The Migration Crisis in the American Southern Cone: Hate Speech and its Social Consequences

This book analyzes how the increase in migration from other Latin American countries to countries of the American Southern Cone such as Brazil, Argentina and Chile has generated a crisis fueled by the emergence of hate discourses towards migrant populations. While extracontinental migration to Europe, North America and elsewhere has waned over the last decades, migration between Latin American countries has increased dramatically as a product of the differential development of the region’s economies, violence, and political turmoil. This book sets out to explain the effects of these trends by analyzing statistical data, official documents and ethnographic material gathered over a long period of research carried out throughout South America. 

The volume is divided in two parts. In the first part, it presents a theoretical contribution, synthesizing particularities of intraregional migration in Latin America, as well as the emergence of hate discourses towards migrant populations, developing approaches oriented towards a critical gender perspective. It also underlines important contributions that Latin American migration studies can make to current debates about migration across the globe. In the second part, it presents case studies dedicated to Argentina, Brazil and Chile.

The Migration Crisis in the American Southern Cone: Hate Speech and its Social Consequences will be a valuable resource to migration studies researchers by presenting fresh theoretical and empirical contributions to the field from a Latin American perspective. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Mar 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030681616

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Part IThe Production of the Crisis

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

M. Guizardi (ed.)The Migration Crisis in the American Southern ConeLatin American SocietiesCurrent Challenges in Social Scienceshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68161-6_1

1. The Migration Crisis and the Ecstasies of Hatred

Menara Guizardi¹, ², ³  

(1)

National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina

(2)

National University of San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina

(3)

University of Tarapacá, Arica, Chile

Keywords

MigrationHate speechDemocratic crisisRacismAmerican Southern Cone

1.1 Stitch-and-Anchoring Stitch

Antón Chekhov (1860–1904) was a Russian writer and doctor obsessed with narrating those interaction details that subjects chose not to express directly and that therefore end up omitted from the gestures or statements they direct at their communication counterparts. He envisioned two sides of human interaction; direct and indirect actions. According to his interpretive framework, it is impossible to comprehend what subjects state or do without simultaneously understanding their silences and omissions. Thus, each explicit action would be delicately interwoven with an endless number of indirect actions.

Correlating these ideas with my grandmother’s embroidery terms used so vehemently when trying (unsuccessfully) to teach me this art fascinates me: For each stitch, an anchoring stitch, said granny María. Although I was never able to develop her skill in these tasks, her words stayed with me. My grandmother alluded to the fact that each piece of thread that we embroidered onto the front side of the fabric had to be supported by a firmer and less polished stitch, hidden on the back. While the visible front displayed its delicate and placid little flowers in an orderly fashion, the invisible one – the reverse – could be a tangled mess of threads and knots. To my grandmother’s despair and frustration, this second side seemed much more interesting to me than the neat surface (which led her to give up on me as an embroidery student). Little did she imagine that, years later, the search to make visible the tangled backside would serve as the navigational rudder of this book on migration and the political production of the migratory crisis in the American Southern Cone. In order to explain this particularity, let us go back to our Russian author.

Although probably oblivious to the maxims of the needle and thread, Chekhov developed his entire narrative, using the same logic that guided my grandmother; that is, seeking to elucidate the invisible reverse side anchoring stitches, entangled and given to disorder, that sustain each visible mark of social life. By doing so, he ended up creating a new dramatic technique that he entitled the method of indirect action, which, as Chekhov proposed, was best expressed in short stories, designed to introduce readers to the microclimate of social relationships. This stitches-and-anchoring stitches exercise predisposed him to a very particular sensitivity: an ability to unravel the correlation between those feelings that we want to present on the surface of our social interactions – as their most representative face – and the entanglement of meanings and intentions that we prefer to hide behind the scenes. It also predisposed him to understand both as part of the same plot of senses and experiences.

