TO
yesterday it was fulfilled a week after one of the worst wildfires in the history of the United States began. On Tuesday, January 7, in the Santa Monica Mountains, in Palisades, California, a forest fire grew rapidly fueled by much faster than normal winds – 160 kilometers per hour – which caused the flames to spread and the impossibility of carry out flights to drop water and chemicals on them. Hours later, two fires started in Los Angeles County. On the morning of January 8, another one also began in Los Angeles, and one more in Riverside County.
Due to the effects of climate change, in the area of the fires the atmospheric rivers discharged water in abundance, which caused the growth of different plant species that, also as a consequence of climate change, dried up, becoming fuel for the flames. If we add to that the strong winds, as a consequence of climate change, the result is just what we experience in California; devastation by an inferno that devastates what is in its path by having all the necessary elements to feed the fire. Given this, there is not enough fire brigade to attend to an emergency that requires international support to be quelled.
The first international delegation to join the fight against the fires in California was the Mexican one, as reported by the director of the National Civil Protection Coordination, Laura Velázquez Alzúa, in yesterday’s morning conference. Seventy-six Mexican specialists in fighting forest fires, civil and military, elements of the Defense and personnel of the National Forestry Commission, in the same delegation, landed last Saturday in California where they were received by Governor Gavin Newsom, who thanked the government of Mexico and President Claudia Sheinbaum for support. It’s what friends do
said the president, who also assured that he did not feel surprised by the aid due to a long friendly relationship between Mexico and California, and even more so now with President Sheinbaum. When you need us we will be there
he stated, and then shook hands with each of the members of the Mexican delegation.
Governor Newsom’s position is very different from that of the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, and his collaborators, who, instead of thanking their neighbors and main trading partners, or millions of countrymen – both from Mexico and the great country – who daily and through their work contribute to American growth and development, criminalize them, insult them, attack them, threaten to deport them and defame them. Just three days ago Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s henchman and henchman, who integrated him into his cabinet, responded with three ellipses on the social network that he bought and that we continue to know as Twitter, despite the fact that he renamed it as x
– the same one that its new owner said would be bot-proof, infodemic-proof and would become a space for discussion far from hate, but which on the contrary is fed by farms that flood the conversation with insults and lies – a message that, without evidence, criminalizes Juan Manuel Sierra Leyva, a Mexican migrant, as the cause of the fires, which adds to the infodemic narrative that seeks to build the false perception that every migrant is a criminal.
According to the 2020 United States census, the city of Los Angeles, California, has a population of close to 3.9 million inhabitants, of which 48.5 percent are of Latin American origin. It is the second city with the most Mexicans in the world, where 43 percent of construction workers are countrymen. They threaten to deport them. If so, who is going to rebuild Los Angeles after the fires?
When consulting which are the most common surnames in California, after Smith and Jackson, there are García, Hernández, López and González. At least 37.7 million Mexicans live in the United States, a country to which they generate 338 billion dollars a year; Its contribution to the economy is 338 billion dollars, equivalent to Colombia’s GDP. Eighty percent of the salaries that Mexican workers receive in the United States remain in that country. If they were deported, they would stop consuming there, which would cause the United States economy to contract by more than one point of its GDP.
If Trump carries out his threat of mass deportations once he protests, not only will his country’s economy collapse, there will also be no one to rebuild what was devastated by the fires in California which, if they continue by then, will not be able to be put out as they have been expelled those who work in it today.
