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.
