Seven days after the start of his second term, president Donald Trump ordered the preparation of an American naval base in the Cuban Gulf of Guantánamo to hold up to 30,000 immigrants. So far, they've been transported to the base. 177 Venezuelans, chained and described as "illegal". After a fewer days They were deported to Venezuela. Another 17 migrants were sent to Guantánamo on 23 February.
Trump's decision met with outrage – and rightly so. But Guantánamo is nothing new.
Outlaw
I came there as a reporter on January 27, 2017, just a week after Donald Trump first became president. In his campaign, he declared "torture works“and promised to fill this illegal military prison with “bad men”. Shortly after the Trump elections won, Camp Commandant Peter Clarke gathered his officers in an outdoor military base cinema to respond to their concerns.
Administration of Barack Obama has taken a sample the closure of the prison in which George W.’s government in the early 21st century. Bush kept up to 780 men (and children) Muslim confessions active in terrorist activities. At the time of my arrival, 41 prisoners remained, present there are 15 of them.
Bush chose Guantánamo, “Legal equivalent of space” to avoid Geneva Conventionabout the treatment of prisoners of war, as well as the American courts and constitution. They were kept “Illegal militants” and allegedly they did not deserve any rights. In many cases, they were tortured to extract questionable quality intelligence and evidence that no court would accept.
In 2015, after many loud investigations into CIA practices in secret prisons, including Guantánamo, torture was banned national law. It was about time. But in Obama's tenure, nothing else truly changed. His administration reduced the number of detainees, sent tens back to their native countries or 3rd countries and ordered prison officers to grant the remainder of the rights compatible with Geneva Convention. They were to be prisoners until the end of the war on terrorism. Prisoners forever.
At an outdoor cinema gathering in 2017, 1 of the officers asked Clarke for a warrant to reconstruct torture given by Trump. The commander responded."In my opinion, the chance that I will be given specified an order that I will gotta answer: 'the order is illegal and I will not fill it', and that would yet happen, is zero. Okay? due to the fact that somewhere in the Constitution, there's this law, this responsibility, that we leaders, we uniforms, follow only orders that are lawful. And a torture order would not be legal."
Two months later, erstwhile I and another journalists in Guantánamo pressed on Clarke, he spoke little categorically: “I just said that we should wait to find out what the fresh policy would be. Promises in the run are promises, nothing more. We will proceed to settle in a safe and humanitarian manner, in accordance with global law and our country's policy and law."
Like Obama, Trump failed to fulfill his run promise. During his first term, no fresh prisoners were sent to Guantánamo, and the torture did not return – although the forced feeding of prisoners on a hunger strike, isolation and indefinite detention without any charges were concluded, and after all, according to International humanitarian law they are considered cruel, inhuman and humiliating.
However, the laws never restricted Trump or the United States in operations on the military base, strategically located on the southeastern coast of Cuba, in the dry, mediocre state of Guantánamo.
Camp history
The base is simply a remnant of the American-Spanish War and US intervention in the Cuban War of independency with a Spanish colonizer – a trap set in Platt Amendmentwhich in 1903 made Cuba a United States protectorate.
The same year the American business of Guantánamo Bay officially began, regulated then 1934 Treaty. According to the agreement, Cuba leases the land to the United States for respective 1000 dollars a year. Although payment is symbolic, Cuba refuses to cash a check all year in a motion of protest against the illegal business of the area. However, the lease can only be terminated if both parties agree to it or erstwhile the US leaves the base.
All of this makes Guantánamo both the oldest military facility in the U.S. country and the only unacceptable host state. Washington recognizes Cuba's sovereignty on this passage of land and sea. It is convenient for itself to deny people imprisoned there – migrants, abroad officials, asylum seekers and terrorist suspects – the rights provided by the American constitution and global regulations. This is legal purgatory.
As I described in my book about six erstwhile Guantánamo prisoners transferred to Uruguay, Guantánamo entre nosotros (2017, “Guantanamo between us”), before Bush opened an illegal prison there in 2002 for terrorism suspects, the base was a gigantic detention in the open air for tens of thousands of Haitians and Cubans fleeing their countries.
