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Nicaraguan author Gioconda Belli earned her money by writing novels that changed how people feel and see the world.
Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega—who made his money by stealing from, terrorizing, and traumatizing people—just seized Belli’s home this week.
Good on Colombian President Gustavo Petro for showing solidarity and observing, “Ortega hace lo mismo que Pinochet.”
As I noted earlier today, I recorded a great podcast yesterday with the director of WOLA’s Mexico program, Stephanie Brewer. It’s about a report they published last week about the growing power of Mexico’s armed forces, and how hard it is to hold them accountable for human rights abuse even as they confront, and arrest, thousands of people per year while carrying out policing missions.
Here’s WOLA’s podcast landing page. And here’s the podcast, embedded:
In this week’s WOLA U.S.-Mexico Border Update:
I recorded a great podcast yesterday with the director of WOLA’s Mexico program, Stephanie Brewer. It’s about a report they published last week about the growing power of Mexico’s armed forces, and how hard it is to hold them accountable for human rights abuse even as they confront, and arrest, thousands of people per year while carrying out policing missions.
Here’s the language from WOLA’s podcast landing page.
A new report from WOLA dives deeply into the growing power and roles of Mexico’s military, and what that means for human rights, democracy, and U.S.-Mexico relations.
WOLA’s Mexico Program published Militarized Transformation: Human Rights and Democratic Controls in a Context of Increasing Militarization in Mexico on September 6. The report voices alarm about the Mexican armed forces’ growing list of civilian tasks, and civilians’ diminishing ability to hold military personnel accountable for human rights abuse and other illegal behavior.
In some new findings, Militarized Transformation reveals official data showing that the military isn’t even reporting its arrests of civilians to civilian security authorities and oversight bodies. The report updates and group together various indicators regarding the justice system and respect for fundamental rights by the security forces, with a focus on the armed forces and the National Guard, as well as the differentiated impacts and situations faced by women. And it makes a series of short-term and long-term recommendations for needed reforms.
This podcast episode features the report’s principal author, Stephanie Brewer, WOLA’s director for Mexico. Brewer discusses the report’s main findings, conclusions, and recommendations, along with a general view of Mexico’s democracy, civil-military relations, and U.S. policy.
“We recognize militarization is is the reality we’re currently working in,” Brewer concludes. “But while that’s going on, what possible reason could there be for the country to want the armed forces not to be operating under effective civilian control or not to be transparent about things like their use of force? Or not to be fully giving information to Congress? That would have to be something that that is in everybody’s interest in the short term.”
Download the podcast .mp3 file here. Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.
Militarized Transformation is the latest of several WOLA reports examining the military’s growing power in Mexico and its human rights and democracy implications. Among them:
With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that nearly half of all migrant deaths worldwide in 2022 occurred in the U.S.-Mexico border zone. The 686 deaths counted by IOM’s Missing Migrant Project are an undercount, limited by available data. Border Patrol is preliminarily reporting a modest decrease in migrant deaths in 2023, but the full toll of this summer’s record heat remains unclear.
Media reports from throughout the Americas in the past week point to record numbers of migrants transiting Panama and Honduras, while large numbers are stranded at the Peru-Chile border, northern Nicaragua, southern Guatemala, southern Mexico, and of course northern Mexico.
As happened in May, asylum seekers trying to turn themselves in between layers of San Diego’s double border wall are not being processed right away. Border Patrol is leaving them outdoors between the walls for a day or more with little food, water, or bathroom facilities.
The Biden administration is considering a policy change that would require many asylum-seeking families to remain in south Texas while awaiting credible fear interviews. Texas’s state government has now put 36,000 migrants on buses to the U.S. interior. An Illinois coroner’s report about a Venezuelan girl who died aboard a Texas bus has discrepancies with Texas’s account of her health when her family boarded the bus. A federal appeals court is allowing Texas to keep a wall of buoys in the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass while it considers a Justice Department lawsuit to take them down.
