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🟧Early November: I’m in Washington with a moderate meeting schedule but some writing deadlines. I’m mostly reachable, but replies may not be immediate.
Luisa González/Reuters photo at The Guardian (UK). Caption: “A Colombian navy boat patrols the Arauca river while a Venezuelan navy boat remains anchored on the border between their two countries as seen from Arauquita, Colombia.”
The corruption of Nicolas Maduro increased the dire humanitarian crisis of the Venezuelan people. In Nicaragua, the corrupt Ortega regime passed increasingly repressive laws that limit severely the ability of opposition political groups, civil society, and independent media to operate. Meanwhile in Cuba, government restrictions continued to suppress the freedoms of expression, association, religion or belief, and movement
The Armed Forces are split between an officer corps that came of age during the disgrace that followed the 1964-85 dictatorship (whose “anniversary” is Wednesday), and generally is loath to be seen as political, and a younger generation whose hatred for the left tends to overcome such misgivings
Retired generals and military analysts in Brazil struggled to make sense of this week’s changes, which neither the president nor the outgoing commanders explained
“The other day I saw a pretty strong article saying Brazil was starting to be seen by its neighbors as a sort of leper colony … and it’s probably true”
La colectividad denuncia que en los últimos meses se han recrudecido las amenazas y la persecución a sus miembros en la capital, donde viven al menos 750 firmantes de la paz
Ellos mismos (la Fuerza Pública) arrancan las matas de aquí y las siembran más allá. Luego pasan, arrancan y vuelven y siembran en otro lado y así, todo el año en esas
Es muy evidente la improvisación, la falta de planificación, la falta de persecución sistemática al crimen. A los militares y policías siempre los sorprenden. Parece que no existiera inteligencia militar ni policial
The change in tack from the government of President Nicolás Maduro most likely reflects a conflict in other shared interests: cocaine trafficking and illegal gold mining
El decreto gubernativo 3-2021, firmado por el Presidente Giamattei, restringe el derecho de protesta pacífica, la libertad de reunión y de locomoción, entre otros, en cinco departamentos del país. La firma de este decreto se da tras comunicaciones en redes sociales y medios de que podría formarse una caravana a partir del 30 de marzo
Gen. Sandoval denied that any of the soldiers had been taken into Guatemalan territory, but the spokesman for Guatemala’s army confirmed it and the Guatemalan government released photos of Mexican soldiers with Guatemalan police
Las autoridades estadounidenses trabajaron silenciosa y pacientemente 14 años para atraparlo, once meses en enjuiciarlo y declararlo culpable y un año y cinco meses para sentenciarlo
During the sentencing hearing, prosecutors and the judge repeatedly called out the Honduran president for his role in the drug trade along with his brother
In 2013, HERNÁNDEZ was campaigning to become a congressman and Juan Orlando Hernández was campaigning to become president. Around this time, according to testimony at trial, Juan Orlando Hernández solicited $1.6 million in drug proceeds from Ardon Soriano to support himself and National Party campaigns
El presidente dedicó parte de su informe a resaltar las acciones de las Fuerzas Armadas en su administración, pues aseguró que sin ellas no solo no podría enfrentarse a la delincuencia organizada, sino que tampoco se podrían realizar obras de desarrollo, o enfrentar la pandemia
Las tres llegaron a Tapachula, Chiapas, donde solicitaron asilo ante la Comisión Mexicana de Ayuda al Refugiado (Comar) el 4 de septiembre de 2017, un año después de abandonar su país
El Ejército mexicano ofreció un millón de pesos como indeminización por el crimen de militares contra el guatemalteco Elvin Mazariegos Pérez en Chiapas, afirmó la familia de la víctima
U.S. efforts to battle powerful drug cartels from inside Mexico have ground to a halt since January as strained relations between the two countries have frozen attempts to corral drug kingpins, according to current and former senior officials in both nations
The children were being housed by the hundreds in eight “pods” formed by plastic dividers, each about 3,200 square feet (297 square meters) in size. Many of the pods had more than 500 children in them
To my frustration, many of my friends in the immigrant-advocacy community will not help shape these decisions; most are unable or unwilling to name any category of migrant who should ever be returned
Department of Homeland Security officials permitted the Associated Press and a camera crew to tour the Donna, Tex., temporary processing facility run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where 3,400 unaccompanied minors were in custody Tuesday along with 700 members of migrant families
“I’m a Border Patrol agent. I didn’t sign up for this,” Mr. Escamilla said as he looked at some of the younger children, many of them under 12, being housed at the facility
Since November, a handful of nonprofit groups that work with unaccompanied children have compiled tallies showing that as many as 10-17 percent of children in custody were separated from relatives
En el marco de la cooperación bilateral entre los gobiernos de Nicolás Maduro y Vladimir Putin, se celebró una reunión de la Comisión Intergubernamental de Alto Nivel Rusia-Venezuela, en la cual Maduro firmó 12 acuerdos con el país europeo
Concessions from Maduro on one or all three of these points could allow the Biden administration to justify taking a bigger policy risk—like offering partial sanctions relief in return for a starting broader, credible negotiations
The lighter “holy week” schedule allowed me to get some writing done yesterday. Today I’ve got an internal meeting and a few interviews on the calendar, but otherwise plan to be at my desk, writing and catching up some overflowing inboxes.
El ministro de Defensa, general Fernando Azevedo e Silva, anunció sorpresivamente su renuncia, horas después de que el canciller, Ernesto Araújo, comunicara su decisión de abandonar el cargo
Jair Bolsonaro’s ultraconservative foreign minister has resigned after a rebellion from diplomats and lawmakers who accused him of demolishing Brazil’s international reputation and putting Brazilian lives at risk
En una carta enviada a la Casa Blanca, 25 organizaciones internacionales y colombianas piden que el gobierno estadounidense no financie la aspersión aérea en Colombia. Enviará familias campesinas de la pobreza a la extrema pobreza, le advirtieron
Está contemplado un encuentro con los directivos de la agencia Homeland Security Investigations (HSI/ICE) y de United States Marshals Service (USMS), y otros altos funcionarios de las áreas de inteligencia y operaciones internacionales de esta agencia federal del Departamento de Justicia
El representante de la cartera castrense Vladimir Padrino López, señaló que los supuestos grupos armados continúan infundiendo terror en la población, al tiempo que los calificó como «mercenarios camaleónicos y desalmados»
El ministro de la Defensa de Colombia, Diego Molano, dijo que las instrucciones de Miraflores apuntan hacia un combate selectivo a uno de los grupos narcocriminales
Videos echoing the death of George Floyd showed a police officer kneeling on the back of the woman, who died of a broken spine, just days before an international forum on gender equality began in Mexico
Elementos del l XV Regimiento de Caballería Motorizada de la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (SEDENA) dispararon contra el guatemalteco Elvin Mazariegos Pérez, quien había cruzado la frontera con México para comprar mercancía
Sólo en el primer trimestre del año, al menos 13 mujeres han sido asesinadas en Quintana Roo, entidad turística donde seis de cada diez detenciones se han hecho con uso excesivo de la fuerza
Las policías ministeriales se involucran periódicamente en actividades delictivas en perjuicio de la población. Nadie parece tener claro, sin embargo, qué hacer con estos cuerpos
The spotlight shone brightly on Anapra in the past week after members of Mexico’s National Guard allegedly held at gunpoint and roughed up six Central Americans who wanted to cross into the United States
Krull’s assistance mapping the shell companies and straw men strung across secretive jurisdictions like Antigua, Malta and Hong Kong where Venezuelans have hidden their ill-gotten wealth has proven decisive
For the first time in a long time, I have no fixed meetings or screaming deadline on the calendar. (Thank you, Easter week.) It’s a good day to catch up on unanswered email, update contacts and out-of-date websites, and do some writing about the border that doesn’t require typing as fast as my hands can go. I should be reachable if needed—though it’s a nice spring day and I may insist on breaking for a walk.
Colombia’s government is moving closer to reinstating a program, suspended in 2015, that would spray herbicides from aircraft over territories where coca is cultivated. Twenty-five U.S. and Colombian organizations have joined on this letter to President Joe Biden urging him to avoid supporting a renewed “fumigation” program, succinctly laying out the reasons why this would be an unfortunate policy mistake. The letter was shared with the White House on March 26.
March 26, 2021
President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. The White House Washington, DC
Dear President Biden,
We write out of strong concern about the imminent restart of a program that your administration is inheriting from its predecessor: an effort to eradicate coca in Colombia by spraying herbicides from aircraft. We encourage you not to provide funding for this program, which not only failed to achieve past objectives, but sends a message of cruelty and callousness with which the United States should no longer be associated. It will undermine the peace accords that are a powerful legacy of the Obama-Biden administration.
Aerial fumigation can bring short-term reductions in the number of acres planted with coca. But past experience shows not only that these gains reverse quickly, but that the strategy undermines other U.S. and Colombian security objectives. Recurring to fumigation is like going back in time, ignoring much that we have learned about what does and does not work.
Many of our organizations have published studies documenting the harm that fumigation has done in the past. The December 2020 report of the U.S. government’s bipartisan Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission found that forced eradication brought “enormous costs and dismal results.” Just since the end of February, we have seen strong critiques of forced eradication and fumigation from the International Crisis Group; the Ideas for Peace Foundation, a Colombian business sector think tank; a list of over 200 scholars, and seven UN human rights rapporteurs.
Between 1994 and 2015, a U.S.-backed program supported a fleet of aircraft, and teams of contract pilots and maintenance personnel, that sprayed the herbicide glyphosate over 4.42 million acres of Colombian territory—a land area 3 1/2 times the size of Delaware. In 2015 the Colombian government suspended the spray program, citing public health concerns based on a World Health Organization study finding glyphosate to be “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
For a few years afterward, the Colombian government failed to replace the strategy with anything—neither eradication nor assistance to affected areas. During the late 2010s, Colombia’s coca crop increased to record levels. Nearly all of the increase happened in the exact municipalities and communities where fumigation had been heaviest. After 20 years of constant eradication, farmers continue to face the same on-the-ground reality.
Most Colombian producers of the coca bush are not organized crime-tied criminals or supporters of illegal armed groups. They are families with small plots of land. Estimates of the number of families who make a living off of coca vary from “more than 119,500” to 215,000. If one assumes four people per family, then more than 2 percent of Colombia’s 50 million people depend on coca. Households earn about $1,000 per person per year from the crop, making them by far the lowest-paid link in the cocaine supply chain.
They live in “agricultural frontier” zones where evidence of Colombia’s government is scarce. Paved or maintained roads are nonexistent. The national electric grid is far off. There is no such thing as potable water or land titles. In some areas, even currency is hard to obtain, and stores offer the option of paying for groceries with coca paste.
These people need to be governed and protected by their state. An aircraft flying anonymously overhead, spraying chemicals on populated areas, is the exact opposite of that. But the program has other important disadvantages:
Because it targets poor households in ungoverned areas, chemical fumigation sends a message of cruelty, and associates that message with the United States. Your administration is steadily working to undo the Trump administration’s cruel migratory measures, which imposed suffering on a weak, impoverished population at the U.S.-Mexico border. We ask that you also avoid returning to “deterrence though cruelty” in rural Colombia.
Like any eradication without assistance, fumigation further weakens governance and threatens to worsen security in Colombia’s ungoverned territories, where illegal economies and armed groups thrive. Forced eradication, especially when uncoordinated with efforts to physically bring government services into territory, sends families from poverty to extreme poverty, with no official help in sight. This hurts the government’s legitimacy in frontier areas where it badly needs to be built up.
After perhaps a short-term drop in cultivation, fumigation is not effective at reducing the coca crop. Past experience shows a high probability of replanting and other means of minimizing lost harvests, in contexts of absent government and few alternative crops.
Fumigation goes against what Colombia’s 2016 peace accord promised. That document’s first and fourth chapters offered a blueprint for reducing illicit crops: first by engaging families in substitution programs, and then by carrying out a 15-year “comprehensive rural reform” effort to bring state presence to rural areas. Fumigation was meant to be a last resort, for circumstances when families were refusing opportunities to substitute crops and when manual eradication was viewed as too dangerous. Rushing to fumigate is a slap in the face to brave farmer association leaders who took the risky step of defying traffickers and leading their communities into the fourth chapter’s crop substitution programs.
Similarly, fumigation risks large-scale social discord in rural Colombia. In 1996, after the program first got started, much of rural Colombia ground to a halt for weeks or months as mostly peaceful coca-grower protests broke out around the country. Today, farmers are even better organized than they were 25 years ago.
Fumigation, meanwhile, may carry risks for human health and the environment. The 2015 WHO document is one of many studies that give us reasonable doubts about the health impacts of spraying high concentrations of glyphosate over populated areas from aircraft. Bayer, the company that purchased glyphosate producer Monsanto, has agreed to settlements with U.S. plaintiffs potentially totaling over $11 billion—another reason for reasonable doubt. While the environmental impacts are less clear, glyphosate’s own labeling warns against spraying near standing water sources, and we are concerned about its use in proximity to rainforest ecosystems. The largest environmental impact, though, is likely to be the way many past farmers have responded after losing crops to fumigation, while remaining in a vacuum of government presence: they move somewhere else and cut down more rainforest to grow coca again.
Like all forced eradication unaccompanied by assistance, fumigation is dangerous for the eradicators themselves. In 2013, not long before the program’s suspension, FARC guerrillas shot down two spray planes within the space of two weeks. While planes and their escort helicopters will be more armored than before, the vulnerability remains. Eradication is far safer when it is agreed with communities by a government that is physically present in its own territory.
In March 2020, Donald Trump met with Colombian President Iván Duque and told him, “You’re going to have to spray.” The country’s highest court has required Duque’s government to meet a series of health, environment, consultation, and other requirements. Colombia’s Defense Minister is now predicting that the spraying could restart in April.
This time, U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg has stated, the U.S. role in the program won’t be as extensive. Still, during the Trump administration, the State Department supported maintenance of the spray plane fleet, upgrades to bases, and training of eradication personnel, among other services. State Department reports sent to Congress in late February and early March hailed fumigation’s imminent restart as a sign of progress.
Nonetheless, we reiterate our hope that the Biden administration will turn away from supporting Colombia’s spray program while there is still time. The United States should not support aerial fumigation in Colombia again. Nor does it have to. We know what to do.
Farmers with land titles hardly ever grow coca. Farmers who live near paved roads hardly ever grow coca. Criminal groups are badly weakened by proximity of a functioning government that is able to resolve disputes and punish lawbreaking.
This is a longer-term project, but Colombia’s 2016 peace accord offered a good blueprint for setting it in motion: a fast-moving, consultative crop substitution program, tied to a slower-moving but comprehensive rural reform program. Though those programs exist and parts of the Duque government are carrying them out diligently, they are underfunded and well behind where they should be as accord implementation enters its fifth year.
