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Guatemalan migrants deported from the United States remain outside the Air Force Base after their arrival in Guatemala City on July 31, 2019. (Photo: by Orlando Estrada/AFP/Getty Images)
All or Nothing: A Green New Deal for Central America
The Trump administration is already campaigning for the upcoming elections and its main target is an easy fragile one – migration and how to put the brakes on it. Turning Guatemala into a temporary prison has been its latest achievement.
Aug 12, 2019
The issue of migration allows Trump to show off his imperial power in front of the cameras, and to cover up with much fuss a series of failures. His latest "achievement" has been to force Guatemala - a country on the verge of collapse and mired in a humanitarian and institutional crisis - into becoming a temporary prison for those seeking asylum in the US.
Guatemala will receive hundreds of deported migrants. The country has been designated as the hell where the concentration camps for migrants will be located, conveniently out of the reach of US courts of justice. Guatemala is thus to become a Tropical Turkey, the country where asylum requests will be brought together, so that the brutality can be carried out offshore.
This is the country with the longest, uninterrupted track record of control and repression of internally displaced persons in Central America. The country which in the past has carried out experiments such as the razed-land policies, or the State terror laboratories called "model villages" which as part of the dispossessing and genocidal policies that forty years ago killed more than 250,000 people. Today this is being repeated.
Central America as a region offers powerful evidence of the complete failure of the economic policies that have benefited a few powerful countries in the world and sacrificed the most vulnerable ones.
The silence of the international community speaks volumes. The accomplices to the Central American calamity are on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The Mediterranean and the Arizona desert tragedies both have similar causes, and the response to both is the same. Multilateral institutions have failed the world's poor and vulnerable, and the current international trade model only favours the perpetrators of the forthcoming global environmental catastrophe and their accomplices.
The US, Canada, China and Europe are the world powers which have contributed to the fast deterioration of the quality of life of Central Americans through exploitation schemes and political pressure. From the destruction of local economies as a result of the signing of the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), to the reinforcement of commercial policies which avoid compliance with human rights, and to the Association Agreement between the European Union and Central America, which protects and consolidates the domination and control by large corporations of the energy matrix of Central American countries.
Could the region this time be the space for testing a set of policies precisely in the opposite direction? Could progressive forces on both sides of the Atlantic dare to push for a Green New Deal for Central America as a response to the current crisis?
Would it be possible for the developed world to imagine a moratorium for the countries which are the most unequal, violent and vulnerable to climate change, allowing their people enough flexibility to exceptionally apply another economic model? Clean energy? Decent jobs? Native seeds?
Central America accounts for 7% of the world's biodiversity despite its small size. It leads the ranking of the most unequal countries in the world and of the poorest countries in the Americas, and it is home to four of the fifty most violent cities in the world. If economic slowdown is added to extreme vulnerability to climate change, lack of active public inclusion policies for women and marked racism to indigenous and Afro-descendant populations, it is obvious that the number of people willing to migrate to the North, even risking everything, will only increase.
A Green New Deal for Central America would allow for the possibility of conducting pilot testing, giving concrete shape to and defending a different future - no longer as an idea, but as a proven reality. Replacing fragile and failed institutions with architecture that results from economic and ecological transformation, empowering indigenous and peasant communities, regaining control of the natural commons, reversing the fast disappearance of unique species, preserving the remaining oxygen reserves in the region, compensating Central American countries for the impact that 10% of the world inflicts on them, putting them on the map of the countries most at risk from the global climate crisis. These changes do not depend on the congresses of these countries. They depend on Washington, Brussels and the international financial institutions.
If radical change is not the option, humanitarian aid patches will end up in the pockets of contractors who are linked to the security industry.
This humanitarian crisis summarizes the failures of the system that the world inflicts on the poor, pushing them to cross seas and deserts, and to risk everything while seeking a better life. At the same time, it is also an opportunity for a radical change, for transcending discourses which promise palliative "sustainable futures" that nobody is willing to finance. It is an opportunity for raising international solidarity on the basis of a concrete plan - beyond words and paper.
