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This was a great panel on November 7, with speakers in four countries (the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia). We talked about challenges for dignified migration at a time of hardening borders and more military and police involvement in migration control throughout the region.
Many thanks to Hispanics in Philanthropy and Open Society Foundations for organizing it and inviting me to participate.
Here’s an 1,100-word statement recalling and highlighting some of the basic principles underlying our border and migration work. Backed up with lots of numbers and data, of course.
The main points:
Read it here. It comes with an embedded video:
I think I’m getting better at making these? Obtaining a cheap teleprompter helped.
In this week’s WOLA U.S.-Mexico Border Update:
In this week’s WOLA U.S.-Mexico Border Update:
We hear a lot that people at the U.S.-Mexico border are being allowed into the United States “illegally.” Well, no.
For decades, U.S. law has stated that if you fear for your life or freedom if returned to your country, you are entitled to due process. Asylum seekers are doing something legal. And many of them qualify.
Here’s a two-minute explanation:
Here’s an 8-minute segment that aired yesterday on France24 Español. A conversation in Spanish with anchor Rosa Pérez about the possible future spread of fentanyl into Latin America, and why the United States has been unable to contain the spread of the compact, highly addictive opioid.
You hear a lot about the popularity of El Salvador’s authoritarian-trending president, Nayib Bukele, who has overseen an anti-gang “state of exception” that has jailed more than 1 percent of the country’s population since March 2022.
The result has been a sharp drop in violent crime that has people throughout the Americas saying “we need a Bukele here.” But there’s a dark side that’s evident to all who care enough not to look away.
One who’s not looking away is filmmaker Amada Torruella, whose short film “La Isla” appears today on the website of the New Yorker. It’s about the family of a man who authorities took away during a sweep early in the state of emergency, even though the part of coastal El Salvador where he lives does not have a significant gang presence.
The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer narrates:
The subjects of Torruella’s film are all female—the wives, mothers, and sisters of the men who have been arrested and sent to prison. “We had just come back from doing some shopping,” one of them says, “when suddenly an officer from the Armed Forces approached him.” She sits on a tidy bed in a small house, sifting through legal papers; her partner has been gone eighteen days. “It’s a lie,” she says, of the government’s accusation. Five months later, she’s still not heard anything from him.
Even though El Salvador’s homicide rate is now purported to be nearly as low as Denmark’s, there is no end in sight to the “state of exception” limiting basic rights, which has been renewed 18 times by Bukele’s legislative supermajority. As Bukele heads for re-election next year even though the country’s laws forbid it, he at least needs to end the pain of thousands of innocents caught up in his sweeps.
Here (en español) is an episode of DemocraciaAbierta’s #Unboxing program, in which host Sandra Borda (of Colombia’s Universidad de los Andes) and I discuss the Biden administration’s post-Title 42 changes to immigration policy. We recorded this in late May, so it’s not razor-sharp current, but we do go into some detail that you don’t often get in a video interview.
In this week’s WOLA U.S.-Mexico Border Update:
As I noted earlier today, I recorded a great podcast yesterday with the director of WOLA’s Mexico program, Stephanie Brewer. It’s about a report they published last week about the growing power of Mexico’s armed forces, and how hard it is to hold them accountable for human rights abuse even as they confront, and arrest, thousands of people per year while carrying out policing missions.
Here’s WOLA’s podcast landing page. And here’s the podcast, embedded:
In this week’s WOLA U.S.-Mexico Border Update:
This makes four weeks in a row that I’ve tried using my new office space at “renovated WOLA” to make quick little mobile-friendly promo videos for things we’ve published. This is the first one with the teleprompter setup that I’ve jury-rigged: a fast overview of the latest Weekly Border Update.
These are “experimenting in public,” figuring out the production, the hardware, and the software as I go. They’ve performed modestly on Twitter and invisibly on Mastodon, but reasonably well on TikTok (where they reliably attract obnoxious far-right commenters) and on Instagram.
My thanks to Gonzalo Abarca and Voice of America’s Foro Interamericano program for inviting me to participate as a panelist on September 1. We talked about the status of counter-narcotics efforts in light of my recent mini-report on the collapse of coca markets in Colombia.
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