Adam Isacson

Defense, security, borders, migration, and human rights in Latin America and the United States. May not reflect my employer’s consensus view.

5 links

March 28, 2021 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • Lost in the “Biden border crisis” news framing is the crude fact that Joe Biden has kept in place a crown jewel of the Trump administration’s approach: the pandemic expulsions policy, known as “Title 42,” that expels most migrants. At the Los Angeles Times, Molly O’Toole explains the policy and unpacks data about how broadly it is being applied.
  • In The Invisible Wall, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, Quixote Center, and UndocuBlack Network show the toll that the Title 42 policy has had on one of the weakest and most vulnerable populations: Haitian and other black migrants.
  • Two years ago, the Bolsonaro government deployed the military to prevent Amazon deforestation. “Operation Green Brazil” has proved to be a predictable but disastrous failure, a Reuters investigation finds, in part because the armed forces were such an inappropriate tool for the job of environmental protection.
  • El Faro talks to a former Salvadoran military captain and others who repent of their role in the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero.
  • Dissent runs a thoughtful critique from three left-of-center scholars of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who “continues to decry the faults of neoliberalism, but his government is, for the most part, failing to build an effective alternative.”

March 21, 2021 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • With a document collection, the National Security Archive marks the tenth anniversary of the Allende massacre in Coahuila, Mexico, when Zetas—apparently responding to information leaked by a Mexican intelligence official—obliterated an entire town.
  • At the New York Review of Books, Delphine Schrank covers the human toll of the two strong hurricanes that hit Honduras within two weeks of each other last fall.
  • James Fredrick at NPR looks at the accusations of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández’s collusion with narcotraffickers, which have been piling up in a U.S. court.
  • At Vice, Nathaniel Janowitz reports on what the brutal rise of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel has meant for life in Guadalajara, Mexico’s “second city.”
  • There was a lot of coverage of the situation at the border last week, but little of it was long-form or in depth. This New York Times piece looking at short, medium, and long-term options was useful.

