• Human Rights Watch worked for many months on this report about killings of social leaders in Colombia. It’s especially strong in its dissection of the Colombian government’s ineffective response, and the ways in which the justice system fails to hold killers accountable.
• The American Immigration Council put out a report on “the Legacy of Racism within the U.S. Border Patrol” that filled a lot of information gaps for me about the agency’s deeply troubled organizational culture, especially about the patterns that developed in its early years.
• I’m intrigued by Latin America’s “Texases”—frontier places that are recently settled by outsiders, taken over by agribusiness or extractives, deeply religious and conservative, and booming and populating until the short-term bonanza—and the environment—are exhausted. Bryan Harris visits a classic example, Brazil’s Mato Grosso, for the Financial Times.
• This report, coordinated by Ernesto López Portillo at the Universidad Iberoamericana’s Citizen Security Program, is a data-rich, current, and easy-to-follow guide to the dangerous recent militarization of policing and public security in AMLO’s Mexico.
• The Washington Post’s Kevin Sieff spent some time with Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, whom U.S. prosecutors believe has been involved in drug trafficking, and looks at how the authoritarian-leaning leader is trying to maintain U.S. favor as Trump gives way to Biden.