Juan Medina

Violent borders

There’s a cruel and unfair war between those who accumulate wealth, not interested in redistribution and those who rightfully wish to access the same rights and opportunities as the privileged society. The obsession of accumulating wealth increasingly in the hands of fewer people won’t stop, and for this reason more and more safety walls and fences are built up to prevent what is felt as a threat, allowing capitals to move across borders while preventing people from doing the same.

The badly named “European Union” was built not to remove borders and allow freedom of movement but to lift up new external borders to keep us away from them. These external borders have only increased, and are now larger, more dangerous, more expensive and deadlier. Its construction was duly financed on behalf of international cooperation, fight against terrorism or migration flows control.

The stories showed in photographs’ selection started at the beginning of year 2000 but the cruelty of borders started long before. Since societies started their modern development they enacted migratory laws that imposed barriers to foreign nationals, but probably never before those walls cost so many lives as in the past decades.

Crossing the Atlantic Ocean to arrive the Canary Islands was already deadly in the late 90’s. So it was to cross the Straits of Gibraltar from Morocco, to jump over the fences in Ceuta and Melilla, challenge border guards – whether Moroccans or Spanish – and to cross the Channel Tunnel, as seen in these pictures.

Nobody should allow the massive cemetery that the sea has become for a long time now, specially keeping in mind that people who cross it are already fleeing dead. Some people have been living in that Void that exists either side of the border for years, in the forests near our cities, in places that are legal limbos full of pain. Some families will never know the whereabouts of their loved ones. There are graves with no names on them and endlessly disrupted lives.

The fact that after 30 years of unceasing deaths in our borders we don’t demand responsibilities is despairing. No one seems to work to truly guarantee that someday all people will be able to exercise their right to move freely and choose the country in which they want to live, work and create their families. All the pledges of Human Rights are also stranded like those lives in the Void of the borders.