It’s not too late to help Colombia jumpstart the model offered by Colombia’s peace accord, which the Obama-Biden administration so effectively supported. We urge you to take that path instead of that of renewed fumigation, which we know to be a dead end.
Sincerely,
Amazon Watch
Center for International Environmental Law
Centro Estudios sobre Seguridad y Drogas, Universidad de los Andes (Colombia)
Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America
Colombia Human Rights Committee
Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento (Colombia)
Corporación Viso Mutop (Colombia)
Drug Policy Alliance
Elementa DD.HH. (Colombia/Mexico)
Fellowship of Reconciliation: Peace Presence
Healing Bridges
ILEX Acción Juridica (Colombia)
Institute for Policy Studies, Drug Policy Project
Institute on Race, Equality, and Human Rights
Latin America Working Group
Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Washington Office
Missionary Oblates
Oxfam America
Oxfam Colombia
Presbyterian Church (USA), Office of Public Witness
Presbyterian Peace Fellowship
Proceso de Comunidades Negras (Colombia)
United Church of Christ, Justice and Witness Ministries
Víctor Peña photo at El Faro (El Salvador). Caption: “After nightfall in Roma, Texas, nobody was running to evade authorities. Groups of 5, 10, even 20 people traveled along the side of the road to turn themselves in to Border Patrol and claim asylum. Every night, agents wait for the groups of Central Americans to arrive.”
La petición formal de no prorrogar el estado de excepción, amenaza de renuncia de un ministro de Defensa y molestia por la disminución del presupuesto son parte de la bitácora que han marcado los últimos meses entre las FF.AA. y el gobierno
Hay quienes cuestionan que el país esté en esa negociación, que sería de US$4.500 millones, cuando enfrenta una crisis social y económica por cuenta de la pandemia
Esta idea de no pasar a la Historia como los únicos responsables de las atrocidades que se cometieron ha sido una preocupación reiterativa para los exjefes guerrilleros desde La Habana
Los casos que han llegado a la Corte IDH demuestran que Colombia ha tratado de esquivar su culpa, incluso con maniobras jurídicas revictimizantes o buscando la forma de señalar a otros o a las mismas víctimas, para atrincherarse
La confrontación armada comenzó desde el viernes pasado en el corregimiento El Plateado, de Argelia, donde más de seis mil campesinos “quedaron expuestos ante el uso de artefactos explosivos convencionales y no convencionales por parte de los actores armados ilegales”
Young people — trapped between an often absent state, the aggressive recruitment of armed groups and the firepower of the military — are once again the conflict’s most vulnerable targets
Atraviesan miles de migrantes que llegan desde Haití, Cuba, e incluso desde Senegal y otros países africanos, como parte de su peligroso periplo para llegar a Estados Unidos
Presuntos disidentes de la Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) habrían atacado entre la noche del 28 y la madrugada de este 29 de marzo un puestos de control de la Fuerza Armada Nacional (FAN) en La Charca, municipio Páez, estado Apure
En redes sociales, periodistas venezolanos han comenzado a publicar desgarradores testimonios de personas que vivieron los combates y que incluso han llegado a denunciar que son víctimas de ejecuciones extrajudiciales, conocidos como falsos positivos
“I couldn’t stay because they are killing people. They killed some neighbors and dressed them in Venezuelan army uniforms to pass them off as guerrillas,” Castillo said
ONG locales han pedido que se investigue si hubo una violación a los derechos humanos tras la muerte de cinco personas en el marco del operativo de la Fuerza Armada de Venezuela en Apure
So far the administration has taken few steps on Cuba. Its only major move was to appoint an official to oversee the State Department’s response to the “Havana syndrome” attacks
The woman died on Saturday in the Caribbean beach resort of Tulum. A video published by news site Noticaribe showed her writhing and crying out as she lay face down on a road with a policewoman kneeling on her back
Los representantes de las instituciones enfatizaron la necesidad de que se tomen todas las medidas pertinentes para asegurar el cumplimiento de los controles migratorios y protocolos sanitarios
El gobernante Juan Hernández aseguró que los narcotraficantes no habían encontrado forma de influir en él o de intimidarlo y que “la prueba más poderosa” era una grabación de 2013 que había hecho un “agente infiltrado” de la DEA
Miles de migrantes centroamericanos y de otros países llevan semanas encerrados en albergues y estaciones migratorias, donde a diferencia de otros éxodos masivos, hoy la presencia de niños, niñas y adolescentes va en aumento
El despliegue ocurre al cumplirse una semana del histórico cierre de la frontera sur que México realizó con el argumento de frenar los contagios de COVID-19
Las autodefensas de Tepalcatepec mantienen una barricada en la comunidad de Pinolapan para frenar el avance del CJNG, que ha protagonizado distintos ataques a comunidades de la zona en la última semanas
Jewish Family Service staff push themselves to support as many asylum seekers as possible who are passing through the organization’s migrant shelter program
Department of Homeland Security officials are privately warning about what they see as the next phase of a migration surge that could be the largest in two decades, driven by a much greater number of families
The current backup at the border stems from more than insufficient infrastructure. Most Central Americans hoping to escape crushing poverty, gang and gender-based violence, and the increasing ravages of climate change are not eligible to apply for any existing American visa
The fate of migrant families is less clear. The administration has emphasized that it continues to expel families, but the latest government data shows the vast majority are now allowed to stay
In just four hours on Friday, March 26, around 300 people crossed the Rio Grande and set off along the dirt roads to Roma, where they were detained by Border Patrol
Alvarado se preguntó como Padrino López puede justificar el asesinato de cinco miembros de una familia en El Ripial y ataque a las ONG y medios de comunicación por difundir las denuncias
As it’s a holiday week in Latin America, I’m hoping the pace of work will slow from “frenetic” to just “busy.” I’d like to answer my email, plan a bit, write, and maybe even go outside and see the sky.
Not today, though: I’ve got about three hours of internal meetings and a meeting with some Colombia researchers. Things will free up a bit mid-afternoon.
I just sent off another e-mail update to those who’ve subscribed. The weekly updates are long, what with all that has been going on in Colombia and especially at the border. This edition contains:
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;
Latin America-related online events for this week;
Combat between Venezuelan forces and FARC dissidents
On March 22, residents of Arauquita, across the Arauca river from Venezuela, “woke up (hearing) explosions, machine guns, gunshots, with a very complex situation” on the other side of the border, the northeast Colombian municipality’s mayor told the Associated Press. In La Victoria, in Venezuela’s state of Apure, armed forces were carrying out an intense ground and air offensive against Colombian guerrilla dissidents, firing from helicopters and dropping bombs from aircraft.
Combat began on the 21st, according to a statement from the Venezuelan armed forces. That day, two Venezuelan officers taking part in border-wide military maneuvers called “Bolivarian Shield”—a major and a first lieutenant—were killed, apparently by landmines, a rarity in Venezuela. The statement claimed that government forces captured 32 people and destroyed 6 encampments while seizing drugs and war materiel, and killing a FARC dissident leader known as “Nando.” An opposition legislator, Karim Vera, said that about 20 Venezuelan troops were wounded.
Details are sketchy, in part due to power outages in La Victoria, but fighting continues. FARC dissidents attacked a Venezuelan military post on the night of March 23.
La Victoria, Venezuela is north and west of the river; Araquita, Colombia is south and east. (From Google Maps)
Civilians are being hit hard. As of March 25, 3,961 residents of La Victoria had fled across the border into Arauquita. “People we have spoken with are terrified and fear for their lives,” Dominika Arseniuk, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Country Director in Colombia, told the Associated Press.
Those who fled the Venezuelan side say that government forces—including the feared police Special Actions Force (FAES), rarely active outside cities—have been raiding homes, looting possessions, and beating people. FAES may have massacred a family in El Ripial, just east of La Victoria, and may have dressed the bodies in uniforms. Anderson Rodríguez, president of the Asociación Campesina de Arauca, told the Fundación Paz y Reconciliación that other families are presumed disappeared and some bombings were indiscriminate.
Three different Colombian armed groups, all of them nominally guerrillas or guerrilla-descended—are active on both sides of this part of the Colombia-Venezuela border. To varying degrees, they profit from extortion, taxing cross-border contraband, skimming from local treasuries, illicit mining of precious metals including the mineral coltan, and trafficking cocaine—though the ELN has prohibited most coca or cocaine production in Arauca, Colombia. Armed groups have also stepped up recruitment of Venezuelan migrants on the Colombian side of the border, especially of minors.
The presence of armed groups in this lightly governed zone goes back to well before Hugo Chávez’s 1998 election; as has happened in all countries bordering Colombia, Venezuelan forces tended to leave Colombian armed groups alone as long as they avoided violence (what Caracas Chroniclescalls “a sort of laissez-passer secret policy”). The armed group presence has increased in recent years, though.
The three groups active now are:
The National Liberation Army (ELN), whose powerful Frente de Guerra Oriental (FGO) is the region’s largest and longest established. It has been operating in Arauca since the 1980s and expanded in Apure, Venezuela for more than 10 years “with the permission of the Chavista regime,” according to Jeremy McDermott of InsightCrime. The FGO’s leader, alias “Pablito,” is a member of the ELN’s five-member Central Command and spends much of his time inside Venezuela. The ELN does not appear to be a party to the past week’s violence.
The Venezuelan forces’ target this week, the 10th Front, a structure led by members of the disbanded Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) who rejected the peace accord in 2016 and refused to demobilize. There are two main networks of FARC dissident bands active in Colombia right now, and the 10th Front appears to be affiliated with the largest: the “1st Front” group led by Miguel Botache alias “Gentil Duarte,” a former mid-level FARC commander most active in south-central Colombia. (InsightCrime’s McDermott says he has doubts about this affiliation.) The 10th may have as many as 800 fighters active in Arauca and Apure. Alias “Nando,” the leader whom Venezuelan forces claim to have killed on March 22, may have been the brother of the 10th Front’s finance chief. The 10th Front and Venezuelan forces have confronted each other in the past, but never on anything near the scale of last week.
Members of the Segunda Marquetalia, the other main FARC dissident network. This band was founded by FARC leaders who demobilized in 2017 then rearmed in 2019, led by Iván Márquez, who was the FARC’s lead negotiator during the 2012-16 peace talks in Havana, Cuba. The group, named for the site where the FARC began following a 1964 military attack, is smaller than Gentil Duarte’s organization, but may enjoy closer political relations with the government in Caracas. (Iván Márquez appeared with Hugo Chávez on the presidential palace steps in 2007, during a brief moment when Colombia’s president, Álvaro Uribe, authorized Chávez to help broker a prisoner-for-hostage exchange.) McDermott says Márquez “has had ties to the highest levels in Venezuela, including the presidency, and many of those ties are still in place.”
These three groups together may have 2,000 or more members inside Venezuelan territory—only some of them in Apure—but have avoided fighting each other. “They are not together but they are not fighting either, it is like a toxic relationship,” Kyle Johnson of Conflict Responses told a forum last week, “but we must remember that the ELN is very present in that area. The ELN believes it owns Apure and makes people think that those who operate there do so because they allow it. I am not entirely convinced of conflicts between these groups as such.” Conflict analyst Naryi Vargas told La Silla Vacía, “In Apure there is a relationship of coordination, and in some cases collaboration, between the Segunda Marquetalia and the 10th Front. There is no rivalry.” The two dissidences “appear to have a live-and-let-live relationship on the border,” tweeted analyst Bram Ebus, who has written a few much-cited studies of this region.
The Colombian government frequently accuses Venezuela of allowing ELN and FARC dissident fighters to operate safely on its soil. “The dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro has done tremendous damage to the implementation of the [peace] agreements by sheltering criminals such as [Nueva Marquetalia leaders] Iván Márquez, Jesús Santrich, alias El Paisa, and alias Romaña,” Colombia’s high commissioner for peace, Miguel Ceballos, told Reuters on March 23.
Several sources cited by Caracas Chronicleshypothesize that Nicolás Maduro’s regime, in seeking to mediate, regulate, or “triangulate” among the Colombian groups active in the region, has decided that the 10th Front is out of line and must be reined in. “One unconfirmed interpretation of the flare up,” Ebus tweeted, “is a business dispute that escalated quickly when it hit political sensitivities. F10 [10th Front] has irritated Venezuelan military authorities before for failing to pay a cut. Their visible presence in Apure may have been a bridge too far.”
A frequent hypothesisadvanced in media coverage contends that Venezuela’s government is favoring the Segunda Marquetalia. “The Venezuelan National Guard has generals in its service who protect the Second Marquetalia,” said former Colombian chief organized crime prosecutor Claudia Carrasquilla. “There is a sector of the National Armed Forces kneeling at the orders of Jesús Santrich and Iván Márquez,” said Venezuelan opposition legislator Gaby Arellano. “Some weeks ago we reported in our PRR [Political Risk Report] that, according to our sources, Iván Márquez was being moved to a more secure location, far from the border, to protect him from eventual operations by Colombian forces,” notedCaracas Chronicles. “The Venezuelan military operations have not touched the operations of the Segunda Marquetalia, which are especially robust in the state of Apure,” McDermott told La Silla Vacía, adding, “The offensive responds to growing reports in Venezuela that the 10th Front had dominance in the area. And it could open a space for Márquez’s dissidents to expand later.”
Cited in Venezuela’s Tal Cual, McDermott also found it notable that Venezuela deployed the brutal police FAES unit to Apure. “Apparently Maduro does not trust the military in the Apure area, the military does not have the capacity to confront the Colombian dissidents, or the military on the border is very corrupt and its capacity has been eroded.”
A statement from a 10th Front leader known as “Arturo” insists that “we weren’t the ones who initiated this confrontation,” vows to keep fighting Venezuelan forces, but also offers to withdraw units if the Venezuelan government sends a “top-level commission to clarify truths.”
Serious incidents like this raise concerns about an outcome that, one hopes, all would wish to avoid: a hot inter-state conflict between Colombia’s and Venezuela’s government forces. The Colombian government announced that it is reinforcing military presence along the Arauca border by about 2,000 troops, and Colombian media report that, though there is no official information, “there is speculation that the Maduro government is enlisting 2,000 men of the Armed Forces to be sent to the border with Arauca.” In Caracas Chronicles’estimation, “We have no reasons to fear for a war between Colombia and Venezuela, but we can’t forget that Venezuela is protecting public enemies of Colombia (the FARC dissidents), and that this is always a source of risks.”
Ebus sounded concerned, too, on Twitter: “Herein lies the danger: now that the confrontation has escalated, there’s no turning back. The dispute between Chavistas and the guerrillas is out in the open and it will be hard for either side to back down. In a moment like this, the grave risks of the lack of communication between Caracas and Bogotá are painfully evident. Political leaders have limited recourse to calm tensions, leaving the cauldron of border tensions to play out for itself.”
