This is Juan,
he is a native Kaqchikel, and he lives in Guatemala.
He is a Mayan, Kaqchikel native.
Like the majority of the Kaqchikel,
Juan grows corn.
The Maya believe they are made of corn.
Their god Huracán, in the Popul Vuh, the Mayan sacred text,
moulds them out of corn paste.
And so, every year, before the dry season,
Juan sows corn.
Each year, he needs 500 dollars to buy seeds,
600 dollars to buy pesticides to protect those seeds
and 900 dollars to buy fertilizers to grow those seeds.
It’s called the “full technological pack”; that is how it is sold.
A technological pack including seeds, pesticides and fertilizers,
that costs 2,000 dollars.
Needless to say, Juan doesn’t have 2,000 dollars.
he needs to go to the bank, to borrow that money.
And by the time he finally delivers,
sells his corn, and pays back his debt,
the amount he owes will be 2,400 dollars.
The problem is that when he sells his corn in Guatemala
–between Guatemala and the U.S. there is a free trade agreement,
and the goods produced in Guatemala and in the U.S.
circulate freely between the two Countries.
And so, when Juan goes to sell his corn,
he has to compete with the corn produced in the U.S.,
where they grow it like this.
Thanks to an ultra-mechanized, industrialized agricolture,
and to large-scale cultivation,
corn in the U.S. is produced
at an infinitely lower price than Juan’s corn.
The price of the corn has dropped so much,
that now Juan sells it at 10 dollars per 100 kilograms.
10 cents per kilogram.
But the year was good,
and Juan managed to produce 500 kilograms of corn,
that will earn him 5,000 dollars.
And when we subtract the 2,400 dollars that Juan needs to return to the bank,
that leaves 2,600 dollars for the entire harvest.
This means 220 dollars a month.
But Juan keeps some of that corn for himself,
and he also has a small garden and a few hens.
Thanks to all of this
he is able to provide for himself, his wife and his three kids
1,700 kcal a day.
These 1,700 kcal a day,
that for us might sound like the perfect low-calorie diet
that helps us flatten our stomach for the summer,
for Juan, they mean a loss of 1 kg a month, every month.
12 kg a year, every year.
This is called malnutrition.
In Guatemala, 22 families own 76% of the land.
9,5 million farmers share what is left.
The plots of land are so small that they cannot produce much,
so that Guatemala is the tenth most malnourished Country in the world.
2,244 kcal are the average in Guatemala. The average.
And this includes people in the cities, wasted food,
the rich plump people who live in the cities,
and it includes millions of farmers
whose intake won’t reach those crucial 2,000 calories, and never will.
According to the World Bank,
49.8% of Guatemalan children under the age of five
are malnourished.
According to the same study of the World Bank,
last year, 72% of Guatemalan families
had to sell some of their assets in order to be able to buy food.
Asset, this word used by the World Bank
that, to us, might sound like a high finance term,
for a farmer means a hoe, a shovel, a plough.
It means selling work tools in order to buy food.
And so, what does Juan do?
He sees a future, something different.
He sees billboards advertising a crop
that could guarantee him a higher income.
It’s the sugar cane.
A U.S. firm produces biodiesel in Guatemala.
They would lend him 3,000 dollars,
and his debt would grow.
But that same firm promises Juan
to buy his corn for 6,000 dollars at the end of the year.
The profit, for Juan, grows from 220 to 250 dollars per month.
Sounds like the best deal of the year.
Juan, gives it a try.
He goes for the sugar cane.
However, now, Juan has no corn at the end of the year.
and what seemed to be a perfect business turns out to be a flop.
And so, his calories go from 1,700 to 1,600.
He won’t be losing 12 kg a year now, but 15.
He can’t make it, it’s impossible.
And so, what does he do?
He decides to sell his plot of land
to the very firm that will produce sugar cane on a large scale,
and will turn it into biodiesel.
He sells his plot of land for about 7,000 dollars.
It’s a good piece of land, for Guatemala,
on a fertile, flat terrain.
Juan even sells his home
and he earns about 6,000 dollars.
And then he makes another debt, for 10,000 dollars.
And with these 23,000 dollars
Juan will pay a coyote, a trafficker of human beings,
who will take him away and will help him cross Mexico,
on this train,
a train that in Latin America is known as “The Beast”.
