The Andes mountains, Ecuador. Daran Kandasamy/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)
The smuggling of migrants has come to be one of the most mediatised and politicised dimensions of contemporary migration. Global media frequently shows a supposed migratory crisis at border zones – particularly at European and US extended fringes – or at zones of transit towards both destinations. In those spaces an apparently state of lawlessness prevails due to the arrival of poor, irregularised migrants brought by smugglers. Whilst the most repetitive images come from Europe, specifically from the Mediterranean and eastern European zones, other images from the American continent have also been mediatised.
Such is the case of the recent migratory crisis of Cuban irregularised migrants stuck between Costa Rica and Nicaragua; or the crisis of unaccompanied children migrating through Central America and Mexico towards the US; or the 2011 massacre of irregularised migrants in San Fernando, Mexico – all reveal the humanitarian crisis of the Mexico-U.S. corridor. The images arising from each of these events indeed capture the most violent part of two of the principal smuggling routes worldwide: the one directed towards Europe, and the other towards the US.
