• PBS’s Frontline program ran a very good episode on how the Trump administration’s migrant crackdown has affected the twin border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. As I noted after returning from a trip there last month, the situation is very grim there. Still, it was good to see a few people I met with there in the video.
• Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake happened 10 years ago this week. The Miami Herald’s veteran journalist Jacqueline Charles reports from a country where many of the disaster’s victims still live in shantytowns and billions of dollars in donor funds are unaccounted for.
• “Year One of AMLO’s Mexico” is a balanced, thorough overview of the populist’s successes and failures, by Humberto Beck, Carlos Bravo Regidor and Patrick Iber in Dissent. “One year in, there is a growing sense of unease that the Fourth Transformation is not delivering the changes that Mexicans so desperately need.”
• Jack Herrera in Politico magazine on Tijuana: “How Trump Created a New Global Capital of Exiles.” The city has a growing population of non-Spanish speaking foreigners stranded there by the Trump administration’s restrictions on asylum. Herrera profiles some of them as they weigh their options.
• At OpenDemocracy, Mariano Aguirre reviews The State Is Always Late, a new book by a scholar who is now a senior magistrate in Colombia’s post-conflict transitional justice system. It’s a great reflection on the overlap between government and organized crime, and how a country with functioning institutions in some areas can be a “failed state” in others.