The death of Jakelín
The misery that marked the short life of the Guatemalan girl Jakelín Caal Maquín only mattered to her parents, especially to the father who undertook with her daughter the sad route to the North that almost always ends in tragedy.
The death of Jakelín after being in the custody of the Border Patrol has gone around the world, and although many lament the death it is good to ask what will happen beyond the lamentations.
Lamentations don’t last long in the government of Donald J. Trump, who has turned the harsh and cruel stand on immigration into his lifeline to maintain the support of his loyal base. In fact, the death of this little girl would come to represent a natural consequence of this anti-immigrant policy, whose representatives nothing seems to move, especially when it comes to undocumented people from countries so despised by this administration.
For Trump and his henchmen there can be thousands like Jakelín meeting the same fate, but they, with a grimace of annoyance, will always consider this as “collateral damage.” They will blame the victim all the time or, as in this case, the father for having brought her on such a hard journey, hoping to cross into the United States, the still considered “promised land” for the contemporary migrant.
Little do they care the reasons that these families have to get into the lion's mouth in a last attempt to try to escape misery. Trump and his people only care to exploit this misery for political purposes, calling these migrants “invaders” and “criminals.” In short, what has been proposed is to cut all access routes to migrants of color, even when legally seeking asylum.
And the situation will get worse, because the more Trump is besieged by all the investigations on his back, there will be no doubt that he will intensify his attacks and his anti-immigrant proposals in order to maintain the support of the base, now that the investi- gations could turn against him, running the risk of impeachment when the House passes into the hands of Democrats in January. And history teaches us that when fear preys on autocrats, they always respond impulsively without measuring the consequences.
On the other hand, the corrupt governments of the nations from which these migrants come also do not care about the misery, hunger, malnutrition and abuse in which millions of their inhabitants have been plunged, particularly the indigenous, without there being a true interest in establishing a comprehensive policy that stimulates the development of these communities, destining them to take the only option they have at hand: emigrate. And when the trip to the North ends in tragedy, then the consular representatives or other figures of those governments are seen giving condolences or financing the transfer of a body to their country of origin, when in life they did nothing for them. Their mouths are filled with official expressions, taken from the manual of the perfect diplomat or the hypocritical public official.
In the photo of Jakelín we see a sweet girl with a hint of sadness in her eyes, perhaps reflecting the hard life that she had to live. And it is painful to think that she also had a terrible death. This has proven that the dehumanization of immigrants is a fierce mission of the current government, which its followers justify by launching insulting anti-immigrant diatribes and based on which their immigration authorities have turned negligence, abuse and cruelty into something “normal.”
The worst of the case is that you do not know how many children like Jakelín will have perished in the crossing, and we will never know; or how many will run the same fate, pushed, on the one hand, by the corrupt governments of their countries of origin, and on the other, rejected on this side of the line by the corrupt who now occupies the White House. (America’s Voice)