A report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) found that the U.S.-Mexico border was “the deadliest land route for migrants worldwide on record” in 2022. IOM’s Missing Migrant Project, which maintains a large database of worldwide migrant deaths, counted 1,457 deaths hemisphere-wide last year, of which 686 occurred on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
As the organization acknowledges, this is an undercount. On the U.S. side alone, “In FY [fiscal year] 2022, more than 890 migrants died attempting to enter the United States between ports of entry across the SWB [southwest border]”—more than the IOM figure, the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and Justice reported in March, in their draft of the May asylum “transit ban” rule. The departments offered no further detail, and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has yet to produce the 2022 version of its Border Rescues and Mortality Data report. The 890 figure, too, is an undercount, as regional humanitarian groups along the border find a higher count of migrant remains than Border Patrol does in the regions that they cover.
“Although the data shows that deaths and disappearances in the U.S.-Mexico border decreased by 8 per cent from the previous year, the 2022 figure is likely higher than the available information suggests,” IOM notes, “due to missing official data, including information from Texas border county coroner’s offices and the Mexican search and rescue agency.” Of the 686 documented deaths in 2022, 307 “were linked to the hazardous crossing of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts” in Arizona and New Mexico.
Elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, IOM counted 350 deaths on migration routes in the Caribbean in 2022, a sharp increase over previous years, and 141 in the inhospitable Darién Gap jungle straddling the border between Colombia and Panama.
Between October 2022 and August 2023, according to a recent WOLA interaction with a Border Patrol official, the agency found the remains of 640 migrants, a 24 percent decrease over the same period in 2022. This could be due to a somewhat smaller migrant population—Border Patrol’s 2023 apprehensions were down 9 percent through July compared with 2022—and stepped-up search and rescue efforts.
On the other hand, this year’s record-breaking heat, especially in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts, may have killed more people than we yet know. Border Patrol told Border Report this week that it has found 140 remains since October in its El Paso Sector, which includes the area around the Texas city and all of New Mexico. That is up very sharply from 71 in 2022, and from an average of 13 in the 24 years between 1998 and 2021.
In the El Paso Sector, “the wall, the arrival of the Texas National Guard, the surge of Department of Public Safety patrols, all of that is pushing people to the desert,” Carlos Marentes, the executive director of the Border Farm Workers Center, told Border Report.
After a lull following the end of the Title 42 pandemic expulsions policy, countries along the northbound migration route are again experiencing elevated levels of migration, which may portend record arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border this fall. These narratives all come from news coverage from the past seven days.
On Peru’s border with Chile, Infobae reported that dozens of Venezuelan, Colombian, Ecuadorian, and Haitian citizens are stranded and sleeping outdoors in the desert border city of Tacna, as Peruvian police prevent them from moving further. The migrants had been living in Chile, which ended a state of emergency in its northern border zone on August 27, making northbound migration somewhat easier.
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Thanks to Juan Carlos Iragorri for giving me a couple of minutes to talk about what’s happening with coca cultivation in Colombia on the “Y Esto No Es Todo” podcast produced by Georgetown University’s Americas Institute. (Audio in Spanish)
Border Patrol is once again keeping hundreds of asylum-seeking migrants outdoors, without even bathroom facilities, for one to two days between the double layers of the border wall between San Diego and Tijuana.
The last time we saw this practice, in May, it generated an outcry, including a letter from Democratic members of Congress and a complaint filed by the Southern Border Communities Coalition.
Now it’s happening again. From California Public Radio:
The camp is in San Ysidro, between the primary and secondary border walls. Migrants there sleep outside with little protection from the elements. There are no bathrooms, leaving men, women and children to relieve themselves in nearby bushes.
…Customs and Border Patrol personnel give the migrants water bottles, cheese and crackers. Everything else comes from volunteers in San Diego and Tijuana, according to several migrants interviewed by KPBS.
Volunteers provided fruits, blankets, medicine, diapers, menstrual pads and generators to charge people’s phones.
