Andrea Pitzer (0:00)

You're listening to. Next comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. Each week we'll figure out how we got where we are and how to fight back. In March of this year, the Trump administration claimed America was at war. The US Is not at war with Venezuela and deported hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants on US soil to El Salvador, despite a US Judge's order one day earlier not to deport them under the Alien Enemies Act. The act has been used just three times in US history, sparking legal battle and public outcry. That language that the Trump administration is trying to use, it refers to armed attacks, not metaphorical, quote, unquote invasions, not migration, not even narcotics trafficking. Last Friday, more than 250of those men were traded to Venezuela by El Salvador in exchange for the release of 10 US citizens and permanent residents held in Venezuela in a swap that appears to violate international law. A lot of these 252 prisoners in El Salvador were in an irregular illegal situation with their immigration status in the US but they weren't serious criminals, most of them. But the good news is that though these men were meant never to be heard from again, we are hearing from them. Physical mistreatment, psychological, mental mistreatment. We were beaten. They are bearing witness to what happened after they vanished from the United States. I received so many beatings and I just was urinating in blood. Today I want to talk about the voices of the lost and the voices of the returned and the importance of telling those stories and remembering the disappeared and remembering those who are currently between in some state of limbo so that we can prevent them from vanishing in the long run. And it's going to be a strange ride today, so just bear with me. I finished college in 1989, the year British director Peter Greenaway's movie the Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover came out. It was an odd, atmospheric film and I was intrigued by its visual tapestry. In the months that followed, I watched all the Peter Greenaway movies I could find. Videos were inexpensive to rent, though you had to go to a video store on foot. Back then, I lived in group houses and we took turns renting things. It was cheap entertainment and DC had places where all kinds of small budget independent and foreign films were available. I was painting a lot at the time, and Greenaway's films had the feeling of a series of static artworks to me. How is it, Mr. Greenaway, that you started your career as a painter and you're now a filmmaker? I was always disappointed the paintings did not have soundtracks, so Maybe what I make is not cinema, but paintings with soundtracks. Now, I won't pretend that what I was getting out of the stories was what Greenaway was intending to put into them. Do we paint what we see or do we paint what we know? And I think most painting is about painting what you know and not what you see. But in my mind, many of the movies were about death and cataloging the world and trying to use art and lists in sequences to somehow bring things to order. I'm sure that the most amazing thing in the whole universe is the human imagination. And I don't think cinema is there simply to reproduce what God has created out there, which is first of all an absolute impossibility. So why bother? One of the films was Death in the Seine, which took a real historical log as its base material. A ledger of the more than 300 dead bodies pulled out of the waters of the Seine in Paris between 1795 and 1801 actually exists, and Greenaway highlights some two dozen of them by recreating their appearance in the morgue behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame, as well as their processing by workers there. Now, the film is not historical reenactment, and if memory serves, although I haven't seen it in over 30 years, it was gross and mundane and yet somehow sweet with comic moments, and was surprisingly moving, despite a lot of vomit. People aren't supposed to die in a river. The ledger is a catalog of bad luck, of malice, of failures of society to protect its vulnerable, and of humans to respect the humanity of other people. Decades after its arrival, Greenaway's film, seen as one of his lesser ones, has slipped into middle obscurity. A related objet d' art that has made a more lasting impression on popular culture is what is known as l' inconnu de la Seine, a death mask of a young girl whose body was pulled from the river in the 19th century. Her visage was said to have so moved the morgue worker that he made a cast of her face. The mask became legendary as that of a lovely girl whose beauty transcended a terrible early death, which was assumed to be due to suicide. The mask was mass produced, and decades later, countless people had it in their homes. It became a phenomenon that never died. The mask wound up being the face of the Resuscitation Annie Doll. Many of us learned on if you ever took a class on cpr. But really, everything around that mask's origins is suspect, and we just don't know whose face it was, whether she had ever been in any river Let alone the Seine or how she died. Unlike the ledger of the drowned from the Seine that Peter Greenaway embroidered for his film, the enormous cultural mythology around that mask is much vaster than any facts about the girl, which essentially don't exist. More concrete deaths of real humans who died in the Seine were often less romantic. Authorities in Paris, as well as France and the world, were less interested in cataloging or learning from the dead. On October 17, 1961, when 30,000 people gathered to peacefully protest a curfew in the seventh year of the Algerian battle for independence from France, the people who assembled in Paris that night were overwhelmingly Algerian and were defying the curfew that targeted them specifically. They were met by 7000 regular officers and 1400 riot police. Law enforcement opened fire on the crowd that night, killing at least 100 protesters, possibly two or three times that many in all. Police Prefect Maurice Papong said two protesters were killed and not by police, yet many had witnessed the killings. Pictures showed the bodies and blood. Some 14,000 Algerians were arrested that night. 