Jineth Bedoya case: government admits partial responsibility
The lead story in last week’s update covered the case in the Inter-American Human Rights Court of Jineth Bedoya, a journalist abducted, raped, and tortured by paramilitares while doing her job in 2000. Bedoya, whose long quest for justice is the first Colombian case of sexual violence ever heard by the Inter-American Court, saw her virtual hearing interrupted and postponed on March 15, when government lawyers accused the Court’s judges of bias and abruptly exited the proceedings.
The hearing resumed on March 22 and 23, after the Court rejected the government’s objections. A few hours in, the government’s lead attorney, Camilo Gómez, read a statement partially recognizing the Colombian state’s responsibility:
On behalf of the Colombian State, I recognize international responsibility for the failures of the judicial system, which did not carry out a criminal investigation worthy of the victim, by collecting twelve statements, and ask Jineth Bedoya for forgiveness for these facts and for the damage they caused her. The State recognizes that these actions violated her rights to personal integrity and judicial guarantees, in relation to the obligation to guarantee the rights enshrined in the American Convention on Human Rights.
This apology covers the Colombian judicial and prosecutorial system’s failures since the 2000 crime, in a case that has only seen the convictions of three low-level paramilitaries, and then not until 2016 and 2019. “Of the nearly 20 people involved in the process, only three have been prosecuted,” Bedoya told the Court. “Three convictions against material perpetrators, partial justice. Masterminds, none.”
The apology does not cover the Colombian executive branch’s failure to protect Bedoya even after she reported earlier threats and attacks, and in the face of evidence that a corrupt National Police General ordered her abduction. Gómez, the government’s lawyer, said that his team will respond to those charges in writing.
The government told the Court’s judges that in 1999, after Bedoya and her mother were attacked, the Presidency’s intelligence service (Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, DAS) studied her risk and offered her a bodyguard. Bedoya, they said, “did not make the necessary arrangements to obtain the accompaniment.”
Bedoya explained she could not do her job as an investigative journalist under such conditions, noting that agents of the DAS—which has since been disbanded after a series of scandals—were working with paramilitaries at the time. “Over time, it was demonstrated that this entity carried out illegal espionage, stigmatization, intimidation, leaking of sensitive information to paramilitary groups, and acts of intimidation,” Jonathan Bock of Colombia’s Press Freedom Foundation said at a subsequent press conference. “Therefore, the lack of protection for the journalist generates state responsibility for failure to comply with the duty of prevention.”
The Colombian government attorneys’ theory that it is not responsible for Bedoya’s lack of protection and prevention “is especially chilling,” said her lawyer, Viviana Krsticevic of the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), “because it advances a theory according to which Jineth is to blame for what happened to her. The State uses part of the factual information in a rigged way and omits saying important things.”
Jineth Bedoya called the government’s partial recognition of responsibility “one more slap in the face. To only recognize that on 12 occasions they made me testify about my rape, that there was no investigation into the threats, and that they do not admit the reparations that I have sought—it is like the cases that I denounce every day, where a husband beats a wife and the next day says ‘forgive me, I love you but I was in a bad mood’. That is what the State has done with me before the Court.”
The journalist, who is now the deputy editor of El Tiempo, Colombia’s most-circulated newspaper, said that she continues to receive frequent death threats. She requested protection for her mother, who also receives constant threats and has no bodyguard. If it treats a person like her, a well-known journalist who has access to the media, in such an undignified manner, she concluded, “imagine how the state treats an anonymous victim, who does not have that possibility.”
Links
A car bomb detonated outside the mayor’s office in Corinto, in conflictive northern Cauca department, on March 26. Seventeen people were wounded, including eleven municipal employees.
Polarizing politics, approaching elections, a slow vaccine rollout, a regressive tax reform, street protests, worsening insecurity, Álvaro Uribe’s judicial case, and the Truth Commission’s upcoming report combine to make Colombia a “powderkeg,” writes Javier Lafuente at Spain’s El País.
A New York Timescover story dives deeply into the March 2 bombing of a FARC dissident site in Calamar, Guaviare that killed two minors whom the group had recruited. A new detail: one of the victims, 16-year-old Danna Liseth Montilla, had worked last year with Voces del Guayabero, a local media collective that published much-circulatedreports and videos documenting violent government tactics during mid-2020 coca eradication operations. Last week soldiers found another 16-year-old girl who had fled the bombing and spent the next three weeks alone, lost in the jungle. The Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía) issued new charges of child recruitment, and arrest warrants, against FARC dissident leader “Gentil Duarte”—whose group had recruited the children killed on March 2—and key subordinates.
75 people who led coca substitution programs in the framework of the peace accords have been killed, according to a report from Somos Defensores, Minga, and Viso Mutop.
“In Colombia we continue to speak of the existence of at least five non-international armed conflicts, whose actors continue to affect the dignity and lives of the civilian population,” reads the annual Colombia report of the International Committee of the Red Cross, released last week.
An analysis in La Silla Vacía finds that the commission that the peace accord set up to manage protection of FARC ex-combatants is moribund, with the government ignoring suggestions and treating it as a forum to present already-crafted policies. Meanwhile, the number of FARC ex-combatants who have been killed since the accords went into effect stands at 261. Protection was among the principal concerns voiced in a letter that the leader of the former FARC party (Comunes), Rodrigo Londoño, sent to the U.S. Congress on March 23.
So far this year, as of March 7, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) reported that 3,119 people have been displaced by violence in Colombia. “1,311 families have fled their lands to safeguard their lives and physical integrity.”
The case of Dilan Cruz, an 18-year-old protester killed by a policeman’s “nonlethal” weapon in downtown Bogotá in November 2019, remains before the military justice system. An amicus brief that Human Rights Watch and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Center submitted to Colombia’s Constitutional Court argues that the military system “fails to guarantee independent and impartial investigations into human rights abuses and should not handle Dilan Cruz’s case.”
A new U.S. Army Security Force Assistance Brigade (SFAB) will deploy to Colombia, as well as to Honduras and Panama, later this year. This unit’s first deployment in mid-2020, which involved dozens of trainers providing instruction to Colombian military personnel in a few conflictive parts of the country, generated controversy in media and among opposition legislators.
Retired Army Gen. Rito Alejo del Río, who was imprisoned for working with paramilitary groups that carried out massacres in northwestern Colombia during the 1990s, appeared before the JEP and, to the disappointment of victims, denied any links with paramilitary groups. Del Río is free from prison for the moment pending his case before the JEP.
The Washington Post published a poignant profile of Gonzalo Cardona, an environmental defender who dedicated his life to saving the endangered yellow-eared parrot in often-conflictive southern Tolima department. Cardona, 55, was shot to death in January.
Lost in the “Biden border crisis” news framing is the crude fact that Joe Biden has kept in place a crown jewel of the Trump administration’s approach: the pandemic expulsions policy, known as “Title 42,” that expels most migrants. At the Los Angeles Times, Molly O’Toole explains the policy and unpacks data about how broadly it is being applied.
In The Invisible Wall, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, Quixote Center, and UndocuBlack Network show the toll that the Title 42 policy has had on one of the weakest and most vulnerable populations: Haitian and other black migrants.
Two years ago, the Bolsonaro government deployed the military to prevent Amazon deforestation. “Operation Green Brazil” has proved to be a predictable but disastrous failure, a Reuters investigation finds, in part because the armed forces were such an inappropriate tool for the job of environmental protection.
El Faro talks to a former Salvadoran military captain and others who repent of their role in the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero.
Dissent runs a thoughtful critique from three left-of-center scholars of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who “continues to decry the faults of neoliberalism, but his government is, for the most part, failing to build an effective alternative.”
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. You can get these in your e-mail each week by joining WOLA’s “Beyond the Wall” mailing list.Since what’s happening at the border is one of the principal events in this week’s U.S. news, this update is a “double issue,” longer than normal. See past weekly updates here.
This is a long update. Use these bookmarks to skip to topics:
Migrants are arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border at a pace rivaling the large numbers encountered in 2019, when Border Patrol apprehended more undocumented people than it had since 2007. Unlike those years, though, about half of all apprehended migrants are being expelled, usually without ever seeing the inside of a Border Patrol facility (most are rapidly turned back into Mexico even if they are Central American). These expulsions are taking place under a public health authority known as “Title 42.”
The Trump administration began implementing Title 42 expulsions in March 2020, and the Biden administration has continued them for all migrant populations except children who arrive unaccompanied by a parent or guardian.
Based on very partial data, mainly provided by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to journalists or on Twitter, we roughly estimate that Border Patrol may encounter 150,000 people in March 2021. (The Wall Street Journal, citing “internal Homeland Security documents,” reported that “border agents had recently averaged about 5,000 arrests a day”—which would be 150,000 over a month.)
150,000 would be the largest monthly total since 2006—except about half of those migrants will have been expelled. The number of migrants who actually have to be processed under normal U.S. immigration law would be perhaps half that: 75,000, a number that was exceeded during March, April, May, and June of 2019.
5,156 unaccompanied children were in CBP’s jail-like holding facilities, where they normally should only be for a maximum of 72 hours before being handed off to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which maintains a network of licensed shelters. The previous high, set in June 2019, was only 2,600 children.
11,900 children were in custody of ORR, whose existing shelters can hold 13,200 children.
Add those two numbers, and that’s 17,056 unaccompanied migrant children in U.S. government custody as of March 24.
On March 24 alone, CBP apprehended 681 unaccompanied children.
CBP was able to transfer 437 children into ORR custody that day—so CBP’s net population in custody grew by 244.
ORR moved 268 children out oif its shelters that day, placing them with relatives or sponsors. The agency seeks to avoid having children in its custody for long-term stays: the goal is to place them with relatives in the United States (in over 80 percent of cases; in 40 percent of cases with parents residing in the United States, and otherwise with a sponsor).
According to the Washington Post, “Border officials are on pace to take in more than 17,000 minors this month, which would be an all-time high,” exceeding the record of 11,475 set in May 2019. Here is how that total would appear on a chart of unaccompanied child encounters since the COVID-19 pandemic began:
As the numbers above indicate, ORR has been unable to find space to take children into its shelter system as quickly as CBP is apprehending new children. That may change soon with emergency measures discussed below. For now, though, it is causing alarming backlogs in CBP’s inadequate facilities, mainly Border Patrol stations and processing centers. More than 822 children had been in Border Patrol custody for over 10 days as of March 22.
A temporary soft-sided (tent-based) facility set up to process apprehended migrants in Donna, Texas—a substitute for a more permanent processing facility in McAllen that is under renovation—had 3,889 children housed in its tents on March 20. It was designed to accommodate 250 migrants.
Families
The Biden administration has sought to expel asylum-seeking families under Title 42, continuing a Trump-era arrangement with Mexico allowing it to expel families from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras back across the border into Mexican border towns. The data indicates, though, that apprehensions of mostly Central American families are rising sharply—probably more sharply than unaccompanied children—and that even if Mexico takes back more expelled families than it did in February, a large majority will not be expelled.
Instead, as in past years, families are being released from CBP custody into U.S. border towns with notices to appear in immigration court to pursue asylum claims. Most U.S. border towns have nonprofit “respite centers,” most of them now receiving federal funds, that receive families and help them with travel arrangements to destinations elsewhere in the United States.
CBP data reported by Axios point to 13,000 family members encountered at the border between March 14 and 21. Of these, 13 percent were returned to Mexico, far less than the 64 percent in January and 42 percent in February. On March 19, according to NBC News, Border Patrol apprehended 1,807 family members and expelled 179, or just under 10 percent.
The decreased percentage of expelled families is in part due to at least one Mexican state (Tamaulipas) refusing to accept families with children under age seven, perhaps because of a recent law prohibiting detention of migrant children. The main reason, though, may be capacity. As this rough projection shows, Mexico may in fact take back more expelled Central American families in March than in any prior month. But Mexico may have hit a ceiling of the number of family members it can absorb.
With increased family and child migration, there is an increase in the number of large groups of migrants arriving on the U.S. side of the border, mostly in south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley region, and awaiting Border Patrol apprehension. These voluntary mass apprehensions usually happen near the Rio Grande riverbank, south of any existing border fence. As of March 18, Border Patrol reported encountering 32 groups of 100 or more migrants since October, up from 10 such groups in all of fiscal 2020. As of March 22, 25 of those group apprehensions had taken place in the Rio Grande Valley, one of nine sectors into which CBP divides the border.
As of late March, it’s safe to say that family members have eclipsed unaccompanied children as the fastest-growing category of migrant now being encountered at the border. “I would’ve said two weeks ago that this was nothing like 2019,” the Migration Policy Institute’s Andrew Selee told CNN. “The fact now that a high percentage of families are being admitted means that it’s likely we’ll see an exponential increase of families getting across.”
Single adults
Single adults are probably still the majority of encountered migrants, and more than 90 percent of them continue to be expelled quickly under Title 42. With almost no hope of seeking asylum, single adults have little incentive to turn themselves in to border authorities; most seek to avoid them.
An unusually large number may be having success in doing that. “During the past seven days, border officials estimated that about 6,500 people evaded detection,” the Wall Street Journal reported on March 24, citing “a person familiar with the government’s internal estimates.”
Of those who are caught and expelled under Title 42, many try to cross again. “The percentage of migrants caught at the border who had already been caught once grew to nearly 40% during the past six months, compared with 7% in 2019,” according to the Journal. “That’s the wonderful thing now. You have the opportunity to bat again and again. That’s better for us,” a Honduran migrant said. Because of this recidivism, “too often it’s groundhog day,” an unnamed federal law enforcement agent in El Paso told the Dallas Morning News. “We encounter the same person again, and again and again. The harder we make it, the more profitable it becomes.”
“Remain in Mexico” returns continue
Every day, the U.S. government continues to admit about 200 non-Mexican asylum-seeking migrants whom the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” program had relegated to Mexican border towns. As of March 18, the UNHCR representative in Mexico tweeted that 2,660 people subject to the program had been brought across the border to pursue their asylum claims in the United States. In a March 23 meeting, administration officials cited a figure of 3,200. The total population of Remain in Mexico subjects eligible for admission in the United States is estimated at over 25,000; as of March 20, 16,776 had registered to do so.
Admissions had been happening at three ports of entry along the border. Two more Texas ports of entry got added this week: McAllen and Laredo.
Title 42 isn’t going anywhere
Though children and most family members are now avoiding expulsion under Title 42, the Biden administration has been forcefully conveying the message that it intends to keep the Trump-era border restriction in place, offering no sense of a timetable for when it might be lifted. Officials also indicate that they are encouraging Mexico to accept more expelled families.
“The border is closed. We are expelling families, we are expelling single adults and we have made a decision that we will not expel young, vulnerable children,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas toldMeet the Press, in one of five March 22 Sunday-morning news show appearances.
