What Hardships Did They Face While They Were Traveling the Oregon Trail

Onorthward May 23, a bystander filmed 20-year-sometime Claudia Patricia Gómez González subsequently a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot her in the caput. The young woman had recently crossed into Texas from Mexico, and she was unarmed. In an commodity published soon after her expiry, her mother, who all the same lives in Guatemala, described her as "naughty and cuddly and playful," adding that "she loved to draw and sing."

Thousandómez González grew upwards in the mountains of San Juan Ostuncalco, a municipality in Guatemala where residents are predominantly Maya-Mam (the fourth largest of Guatemala's 22 Indigenous Maya groups). San Juan Ostuncalco's communities are ready in high-altitude volcanic mountains and are some of the poorest in Guatemala. I study maternal wellness care in Gómez González's community, La Unión Los Mendoza, and the wider Mam highlands as an anthropologist, living and speaking with people in the region. During the past two decades, I take met many women who fit Gómez González's mother's clarification of a loving and adamant daughter who was harmed by the militarization of American borders.

Weeks before Gómez González was killed, U.S. Chaser General Jeff Sessions appear that anyone entering the U.S. without documentation would be charged with a crime—fifty-fifty those requesting aviary. This announcement came as part of a broader button by the Trump assistants to penalize border crossers. The number of people apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico edge in August 2018 was up 52 per centum from Baronial 2017.

The community of Claudia Patricia Gómez González mourns her decease. Johan Ordonez/Getty Images

Due westomen and families take been fleeing Key America, in item, in record numbers. And in contempo months, the Edge Patrol has documented the separation of 2,617 immigrant children from their parents, with new cases notwithstanding being reported. Between October 1, 2017, and August 31, the U.Due south. government arrested 42,757 Guatemalans who came to the U.S. with family members—the highest number of migrants with families from any 1 country. Equally this commodity goes to press, a caravan of roughly 7,300 people, all of whom are reportedly from Cardinal America, is traveling through southern Mexico with the aim of reaching the U.S.-Mexico edge. Many say they are fleeing unsustainable weather in their home countries.

U.Southward. policies that criminalize such migration ignore the longstanding relationship between the U.South. and Central America. During my fourth dimension in Guatemala, I have learned that Maya-Mam residents have all-encompassing cognition of the history of U.S. intervention in their communities. Most U.S. media outlets characterize migrants equally fleeing Guatemalan violence and impoverishment for a land where they exercise not belong. For many Guatemalans, they are fleeing circumstances that are American-made. Their merits to the U.S. is legitimate, they believe, because they fit the conditions for asylum. They also identify with the U.South. considering its authorities has extensively shaped their daily lives—long before they attempt to cross the U.South.-Mexico border.

Their stories, my research, and investigative reports from human rights groups and others reveal how policies and U.Southward. political interventions of the past—and the present—have led to malnutrition, maternal and infant mortality, fractured communities, deep-rooted violence and corruption, and the loss of loved ones amid Indigenous peoples living in the highlands. Those who leave for the U.S. are fleeing these conditions, which have been inflicted upon them, and doing what they must to survive.

Early in 1999, when I first lived in the highlands, two stories dominated Guatemala'due south news. The first focused on a recently released report from the Committee for Historical Clarification (CEH), a U.N.-supported truth commission tasked with investigating the events of more than than three decades of state of war, from 1960 to 1996. After almost a twelvemonth of investigation that included interviews with 11,000 people, the independent commission concluded that military and paramilitary groups were responsible for 93 percent of the more than 200,000 war-related deaths.

The commission's conclusion that the violence was almost entirely carried out past state forces countered the popular narrative that an ideological battle betwixt communism and capitalism had split the country in ii. This narrative held that the war entailed insurgents, or guerrillas, on i side fighting for land redistribution and counterinsurgents on the other purportedly defending the rule of police force. The CEH instead found disarming bear witness of genocide. Of the 42,275 killings it documented, 83 percent of the victims were Maya.