15,000 would be deported to Algeria. A BBC report from the 60th anniversary of the massacre records that French authorities censored coverage of the deaths, destroyed records to keep the news from coming to light, and kept journalists from being able to investigate what happened. France News told me, your pictures are amazing, but we can't print that. Our paper would be seized. I told them that's what a newspaper should do. A half century after the murders, Limanite in France tried to preserve the past and reconstruct what had happened that night. I don't know by what miracle I was not thrown in the river, said eyewitness Hossein Hakem, 51 years later to the newspaper. He had been 18 at the time of the killings. Left wing newspapers at the time expressed outrage and even filed a lawsuit later over other killings of protesters, those they saw as truly French. But they remained silent about the deaths of Algerians. Bodies that washed up on the banks of the river in the days that followed the protest revealed gunshot wounds and skulls that had been bashed in. Graffiti painted on a wall along the riverbank read, ICI en noi les Algeriens. Here we drown Algerians. Whether it was meant to be a threat or an eyewitness account of what had happened, the graffiti was its own historical documentation. If there were to be a true record of all the dead bodies in the Seine to match and extend that historical ledger from more than 150 years, the Ledger that Peter Greenaway used, it isn't clear whether the girl whose face is the celebrated death mask even belongs on it. But without all the names of the Algerian dead from 1961, that list is woefully incomplete. I'm telling you all this because people are being targeted right now, today, because people are disappearing before our eyes. ICE is using the federal immigration detention regime to be able to move people around precisely so that lawyers cannot stop them from doing their illegal activity. After the suppression that happened in France back in 1961, researcher Jean Luc Einaudie spent years searching for eyewitnesses to the violence and trying to reconstruct events from that evening. But now, in the 21st century, we have so many more ways to monitor and record what the authorities do to track these moral outrages that are unfolding daily. 30 year old Rumesa Asturk was on her way to break her Ramadan fast with friends on Tuesday when six plain clothed officers approached her. They take her phone and put her in handcuffs. Only then do they appear to identify themselves as police. The neighbor who captured the arrest on surveillance video described it as a kidnapping. We are still able to work to prevent the kind of suppression that happened back in 1961 from being repeated and to prevent the deaths in the first place. I would encourage every one of your listeners to rewatch that video. It is shocking. It tugs at the hearts of what it means to be a person in this country. Here you have someone that is walking down the street and she's accosted by people wearing hoods, people wearing masks that forcibly take her phone, take her backpack, she screams. Every person who is run through this harrowing process is a witness to its cruelty. We actually see that this is what the fate of unfolding authoritarianism looks like in the context of the United States. The more attention we can call to what's happening in real time and to amplify the voices of those who can testify about it, the lower the body count will be. In the end, some people will say, well, if we just keep our heads down, maybe it'll go away. But that actually doesn't happen in authoritarian regimes. When the middle capitulates, it strengthens the government. Despite some calls not to talk about immigration, which Trump ran and won on the coverage of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in the first weeks after his illegal deportation to El Salvador appears to have actually helped shift public opinion about Trump's immigration policies. It's impossible not to consider the fact that there was, when this first broke, that Donald Trump's approval ratings, both generally and on Immigration dropped. There are real political ramifications to it that the administration, at least the first time around, did seem to be responsive to the public opinion on it, but only during the time that it received media attention. The more that you have the Stephen Millers and the ICE agents pushing to scoop up anyone they can, the more they're going to pull up people who have sympathetic life stories, who have children that they're leaving behind. We hear about pets being left in pet shelters. We hear about kids waiting to see if their mom's going to come home. We can keep the focus on these and others who have received the same treatment, making sure our local authorities are aware of it and pressing local media to cover what's going on. In some cases, as with DHS leader Kristi Noem at SECOT in El Salvador, this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use. And in the Everglades, we see the administration documenting its own cruelty. And it's good to point those moments out, but we have to take those images and overlay them with the voices of what is being done to people in the facilities about which the administration boasts. One of the detained people they spoke to said detention officers made men eat while shackled with their hands behind their backs. One man said, quote, we had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths like dogs. The report also describes how detained immigrants are routinely denied access to legal counsel and critical medical care. Some have been held incommunicado in solitary confinement as an apparent punishment for seeking mental health care. And where we don't yet have that information, we have to keep the names and the families of the disappeared before the world's eyes. Gabriela Mora's partner, Carlos, is one of over 250 Venezuelans sent by the US to El Salvador's most notorious prison. I stay ahead. This can be done in small ways. Earlier this year, Michael J. McClure began posting a picture every day of Andre Jose Hernandez Romero. He came to the US to seek asylum, but he never set foot in the country and never had a chance to plead his case. He was immediately placed in immigration detention here in the US Reportedly because of a tattoo he has of a crown. The hairdresser deported to ccot. We had a very close relationship, more than a friendship, like siblings. We also worked for the same Three Wise Men foundation where Andriy has been an actor for 25 years, to