Adam Isacson

Defense, security, borders, migration, and human rights in Latin America and the United States. May not reflect my employer’s consensus view.

Archives

December 2020

Some articles I found interesting this morning

Photo from Tal Cual (Venezuela). Caption: “El racionamiento de agua se endureció en todo el país durante la cuarentena”

(Even more here)

December 31, 2020

Brazil

Bolsonaro has surrounded himself with corrupt figures, used propaganda to promote his populist agenda, undermined the justice system, and waged a destructive war against the Amazon

Colombia

Desde el Ejecutivo dicen que reportarán incumplimiento a la JEP y la Fiscalía. Farc invita a un espacio de trabajo conjunto para superar los inconvenientes

El exfiscal anticorrupción, Luis Gustavo Moreno, quien llegó al país el pasado 4 de diciembre, luego de purgar una condena de 48 meses de prisión en Estados Unidos, será trasladado a la cárcel La Modelo

“We have achieved the highest level of manual coca eradication ever recorded by Colombia: 130,000 hectares (321,000 acres),” President Ivan Duque said

La JEP cerró el año pasado con más de 36.000 decisiones adoptadas, 308.000 víctimas acreditadas en los siete macrocasos y un terreno abonado para las primeras decisiones de fondo y condenas contra los máximos responsables

Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela

Las investigaciones revelan que existe una red de trata de personas en la que participan presuntos coyoteros que operan en Colombia, Ecuador y Perú

Cuba

Since November, a group of Cubans has been demanding freedom of expression in solidarity with members of an artists collective which has been facing repression from state authorities

Mexico

When met with what they say is official indifference or outright resistance, the collectives purchased shovels and other tools and began conducting their own searches in clandestine mass graves and abandoned properties

En 2020 habrá una disminución de 0.4% en homicidios dolosos y de 1.3% en la tasa de homicidios por cada 100 mil habitantes, con relación a 2019

Military and police forces said on the final day of the year that they had seized an estimated 1.3 tons of the synthetic opioid, compared to 222 kilograms in 2019

The episode, described by one American official as “a total shitshow”, has complicated the Mexican-American relationship just as it had at last seemed to be getting simpler

Peru

Seguridad Ciudadana se prepara para afrontar un nuevo año con retos por venir, en circunstancias que seguramente serán diferentes para nuestra ciudadanía, con eminentes cambios políticos

U.S.-Mexico Border

Don Paco, as he was known to friends and migrants, founded the San Juan Bosco migrant shelter in Nogales, Sonora in 1982

As of Dec. 16 3,600 National Guard and reserve troops are stationed at the border, with a cap of 4,000 issued in June

Venezuela

Denuncias de torturas, detenciones arbitrarias y ejecuciones extrajudiciales se combinaron este año con las vulneraciones a los derechos a la alimentación, salud y servicios básicos

El Arco Minero del Orinoco se ha convertido en una tierra de barbarie donde la ley la imponen los grupos armados irregulares

Some articles I found interesting this morning

(Even more here)

December 30, 2020

Western Hemisphere Regional

Todos nos sentimos sacudidos, hostigados, dañados y algo traumatizados por el paso de Trump. Creo que los latinoamericanos han de sentir algo parecido

Argentina

The Senate vote on Wednesday was a major victory for Latin America’s growing feminist movement, and its ripple effects are likely to be widespread

Bolivia

El anterior jefe de las FFAA había expresado el malestar institucional por los procesos a militares por las muertes de Sacaba y Senkata

Chile

Cabe destacar que la creación del COPE es parte de las modificaciones diseñadas para la nueva Estructura Superior del Ejército (ESE) y depende directamente del Comandante en Jefe

Colombia, Venezuela

The message that Venezuelan migrants are no longer welcome comes from average Colombian citizens and powerful government officials alike

Cuba

On the campaign trail, President-elect Joe Biden promised to reverse Donald Trump’s restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba. But he stopped short of saying just how far he’ll go

The plan to restore Cuba to the terrorism sponsor list was developed, in a break from standard process, by the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs and not its Counterterrorism Bureau

Cuba, U.S.-Mexico Border

U.S. authorities, including police in anti-riot gear, closed off the bridge that leads into El Paso, Texas, with a concrete barrier topped with barbed wire

Honduras

Félix Vásquez, 60, a veteran leader of the indigenous Lenca people, was shot dead at home in Santiago de Puringla, a rural community in the department of La Paz

Mexico

Mexico’s Senate passed a bill in late November legalizing recreational marijuana. Lawmakers in the lower house say they will approve a bill by February, though they want to raise the amount of pot consumers may possess in public

El 6 de junio de 2021, 94 millones de mexicanos están llamados a las urnas para elegir a los 500 diputados federales, 15 de los 32 gobernadores, 30 congresos estatales y mil 900 ayuntamientos

Se inauguraron 22 bases de la Guardia Nacional en la entidad, pero no responden a la violencia

When the flow of drugs regained momentum, the transportation hurdles resulted in a sharp drop in the frequency of shipments, with cocaine from the Andean countries of South America arriving in Mexico once every two weeks, instead of a few times a week

U.S.-Mexico Border

The cartel operative, who asked not to be identified to avoid retribution, said cartels not only have ties to the Border Patrol but to CBP officers at the international bridges as well

Venezuela

En el acto de salutación a la Fuerza Armada Nacional celebrado el 28 de diciembre de 2020, Nicolás Maduro asistió vestido de militar

Los presos políticos permanecen en diferentes recintos carcelarios como el Helicoide, los calabozos de la Dirección General de Contrainteligencia Militar (Dgcim) y en la sede principal del Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional

Entre las muertes violentas, hubo 4.231 personas que fallecieron en casos de «resistencia a la autoridad», 4.153 homicidios y otras 3.507 muertes que están en averiguación

Some articles I found interesting this morning

(Even more here)

December 29, 2020

Western Hemisphere Regional

The Biden administration will need to expect the unexpected and plan for multiple contingencies, whether migration surges, natural disasters, or constitutional crises

Brazil

Illegal goldminers supported by Bolsonaro bring environmental destruction and coronavirus to Yanomami communities

Colombia

Miembros de las Fuerzas Armadas y de la Policía han participado en espacios de escucha como víctimas del conflicto armado y también han aportado sus versiones para el esclarecimiento de la verdad

Entre las víctimas está Rosa Mendoza, una excombatiente de las Farc y su hija, menor de edad

Sería muy útil para la paz nacional, así como para restablecer la confianza de los ciudadanos, ver un liderazgo menos conflictivo y escudado en el debido proceso para no dar explicaciones necesarias

Colombia, Venezuela

“Desde Colombia se preparan ataques contra unidades militares del país, con mercenarios entrenados bajo el financiamiento de Iván Duque, se preparan ataques a final de este año o en los días por pasar a principio del 2021”, aseguró

Costa Rica

Both versions of 2020 — the rapid and competent initial Covid-response and scientific development, and the blundering financial reaction and misreading of public needs — will be part of the benefits and burdens Costa Rica carries into the future

El Salvador

Tucked into the omnibus spending bill signed Sunday by President Donald Trump was a provision barring access for El Salvador — as well as for neighbors Guatemala and Honduras — to a State Department program that finances the purchase of U.S. defense equipment

Guatemala

In Guatemala, fear of the virus was overshadowed by outrage in the face of corruption and abuse of power

El fotógrafo esperaba la llegada de Mynor Moto a Puerto Barrios, pero captó al excandidato presidencial Fredy Cabrera, que le advertía al juez “¡Metete, metete!”

Honduras

The pandemic is thriving in countries like Honduras where democracy and dictatorship blend together into a toxic autocracy

Mexico

Ni el confinamiento por la pandemia, ni el despliegue masivo de la Guardia Nacional lograron una reducción de la violencia homicida

U.S.-Mexico Border

Additional steps may be tougher, but are still worth considering

The next head of DHS will need to grapple with the insular, hard-right worldview held by influential border and immigration officials

Venezuela

Dos o tres lanchas parten de forma clandestina cada semana en Güiria. Surcan el oleaje del océano Atlántico que baña la costa oriental, con venezolanos que escapan

Nicolás Maduro reaccionó en rechazo a la declaratoria de la continuidad administrativa y constitucional de la Asamblea Nacional (AN) presidida por Juan Guaidó

Some articles I found interesting this morning

(Even more here)

December 28, 2020

Western Hemisphere Regional

Some immigrants have been withdrawing cases against their lawyers’ advice, saying they’re more afraid of being in detention during a coronavirus outbreak than of what might be waiting in the places they fled

Colombia

Gracias al trabajo de la Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, la Comisión de la Verdad y la Unidad de Búsqueda de Desaparecidos, el país ha podido conocer versiones sobre varios hechos que permanecieron ocultos

Sólo doce han terminado en una condena, pero veinte están en juicio

El Estado colombiano no tiene certeza de cuántos son los predios considerados baldíos y mucho menos sus dimensiones reales. Aprovechándose de esa falencia, cientos de colombianos se habrían apropiado de grandes extensiones de tierra

Rosa Amalia Mendoza y Manuel Alonso Villegas, exarc asesinados este domingo, 27 de diciembre en los departamentos de Bolívar y Cauca

U.S.-Mexico Border

The U.S. has always resisted protecting refugees at its border. The incoming Biden administration will have to decide whether to break with that past

Some articles I found interesting this morning

(Even more here)

December 24, 2020

Colombia

Por situación de seguridad en los territorios, muchos de ellos ya no se podrán entregar. Gobierno dice que tiene toda la logística necesaria disponible para recibir los bienes

Si en efecto vuelven las aspersiones con glifosato, es fácil predecir qué va a ocurrir: la política de drogas de Colombia continuará en el fracaso

La Fiscalía debía informar sobre los avances en las investigaciones penales por los hechos ocurridos el 25 de mayo de 2000 que atentaron contra la vida, integridad y libertad de expresión de la periodista