Perched on this train, every single day, thousands of migrants travel
to escape, to flee from their countries to reach the United States.
For a month, Juan will travel in brutal conditions.
Perched, at times tied, for the fear of falling if he dozes off.
He is tied to this silo,
transporting that very biodiesel produced from the crops he grew.
Juan paid 23,000 dollars
to be illegally transported from Guatemala towards the U.S.
And those 500,000 liters of biodiesel
are being transported at the cost of 350 dollars.
Why am I telling you all of this?
And why me?
Well, because I lived for a long time in Latin America, in Guatemala,
and I have heard hundreds of stories like Juan’s.
So, one day, I said to myself that someone had to tell the story
and had to come here to tell what happens.
In order to do so,
first I had to deprive myself of something and get rid of it,
I had to get rid of this shield that we all have,
this protection we receive at birth,
the most precious thing we have.
You might think, when one is born,
to a newborn, we usually say,
“It’s your health that counts, as long as you are in good health,
and that you have enough money, and the sun is shining,
and you live somewhere beautiful, and your family loves you.”
There’s something much more important,
something you are assigned, randomly, at birth.
Something we cannot touch,
intangible, that we cannot see, but that we all have.
And it is one of the most violent things ever invented:
our citizenship.
Citizenship is represented by this dumb brownish booklet
that we all have.
They give you one when you’re born, almost like winning the lottery.
I won it,
because mine says “Repubblica italiana”.
With this, I can access
the best educational systems, and the best health care.
With this I can enter 173 Countries without a visa.
There are people, just like me,
whose passport, however, says “Republic of Syria”,
and with that, they won’t be going anywhere.
In 1853,
the United States needed to build the Trans Pacific railway,
the one that runs from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
But they found an obstacle:
the central area of the United States, in Arizona,
it was all mountains.
And so they had no way to build the railway.
It was complicated, it was a mess.
So, what did they do?
They contacted Mexico, that had zero money, like today,
and bought a piece of land from it.
The sale of the Mesilla.
A few men, in Washington,
drew a straight line, like this one, in the middle of the desert,
because they needed the plain to build their railway.
Today, the border runs along that straight line.
And there is a town in the middle of that straight line,
its name is Nogales.
Nogales is cut into two parts:
if you are born on that side you get a U.S. passport.
You can access the best schools and the best health care.
You have a passport that allows you to enter 167 Countries in the world.
If you are born on this side, you are Mexican,
and, with your passport, you can’t do anything.
You thought that health mattered most?
Your passport is what counts.
And it might be assigned to you
because of a straight line drawn in Washington 160 years ago.
But I wanted to tell the story, and experience it like they do.
But to do so, I had to get rid of this passport.
So, I put it in an envelope, and I mailed it to a friend’s house.
I camouflaged, I transformed myself
into a Peruvian migrant from Amazonia, by the name of Aymar Blanco.
I crossed the Suchiate river, that separates Mexico from Guatemala,
and then I crossed the entire country of Mexico.
Since 1994 Mexico has been collaborating with the Unites States
to block illegal immigration.
Each year, the U.S.
pours between 4 and 6 billion dollars into Mexico,
so that Mexico can do its dirty work
and stop Central and South American migrants.
So, now, the border
is not just the line between Mexico and the U.S.
The border is the entire Mexican territory!
And Mexico is endless, it so long, and huge.
Depending on where you cross it, it can be more than 2,500 miles.
For the most part of the journey you travel perched, wedged in,
at times tied, like Juan, on these freight trains,
known all over the Americas as “The Beast”,
or the train of death.
Father Solalinde called these railroad tracks
the “largest open-air cemetery in the world.”
Every year, thousands of people fall asleep, or get distracted.
They fall off the train, getting sucked up under the tracks.
This train is the emblem of our modern world;
a moving train,
an endless cargo train that won’t carry passengers,
but runs non-stop carrying low-cost goods from the South to the North,
and yet, it will not carry passengers.
Coal, iron, zinc, copper, pieces of machinery,
scraps of clothing, finished clothing,
mangos, papayas, bananas.
Everything travels freely without taxes, without borders, without anything.
The only things that, on that train, are travelling illegally,
are human beings.
