And I never should have been.

Belen Fernandez is the author of Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR... Books, 2019), Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016), and The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011). She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine, and has written for the New York Times, the London Review of Books blog, Current Affairs, and Middle East Eye, among numerous other publications.
And I never should have been.
A short visit to the auspiciously named San Salvador neighbourhood, ’10 de Octubre’.
The whole US system of patriarchal capitalism must indeed be aborted.
The US state department wants travelling Americans to be wary of the ‘dangerous’ world their country helped create.
Mask-lessness is becoming contagious and normalised in a world that is far from “normal”.
Forty years after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Israel persists with its lunatic urges to kill in Palestine and beyond.
In its efforts to ensure no crime is tolerated in El Salvador, the Bukele regime itself is committing one big crime.
School shootings have become as American as apple pie.
The effective annihilation of a nation is hardly a laughing matter.
Bukele’s forever-emergency is morphing into a perennial war on people, human rights, journalism, and reality itself.