Inside Siglo XXI: Inside Latin America's Largest Immigration Detention Center

Inside Sigli XXI uses Belen's detention experience in Siglo XXI and interactions with detainees from Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, Bangladesh, and beyond to explain the role of the USA in Mexico's migrant detention apparatus and-more broadly-it's role in fueling the very migration patterns that must then be criminalized. Belen's unique position as an ex-detainee allows her to provide a firsthand account of the abusive and psychologically torturous conditions in which migrants are jailed in Tapachula. Siglo XXI (which means "the 21st century" in Spanish) was christened as such in 2006 by the either witting or unwitting irony of the administration of Vicente Fox, a former CEO of Coca-Cola Mexico. But in the end, the Siglo XXI migrant prison is appropriately symbolic of a 21st century in which much of the earth's population is effectively imprisoned in US-inflicted political and economic nightmares, and Belen's detention gave her yet another opportunity to document US-inflicted horrors juxtaposed with the resilient humanity of the system's victims.