Hidden in Plain Sight: How Stories of Central American Climate Displacement Were Buried Under a Border Crisis

Image: Wikimedia Commons

By Elizabeth Courtney 

For InterAction

This piece was originally published on InterAction.org.

“I’m doing this for my children.” 

That’s what Martha from Colón, Honduras, said to a reporter in November 2018. If you turned on any U.S. news channel in the Fall of 2018, you likely saw a lot of people like Martha—people who left their homes in the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador in search of a better life in the United States. 

When large numbers of people arrive en masse to seek asylum at the U.S. border, it’s a newsworthy story. But what kind of story is it? Who decides how to tell it?

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Book Review: Christina Lamb’s Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women 

By Alexia Rauen

Trigger Warning: Sexual Violence

In fact, they realised, women had been speaking up about this from the very start – it was just that no one was listening. ‘In the Juntas Trial in 1985 in which nine commanders were tried, there was a victim who said I was raped, and the prosecutor just ignored this. He literally said, “Don’t lose the wood for the trees. We need to focus on the torture and murder.”’ 1 

In her work Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women, Christina Lamb explores the phenomenon of sexual violence in armed conflict. Her travels take her from Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (nothing democratic about it) to Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. She also goes to Argentina, where she explores the violence against women that occurred during the military regime from 1976 to 1983. 

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Tomasa Tito Condemayta: Entrevista con la escritora e ilustradora Erika Quinteros

Traducido por Pilar Espitia

La siguiente entrevista se llevó a cabo en julio de 2020 con Erika Quinteros, escritora e ilustradora de TOMASA TITO CONDEMAYTA: Una histora de valor y coraje. Erika Quinteros es ingeniera industrial con una maestría en Comunicación Política y Gobernanza de la Universidad George Washington. Ha trabajado como asesora en el diseño y evaluación de proyectos de desarrollo comunitario. Tiene un particular interés por temas de género, los derechos de las personas indígenas y la protección medioambiental. 

¿Qué te inspiró a escribir la historia de Tomasa Tito Condemayta?

Fue la misma Tomasa y su poderosa historia. Fue una mujer indígena que lideró un batallón de mujeres para luchar contra los españoles. Esto sucedió en un periodo cuando muchos peruanos creían que la mujer no tenía un papel militar o político. 

Creo que, al haber crecido leyendo tantos libros diferentes y siendo inspirada por personas extranjeras, no podía creer que nadie me hubiera contado la historia de Tomasa. Era peruana, como yo. Era una mujer, como yo. Y aunque yo no soy indígena, mi abuela era indígena, así que una parte de mí es indígena. En Perú nuestros héroes nacionales son sobre todo hombres blancos y pudientes. Creo que todo niño/a debería poder aprender sobre héroes con los que él o ella se pueda identificar, y estoy segura que muchos estarán fascinados e inspirados por Tomasa y su valentía.

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Prejuicio racial en el sistema educativo estadounidense: Efectos del racismo en las vidas de estudiantes negros y en su éxito académico

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Escrito por Shreyansh Budhia

Traducido por Pilar Espitia

Mientras que los embates entre grupos de supremacistas blancos y opositores en Charlottesville, Virginia, en agosto 12 y 13 de 2017 demuestran que el racismo en Estados Unidos es un fenómeno generalizado que persigue a las minorías raciales, se vuelve más y más evidente que nuestra tarea como sociedad para eliminar este mal y liberar a las minorías de sus garras no está completa. A decir verdad, el racismo en ambas formas, tanto extrínseco como intrínseco, afecta a las minorías de todas las etnicidades y colores en Estados Unidos. Hoy en día, las instituciones educativas en todo Estados Unidos usan el racismo para impactar de manera desfavorable el desempeño educativo de los estudiantes negros. Las cortes y organismos policiales son liderados por reconocidos supremacistas blancos que fallan a favor de los suyos. Los hombres negros se vuelven injustamente sospechosos en encuentros con la policía, y los reclusos negros superan en números de proporciones incomprensibles a los blancos. Los profesionales negros en el gobierno y el mundo corporativo se encuentran con casos sutiles de comportamientos prejuiciosos debido al color de su piel y herencia. Todos estos ejemplos sugieren que el racismo es un problema social que actúa como un obstáculo para el desarrollo socioeconómico de la comunidad afroamericana. 

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Tomasa Tito Condemayta: An Interview with Author and Illustrator Erika Quinteros

The following interview was conducted in July 2020 with Erika Quinteros, author and illustrator of TOMASA TITO CONDEMAYTA: Una historia de valor y coraje. Erika Quinteros is an industrial engineer with a Master’s degree in Political Communication and Governance from the George Washington University. She has worked as a consultant in the design and evaluation of community development projects. She has a particular interest in issues of gender, the rights of indigenous people, and environmental protection.

What inspired you to write the story of Tomasa Tito Condemayta?

It was Tomasa herself and her powerful story. She was an indigenous woman leading a battalion of women to fight against the Spanish. This happened during a period when many Peruvians believe that women had no military or political role. 

I think, having grown up reading so many different  books and being inspired by people overseas, I just couldn’t believe that no one had told me Tomasa’s story. She was Peruvian, like me. She was a woman, like me. And even though I am not indigenous, my grandmother was indigenous, part of me is indigenous. In Peru, our national heroes are mostly wealthy white men. I think every child should be able to learn about heroes that she or he can identify with, and  I am sure many will be fascinated and inspired by Tomasa and her courage.

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Green Grabbing: The Modern-Day Colonization

By Jessica Turner

This piece was originally published on defineearth.com.

Imagine waking up one day to the news that your land, which you and your tribe have subsisted on for generations, has been sold by the government to someone else. In return, you will be moved to a small plot of land without the same kinds of resources as before. This loss of land creates a domino effect of loss in other areas such as income, traditional environmental knowledge, and general stability. Through green grabbing, government entities or private investors use their power over Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups to confiscate land under the guise of environmental conservation.

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The criminalisation of dissent: State Repression of Land and Environmental Activism in Chile and Honduras 

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By Lewis Harrison

This piece was originally published on Lewis on Latin America.

Across Latin America, the centuries-old issue of land conflict is gaining new dimensions as nations are increasingly bound into globalised supply chains of resources, food and energy (Peluso & Lund, 2011). The growing influence of corporate actors has transformed struggles over who has the right to inhabit and work the land, as states respond to competing claims from powerful enterprises and rural residents, who are often poor and indigenous. This essay will examine how the authorities in Chile and Honduras have repressed the protests of communities against the appropriation or contamination of their lands by these commercial interests. Despite the many differences between these countries – Chile being one of the most peaceful and prosperous nations in the Americas, Honduras one of the poorest and most violent – they share many similarities in this respect. Via a process that Bessant (2016) calls the ‘criminalisation of dissent’, their governments have prohibited rural activism through authoritarian legislation and violence in order to serve the interests of powerful national and multinational corporations.

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