to the South. In Argentina, more than 60 groups organized to protest against the construction of a new “humanitarian base,” under the purview of USSOUTHCOM, to be situated close to major oil reserves in Neuquén, Argentina. A document signed by 60 Argentine organizations explains the manipulative engineering of language which proposed that because the base is to be considered an “Emergency Operating Committee” and will include an evacuation center and a medical facility, it falls under the category of humanitarian aid, rather than military base, “which would require approval of Argentina’s Congress” (Telesur, 2018). The collective finds the categorization deceptive and unbelievable, as the location is not proximate to areas that suffer from volcanic eruptions or earthquakes.

The base in Neuquén is connected to military exercises in the Amazon in the area where the borders of Brazil, Colombia, and Peru meet. Thirty military defense companies use the area for testing, and the Brazilian military uses the site for hosting multinational exercises, such as AmazonLog 2017. USSOUTHCOM participates in the event, which includes an arms fair, ground operation exercises, a Humanitarian Logistics Symposium, and the testing of products (Bessi and Navarro, 2017: 3). Brazilian General Theophilio Gaspar de Oliveira maintained “this exercise will bring a series of improvements in the logistics of the western Amazon” and that “we are developing a humanitarian aid doctrine of exchange between neighboring countries of interoperability between armed forces and civil agencies” (Bessi and Navarro, 2017: 3). The Expo’s website describes it as “a challenge held in the heart of the Amazon rainforest” (AmazonLog Expo). The tripartite AmazonLog was used to create a significant military infrastructure in an area rich with petroleum and to facilitate agreements for more military exercises. The next AmazonLog has already posted a save the date, an announcement of a vow renewal between world militaries and the defense industry. AmazonLog’s November 12–15 event will be held in Brazil and is advertised as a unique security event, “the only safety and defense event in the Amazon” (Amazon Security Defence Exposition Website, 2019).

In his speech at the Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas, then US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel (2014) praised leaders in Latin America for becoming “exporters of security” cooperating with “neighboring countries to provide training, build capacity, and address urgent security needs.” Hagel (2014) drew attention to units in Salvador, Ecuador, and Honduras that participated in the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti and to cooperation from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Paraguay in the Partnership of the Americas exercise framed through the language of “peace support operations, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief missions.” When, he announced the DoD Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap at a conference in Peru he discussed climate change in the language of catastrophe: infectious disease, armed insurgencies, drought, crop failures, flooding, and mass migration. With his alarmist language, he explicitly noted the impact on coastal communities in the Caribbean, warning that some island populations might need total evacuation. The United States is taking a defensive posture toward these catastrophic futures.

Guantánamo redux

The US prison camp at Guantánamo is on the island of Cuba on a 45-square-mile US military base. The United States continues to hold 40 prisoners, the majority of whom have not been charged (Human Rights First, 2018). The Cuban government considers the base and the presence of US military personnel an occupation. But the US military frames the base as crucial. Here Admiral Kurt W. Tidd’s (2018) Posture Statement to Congress explains, “As the only U.S. forward-operating base in the Caribbean and the gateway to the Gulf of Mexico, Naval Station Guantánamo Bay plays a critical role for USSOUTHCOM, the State Department, Navy, Coast Guard, and DHS. The Naval Station is pivotal during mass migration events, counterdrug and search and rescue operations, humanitarian assistance, and disaster-relief operations in the Caribbean” (pp. 26–27). Note that Tidd’s language justifies the presence of a military base on the basis of non-combat functions which are intimately tied to natural disaster.

In February 2018, RQ Construction, LLC (Carlsbad, California) was quietly awarded a US$23,000,000 contract to build a “Contingency Mass Migration Complex” at Guantánamo that could hold upwards of 30,000 migrants. With up to 10 additional options, the contract could be worth up to US$27,000,000 for the implementing firm (DoD, 2018a). Seven months later, in September 2018, six other firms were awarded US$75,000,000 each for ambiguous “design-build construction projects” at Guantánamo to be completed by September 2020 (DoD, 2018b). Just 2 weeks later, a group of six contract firms won a joint award that with options amounting to US$240,000,000 for “indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity multiple award design-build construction contract for construction projects” at Guantánamo Bay to be completed by September 2023 (DoD, 2018c). The island base and prison are revamping old infrastructures, and building new ones, with a clear future directive. One might think that the shameful histories of warehousing Haitian and Cuban asylum seekers in the 20th century, and of imprisoning nearly 800 men and boys in the 21st, would prompt a cautionary impulse, but because no responsibility has ever been assigned and no consequences meted out, the camps are once again expanding. As the new camps are being constructed at Guantánamo, 40 men languish there as prisoners, 26 of whom are held indefinitely, with no plans for charges or trials.

