Jared Olson

(All photos by Seth Berry)

This piece originally appeared in The Nation

San Pedro Sula, Honduras—Above a steaming hot floodplain at the edge of gang territory, a ragged group of tents lays sprawled beneath the highway.  

It’s been over six months since back-to-back hurricanes ravaged Honduras. But even now, people displaced by the floodwaters are still living here: over a dozen malnourished families in dark, humidtents in the cavernous space beneath the CA4 highway. Living conditions are less than idyllic: skeletal dogs prance around burning mounds of trash, while a constant flow of traffic echoes past on the bridge overhead. Facing a climate catastrophe that washed away their homes, an utter lack of employment, and unceasing violence from both the government and gangs, places like this encampment have become ground zero for undocumented migrants who’ve traveled to the US. But the Biden administration — selling its immigration policies as a departure from Trump’s cruel racism even as it seeks to stem migrant flows — has different plans in mind. 

“We’ve secured agreements for [these countries] to put more troops on their own border,” Tyler Moran, Biden’s special assistant to the President for immigration said on MSNBC on April 12, announcing plans to stop irregular migration by having the Honduran military, among others, deploy 1,500 troops to the country’s US-facing Guatemalan border. “Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala have all agreed to do this. That not only is going to prevent the traffickers, and the smugglers, and cartels that take advantage of the kids on their way here, but also to protect those children.”

However critics fear further militarization of the border will in fact produce the opposite effect. As long as structural violence forcing people to flee continues, migration out of Honduras won’t stop — but it will, they contend, become  far more dangerous.

Continue reading “In Honduras, US Efforts to Deter Migrants Add Danger, Costs”

This article appeared original in The Nation

Since Donald Trump’s election, pundits and reporters have been debating how to describe the movement that propelled him to the White House. Did his supporters’ attacks against immigrants, street brawls with antifa, and cheeky embrace of authoritarianism really constitute 1930s-style fascism? Or was it rather the “Southern strategy” on steroids, strongman populism, or savage capitalism?

When journalist Brendan O’Connor considered the question, he saw echoes of the 1930s, but realized that Trump’s movement deserved an entirely new category: border fascism.

When O’Connor started on his book in summer 2018, Trump had just begun implementation of Stephen Miller’s zero-tolerance border policy; soon, thousands of migrant children would be caged and separated from their parents. As O’Connor finished his book, police across the country were arresting, beating, and launching tear gas at participants of the largest anti-racist movement in US history. In Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right, O’Connor tries to get to the root of this mix of xenophobia and state violence. Border fascism, he explains, is a new strain of a far-right nationalism that fetishizes boundaries. The racism of this movement isn’t always overt, but its underlying ideology is based on a racialized understanding of citizenship that idolizes “law and order” and attacks “the illegals” for violating the supposed sanctity of the country’s border.

—Jared Olson

JARED OLSON: The big idea I got from the book was the idea of border fascism. How did you come to that? And was there any distinct moment in your report or research when that became clear to you?

Continue reading “How Border Fascism Explains the Trump Movement”

This piece originally appeared in El Faro English

Anastasia Mejía was already uneasy by the time the authorities reached her door last September. An indigenous Maya journalist in the rural Guatemalan department of Quiché, and a prominent woman in a community stained by widespread sexism and a country known for its anti-indigenous racism, Mejía had no shortage of antagonists. But after reporting on an August 2020 protest against the mayor of Joyabaj, accused of corruption, which devolved into the sacking of a municipal government building, she’d felt more on edge than usual. The arrival of the National Civil Police to her house on September 22 confirmed the worst of her fears: she was accused of participating in the disturbance she’d reported on and, alongside twelve participants, was being charged with sedition, arson, aggravated assault and robbery. 

It was the beginning of an ongoing nightmare for Mejía. Confined to conditional house arrest, the court forbade her from writing about or approaching the mayor against whom the protest was staged over half a year ago and from leaving the department of Quiché.

“It’s a way of continuing to silence me,” Mejia said last December. For seven years, she’d been able to use the radio equipment, installed on a rickety wood table in her house, to report on the protests and steadily mounting corruption allegations against Florencio Carrascoza. Now, according to the terms of her arrest and release, saying even a word about him would send her straight back to jail. 

Continue reading “Guatemalan Indigenous Journalist Censured for Reporting on a Protest”

The piece appeared originally in The Nation magazine

ORLANDO, FLA.—It would be easy to see the relative calm of Donald Trump’s post-insurrection career as an ignominious end to six years of MAGA. For those of us used to waking up every day for the past four years wondering what wreckage he left behind overnight—and then compulsively scrolling through Twitter to find out—it’s been tempting to regard Trump as a spent force. But the atmosphere outside the hotel here last weekend hosting the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)—with demonstrators cavorting in cheerful defiance of Trump’s election defeat—gave a very different vision of that movement’s future. It didn’t take long for me to realize that these people have no plans of going away.