La nueva cabeza de esa institución es una ficha que genera confianza en distintos sectores políticos, en el Ejército y en las agencias de inteligencia internacional

This role has been most pro­nounced in the U.S. coun­ternar­cotics pol­i­cy in the coun­try for the past few decades. Under the Trump admin­is­tra­tion this pol­i­cy has been mixed with ani­mos­i­ty toward the 2016 peace agree­ment

Guatemala

Out now in documentary form, The Art of Political Murder presents a riveting narrative reconstruction of one of Latin America’s most controversial and bizarre criminal cases

Mexico

Al menos 26 mil 105 personas fueron asesinadas de marzo a noviembre de 2020, periodo en el que se han mantenido las medidas de restricción por la pandemia

Nicaragua

Carlos Chamorro denunció que el régimen de Daniel Ortega ordenó confiscar todos los bienes que pertenecen a los medios de comunicación, El Confidencial

Peru

Especialista advierte que hace 20 años no se producía un ataque contra miembros de esta institución

U.S.-Mexico Border

The government’s strategy of awarding contracts before acquiring titles to land in Texas has led to millions of dollars in costs for delays. Things could get even more complicated if President-elect Joe Biden stops border wall construction

The work is part of a final sprint to complete as many miles of border wall as possible before President-elect Joe Biden takes office

President Trump issued pardons to Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, two U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents who were convicted in 2006 of shooting Osvaldo Aldrete-Davil and then attempting to cover up the shooting

There is the promise of more lenient immigration policies to come, but as Tony Payan argues, it’s more about what people are running from than what they are running toward

Venezuela

Like the December 6 sham election, the consultation has done nothing to jump start a transition to democracy

Some articles I found interesting this morning

(Even more here)

December 23, 2020

Colombia

Organizaciones sociales y voceros comunitarios, a pesar del miedo, denuncian una supuesta connivencia entre la fuerza pública y los grupos ilegales

La pugna que enfrenta al grupo narcoparamilitar Los Rastrojos con la guerrilla del ELN ha dejado una estela de muerte

El Nudo del Paramillo, frontera natural entre los dos departamentos, es hoy un corredor que ocho grupos se disputan tras la salida de las Farc

Colombia, Venezuela

President Iván Duque says undocumented Venezuelans will be denied access in a move denounced as unethical and impractical

El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras

Legislation requires creation of “Engel list” of corrupt and undemocratic actors who will be denied entry to U.S.

U.S.-Mexico Border

They are likely the result of a combination of changes to border policy by the Trump administration, an increase in hostility by US Border Patrol toward humanitarian aid workers, and record-breaking heat

The president-elect said creating a system to process thousands of asylum seekers will take months, because the government needs funding to put staffers such as “asylum judges” in place

While tens of thousands of asylum seekers, mostly from Central America, have given up and returned home, many others haven’t

Some articles I found interesting this morning

(Even more here)

December 22, 2020

Western Hemisphere Regional

Judge Hanen declined to immediately end DACA as Texas requested when the state filed its suit in 2018, but he wrote in a preliminary opinion that Texas was likely to ultimately win the suit

Colombia

El fiscal del caso resolvió declarar como crimen de lesa humanidad el presunto delito de concierto para delinquir que se les imputa a los reconocidos empresarios

En la lista de mandatarios, presidentes, cancilleres y primeros ministros que han hablado telefónicamente con el presidente electo de los Estados Unidos, Joe Biden, no aparece el presidente Iván Duque

Colombia, Venezuela

President Iván Duque says undocumented Venezuelans will be denied access in a move denounced as unethical and impractical

Cuba

WOLA and CDA representatives said they had provided the “detailed inventory of what needs to be done” to members of Biden’s transition team, and they hoped the report would create a “momentum for engagement”

Guatemala, Honduras

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team is weighing whether to grant them Temporary Protected Status (TPS)

Mexico

Nine journalists killed in 2020, bringing deaths to 120 since 2000

The case that Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos took bribes from drug cartels is largely circumstantial, people in both countries say, clouding chances of a conviction in Mexico

Before this grows into a very damaging bilateral problem, the two governments urgently need to engage to address the serious and legitimate issues at stake and find workable solutions

U.S.-Mexico Border

Rice y Sullivan intentaron contener el “efecto llamada” que puede generar entre los migrantes la próxima llegada al poder de Biden, después de cuatro años de restricciones al derecho al asilo

Federal statistics show that search and rescue operations near Arizona’s border inexplicably dipped to 213 during a record-hot July and August, from 232 in July and August 2019

Rice and Sullivan’s interview with EFE were the first extensive on-the-record statements on immigration policy plans from Biden’s White House team

Uruguay

The law aims to reform a wide range of issues, including broadening the power given to the police force during public demonstrations

Venezuela

Venezuelan authorities are harassing and criminally prosecuting civil society organizations that are doing essential work to address the ongoing humanitarian emergency in the country

For months, Mr. Esper had fended off pleas from the State and Justice Departments to deploy a Navy vessel to Cape Verde to deter Venezuela and Iran from plotting to spirit Mr. Saab away from the island

Some articles I found interesting this morning

(Even more here)

December 21, 2020

Colombia

El presidente de Colombia mantiene su rechazo a los acuerdos de 2016, pero asegura que su Gobierno quiere que la reincorporación salga bien. “Los asesinatos de líderes sociales vienen de atrás”, justifica tras un demoledor informe de la ONU

Este 19 de diciembre fueron citadas múltiples organizaciones campesinas y civiles para discutir un tema esencial: si se aprueban o no los cambios del Plan de Manejo Ambiental de la Policía, lo que llevaría al regreso de las fumigaciones

SEMANA conoció que, durante los últimos diez años, 326 miembros activos y en retiro del Ejército Nacional han estado relacionados con investigaciones por posible abuso y acoso sexual

So why doesn’t the Colombian government just send more police or troops to protect the land defenders? It’s complicated

Desde el sur de Bolívar, Arauca y Nariño son reconocidos como referentes de procesos organizativos. Este lunes se define su situación judicial

El Ministerio de Defensa, que está a cargo de la primera etapa del sometimiento, se negó a darnos detalles sobre la entrega

El centro de investigación también advierte que a lo largo de 2020 han sido asesinados 292 líderes sociales

  • Juan Gomez, Silvia Corredor Rodriguez, Valeria Arias Suarez, Carlos Mayorga, Periodistas de la Paz en el Terreno, Antioquia Silenciada (El Espectador (Colombia), December 21, 2020).

Así lo mapeó el Proceso Social de Garantías para la Labor de Líderes, Lideresas, Defensores y Defensoras de Derechos Humanos de Antioquia, una red que reúne 80 organizaciones sociales en el departamento

Guatemala

Ayer también hubo cambios en la jefatura del Estado Mayor de la Defensa Nacional

Mexico

Este domingo, el presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador anunció que la administración, la operación del tren, de Tulum hasta Palenque, que son tres tramos, además del Aeropuerto de Tulum, el Aeropuerto de Chetumal, el Aeropuerto de Palenque y el Aeropuerto Felipe Ángeles de la Ciudad de México estarán a cargo del Ejército

La Fiscalía General de la República (FGR) y la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (SRE) declararon como reservada por un periodo de cinco años toda la información relacionada con la detención en Estados Unidos del general Salvador Cienfuegos

El fundador de la Casa del Migrante de Saltillo falleció a los 76 años, su voz sonó con fuerza en el noreste del país, especialmente en los años más cruentos de la guerra contra el narco de Felipe Calderón

Aristóteles Sandoval was shot in the back inside a restaurant restroom in one of the highest-profile political killings in Mexico in recent memory

El trabajo de la prensa pasó a estar totalmente controlado por el crimen organizado, coludido con autoridades locales. Nada se podía publicar sin el aval de los capos

Funcionarios plantearon que se quiere sentar el precedente de que el gobierno mexicano planea perseguir vigorosamente a quienes trafiquen con armas, aún cuando hayan cometido el delito en territorio estadunidense

U.S.-Mexico Border

Furniture making, housekeeping and makeup practice – people of Matamoros camp pass the time in the long wait for asylum

“For the first time in decades,” she says, “we need to think how we can actually allow, receive, and welcome them in a way that’s fair rather than presume from the get-go that our goal is to keep them out”

Uruguay

El ministro de Defensa Nacional, Javier García, advirtió por el “proceso de desmantelamiento” de las Fuerzas Armadas iniciado por el Frente Amplio

Venezuela

An exit remains possible if the government and opposition adjust their zero-sum thinking to admit the need for compromise. The new U.S. administration can help

The US dollar is increasingly taking precedence over the bolivar, and while the Venezuelan minimum wage is the lowest in the region, the country’s stock market is booming

Ramsey and Smilde offer a series of concrete policy recommendations for the next administration

Weekly email update is out

I just sent off another e-mail update to those who’ve subscribed. It’s a bit shorter because I’ve been off, but it has:

  • Information about a good bill that actually passed Congress about missing migrants at the border;
  • Full text of this week’s Colombia peace update;
  • Full text of this week’s U.S.-Mexico border update;
  • 5 “longread” links from the past week;
  • A brief comment about drug policy; and, finally,
  • An extra helping of funny tweets.

Here’s the page with past editions and a blank to add your e-mail address if you want these more-or-less weekly missives in your inbox.