A March 19 Los Angeles Times analysis by Molly O’Toole offers a thorough explanation of the Title 42 expulsions policy, its impact, and its legality. It explains that when encountering migrants, Border Patrol agents may not ask them whether they fear return to their country. If migrants spontaneously claim fear, they are still expelled unless they can meet threat criteria under the Convention Against Torture, which are more stringent than asylum. In Title 42’s first year, fewer than 1 percent of encountered migrants have been able to seek protection.
After the Trump administration implemented Title 42 last March, O’Toole notes, “lawmakers—including then-Sen. Kamala Harris—called it an unconstitutional ‘executive power grab’ that had ‘no known precedent or clear legal rationale.’”
“The Biden administration’s use of Title 42 is flatly illegal,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt, which sued the Trump and Biden administrations to stop the expulsions, told O’Toole. “There is zero daylight between the Biden administration and Trump administration’s position.”
On March 25, in his first formal press conference, President Biden offered a full-throated defense of Title 42, and urged its fuller application to families.
If you take a look at the number of people who are coming, the vast majority, the overwhelming majority of people coming to the border and crossing are being sent back—are being sent back. Thousands—tens of thousands of people who are—who are over 18 years of age and single—people, one at a time coming, have been sent back, sent home.
…What about dealing with families? Why are not—some not going back? Because Mexico is refusing to take them back. They’re saying they won’t take them back—not all of them.
We’re in negotiations with the President of Mexico. I think we’re going to see that change. They should all be going back, all be going back. The only people we’re not going to let sitting there [sic.] on the other side of the Rio Grande by themselves with no help are children.
Biden’s remarks were clearly triggering to the ACLU, which had agreed to hold its lawsuit against Title 42 expulsions until the end of the month while the administration developed plans to stop applying it to families. “We put our Title 42 case for families on temporary hold in exchange for good faith promise to negotiate,” Gelernt tweeted. “But POTUS JUST said his hope is that U.S. wants to expel ALL families if Mexico will allow them. Then litigation may be only choice.”
The expulsions don’t just affect Mexicans and Central Americans. The Invisible Wall, a March 24 report by the Haitian Bridge Alliance, Quixote Center, and UndocuBlack Network, documents a sharp rise in Title 42 expulsions of Haitian migrants back to their politically convulsed country, via numerous ICE flights to Port-au-Prince. “More Haitians have been removed to Haiti in the weeks since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office than during all of fiscal year 2020,” the report reads. It notes that more Haitians have been arriving at the border, misled by misinformation that the Biden administration had lifted hardline Trump-era policies like Title 42 expulsions. Writing in The Nation, Jack Herrera discusses the disproportionate challenges faced by Black migrants and those advocating for them.
“What gave Donald Trump his wall was Title 42,” Ruben García, director of El Paso’s Annunciation House respite center, toldThe Guardian. “That has been incredibly more effective than any physical barrier. This was never about the pandemic to begin with. This was precisely about border enforcement.”
Facilities for unaccompanied children coming online
The thousands of unaccompanied children stuck in CBP and Border Patrol custody are largely invisible, but accounts of conditions in facilities like the Donna, Texas processing center have filtered out via members of Congress. A few senators who accompanied DHS Secretary Mayorkas on a March 19 visit described miserable conditions at the Donna facility.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) tweeted of seeing “100s of kids packed into big open rooms. In a corner, I fought back tears as a 13 yr old girl sobbbed [sic.] uncontrollably explaining thru a translator how terrified she was, having been separated from her grandmother and without her parents.” CNN reported that “children are alternating schedules to make space for one another in confined facilities, some kids haven’t seen sunlight in days, and others are taking turns showering, often going days without one,” CNN reported.
At his press conference, President Biden recognized the problem, and promised that 1,000 kids would be moved out of the facilities and into ORR custody within the next week.
A big part of the strategy for doing so involves opening up emergency housing facilities, in some cases with assistance from DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Defense. They include the following (with a hat tip to an informative tweet thread from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas):
952 beds at the Carrizo Springs Influx Care Facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, opened February 22.
700 beds at a facility in Midland, Texas, opened in mid-March with significant American Red Cross involvement. On March 19 the Associated Press reported that this facility had paused new intakes as it “has faced multiple issues,” including a 10 percent COVID-19 positivity rate among the children.
2,300 beds at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, Texas, opened March 19.
500 beds, expandable to 2,000, at Target Lodge Pecos North, in Pecos, Texas, announced on March 20.
500 beds at a second Carrizo Springs facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, announced on March 23.
1,400 beds at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California, announced on March 24. Closed by COVID-19 until events are to resume in August, the Center was being used to shelter homeless people. It will be available for children for 90 days.
2,400 beds at the Freeman Expo Center in San Antonio, Texas, announced on March 25.
5,000 beds at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas, announced March 25.
350 beds at Joint Base San Antonio Lackland, in San Antonio, Texas, announced March 25. A Pentagon spokesman, saying “we have just received this request” from ORR, said he had no details about Fort Bliss and Joint Base San Antonio.
It appears that plans have been abandoned to use Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View, California and Fort Lee in Virginia. This would not be the first time military bases have been used to accommodate unaccompanied children. In 2014, the Obama administration sheltered up to 7,500 kids for about four months at Joint Base San Antonio; Naval Base Ventura County, California; and Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
All together, these facilities could shelter about 15,600 children which, added to ORR’s existing capacity of 13,200, would allow short-term care for 28,800 kids. These 15,600 beds, however, would be in emergency, often barracks-like conditions, instead of the more than 170 state-licensed childcare facilities that ORR normally runs.
ORR is also endeavoring to empty out its shelters as quickly as possible by placing children with relatives or sponsors in the United States. For so-called “category 1” children—those who have parents or legal guardians here—ORR is streamlining its background checks and approvals process, even paying the travel costs that relatives must incur in order to retrieve the children.
These measures could soon bring the child migrant situation more or less under control, at least bringing an end to the conditions revealed in a series of photos that Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) shared with Axios on March 23, depicting crowds of children in the Donna facility, lying on mats closely placed on a tent floor, under mylar blankets.
Rep. Cuellar said he shared the photos, which he had been given, because the Biden administration had been refusing media access to Donna. Both CBP and HHS have been refusing requests to visit their facilities, “due to agency COVID protocols and in order to protect the health and safety of our workforce and those in our care.”
Like Cuellar, other centrist Democratic legislators from border states have been urging the Biden administration to move faster. “The policy does need to change,” Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) told the Wall Street Journal. “I’m concerned they don’t totally have this figured out.” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) “pressed the president in a closed-door meeting earlier this week for a timeline for additional resources, facilities and coronavirus testing protocols,” the Journal added. Arizona’s other Democratic senator, Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona), produced a joint statement with Texas Republican John Cornyn (R-Texas) calling on the federal government to “rise to this challenge” without being “consumed by partisan battles on this critical topic.”
Accommodations for a rising number of families
As noted above, asylum-seeking families are now arriving in numbers that appear to exceed Mexico’s ability to receive expulsions, and many are now being released into the U.S. interior. This week NBC News and the Los Angeles Times reported that in some cases, the families are being released without an immigration court date specified on their paperwork. They were asked to provide contact information, then given documents with the court date “to be determined” with instructions to expect to be contacted within 30 days. Asylum attorneys cited say that migrants find this very confusing. A CBP document told Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol agents that they could release migrants without court dates when facilities reach 100 percent capacity, among other criteria—a standard that has long since been surpassed.
Most releases of asylum seeking families happen in border cities that have respite centers run by non-profit organizations, where migrants can often stay for a day or two and receive food and medical attention while making travel arrangements to their U.S. destination cities. One of the best known respite centers, the Catholic Charities facility run by Sister Norma Pimentel in McAllen, Texas, received 150 to 200 family members each day during the week of March 15, the Associated Press reported, while the Los Angeles Times learned that 350 family members were released into the surrounding Rio Grande Valley region in one day, March 22. The respite center run by Jewish Family Service in San Diego, California, is also busy. It sheltered 490 asylum seekers in February, while as of March 19 it had attended to a total of 1,510 for the month, with Hondurans, Brazilians, and Cubans the largest groups. As of March 21, it was lodging some of the family migrants in four hotels.
In Arizona, Border Patrol has begun releasing families into desert towns with few resources to attend to families, like Yuma, Ajo, and Gila Bend, forcing service providers to scramble.
Before releasing families, CBP is also facing challenges in processing them: collecting identifying information, performing background checks, starting asylum paperwork, and other duties. The agency is opening tent-based processing centers in Tucson and Yuma. ICE has signed an $86.9 million contract with the Texas nonprofit Endeavors to add 1,239 beds in seven Arizona and Texas hotels, where families can stay while completing paperwork. Families may be free to leave the hotels within six hours if paperwork is completed, they have transportation, and test negative for COVID-19.
The lack of processing capacity is leading to miserable conditions in the Rio Grande Valley, where up to 600 families have been spending up to a few days under the Anzalduas International Bridge in Mission, Texas, sleeping on the dirt “without much food or access to medical care,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “We asked them why we were there for so long,” a Honduran mother of a five-year-old told the Times. “All they told us was, ‘That’s your problem.’”
Messaging and smugglers
Biden administration officials are aiming to be “more aggressive” in communicating that the border is “closed” and migrants shouldn’t come. “The message isn’t, ‘Don’t come now,’ it’s, ‘Don’t come in this way, ever,’” Amb. Roberta Jacobson, the National Security Council’s (NSC) coordinator for the southern border, told Reuters. “The way to come to the United States is through legal pathways.” The U.S. government has contracted radio ads across Latin America, in Spanish, Portuguese, and six Indigenous languages, warning people not to come.
Still, the administration has come under fire for perceptions that officials sent mixed messages by allegedly indicating that they would be more welcoming than Donald Trump. “You’ve got to be unambiguous,” Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) told the Wall Street Journal. “’Don’t come now, come later?’ What kind of message is that?”
It’s not clear, though, that what officials say matters. In Tijuana, a small plaza outside the main port of entry to San Diego has filled up with 200 tents, housing perhaps 1,500 migrants, none of whom have a chance of being admitted to the United States as long as Title 42 remains in place. “Badly misinformed, the migrants harbor false hope that President Joe Biden will open entry to the United States briefly and without notice,” the Associated Press reported. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) told the Washington Post of an interaction with Central American teenagers at the Carrizo Springs ORR facility. “They said, ‘We see this on TV. We see images of people coming across. … We see people coming across, so we’re going to do the same thing.’”
Migrant smugglers, in particular, offer counter-messaging, on social media and through community ties, that almost certainly overwhelms whatever warnings a U.S. official might issue from a lectern. A migrant told the Dallas Morning News of being enticed by $10,000 to $15,000 smuggling package, with $6,000 up front, that “would include a paid Uber ride from a nice hotel to the border wall where he’d use a $6 rebar ladder to climb over part of a $15 billion structure.”
Smugglers know that the Biden administration is not expelling unaccompanied children, and some told Reuters that they’re encouraging parents to send their children alone. “It’s good to take advantage of the moment, because children are able to pass quickly,” Daniel, a Guatemalan smuggler, told the wire service. “That’s what we’re telling everyone.” A Mexican smuggler added that “the cartel that controls the territory along the border in his region mandates that he and other smugglers use the migrant children as a decoy for the cartel’s own drug smuggling operations.”
Kamala Harris to lead a foreign policy push
On March 24 the White House announced that Vice President Kamala Harris will lead U.S. efforts with Mexico and Central American governments to address migration. Her mandate will focus on diplomatic efforts both to “stem the flow” of migrants and to collaborate on efforts to ease the “root causes” underlying migration from the region. The vice president’s involvement “could help shift part of the conversation away from the media-centric idea that the sum total of this ‘crisis’ is what’s happening at the border, and focus it on the deeper causes of these migrations,” observedWashington Post blogger Greg Sargent.
The diplomatic push is already underway. On March 22 Amb. Jacobson traveled to Mexico, accompanied by NSC Western Hemisphere Director Juan González and the newly named State Department special envoy for Central America’s Northern Triangle, Ricardo Zúñiga. González and Zúñiga were to travel to Guatemala on the 23rd, but ash from the Pacaya volcano closed Guatemala City’s airport, so meetings were virtual.
In meetings with Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard and other officials, the U.S. delegation focused on how to cooperate “to manage migration” and make it “orderly and safe.” While we cannot confirm this, messaging probably included suggesting that Mexico interdict more northbound migrants and—as President Biden mentioned in his press conference remarks—accept more expelled families at the border.
Mexico cracks down
Mexico has clearly gotten the message, following up a March 18 agreement to do more to control migration with a deployment of immigration and security personnel to its southern border with Guatemala. On March 19, immigration agents and National Guardsmen in riot gear paraded through the capital of border state Chiapas. The next day, agents and a few guardsmen appeared at several sites along the Suchiate River bordering Guatemala, checking the credentials of all who cross irregularly—as both migrants and people conducting local business have done in this area for decades.
Mexico also declared its southern border closed to all inessential travel, which it had not done when the pandemic broke out a year ago. Counter-migrant operations in the border zone, officials announced, would include “the installation of sanitary and inspection filters [checkpoints] to verify the documentation and migratory status of individuals and families seeking to enter the national territory, through the use of technological equipment such as drones and night vision mechanisms for surveillance.”
Mexican Defense Secretary Luis Crescencio Sandoval announced on March 22 that 8,715 army troops and national guardsmen (many of them army personnel on temporary duty) were deployed to the country’s northern and southern border. The Washington Post questioned whether this number was enough: “barely more than the average of 8,058 troops posted at the borders during 2020” and less than the 15,000 troops sent to Mexico’s borders in mid-2019 when Donald Trump threatened the country with tariffs if it failed to crack down on migration.
Groups like WOLA and Mexico’s governmental human rights ombudsman warned that a militarized Mexican crackdown on migrants could have grave human rights consequences, as such operations have in the past. The announcement from Mexico’s migration authority, WOLA noted,
contains no reference to the possibility that any families might need asylum. Additionally, Mexico’s refugee agency, COMAR, is thus far glaringly absent from the list of institutions playing a role in the border operation. The institutions that are most visible instead include Mexico’s armed forces—whose core mission is to defend against enemies, not to carry out migration tasks—and the National Guard, which is composed mainly of military troops and has already been implicated in human rights abuses against migrants.
Central America aid
González and Zúñiga spoke with Central American reporters on March 23 about priorities for “root causes” assistance to the region. President Biden has voiced support for providing the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras)” with $4 billion in such assistance over four years.
The U.S. officials centered their message on countering corruption, which is “at the center of everything we have to do,” as González put it. They mentioned plans to create a task force to combat corruption, drug trafficking, and money laundering in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, with an emphasis on assisting “prosecutors, investigators, and judges in their own countries, who are carrying out these important investigations.”
Asked about relations with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele (who has repeatedly attacked democratic institutions and rule of law), Zúñiga emphasized the importance of separation of powers and strong institutions in a democracy. On Guatemala, the officials voiced support for an independent Constitutional Court, following recent nominations of a majority of justices believed to have ties to corrupt interests.