March 15, 2021 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • The situation at the border right now—a jump in arrivals of unaccompanied children, the slow end of Remain in Mexico, the persistence of the Trump pandemic “expulsions” policy—is really confusing. At the New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer unpacks this moment and the difficult choices with which it presents the new Biden administration.
  • The ACLU sent a letter with a big appendix to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas detailing 13 administrative complaints about “abuse, neglect, and trauma inflicted by CBP on people simply seeking protection in the United States.” The organization had filed these complaints with the DHS Inspector General between 2019 and 2020, but none of the cases has moved.
  • The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights last week made public a December 17 letter from seven of its rapporteurs, urging the Colombian government not to restart an aerial herbicide fumigation program in the country’s coca-growing areas.
  • I haven’t finished reading this yet—it’s long but impressive. Noria Research published a series about Mexico’s opium poppy economy, based on fieldwork in cultivation zones. It questions dominant narratives and policies: “In Mexico, opium functions as a ‘political opiate’: one that allows marginalized regions to economically survive, while the State limits its social, educational, and development functions to a minimum.”
  • A drug trafficker’s trial in New York is causing problems for Honduras’s corrupt president, Juan Orlando Hernández. At Contra Corriente, Leonardo Aguilar details some of the revelations implicating top politicians like Hernández and his rival Manuel Zelaya, as well as leadership of the security forces.
February 21, 2021 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • Part 2 of an InsightCrime series about overlaps between government and organized crime in Central America’s Northern Triangle is a potboiler: an unflinching probe of Honduras’s governing National Party, which “since 2010 has become a federation that welcomes politicians and officials involved in criminal businesses ranging from timber to drug trafficking to the misappropriation of public funds.”
  • Fourteen Colombian legislators from the political opposition, spanning six parties, issued the latest in a series of data-rich reports monitoring the government’s compliance with commitments made in the 2016 peace accords. They find the Colombian government falling ever further behind in implementing the accord.
  • The San Diego Union-Tribune profiles Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent who underwent abuse and trauma during her time in the force, and who now, accompanied by the Southern Border Communities Coalition, is one of its most outspoken critics. This is a very troubled agency.
  • At OpenDemocracy, Robert Muggah brings both context and readability to a discussion of Brazil’s grim current political reality, the role of systemic racism, the legacy of the Worker’s Party, and why “Bolsonaro is the candidate to beat in the presidential elections in 2022—and by a wide margin.”
  • Four researchers from Colombia’s Ideas for Peace Foundation dispute claims that the ELN guerrilla group is facing a big internal schism. The ELN has always been divided, they say at Razón Pública—and the Colombian government has done little lately to weaken it.
February 15, 2021 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • 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.
February 7, 2021 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • I’m growing ever more obsessed with the institutional culture at U.S. border security agencies, and last week gave me some important new inputs. At the Intercept, Ryan Deveraux summarized affidavits signed by three former DHS whistleblowers, which detail how Border Patrol and Department leadership frustrated an investigation into the 2010 beating death of Mexican citizen Anastasio Hernández. Kate Morrissey also covered this well at the San Diego Union-Tribune. The oversight picture grows even darker with this Ken Klippenstein exposé, also at the Intercept, about how insane infighting at the DHS Office of the Inspector-General crippled oversight of the agency when it was most needed, during the darkest period of the Trump administration.
  • Two Arizona humanitarian organizations, No More Deaths and the Coalición de Derechos Humanos, published a report alleging that while Border Patrol has all but monopolized emergency response in the border zone, the agency has a poor record of responding to calls for rescue from lost migrants dying in the desert.
  • Mexico’s Animal Político published a disturbing revelation about the Mexican government’s response to abuse of migrants. The country’s nominally independent human rights ombudsman’s office, the Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH), had collected 32 documents’ worth of accounts of horrific abuses of migrants traveling through Mexico—some of them with the participation of security and immigration forces. But the CNDH, which is supposed to advocate for victims and seek to hold abusers accountable, sat on this information.
  • As the Biden administration stands down on border wall construction, get ready for more discussion of building a high-tech “smart wall.” We’re starting to see some smart discussion of the risks of installing more sensors, cameras, drones, biometric data collectors, and the like, and giving them to our troubled border agencies. This Truthout analysis by Candice Bernd is an excellent place to start. A key quote, from Jacinta González, an organizer at Mijente: “What we’ve seen over and over again is, a lot of these companies, they start to create new technologies for war zones, they bring them to a militarized border, and then they start to use them across the U.S. We then start to see these technologies normalized and brought to local police departments.”
  • It’s always revelatory when InsightCrime profiles a previously unknown person who turns out to be a crucial node on the network of Latin American organized crime. You’d expect the mayor of a Guatemalan town that borders both El Salvador and the Pacific—the very definition of “trafficking corridor”—to be compromised, and Carlos Roberto Marroquín Fuentes, the mayor of Moyuta, very much is. InsightCrime also published their annual “homicide roundup” this week, and while I wish they didn’t have to, this is still the only resource where you can easily find this piece of violent-crime data for the whole region.
February 1, 2021 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • 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.
January 24, 2021 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • Senate Foreign Relations Committee Western Hemisphere Democratic staff have been doing great oversight work on the Trump administration’s intensely harsh anti-migrant policies’ impact on Central America. In October they revealed that DHS personnel in Guatemala were packing migrants into unmarked cars and shipping them back to Honduras. A new report this week finds that of 945 non-Guatemalan asylum seekers shipped to Guatemala under a so-called “safe third country” agreement, not a single one received protection.
  • At the Los Angeles Times, Molly O’Toole provides a panoramic view of border and migration policy as Trump gives way to Biden. “I am just deeply worried that every single day the Biden administration waits to give clear indications of what’s going to happen at the border after Jan. 20, they put more people in danger,” Savitri Arvey, co-author of a series of reports on “metering” along the border, tells O’Toole.
  • In Mexico, the López Obrador government’s trajectory keeps getting more alarming. Animal Político finds that the presidency has shut down access to public information and official documents about a host of current issues, including “the Tren Maya, the Santa Lucía [new Mexico City] airport, contracts for vaccine purchases, data on COVID deaths, …the presidential plane, and the operation against Ovidio Guzmán.”
  • Writing for The Atlantic, Daniel Loedel reflects on retrieving the remains of an older half-sister he never met. Isabel Loedel was one of tens of thousands disappeared by Argentine forces during the 1976-83 military dictatorship.
  • Colombia’s Vorágine publishes an account, by reporters from “La Cola de Rata” and “La Liga Contra el Silencio,” of conditions along the San Juan River, which flows into the Pacific in southern Chocó department. This territory of collectively held Afro-descendant and indigenous lands is strategic for cocaine transshipment and other illicit income sources, and communities are caught in the middle of fighting between armed groups and the military. Virtually the only government presence is military patrols—who appear to be capturing community leaders based on false pretenses or bad information—and coca eradicators.