…Migrants interviewed in the camp Tuesday told KPBS that they were not free to leave the camp whenever they wished. All of them had wristbands given to them by CBP personnel. Many of the people in the camp want to pursue asylum claims in the United States.
Volunteers told California Public Radio that the migrants are spending between 24 and 36 hours in the camp before agents pick them up for processing. In the meantime, they must relieve themselves in bushes between the fence lines.
Border Patrol claims that they are facing capacity challenges. These challenges are certain to increase as numbers of migrants, many of them asylum seekers, have been growing since July and may continue to grow into the fall. If that happens, and if Border Patrol is allowed to keep using the space between the walls as an open-air pen, then the wait times will get longer.
Many of the asylum seekers have given up on waiting for the “CBP One” smartphone app to cough up an appointment. Enrique Lucero, the director of Tijuana’s municipal migrant affairs office, told the local El Imparcial “there are between 5,500 and 6,000 migrants in city government-recognized shelters, who are waiting to obtain a CBP One appointment to begin their asylum process in a way that is safe and ordered by the United States.”
At the San Ysidro port of entry, CBP is taking 385 CBP One appointments per day—16 times smaller than the officially known portion of Tijuana’s migrant shelter population—plus maybe 10 more “walk-ups,” according to an August 31 report from the University of Texas’s Strauss Center.
In its latest annual report, the UK-based group Global Witness counted 177 murders of environmental defenders worldwide last year. And 156 of them happened in Latin America.
Colombia tops the global ranking with 60 murders in yet another dire year for the country. This is almost double the number of killings compared to 2021, when 33 defenders lost their lives. Once again, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, small-scale farmers and environmental activists have been viciously targeted.
In 2022, voters in Brazil and Colombia elected leaders who lean hard into pro-environment rhetoric. That may not mean daily life is any safer for those countries’ beleaguered communities trying to defend forests and other resources. Next year’s numbers, though, absolutely must go down. This is inexcusable.
This is from a September 5 update from the Regional Inter-agency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela (R4V). Some changes owe to governments (like Panama’s) recalculating their population estimates, rather than actual movement of Venezuelan migrants.
Eight countries (not including the United States) now have at least 100,000 Venezuelan-born people living within their borders:
Yesterday, outside the La Moneda presidential palace in Santiago, Chilean President Gabriel Boric held a dignified commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the September 11, 1973 military coup that replaced elected president Salvador Allende with military dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
No leader of Chile’s armed forces deigned to attend.
From Chile’s La Tercera, in an article entitled “The government’s frustrated attempt to involve the Armed Forces in the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup”:
As an official activity, the Executive was expecting the presence of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force (Fach), but they did not arrive.
General Javier Iturriaga, commander in chief of the Army; Admiral Juan Andrés de la Maza, of the Navy; and the head of the Fach, Air General Hugo Rodríguez, were invited by the government to the ceremony in La Moneda, but all three, in unison, declined to attend.
The three branches of the Armed Forces excused themselves from attending, through the Ministry of Defense, to which they sent their refusal to participate in the event. When this ministry was consulted about the reasons given by the armed institutions, and about the specific absence, it did not mention them.
At the 50th anniversary of Chile’s bloody military coup, the pollster CADEM found a nation that remains divided, at times sharply. Of Chileans surveyed:
At least there’s some rhetorical consensus here:
According to the Colombian daily El Espectador, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime detected 230,000 hectares of coca in Colombia in 2022. That amount—which extends the dark blue line in the chart below to 2022—would be the most coca that the UN agency has detected in any year since it began issuing estimates in 1999.
Colombia was governed for just over the first seven months of 2022 by Iván Duque, and for the remaining less than five months by Gustavo Petro.
Petro was still putting together his government by the time 2022 ended. His drug policy team only published their counter-drug strategy this past weekend. While that is a notably slow pace, it was not the cause for 2022’s result.