President Bukele tweeted in English that he was opposed to a “recycled plan that did not work in 2014.” He rejected “the ‘northern triangle’ concept” that treats El Salvador the same as Guatemala and Honduras, which send more migrants to the United States. Measured by apprehensions since January 2020 as a portion of population, though, El Salvador is only modestly behind the other two Northern Triangle nations:
Honduras: 849 U.S. border apprehensions/encounters per 100,000 population
Guatemala: 549 per 100,000 population
El Salvador: 459 per 100,000 population
Mexico: 316 per 100,000 population
For her part, Rep. Norma Torres (D-California), a member of the House appropriations subcommittee that allocates foreign aid, wrote a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan recommending “severely restricting funding that goes to central governments of the region. Instead, our foreign assistance should go to civil society, non-governmental organizations, multilateral institutions, and other credible institutions.”
Republican reactions
Eighteen Republican senators are paying a visit to the border on March 26, led by Texas Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) told Fox News that if the delegation is denied access to facilities where CBP is holding children, “we’re going to shut the Senate down.” Graham—who in 2013 was a member of the “Gang of Eight” senators who promoted a bipartisan immigration reform bill—added, “It will never change, President Biden, until you tell everybody to go home and stop bringing people into the United States.”
(Also coming to the border on the weekend of March 27 will be a delegation of Democratic members of Congress invited by another Texas legislator, Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) of El Paso.)
Elsewhere in the Senate, five Republicans sought, and failed, to obtain unanimous consent for consideration of legislation, the “Stopping Border Surges Act,” that would make child and family detention legal, would make it possible to immediately deport children from non-contiguous countries, would reinstate “safe third country” agreements with Central America, and would tighten credible fear standards, among other measures.
More than 60 Republican House members and 40 Republican senators have requested that the Government Accountability Office, an independent auditing arm of Congress, examine the legality of President Biden’s 60-day suspension of border wall construction. The building freeze, mandated by a January 20 presidential proclamation, formally ended on March 21 without a plan in place yet for how to proceed. Construction remains on hold, however. The Republican legislators allege that Biden’s freeze is “a blatant violation of federal law and infringes on Congress’ constitutional power of the purse.”
Links
A DHS Inspector-General report made public on March 22 finds that, during the 2019 spike in child and family migration, the Trump administration threw out existing plans for dealing with the challenge, “created ad-hoc solutions,” and failed to get agencies to work together smoothly.
“Immigrant rights advocates and others claim that” March 11 footage of smugglers floating migrants across the Rio Grande, which aired on CNN, “was staged, potentially with the cooperation of the Border Patrol,” the American Prospect reports. Smugglers, it notes, “don’t normally provide face masks and life vests, nor ferry six boatloads of people across in broad daylight.”
The New York Times published a gripping photo essay from Comitancillo, Guatemala, depicting the return of the bodies of 13 migrants from that town who were massacred, apparently by Mexican state police, in Camargo, Tamaulipas, on January 22.
On March 18 the House of Representatives passed the Dream and Promise Act, which would create a path to citizenship for up to 4 million “Dreamers”—undocumented people who were brought to the United States as children—and recipients of Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
“You have, frankly, a predatory elite that benefits from the status quo, which is to not pay any taxes or invest in social programs,” said Gonzalez, the National Security Council’s senior director for the Western Hemisphere
El programa Somos Defensores, la Corporación Viso Mutop y la Asociación Minga presentan hoy un documento sobre las agresiones a esta población desde la firma de la paz
Kyle Johnson, cofundador e investigador de la fundación Conflict Responses, aseguró que hay intentos de reclutamientos de migrantes venezolanos dentro de Colombia
“In many foreign policy circles we have a tendency to look at the world, and in Latin America in particular, in terms of left and right, with the left as bad guys and the right as the good guys.”
Mexico
Asuncion Cabrera, Alondra Resendiz, Fernanda Vega, Xareni Marquez, Metztli Molina, Javier Sanchez Alpizar, Juan Gomez, Becarixs; Dulce Soto, Violeta Santiago, Paris Martínez, “NGOs: Venezuela military, Colombia rebels continue fighting” (The Washington Post, March 26, 2021).
International monitoring groups say clashes that began over the weekend between Venezuelaâ??s military and a Colombian armed group in a community along the nationsâ?? shared border have continued
Un grupo de mujeres migrantes centroamericanas y sus hijos se amotinaron este viernes en el albergue conocido como La Mosca en el municipio de Chiapa de Corzo
Las fuerzas federales mexicanas se han desplegado por las peligrosas rutas migratorias entre el estado de Tabasco (sureste de México) y la frontera con Guatemala, hoy cerrada a toda actividad no esencial, lo que obliga a los migrantes a buscar nuevos caminos
El Gobernador Alfredo del Mazo ha sido incapaz de frenar al crimen organizado en el territorio que gobierna; tampoco ha puesto orden en las filas policiacas, consideradas una de las más corruptas del país
“Te enfrentas a una serie de obstáculos que coartan tu trabajo y la posibilidad de seguir avanzando, de seguir acompañando, de seguir señalando”, dice Anaís al recordar. Luego sentencia: “Tienes al aparato estatal soplándote en la nuca”
La Reinforcing Nicaragua’s Adherence to Conditions for Electoral Reform (RENACER Act) también busca reforzar los informes de inteligencia sobre las actividades de espionaje de Rusia en Nicaragua
Entitled the Reinforcing Nicaragua’s Adherence to Conditions for Electoral Reform (RENACER) Act, the legislation proposes new initiatives to address corruption by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s government and family, as well as human rights abuses
“It’s 30 miles to the next type of town — and that’s 30 miles of open desert,” Mayor Chris Riggs said on Tuesday. “Come July and August, we’re going to be finding bodies”
The Biden administration estimates that between 18,600 to about 22,000 children could cross the U.S. southern border in April. For May, officials are guessing the figure could rise to between 21,800 and nearly 25,000
Desperate migrants brave perilous river, ocean and desert crossings to reach the United States. Many have died of heat stroke after getting lost in the remote, rugged arid lands of Arizona
What they reported was not exactly great, but it was perhaps somewhat encouraging, particularly in light of other dire images of migrant families held at the border
Congressional Republicans and Democrats were about 245 miles away from each other in Texas Friday for firsthand observation of the children and families coming into the United States from Mexico — and worlds apart on how to handle the increase
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who fled civil war-torn Somalia with her family when she was 8 and spent four years in a refugee camp before moving to the U.S., said she saw herself in the children she talked to at the facility
I’ve got a more open schedule today, but need to meet some writing deadlines (including what will be a beast of a weekly border update). I won’t be very responsive until I’m done—probably in the early to mid-afternoon.
El hecho es que el combate a la corrupción sí será un eje central: el eje de la política del Presidente Biden para Centro América, porque, como podemos ver, entre el crimen organizado y la corrupción pública, eso es un elemento fundamental en el deterioro
Pares habló con Anderson Rodríguez, presidente de la Asosicación Campesina de Arauca, para conocer sobre la situación que se está viviendo en el municipio de Arauquita
Thousands of Venezuelans are seeking shelter in Colombia this week following clashes between Venezuela’s military and a Colombian armed group in a community along the nations’ shared border
Reduced to ignominy, Saravia has been a pizza delivery man, a used car salesman and a drug money launderer. Now he is burning in the hell he helped create during a time when killing “communists” was a sport
The biggest cash cow for the smugglers knows as coyotes are the individuals and families that are lured to the U.S. with the promise that their guides will try three or more times to get them safely across the border
El 16.6% de los entrevistados está “muy de acuerdo” y otro 23.5% “algo de acuerdo” con un gobierno militar (40% en total). El restante 60% rechazó este tipo de gobierno
Biden on Thursday said he was negotiating with the president of Mexico to address the refusals to take back families at the border: “I think we are going to see that can change.”
Single adults account for 82% of the apprehensions so far this fiscal year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. Some 60% of all single adults apprehended were Mexicans
The Biden administration says it is attempting to build a new immigration model that will deliver asylum decisions in the U.S. much more quickly and vet more people for their eligibility in their home countries—but both will take time
It is a task that carries political risks for Harris, a potential future presidential candidate. Border woes have been an intractable problem for multiple presidents
More than 16,500 unaccompanied migrant children were in federal custody as of early Wednesday. More than 11,500 of those children were being housed in shelters and emergency housing sites, while another 5,000 were stranded in overcrowded Border Patrol facilities
Up to 600 families were assembled in recent days at the site under the Anzalduas International Bridge in Mission, Texas, sleeping in the dirt, exposed to the elements, without much food or access to medical care
The Border Patrol has started releasing migrant families in Yuma, Ajo and Gila Bend, where nonprofits and local government officials are trying to care for them despite the COVID-19 restrictions and the community’s lack of infrastructure
La CIDH destacó que el uso de la jurisdicción penal militar se intensifica durante los episodios de protestas, como ocurrió en el año 2017, cuando más de 750 personas civiles fueron presentadas ante esos espacios
El mandatario argentino encabezó un acto en honor a los grupos de mujeres que “tuvieron el coraje que la sociedad no tuvo” para enfrentar a la dictadura en el país
Las sanciones y bloqueos impuestos a Venezuela y a sus autoridades, así como los intentos de desestabilización ocurridos en 2020, no han hecho más que agravar la situación de su población
Luis Alberto Arce Catacora, Presidente del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, agradeció esta mañana, conmovido, a México y a su Jefe del Poder Ejecutivo, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, por haberle dado asilo –junto a Evo Morales y otros
For all the justified outrage over the lack of proper facilities to house the thousands of young immigrants at the border, for most of those children — and for the parents who, in many cases, sent them on their way to the United States — the alternative is much worse
The amicus brief supports a petition to transfer the criminal investigation into the 2019 death of an 18-year-old protester, Dilan Cruz, at the hands of police to the ordinary justice system from the military courts, where it currently stands
Los seis integrantes de la sociedad civil que están en la Comisión se apartaron del documento final, y, en una carta enviada al comisionado de Paz, Miguel Ceballos, se quejaron de que la mayoría de sus propuestas habían sido ignoradas
En Colombia seguimos hablando de la existencia de al menos cinco conflictos armados no internacionales, cuyos actores continúan afectando la dignidad y la vida de la población civil
El Gobierno pidió perdón y reconoció una responsabilidad parcial. “Nos parece lamentable teniendo en cuenta la gravedad de las violaciones”, respondió una de las abogadas de Bedoya
“Es como los casos que denuncio todos los días, donde el marido golpea a la mujer y al otro día le dice ‘perdóname, te quiero pero estaba de mal genio’. Eso es lo que el Estado ha hecho conmigo ante la Corte”
3.119 personas y 1.311 familias se han desplazado forzosamente este año. Así lo revela el Sistema de Monitoreo de Riesgos y Prevención de la Unidad de Investigación y Acusación de la JEP
Rocío San Miguel, presidenta de Control Ciudadano, subraya que cuando se asume una política de neutralidad frente a grupos guerrilleros en guerra con otros, las retaliaciones que se desencadenan tienen un efecto más duro en la población
Fue sustituido por un excandidato a diputado de GANA sin experiencia en la conducción de cárceles de máxima seguridad, que a su vez fue sustituido por un abogado sin ninguna experiencia en centros penales
There is a high probability that the features of the 2017 electoral process will be repeated, when the weakness of the electoral institutions was clear, and the lack of confidence and credibility of the results brought a crisis of governability
Evidence presented in court over two weeks provided a searing assessment of the president, whose government’s failure to build a lawful state and a robust economy has helped drive hundreds of thousands of despairing citizens to emigrate
“Nuestra tradición humanista nos compromete a reforzar las acciones para atender a las personas que se encuentran en riesgo al migrar, especialmente a las niñas, niños y adolescentes acompañados y no acompañados”
It is alarming that the Mexican government is sending in more troops to crack down on asylum seekers and migrants, even as Mexico’s refugee agency still lacks presence at the ports of entry
Humberto Beck, Carlos Bravo Regidor, Patrick Iber, “The Immovable Amlo” (Dissent, March 24, 2021).
AMLO continues to decry the faults of neoliberalism, but his government is, for the most part, failing to build an effective alternative to it. Yet even as former supporters have slowly stepped away from the government and criticism has mounted, AMLO’s level of popular support remains high
“Ya nosotros en Guardia Nacional contamos con cerca de 100 mil elementos, están terminados 155 cuarteles y está en proceso de construcción otro número importante”
La Fiscalía General de la República (FGR) arraigó por 40 días al sujeto identificado como Erick del Toro López, alias “El M3”, señalado como supuesto jefe de sicarios del Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación
ATF found that 70 percent of firearms reported to have been recovered in Mexico from 2014 through 2018 and submitted for tracing were U.S. sourced. However, ATF does not receive complete data about thousands of firearms
Mexican Defense Secretary Luis Crescencio Sandoval announced Monday that 8,715 army and National Guard troops were deployed at the country’s northern and southern borders to detain unauthorized migrants
Swelling numbers of Mexicans are heading north across the border, propelled by a deep economic crash and drawn by promises of a stimulus-fueled resurgence in the U.S.
Roberto, a smuggler who said he is linked to a powerful cartel in Ciudad Juarez, said his network is now flying minors directly from Central America to the U.S. border by plane
More help in facing the pandemic is one thing López Obrador already said he asked of Biden. Additional resources to help Mexico deal with the migrants gathering at their shared border could be another
Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Monday introduced the Stopping Border Surges Act, a bill to address loopholes in our immigration system
The San Diego Convention Center is expected to host migrant children until July 1. About 90 percent of the unaccompanied children who will be in the shelter have family members in the United States
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby confirmed Tuesday that the Department of Defense “has received a request for assistance from the Department of Health and Human Services to temporarily house unaccompanied migrant children”
The Biden administration is leaning on a public health law invoked by the Trump administration to quickly expel migrants who are encountered at the US-Mexico border, typically single adults and some families
Biden administration officials are set to visit both countries this week as critics call for more actions to stem the influx. Apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border are on pace to hit highs not seen in 20 years
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for the U.S. to end what he called the “misguided” policy
I’m somewhat reachable in the morning and not at all in the afternoon. (How to contact me)
I just took my daughter across town to take her SAT exam. They grow up so fast. (Not really, it feels like it’s been a long time.)
While that’s going on, I’ve got a lot else on the calendar: two border coalition meetings, a meeting with legislative staff, an interview. I may be hard to get in touch with today.