5 links from the past week

  • In part 5 of a 5-part series, The Washington Post’s Mary Beth Sheridan takes an in-depth look at the increasing power and unaccountability of Mexico’s military. Few countries in Latin America have handed over so many roles to the armed forces, and it happened fast.
  • Pair that with J. Weston Phippen’s investigation in Politico Magazine of a U.S.-aided Mexican Marine Special Forces unit that went on a rampage in the border city of Nuevo Laredo in 2018, disappearing dozens of people—including a U.S. citizen—without a peep from the Trump administration.
  • Pair that with what is probably longtime New York Times bureau chief Azam Ahmed’s last piece before departing Mexico: the story of Miriam Rodríguez, the mother of one of tens of thousands of Mexican victims of kidnapping and murder, who got almost no help from law enforcement and captured her daughter’s killers down on her own until she, too, was murdered in her home in San Fernando, Tamaulipas.
  • Communities in Colombia’s ill-governed coca-growing territories are bracing for a possible holiday announcement that U.S.-funded spray planes are to resume spraying glyphosate after a 2015 suspension. Two analysts at DeJusticia—an NGO at the vanguard of the legal fight against fumigation—decry the policy and the process being used to restart it.
  • The International Crisis Group and the Fundación Paz y Reconciliación published reports warning of a deteriorating security situation along the Colombia-Venezuela border. It is formally closed due to the pandemic, but armed and criminal groups operate numerous illicit crossings. Both reports find the ELN gaining strength, at times abetted by the Venezuelan government, while paramilitaries, FARC dissidents, EPL guerrilla remnants, Venezuelan gangs, and Mexican cartel middlemen all add to the complexity.

Colombia peace update: Week of December 13, 2020

Cross-posted from WOLA’s colombiapeace.org site. Between now and the end of the year, we’re producing weekly sub-1,000-word updates in English about peace accord implementation and related topics. After that, we will evaluate the experience—both audience response and our own time commitment—before deciding whether to produce these permanently.

Consultation puts a restart of fumigation on the front burner

On December 19 Colombia’s environmental authority, the ANLA, is holding a long-awaited public hearing about resuming coca fumigation. The term refers to a U.S.-backed program that uses aircraft spraying the herbicide glyphosate to eradicate coca. The hearing is a step toward ANLA’s deciding whether to award the controversial program an environmental license, one of several prerequisites that Colombia’s Constitutional Court has set for its restart.

Colombia suspended fumigation in 2015, after 21 years and over 1.8 million hectares sprayed, following a World Health Organization literature review’s finding that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic.” Since then, the government was slow to implement an alternative—whether on-the-ground eradication or building state presence and services in coca-growing zones—and coca cultivation surged.

The December 19 public hearing centers on the 4,000-page modification that the National Police—which runs the spray program—is proposing to the ANLA’s environmental management plan for the spraying. The hearing responds to a March request from four NGOs, Acción Técnica Social, Elementa, Viso Mutop, y Dejusticia. The pandemic has delayed it: courts ruled that communities in remote areas far from internet access could not be consulted “virtually.” A higher court overruled that in October, however, finding that virtual consultations could go ahead.

The groups that called for the hearing contend that the spray program is risky and ineffective. DeJusticia’s co-founder, Rodrigo Uprimny, notes, “The argument against fumigation is simple: it is not effective, it has serious negative effects, its legal viability is precarious, and there are better strategies.” María Alejandra Vélez of the Universidad de los Andes’ Center for Security and Drugs (CESED) contends that fumigation causes “a loss of state legitimacy,” a “balloon effect” as coca cultivation moves elsewhere, and conflict with the peace accords’ offer of help with crop substitution.

Should this process lead to a restart of spraying, we can expect Colombian organizations—including those that called for the December 19 hearing—to challenge it before the Constitutional Court. An analysis from DeJusticia advocates finds “poor transparency and access to information in the process, weak evidence, and failure to comply with constitutional orders,” while little is known about the health study that Colombia’s equivalent of the CDC (the INS) has been required to carry out. A joint letter from numerous Colombian organizations found that “the government is not complying with the legal and constitutional mandate to respect consultation and free, prior, and informed consent in eradication plans in ethnic territories,” and demanded that the December 19 hearing be suspended.

Coca fumigation has been the subject of numerous WOLA reports and commentaries, a November 30 joint letter with Colombian partners, and an event we co-hosted on December 9.

International warnings about massacres and social leader killings

“I call on the Colombian authorities to take stronger and much more effective action to protect the population from this appalling and pervasive violence,” reads a statement from UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet that counts 375 people murdered in 2020 by massacres and targeted social leader killings. A summary of the statement was featured for at least two days this week on the main page of the United Nations’ website. During the past week, strong concerns about massacres (defined as the killing of multiple people at a time) and social leader murders also came from:

  • The 29th semi-annual report of OAS mission in Colombia (MAPP-OEA), drawing attention to “illegal armed groups’ territorial and social control.”
  • A Verdad Abierta resource that allows a reader to view brief biographical and geographical information about 602 social leaders killed between January 2016 and September 2020, selecting for year, region, and stage of judicial investigation.
  • WOLA’s monthly alert about the human rights situation, which “cannot stress enough that international actions are required to stop the human rights rollbacks occurring as a result of the inadequate implementation of the 2016 peace accord.”

Two reports warn about security along the Colombia-Venezuela border

Two high-credibility security think tanks released reports raising alarms about worsening security conditions at the Colombia-Venezuela border. Even as pandemic measures stop all legal border crossings, violent organized crime activity has increased, in a way that mixes dangerously with the neighboring governments’ poor diplomatic relations.

“In the 24 border municipalities of Colombia, during 2020, 472 people have been assassinated, 63 of Venezuelan nationality; 24 have been massacred; 1,365 persons have been forcibly displaced and 13 have been kidnapped,” reports the Fundación Paz y Reconciliación in a 55-page report on The Situation of Security and Migration on the Colombia-Venezuela Border. “On the Venezuelan side,” however, the Foundation could obtain “no known figures that would allow us to specify” how bad the situation is.

“Numerous armed groups clash with one another and harm citizens along a border marked by abundant coca crops and informal crossings,” reports the International Crisis Group’s Disorder on the Border: Keeping the Peace between Colombia and Venezuela. “High bilateral tensions could spur escalating border hostilities while perpetuating the mistreatment of migrants and refugees whose movements have been restricted by COVID-19.”

Both reports find the Rastrojos, a paramilitary-derived organized crime group, losing ground to the ELN along the border between Norte de Santander, Colombia and Táchira, Colombia: a more densely populated part of the border especially coveted by smugglers. The Rastrojos were found to have helped Venezuelan Assembly President (recognized by several dozen countries as Interim President) Juan Guaidó to cross overland into Colombia in February 2019. Since then, Venezuela’s security forces have cracked down on the group, along with the ELN, which moved quickly to fill the vacuum and to consolidate its dominance on the Venezuelan side on the border.

The Venezuelan government appears to have aided and abetted the ELN, the Crisis Group notes, as Caracas officials “view the ELN as a supplement to the state’s border defenses and seem willing to overlook occasional clashes between its fighters and the Venezuelan military.”

Other groups, like FARC dissidents, remnants of the EPL guerrillas, Venezuelan gang networks, and Mexican cartel middlemen, are also very active, adding to the chaos. “The Colombian army, for its part, is under orders not to rock the boat” in order to minimize the likelihood of conflict, the ICG finds.

Links

  • The Fiscalía is investigating 2,314 cases of “false positive” cases involving 10,949 members of the Army, including 22 generals, involving 3,966 victims, according to a September document that the prosecutor’s office sent to the International Criminal Court.
  • Despite the sharp rise in massacres and social leader killings, Colombia’s 2020 homicide rate to date is 23.8 murders per 100,000 residents, which Colombia’s Police say is the lowest in 46 years.
  • Kyle Johnson and Juanita Vélez of Conflict Responses take issue with government claims that nearly all 250 killings of ex-FARC guerrillas are related to narcotrafficking.
  • “Of the 75 municipalities with the most coca or substitution leader killings…there were specialized judges in only 3 (Puerto Asís, Tumaco, and Cúcuta) and criminal judges in 6. There were judicial police in 11 and specialized prosecutors in 7,” reads a La Silla Vacía analysis of the justice system’s absence.
  • Prominent center-left columnists Ramiro Bejarano, María Jimena Duzán, and Cecilia Orozco continued to question former Fiscal General Néstor Humberto Martínez, whom they accuse of plotting with the U.S. DEA to entrap participants and supporters of the peace process between 2017 and 2019.

Weekly border update: December 18, 2020

There’s so much happening at the U.S.-Mexico border—much of it outrageous, some of it heroic—that it’s hard to keep track. With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments in 900 words or less. We welcome your feedback.

You can get these in your e-mail each week by joining WOLA’s “Beyond the Wall” mailing list.

2021 spending package probably includes some border wall money

The House and Senate have almost completely agreed on a federal budget for 2021. Its final approval might not come until next week, as negotiations continue over an accompanying COVID-19 relief package.

Border wall and ICE detention money were reportedly two of the sticking points on the 2021 omnibus budget bill. The Republican-majority Senate’s Homeland Security appropriation had sought to devote $1.96 billion to border wall-building next year, while the Democratic-majority House sought to zero out the wall and rescind some past-year money. The House also would have paid for roughly half as many ICE detention beds as the Senate.

The chambers appear to have reached a compromise. “The final disposition of immigrant detention bed capacity and border wall funding wasn’t immediately clear,” Roll Call reported on December 14. “But there was an expectation that the average daily population at ICE facilities would be cut under the tentative agreement in exchange for some wall construction funding.”

Nobody has seen any numbers, and it isn’t clear how the bill’s language might compel President-elect Joe Biden, who has said he would stop wall construction, to spend any new wall-building money.

The Washington Post learned from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that about $3.3 billion in its Defense budget wall construction accounts will be unspent as of January 20. As it might cost $700 million in fees to extricate the Corps from its contracts with construction companies, a halt would bring a net savings of about $2.6 billion.

Meanwhile in Arizona, NPR reported, “contractors have added shifts—they’re working all night long under light towers to meet Trump’s goal of 450 miles of new barriers before his term is over.”

El Salvador “safe third country” agreement is finalized

Chad Wolf, the acting secretary for Homeland Security (depending on whom you ask), visited El Salvador this week. There, he met with President Nayib Bukele and announced implementation accords for a so-called Asylum Cooperative Agreement (ACA, or “safe third country” agreement) that the United States and El Salvador signed in September 2019.