Petro has sought to de-emphasize forced eradication of small-scale coca farmers’ crops, which places the government in an adversarial relationship with poor people in historically abandoned territories. Through July, forced eradication is down 79 percent over the same period in 2022. Instead, the new strategy document promotes interdiction, targeting cocaine production and related finances, and other strategies.
Still, critics of the Petro government’s choices will use the 230,000 figure to oppose them. It’s possible, though, that the 2023 coca acreage figure could be reduced, because a historic drop in prices may be making the crop less attractive to many growers.
“This summer’s record-melting heat has pushed migrant deaths to a 25-year record with more than 130 victims and counting in the Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector, which covers the westernmost tip of Texas and all of New Mexico,” reads a September 10 El Paso Times report on the discovery of the remains of 2 migrant women in Sunland Park, New Mexico. (Sunland Park is the first town you hit when you go west out of El Paso.)
On August 30, the El Paso Times’s Lauren Villagrán reported that, amid record summer heat, “U.S. Border Patrol reports at least 136 migrants have died in El Paso Sector” in fiscal year 2023, up from 71 in 2022.
The number of migrants who’ve died in El Paso and New Mexico since October 2022 is surely greater than 136, as many remains are never found. The chart above shows what 136 looks like in this sector, though.
The death toll has undergone a vertiginous increase in the past three years as people with no other apparent legal pathway attempt to defy the heat and enter the United States through the Chihuahuan Desert, often having to cross fast-flowing irrigation canals along the way.
Across the entire U.S.-Mexico border, Border Patrol hasn’t reported a migrant deaths total for 2022 yet, though the Biden administration’s draft asylum rule—shared in March—reported that “in FY 2022, more than 890 migrants died attempting to enter the United States between ports of entry across the SWB [southwest border].” That was up sharply from 565 in 2021 and 254 in 2020.
For many of us, the Chilean coup changed the way we thought—and still think—about the United States. It also sparked the creation of new organizations dedicated to educating and promoting a human rights framework for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.
Brilliant piece at The Hill by WOLA’s founder, Joe Eldridge, who was in Chile 50 years ago today when the U.S.-backed coup happened.
Emily Bregel published a terrific story at the Arizona Daily Star about our August 2 report, with the Kino Border Initiative, about abuse and accountability at Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol.
Bregel got comment about our findings from CBP, former CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus, and the offices of Rep. Raúl Grijalva and Sen. Mark Kelly, among others.
And she had a great conversation with my co-author on the report, Zoe Martens of the Kino Border Initiative:
At Kino, Martens offered to help the man file a complaint about the violation of his right to request asylum. She explained he likely wouldn’t get justice in his case, but that documenting it could help improve the system for others. The man quickly agreed, saying, “Don’t worry — we’re used to lack of justice in our own country,” Martens recalled.
The comment stuck with her.
“These are our U.S. accountability systems. I think we’d assume they are more effective than in places where we know impunity is widespread,” as in Mexico, she said. “We must, and we can, do better.”
(Events that I know of, anyway. All times are U.S. Eastern.)
A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released on September 7, covering harms done by Trump-era U.S.-Mexico border wall construction, includes the only number I’ve seen of the total amount of barriers currently built along the border.
A bit oddly, the report doesn’t exactly say how many miles are fenced off. But GAO reported that number in 2017, and last week’s report explains how many new and replacement miles got built during the Trump years. It’s easy to add them together.
| 2017 | 2023 | Difference | % Difference | |
| Pedestrian Barrier | 354 | 636 | 282 | +80% |
| Vehicle Barrier | 300 | 105 | -195 | -65% |
| Total Border Fencing | 654 | 741 | 87 | +13% |
Taking those sources together reveals that 741 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border is now fenced off.
Of that amount, 636 miles are fenced off with what usually gets called “border wall”: “pedestrian fencing,” or segments of barrier that are high enough, with slats close together enough, to block someone crossing on foot (and unwilling to climb). The other 105 miles are “vehicle fencing”: usually, barrier that is low or widely spaced enough to walk through or over, but not to drive through or over.
