• Two New York Times reporters and a photographer traveled 1,000 miles across Colombia to find out how badly people are hurting as the pandemic approaches (but hasn’t yet reached) it’s height. People are hurting really f***ing badly, they found.
• Colombia’s La Silla Vacía ran an interesting interview with psychologist Sandra Trujillo, whose work has focused on the mindset of military personnel and other combatants. What explains the lack of empathy, of humanity, that has been evident from Colombia to Minneapolis to the U.S.-Mexico border? A few clues here.
• Brookings’s Vanda Felbab-Brown examines eight occasions since 1990 when Latin American governments negotiated with violent criminal (not insurgent, not political) groups. She highlights several preliminary findings, much of them reasons why this is a lot more difficult than a political negotiation.
• Spain’s El País accompanies one of very few mothers in Mexico whose missing son’s remains are identified and handed over to her. To me, anyway, her story says so much about daily life for the majority in Mexico today.
• Colombia’s Semana magazine reveals something that many of us suspected: teams carrying out (often U.S.-backed) coca eradication systematically inflate their numbers. It’s hard to blame them, given the conditions under which they work.