From this sensitivity Chekhov’s literature generates an interpretive framework for the social relationship between belonging and rejection that is still incredibly valid. Through a delicate portrayal of Russian life at the end of the nineteenth century, Chekhov observed that, contrary to what the moralism in vogue at that time generally assumed, shared hatred constituted a community catalyst that was politically more powerful than love, friendship, or respect. Curious as it may seem, his technique of indirect action led him towards a theory of the relationship between hatred, morality, and ordinary life (or community bounds). Many of his short stories show, precisely, the place hatred has in the most everyday social life relationships. His characters are, frequently, traversed by this feeling and turn it into action: they either hate or provoke (and so are recipients of) the hatred of others.

Thus, as a constant theme of the dialogues (re)constructed by Chekhov, hatred became another of his narrative obsessions. From one of his characters’ mouths we hear two questions that inspired this book’s research perspective. I would like to redirect them to the readers: Has any of you, fellows, been hated passionately, furiously hated? Has any of you watched the ecstasies of hatred? Eh? (Chekhov 2015 [1887], n.p.).

In the story, these questions are asked by Petya, a military man that Chekhov describes as a plump General Staff Officer. They are addressed to his hunting companions one evening at a get-together. The story is called Zinotchka, the name of Petya’s governess who was charged with giving him a basic education in his childhood, and who also became (dialectically, I would say) his brother Sacha’s first love, and the first person to hate Petya with a passion. In this short story, Petya describes himself as a naive child who had no notion of love or hate. At the same time, he describes Zinotchka as a pretty girl, a pleasant and poetic creature, full of enthusiasm for knowledge, given she had just finished her studies and was confident about the possibilities teaching could offer. Since Petya was more concerned with the yard – or rather, with going out to play in it, wandering the fields and forests and chasing animals, his governess’s job was not an easy one. As she struggled with Petya’s distraction, his older brother caught Zinotchka’s eye; he was suffering toothache and therefore had withdrawn to his parent’s home for some time. Petya became aware of the blossoming romance between them, of the swapped notes, of the blush on his governess’s cheeks. One day he surprised them in a furtive encounter and, spying on them secretly, witnessed their first kiss. Petya began to hound his governess, threatening to tell his mother about the affair. So, he resorted to blackmail to get out of his student responsibilities. While these intrigues carried on, Zinotchka’s health began to suffer. She started to sleep badly, to wake up with increasingly darker circles under her eyes, to lose her appetite. She was constantly worried. This anguish turned into a persistent hatred for Petya, which grew inversely proportional to the love she felt for his brother, Sacha. Petya ended up telling his mother everything, who discreetly fired Zinotchka a few months later to avoid a scandal. Shortly after, Zinotachka and Sacha got married, but she would never forgive her little student Petya’s behavior. This conflict between love and hate planted the seed of an everlasting memory for both Petya and Zinotchka. Chekhov thus establishes a direct relationship between two contradictions: memory and oblivion, and love and hate.

What is curious about the story is that, in the end, the military man reflects on how, as Zinotchka’s love for Sacha grew stronger and stronger (they got married and lived together), her hatred towards Petya intensified. Neither of them could ever escape this hateful connection. The conclusion seems simple and, at the same time, sociologically powerful: even if we pretend otherwise, hate builds such a strong bond, with as much lasting capacity, as love. Thus, in its most explicit vision – visible face of the embroidery, hatred signifies or represents a desire for rejection, separation, and rupture between those who share it. However, the scribblings that this feeling produces on the back of the fabric completely contradict these claims: hatred establishes a lasting and stable bond between those who practice it and those considered to be its recipients.

Throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century, these questions from Chekhov’s Petya and the reflections they allow us to weave have gained renewed validity: we can draw an analogy between the moral of this short story and the construction of current political imaginary and narratives. Hatred has re-emerged in the right, and the extreme right’s political discourses around the world with an unusual legitimacy and has been used as one of the main resources for the construction of borders and for the invention of communities (whether national or not). It has been used, in the last two decades, as a mechanism for accommodating the transformations within-boundaries (internal to groups or social collectives) and cross-boundaries (between these groups) (Tilly 2004, p. 213). Throughout the world, and with suspicious generality, hatred has been aimed at international migrant communities, establishing, precisely, the new configurations of these boundaries.¹ Contradictorily, we live in a world where migrants are necessary, fundamental pieces² in our societies, and yet they are rejected by the populations who identify as part of the community that is being invaded.

In general, creating a sense of community belonging – or, to put it in anthropological terms, the process of identifying a group as an imagined community – involves conflicting interactions of explicit and implicit negotiation of the claims and interests of social actors. Endorsed by asymmetries of power, these tensions are a dynamic part of the configuration of the border between those who are inside and outside the collectives, establishing at one end of the dividing line:

[…] the good citizens, the people like oneself, the members of the establishment, who, by managing to monopolize with relative success the place of moral entrepreneurs (Becker 2008) and in their double character of judge and party, are usually admitted without major difficulties as full members of the community with which they identify. Correlatively, and at the other extreme, we find the actors whose claims of full membership of the collective are routinely challenged by the implacable tribunal of the good society since they lack certain attributes that are supposed to be inherent to the identity to which they aspire, or by virtue of possessing other negatively valued attributes, incompatible with those. (Noel 2011, pp. 100-101. Our translation).

The curious thing about the boundaries and borders that are being built between good citizens from various national contexts and migrants" (represented as negative, uninvited, unwanted identities) is that they seem to respond to two interconnected aspects of which migrants are not, in fact, responsible for: (1) the global worsening of living conditions due to the agonistic crises of the neoliberal capitalist model (an aspect that I will address later) (Castañeda and Shemesh 2020); and (2) the persistence of racial/ethnocentric ideologies juxtaposed to the notion of national identity. To a large extent, the perception of displacement, of the loss of some form of right, privilege, or benefit, incites collective feelings of insecurity, fear, and deprivation in populations exposed to the twenty-first century’s neoliberalism. These feelings respond to diffuse processes that are difficult to explain given, among other things, the pulverized, delocalized nature of the economic and political powers (or forces) that cause this situation on a planetary scale.

In the midst of this uncertainty, being able to channel frustrations, fears, and rages and attribute them to a subject – or group of subjects – that can be easily identified (that is, a defined target) constitutes an escape valve: a cathartic mechanism for regulating tensions that, without this specific expression of hatred, could cause major social disruptions. Migrants have been fulfilling, precisely, this cathartic function in global imaginaries: when everything else seems to fall apart, the hatred directed at these subjects – at their position as the imagined others – recomposes a sense of community that can no longer be found elsewhere. Thus, the need for migrants is forgotten, and their foreignness is vehemently remembered. Countries that have emitted massive migratory populations in recent historical periods erase these events from their memory and set out – with war technologies as expensive as they are inefficient for this purpose – to close their doors to migration. This type of contradiction between forgetting and remembering structures, legitimizes, and allows those defined by their foreign origin to be hated with such conviction. Stitch and Anchoring Stitch.

Although the hatred directed to those imagined as from another national community has been an important constituent factor in the history of the world system since the invention of Nation-states (from the French Revolution of 1789 onwards), our current experiences of migratory hatred have sui generis contours and respond to a particular historical context. This topic will be discussed in detail in Chap. 2, but some aspects of this debate should be advanced.

In the core countries of capitalism, the use of hatred as a moral resource that prevents migrants’ access to community membership rights has been repeated at various moments of the twentieth century. However, this use became gradually more visible after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York (September 11, 2001), and it radicalized after the economic crisis that impacted the Global North from 2008 onwards. Its Latin American expression appeared from 2015 onwards. As we will see in the chapters of the second part of this work, these new uses of hate acquired contextually rooted versions in the Southern Cone. They are part of the dispute between the circulatory ideals that have characterized the governance of globalization since the nineties, and the consolidation of a renationalizing and sovereign mentality that marked a new phase in the governance of international migration. If the eighties and the nineties were called the era of migration (Castles and Miller 1993), we are now living in the era of the migratory crisis (Guizardi 2019).

