• Every few months, a team of researchers at the University of California at San Diego’s Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies and the University of Texas’s Strauss Center surveys U.S.-Mexico border crossings and summarizes the “metering” situation at each one: how many people are waiting, who runs the list, how many people CBP typically takes in a day. In their latest “Metering Update,” they count 15,000 people waiting—a big drop from the past, due to the near impossibility of winning asylum at the border. Most are now Mexican.
• The International Committee of the Red Cross mission in Colombia released its annual report, and it is grim. They emphasize increases in landmine victims, confinement of communities, and attacks on medical personnel.
• As Mexican women prepare for a day of nationwide protest on March 9 against targeted violence, Valeria Durán and Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad published an incredible report and multimedia presentation documenting how badly the country’s justice system has failed women who are victims of violence.
• It seems like a no-brainer that demobilized FARC fighters would be excellent mine clearance personnel. Their group laid most of the mines. A key obstacle, though: no matter how committed they are to the peace process, they can’t get a dime in U.S. aid money—not even to attend a U.S.-funded conference—because the FARC is still on the U.S. list of terrorist groups. Andrés Bermúdez Liévano reports at justiceinfo.net.
• At Honduras’s ContraCorriente, Fernando Silva discusses the torturous route of the country’s recent police reform efforts, which have really been thousands of politicized mass firings instead of institutional reform. “Since Juan Orlando Hernández hasn’t managed to give the Military Police constitutional status [as a permanent branch of the armed forces], he’s doing away with the civilian police so that the Military Police may occupy its space,” a former police commissioner tells Silva.