An “imperial fucking holding pen.” That’s how Polo, a pseudonymous employee of an immigrant rights organization, describes Siglo XXI, reportedly Latin America’s largest immigration detention centre. The facility is located in Tapachula, Mexico, near the border with Guatemala. According to the Geneva-based Global Detention Project, Siglo XXI warehouses migrants and provides inadequate access to food, medical care, and clean drinking water. People have reportedly died and attempted suicide in the prison. Journalists aren’t allowed to enter Siglo XXI but the Associated Press has heard testimony about life inside, according to which “Women slept in hallways or in the dining hall among rats, cockroaches and pigeon droppings, as children wailed, mothers reused diapers and guards treated everyone with contempt.”

Such conditions are brought to life in Inside Siglo XXI, the fifth book from Belén Fernández, one of the only journalists who has set foot inside the facility. Fernández, an Al Jazeera columnist and Jacobin contributing editor, got access to the jail not because she secured a press pass but because—thanks to an expired visa—she was a detainee. The author used the ordeal to generate an enlightening book that blends memoir and journalism to provide both compelling political analysis and glimpses of some of the people caged for fleeing poverty and violence—often authored or exacerbated by US policies in the region.

In less skilled hands, this book might have ended up a self-indulgent grotesquerie: a book about migrant detention in Mexico centring on an American’s experience. Fernández, however, handles her story’s potential pitfalls assiduously. She is reflexive about her position as a “gringa” and about the irony that the other detainees are desperately trying to get to the same country to which she would like to avoid deportation. Fernández also describes her concern with “using my fellow inmates as my own personal captive population for journalistic exploitation. People who were already physically and emotionally exhausted on every level did not need some gringa running around interrogating them about their tragedies.”

Inside Siglo XXI’s most heartfelt moments concern the ways in which detainees support each other. Early in Fernández’s time in the jail, she despairingly wanders around alone, until a group of Honduran, Salvadoran, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Cuban women insist that she join them, and their companionship raises her spirits. Fernández and a Bangladeshi woman share a tender moment concerning the mental anguish the latter was enduring, particularly because of the despair she knew her incarceration was causing her mother back home. Such “emotional solidarity,” Fernández writes, constitutes “an anti-systemic ‘fuck you’ to US-backed policies playing out on migrant bodies.”

The author locates contemporary migration to the US in the context of America’s economic, political, and military wars in Latin America and the Caribbean. Fernández chronicles the ways that Washington’s devastating blockade of Cuba and its merciless sanctions on Venezuela have driven people to leave both countries in large numbers. She shows the relationship between Honduran flight to the US and the US-backed 2009 coup against the moderately left-leaning, democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. His ouster coincidentally occurred after he dared to raise the minimum wage, undertake pro-peasant agrarian reform, and ask communities impacted by corporate mining what they the thought of the practice. After the coup, the US increased its number of military bases in the country and gave more aid to the Honduran security forces. This period saw the homicide rate spike dramatically, along with a wave of assassinations targeting anti-coup journalists, teachers, environmental defenders, campesinos, human rights activists, and LGBT+ organizers (and non-organizers).

When US-bankrolled death squads massacred thousands in El Salvador during the country’s 1980-92 civil war, large numbers of Salvadorans sought refuge in the US. Some in the Los Angeles area formed gangs in part as a mechanism of communal self-defence and, when the war was over, the US deported many of them—including those who had done time in American prisons—back to El Salvador. There, US-nurtured inequality and extrajudicial executions created fertile terrain for a rise in the murder rate and the proliferation of international criminal gangs like MS-13, which in turn provide an ideological rationale for cracking down on migrants trying to enter the US.

Haiti is another instructive case. The reparations the tiny island nation was forced to pay France for carrying out a successful anti-slavery rebellion bankrupted the island, forcing it to take out massive loans from global lenders. To ensure that these loans were repaid, US Marines invaded Port-au-Prince and stole half the country’s gold reserves from its central bank. Subsequently, American Marines occupied Haiti for almost two decades and re-introduced forced, unpaid labour in the nation. Next up was the US underwriting the Duvaliers, two coups against the democratically elected governments of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, sending Haitians seeking asylum to Guantanamo, and the Obama administration plot to stop a 31 cent an hour raise in the minimum wage for Haitians working for American clothing manufacturers. Recently, we have seen the US ramp up its deportation of Haitians seeking a more secure and prosperous life than that which the US-aligned Haitian ruling class and its undemocratic governments have offered. As Fernández points out, “it has never been the point of US capitalism to actually resolve [humanitarian crises], but rather to find lucrative non-solutions to the problems it causes.”

This is a highly readable and, at times, darkly funny book. The author vividly renders life inside Siglo XXI though some of her digressions about her personal experiences and observations in the jail are less than riveting, particularly in comparison with the bulk of the book. Still, amid a US presidential election between Kamala “Do not come” Harris and Donald Trump, who plans to deport 15-20 million people, and in a context where the Latin American ‘pink tide’ has been rejuvenated, Inside Siglo XXI is a valuable resource for understanding the current conjuncture and the people whose lives it shapes.

Greg Shupak writes fiction and political analysis and teaches Media Studies and English at the University of Guelph-Humber. He’s the author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media. He writes a monthly column with Canadian Dimension and his work frequently appears in outlets like Electronic Intifada, F.A.I.R, The Guardian, In These Times, Jacobin, and The Nation.