Air Mobilities on the U.S.–Caribbean Border: Open Skies and Closed Gates

Abstract

The convergence of intensive human mobilities, offshore financial flows, and new forms of border surveillance make the Caribbean a crucial region in which to study how emerging forms of electronic data, mobile communication, and information flow are respatializing borders. The growth of tourism, the opening of free trade zones, and the expansion of transmigration between the United States and the Caribbean are one side of the picture of mobility in the region. On the other side, we find a grimmer panorama: the ongoing Cuban trade embargo, the problems of drug and gun smuggling, illegal immigration, and the continuing deaths of Haitian refugees at sea. In this article the author presents a preliminary model for understanding the contested mobility regimes along the U.S.–Caribbean “Third Border,” envisioned as an uneven and multifaceted space of connectivity and barriers that is currently undergoing complex transformations, both material and rhetorical. It draws on empirical examples and photographs of recent travel to Haiti, in particular, to highlight some of the disparities in Caribbean travel. The analysis shows how the Caribbean region is currently undergoing reconfigurations of territory, sovereignty, and material infrastructure that are informed by rhetorics of “open skies” and open trade (liberalization) which claim to increase mobility, but are in fact associated with material practices of border securitization and increased immobility, including refugee interception, migrant detention, and the militarization of air space.

Notes

¹On the emergence of a critical mobilities paradigm, I refer to the work published in Mobilities, of which I am co-editor. See key texts in the field (e.g., Adey, 2010; Sheller & Urry, 2006; Urry, 2007) and a number of recent conferences such as “Tracing the New Mobilities Regimes” (Munich, Germany, October 16–17, 2008); “Cultures of Movement: Mobile Subjects, Communities and Technologies in the Americas” (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, April 8–10, 2010); and various panels organized at the Association of American Geographers annual meetings in 2009 and 2010 on themes of mobility.

²Regime change in Cuba and new policies of the Obama administration in the United States indicate an imminent opening of the border between the two countries. In 2009, restrictions were eased on travel to Cuba by Cuban Americans. In February 2010, a bill was drafted that would lift the U.S. travel ban for Americans wishing to visit Cuba; in June 2010, 74 Cuban dissidents signed a letter to the U.S. Congress in support of the bill; and the Obama Administration is currently floating the idea of easing travel restrictions (for more information, see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/world/americas/17cuba.html).

³For example, in May 2010, the Jamaican police killed 70 people in pursuit of a fugitive gangster, Christopher “Dudus” Coke, wanted for extradition to the United States on drug and gun trafficking charges. The drugs trade and illegal immigration are key factors in U.S. policy toward the Caribbean region, and Jamaica especially (Haughton, 2007, 2009).

⁴In 1997, Haitian President Préval signed the Préval/Albright accord, which permitted the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to enter Haitian territory—sky, earth, and sea—in the pursuit of drug traffickers, but it effectively also allowed the interception of refugees.

⁵The author undertook two trips to Haiti in May and July 2010, as part of research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF Haiti-RAPID Award #1032184 “Supporting Haitian Infrastructure Reconstruction With Local Knowledge”); however, the data and arguments presented here are unconnected to that research project. The main arguments here draw on a pending NSF application “Air Mobilities on the U.S.–Caribbean Border.”

*Information accessed November 1, 2010 from http://www.nmia.aero/doing_business/dobusiness/

⁶Open skies agreements include free market competition with no government restrictions on pricing, route rights, capacity, frequency, type of aircraft, or marketing competition. This is to be distinguished from the 1992 Helsinki “Treaty on Open Skies,” which instigated the multinational sacrifice of air sovereignty to allow for military observational flights to take place over national territories by aircraft fitted with optical panoramic and framing cameras, video cameras with real-time display, and thermal infrared imaging sensors and imaging radar. Of course, the simultaneity of these two kinds of open skies is not coincidental according to the view taken here, but instead represents parallel civil and military aspects of the new surveillant assemblage.

⁷Hervé Jean Michel, “La Téléco liquideé a la Viettel!” Haïti Liberté, 3. March 10–16, 2010, p. 9.

⁸This was initially due to concerns over money laundering associated with the United States' “War on Terror” and “War on Drugs,” but was exacerbated even more so with the collapse of Texas billionaire Robert Allen Stanford's International Bank Ltd., based in Antigua, in a massive Ponzi scheme, not to mention the British government's takeover of the Turks and Caicos government after charges of corruption and incompetence.