If the Green New Deal does not work here and now, if it cannot surpass humanitarian camp reactions and massive exoduses and produce a positive agenda, tomorrow will be too late. If we seal a new social contract, we must include everyone, we must make sure that no one is left behind - starting with those to whom we owe the most.
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Renata Avila
Renata Avila is an Executive Director of the Smart Citizenship Foundation, Chile. Renata is an international Human Rights lawyer, specializing in the next wave of technological challenges to preserve and advance our rights. She is currently writing a book on digital colonialism and designing international tech policies for a democratic future. She is a member of the Coordinating Collective of @Diem_25, Board member for @creativecommons and co-convener of the Progressive International.
The issue of migration allows Trump to show off his imperial power in front of the cameras, and to cover up with much fuss a series of failures. His latest "achievement" has been to force Guatemala - a country on the verge of collapse and mired in a humanitarian and institutional crisis - into becoming a temporary prison for those seeking asylum in the US.
Guatemala will receive hundreds of deported migrants. The country has been designated as the hell where the concentration camps for migrants will be located, conveniently out of the reach of US courts of justice. Guatemala is thus to become a Tropical Turkey, the country where asylum requests will be brought together, so that the brutality can be carried out offshore.
This is the country with the longest, uninterrupted track record of control and repression of internally displaced persons in Central America. The country which in the past has carried out experiments such as the razed-land policies, or the State terror laboratories called "model villages" which as part of the dispossessing and genocidal policies that forty years ago killed more than 250,000 people. Today this is being repeated.
Central America as a region offers powerful evidence of the complete failure of the economic policies that have benefited a few powerful countries in the world and sacrificed the most vulnerable ones.
The silence of the international community speaks volumes. The accomplices to the Central American calamity are on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The Mediterranean and the Arizona desert tragedies both have similar causes, and the response to both is the same. Multilateral institutions have failed the world's poor and vulnerable, and the current international trade model only favours the perpetrators of the forthcoming global environmental catastrophe and their accomplices.
The US, Canada, China and Europe are the world powers which have contributed to the fast deterioration of the quality of life of Central Americans through exploitation schemes and political pressure. From the destruction of local economies as a result of the signing of the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), to the reinforcement of commercial policies which avoid compliance with human rights, and to the Association Agreement between the European Union and Central America, which protects and consolidates the domination and control by large corporations of the energy matrix of Central American countries.
Could the region this time be the space for testing a set of policies precisely in the opposite direction? Could progressive forces on both sides of the Atlantic dare to push for a Green New Deal for Central America as a response to the current crisis?
Would it be possible for the developed world to imagine a moratorium for the countries which are the most unequal, violent and vulnerable to climate change, allowing their people enough flexibility to exceptionally apply another economic model? Clean energy? Decent jobs? Native seeds?
Central America accounts for 7% of the world's biodiversity despite its small size. It leads the ranking of the most unequal countries in the world and of the poorest countries in the Americas, and it is home to four of the fifty most violent cities in the world. If economic slowdown is added to extreme vulnerability to climate change, lack of active public inclusion policies for women and marked racism to indigenous and Afro-descendant populations, it is obvious that the number of people willing to migrate to the North, even risking everything, will only increase.
A Green New Deal for Central America would allow for the possibility of conducting pilot testing, giving concrete shape to and defending a different future - no longer as an idea, but as a proven reality. Replacing fragile and failed institutions with architecture that results from economic and ecological transformation, empowering indigenous and peasant communities, regaining control of the natural commons, reversing the fast disappearance of unique species, preserving the remaining oxygen reserves in the region, compensating Central American countries for the impact that 10% of the world inflicts on them, putting them on the map of the countries most at risk from the global climate crisis. These changes do not depend on the congresses of these countries. They depend on Washington, Brussels and the international financial institutions.
If radical change is not the option, humanitarian aid patches will end up in the pockets of contractors who are linked to the security industry.
This humanitarian crisis summarizes the failures of the system that the world inflicts on the poor, pushing them to cross seas and deserts, and to risk everything while seeking a better life. At the same time, it is also an opportunity for a radical change, for transcending discourses which promise palliative "sustainable futures" that nobody is willing to finance. It is an opportunity for raising international solidarity on the basis of a concrete plan - beyond words and paper.