Under this agreement, El Salvador—a country so unsafe that it often tops the list of U.S. asylum seekers’ nationalities—will accept U.S. transfers of other countries’ asylum seekers, who would then need to seek protection in El Salvador.

DHS signed similar agreements with Guatemala and Honduras in 2019. Only the Guatemala agreement entered into force, and the Trump administration sent 939 Salvadoran and Honduran asylum seekers to Guatemala City between October 2019 and March 2020, when pandemic measures suspended the arrangement. Only 20 percent of them decided to apply for asylum in Guatemala; at least some of the rest were assuredly returned to danger. Human Rights Watch and Refugees International performed follow-up fieldwork in Guatemala, and found that of 30 returnees interviewed:

Several said they had no family or support networks in Guatemala and that they feared for their safety in Guatemala. Many indicated they would return to El Salvador and Honduras despite continuing to express a fear of persecution there.

Don’t expect the Biden administration to implement the El Salvador or other Northern Triangle safe third country agreements. A Biden campaign document was unequivocal: “Biden will end these [detrimental asylum] policies, starting with Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols and Safe Third Country Agreements.”

CBP’s November numbers show the expected migrant “wave” flattening out, for now

On December 14 Customs and Border Protection released monthly border statistics, covering November. After six consecutive months of increases in Border Patrol’s apprehensions of undocumented migrants, the new data showed a leveling off last month.

Download a PDF of dozens of border infographics at bit.ly/wola_border.
  • Apprehensions declined by 0.8 percent, from 67,639 to 67,101, from October to November.
  • This, however, was the largest apprehensions number for a November since November 2005.
  • Note that this number measures “apprehensions” or “encounters,” not “people.” The quick turnaround of CBP’s pandemic-era expulsions is spurring recidivism as migrants turn around and try to cross again. The 67,101 includes much double and triple-counting.
  • Between March and November—with some double-counting—CBP expelled 328,037 apprehended migrants under the “Title 42” CDC pandemic policy, which ejects adult and family asylum seekers without a hearing. That policy faces legal challenges; on whether to lift or alter it, “the incoming administration has been silent,” a New York Times analysis notes.
  • Demographic trends are mixed. Compared to October,        
    • single adults from Mexico declined 2 percent;
    • single adults from the Northern Triangle increased 21 percent;
    • unaccompanied children from Guatemala and El Salvador increased, but children from Honduras and Mexico declined;
    • family unit members from Guatemala and Mexico increased, but those from El Salvador and Honduras declined.
Download a PDF of dozens of border infographics at bit.ly/wola_border.

As noted in previous updates, officials and press coverage are predicting a migrant “surge” from Central America in early 2021. While that remains likely, November’s apprehension data revealed an unexpected break in momentum. One hypothesis: mobility was curtailed during the first half of November, when Central America was slammed by two major hurricanes.

Links

  • In a Wednesday voice vote, the House of Representatives passed the Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains Act (S. 2174), which addresses the longstanding crisis of hundreds of migrants each year dying in U.S. borderlands of dehydration and exposure. It authorizes spending for rescue beacons, identification of remains, and other priorities, as discussed in last week’s update. Because of some technical changes to the bill’s language, it needs the Senate—which passed the bill in November—to quickly approve it a second time before it goes to the President for signature.
  • A new Human Rights First report counts at least 1,314 attacks, including kidnappings, rapes, and assault, on asylum seekers subject to the “Remain in Mexico” policy in Mexican border cities.
  • Though a Supreme Court decision just preserved the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, a big challenge goes before a Texas federal court on Tuesday. A suit led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, now known nationally for leading a multi-state challenge to Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, is going before Houston District Judge Andrew Hanen, who during the Obama administration ruled against two other deferred-action programs and now may find DACA to be illegal.
  • “Although Biden promised to reverse Trump’s most restrictive immigration policies, he didn’t include immigration among his top four priorities: the coronavirus pandemic, economic recovery, racial equity and climate change. That was intentional,” an unnamed source close to the transition told NPR’s Franco Ordóñez, adding “that the Biden campaign and then the transition team felt that immigration activists had become too adversarial.”

Some articles I found interesting this morning

Luis Antonio Rojas photo at The Washington Post.

(Even more here)

December 18, 2020

Western Hemisphere Regional

Nearly a dozen immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement were kept in solitary confinement for more than two months, including two people who were isolated for more than 300 days

Aruba, Curacao, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela

Venezuelan migrants have greatly struggled to gain access to legal status in host countries in the Caribbean

Bolivia

Solo se destruyeron 2.177 hectáreas de la hoja verde. Efectivos encargados de esa labor atribuyen el descenso a la pandemia y a los conflictos que vivió el país

Colombia

La Fiscalía investiga 2.314 casos de falsos positivos contra 10.949 miembros del Ejército que involucran a 3.966 víctimas

Sería un error histórico para Colombia desconocer tanto la evidencia sobre la aspersión como las demandas sociales y ambientales de los territorios

Rechazamos la pretensión del gobierno nacional de imponer el plan de aspersión aérea y dejamos constancia de nuestros desacuerdos frente a la audiencia del Plan de Manejo Ambiental del PECIG con la que se pretende haber ajustado al Plan de Manejo Ambiental con miras a reactivar las fumigaciones

De acuerdo con la Fiscalía, el actual presidente (José Miguel Linares) y el expresidente de la multinacional (Augusto Jiménez) carbonífera habrían financiado y promovido la creación y los propósitos ilícitos de las Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia entre 1996 y 2001

El Salvador

A police chief allegedly protecting cabinet ministers under criminal investigation underscores how the force’s highest officials still act in ways that obstruct justice and guarantee impunity

Guatemala

El Ministerio de la Defensa (Mindef) gastó más de Q48 millones en vehículos y reparaciones de aeronaves bajo el Plan de recuperación de Capacidades del Ejército

Mexico

Durante su visita a Bavispe, Sonora, señaló que ya no se encubren delitos cometidos por militares y hay autoridad moral en el comandante de las Fuerzas Armadas y los mandos

Under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, troops have taken on expanded tasks well beyond their bases

López Obrador denied that the U.S. government had pressured Mexico to impose the restrictions, including the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy on asylum seekers

Peru

We have gathered worrying evidence of excessive use of police force against demonstrators protesting the very questionable removal of president Vizcarra

U.S.-Mexico Border

Environmentalists hope President-elect Joe Biden will stop the work, but that could be difficult and expensive to do quickly and may still leave pillars towering over sensitive borderlands

Some articles I found interesting this morning

(Even more here)

December 17, 2020

Colombia

La Misión de Apoyo al Proceso de Paz en Colombia de la Organización de los Estados Americanos (MAPP/OEA) presentó hoy ante el Consejo Permanente de la Organización su vigésimo noveno informe semestral

En esas comunidades se sienten frustrados, porque lo pactado no sólo incluía obras y recursos, sino que también le apostaba a empoderar y darles mayor capacidad de decisión a los habitantes de estas regiones. Y esta apuesta se ha ido diluyendo

Registrar cifras tiende a deshumanizar y a invisibilizar las historias de valientes ciudadanos y ciudadanas que asumieron la vocería de sus comunidades para exigir derechos o para denunciar atropellos

Rober Daza, Adelso Gallo y Teófilo Acuña, dirigentes y voceros del Coordinador Nacional Agrario y la Cumbre Agraria, fueron capturados en tres operativos realizados entre el 15 y 16 de diciembre, acusados de rebelión agravada

The helmeted officer can be seen punching him in the face, pulling a handgun and appearing to cock it before holstering the weapon and putting Sampson in handcuffs

La Jurisdicción argumenta que no es el momento para evaluar si los militares pierden o no los beneficios por entrar a la JEP o si son expulsados

El Salvador

Not long before the pandemic touched down in El Salvador, which over the years has been the Central American country hardest hit by gang violence, the

Guatemala

The OAS actions appeared based more on personal relations between its representatives and Guatemalan officials, particularly the appointment of someone with a clear conflict of interest

ICE emails show officials scrambling to decide what to do after a plane carrying 32 immigrant children landed in Guatemala — right around the same time a judge blocked the controversial Trump administration policy that allowed them to be deported

Honduras

Honduras is experiencing dire symptoms of a failed state, accelerated by a pandemic and two hurricanes, and nurtured by weak state capacity, corruption and poor rule of law. How to fix that?

Peru

Los oficiales, pasados al retiro el 24 de noviembre, sostienen que las decisiones tomadas por el Ejecutivo violaron la normativa de la Policía

U.S.-Mexico Border

The government would owe construction firms about $700 million for terminating contracts

This bipartisan and bicameral legislation will enhance local jurisdictions’ ability to record and report missing persons and unidentified remains found in South Texas and elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border

The Trump Administration continues to break U.S. laws and treaty obligations that protect refugees from persecution, returning to danger people seeking protection at the southern border

Rethinking drug policy

Here’s a 250-word comment in yesterday’s edition of the Inter-American Dialogue’s Latin America Advisor newsletter.

Q: U.S. Representative Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, on Dec. 1 released the final report of the congressionally mandated Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission, which includes recommendations to improve U.S. drug policy in Latin America and the Caribbean. Does the United States need a renewed blueprint for counternarcotics policies, as the report suggests? What are the most significant changes in drug policy that the commission recommends, and are they the right ones? In what ways would the proposed policies affect anti-drug cooperation between the United States and countries in Latin America and the Caribbean?