The transition between these eras is part of a North-centric narrative (produced in the countries of the Global North and supported by their own political mythologies). Also, it is accompanied by a change in the production of globally shared imaginaries about migration: we went from a discourse that celebrated (very contradictorily, as will be explained in Chap. 2) cross-border and transnational mobility to one that speaks of it, openly, as an evil to be persecuted and eradicated. Although this transition has been underway for almost two decades, its imprint has really set in over the last four years, consolidating a conservative, xenophobic and racist turn in international migration governance. However, this shift is not a tacit political innovation. Rather, it presents ruptures and continuities with previous processes, being dialectically connected with the political formulations on migration and cultural diversity developed in the twentieth century. For want of a better name, different authors have referred to this set of transformations as post-globalization (Guizardi 2019; Sanahuja 2017).

Post-globalization’s most general characteristics acquire specific configurations in the different regions of the world (varying in each country’s internal context). This production of discourses and political imaginaries blames migration for the disastrous characteristics of the economic model (for example, unemployment, rising prices, inflation, the destruction of public health and social protection services) and associates it to crime (Bauman 2016) (Fig. 1.1).

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Fig. 1.1

A daughter of migrants on the march against the installation of a Detention Center for Foreigners holds a sign stating: I am Argentine, and I do not want a jail for my parents. Buenos Aires, Argentina. (2016). (Photographer: Pablo Mardones)

In the American Southern Cone, Mauricio Macri (who presided over Argentina between 2015 and 2019), Jair Bolsonaro (president of Brazil since 2019), and Sebastián Piñera (president of Chile since 2018) adhered to this criminalization of migration, aligning themselves with Donald Trump’s (who has presided over the United States between 2017 and 2020) speech. Nevertheless, the three South American leaders did so (each in their own way) by picking up elements of the National Security Doctrine that characterized the policies of internal and border control in South America during the military dictatorships that ruled between the sixties and the nineties (Grimson and Renoldi 2019, p. 80). All three countries coincided by strongly attacking existing migration legal frameworks that had a focus on human rights, on the one hand, and in the implementation of increasingly restrictive measures for migratory regularization, on the other (Canelo et al. 2018).

This volume addresses precisely this phenomenon. Alluding to Chekhov’s hunter’s questions, the chapters that follow seek to watch the ecstasies of hatred that make up the migratory crisis in the American Southern Cone. In order to convey our crusade in the pages that follow, it is necessary to specify the link between the two central categories of this chapter’s title: crises and hatred.

1.2 Crises and Hatred

In his latest text, Bauman (2016) draws attention to the formation at the beginning of the twenty-first century of a specific form of intersubjectivity and perception of differences (of class, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and generation). He states that it constitutes a hegemonic model on a planetary scale, despite the fact that it is produced according to the political (cultural and semiotic) keys operated from the Global North. He points out, thus, the generalization of the public perception that we are advancing globally towards a process of collapse and demise of the way of life that we know, practice and cherish (Bauman 2016, p. 9). Even recognizing the constitutive heterogeneity of the various ways of life – and the contextual character of their experience in different parts of the planet, Bauman asserts the global character of the feelings of rupture and disarticulation of those shared frames that endow subjects with the capacity to read social processes. His argument indicates, then, that the politically strategic use of fear has become a hegemonic mechanism that impacts localized forms of life, enhancing what Grimson (2015) calls the emergence of new homogeneity producing strategies (p. 142. Our translation).