The communities, or aldeas, of San Juan Ostuncalco prevarication in the highlands of Guatemala, about a six-hour bulldoze from Republic of guatemala City. Catherine Gilman/SAPIENS

The truth commission concluded that acts of violence "were non only an attempt to destroy the social base of the guerrillas, but above all, to destroy the cultural values that ensured cohesion and commonage action in Mayan communities." Indeed, Benito Ramírez, a prominent Maya-Mam community leader with whom I spoke that first spring I was in Guatemala, warned me not to call the war a "civil war," which would imply that the state was torn in one-half. Many newspapers and government sources had framed the war in such a manner. Every bit I would come to acquire immediate, the devastation was one-sided: Maya people were the main target of violence. The conflict was a racial war with a primary objective of killing Indigenous peoples.

The 2nd dominant story that leap described U.S. President Pecker Clinton's formal apology on behalf of the U.South. regime for actively supporting Guatemalan armed services forces and intelligence units during the repression and violence. The truth commission had concluded that the U.Due south. had provided the Guatemalan authorities with all-encompassing financial, intelligence, and military machine help throughout the war.

This second news story spoke to longstanding ties between U.S. and Guatemalan political elites. These had intensified in 1954 when two white American brothers—Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, and John Foster Dulles, the secretarial assistant of state—helped to depose Guatemala's second-ever democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz. The Dulles brothers were amid many prominent U.S. political figures who had financial ties to United Fruit, a U.S. plantation company that controlled vast amounts of Guatemalan land. Árbenz, who was raised in the highlands near where Gómez González was from, had supported efforts to return land to Indigenous peoples, who had been dispossessed from their lands nether Spanish dominion. His pop agrestal reform goals threatened the economical interests of United Fruit and the political interests of the United States. The U.S. government conspired with a mercenary army led by an exiled, correct-wing officer to remove Árbenz from power, thus catastrophe whatever movement toward land redistribution and broader economic equality. Some other U.S.-backed coup occurred in 1963, and before long, anyone in Guatemala speaking against human rights abuses was putting their life and community in danger.

Declassified government documents implicated the U.S. government in Republic of guatemala'southward terror. U.S. military strategies of torture and violence honed during the Vietnam War directly shaped the Guatemalan war machine'due south arroyo to war. Between the 1950s and 1980s, the CIA and the U.S. Army Special Forces known every bit the Green Berets trained Guatemalan military machine officers in techniques of brutality, with stunning efficacy. The CEH report singled out the U.S. Army School of the Americas for cruel counterinsurgency training and for explicitly encouraging the violation of human rights. Guatemalan armed forces committed 626 massacres (defined as the execution of five or more defenseless individuals) against Maya people, often also destroying their homes, crops, and livestock. The truth commission estimated that as many equally 1.v million people were displaced between 1981 and 1983 lonely. Disappearances were some other ways of spreading terror, as thousands of people began to vanish throughout the country—many gone without a trace.

During Guatemala's armed disharmonize, ethnic violence in Guatemala specifically targeted women considering they were viewed as being responsible for biological and cultural reproduction, as anthropologists Carol Smith and M. Gabriela Torres have shown. (The same is true today.) Indeed, roughly one-quarter of the victims of Guatemala's wartime human rights violations and violence were women, the commission reported, many of whom died gruesome deaths. Opening "the wombs of significant women" was ane of the grotesque strategies the military employed. Sexual violence was some other tactic of terror. Men raped more than than 100,000 women during the war.

At the time of the CEH study and Clinton's subsequent apology in early 1999, I lived in a mount community in northwest Guatemala with a Maya-Mam adult female named Maria, whose concluding proper name has been omitted for privacy. She had been pregnant with her third child when her hubby left for the Us, three years before I arrived. Unable to sustain his family unit on their small-scale plot of land, he was drastic for employment. Poor, Indigenous Guatemalans were rarely granted U.S. visas, and he had left without documents. He crossed more than ane,500 miles in United mexican states before making it to the U.Due south. and somewhen settling in Chiliad Rapids, Michigan.

A story that received little media attention in the spring of 1999 was about Guatemalan farmers—how men like Maria'due south husband were existence squeezed off their state. The 1996 Guatemalan peace accord that officially ended the war was celebrated for bringing peace to the country, and many people who had sought refuge in United mexican states began to return. But the late 1990s also saw a spike in migration as Guatemalans tried to escape crushing poverty.