remind others that no one had heard from him for months and that he shouldn't be forgotten. One day he called me and said, Reyna, they're linking me to Trend Aragua. I need you to get me photos, all the documentation from the Three Wise Men. Because of the crowns. I sent these documents and evidence so that he could defend himself, something US authorities never gave him the right to do. He never had due process after so long without news. Hernandez Romero was one of those released in the sketchy prisoner exchange El Salvador did with Venezuela and the US Last week. I was sent a video from Venezuelan state TV that has Andri doing a testimonial on camera. And I will just say that, you know, some of what he describes as what happened to him in El Salvador is absolutely horrific. Describing torture and sexual abuse. US prisoners were released in return for El Salvador sending Venezuelan prisoners that America had deported to sicot. I thought of my daughter, thought of my wife, thought of my brothers and my family. That gave me strength not to give up, not to let myself die. And I didn't let myself. I didn't let myself because I'm a warrior. As an aside, I'll note that the exchange only further underlines that despite the administration's statements in court and to the media, the United States government had been repeatedly telling courts, we can't do anything about these individuals at sicot. It's solely El Salvador's responsibility. The US remained in control of the fate of the CECOT prisoners the whole time. The accounts of those men who were released from SICOT to Venezuela are heartbreaking. We were kidnapped, Arturo Suarez told a Venezuelan broadcaster. We got a beating for breakfast, we got a beating for lunch, we got a beating for dinner. Since his court ordered return to the US in June, Abrego Garcia described similar beatings as well as being forced to remain upright, kneeling through the night and guards threatening him with being turned over to gang members in the prison. This is from El Salvador's president, posted on X. Well, it counters claims made by Abreco Garcia and his lawyers that he was tortured while imprisoned. However, it's important to note that this video that was posted online starts after he was transported out of the super prison seacot, which is infamous for their harsh treatment and alleged human rights abuses. In Vanity Fair. We finally heard too from Rumesa Ostrich, a Tufts University doctoral student and Turkish national who was ambushed by ICE on the streets, apparently over an editorial she wrote. She was detained and released in May. I came to United States to pursue my graduate studies, learn and grow as a scholars, and also to contribute child development fields with my teaching, research and applied work. America is the greatest democracy in the world and I believe in those values that we share. She recently wrote of the grinding negligence in ICE facilities and the mistreatment of countless women she encountered whose voices she is now trying to amplify and share. She described an Armenian woman she met who asked every time they met. Rumesa, please write about us. Please let the world hear our story. And she wrote, I am keeping my promise, Auntie. I will also remind one more time, please don't forget about all these wonderful women in the immigration defense systems. It might be tempting to see people being released from SICOT or ICE detention or brought back to the US and think that this story now has a happy ending. Grandri and many other Venezuelans were kidnapped, sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador where they remained with no contact to lawyers and no contact to their family, no access to due process for 125 days. So for 125 days they were in the torture prison in El Salvador, sicot. But the prisoners traded from El Salvador to Venezuela after being fortunate enough to escape the clutches of sicot, are now back in the country that they fled before coming to the U.S. a place where many of them fear persecution. Andri started picking up small jobs around town and eventually got a big job in Caracas as a makeup artist for a state owned TV station. There he told his friends he was harassed for his queerness and his opposition to the Venezuelan government. Kimora Abrego Garcia returning to us and giving testimony about what was done to him at the behest of the Trump administration is certainly a victory and a big one. To be sure. He is not coming back to our country and President Bukele said he was not sending him back. That's the end of the story. There can be no happy ending until the larger nightmare is stopped. In early August, I'm going to do an episode focused entirely on the nuts and bolts of how you can work to disrupt ICE's presence in and partnerships with your own community. For now, as I've mentioned before, you can talk to your local representatives to find out what relationship local law enforcement has with ICE currently where ICE detention happens near you and you can make it clear you are seeking an end to both. As we move forward, documenting what's happening. The log of the drowned and the saved is critical and each new bit of information can be a step toward ending the larger nightmare. And the testimony of eyewitnesses is a key way we can know what the government is doing in our name. A map of what we need to stand up against it's also the most likely means by which public opinion can be turned even further to oppose this outrageous violence against civilians committed against our friends and our neighbors. Historically, in concentration camp regimes, in ostensible democracies, public opinion shifts slowly, then goes over a cliff under the power of one or two single stories that make a strong impression about injustice, we can't know in advance which one of the disappeared, which one of the dead, which one of the returned will be what lights the fire of righteous fury against what's happening? We can't know today, but we can prevent as many disappearances as possible. We can call out the names of the missing and we can work for their return. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts. If you do have the means, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber and you can do that@Andreapitzer.com and just go to the newsletter link which is in the first paragraph of the homepage and you can sign up from there. Thank you for listening and thank you for watching.