During my journey I was abducted three times.
A gang of hooded men, in the middle of the desert,
after robbing us of everything emptied our water supplies.
It was the only thing left to do,
so they emptied our bottles right in our faces,
so that we could go thirsty.
I had to run, flee,
jump off a moving train several times,
run faster than pregnant women and elderly men to be able to get away.
I had to plug my ears, close my eyes,
not to hear the screams of those who didn’t make it.
Amnesty International
reports that 60% of women, before entering the U.S.,
get raped during their journey.
60%.
The Federal Police caught us and arrested us.
They locked us into a 52 square foot cell, where there were 40 of us.
For two days, at 104 degrees in the day, with no water, no food, no bathroom.
40 people: we had to take turns to sit.
Not even to lie down, just to sit.
There was no way to sit at the same time.
We took turns, alternating, to sit, and stand.
For two days straight.
We were forced to eat, drink,
shit, piss, vomit, faint,
all together in that space.
At some point there was no train, the rain had washed it off the tracks,
so they replaced it with a truck service.
And we spent 26 hours hidden in the false bottom of a truck.
At the end of the leg,
our joints were so stiff
that we fell face down in the mud.
Our drivers were laughing and drinking tequila.
Despite all of this, thousands of people,
forced by desperation, begin this journey
and reach the U.S. border, and I did it with them.
The U.S. border
can virtually be divided into three areas.
You arrive, after crossing Mexico in its entirety,
but you still have to cross the border,
you still have to make it into that “promised land.”
The most eastern part is the only one with an actual natural border,
the Río Bravo,
a river with a funny name,
because in the U.S. they call it the Río Grande del Sur,
the big southern river.
In Mexico, they call it the Río Bravo, the evil river.
Hundreds, possibly thousand of people
drown, each year, in their attempt to cross it.
The current drags them out to sea, where the Gulf of Mexicos currents,
as a last insult, take them into Texas
Dead.
The 7 counties of the Southern Texan Coast
have been in a state of medical emergency since 2008,
due to the number of dead bodies washing onto their coast every day.
Go West, and you have the wall: 760 miles,
the second largest separation barrier
ever built by human beings.
In 20 years, that wall has already seen the death
– according to the U.S. official numbers – of 3,040 people.
So that you can compare,
during the 28 years of the Berlin wall,
the number of deaths amounted to 98.
Officially, we talk of 3,040.
In Mexico, the estimate is around 15,000.
And then, in the middle, there is nothing, a gap.
What else could you add in addition to the Sonora desert,
a desert as large as a third of Italy,
with temperatures exceeding 104 during the day,
and plummetting to 14 degrees at night.
Pima county, just over the border,
declared bankruptcy in 2013.
They could not pay the power bills
to run the freezers
where they stored 871 unidentified corpses
of migrants who had died in their attempt to cross the desert.
And that is where I crossed.
You walk at night, it’s freezing cold
and hide during the day in the scorching heat.
Groups of “U.S. patriots” poison the water wells.
One night we found a poisoned well.
I got sick.
I owe my life to a Nicaraguan migrant, whose name I don’t even know.
While I was vomiting behind a cactus he grabbed my shoulder and said,
“Hey, look, they are leaving you here. Move it!”
Not everyone has a Nicaraguan guardian angel.
We left in a group of 24 and only 19 made it to Tucson.
Today, through that desert,
they want to add to, build yet another wall,
a further barrier to separate the two countries,
a further barrier to prevent human beings
to do the most natural thing ever:
move, relocate.
3.5 million years ago we were monkeys,
and we climbed down the trees to move.
We acquired the upright position, as bipeds,
to be able to walk long distances, to be able to move.
Human history is made of countless relocations,
countless migrations and transfers from one place to the next,
in search of food, in search of partners.
And then we go back, we flee from catastrophes.
Human beings move.
Infants learn to walk
before they learn to properly use their hands.
Infants walk before they learn to speak.
They learn to walk before eating solid foods.
The human being is made for walking.
And no wall, no barrier in the world,
for as large as they might build it,
no barrier in the world will ever prevent human beings
from moving from place to place.
Thank you.
(Applause)
[Roots are important in the life of a person,
but we, as humans, have legs, not roots,
and legs are made to go elsewhere – Pino Cacucci]
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