January 18, 2021 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • The Justice Department’s Inspector-General released a scathing and detailed report, years in the making, about the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance” or family separation policy. It lays blame at the feet of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other top officials, for whom separating asylum-seeking migrant families without documenting the parent-child relationship was a feature—a “deterrent”—not a bug.
  • Investigators at El Salvador’s El Faro find that a healthy top MS-13 leader was taken out of maximum security prison for “medical emergency” reasons, a likely result of negotiations between the gang and the government of Nayib Bukele.
  • At Criterio, Aimée Cárcamo takes a deep dive into Honduras’s disappointing experience with reforming its 18,486-member national police force since 2012. It concludes that police “purification” can’t succeed in the midst of a “narco-dictatorship.”
  • Days after declining to prosecute its former defense minister, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, whom U.S. agents arrested last November in Los Angeles on suspicion of working with drug traffickers, Mexico’s government shared the 750-page collection of evidence that the U.S. Justice Department gathered about the case. Most of it is text messages.
  • Human Rights Watch’s latest World Report found a lot of backsliding throughout the region in 2020.
January 10, 2021 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • At Nexos, scholar Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo offers a devastating assessment of civil-military relations in Mexico, as the López Obrador government further increases the armed forces’ role in Mexicans’ daily lives. “We had a parenthesis of civilian rule that lasted about 50 or 60 years. That parenthesis has closed.”
  • At Mexico’s SinEmbargo, veteran crime journalist Ricardo Ravelo offers a sweeping who’s-who of the country’s current constellation of cartels and regional organized crime structures. Pair this with Ravelo’s January 1 look at the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which may be eclipsing Sinaloa as Mexico’s largest and deadliest.
  • The UN Verification Mission in Colombia released its latest report on the peace process. With a lot of new statistics, it puts front-and-center concerns about rampant killings of social leaders and ex-combatants.
  • OpenDemocracy provides a grim point-by-point evaluation of Colombia’s compliance—or lack thereof—with each chapter of the 2016 peace accord.
  • DHS’s Office of Immigration Statistics is an island of seriousness at the troubled agency. Its latest Enforcement Lifecycle Report has a wealth of information, including detailed appendix tables, illustrating what happens to undocumented migrants after DHS apprehends them, including those who make claims of fear.
December 20, 2020 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • In part 5 of a 5-part series, The Washington Post’s Mary Beth Sheridan takes an in-depth look at the increasing power and unaccountability of Mexico’s military. Few countries in Latin America have handed over so many roles to the armed forces, and it happened fast.
  • Pair that with J. Weston Phippen’s investigation in Politico Magazine of a U.S.-aided Mexican Marine Special Forces unit that went on a rampage in the border city of Nuevo Laredo in 2018, disappearing dozens of people—including a U.S. citizen—without a peep from the Trump administration.
  • Pair that with what is probably longtime New York Times bureau chief Azam Ahmed’s last piece before departing Mexico: the story of Miriam Rodríguez, the mother of one of tens of thousands of Mexican victims of kidnapping and murder, who got almost no help from law enforcement and captured her daughter’s killers down on her own until she, too, was murdered in her home in San Fernando, Tamaulipas.
  • Communities in Colombia’s ill-governed coca-growing territories are bracing for a possible holiday announcement that U.S.-funded spray planes are to resume spraying glyphosate after a 2015 suspension. Two analysts at DeJusticia—an NGO at the vanguard of the legal fight against fumigation—decry the policy and the process being used to restart it.
  • The International Crisis Group and the Fundación Paz y Reconciliación published reports warning of a deteriorating security situation along the Colombia-Venezuela border. It is formally closed due to the pandemic, but armed and criminal groups operate numerous illicit crossings. Both reports find the ELN gaining strength, at times abetted by the Venezuelan government, while paramilitaries, FARC dissidents, EPL guerrilla remnants, Venezuelan gangs, and Mexican cartel middlemen all add to the complexity.
December 13, 2020 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • Reporters from several outlets around the world, calling themselves “The Cartel Project,” published an investigation into the 2012 murder of Veracruz, Mexico journalist Regina Martínez, which they portray as the template that organized crime-tied politicians have since used to silence the press. They aim to finish the work Martínez was doing—investigating the corrupt links between Veracruz’s state governors and organized crime—when assassins killed her in her home. Stories appear concurrently in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Spain’s El País, Mexico’s Proceso, and OCCRP.
  • An unsealed whistleblower complaint from a border wall construction site in California has some remarkable allegations, summarized by The New York Times’ Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Among them, contractors brought Mexican citizens illegally onto their work site, on the U.S. side of the border, to work as armed guards. CBP records meanwhile show that between October 2019 and March 2020, migrants breached the border wall in California and Arizona more than 320 times.
  • Two new Colombian online investigative outlets, Vorágine and La Liga Contra el Silencio, collaborated to tell the story of Juana Perea, a Bogotá-raised beachfront hotel owner and defiant activist in the town of Nuquí, Chocó. In October, Perea became one of many social leaders murdered in northwest Colombia by the Gulf Clan neo-paramilitary group. Pair this with Verdad Abierta’s thoroughly reported and vividly photographed story about William Castillo, a social leader in Antioquia’s Bajo Cauca region whom Gulf Clan hitmen murdered in 2016.
  • “Since 2007, the U.S. government has relied on a small coterie of Mexican officials to implement the Mérida Initiative,” begins an account presenting a trove of U.S. documents that the National Security Archive obtained via a FOIA request. It’s hard not to cringe reading U.S. officials’ words of praise for Mexican counterparts who now face criminal charges for links to organized crime.
  • Honduras’s ContraCorriente finds that, after years of corruption undermining public-private infrastructure projects, the public almost completely distrusts the government’s announced bipartisan rebuilding effort following hurricanes Eta and Iota.
December 6, 2020 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • The Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission, a bipartisan body created in 2017, came out with a thoughtful report based on a year and a half of work. Lots of recommendations that sound like common sense and leave you wondering why they weren’t implemented already—unless you’ve been mired in the politics of drug policy.
  • The fourth of a five-part Washington Post series about “how criminal groups are transforming Mexico” focuses on the arduous search for the disappeared, spurred far more by mothers than by the authorities, amid a profusion of mass graves. The Post has put a lot of resources into this series, and it’s worth your time. Pair it with this profile of the Madres Coraje, who are using drones and other tech to locate remains in Nuevo León, by the Camino a encontrarles project.
  • Santa Marta is a beautiful Caribbean city whose environs, during the 1990s and 2000s, were under the brutal sway of the AUC paramilitary blocs led by “Jorge 40” and Hernán Giraldo. Colombia’s La Liga Contra el Silencio finds that paramilitaries, most of whom can trace their DNA to the old AUC, are making a comeback in the city just as 40 and Giraldo are being returned from U.S. prison.
  • Guatemala’s Agencia Ocote profiles Anatasia Mejía Tiriquiz, the director of Xolabaj Radio and TV, an independent media outlet in conflict-battered Quiché department. Mejía has just returned from 37 days in prison, a case that alarmed press freedom watchdogs about the state of free speech in Guatemala.
  • The International Crisis Group’s Elizabeth Dickinson profiles Luz Mary, a social leader in the Altos de Cazucá slum on Bogotá’s far outskirts. Most striking about the story is how completely abandoned she is by the government, even in a densely populated area near the center of Colombia’s political life, and even as she tries to maintain a program to help at-risk youth.