The more than 1,500 pages in the case file against Morales, which we reviewed, contained zero evidence he had committed acts that would appropriately be considered terrorism. Similarly, the terrorism charges against Áñez are grossly disproportionate
The national security law, which dates from 1983, near the end of the country’s military dictatorship, states it is a crime to harm the heads of the three branches of government or expose them to danger. That vague definition has recently been used
Estados Unidos ha nombrado enviado especial para el Triángulo Norte al hombre que en 2014 negoció la reapertura de relaciones con Cuba y diseñó la estrategia de ayuda a Centroamérica con que Obama respondió a la crisis de los niños migrantes
En los últimos cuatro años, se han registrado 375 homicidios que habrían sido cometidos por agentes. Por lo menos ocho tuvieron lugar en estaciones de Policía. Presentamos cuatro de esas historias
Duque le jugará más a las presiones políticas internas por lograr resultados a corto plazo del Centro Democrático, que a una estrategia de largo plazo, como la que vienen pidiendo algunos Demócratas en Washington
U.S. Army South hosted a pre-deployment training seminar, Operation Alamo Shield Mission Prep, at their headquarters February 23-25, to prepare teams assigned to the 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade (1st SFAB) for future training and advising missions in Colombia, Honduras, and Panama
El Gobierno de Nicolás Maduro en Venezuela confirmó que durante este domingo las fuerzas militares de ese país desarrollaron una operación en el estado venezolano de Apure, limítrofe con el departamento de Arauca, en el que murieron dos militares
The Special Envoy will engage with regional governments, including but not limited to Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, on a range of issues in order to seek to improve conditions in Central America
In or about 2013, FUENTES RAMIREZ paid a bribe of at least approximately $25,000 to Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado (“JOH”), who was at the time the president of the Honduran National Congress, and allowed JOH to access millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine
Damián Genovés Tercero murió a manos de elementos del Ejército Mexicano, en una ejecución extrajudicial, según se mira en un video que un oficial del propio Ejército entregó al padre de la víctima; a pesar de que los autores confesaron el delito, la justicia no llega
FIDH – Federación Internacional por los Derechos Humanos y el Centro Nicaragüense de Derechos Humanos (CENIDH) publican un informe de más de 70 páginas sobre esta ola de represión y terror
Vivimos bajo un estado policial que ha conculcado por las vías de hecho las libertades de reunión, asociación y movilización, y las libertades de prensa y de expresión
The new process allows caseworkers to partially fill out applications necessary for the release of children during interviews with their parents or legal guardians, instead of having the prospective sponsors complete the forms
While President Biden has taken some steps to change Trump’s asylum policies, many are still in effect to keep asylum seekers out of the country they hope will protect them. Those policies are not being applied evenly
Some of the migrants mistakenly believed they had 90 days to apply for permission to remain in the U.S.; that they already had permission, or that their paperwork contained a phone number for them to contact immigration officials
The criteria to be allowed into the U.S. are a closely held secret. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has referred only to “acute vulnerabilities” that qualify families for release in the United States to pursue asylum instead of immediate expulsion
According to data obtained by NBC News, Border Patrol apprehended 1,807 migrants who were traveling as parts of families on Friday, and only 179 of them were expelled back into Mexico
As of Saturday, there were 10,000 migrants in CBP custody overall. Nearly half were unaccompanied minors — thousands of whom had been waiting for more than 3 days
They also shed the plastic bracelets they had been issued by smugglers to signify they had paid for their passage. The brush around them was littered with scores of the bracelets
The Senators wrote, “We write to urge you to use your full authorities to effectively respond to and successfully manage the ongoing crisis at our Southwest Border”
I’m around, other than meetings mid-day and mid-afternoon. (How to contact me)
As happens when an issue one works on takes over the national news, the border situation is occupying me all day long. I realized I had to get a good night’s sleep yesterday, when in a Spanish interview it took me 3 seconds to remember the verb “expulsar“—and I did sleep well.
Today I’m briefing 2 groups of congressional staff, but otherwise have no pre-planned meetings and should be reachable as I catch up my news database and my e-mail and other communications inboxes. I’d also like to carve out some time to write, but am not sure that will happen.
A potential clash is looming in northern Brazil between the Munduruku people and mining prospectors armed with rifles and handguns who have intruded into Indigenous lands in the Tapajós River basin of Para state
Hoy esta aún más claro que el glifosato está vinculado con riesgos de desarrollar cáncer, enfermedades dermatológicas, respiratorias, y abortos en la población que reside en zonas de aspersión. Estos riesgos no son especulaciones
In one of the most biologically diverse countries in the world, environmentalists are being targeted for their efforts to preserve sensitive habitats used by drug traffickers and armed gangs, and their activism against legal and illegal mining, agriculture, fossil fuel extraction, and hydroelectric plants and dams
Los altos índices de violencia, el choque por la independencia judicial, la falta de avances en la implementación del proceso de paz se topan este año con un proceso electoral
De acuerdo con residentes de La Victoria, en la localidad se escuchan explosiones y ráfagas de disparos desde helicópteros, que apuntarían a militantes de las FARC encabezados por alias Farley
Relatives, friends and neighbors in Comitancillo watched the broadcast in their homes as they made final preparations for the arrival of the bodies and for the wakes and burials to follow
“Lo que más nos preocupa es que haya más medidas de contención y rechazo al migrante en lugar de crear una hoja de ruta con enfoque de derechos humanos para recibir a este flujo de personas con necesidades de protección”
Those turned away weren’t migrants, they were the small-time Guatemalan merchants and residents from Tecun Uman, across the river, who buy in bulk in Mexico to re-sell in Guatemala
La zona centro del país, que abarca estados como Michoacán, Guerrero, Ciudad de México, Morelos y el Estado de México, se ha vuelto disputa de al menos 13 grupos del crimen organizado
Today, Border Patrol agents are making both the initial and — in the vast majority of cases — final decision over who gets to stay, giving law enforcement unprecedented power over the fate of vulnerable populations
Migrant children and families are dangerously packed into holding facilities on the southwest border, lawmakers and child-welfare monitors warned Friday, as Customs and Border Protection weighed taking the emergency step of putting migrant families on airplanes
The belief that the end of the Trump administration has opened the border has spread throughout the region alongside another rumor: Young children are the ticket in
“You’re sleeping on thin mattresses on the floor. They are sort of bunched, you know, about six inches to a foot from each other,” Murphy said on NPR Saturday. “We’ve got to ultimately do better”
When 149 migrants were escorted onto a bridge by U.S. Border Patrol agents, they had no idea where they were being taken. Many collapsed, crying, when they learned they were back in Mexico
Folks tuning in to ABC’s This Week were treated to the Powerhouse Roundtable panelists parked in front of a fence in El Paso, as if they were College GameDay hosts getting ready for a big Alabama-LSU game down in Death Valley
I just sent off another e-mail update to those who’ve subscribed. It explains why it’s a day later than usual: I work on the border, the border is one of the main news stories right now, and I hardly have time to go to the bathroom lately. This email contains:
An excerpt from WOLA’s big explainer about the border situation;
Video from last Thursday’s Colombia event;
Full text of this week’s U.S.-Mexico border update;
Full text of this week’s Colombia peace update;
5 “longread” links from the past week;
Latin America-related online events for this week;
Jineth Bedoya’s Inter-American Court case delayed as government “walks out” of hearing
One of Colombia’s most emblematic human rights cases suffered a momentary but confounding setback, as government representatives abruptly withdrew from a hearing at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
This Court is an OAS-affiliated body, based in Costa Rica, that hears cases when signatory nations’ judiciaries have proved unable to win redress for victims. It was holding a virtual hearing on March 15 for oral arguments in the case of Jineth Bedoya, a prominent journalist who was abducted, raped, and tortured, with security forces’ involvement, in 2000.
That year Bedoya, then a reporter at El Espectador, was investigating networks of arms trafficking, human trafficking, and other criminal activity linking paramilitaries, guerrillas, organized crime, and members of the security forces. These networks centered on Bogotá’s La Modelo prison, which both then and now has been a violent place. (A year ago, on March 21, 2020, guards killed 24 prisoners there, apparently shooting to kill, while putting down a riot.) “La Modelo was the ‘office’ from which all crime in the country was connected,” reads an account from Bedoya reproduced this week by journalist Cecilia Orozco.
In May 2000, Bedoya was receiving threats from paramilitaries as she investigated a massacre of 32 prisoners at La Modelo. On the morning of May 25, 2000, she showed up at the prison gate—which is not far from the Chief Prosecutor’s office (Fiscalía) and the U.S. embassy—for an arranged meeting with paramilitaries who had been threatening her. “It was a trap,” Bedoya recalls. She was abducted from the front door of the prison and driven out of the city, tortured, and repeatedly raped. “Then I don’t know what happened. I was left abandoned on a road, almost dead.”
Even as a respected reporter from mainstream media outlets (she later moved to El Tiempo), and even as a 2012 State Department “International Woman of Courage,” Jineth Bedoya has been unable to win justice for what happened to her. Only three of her attackers—low-level actors—have been sentenced. The Fiscalía mysteriously lost key evidence. “For 11 years the prosecutor who was in charge of the case would call me to suggest that I investigate, and give the results to him.” The Fiscalía forced her to narrate, and relive, what was done to her on 12 different occasions. One of her sources was killed an hour after meeting with her. She learned that a corrupt National Police General ordered her abduction.
She went to the OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission, which issued recommendations to Colombia for her case. These went unmet. The next step was to go to the Inter-American Human Rights Court, which took her case in May 2019. It reached its oral arguments phase, with hearings set to begin on March 15, 2021. The Guardianhailed what appeared to be a big step toward justice:
“To bring my case before an international court not only vindicates what happened to me, as a woman and a journalist,” Bedoya said in a video shared on Twitter. “It opens a window of hope for thousands of women and girls who, like me, had to face sexual violence in the midst of the Colombian armed conflict.”
That’s not quite what happened. The hearing, held virtually due to COVID-19, began with justices asking Bedoya questions. After a while, the government’s representative asked to speak.
That representative was Camilo Gómez, head of the National Agency for the Legal Defense of the State (ANDJE) in President Iván Duque’s government. From 2000 to 2002 Gómez was the high commissioner for peace—the government’s chief negotiator—for then-president Andrés Pastrana’s failed effort to negotiate peace with the FARC.
Instead of addressing what happened to Bedoya, Gómez charged that the Court’s six judges were “pre-judging” Colombia during the day’s questioning, and called for all but one of them to be recused. The government’s legal team then abruptly exited the virtual hearing. The judges heard from one more witness, then suspended the Court’s proceedings while they determined what to do next.
Condemnation of the government’s response came quick. “The Colombian government’s decision to effectively stomp out of the Inter-American Court hearing shows the authorities’ shocking disregard for the violence inflicted on Jineth Bedoya, and is a slap in the face to every Colombian journalist—especially women journalists—fighting impunity,” said Natalie Southwick of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “I have been litigating before the Inter-American Court for 25 years, said Bedoya’s lawyer Viviana Krsticevic, the director of the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), “and this is unusual, unheard of, we are surprised that the State of Colombia is doing what even really authoritarian governments like Fujimori’s government in Peru, Ortega’s in Nicaragua, Maduro’s in Venezuela, did not do.”
On March 17 Camilo Gómez sent Bedoya a letter, which he made public on Twitter, suggesting an out-of-court settlement. Such offers have happened before, said Jonathan Bock of the Press Freedom Foundation (FLIP), but they have merely been offers of monetary payments without the government recognizing its responsibility for what happened to Bedoya. Bedoya’s legal team refused, adding that making the letter public was “an act of harassment and malicious litigation.”
On March 18 the Court’s judges, led by the one justice whom Gómez had not called to be recused, rejected the Colombian government’s request for new judges. Jineth Bedoya’s hearing is set to restart on March 22 as though nothing had happened.
Numerous activists and analysts voiced puzzlement at the Colombian government’s behavior, showing insensitivity to a high-profile victim while inviting a legal defeat. Santiago Medina-Villarreal, a former lawyer at the Inter-American Court, fears that the government is playing a long game, sending a message ahead of future cases scheduled to go before the Court. “With this attitude, the State intends to undermine with doubts the judges’ appearance of impartiality.” An effort to de-legitimize the Court, Krsticevic toldEl Tiempo, “would be very serious for Colombia and the region.”
“They killed me on the morning of May 25 [2000],” Jineth Bedoya writes. “I believed that words are the best way to transform pain. But my life is over: having to see the marks of sexual violence and torture on my body every day is something that does not allow me to close this cycle definitively.”
U.S. officials point to outlines of Biden approach to coca and peace
While eradicating record amounts of coca manually, Colombia continues to move toward restarting a U.S.-backed program to spray herbicides from aircraft over territories where the plant is grown. Citing health concerns, the government of Juan Manuel Santos had suspended this program in 2015. As past weekly updates have noted, the new Biden administration is not opposing continued U.S. support for “fumigation.” In fact, February and March State Department documents hailed the Duque government’s efforts to relaunch the program.
On March 14, El Tiempo’s longtime Washington correspondent, Sergio Gómez, shed a bit more light on the Biden administration’s thinking, excerpting views on eradication and peace accord implementation from interviews with several officials. In general, these officials and legislative staff told Gómez that they don’t see fumigation or forced eradication as keys to long-term reductions in coca-growing. Instead, they voiced a preference for implementation of the 2016 peace accord and increasing government presence in long-abandoned rural territories.
Here are a few highlights indicating how official thinking may be evolving:
”A senior U.S. Embassy official in Bogotá authorized to speak on this issue: “Essentially, our idea is that the territorial transformation that would come from the full implementation of the accords is the best long-term security strategy and the most promising and sustainable solution to the problem of illicit crops.”
Another U.S. Embassy official: “The clearest lesson from the period from 2012 to 2017, when cultivation went from its lowest point to its highest in just 5 years, is that Colombia was successful in reducing crops, but not in sustaining those gains. … The best way to sustain them is to increase the presence of the state and offer economic opportunities in rural areas. You can’t just eradicate and attack criminal groups.”
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, who voiced disappointment with a February State Department document praising fumigation: “We want to help Colombia reduce coca production and cocaine trafficking, but as we have seen over the years sustainable progress is not measured in the number of hectares eradicated. Government presence—in the territories most affected by this problem—is not achieved simply by sending in armed forces. Nor do we see evidence that illegal armed groups are being dismantled, especially when so many social leaders are being threatened and killed.”
A senior legislative aide, who said that the State Department’s recent written praise for forced eradication “seemed ‘outdated’ or the work of some Trump administration holdover”: “We want to see progress in coca reduction, but we don’t see anything that gives us confidence that the Duque government has a sustainable strategy to achieve it.”
Another congressional staffer: “When Plan Colombia kicked off in 2000, the goal was to reduce coca cultivation by half in 5 years. And here we are, 20 years later and there is still the same or more drugs than two decades ago with a ‘new plan’—agreed between Duque and Trump—that again seeks to reduce crops by half in another 5 years.”
Sen. Leahy’s office told El TIempo “that the Senator ‘would oppose the use of U.S. funds to finance aerial spraying’ when it resumes,” which could mean a fight if the Biden administration decides to keep supporting the controversial herbicide spray program.