I’d come to Orlando to interview MAGA supporters and get a taste of their plans following the unwelcome loss of the presidency. Few of them captured the tenor of the crowd better than Enrique Tarrio, the current chairman of the Proud Boys and one of the most controversial luminaries of the far right, whom I found slipping along the sidewalk with his own coterie of diehard supporters. To him, the reason everyone was out there braving the heat that afternoon was clear.

Continue reading “Florida Man Goes Fascist: An Encounter With Enrique Tarrio”

This piece originally appeared in Toward Freedom

THERE WAS SOMETHING UNSETTLING about the self-perception of the killer. After a six hour drive from his home in Allen, Texas to the Mexican border at El Paso, his head swimming with fever dreams of invading Hispanic hordes, twenty-one-year old Patrick Crusius walked up to a Walmart frequented by Latinos and, raising an AK-47 style assault rifle to his shoulder, opened fire. It took less than six minutes to carry out the deed, in which he slaughtered twenty three people and injured dozens more. The manifesto he released the day of the attack invoked The Great Replacement theory—the conspiracy that global Jewish elites are importing immigrants to destroy the white race. It then paid homage to the killer who gunned down fifty-one Muslims in a New Zealand mosque. But the second paragraph of the poorly-worded treatise contained an unexpected tribute: he invoked, as his antecedents, the slain Native Americans.

“The natives didn’t take the invasion of Europeans seriously,” Crusius wrote, making an absurd comparison between the European genocide of natives in the past to the influx of Latinos in the present, “now what’s left [of native Americans] is just a shadow of what was.”

Continue reading “All-American Nativism Review”

This piece first appeared in The New Humanitarian

FOR MANY HONDURANS already suffering widespread poverty, government corruption, and one of the highest rates of violence in the world outside a war-zone, back-to-back hurricanes in November, which razed paths of destruction and displaced hundreds of thousands from their homes, were the final straw.

Hundreds began trickling out of the northern city of San Pedro Sula on foot on 9 December – the first US-bound caravan since early October, and potentially the start of a new wave of Central American migrants that would test Joe Biden’s commitment to moving on from the anti-migration policies of the Trump era.

Continue reading “Honduran storm survivors form US-bound migrant caravan”

This report original appeared in Vice News

SAN PEDRO SULA, HONDURAS – In a drug house in the heart of a slum controlled by the MS-13 street gang in the city of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, a gang member saunters in and dumps his product on the table. 

On one side is cocaine, each portion twisted into wraps of parchment paper. On the other lie several dozen impeccable plastic baggies of the gang’s newest cash-cow: a powerful strain of chemically-altered marijuana known as Krispy, or Tiburón (which means “shark” in English).

It’s unclear what chemicals or substances have made the new drug so addictive, but the gang has been making a killing off it.

Continue reading “MS-13 Is Getting Rich From Chemically-Altered Weed That’s ‘More Addictive Than Cocaine’”

A friend who runs a non-profit helping schoolchildren in Honduras invited me to give this online lecture and Q&A about systematic injustices in that country. I’m no expert on these issues. But I like to think that, after a year and a half of periodically reporting on and studying them, that I am an eager student. I’ve learned a lot. Attached below is the link to the Youtube of my talk.

This piece originally appeared in The New Humanitarian

AS HONDURAS ENDURES it’s second storm in as many weeks, international aid agencies and local volunteer groups are scrambling the best responses they can to assist people displaced by flooding and landslides.

But aid experts and rights activists, as well as local residents and politicians, say longer-term problems are being neglected in a country where years of devastating drought have caused mass hunger and are leading thousands of Hondurans to flee annually towards the United States.

Yamely Cáceres was displaced from her Chamalecón neighbourhood in San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras after flooding from Hurricane Eta, and then prevented from returning due to resurgent floods from Hurricane Iota, which crashed through the region from 16-18 November. 

“People are losing everything,” Cáceres, who is now living under a highway overpass, told The New Humanitarian via WhatsApp. “They’re already losing so much with the El Niño droughts before this. I bet more and more people are going to leave after this.”

Continue reading “In storm-hit Honduras, a climate crisis drives needs and fuels migration”

Originally published in the Los Angeles Review of Books

VICTORIA DEL PORTETE, an Ecuadorian town, had decided the time had come for a vote.

Residents of the marshy Andean village came to the parish council building in 2011 to vote “yes” or “no” on the following question: are you in agreement with mining activity in the wetlands and watershed of Kimsacocha? The results, counted by hand, became undeniable by day’s end. Ninety-three percent of the participants said they didn’t want foreign gold extraction in the vicinity of their watershed. “No one and nothing will stop our fight in defense of water and in defense of our territories,” one organizer said afterward, “to construct a better Ecuador, without mining in our territories.”

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa arrived at the village not long after with an entourage of apparatchiks and pro-government reporters. Correa reprimanded the anti-mining activists for their “lies,” painting the electoral outcome as the result of rural zealotry. Those who voted no, he said, suffered from “mental fundamentalisms.”