November 29, 2020 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • The U.S. Department of Justice ordered the arrest (and then the release) of former Mexican Defense Minister Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos because it believed the General was tied to a regional drug trafficking group based in Mexico’s Pacific state of Nayarit. At the Mexico Violence Resource Project, Nathaniel Morris tells the recent story of drug trafficking in Nayarit, a principal source of illegal opioids, and the extreme complicity of local government.
  • On a related topic, Dolia Estévez at Mexico’s SinEmbargo talks to Craig Deare, a defense academic who specializes in Mexico, about the Cienfuegos case. Deare finds it unlikely that the General would throw so much away just for a relationship with a minor narco group. The article also includes a long transcript of a 2018 interview Gen. Cienfuegos gave to Deare. Cienfuegos says much that I disagree with, but it’s a rare glimpse into the worldview of Mexico’s top-level military.
  • The quarterly “metering updates” from the University of Texas’s Robert Strauss Center have become an essential document for understanding what’s happening to asylum-seeking migrants at the border. The latest edition finds that, eight months into the pandemic, 15,690 asylum seekers are STILL on waitlists in nine Mexican border cities, hoping to present at U.S. ports of entry.
  • A long, fascinating, but ultimately inconclusive investigation by Israel’s Ha’aretz reveals a host of details about the Mexico operations of NSO, the Israeli company that makes and sells the super-controversial Pegasus phone-hacking software.
  • One link that’s not about Mexico: Fernando Silva at ContraCorriente details how even in the capital, Tegucigalpa, the Honduran government’s response to victims of hurricanes Eta and Iota has been improvised, politicized, and far from sufficient.

