• In a report titled, in Spanish, “They Call Us the Crazy Women With the Shovels,” the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center shines a light on Mexico’s forced disappearance crisis by telling the stories of nine mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters searching for their loved ones.
• Colombia is still contending with revelations that Army intelligence has been spying and building detailed dossiers on reporters, judges, politicians, human rights defenders, and other law-abiding civilians. La Silla Vacía bravely profiles some of the generals and colonels involved in the scandal, and what their involvement probably looked like.
• Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador issued a decree this week giving the military a leading role in policing for the remainder of his government (through 2024). SinEmbargo looks at some of the things that the vaguely worded decree now allows the armed forces to do, with unclear civilian supervision.
• A detailed report by Human Rights First offers the best current overview of how the Trump administration’s COVID-19 response, including blanket expulsions of asylum-seeking Mexicans and Central Americans—including unaccompanied children, is worsening the humanitarian situation along the border.
• At The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer points out two vectors by which the Trump administration’s immigration hard line is spreading the coronavirus right now: via deportations and in ICE detention centers. Guatemala’s health minister tells Blitzer that the United States has become “the Wuhan of the Americas.” An unnamed U.S. official tells him, “The White House doesn’t have time for Guatemala’s bullsh*t. Deportations must continue.”