A: Adam Isacson, senior associate for the regional security policy program at the Washington Office on Latin America: “For four decades, U.S. administrations have sought to address illicit drugs as a problem somehow separate from Latin America’s other challenges, as though a country wracked with impunity, poverty and weak governance could somehow eliminate drug trafficking. Washington encouraged the region to pursue coercive strategies with short-term success measures and punished countries that failed to ‘cooperate fully.’ It hasn’t worked. Today, the United States is at a moment of record overdoses from illicit drugs produced in the region, while seizures and price data indicate burgeoning supplies. Organized crime, which gets much of its revenue from the drug trade, is thriving and spurring alarming levels of violence in many countries. Overall, the Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission’s most important contribution is its encouragement of a long- term time frame and a more equal, consultative approach. It would replace the unilateral ‘certification’ process with agreed-upon ‘compacts.’ It would place badly needed emphasis on illicit financial flows, which too often benefit corrupt officials and economic interests. In Colombia, it would de-emphasize forced eradication in favor of implementing the peace accords’ rural governance provisions. In Mexico and Central America, it prefers criminal justice reform and citizen security to endless ‘kingpin’ operations. The commission’s less threat-based, more equal approach might take longer to yield results and will require unaccustomed patience. These results, however, would hold much more promise of being permanent. A more consultative posture, meanwhile, would do far more to improve cooperation regionwide than the asymmetric relationship we’ve seen for so long.”

Some articles I found interesting this morning

Photo from U.S. Embassy El Salvador. Caption: “Ambassador Ronald Johnson, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad F. Wolf and President Nayib Bukele.”

(Even more here)

December 16, 2020

Western Hemisphere Regional

Even if immediate reforms are modest compared to the enormity of the problem, Biden can make a lasting contribution by simply being honest about the limits and costs of overseas supply control

Bolivia

El coronel Jaime Zurita llegó a la Fiscalía de Sacaba y se abstuvo de emitir sus declaraciones. El expresidente se reunió con misión de la CIDH por hechos de 2019

Brazil

“The benefit reached many people long before the disease did”

Brazil, Mexico

Writing to Trump after his own election in 2018, Amlo presented himself as a fellow populist – and signed off with abrazos (hugs) as opposed to the more formal un saludo (regards) he directed at Biden

More surprising was the tardy and somewhat chilly letter López Obrador said he sent to Biden late Monday

Colombia

El próximo sábado 19 de diciembre se llevará a cabo la Audiencia pública ambiental sobre el trámite de licencia para el Programa de Erradicación de Cultivos Ilícitos con Glifosato (Pecig)

The United Nations has recorded the deaths of 255 people in 66 massacres in Colombia this year, as well as the killing of 120 human rights defenders, the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said on Tuesday

El control ilegal sobre una nutrida lista de ‘botines’ de guerra que van más allá de la coca, la poca presencia del Estado y conflictos con grandes empresas mineroenergéticas tendrían silenciados a los líderes y las lideresas sociales antioqueños

Varios elementos tienen en común los tres operativos: uno, agentes de la DEA que intervinieron en el primero también lo hicieron en el segundo y en el tercero

La Alta Comisionada de las Naciones Unidas para los Derechos Humanos, Michelle Bachelet, condenó el martes el incremento de la violencia ejercida por parte de grupos armados no estatales, grupos criminales y otros elementos armados en Colombia

Colombia, Venezuela

En los veinticuatro (24) municipios fronterizos de Colombia ubicados en estas regiones , durante el 2020, han sido asesinadas 472 personas; 63 de nacionalidad venezolana; 24 han sido masacradas; 1.365 personas han sido desplazadas forzosamente y 13 han sido secuestradas

Cuba

The prospect of a détente between Washington and Havana rekindles memories of the thaw that Biden helped champion during the Obama administration

Despite Trump’s repeated falsehoods about Obama’s “one-sided deal” with Cuba, during its short duration, the policy of positive engagement achieved remarkable results

El Salvador

Earlier this year, the Biden–Sanders task force, organized after the president-elect won the Democratic nomination, recommended an end to the agreements signed with the Central American countries

Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris has criticized the agreements with Central American countries. President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment

Mexico

No se refiere a los civiles que han muerto a manos de militares por pasarse un retén o en otro evento castrense, sino a soldados que acabaron siendo procesados por esto

Se repite la historia: queman casas y asesinan a pobladores; no pasa nada, dice el alcalde

The new law is likely to make U.S. agencies reluctant to share information with Mexican institutions they consider to be corrupt, and Mexican officials won’t meet with their U.S. counterparts because of the requirement they disclose the meetings

A senior U.S. law enforcement officer who has spent much of his career working on cases involving Mexico said Tuesday that the legislation may all but cripple American investigations in Mexico

Peru

Tendrán en promedio una duración de 365 días y se realizarán en los Departamentos de Apurímac, Arequipa, Ayacucho, Cerro de Pasco, Huánuco, Huancavelica, Junín, Lima, Loreto, San Martin y Ucayali

U.S.-Mexico Border

Agents have targeted Arizona’s No More Deaths after the group went public with evidence of abuses of power in immigration enforcement

“What really gets me so angry is that they don’t get an opportunity to see a judge or to get a lawyer”

Some articles I found interesting this morning

Photo from Instituto de Defensa Legal (Peru).

(Even more here)

December 15, 2020

Western Hemisphere Regional

No president today would name high ranked foreign policy staff without including individuals with knowledge and background on China, Europe, or the Middle East. The same needs to be true for Latin America and the Caribbean

Under Trump, China has left the United States trailing in terms of power and influence across most of Latin America

Notably, the federal judge in the Texas case, brought by Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, has ruled against two other deferred action programs initiated by the Obama administration

Brazil

The report describes the origins of the PCC, its unique model of organization, and its ability to regulate criminal markets in the areas it controls

Chile

El Mandatario aseguró que la iniciativa “atenta contra el orden público, la seguridad ciudadana, la democracia y el Estado de derecho”

Colombia

La hipótesis del Gobierno que culpa a las disidencias vinculadas al narcotráfico no deja ver las diferencias entre cada asesinato ni ayuda a comprender o resolver el problema

SEMANA RURAL le explica en qué va el desminado humanitario en el país y cómo los excombatientes están aportando en el proceso

Una de las cabezas de esta organización creada por Pablo Escobar en los ochenta, usa el contrabando para legalizar dinero del narcotráfico

Grupos armados ilegales, algunos heredados del paramilitarismo, cooptan no sólo las gestiones de líderes y lideresas del departamento de Córdoba, sino la vida misma de las comunidades

Colombia, Venezuela

The two countries should urgently reopen communication channels to lower tensions and lessen the suffering of migrants who cross the border

Cuba

Like the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, the N27 protest was sparked by police brutality against Afro-Cubans

El director de la revista ‘El Estornudo’ y colaborador de EL PAÍS fue puesto en libertad tras seis horas detenido. El escritor se encuentra bajo vigilancia desde que participó en el Movimiento San Isidro

Mexico

Tres presidentes consecutivos dieron órdenes de que los agentes de la DEA, el FBI, la CIA y el ICE, operaran en México con toda libertad

Mexico, U.S.-Mexico Border

The Sinaloa and Arellano Felix cartels have long been at war with each other for “turf.” After the arrest of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in 2016, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel became increasingly involved

Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela

Diputados de la Asamblea Nacional (AN) continúan recabando información sobre lo ocurrido y se evalúan acciones ante organismos internacionales de derechos humanos

U.S.-Mexico Border

Border Patrol has told the stewards of the park that it plans to quickly replace the two fences that line it with two thirty-foot fences made of metal bollards

Congress must pass the Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains Act of 2020 (H.R. 8772). It is a true unicorn of legislation in that it has wide bipartisan support

The Biden administration will be expected to balance demands for more lenient policies with moderates’ concerns that any show of tolerance could lead to more illegal migration

U.S. border officials and shelter directors along the border are concerned about the effects of a major surge in migration in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, as is the Biden transition team

Immigration advocates are hopeful that the Biden administration will work to reverse the regulations, but doing so could take as many as sixty days

Venezuela

The new report from the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor’s office, indicating that the office’s examination of possible crimes against humanity in Venezuela is moving forward, advances the search for justice

A Reuters review of over 40 recent arrests found in each case that authorities used the law to detain critics of the president, his aides or allies

The day ahead: December 15, 2020

I’ll be in meetings nearly all day. (How to contact me)

This is it, my last day fully on the job in 2020. during the rest of the year, I’ll be using vacation days not to travel—not this year—but to get some deep writing done, and then to unplug almost completely.

Today I have 3 internal meetings, I’m talking to a gathering of Colombian Afro-descendant activists, and sitting in on a capstone project presentation for some Georgetown students working on civil-military relations in the Americas. That will leave little time to correspond, except perhaps a window mid-day.

Some articles I found interesting this morning

Fernando Vergara / AP photo at El País (Spain). Caption: “Soldados del ejército colombiano realizan un operativo de erradicación de hoja de coca en San José del Guaviare en marzo de 2019”

(Even more here)

December 14, 2020

Western Hemisphere Regional

“It turns out,” the judge wrote, “that CoreCivic, Inc., did, in fact, operate detention facilities for parents separated from their children”

Brazil

Pursuit of Sleeping Giants Brazil is part of a growing trend over the last several years to instrumentalize the judiciary against those who train fire on conservative media outlets, interest groups and Bolsonaro’s administration

Brazilian peacekeepers led MTF, which until the latest departure had six ships and about 800 sailors, since 2011

Chile

En las últimas semanas ha surgido la idea de que exoficiales o incluso oficiales participen en mesas técnicas de la Convención al momento de abordar el tema de Defensa

Colombia

  • Yohir Akerman, El General Rey (El Espectador (Colombia), December 14, 2020).

Centrémonos en el caso de un militar que no es el personaje de mayor rango, pero donde la evidencia es abrumadora y estremecedora

El próximo sábado 19 la ANLA realizará una audiencia en el trámite de la eventual licencia ambiental para esas fumigaciones

El excomandante paramilitar aseguró también que la mayoría de las desapariciones forzadas se hicieron por pedido de las Fuerzas Militares

De los 75 municipios con más coca u homicidios de líderes de sustitución, a febrero de este año solo había jueces especializados en tres (Puerto Asís, Tumaco y Cúcuta) y jueces penales en seis

Colombia, South America Regional, Uruguay

  • Guillermo Garat, Eliezer Budasoff, Jorge Galindo, La Cocaina Universal (El Pais (Spain), December 14, 2020).

