First they found the left foot, then they found the right foot and a hand. these are the parts of a child’s body found since last night at Garfield Park, a park in the western part of my hometown of Chicago. A few days ago, the death of another child shook the world, and with good reason, a Syrian child fleeing his country was found dead on Turkish beach. Between my house and this park in Chicago there is an invisible boundary and it’s always much more likely to find a body on that side of the boundary (regardless of the cause of death).

Initially, we might think that the death here on the side has nothing to do with the death in the Turkish sea. But there is. We live in a world full of borders, visible and invisible. Worse than that, if there is no image, there is no revolt, as the founder of Border Angels, a humanitarian group that supports family members searching for their missing ones along the US-Mexico border. The US Border Patrol that “protects” this border found 307 dead in the year 2014, not counting the death toll across the border. The death toll on the American side was 492 in 2005. Any Brazilian who applied for a visa to enter the US before the economic crisis knows the stress of wanting to cross that border, but I can’t even imagine the stress of an “illegal ” in “alien” land or the stress of a refugee in a trance.