If the Green New Deal does not work here and now, if it cannot surpass humanitarian camp reactions and massive exoduses and produce a positive agenda, tomorrow will be too late. If we seal a new social contract, we must include everyone, we must make sure that no one is left behind - starting with those to whom we owe the most.
Renata Avila
Renata Avila is an Executive Director of the Smart Citizenship Foundation, Chile. Renata is an international Human Rights lawyer, specializing in the next wave of technological challenges to preserve and advance our rights. She is currently writing a book on digital colonialism and designing international tech policies for a democratic future. She is a member of the Coordinating Collective of @Diem_25, Board member for @creativecommons and co-convener of the Progressive International.
The issue of migration allows Trump to show off his imperial power in front of the cameras, and to cover up with much fuss a series of failures. His latest "achievement" has been to force Guatemala - a country on the verge of collapse and mired in a humanitarian and institutional crisis - into becoming a temporary prison for those seeking asylum in the US.
Guatemala will receive hundreds of deported migrants. The country has been designated as the hell where the concentration camps for migrants will be located, conveniently out of the reach of US courts of justice. Guatemala is thus to become a Tropical Turkey, the country where asylum requests will be brought together, so that the brutality can be carried out offshore.
This is the country with the longest, uninterrupted track record of control and repression of internally displaced persons in Central America. The country which in the past has carried out experiments such as the razed-land policies, or the State terror laboratories called "model villages" which as part of the dispossessing and genocidal policies that forty years ago killed more than 250,000 people. Today this is being repeated.
Central America as a region offers powerful evidence of the complete failure of the economic policies that have benefited a few powerful countries in the world and sacrificed the most vulnerable ones.
The silence of the international community speaks volumes. The accomplices to the Central American calamity are on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The Mediterranean and the Arizona desert tragedies both have similar causes, and the response to both is the same. Multilateral institutions have failed the world's poor and vulnerable, and the current international trade model only favours the perpetrators of the forthcoming global environmental catastrophe and their accomplices.
The US, Canada, China and Europe are the world powers which have contributed to the fast deterioration of the quality of life of Central Americans through exploitation schemes and political pressure. From the destruction of local economies as a result of the signing of the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), to the reinforcement of commercial policies which avoid compliance with human rights, and to the Association Agreement between the European Union and Central America, which protects and consolidates the domination and control by large corporations of the energy matrix of Central American countries.
Could the region this time be the space for testing a set of policies precisely in the opposite direction? Could progressive forces on both sides of the Atlantic dare to push for a Green New Deal for Central America as a response to the current crisis?
Would it be possible for the developed world to imagine a moratorium for the countries which are the most unequal, violent and vulnerable to climate change, allowing their people enough flexibility to exceptionally apply another economic model? Clean energy? Decent jobs? Native seeds?
Central America accounts for 7% of the world's biodiversity despite its small size. It leads the ranking of the most unequal countries in the world and of the poorest countries in the Americas, and it is home to four of the fifty most violent cities in the world. If economic slowdown is added to extreme vulnerability to climate change, lack of active public inclusion policies for women and marked racism to indigenous and Afro-descendant populations, it is obvious that the number of people willing to migrate to the North, even risking everything, will only increase.
A Green New Deal for Central America would allow for the possibility of conducting pilot testing, giving concrete shape to and defending a different future - no longer as an idea, but as a proven reality. Replacing fragile and failed institutions with architecture that results from economic and ecological transformation, empowering indigenous and peasant communities, regaining control of the natural commons, reversing the fast disappearance of unique species, preserving the remaining oxygen reserves in the region, compensating Central American countries for the impact that 10% of the world inflicts on them, putting them on the map of the countries most at risk from the global climate crisis. These changes do not depend on the congresses of these countries. They depend on Washington, Brussels and the international financial institutions.
If radical change is not the option, humanitarian aid patches will end up in the pockets of contractors who are linked to the security industry.