As a consequence of the coup against Democratic president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haitian exile crisis, lasting from 1991 to 1994. In the first six months, the U.S. Coast defender intercepted Over 38,000 peoplewho left the country by sea. She sent them to the overcrowded. camps in GuantánamoWhere surviving conditions were shameful, or back to Haiti.
Only 10.5 1000 of these people could search asylum in the United States after being x-rayed by U.S. Navy officials. Among another things, HIV tests were carried out and those with a affirmative consequence had to meet a higher standard of "reasonable fear" against persecution in order not to be sent back to Haiti. Then even 250 seropositive refugees were placed in a separate camp in Guantánamo. The United States has become the only country in past that had a internment camp for seropositive people.
In 1993, an American justice issued a ruling ordering the administration of Bill Clinton to close the HIV detention facility and supply prisoners with access to appropriate wellness and legal services so that they could search asylum. The justice statedthat ‘arbitrary and indefinite detention’ of Haitians violates their right to a fair trial and a long-term prison “does not service a intent another than punishing them for illness”.
This was the first time the American justice strategy ordered the government to close the facility in Guantánamo. But Washington has been fiercely refusing this for years. On the contrary, 1 administration after another uses the legal black gap that the US created itself.
The Haitian crisis evolved and in the meantime another began: after Fidel Castro lifted the ban on emigration in August 1994 thousands balserostraveling on their own rafts, She's gone to sea.. These people fled political repression and a serious recession in the country (so-called peculiar period) whose infirm economy lost its support after the collapse of the russian Union in 1991.
Since the 1959 Revolution, Cuba has left and alternatively well received hundreds of thousands of people. However, fearing the arrival of fresh migrants, Clinton's administration issued a warrant interception balseros at sea And sending them to Guantánamo. In little than 2 months, more than 32,000 Cubans were captured and held in camps, separated from Haitian migrants.
At the highest of the phenomenon in 1994, little than 50,000 refugees lived on the Guantánamo base – in tents, without moving water and eating, appropriate hygiene or a strategy of leaving the camp or receiving in the United States. There were protests. The rebels were shut down in a separate area that the military called Camp X-Ray.
Although any Cubans were sent to Panama, most yet received approval to settle in the US. In 1996, migrants were no longer held in Guantánamo. The remaining Camp X-Ray, and its territory and name were to belong to the first experimental military prison for terrorism suspects.
If you are of the right age, you may callback pictures of Camp X-Ray: prisoners in orange suits, handcuffed and chained, with masks on their faces and flaps in their eyes, hands hidden in thick gloves, kneeling in an unbearable position in cages under the open sky, surrounded by razor wire meshes, guarded by the military. If you don't remember, you can Google.
Public curiosity
I return to my stay in Guantánamo in 2017. Camp commander Peter Clarke and his officers repeated that it was crucial for us to send a message to the planet that prisoners "now" are treated humanitarianly and in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. Article Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of WarAnnouncesthat they should “be protected constantly [...] from insults and public curiosity”. For this reason, the commandant commanded, we could not talk to men or photograph their faces.
However, we could observe, take pictures and evidence (without showing our face). We could have looked at men through a dark Venetian mirror. We've been instructed to stay silent so they don't know they're being watched erstwhile they pray and eat dinner in Camp VI's shared space. We couldn't talk, we couldn't interview. We couldn't give them the floor. This is simply a peculiar explanation of what it means to “protect from public curiosity”.
Short video published on the X portal by the current squad in the White home shows how American authorities dehumanize and mock undocumented migrants. We're watching them chain up before they get to the deportation flight. The video can be heard buzzing the shackles that are pulled out of a plastic box and then assumed, which is why it was titled "ASMR: An illegal migrant deportation flight". ASMR is an abbreviation for the "autonomic reaction of sensory meridians", utilized in videos with different sounds that origin pleasant tingling in people.
Unlawful cruelty is nothing new. But it can always be more fancy.
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Diana Caribbean is an openDemocracy editor, coordinating investigative journalism projects in the Latin American region. She was co-editor of the IPS information agency and ran its Latin American department for more than 10 years. She wrote a book. Guantánamo entre nosotros (2017). He lives and works in Uruguay.
The article was published on openDemocracy. In English she translated Aleksandra Paszkowska.
