• Colombia’s transitional justice system’s historic indictment of the former top FARC leadership, for kidnapping 21,396 people, is linked at the bottom of this press statement, along with a large, devastating collection of excerpts from victims’ testimonies.
  • At Scientific American, April Reese looks at the challenges that stand in the way of restoring the environmental damage done by the Trump administration’s rush to build miles of border wall.
  • Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive eulogizes Chilean judge Juan Guzmán Tapia, who died on January 22. Guzmán dared to prosecute Augusto Pinochet for human rights crimes starting in 2000. “His pioneering judicial investigations opened the door to hundreds of human rights prosecutions in Chile.”
  • The Pinochet government coerced thousands of Chilean mothers into giving up their children for adoption by parents in wealthier countries. Now many adults are learning troubling things about their origins, Aaron Nelson recounts in the Guardian.
  • There are between nine and nineteen “high impact” criminal groups operating in Mexico, with two dominant ones—the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels—plus at least 100 small groups, according to a Revista Zeta analysis at SinEmbargo.