The concept and development of island prison camps is rapidly expanding to include both actual and virtual islands. The US camp near the town Tornillo, for instance, is essentially an island in the desert borderlands of Southwestern Texas. As of November 2018, the camp held more detainees than the population of the nearest town of Tornillo. The approximate 2300 detainees held were all children, most from age 13 to 17 years. The majority of the children are Guatemalan. Though the camp was supposed to close in the summer of 2018, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Refugee Resettlement awarded a new contract for fall 2018 as the number of children warehoused there continues to swell. The agency announced that, it would be issuing

an OPDIV-Initiated Supplement in multiple installments to BCFS Health and Human Services, San Antonio, TX. The aggregate total of the multiple installments will not exceed $367,860,381. The first two installments will be issued prior to September 30, 2018. The remaining installments will be issued after September 30, 2018 on to be determined dates. ORR has been identifying additional capacity to provide shelter for potential increases in apprehensions of Unaccompanied Children at the U.S. Southern Border. Planning for increased shelter capacity is a prudent step to ensure that ORR is able to meet its responsibility, by law, to provide shelter for Unaccompanied Alien Children referred to its care by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). To ensure sufficient capacity to provide shelter to unaccompanied children referred to HHS, BCFS proposed to provide ORR with 3,800 beds in an expedited manner. (Shields, 2018)

In an interview with Anthropological Airwaves, Joe Masco (2018) notes that the framing of migration in terms of national security “captures a bigger part of the budget, a bigger part of the imaginary.” In a shift from the stated goals of previous administrations, lethality is now listed as first priority both in the summary issued by Mattis, and the DoD operates nearly 5000 (known) sites around the world.

As the camp in Texas illustrates, the militarism of the Global North not only extends to countries considered part of the Global South but also creates pockets of the Global South within the Global North: Texas is still a part of the United States. Several other climate-related events which occurred on US soil in the 21st century have given us adequate forewarning of how extreme climate-related disasters will be blamed on the victims and the management of disaster, even in this very country. We can harken back to Katrina and the Gulf Coast, not so long ago, and realize that adequate and appropriate help is still not arriving to those who need it during and post disaster. The incompetent response to Katrina was not a fluke, but a clear signpost for the future.

In one heartbreaking account, husband and wife, Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun, survived Hurricane Katrina—Kathy and the children had been evacuated—but Abdulrahman stayed behind to help in relief efforts. He was arrested in a home he owned on suspicion of terrorism, profiled because of his name and Middle Eastern appearance, and “held without contact, charges, bail or trial” (Eggers, 2009: 255). The disaster zone of New Orleans was being managed as a conflict zone full of enemies. Eggers (2009) writes that Zeitoun “did not want it to be true that his home and city were underwater. He did not want it to be true that his wife and children were fifteen hundred miles away and might by now presume him to be dead. He did not want it to be true that he was now and might always be a man in a cage, hidden away, no longer part of the world” (p. 256). Abdulrahman Zeitoun was also released after a devastating confinement. Zeitoun’s wife was not physically locked away, but she says of his disappearance and secret imprisonment in the United States, her country and his, “I felt cracked open . . . it broke me” (Eggers, 2009: 319).

If adequate help did not arrive for poor and working-class black residents of the Gulf Coast, neither did it arrive for the Puertorriqueños after Hurricane Maria, nor for the poor, mainly white and elderly, residents of Paradise, California who spent weeks in tents after their town was razed by the most lethal fire in California history. Waiting in a Walmart parking lot in Chico, there were no FEMA officials in sight. In October 2017, President Trump threw rolls of paper towels at survivors of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. In November 2018, in lieu of addressing climate change, he recommended raking brush and cleaning the floors of the forest to California firefighters, politicians, and survivors as future policy. These three cases represent racialized and class-based responses to American citizens in US territories suffering from climate-related issues. Responses to coming catastrophes in non-US territories in the Global South will not be more humane and are sure to be more militarized as bodies on the move are identified as invasive.

No salvation

On 29 March 2019, the DoD awarded nearly a billion dollar contract for another project similar to the earlier mass migration complex (DoD, 2019). In terms of the total military budget, the dollar amount accounts for very little, but at US$975 million in what is a very ambiguously worded funding, the contract deserves a look, emphasizing as it does a 5-year plan for vaguely worded militaristic contingency projects (in)directly related to both disaster and conflict. Framed through the language of contingency, conflict, emergency, and disaster and broad-sweeping in its description of the intended target populations, it is a global catastrophe response military slush fund that cannot possibly be read through the lens of humanitarian relief.

We are entering into an era in which troops will be reliably deployed to defend against the intrusion of migrant bodies, military technologies will track migrant bodies, and militarized security forces will capture them, transport them to camps, and detain them. Resistance movements to both militarism and its unsustainable environmental toll are not new, but are more urgent. The Havana Declaration issued at the 7th Summit of the Association of Caribbean States articulates a markedly different approach advocating for a strengthening of integration of Latin America and the Caribbean under the banner of “United for a Sustainable Caribbean” (Granma, 2016). The third of the 44 items that comprise the declaration is concerned with the impact of climate change, especially on Small Island Developing States, while the fourth emphasizes people-centered societies and the eighth upholds the human rights of migrants. That said, the phrase I heard in Havana on a panel on environmental disaster, “no one is coming to save us,” portends a grim truth. This is perhaps the rawest organizing cry for the precarious of the Global South.

In his 1986 poem, “El sur También existe,” Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti wrote of a world split by power into geographies of North and South. Benedetti described the North as domineering, extractive, and militaristic with “its Chicago School . . . its worship of steel . . . its covert wise men . . . its cults of god the father and military epaulettes . . . its missiles . . . its encyclopedias and its Star Wars.” Against this, he posits the “bitter fruits” of the south, but also “roots . . . and men and women who know what to hold onto” (Benedetti, 1986).