However, Bauman also warns that this transformation must be read through specific economic and political keys. On the one hand, it should be associated with a turn in shaping the global neoliberal economy, with the emergence of a new model for managing cumulative cyclical breaks. On the other, with the growing inability of democratic regimes to reconcile the structural principles of the Rule of Law with the intensification of this economic model (Appadurai 2017). On this point, his reflections coincide with those of Harvey (2008): the neoliberalism of the twenty-first century has become an accelerated logic of creative destruction (p. 15. Our translation), based on the prolonged and concatenated support of different crisis processes. The ultimate goal was to feed the continuity of accumulation (limited to specific and increasingly reduced social sectors) through a process of generalization and massification of dispossession. Following these debates, twenty-first-century capitalism could be characterized as the age of sequential crises.

Bauman and Harvey write in dialogue with Marx’s argument (1996, p. 134) about the structuring character of crises in the capitalist mode of production.³ But both emphasize that globalization has implied a semantic and semiotic transformation of these crises. The neoliberal hegemony transformed them from being recurring isolated incidents (coinciding with the end of each accumulation cycle) to being constitutive elements of the continuous economic process. In short: the maintenance, reproduction, and concatenation of crises became both the semantic core and the way through which neoliberal capitalism of the twenty-first century operates.

As we will discuss in Chap. 2, various analysts endorse these arguments from other perspectives, affirming that these changes compose a symbolic-cultural framework articulated by the lack (or active destruction) of alternative models and by the consolidation of capitalist realism that disavows the humanist values and counter-hegemonic worldviews (Fisher 2009). The closing of borders, the recent military interventions by the great powers of the North, the persecution of refugees and migrants with high-tech weapons of war, the criminalization of workers (and their organized movements), the increase in femicides (and the ongoing impunity regarding them) are expressions of this realism in concrete modes of political action.

The conformation of (post)globalized political imaginaries seems to give rise to two specific outcomes. First, a general feeling of discredit in the political institutions of the most varied spectra – political parties, unions, States (and their agencies), as well as supra-State organizations. According to Segato (2007, p. 16), this process leads to an emptying of politics and its reduction to the terms of a redistributive fight based on the polarization of identities and ethnic phobias (our translation).⁴ Second, the devastating collective impression that we have no alternatives to this progressive dehumanization fuels cynicism , which is presented as the only viable option for survival in the face of this agonizing picture. This last aspect consolidates the sedimentation of an imagination and political discourse rooted in what political scientists have called post-truth.⁵

Extrapolating these arguments, it is possible to argue that this victory of cynicism over convictions is linked to the radicalization of neoliberal mechanisms of domination, with the capitalist realism of Fisher (2009). That is to say: to the extent that capitalism acts in a growingly realistic way, the constitution of political opinions on the globe is increasingly sedimented in post-truth, endorsing the political victory of those who manage to make the masses and pressure groups believe in clearly distorted versions of social processes. Versions that, nonetheless, fulfill expectations and respond with calming illusions to the anxieties of broad segments of the population (Bauman 2016, p. 9). Hate speech is framed precisely in this type of enunciation that, as Chekhov said more than a century ago, has the power to congregate and unite that is even stronger than those sentiments considered noble, such as love and respect. For this reason, hatred has immediate political uses, although with dire impacts of medium- and long-term duration.

Contemplating the systemic nature of the crisis scenario contributes to understanding various ongoing processes in the American Southern Cone, where we observe a contradiction between political-social imaginaries, consumer expectations, and the new aesthetics of the popular sectors (Fig. 1.2). These elements are stressed by the availability of representation and effective political dialogue amongst different social sectors; and between them and governments, parties, unions, or political associations. The dynamics and conformations of these crises in the different countries – and in the different regions in each country – require the contextual configuration of these processes to be looked at much more carefully.