Grupos criminales utilizan la logística de empresas legales. Se disloca el negocio con grupos multinacionales que aumentan la oferta en todo el mundo

Honduras

Craig Faller, jefe del Comando Sur de Estados Unidos, recibió este viernes la Medalla Gran Cruz de las Fuerzas Armadas de parte del gobierno de Honduras por su cooperación

Mexico

La Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (CNDH) y la Secretaria de la Defensa Nacional (Sedena) firmaron un Convenio de colaboración para la formación de militares

For many in the northern city of San Fernando, her story represents so much of what is wrong in Mexico — and so remarkable about its people, their perseverance in the face of government indifference

El proyecto presupuestal solicitado al gobierno estadunidense también incluye una partida de 7.7 mdd para capacitar policías e infiltrarlos en células delictivas de diferentes regiones

Nicaragua

Los años 2018, 2018 y 2020 son inolvidables para Nicaragua y no precisamente por las cosas buenas que dejaron sino por la consolidación de otro régimen dictatorial, el de la familia de Daniel Ortega y Rosario Murillo

El ejemplo de Costa Rica, la historia del Triángulo Norte de Centroamérica, y nuestra propia historia, nos ofrecen pistas fehacientes para la respuesta

Nuestra redacción, ocupada manu militari, está en las mentes y corazones de los reporteros, y en la decisión de no aceptar la censura y autocensura

Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela

Fourteen people believed to have traveled from Venezuela to Trinidad and Tobago were found dead in waters near the South American nation’s coast

U.S.-Mexico Border

The president-elect has promised a more humane border policy. But devastated economies and natural disasters in Latin America have fueled a spike in migration that could make pledges hard to keep

U.S. border officials have expelled at least 66 unaccompanied migrant children without a court hearing or asylum interview since a federal judge ordered them to stop the practice

A person familiar with transition discussions. He told NPR that the Biden campaign and then the transition team felt that immigration activists had become too adversarial

Federal shelter contractors who operate these facilities disagree with the administration’s court declarations and say there’s a safe way to care for and house migrant children before they’re placed with family members

The day ahead: December 14, 2020

I should be around in the afternoon. (How to contact me)

This is my first workday in a while with only one meeting on the calendar. It’s a weekly marathon morning internal staff meeting, but still, I’ve got the afternoon to catch up on a series of smaller things on my list.

It would be nice to clear those off: I won’t have as much alone-time tomorrow, and then I plan to take the rest of the week, Wednesday through Friday, for what I’m calling a “soft vacation” before the holidays. I did not come close to using my leave time for 2020 (I’ll be losing some of it), but from the 16th onward I want to refuse meetings, turn on the e-mail autoreply, and finally finish a report on Putumayo, Colombia, that I’ve been fitfully working on for months.

So while I’m trying to clear the decks of other commitments today in order to focus on writing starting Wednesday, this afternoon is probably the best time all week to try to contact me.

Weekly email update is out

I just sent off another e-mail update to those who’ve subscribed. It’s got:

  • A link to our latest border policy commentary (a good one);
  • Our four-part podcast miniseries on the U.S. transition and Latin America;
  • Video of last Wednesday’s discussion of coca and eradication in Colombia;
  • Video of last Friday’s discussion of civil-military relations in Latin America, along with that of a companion event we hosted in September;
  • Full text of this week’s Colombia peace update;
  • Full text of this week’s U.S.-Mexico border update;
  • 5 “longread” links from the past week;
  • Links to 4 government reports relevant to Latin America obtained in November;
  • Links to Latin America-related events this coming week; and, finally,
  • Some funny tweets.

Here’s the page with past editions and a blank to add your e-mail address if you want these more-or-less weekly missives in your inbox.

“The Transition”: a four-volume WOLA podcast miniseries

In the weeks after the U.S. election was called for Joe Biden, I asked my colleagues at WOLA to join me for a series of podcasts. Following the four topics of a series of panels that WOLA hosted over the summer, we looked at some of the main challenges the new administration is sure to face—and how it might break with history and handle them differently this time.

I’m really glad I did these, and that eight of my co-workers took the time to join me. Though I’m still learning about audio quality (these are perfectly listenable but you can see why NPR spends so much on fancy studios), I’m delighted that we now have more than two and a half hours of high-quality analysis from people who are really paying attention to what’s going on. These four .mp3 files form an amazing snapshot of U.S.-Latin America relations on the threshold between two very different U.S. presidencies.

Each of the podcast player widgets below has a little download button (the down-arrow) so you can save the .mp3s. You can always find all of WOLA’s podcasts, going back to 2011, here. Or subscribe using your podcast player, we’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you listen to podcasts. The main feed is here.


November 16: U.S. Credibility, Cooperation, and a Changed Tonewith WOLA’s President, Geoff Thale; Vice President for Programs Maureen Meyer; Director for Drug Policy and the Andes John Walsh; Senior Fellow Jo-Marie Burt; and Venezuela Program Assistant Kristen Martinez-Gugerli.

Even as the Biden administration adopts a changed tone in its relations with the region, there may be some surprising continuities from the Trump years. And the United States, beset domestically with political polarization, human rights controversies, and mismanagement of a public health emergency, suffers from reduced influence and credibility in the region.


November 23: A Rational, Region-Wide Approach to Migrationwith Vice-President for Programs Maureen Meyer.

Trump’s hardline on migration policy is giving way to what promises to be a more humane and managerial approach under Biden. How profound that change will be remains unclear, though, as the United States and the rest of the hemisphere adjust to a reality of high levels of migration, and as the drivers of migration region-wide continue to accelerate.


December 1: The future of Latin America’s anti-corruption fightwith Director for Citizen Security Adriana Beltrán and Mexico Program Assistant Moses Ngong.

Focusing particularly on Mexico and Central America, we discuss who the region’s anti-corruption reformers are, the challenges they face, and how the United States and other international actors can best support them. A key point for the Biden administration is that other policy goals in the Americas will be impossible to achieve without a determined approach to corruption that upholds reformers.


December 11: Authoritarianism, Populism, and Closing Civic Spacewith WOLA’s president, Geoff Thale, and its director for Venezuela, Geoff Ramsey.

For the first time in decades, Latin America is becoming less democratic, amid a rise in populism, authoritarianism, and militarism. The U.S. role in upholding democracy and civic space has been inconsistent at best, and other regional institutions haven’t performed much better. How can the Biden administration change course?

Latin America-related online events this week

Monday, December 14

  • 7:00pm at ContraCorriente: Periodismo transnacional: retos y logros (RSVP required).

Tuesday, December 15

  • 8:00–9:00am at csis.org: A Partnership for Taiwan and Latin America: The Creative Economy (RSVP required).
  • 11:00–12:00 at the dialogue.org: Economic Recovery and Rebuilding the Social Fabric in Latin America and the Caribbean (RSVP required).
  • 2:30 at Amnesty USA Zoom: Protecting Asylum-Seekers During COVID-19: How We Can Uphold Human Rights, Safeguard Public Health, and Ensure Humanitarian Support (RSVP required).
  • 3:00–4:15 at thedialogue.org: Rethinking Drug Policy in the Americas (RSVP required).

Wednesday, December 16

  • 11:00–12:00 at the dialogue.org: Ingresos mineros y petroleros, el cambio climático y la recuperación verde (RSVP required).
  • 3:00–4:30 at wola.org: Peru 2021: ¿Quo Vadis? (RSVP required).
  • 5:00 at atlanticcouncil.org: Latin America-China relations in 2021: Opportunities, risks, and recommendations (RSVP required).

5 links from the past week

  • Reporters from several outlets around the world, calling themselves “The Cartel Project,” published an investigation into the 2012 murder of Veracruz, Mexico journalist Regina Martínez, which they portray as the template that organized crime-tied politicians have since used to silence the press. They aim to finish the work Martínez was doing—investigating the corrupt links between Veracruz’s state governors and organized crime—when assassins killed her in her home. Stories appear concurrently in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Spain’s El País, Mexico’s Proceso, and OCCRP.
  • An unsealed whistleblower complaint from a border wall construction site in California has some remarkable allegations, summarized by The New York Times’ Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Among them, contractors brought Mexican citizens illegally onto their work site, on the U.S. side of the border, to work as armed guards. CBP records meanwhile show that between October 2019 and March 2020, migrants breached the border wall in California and Arizona more than 320 times.
  • Two new Colombian online investigative outlets, Vorágine and La Liga Contra el Silencio, collaborated to tell the story of Juana Perea, a Bogotá-raised beachfront hotel owner and defiant activist in the town of Nuquí, Chocó. In October, Perea became one of many social leaders murdered in northwest Colombia by the Gulf Clan neo-paramilitary group. Pair this with Verdad Abierta’s thoroughly reported and vividly photographed story about William Castillo, a social leader in Antioquia’s Bajo Cauca region whom Gulf Clan hitmen murdered in 2016.
  • “Since 2007, the U.S. government has relied on a small coterie of Mexican officials to implement the Mérida Initiative,” begins an account presenting a trove of U.S. documents that the National Security Archive obtained via a FOIA request. It’s hard not to cringe reading U.S. officials’ words of praise for Mexican counterparts who now face criminal charges for links to organized crime.
  • Honduras’s ContraCorriente finds that, after years of corruption undermining public-private infrastructure projects, the public almost completely distrusts the government’s announced bipartisan rebuilding effort following hurricanes Eta and Iota.