This humanitarian crisis summarizes the failures of the system that the world inflicts on the poor, pushing them to cross seas and deserts, and to risk everything while seeking a better life. At the same time, it is also an opportunity for a radical change, for transcending discourses which promise palliative "sustainable futures" that nobody is willing to finance. It is an opportunity for raising international solidarity on the basis of a concrete plan - beyond words and paper.
If the Green New Deal does not work here and now, if it cannot surpass humanitarian camp reactions and massive exoduses and produce a positive agenda, tomorrow will be too late. If we seal a new social contract, we must include everyone, we must make sure that no one is left behind - starting with those to whom we owe the most.
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Senate GOP Fuels Privatization Fears by Confirming 'Quack Grifter' Dr. Oz
The new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator joins "a team of snake oil salesmen and anti-science flunkies that have already shown disdain for the American people and their health," said one critic.
Apr 03, 2025
Echoing a party-line vote by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee last week, the chamber's Republicans on Thursday confirmed President Donald Trump's nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, former televison host Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Since Trump nominated Oz—who previously ran as a Republican for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania—a wide range of critics have argued that the celebrity cardiothoracic surgeon "is profoundly unqualified to lead any part of our healthcare system, let alone an agency as important as CMS," in the words of Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.
After Thursday's 53-45 vote to confirm Oz, Weissman declared that "Republicans in the Senate continued to just be a rubber stamp for a dangerous agenda that threatens to turn back the clock on healthcare in America."
Weissman warned that "in addition to having significant conflicts of interest, Oz is now poised to help enact the Trump administration's dangerous agenda, which seeks to strip crucial healthcare services through Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act from hundreds of millions of Americans and to use that money to give tax breaks to billionaires."
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CMS is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who, like Oz, came under fire for his record of dubious claims during the confirmation process. Weissman said that "Dr. Oz is joining a team of snake oil salesmen and anti-science flunkies that have already shown disdain for the American people and their health. This is yet another dark day for healthcare in America under Trump."
In the middle of Trump's tariff disaster, the Senate is voting to confirm quack grifter Dr. Oz to lead the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services.
[image or embed]
— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 12:29 PM
Oz's confirmation came a day after Trump announced globally disruptive tariffs and Senate Republicans unveiled a budget plan that would give the wealthy trillions of dollars in tax cuts at the expense of federal food assistance and healthcare programs.
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Israeli airstrikes targeted at least three more school shelters in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, killing dozens of Palestinians and wounding scores of others on a day when local officials said that more than 100 people were slain by occupation forces.
Gaza's Government Media Office said that at least 29 people—including 14 children and five women—were killed and over 100 others were wounded when at least four missiles struck the Dar al-Arqam school complex in the Tuffah neighborhood of eastern Gaza City, where hundreds of Palestinians were sheltering after being forcibly displaced from other parts of the embattled coastal enclave by Israel's 535-day assault.
Al Jazeera reported that "when terrified men, women, and children fled from one school building to another, the bombs followed them," and "when bystanders rushed to help, they too became victims."
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Warning: Video contains graphic images of death.
Horrifying scenes following the Dar Al-Arqam School Massacre!#Gaza pic.twitter.com/xOvuq3Zztx
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Gaza Health Ministry spokesperson Zaher al-Wahidi said that the death toll was likely to rise, as some survivors were critically injured.
Dozens of victims were reportedly trapped beneath rubble of Thursday's airstrikes, but they could not be rescued due to a lack of equipment.
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"While your kids are getting ready for school, kids in Gaza were once against just massacred in one," Australian journalist, activist, and progressive politician Sophie McNeill wrote on social media. "We must sanction Israel now!"
There were other IDF massacres on Thursday, with local officials reporting that more than 100 people were killed in Israeli attacks since dawn. Al-Wahidi said more than 30 people were killed in strikes on homes in Gaza City's Shejaya neighborhood, citing records at al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital in Gaza.
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"We could replace a billionaire with a mechanic," Osborn wrote in a thread on X on Thursday. "I'll run against Pete Ricketts—if the support is there." Osborn said that he's launching an exploratory committee and would run as Independent, as he did in 2024.
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