The ELN and Ecuador’s elections
The candidate who led February 7 first-round voting for Ecuador’s presidential election is vehemently denying allegations that his campaign received support from Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas. Andrés Arauz, the candidate favored by left-populist ex-president Rafael Correa, is threatening legal action.
On October 25, a Colombian Army raid in Chocó killed Andrés Felipe Vanegas, alias “Uriel,” a mid-ranking ELN leader who had a high profile because he gave frequent interviews. At the site of the raid, soldiers reportedly recovered computers and other data devices with over 3 terabytes of information.
On January 30, the Colombian newsmagazine Semanareceived some of that information from official sources. An e-mail from Uriel to two other ELN members, presumed to be contacts in Ecuador, appeared to refer to a US$80,000 “investment” in “supporting hope.” Andrés Arauz’s political coalition is called the “Union for Hope.”
On February 12, a few days after Arauz led first-round voting with 32.7 percent, Colombia’s prosecutor-general (FIscal), Francisco Barbosa, paid a quick visit to Quito to hand over to his Ecuadorian counterpart all evidence from “Uriel” pointing to links between the ELN and Arauz.
Last week Arauz enlisted the aid of a Colombian jurist, former Fiscal Eduardo Montealegre, an opponent of Colombia’s current ruling party whose term coincided completely with the presidency of Juan Manuel Santos. As El Colombianoexplains, the Ecuadorian candidate granted Montealegre power of attorney “to investigate and file a complaint for falsehood and procedural fraud against Colombia due to allegations linking him to the ELN.”
Arauz called the allegations a “crude setup.” He argued that “Uriel” operated far from Colombia’s border with Ecuador, and questioned the Colombian armed forces’ honesty, arguing that they have engaged in a cover-up of thousands of extrajudicial executions—the so-called “false positives” human rights scandal. He added that he sees Colombia’s conservative government engaging in “a state policy to delegitimize and undermine governments with progressive tendencies.” The ELN, for its part, also rejects the allegations, calling them “fake news.”
We are unlikely to learn what really happened before April 11, when Ecuadorians vote in the presidential runoff election. Polling is sparse, but the race appears close between Arauz and center-right candidate Guillermo Lasso.
Links
WOLA hosted a discussion on March 18 about the Colombian military’s “false positives” killings, which the transitional justice system (JEP) revealed in February to have likely been more extensive than most knew. On March 17, the Mothers of False Positives (MAFAPO) presented a report to the Truth Commission.
In May 2019, the New York Times had triggered an outcry by reporting that Colombia’s Army leadership was returning to “body counts” as a measure of success, setting numerical goals for units to meet. The Inspector-General’s office (Procuraduría) just completed an investigation begun that month, exonerating the Army’s commander at the time, Gen. Nicacio Martínez, of “pressuring or requiring” generals “to meet minimum targets for casualties, captures or demobilizations.”
El Tiemporeported that coroners have identified the bodies of eight of the ten people killed in a March 2 bombing raid on a FARC dissident site in Guaviare. One of the eight was a 16-year-old girl. (El Nuevo Sigloreported that coroners determined a second girl, age 15, was also killed in the attack, but the El Tiempo story makes no mention of this.) As noted in last week’s update, charges that child combatants were among the dead led Defense Minister Diego Molano to make some very crude remarks about child combatants.
Colombia’s Congress briefly faced a legislative proposal to extend President Duque’s term by two years, along with those of members of Congress, mayors, governors, high court judges, the chief prosecutor, and other top officials. The initiative quickly collapsed after news of it emerged, and 15 legislators withdrew their signatures.
“In the coming months, negotiations will be concluded for the acquisition of 24 new, state-of-the-art fighter planes,” Semanareports. The purchase could total US$4 billion.
The next step for the witness-tampering case against former president Álvaro Uribe will take place on April 6, when a judge will consider the Fiscalía’s request to drop the charges. (See the overview of the case in our March 6 update.)
The JEP’s “top-down” investigation of the FARC’s mass kidnappings, which featured the indictment of eight top leaders in February, is moving down the chain of command, with three mid-level leaders providing grim testimony of the inhuman treatment to which they subjected their kidnap victims.
With a document collection, the National Security Archive marks the tenth anniversary of the Allende massacre in Coahuila, Mexico, when Zetas—apparently responding to information leaked by a Mexican intelligence official—obliterated an entire town.
At the New York Review of Books, Delphine Schrank covers the human toll of the two strong hurricanes that hit Honduras within two weeks of each other last fall.
James Fredrick at NPR looks at the accusations of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández’s collusion with narcotraffickers, which have been piling up in a U.S. court.
At Vice, Nathaniel Janowitz reports on what the brutal rise of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel has meant for life in Guadalajara, Mexico’s “second city.”
There was a lot of coverage of the situation at the border last week, but little of it was long-form or in depth. This New York Times piece looking at short, medium, and long-term options was useful.
Esta inquietud llegó primero el sábado, a través de un comunicado, pero el jueves ésta fue expuesta durante una reunión virtual entre Guterres y el presidente Luis Arce
El grito de guerra del Mandatario fue el preámbulo del deterioro en la relación del Ejecutivo y las FF.AA. Esto llegó a tal punto y desconfianza, que los generales terminaron siendo acompañados por abogados a las reuniones con el gobierno para protegerse
En tiempos recientes de Chile no estamos acostumbrados a que las Fuerzas Armadas tengan un alto protagonismo, pero lamentablemente las circunstancias políticas y sociales por las cuales estamos atravesando desde hace aproximadamente 18 meses las ubican en el centro del huracán
Colombia insists the aerial spraying of coca, the base ingredient for cocaine, is the best option in the war on drugs. More than 150 experts say it can cause serious health problems and environmental destruction
Aunque los magistrados se han comprometido a investigar la violencia sexual y basada en género en los siete casos abiertos, mantienen un debate interno sobre si seguir trabajándolo transversalmente o si apostarle a un caso
Queda en el aire la grotesca actitud frente a Jineth Bedoya, una mujer que es el rostro de muchas mujeres que han sufrido la violencia sexual en el marco del conflicto armado en Colombia
Está prohibido por el derecho internacional establecer como causal disciplinaria o, en este caso, de antejuicio, actuaciones relacionadas con el juicio o criterio jurídico
En la actualidad no hay fuerzas políticas capaces e interesadas en terminar con el narcotráfico y la corrupción. Aunque las hubiera, reducir sus efectos e intensidad tomaría décadas, por mucha voluntad que presente el actual gobierno de Estados Unidos
En Chiapas, fueron desplegados elementos de seguridad en la frontera sur de México, luego de que la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores anunciara que sería cerrada la frontera con Guatemala
To date, only a handful of Zetas and corrupt police officials have been convicted in a case that involves dozens of crime scenes, hundreds of victims, and the documented participation of numerous Zetas and public officials
“Para prevenir la propagación de #COVID19, México impondrá a partir del 19 de marzo de 2021, restricciones al tránsito terrestre para actividades no esenciales en su frontera norte y sur”, informó la Cancillería
De los casi 30 mil elementos que formaban parte de la Policía Federal (PF) y que se pretendía que se integraran a la Guardia Nacional, 12 mil agentes solicitaron su baja y recibieron una compensación económica
Mexico has agreed to increase its presence on its southern border with Guatemala to deter migration from Central America, one of the government officials said, and local Mexican officials say their country has recently stepped up efforts to stop migrants
The requests for more migration cooperation fit an increasingly familiar pattern in which the United States turns to the Mexican government for enforcement help during moments of crisis
96 de 161 agentes (el 60 por ciento del personal) de la División de Investigación de Delitos de Alta Complejidad (Diviac), fueron sumariamente cambiados de su unidad a varias otras dependencias
Mayorkas will be joined by top members on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Senators Gary Peters and Rob Portman, as well as leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee on Homeland Security, Senators Chris Murphy and Shelley Moore Capito
“The message isn’t, ‘Don’t come now,’ it’s, ‘Don’t come in this way, ever,’” Roberta Jacobson, the White House’s southern border coordinator, told Reuters
Mientras persista la utilización de la Fuerza Armada Nacional como principal medio para el control del poder en Venezuela, lo cual incluye la instrumentalización del elemento partidista-ideolo?gico de la institucio?n, no existe posibilidad alguna de iniciar un proceso para su reinstitucionalizacio?n y profesionalización
While success is not guaranteed, this week’s extension of a key deadline in the process of naming a new National Electoral Council (CNE) suggests negotiations are progressing
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. You can get these in your e-mail each week by joining WOLA’s “Beyond the Wall” mailing list.Since what’s happening at the border is one of the principal events in this week’s U.S. news, this update is a “double issue,” longer than normal. See past weekly updates here.
Administration scrambles to accommodate children while expelling most others
Unaccompanied children
Border Patrol apprehended 561 unaccompanied children across the U.S.-Mexico border on March 15, up from a daily average of 332 per day in February. On a March 18 call, senior Biden administration officials told reporters that about 14,000 migrant children who had arrived without a parent or guardian were in U.S. government custody.
Of these, 9,562 were in the shelter system of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR, part of the Department of Health and Human Services or HHS), where COVID-19 response had lowered a 13,200-bed systemwide capacity to about 8,000. Once they are in these shelters, ORR works to place the children with a relative or other sponsor in the United States, with whom they stay while the U.S. immigration court system decides whether deportation would endanger them. In more than 80 percent of cases, a relative is located, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas notified this week. In more than 40 percent of cases, that relative is a parent or legal guardian.
(Read more about how the processing and sheltering of unaccompanied migrant children are supposed to work, and how the caseload has grown, in our updates of March 12, March 5, and February 26 and in a new explainer document that WOLA published on March 17.)
The remaining 4,500 unaccompanied children were stuck in Border Patrol stations and processing centers as of March 18, awaiting placement in ORR’s shelters. This shatters the previous high of 2,600 kids in temporary Border Patrol custody, set in June 2019.
By law, children are not supposed to be in short-term Border Patrol custody for more than 72 hours. The agency’s austere holding facilities—which resemble the holding tanks in a local police station or, as some say, “cages”—are not designed for vulnerable populations. As of March 14, though, when 4,200 kids were in Border Patrol facilities, about 3,000 had been there longer than 72 hours. The average time in custody climbed to 120 hours by March 17. CNN reported on March 15 that more than 300 of the kids had been stuck for more than 10 days.
Two attorneys who visited CBP’s temporary migrant processing facility in Donna, Texas on March 11 came away horrified by what they heard from 20 interviews with kids. The Donna facility, which is mostly sturdy tents, can hold 250 people but had about 1,000 at the time, and children said they had gone days without showering. Kids are sleeping on gym mats or on benches and concrete floors, under thin mylar blankets. Many have been stuck in crowded tents for days. A “staggering” number of the 1,000 kids at Donna are under 10 years old, one of the lawyers told the New York Times.
The main bottleneck here is at ORR: the agency’s shelter system is nearly out of space, and can’t place children with sponsors as fast as new kids are arriving at Border Patrol facilities. The federal government is taking several measures to increase its capacity:
On March 12 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) allowed ORR to return its bed space back to pre-pandemic levels.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, part of DHS) converted the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in downtown Dallas into a shelter for up to 3,000 migrant boys age 15 to 17.
FEMA has also converted an oil workers’ camp in Midland, Texas, into temporary shelter space for another 700 children, and HHS is looking at other facilities in Texas, Arizona, California, Florida, and Virgina.
On March 17 FEMA awarded $110 million in funds appropriated by the American Rescue Plan Act “to eligible local nonprofit and governmental organizations and state governmental facilities” working with migrants.
Secretary Mayorkas reported that more than 560 DHS employees had volunteered “to support HHS in our collective efforts to address the needs of the unaccompanied children.”
Families and expulsions
“We will have, I believe, by next month enough of those beds to take care of these children who have no place to go,” President Joe Biden told ABC News. “Let’s get somethin’ straight though,” the president added (with the contraction in the original transcript). “The vast majority of people crossin’ the border are being sent back. Are being sent back, immediately sent back.”
This is true. As last week’s update noted, 72 percent of migrants Border Patrol encountered at the border in February were expelled, usually within hours, without seeing the inside of a CBP facility or having a chance to ask for asylum or protection. They are either flown back to their own countries or, if they are Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, or Honduran, sent back across the border into Mexico, where the Mexican government has agreed to receive most of them.
This is done under a pandemic public health order, known as “Title 42,” that permits rapid expulsions, and which two presidential administrations have now interpreted to mean rapid expulsions without regard to migrants’ protection needs. The Trump administration began employing Title 42 in March 2020.
The Biden administration continues to use it, but it is not expelling unaccompanied children. It is, however, expelling nearly all single adults and a large portion of family units (parents with children).
As CBS News reported a week ago, nearly 60 percent of families Border Patrol encountered in February were not expelled. That is up from 38 percent not expelled in January. There appear to be two main reasons why a family does not get expelled. Either they are from countries to which expulsions are difficult, like Cuba or Venezuela, or they are part of a minority of families from Central America’s Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) whom Mexico is refusing to take back.
Though there is no public written evidence of a policy, authorities in Mexico’s border state of Tamaulipas have been refusing expulsions of families with small children, citing a lack of family-appropriate shelter space that would violate a recent child welfare law. (Ciudad Juárez faces some capacity limits too, according to the U.S. Border Patrol Chief in El Paso.)
This has led Border Patrol and ICE to release some asylum-seeking Central American families, with notices to appear in U.S. immigration court, in south Texas border cities. There, charities have been taking in the modest flow of family members: about 150 migrants per day in Brownsville, for instance, where the mayor told local news, “It’s not a threat at this point.”
DHS has found a way, though, to expel many families despite Mexico’s localized restrictions: flying them to parts of the border where they can still expel them. On March 9 authorities in El Paso were notified that two daily planeloads of migrants would begin being flown all the way across the state, from south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley region. Even as shelters prepared to greet the families, by March 13 it was evident that DHS was bringing most from the airport straight to the border, sending them across into Ciudad Juárez. WOLA has heard, but hasn’t yet fully confirmed, that flights are also going to San Diego to expel families into Tijuana.
As the border remains closed with no end to Title 42 in sight, national news covered populations of protection-seeking migrants crowding into Mexican border towns: in a new tent encampment outside Tijuana’s El Chaparral port of entry; among the tearful expelled population in Ciudad Juárez; and at a grim government shelter in Reynosa that is now holding 700 unaccompanied children apprehended by Mexican authorities.
The Biden administration’s message to them continues to be “don’t come now,” as repeated by the president himself in his ABC News interview:
I can say quite clearly don’t come over. And the process of getting set up, and it’s not gonna take a whole long time, is to be able to apply for asylum in place. So don’t leave your town or city or community. We’re gonna make sure we have facilities in those cities and towns run by department of—by DHS and also access with HHS, the Health and Human Services, to say you can apply for asylum from where you are right now.