Colombia peace update: Week of December 6, 2020

Cross-posted from WOLA’s colombiapeace.org site. Between now and the end of the year, we’re producing weekly sub-1,000-word updates in English about peace accord implementation and related topics. After that, we will evaluate the experience—both audience response and our own time commitment—before deciding whether to produce these permanently.

Fumigation is coming

Colombia’s justice minister, Wilson Ruiz, told the Blu Radio network that a U.S.-backed program of aerial herbicide fumigation might restart in as little as “between a month and a half and two months.”

Five years ago, citing health concerns, the government of then-president Juan Manuel Santos suspended this program, which used aircraft to spray the controversial herbicide glyphosate over 1.8 million hectares (4.4 million acres) of Colombian territory between 1994 and 2015. The current government of Iván Duque is working to restart the program, with U.S. funding and exhortations from Donald Trump: “you’re going to have to spray.”

That requires meeting a series of requirements laid out by Colombia’s Constitutional Court, among them consultations with communities and studies of environmental and health impact. The consultations had been slowed by the pandemic: a court in Nariño found that “virtual” exchanges were impossible with communities in remote areas far from internet coverage. That decision, though, was reversed by an October higher-court ruling. Now, 17 consultations are ongoing, and the environmental licensing authority, ANLA, will hold a final national consultation beginning on December 19.

Though Minister Ruiz’s maximum-two-months is on the fast end of estimates we have heard for when fumigation might restart, it is not implausible.

At a December 9 event WOLA hosted with five experts from around Colombia, speakers warned about potential damage that a renewed aerial glyphosate spraying might cause: to human health, to the environment, to indigenous cultures, and to nearby crops needed for food security. Speakers warned that a fumigation program would be costly, would cause forced displacement, and, under most circumstances, would violate the peace accords’ fourth chapter. They warned that a renewed fumigation program could inspire a wave of protest in coca-growing zones, especially if carried out under current conditions of insufficient prior consultation and few opportunities to receive crop substitution assistance.

FARC dissident activity around the country

Concerning reports from around the country point to increasing activity of FARC dissident groups. These are armed groups made up of FARC guerrillas who rejected the peace accord in 2016, ex-guerrillas who demobilized but later rearmed, and new recruits. The Fundación Paz y Reconciliación’s (PARES) latest report on the country’s security situation estimates that about 30 such groups, totaling perhaps 2,600 members, are active in 113 of the country’s 1,100 municipalities (counties). It places them in three categories:

  • Those networked under the 1st and 7th Front structure headed by Gentil Duarte, a mid-level FARC leader who refused to demobilize in 2016. PARES estimates that 65% of dissidents are in this network.
  • The “Nueva Marquetalia” network headed by Iván Márquez, who was the FARC’s lead negotiator during the Havana peace talks but rearmed in 2019.
  • Smaller, “dispersed” groups, often headed by very young people.

After Iván Márquez and several other top ex-FARC leaders launched their “Nueva Marquetalia” dissident group in August 2019, Gentil Duarte’s larger dissident network appeared to rebuff their outreach. Now, “Police say there is a war to the death in the areas [the two dissident networks] aspire to control, such as Putumayo, Nariño, Catatumbo, and Cauca,” according to a December 10 story in El Espectador, which relies heavily on National Police information.

That story warns that Nueva Marquetalia is moving into the heartland of Gentil Duarte’s group, seeking to traffic cocaine along the Guaviare River between Meta and Guaviare. A December 7 half-ton cocaine seizure in Puerto Concordia, Meta, may indicate that Iván Márquez may have sent a powerful emissary to do this: Henry Castellanos alias “Romaña,” who twenty years ago was one of the most feared FARC members because he pioneered ransom kidnappings along main roads out of Bogotá. Much of the cocaine produced in Meta and Guaviare goes through Arauca into Venezuela, then by air or boat to Central America and Mexico, or on to Europe.

To the west of Puerto Concordia, in La Macarena, Meta, dissidents are believed to be behind the murder of Javier Francisco Parra, the director of Cormacarena, the Colombian government’s regional environmental body. Parra was known as a defender of Caño Cristales, a tourist destination famous for its uniquely colored algae. The site’s accessibility was widely hailed as a tangible benefit of the peace accord.

Another feared member of the Nueva Marquetalia, Hernán Darío Velásquez alias “El Paisa”—who headed the FARC’s brutal, elite Teófilo Forero Mobile Column—was dispatched to Putumayo. There, he made an alliance with that department’s most powerful regional organized crime group, called “La Constru” or occasionally “La Mafia Sinaloa,” and with remnants of the FARC’s 48th front. All are fighting the Carolina Ramírez FARC dissident group, which is aligned with Gentil Duarte, for control of Putumayo’s lucrative trafficking routes through Ecuador and out to the Pacific, and down the Caquetá river into Brazil and on to Europe.

Colombian press reports from the past week also find a worsening humanitarian situation in Nariño’s Pacific coastal region. In the busy port of Tumaco, “where, curiously, there are hundreds of Mexicans these days,” Alfredo Molano Jimeno reported in El Espectador about the wave of violence that followed the September collapse of a two-year truce between two local dissident groups, the Frente Óliver Sinisterra and the Guerrillas Unidas del Pacífico.

Several hours north and inland from Tumaco, in the violent Telembí Triangle region, La Silla Vacía reports on fighting between the Óliver Sinisterra, the Gentil Duarte-tied 30th Front, and the Gulf Clan neo-paramilitary group, for control of the Patía River’s trafficking routes. Violence broke out six months ago, during the pandemic, and has been worsening ever since. Further north along the coast, the UN humanitarian agency OCHA alerted about combat between dissidents and other groups causing mass displacements in Iscuandé, Nariño.

In all of these reports, a common theme is the near-total absence of Colombia’s state. Usually, the only government presence is military—and in places like coastal Nariño, there is only so much even a corruption-free armed forces could do. In La Silla Vacía, the general heading the local armed forces task force “recognizes that the Patía River is too extensive and connects with a maze of smaller rivers that are impossible for the security forces to control in their entirety.”

Links

  • Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-New York), the new chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said his first overseas trip as chairman will be to Afro-descendant regions of Colombia , a country he knows well (and, some contend, controversially).
  • Colombia’s Senate approved a round of 19 military promotions, including those of Army Generals Evangelista Pinto Lizarazo and Edgar Alberto Rodriguez Sánchez, who commanded units during the 2000s alleged to have committed large numbers of “false positive” killings.
  • Joshua Collins reports for The New Humanitarian from Caucasia, in northeastern Antioquia’s convulsed Bajo Cauca region. Verdad Abierta also focused on the Bajo Cauca region, publishing a threepart series, with some striking photos, about armed group activity and social leaders’ precarious situation.
  • At a virtual hearing of the OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission, representatives of Colombia’s Truth Commission denounced obstacles that the government has placed in the way of their work, such as security forces’ refusal to turn over requested documents. Colombian government representatives declined even to participate in the hearing.
  • A UNDP-PRIO-Universidad de los Andes poll of 12,000 residents of the 170 post-conflict “PDET” municipalities found reduced overall perceptions of armed-group control, and 80% support for programs that reintegrate former FARC combatants.

A video archive about late 2020 civil-military relations, covering 11 Latin American countries

After a very successful event today, we now have, on WOLA’s YouTube page, four hours of discussions of the current moment with premier experts in civil-military relations from 11 Latin American countries. It’s in two parts: today’s discussion, and an earlier one, with a similar format, hosted in September.

Taken together, they are a tremendous resource for understanding this uneasy, precarious moment in the hemisphere’s politics and democratic transitions (or reversions). Sort of like two focus groups taking the pulse of things, shared with the public.

This is raw video in Spanish, though. Some audiences, like busy policymakers with competing commitments and responsibilities, won’t watch all of it. We need to repackage it, perhaps in a variety of formats. I need to figure out over the holidays how best to do that.

In the meantime, though, here are the event videos, which are really worth your time. In reverse chronological order:

Today’s video (December 11), covering Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru.
Our September 11 event, covering Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay.

Weekly border update: December 11, 2020

There’s so much happening at the U.S.-Mexico border—much of it outrageous, some of it heroic—that it’s hard to keep track. With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments in 900 words or less. We welcome your feedback.

You can get these in your e-mail each week by joining WOLA’s “Beyond the Wall” mailing list.

Border wall a key disagreement delaying 2021 appropriations

Today, December 11, is the deadline that Congress had set for passage of a 2021 federal government budget. While the Democratic-majority House and Republican-majority Senate continue talks on a budget that Donald Trump might sign, they’re not finished. The Senate is likely to approve a continuing resolution, which the House passed Wednesday, extending the deadline to December 18 and averting a government shutdown in the midst of a pandemic.

Legislators are “torn on at least a dozen policy issues, particularly related to immigration,” congressional staff told the Washington Post. “The most divisive issues in government spending talks concern funding for President Trump’s border wall with Mexico and detention facilities run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

The two chambers’ versions of the 2021 Homeland Security Appropriations bill could hardly differ more widely on border wall funding. The Senate bill—which the Senate Appropriations Committee revealed in November but never voted on—provides $1.96 billion “for the construction of barrier system” along the U.S.-Mexico border. The House bill—which the House Appropriations Committee passed in July but was never debated on the floor—not only has no money for wall construction, it would rescind $1.38 billion from 2020 and ban future transfers of Defense Department funds for wall-building, as President Trump has done by declaring a “state of emergency.”

“Trump almost certainly won’t sign a package that guts funding for one of his biggest priorities as his administration comes to a close,” notes Politico. Still, with President-elect Biden promising to hold wall construction immediately upon his inauguration, it’s not clear what would happen with any wall-building money in the 2021 bill.

Media continue pointing to increasing migration, “caravan”

CBP has yet to release its November migrant apprehensions numbers. But November is likely to be the seventh consecutive month of increased migration since arrivals hit a pandemic low in April. Reports in major media—some citing CBP officials—are rumbling about an accelerating increase in migration from pandemic and hurricane-hit Central America. A common framing is that it’s an “early test” for the incoming Biden administration.