Maya children participated in a procession in front end of the cathedral of Guatemala Metropolis on December 29, 1996, to celebrate the signing of a peace agreement that many hoped would end 36 years of violence and genocide in the country. Jorge Uzon/Getty Images

Trade liberalization driven by the Globe Bank'south 1980s structural aligning policies had reduced barriers to imports from the U.S. As corn from the U.Southward. flowed into Guatemala, it diminished the value of locally grown crops, forcing countless rural farmers into debt or financial ruin. Farmers could no longer earn enough from their crops to survive. Maya-Mam Guatemalans I lived among saw the expansion of gratuitous trade every bit an economic extension of the genocide waged against them.

"We take no future hither," Maria told me in 1999. "If I could leave also, I would." She was among many who experienced the new wave of poverty as a continuation of the earlier war.

One thousandany Guatemalans I met at that time felt Clinton undermined his promise that the U.Southward. would not repeat the mistake of supporting campaigns of repression when he simultaneously pushed for the expansion of trade liberalization. Subsequently that year, the Globe Merchandise Organization coming together in Seattle, Washington, drew massive protests as activists rallied against proposals to further deregulate international merchandise. Critics from around the globe—labor unions, subcontract workers, and students, among others—voiced concerns about the negative impacts. And Ethnic leaders warned how the inundation of cheap consumer foods would upend their people'due south traditional ways of life.

But having lived through decades of open warfare, Guatemalans generally did not protestation. Instead, they fled.

A decade afterwards my first visit to Republic of guatemala, after years of annual travel to the country, I moved to Guatemala to study how chronic violence was affecting people's health. Histories of violence bear on all aspects of highland life, and decades of suffering and precariousness take taken a toll on people's bodies. Diabetes, heart disease, gastritis, and cancer are, in big part, caused by the physiological stressors of poverty and racism. Women, particularly, bear an impossible burden: The government holds them responsible for the futures of their children, even while undermining the possibilities their children might have.

The maladies people suffered from were difficult to treat, so I was surprised by how much time we spent laughing. The women I lived amid taught me that even in conditions of tremendous oppression, sovereignty remains.

As part of my research, in 2008–2009, I linked up with a authorities-sponsored wellness projection that made daily trips to deliver nutrient supplements and basic health services to San Juan Ostuncalco communities, including the 1 in which Gómez González was raised. Guatemala has the 3rd highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world, according to UNICEF, and San Juan Ostuncalco's rate is among the highest in the state. Long-term persecution of midwives has contributed to staggering rates of maternal bloodshed as well. "These villages are so neglected," a city doctor told me, overlooking the transnational political forces that have kept these communities poor and vulnerable.

And the violence has not subsided. Guatemalans point to a civilization of impunity cultivated during the state of war that continues to foster the widespread murder and abuse of women: The charge per unit of femicide is the 3rd highest in the world. An average of 62 women are reportedly killed in Republic of guatemala each month. Grandmothers tell me that violence against women was non a given in their youth, pointing out that they have no Mam word for the term violence. (Instead, they use the Spanish word violencia.) Today nearly every woman in the highland communities has a story well-nigh someone they love having been harmed. Several studies of women in the Western Highlands take found that a majority accept been battered both sexually and physically.

Maya-Mam women from San Juan Ostuncalco come up together to help their children grow and thrive. They have supported ane another through affliction and suffering. Emily Yates-Doerr

Southtill, in the confront of these hard circumstances, women who stay in Guatemala manage to hold on. They comfort each other through heartbreak, hardship, and violence. When ane woman establish piece of work that was a few hours away, her community members stepped in to nurse her baby. When a small girl was raped in the cornfields, the community fix a neighborhood watch. Anybody does what she can to make sure each other's daughters become to school. They labor in one another's gardens and share household tasks, such every bit cooking and shopping. They tell stories and jokes to brand each other laugh—and to recover lost memories and rebuild futures that take been taken from them.

"We will survive, we will survive, we volition survive," many accept repeated to me during interviews, willing that information technology be true.

Yardigration has been a cardinal survival strategy, non only for those who take left the country merely also for those who accept stayed. In 2017, US$vii.5 billion came to Republic of guatemala, predominantly from Guatemalans living in the U.S., and that is expected to increase 10 pct in 2018. Several communities in the Maya highlands rank among those where families receive more than remittances than in other regions of the country, and nearly of the coin is spent on basic household needs.

When I began to travel to Guatemala in the 1990s, most of the people leaving for the U.S. were men. Over the years, I have seen the demographic of the emigrant modify. Wives follow husbands, daughters migrate to reunite with parents, and entire families pursue economic and educational opportunities they are excluded from in Guatemala. And plenty of women get out not to follow, but to flee.

