Central American migrants cross the Suchiate River between Guatemala and Mexico, October 2018. Credit: Fred Ramos for El Faro
Emma Feeney
The refugee and migration crisis is a global issue that is increasing in severity. The number of people seeking to escape from danger and civil unrest in the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Central America continues to rise. We have had multiple class discussions focused on media and its role in exposing these harsh realities and injustices experienced by migrants. Fred Ramos is a known photographer who captures the lives of Central Americans adversely affected by the gang violence and government corruption. His work is featured in The New York Times article “Chronicling the Reasons Central Americans Migrate to the United States.” As Roland Barthes says of images and rhetoric, the rhetoric of Ramos’ images frame the viewer’s interpretation of the picture. His images are impactful, with subjects who are physically affected by the unrest in their communities. Children are photographed sleeping in the back of a truck as they travel to the border. Another photo shows a family gazing into the United States through a wired border. One of the last photographs in the article shows the remains of a river in Honduras. The river was drained for the benefit of a hydroelectric plant in Honduras. As a result, the community no longer has a source of water.
This is an example of what Rob Nixon, in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor calls “slow violence.” The creation of the hydroelectric plant negatively affects the environment and as a result has depleted the community’s resources. Nixon argues that the depletion of the community’s water supply is an act of “slow violence,” because it is a more subtle and less “visible act,” than violence involving weapons or explosives. Instead, communities are being harmed by environmental calamities. These environmental calamities are causing families to flee their homeland and seek refuge where they will have access to physical resources to meet their basic needs. Nixon writes that when a community is deprived of their natural resources by an act of slow violence, they too become people removed from their home, migrants, since their community is altered by the loss of its resources. Their home is no longer what it used to be. Nixon highlights the need for the media to capture the “long emergencies” and the slow violence. The depleting number of resources and environmental dangers has already harmed countless communities, some of which have been forced to seek relocation. There is a great need for an increased public awareness of the violence that is taking place without the use of weapons. The media has such a powerful influence today and photographers like Ramos, and other forms of media, have the potential to bring public attention to the global acts of slow violence. Increasing awareness of the environmental issues being invoked on global communities specifically because of the United States’ consumerist habits could increase motivation in both governments and citizens to increase efforts to stop slow violence. I believe media to be the most powerful medium to pursue change due to its ability to frame images and videos so that it creates empathy and a healthy despair in human beings who are living comfortably and never doubt their plentiful resources.