Storming the Wall. Todd Miller
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how money is spent. “Hundreds of billions of dollars each year subsidize fossil fuel industries globally—the main cause of climate change—and nearly $2 trillion are spent on the military.”51 And, of course, the military, even as it greens its own technology, provides the business-as-usual security for the fossil fuel industries.
Thomas Smith is one of the principal authors of the 2014 Homeland Security Quadrennial Review, the main public doctrine that explains the DHS mission and now recognizes climate change as a central threat. Smith said earlier that experts in the Office of Policy Strategy did a number of activities to understand the threats and hazards facing the United States, and “the strategic environment we operate in.” This collection of analyses was known as the Homeland Security Strategic Environment Assessment. It looks at risks, threats, and trends during a given time frame, in this case, the 2015–2019 window, and collectively identifies “natural disasters, pandemics, and climate change as key drivers of change to the homeland security strategic environment.”52 In the Quadrennial Review, Smith says, these associated trends continue to present “a major area of homeland security risk,” and he specifically mentions that “more frequent severe droughts and tropical storms, especially in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean could increase population movements, both legal and illegal, toward or across the U.S. border,”53 a tame version of the threat forecasts issued by officials worldwide.
To Duncan, Smith says: “We describe that climate change can aggravate stressors such as poverty, such as food insecurity, such as causing population migration. For vulnerable populations with weak government institutions it may enable terrorism to take hold.”54
The congressman from South Carolina is definitely not the only one fooled into thinking that discussions in Washington about climate change are limited to science and to laws regulating carbon emissions and debates about whether or not it exists. In the strategy rooms of Washington, a climate adaptation program for the rich and powerful is being created, and the walls and weapons to protect their systems of profit and politics as long as possible. The real threat is the inability to obtain alloying agents needed to make more fighter jets.
THREE
THE 21ST-CENTURY BORDER
If you ask us what’s going to happen in the near future, we have no fucking idea. Sorry for using the word “idea.”
—Subcomandante Marcos (now known as Galeano), at a press conference.
Three Honduran men sit by the train tracks in the small, broiling town of Tenosique, Mexico. They wait where hundreds of Central Americans congregate each night in hopes of jumping on the freight train notoriously known as The Beast, as it chugs north to the United States. In the distance, across the tracks, an army truck rumbles by. In the back, two soldiers stand poised with assault rifles, their faces covered with black balaclavas. The shiny Dodge Ram contrasts against the rusted machinery scattered in the overgrown grass and cement. It is as if we are on the set of a movie somewhere between Children of Men, a film that depicts the United Kingdom as an ultra-militarized police state rounding up and incarcerating refugees, and The Road, a tale of a father and son who walk across a post-apocalyptic North America devastated by an unknown cataclysm.
The Honduran men’s names are Luis Carlos, Santos Fernando, and Ismael. They have been living by the tracks in a small shack built of corrugated metal for several days. When I ask Ismael where he is from, he pulls out the identification card that is warped and fraying at the edges, as if it has been pulled out one too many times. I am not there to look for “climate refugees.” I am there to investigate Mexico’s upsurge in border policing since 2014, known as Programa Frontera Sur. The soldiers across the tracks are moving away from us. I wonder, as I watch them monitoring the train yard, if they are among the many military, police, and immigration officials who have been trained by the United States.
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