David Shahoulian, the DHS assistant secretary for border security and immigration, acknowledged that “the messaging to discourage migrants from coming had not been working and that the administration would need to be clearer in the future,” according to the New York Times. With thousands of expelled families clearly acting on erroneous information, it’s not clear what the administration can do to counteract inaccurate but rapidly propagated messages from smugglers and on social media. “At some point,” longtime Ciudad Juárez migration official Enrique Valenzuela told Public Radio International, “people were tricked into thinking that the U.S. opened its doors all the way to people seeking international protection.”
Reports indicate Biden administration pressing Mexico to interdict more migrants
In a March 1 video call with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the New York Times reported, President Biden asked Mexico to do more to “help solve the problem” of increased immigration flows to the United States. In the same conversation, López Obrador asked Biden for access to stockpiled doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, which is not yet approved for use in the United States.
On March 18 the White House announced that the U.S. government would share 2.5 million vaccines with Mexico and 1.5 million with Canada. Mexico, meanwhile, has agreed to do more to contain migration through its territory and to take more families expelled under Title 42, the Times and the Washington Post reported. Both countries’ officials insist that there was no vaccines-for-border-enforcement quid pro quo; a senior Mexican diplomat told the Post that it was a “parallel negotiation.”
Whatever it was, the result could be more Title 42 expulsions of families into Mexico, which as noted above has been refusing to take back Central American families with small children in some areas. “Mexican officials have told the Biden administration they are willing to alter or delay the implementation of a law passed in November that limits their ability to detain minors,” the same article continues. DHS Secretary Mayorkas had hinted at this in a March 16 memo: “We are working with Mexico to increase its capacity to receive expelled families.”
Mexican immigration and security forces have meanwhile stepped up immigration raids throughout its territory. Reuters reported that Mexican forces apprehended about 1,200 Central American migrants, including more than 300 children, along southern Mexican cargo train routes between January 25 and February 16. Another 800 were detained aboard buses and tractor trailers “in recent weeks.” Mexico has not released February migrant apprehension data yet; in January it reported apprehending 9,574 migrants—the second-highest monthly total since the pandemic began—of whom 9,145 were from the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador).
“A more visible Mexican immigration enforcement effort is expected to be announced soon, according to current and former Mexican officials,” the Washington Post reported on March 18. The new effort, it added, may be targeted less at migrants along the train route—generally the poorest migrant population—and more at the larger number who travel, often in private vehicles, with paid smugglers. Such an operation may require a large anti-corruption component to succeed, since much of smugglers’ high fees are reportedly spread among officials who enable their vehicles to proceed.
Mexico has also agreed to increase its presence—mainly of members of its National Guard, a new militarized police force—near its southern border with Guatemala, according to the New York Times and Reuters. On March 18, Mexico’s Foreign Relations Secretariat announced that it would be closing its southern border to all non-essential traffic, as the United States has done with its southern border. It’s not clear yet what criteria must be met for travel to be “essential.”
Secretary Mayorkas testifies as GOP cranks up “crisis” rhetoric
“We are on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years. We are expelling most single adults and families. We are not expelling unaccompanied children,” reads a March 16 memo from DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas updating about the situation at the border. The secretary also gave his first major testimony since his nomination process concluded, appearing for four hours before a House Homeland Security Committee that displayed bitter divisions between its Democratic and Republican members.
“The border is secure, and the border is not open,” Mayorkas told the committee. His written testimony laid out very broad outlines for what a new approach to protection-seeking migration might look like, naming three elements: addressing root causes driving migration; helping regional governments offer more asylum or protection in their own countries; and “dramatically” improving the U.S. migrant processing and asylum adjudication systems.
That last point—asylum adjudication—is in bad shape: the testimony notes that backlogs are so bad that “[i]n some locations, there is a more than four-year waiting period for a final hearing.” Mayorkas’s March 16 memo sets a goal of “shorten[ing] from years to months the time it takes to adjudicate an asylum claim while ensuring procedural safeguards and enhancing access to counsel.”
Republican legislators at the March 17 House Homeland hearing were sharply critical. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), a committee member who is also the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, praised “Remain in Mexico” and other Trump-era restrictions on asylum, adding, “With all due respect, this administration has created this crisis. … Cartels and traffickers see that the green light is on at our southern border, and the United States is open for business.”
Several Republicans sought to get Mayorkas to use the word “crisis” to describe the situation at the border. The secretary’s reply to Rep. McCaul was blunt: “A crisis is when a nation is willing to rip a 9-year-old child out of the hands of his or her parent and separate that family to deter future migration.”
“Biden border crisis” is now one of the most prominent messages coming from GOP politicians and media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart. A group of 12 House Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) and ranking Homeland Security Committee member John Katko (R-New York), traveled to El Paso on March 15. They delivered statements in front of a half-mile segment of border wall that was built in 2019 by a private non-profit whose leadership—including former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, until Trump pardoned him—is facing fraud charges. “There’s no other way to claim it than a Biden border crisis,” Rep. McCarthy said. Rep. Katko called it “disorder at the border by executive order.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has been vocal about the border situation, made a March 17 appearance using as a backdrop the Dallas convention center where FEMA is sheltering unaccompanied children. “The Biden administration opened the floodgates to any child who wants to come across the border,” he said. Abbott asked the federal government to give Texas law enforcement officers access to the children in the convention center, in order to investigate human trafficking. The Biden administration turned him down on grounds that the children should not be forced to undergo the trauma of repeating their stories several times.
Two sets of Republicans’ claims about the border situation have been widely debunked.
First, Abbott and others had been alleging that the migrant population is spreading COVID-19. In fact, the acting head of FEMA reported that less than 6 percent of tests on migrants have come back positive, lower than Texas’s overall 7.4 percent positivity rate. Migrants in Brownsville showed a similar positivity rate: 210 of nearly 3,000 people tested since January 25, or 6 percent.
Second is terrorism. Katko, McCarthy, and others on the March 15 El Paso visit said Border Patrol agents told them they had apprehended four individuals so far in fiscal year 2021 who were on the U.S. “Known or Suspected Terrorist” list (or perhaps the Terrorist Screening Database). Three were from Yemen and one was from Serbia; McCarthy had also named Iran, Turkey, and China but later had to retract. While the U.S. government is not transparent about this data, four apprehensions of people on the watchlist appears to be normal, according to a Washington Post fact check that surmised, “the real number ranges from around three to a dozen per year.”
Former officials noted that being on this list is only an alert, and does not point to actual involvement in terrorism; it often indicates a degree of separation from a suspected terrorist. Investigative journalist Ryan Deveraux, who looked deeply into this in 2014, tweeted that the database “is a train wreck that has been shown to include huge numbers of people without facts or evidence.”
The “border crisis” narrative is likely to persist until ORR can accommodate the rising numbers of unaccompanied children, and until processing and other capacity exist to allow a long overdue wind-down of Title 42. In the meantime, as the Washington Post and Politico noted, Republicans are seizing on immigration as their banner issue as they endeavor to win back congressional majorities in the 2022 midterm elections.
“Can we just agree not to use these human beings in front of us as political pawns?” Ruben Garcia, director of El Paso’s Annunciation House migrant shelter, told Politico. “Let’s just make sure they’re taken care of.”
Links
Don’t miss the 3,200-word explainer that WOLA published this week, covering the current moment for U.S. border policy and migration, and recommendations for what lies ahead.
Gen. Glen Vanherck, commander of U.S. Northern Command, told reporters that 3,500 National Guardsmen from 22 states remain deployed at the U.S.-Mexico border. That deployment is “100 percent of the forces” currently at the border, he said, which implies that the regular military personnel deployed by President Trump in 2019 are no longer there. The troops are manning observation sites looking for border-crossers, using 24 UH-72 helicopters for aerial detection and monitoring, and helping to maintain CBP vehicles. DHS, Gen. Vanherck continued, has indicated it would like the military presence to continue after its next expiration date, the September 30 end of fiscal year 2021. (As noted in our February 26 update, the military deployment was the subject of a detailed report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).)
The New York Times covers the fragments of half-built border wall scattered across wilderness areas as the Biden administration’s pause on barrier construction continues. The Palm Springs Desert Sun looks at segments of wall built at great cost in south-central California’s Jacumba wilderness.
The “La 72” migrant shelter, near the Guatemalan border in Tenosique, Mexico, attended to 2,836 people in the pandemic year 2020, according to its annual report released this week. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that “La 72” had already attended to 6,000 migrants so far in 2021.
The remains of 16 migrants massacred—probably by state police—on January 22 in Tamaulipas, Mexico, were returned to the migrants’ hometown of Comitancillo, San Marcos, Guatemala. That town, the Wall Street Journal reports, has sent many emigrants to Carthage, Mississippi, where a giant 2019 ICE raid of chicken processing plants caught up one of the murdered migrants, Édgar López, a longtime Carthage resident who was trying to return.
Border Patrol agent Alejandro Flores-Bañuelos, age 35, died on March 15 after being struck by a passing vehicle while assisting a traffic collision in southeast California’s El Centro sector.
NBC News reports that DHS is requiring that all inquiries to local Border Patrol personnel be routed through the press office in Washington, as was the policy during the Obama administration. Unnamed officials referred to it as a “gag order.”
Former Border Patrol agent Jenn Budd, a prominent critic of her former employer and its culture, believes that the agency is manufacturing a sense of crisis at the border right now. She contends that agents likely helped concoct a strange video, which appeared on CNN, depicting smugglers taking a boatload of migrants across the Rio Grande in broad daylight.
Admiral Craig S. Faller, General Glen D. Vanherck, “Usnorthcom-Ussouthcom Joint Press Briefing” (U.S. Southern Command, U.S. Northern Command, U.S. Department of Defense, March 18, 2021).
100 percent of the forces are currently National Guard forces from 22 states under Title 10 status. Right now the mission is through the end of this fiscal year. It will be the secretary’s decision going forward
Several Mas politicians had been constitutionally in line to fill the presidency ahead of Áñez after his resignation but declined to do so, he noted. “She just caught the ball,” Shultz said
Fair, credible and impartial trials are absolutely necessary in this regard, and that is what the proposal recently formulated by the General Secretariat calls for
Chile, with 19 million people, would be the first country with a constitution drafted by an assembly equally divided between men and women, according to the United Nations
En el Congreso ya circula el texto de una reforma constitucional que propone, además, que dicha ampliación de períodos se extienda a magistrados de las altas cortes, auditor, contralor, procuradora y fiscal general, así como alcaldes, gobernadores, diputados y concejales
Viviana Krsticevic, directora de Cejil, manifestó que nunca se esperaron que el Estado se fuera a retirar del juicio y que si existiera una intención de la Nación de deslegitimar este tribunal internacional, de cara a una eventual sentencia condenatoria, esto sería muy grave
Despite U.S. sanctions, Cuba remains a one-party state. But it is also changing in positive ways, largely due to demographics and the Internet. During this time, the U.S. can either be actively engaged, or watch as our competitors fill the vacuum
The Central American nation has become a terrifying case study in what results when climate change, government failure, gang violence, and natural disaster collide
Prosecutors accuse Hernandez of conspiring “along with” his brother, President Juan Orlando Hernandez, to traffic 200 tons of cocaine to the United States
Se trata de una situación que para cualquier corporación de policía sería ilegal sino fuera porque a la Guardia Nacional se le dio un plazo de dos años para que cumplimentara ese proceso y, con ello, no frenar su despliegue inicial
Mexico would deploy security forces to cut the flow of migrants, the bulk of whom come from Central America’s so-called Northern Triangle of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras
Desde Sinaloa hasta Tijuana, la intervención criminal de Iván Archivaldo y Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, conocidos como “Los Chapitos”, ha intensificado la violencia contra todo aquel lugarteniente que no se someta a su nuevo liderazgo
The U.S. government’s partial and seemingly conflicting disclosures on this issue hardly inspire confidence. Sensitive matters such as this should be explained in clear and specific terms in a public setting
The southern border of the Jacumba Wilderness is now pierced by about 3 miles of 30-foot-tall steel bollard fencing, its construction clearing pristine habitat and bulldozing what are believed to be cultural resources of the Kumeyaay Nation
Here’s a thought experiment: If the administration did get the system working faster and more humanely, would Republicans view that as a success? It’s doubtful
The Border Patrol encountered 561 unaccompanied children on Monday, up from an average daily peak of 370 during Trump’s presidency in May 2019 and 354 during a peak in Barack Obama’s presidency in June 2014
Since Jan. 25, 210 migrants have tested positive for COVID-19 — a seven percent positivity rate for the nearly 3,000 people who have been processed. In comparison, the state averaged nearly double that positivity rate at 13 percent
You may have seen that Colombia’s transitional justice tribunal recently found that the country’s armed forces likely killed a shocking 6,402 civilians between 2002 and 2008. WOLA is putting on an event today at 4:00 Eastern to talk about it, and I’ll be presenting. Here’s the text of the announcement at WOLA’s website, where you can RSVP:
**Due to emergency security concerns, Sergeant Mora will not present during this panel**
The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) cordially invites you to our webinar:
Afro-Colombian Sergeant Carlos Eduardo Mora of Colombia’s 15th Mobile Brigade of Ocaña observed inconsistencies in the combat deaths that members of his battalion were reporting in their counterinsurgency statistics. In 2008, Mora denounced his colleagues for killing civilians and later passing them as enemy combats. These extrajudicial killings were widespread throughout the country and became nationally known—and erroneously termed as “false positives”—when a scandal involving 19 murdered young men from the southwestern Bogotá neighborhood of Soacha was undercovered.
Mora has suffered greatly for his role as a whistleblower, having faced multiple types of retaliation like public humiliation and death threats. His security situation became so serious that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a resolution in 2013 urging the Colombian state to protect Mora and his family.
In February, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, JEP)—Colombia’s transitional justice tribunal devised in the 2016 peace accord—revealed that the Colombian armed forces committed at least 6,402 extrajudicial killings between 2002 and 2008. In light of these disturbing revelations, WOLA’s Director for the Andes Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli will moderate a panel to discuss the role of individuals like Sergeant Mora and hear from two human rights and U.S. military aid experts. Alberto Yepes, Coordinator for the Human Rights Observatory of the Colombia-Europe-United States Coordination (Coordinación Colombia-Europa-Estados Unidos, CCEU) coalition, will discuss the implications of the JEP’s recent order on extrajudicial killings. Adam Isacson, WOLA’s Director for Defense Oversight, will discuss U.S. funding to Colombia’s armed forces and what actions can be taken to guarantee justice in these horrific cases.
I’m not easy to reach today due to a full schedule. (How to contact me)
I’ll be speaking at an event put on today by WOLA’s Colombia program. I put together what I believe is a blistering talk on the country’s current human rights trajectory, so don’t miss it. I’ve also got on the schedule two interviews, two coalition meetings, and an internal meeting, and I’ll be working on a weekly border update. All that may make me hard to contact today.
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