Officials are reporting increased arrivals of unaccompanied children, who are less subject to immediate expulsion under questionably legal pandemic border measures. Deputy Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz said that the agency is “apprehending an average of 153 young migrants a day at the border since October.” In court filings, CBP has projected “that the flow of unaccompanied children could increase by 50 percent by late March 2021,” the Texas Tribune reports.

Often, Ortiz said, the children and their smugglers are seeking to avoid apprehension—which is a new pattern—and are being kept in “stash houses” in the border zone before being moved further north. For those who are apprehended, the Office of Refugee Resettlement—to which unaccompanied children are transferred—has less shelter space due to COVID-19 distancing restrictions: 7,971 beds, down from the norm of 13,764.

More migration from pandemic and hurricane-battered Central America appears to be a certainty. About 1,000 Honduran people, most of them victims of hurricanes Eta and Iota, departed the bus station in San Pedro Sula on Wednesday night in a “caravan” reportedly organized over social media. These efforts to migrate across Mexico, using “safety in numbers” rather than paying thousands of dollars to smugglers, became a staple of Fox News coverage and Donald Trump messaging in 2018.

Since then, though, almost none have made it through Mexico. A few members of a January 2019 caravan trickled into the United States, but most remained in Mexico. Since then, Mexico has deployed security and migration forces to block attempted caravans in the country’s far south, in April and October 2019, and again in January 2020. In October 2020, a caravan of Hondurans was broken up in Guatemala. And now, Guatemala’s National Police have announced “preventive actions” against new Honduran migration, requiring travelers to have valid passports and COVID-19 tests.

It’s not clear what a migrant wave might mean for the Biden team’s promised dismantling of the Trump administration’s hardline migration measures. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Biden transition team is “trying to decide which policies to change and when, in order to fulfill Mr. Biden’s campaign promises without creating the appearance of leniency.” This may include “temporarily leaving in place Mr. Trump’s pandemic order to return most migrants to Mexico shortly after they cross the border,” despite the illegality of expelling endangered people without giving them a hearing.

In WOLA’s view, dealing with a rising flow of asylum-seeking migrants is an administrative issue that—while difficult because the Trump administration is leaving behind a lack of infrastructure—can be handled with little drama. In a December 9 commentary, WOLA points to short, medium, and long term measures that the Biden administration can implement to handle a “wave” while guaranteeing protection to those who need it.

Hope for passage of missing migrant bill

The remains of about 8,000 migrants, most of whom died painful deaths of dehydration and exposure, have been found on U.S. soil, in border regions, since 1998. Advocates who have spent years trying to prevent these deaths, and to identify the remains, are hopeful that long-awaited legislation might ease their work.

S. 2174, the Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains Act of 2019, co-sponsored by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris (D-California), passed the Senate by unanimous consent on November 16. Among other measures, the bill would fund the installation of up to 170 rescue beacons in desert areas, while helping local jurisdictions and non-profits pay for efforts to handle and identify migrant remains.

An identical bill in the House, H.R. 8772, was introduced November 18 by Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) and Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas). It needs to pass by the end of the 2020 congressional session in order to become law, otherwise both chambers need to start over again in 2021.

Links

  • The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) extended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for some citizens of El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Honduras, and Nepal until at least October of 2021.
  • The Trump administration is leaving office by promulgating its most restrictive rule yet undoing the right to seek asylum.
  • The New York Times published a wild story, based on a whistleblower complaint and a FOIA request, alleging that border wall contractor SLS and subcontractor Ultimate Concrete had brought Mexican citizens illegally onto their work site, on the U.S. side of the border in California, to work as armed guards. CBP records meanwhile showed that between October 2019 and March 2020, more than 320 breaches of the border wall took place in California and Arizona—nearly 2 per day.
  • Thirty-five Democratic members of the House of Representatives, led by Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), sent a letter to Joe Biden asking him to “immediately” rescind Trump’s emergency declarations, waivers, and private property condemnations enabling wall-building.
  • The El Paso Times ran a 4,000-word account of the journey of a Guatemalan father and his 10-year-old daughter caught in the web of “Remain in Mexico.”

Some articles I found interesting this morning

Reuters/Jose Cabezas photo at PBS NewsHour. Caption: “Members of Honduran security forces stand in front of a bus carrying people who take part in a new caravan of migrants, set to head to the United States, at a check point in Ocotepeque, Honduras December 10, 2020.”

(Even more here)

December 11, 2020

Western Hemisphere Regional

It is perhaps little surprise, then, that Latin America, the region with the world’s biggest gap between the rich and the poor, would also be ground zero for the pandemic

Chile

El Mandatario se reunió esta tarde con el director del Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos, Sergio Micco, en La Moneda

Colombia

Así lo reveló el informe “Luces y sombras de la implementación del Acuerdo” realizado por el Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo en Colombia (PNUD), PRIO (Peace Research Institute Oslo) y la Universidad de los Andes

El asesinato de esta lideresa y empresaria en Nuquí, un rincón paradisiaco de la costa chocoana, muestra el dominio que ejercen los paramilitares en distintas poblaciones de ese departamento

También pedimos al organismo incluir a Colombia en el capítulo 4 de su informe anual, en el que se exponen las situaciones de los países materia de especial preocupación

The city is part of a conflict zone in Colombia’s northern Bajo Cauca region, where illegal mining, coca production, and extortion are the economic lifeblood of the rival armed groups

Este viernes el colectivo dhColombia radicará una denuncia en contra del ministro Carlos Holmes Trujillo y otros altos mandos policiales solicitando investigue la responsabilidad que estos pudieron tener, por línea de mando, en los hechos de abuso policial

La Segunda Marquetalia contactó a viejas fichas de las Farc para comprar cocaína y venderla a carteles mexicanos y mafias europeas

Cuba, Guyana, South America Regional, Suriname

From Guyana to Paraguay and Chile, Cuban migrants are posting notes on social networks to join the caravans, which have already created problems in Suriname

Honduras

Hundreds of Hondurans trying to start a new caravan to reach the U.S. border were stopped by Honduran security personnel

Para este grupo poblacional, que se estima representa el 10 % de la población hondureña (unas 934,000 personas), distribuida en nueve grupos étnicos, la decisión que tomó el gobierno de confinamiento sólo agravó la ya difícil situación

Mexico

The decision to review the case comes a week after Mexico’s representative for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) said in a hearing that the victim, Ernestina Ascencio, died from health problems, sparking backlash

De acuerdo con diversas organizaciones, ninguna de las instituciones de fuerzas federales ha cumplido con la obligación de capacitar a sus elementos en materia de derechos humanos

Aunque el presidente sostiene que ya no se permiten ni la tortura ni la impunidad, la Fiscalía responsable sigue recibiendo denuncias de nuevos casos

Since 2007, the U.S. government has relied on a small coterie of Mexican officials to implement the Mérida Initiative. Now, some of those same individuals are facing trial in the United States

  • Ricardo Ravelo, Tema Explosivo (SinEmbargo (Mexico), December 11, 2020).

¿Podrá el Gobierno de México limitar el número de agentes de la DEA en México? ¿Cuál es el objetivo? ¿Qué no hagan investigaciones que pongan en evidencia el llamado narco-Estado?

U.S.-Mexico Border

“Wow! This is almost like busy work they’re doing,” exclaims biologist Myles Traphagen as he drives his truck up to the construction staging area and beholds the destruction for the first time

Venezuela

Un total de 21 casos de violaciones a la libertad de expresión ocurrieron el domingo, 6 de diciembre, durante el desarrollo de las elecciones parlamentarias

Venezuela, Western Hemisphere Regional

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and IOM, the International Organization for Migration, launch a US$1.44 billion regional plan to respond to the growing needs of refugees and migrants from Venezuela and the communities hosting them across 17 countries

WOLA Podcast: The Transition: Authoritarianism, Populism, and Closing Civic Space

Here’s a great episode closing out a four-part cycle in which we look at what confronts U.S. policy toward Latin America during this sharp break of a presidential transition. Thanks to Geoff Thale and Geoff Ramsey for joining me here.

I’m also happy that I finally figured out the “reduce noise” filter on the Audacity sound editing app. Makes a difference.

The .mp3 file is here. The podcast feed is here. And here’s the text from WOLA’s podcast landing page:

This is part four of a four-part podcast miniseries looking at key issues facing U.S. policy toward Latin America, as Washington transitions from the Trump era to the Biden administration.

This episode focuses on the state of democracy and civic space in the region. For the first time in decades, Latin America is becoming less democratic, amid a rise in populism, authoritarianism, and militarism. The U.S. role in upholding democracy and civic space has been inconsistent at best, and other regional institutions haven’t performed much better. How can the Biden administration change course?

Host Adam Isacson talks about this with WOLA’s president, Geoff Thale, and its director for Venezuela, Geoff Ramsey.

Hear Geoff Ramsey’s and the Venezuela program’s new Venezuela Briefing podcast. And here, view the video of President Trump meeting with regional leaders that Ramsey mentions in this episode’s discussion.

Earlier episodes of this “transition” podcast series covered U.S. credibility (November 16), migration (November 23), and corruption (December 1).

Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.

The day ahead: December 11, 2020

I’ll be hard to contact today. (How to contact me)

This morning I’m a panelist at an “Afro-Descendant Non-Repetition Dialogue” organized by the National Afro-Colombian Peace Council and the Truth Commission edit: this was just postponed to Tuesday and they’re going to make it a private discussion. Then at noon we’re hosting another event of our own, on civil-military relations in the Americas. Then I’m in a meeting of arms trade groups, and an internal meeting at WOLA. By the time that ends, the workday will be nearly over, so I’ll be hard to contact.

This may be my last day of 2020 that’s so packed with events. Meanwhile, look for a border update and a new podcast by the end of the day.

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