November 21, 2020 — 0

5 links from the past week

  • A country that won’t take dramatic action after 250,000 people die from a pandemic also won’t take dramatic action after 2.5 million weapons are smuggled from its legal gun dealers across the border into Mexico, just over the past 10 years.
  • 5,400 words in English about Colombia’s false positives scandal, the ups and downs of the country’s armed forces, and the struggle of the victims? Yes, please. The Guardian’s latest “long read” is a great piece by Mariana Palau.
  • Two of the profession’s most trusted and cited border and migration reporters, Alfredo Corchado and Dianne Solís at The Dallas Morning News, dig into the likelihood that the Biden administration will truly undo the Trump administration’s hardline policies. This analysis will lower your expectations.
  • It’s more than just climate change. Writing between two brutal hurricanes, El Faro’s Carlos Martínez draws a direct parallel between Honduras’s endemic corruption and the amount of damage that a storm can do. Pair that with this analysis of Honduras’s “murky” police reform and pervasive mistrust of government, by Marna Shorack, Elizabeth G. Kennedy, and Amelia Frank-Vitale at NACLA.
  • In an excellent four-part series, Nicaragua’s Expediente Público talks to experts and social movement leaders to figure out what it would take to reimagine and reform the country’s police force in an eventual post-Ortega context.
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