The Trump administration built 87 miles of border wall in spaces that had no barrier before. That doesn’t sound like much: a 13 percent increase over where things stood at the end of the Obama administration. But Trump’s people replaced 195 miles of vehicle fencing with pedestrian fencing, for a total of 282 miles of new pedestrian barrier: an 80 percent increase. And they made a lot of old pedestrian barrier taller, or double-layer.
The entire U.S.-Mexico border is about 1,950 miles long (it’s hard to measure exactly over all of the Rio Grande’s twists and turns). So today, about 38 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border is fenced off, 33 percent of it with pedestrian fencing. The Trump administration added new fencing over 4 percent of the border that was previously unfenced, and new pedestrian fencing over 14 percent of the border.
Most of Texas, which follows the Rio Grande and is largely privately owned land, is not fenced.
Here’s where I derive the numbers in the table above:
From report GAO-17-331, Southwest Border Security: Additional Actions Needed to Better Assess Fencing’s Contributions to Operations and Provide Guidance for Identifying Capability Gaps, published February 16, 2017:
From report GAO-23-105443, Southwest Border: Additional Actions Needed to Address Cultural and Natural Resource Impacts from Barrier Construction, published September 7, 2023:
My Twitter account is now dormant. It’s not fun walking away from a platform where more than 16,000 people follow you. But remaining on that platform is even less fun, and no longer defensible.
The thought process behind my decision to leave is in the table at the bottom of this post. From now on, I’ll still check Twitter for news that I might not see elsewhere, mainly the accounts on a private “news posters” list that I maintain. But I don’t plan to post content, or to like or retweet content that I see.
I’m still posting lots of things, though. I’m just doing it elsewhere.
Here’s where you can find me.
I’m trying to do it as much as possible on platforms I own, and copying it elsewhere. (What the IndieWeb folks call POSSE, “Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.”) At those “elsewhere” platforms, I’m still figuring out what makes them different, if anything.
I’ve also been posting a bunch of shorter videos over the past several weeks. I’m sharing them at some experimental accounts for video content:
Then there are some platforms I’m neglecting but where I at least try to “keep the lights on” from time to time:
| Reasons to stay | Reasons to go |
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I’m angry at Ratboys (a group I’ve seen twice, because they’re always touring and open for everybody) for writing a song that’s absolutely brilliant and instantly catchy—but I can’t seem to hear without tearing up.
Stereogum explains why:
“I wrote this song a few days after the death of my grandma in June 2020,” says Ratboys’ Julia Steiner. “She didn’t have COVID, but because of the pandemic my grandpa wasn’t able to visit her in person at the nursing home to say goodbye. He ended up standing outside her room and saying goodbye through an open window. A lot of the lyrics are direct quotes of things he said to her in those final moments.”
Gorgeous but gutting. Damn it, got something in my eye again.
A new “Child Alert” from UNICEF shows how downright medieval conditions are becoming for Latin America’s region-wide exodus. “Today, the largest group of migrant children consists of children below 11 years old – accounting for up to 91 per cent of children on the move at some key transit points.”
A three-year-old Venezuelan girl died on August 10 aboard one of the buses that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has contracted to take asylum-seeking migrants from his state’s border areas to cities run by Democratic mayors—in the case of this bus, to Chicago.
On September 6, the coroner of Marion County, Illinois, where Jismary Alejandra Barboza Gonzalez’s bus was passing through when she died of “bacterial Shigella Flexneri Colitis and Aspiration Pneumonia,” put out a statement about the event.
Juxtaposing that document with the August 11 account of Texas’s Department of Emergency Management shows a confusing discrepancy about the child’s symptoms when Texas officials placed her and her parents aboard a bus. See the highlighted text below.
I learned a lot about the current moment in Venezuela during this podcast conversation with one of my newest colleagues, Laura Dib, the recently arrived director of WOLA’s Venezuela Program. Here’s the overview text from WOLA’s podcast landing page.
In this podcast, Laura Cristina Dib, WOLA’s director for Venezuela, discusses the daunting political situation in Venezuela with WOLA’s Adam Isacson.
