A Border Crossing

There I was, my first overland border crossing in Latin America. I’ve gone through my fair share of customs over the years, between the US and Canada, the US and Mexico, and at a few international airports. Somehow I’ve never warmed up to the process of being herded through long lines and questioned by stern-faced security officials about my lodging, intentions, and profession, just to cross an imaginary political border with (generally) arbitrary legal differences.

When I got to the front of the customs line this time, traveling by bus from Costa Rica to Nicaragua, I tried to refuse to have my picture taken. “Do I have to?” I asked the Spanish-speaking official. He assured me that yes, I did, if only to train the facial recognition AIs that aspire to track people’s every movement for the suspect purposes of “national security.” Not one to make too much of a fuss, I frowned at the camera.

Then, when asked my profession, I made the mistake of saying escritorio — writer. Apparently with this I’d gone too far, for the official took mine and my travel partner’s passports away for a solid ten minutes to do or to check God knows what. Maybe just to make us sweat. I couldn’t help but think of how much totalitarian governments have targeted writers and poets in the past, proving the fragility of their power-over regimes and the old adage that “the pen is mightier than the sword.”

I know, I know. I’m probably flattering myself here that my little-read poetry and essays would pose any serious threat to the imperial security forces that seek to control so much of the world, installed and backed by US military power especially in Latin America’s former banana republics. But one can dream, can’t one?

The irony is that I consider most of my work more personal than political. But alas, under modern capitalist and techno-feudalist regimes that seek to control the flow of information and interactions that might undermine the present power structure, the personal is, inescapably, political. Here, to me, was another instance of firsthand proof how the exercise of freedom of speech and request for privacy can easily slip into cause for search and seizure, especially at a border crossing. Rather than dissuade me from political writing, this experience inspired it.

So this week, here’s my latest primal scream against the national security interests that come at the cost of a couple of our most basic freedoms, of movement and expression.