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Fig. 1.2

A son of Bolivian migrants playing the tarka (Andean instrument used by Aymara groups) at the Bolivian carnival in the working-class neighborhood of Lugano. Buenos Aires, Argentina. (2014). (Photographer: Pablo Mardones)

Even responding dialectically to global logics, crises could only occur in a context that operates, at the same time, as their framework and configuration" (Grimson 2016, p. 140. Our translation). For this reason, understanding how this globalized crisis scenario thrives in – impacts on or alters – specific contexts in the American Southern Cone, and their specific relationship with the migratory phenomenon presents challenges for social research. The social sciences have been making progress in recent years, recognizing the constitutive social, economic, political, and cultural heterogeneities of the region. They have also recognized that different countries occupy relatively equivalent positions in the unequal process of globalization (Grimson 2016, p. 141. Our translation).⁶

From our perspective, crises can be defined, precisely, as those processes that cause some destabilization (and the degrees of instability can vary) of the existing articulation between homogeneity and heterogeneity in a given context (Grimson 2015, p. 141). Although their effects are multiscale and multifaceted – for example, they may involve political, economic, symbolic, or religious aspects – crises have the effect of disrupting (or at least destabilizing) the identifications and alterizations that frame social relations and practices in a given context. For this reason, we can speak of them as cultural phenomena. A cultural crisis starts precisely when the automatism of everyday life is interrupted in some crucial dimension. Among these crucial dimensions can be urban life, economic life, political life, and community feelings of belonging (Grimson 2015, p. 149. Our translation).

In this book, the use of the expression migratory crisis applied to the Southern Cone refers precisely to the fact that migration has become an element that, from the perspective of various subjects or groups (in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay), interrupts crucial dimensions of their lives, threatens their community feelings of belonging and mobilizes moral resources that reorder the boundaries between those who belong or not to the social spaces. In general, this crisis has also been characterized by the fact that the moral resources applied to creating these new boundaries (and borders) appear as justifications for the violence used by different social, media, and State actors towards the migrant population.

Among the various forms of violence that operate on the migratory populations of the Southern Cone, we identify (especially in the chapters of the second part of the book) that which Bourgois (2001) calls structural, alluding to the conditions of inequality faced by the subjects that result from the asymmetries of rights institutionalized by the political and economic organization of society. This form of expressing violence is reproduced by the State when it does not take care of certain social needs and demands, causing the amplification of the violations to which some groups are exposed (in this case, migrants).

But, following Noel and Garriga’s arguments (2010, pp. 108–113), we also assume that violence operates dialectically in the construction and deconstruction of social ties. Its production as a shared social reality articulates specific forms of meaning and symbolism. Thus, we consider that this structural violence that States articulate on migrant populations can only be carried out when – supported by symbolic mechanisms that allow their (re)production in all corners of the social field – they succeed in permeating the persons’ bodily and spatial experience. Complementing this aspect, we also rely on the reflection of Bourdieu and Passeron (1977, p. 44), for whom the power configurations demand forms of symbolic violence through which some meanings are imposed as legitimate, disguising the relations of force. Over the last two decades, this symbolic violence, as we will see in many passages of this book, has relied on a huge media production that has succeeded in fueling public opinion fears and raising anti-immigration alarms.

To a large extent, these political and media discourses and practices have an enabling effect: they create a communicational and interactional framework in which both the blaming of migrants and the expression of rejection towards people identified by this condition is being consented and validated. The consequent enablement of these practices and narratives paves the way for their intensification and violent expression in everyday relationships. In other words, we are facing the production and empowerment of transversal social uses of hate speech towards migrant populations and, in increasingly frequent cases, the adoption of explicit physical violence against these populations.

1.3 Horizons, Compasses and Axes

Using this debate on crises as a starting point, the following chapters share a common perspective: the notion that the tensions related to the migratory phenomenon in the American Southern Cone are configured in a particular way in different contexts and involve forces, institutions, and multiscale interests (Merenson 2012, p. 405). This idea is the book’s horizon and its compass (Fig. 1.3).

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Fig. 1.3

A fisherman observes the horizon before preparing his boat for fishing on Copacabana beach. Rio de Janeiro Brazil. (2017). (Photographer: Pablo Mardones)

Therefore, the analyzes developed are intended not as monolithic definitions of the migratory phenomenon in the subregion but as openings to elements that should be considered and