Women are, notwithstanding, fleeing one incommunicable condition for another. The estimated incidence of rape among Key American women and girls along the migrant trail ranges from six in x to eight in 10. These statistics are difficult to collect with conviction, but many reports echo something I have also heard in Guatemala: Rape is and then common that women are counseled to take contraceptives before they leave.

Donald Trump's master of staff, John Kelly, has said "a big name of the game" at the border is "deterrence," making borders frightening enough that people volition stay away. For Guatemalans, migration is not a game. Everyone who leaves is already terrified of the dangerous journeying. The decease of Gómez González has been the most publicized from San Juan Ostuncalco, just ii other residents are known to take drowned attempting to cross into the U.S. in May and June of this year. As the Maya-M'iche' anthropologist Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj has written, Guatemalan children "leave because they want to interruption the curse that steals their dreams."

More than 2 decades subsequently the signing of the peace agreement, the aforementioned "racist prejudices" that the truth commission found were a commuter in the war against highland people remain strong. In May, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human being Rights issued a statement expressing business concern most the assassination of Indigenous community leaders. Then far this twelvemonth, 21 human and ecology rights defenders have been killed in Guatemala. Man rights organizations and activists say the government has not investigated these crimes or protected those who are targeted. Observers have pointed out how justice is being eroded by connections between U.S. and Guatemalan politicians.

In August, Guatemala's president Jimmy Morales announced the expulsion of the U.Northward.-backed International Committee Against Impunity in Republic of guatemala. The commission has been instrumental in holding Guatemalan politicians to account for their crimes. Several news outlets reported that at Morales' proclamation, army vehicles that had been donated by the U.S. were deployed—a clear sign of intimidation, as some noted. The day after Morales announced his conclusion, U.S. Secretarial assistant of State Mike Pompeo declared his appreciation for Guatemala'southward "security" efforts.

Protestors in Guatemala City phone call for the resignation of Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales this September in response to his announcement that a U.N.-backed anti-corruption commission, which had been investigating Morales for alleged corruption, would be expelled from the country. Johan Ordonez/Getty Images

Yet as the events of the last several months illustrate, within the U.S. immigration system, homo rights abuses proceed. In the months following Sessions' "zero-tolerance" announcement, news reports circulated of U.Due south. detention guards sexually abusing asylum-seeking Guatemalans. In late May, the ACLU released a written report detailing widespread abuse against immigrant children, describing what information technology calls a "culture of dispensation" among U.S. border authorities. Officials have also reportedly discouraged parents from applying for asylum, telling them that they will lose their kids if they do. As of early July, 61 girls were described as having been kept in cages—chosen "iceboxes" considering they were so common cold—where guards refused to comfort them.

Inorthward addition, in late September, hundreds of migrant children were moved to a tent metropolis in the desert of Westward Texas, with no schooling and limited access to legal services. The U.S. government has continued actively separating families, even after indicating it would end the practice. Nearly three months later a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunite children and their parents, the ACLU reported that more than 400 children were still in the intendance of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. For at to the lowest degree 279 of these children, their parents were no longer in the Usa. The location of many was unknown.

The swell of public outcry confronting this violence and against the separation of migrant children from their parents marks this as a historic moment, but U.S. violence against Guatemalans has a long history. In the ii decades I accept traveled and worked in the highlands, residents have advised me to detect how the genocide against Indigenous peoples in Republic of guatemala is not yet over. In learning how to look—and mind—I have seen how the U.S. government continues to shape Guatemalan means of life, encouraging a climate of violence. Guatemala's state of war was always, in function, a U.S. war. Now violence against Guatemalans is visibly happening inside the U.Due south. too.

It is time for U.S. citizens to take responsibility for the political past of the United States. Ending genocide and its concomitant violence against women will be a long and hard process, but 1 critical step is clear: The U.Due south. must allow Guatemalans, whose lives have been torn apart by U.S. involvement in their country, to safely enter the U.South. They should be supported through the procedure of applying for asylum and rebuilding their lives. This will not make up for what the U.S. government has taken from them, just it volition aid to bring stability to the U.S.-United mexican states border (and beyond). What happened to Claudia Patricia Gómez González should never happen to anyone again.

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