Venezuela is to hold presidential elections at some point in 2024. Whether they will be at least somewhat free and fair is unlikely but far from impossible. It is a goal that must guide the international community and Venezuelan civil society.
The episode covers the recent naming of a new National Electoral Council, a seemingly technical step with wide-ranging consequences; the need for a clear and transparent electoral timetable; and the importance of updating voter rolls and other crucial steps for the elections’ credibility.
Laura Dib notes a recent increase in repression, threats, and disqualification of candidates as the Maduro regime appears to grow uneasy. That makes the international role increasingly important—as it has been in Guatemala’s elections—starting with a stronger commitment to a humanitarian agreement, which resulted from the 2022 negotiations and has yet to be implemented. “International” includes Venezuela’s neighbors, like Brazil and Colombia.
“There’s always hope, I don’t think that everything is lost,” Dib concludes. “I think that there’s always opportunity, and I continue to work very closely with a civil society that is more knowledgeable than ever on how to advocate for their rights beyond their borders.”
Download the podcast .mp3 file here. Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.
“The Mexican government is giving more and more power to institutions known precisely for their lack of transparency, and it is doing so without adequate civilian controls, in a process that will be difficult to reverse,” warns a report published today by my colleagues in WOLA’s Mexico Program.
Ernesto López Portillo of the Universidad Iberoamericana Citizen Security Program, writing at Elefante Blanco, echoed those concerns:
The total operational deployment of military personnel for public security in 2023 exceeds the total number of state and municipal police. The news is unprecedented in contemporary Mexico.
…The total operational deployment of military personnel for public security already amounts to 261,644, while state and municipal police forces total 251,760.
Tom Cartwright’s latest Witness at the Border monthly report on ICE flights finds “removal flights increased by 54 (55%) from 99 to 153 which was 13 (9%) over August 2022, and up 34 (28%) from the prior 6-month average.”
Of the 44 months Tom has tracked, only September 2021 had more removal flights. That month, the Biden administration went into overdrive expelling Haitians after the Del Rio “horse reins” incident.
There was even a deportation flight to Kathmandu (not shown below).
Screenshot from page 22 of the report
The Justice Department won its lawsuit against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott over the ridiculous border buoys in the Rio Grande.
The court just ordered the “buoy wall” taken down by September 15.
(All times are U.S. Eastern.)
The Mexican government’s refugee agency, COMAR, just posted data through August about the number of migrants from other countries who have applied for asylum in Mexico. Eight months into the year, COMAR is nearly at 100,000 applications, on pace to reach, or be just below, 150,000 by the end of the year. Mexico appears certain to break 2021’s record of 129,768 asylum applications.
Most applicants are from Haiti, Honduras, and Cuba. As Gretchen Kuhner of Mexico’s non-governmental Institute for Women in Migration (IMUMI) pointed out in last week’s WOLA Podcast, a lot of migrants stranded in Mexico are being channeled into the asylum system by a lack of other options for having a legal status in the country.
This makes four weeks in a row that I’ve tried using my new office space at “renovated WOLA” to make quick little mobile-friendly promo videos for things we’ve published. This is the first one with the teleprompter setup that I’ve jury-rigged: a fast overview of the latest Weekly Border Update.
These are “experimenting in public,” figuring out the production, the hardware, and the software as I go. They’ve performed modestly on Twitter and invisibly on Mastodon, but reasonably well on TikTok (where they reliably attract obnoxious far-right commenters) and on Instagram.
My thanks to Gonzalo Abarca and Voice of America’s Foro Interamericano program for inviting me to participate as a panelist on September 1. We talked about the status of counter-narcotics efforts in light of my recent mini-report on the collapse of coca markets in Colombia.
I never bothered to plot this out before: the last 286 months of Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants, according to the nine geographic sectors in which the agency divides the U.S.-Mexico border.
Here’s the data table, based on data CBP provides from fiscal years 2000-2020 and 2020-present.
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