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12:00-1:00 at Center for American Progress YouTube: Guns Without Borders: Addressing the flow of U.S. firearms to Mexico and Central America (RSVP required).
4:00-8:00 at Race and Equality Facebook Live: Nicaragua: 5 años de crímenes de lesa humanidad (RSVP required).
10:00-11:30 at Georgetown University Zoom: “Alone and Exploited”? The Impacts of U.S. Immigration Enforcement on Child Migration and Labor (RSVP required).
10:30-12:00 at thedialogue.org: Information About Child Migration (RSVP required).
11:00-12:00 at wilsoncenter.org: Electoral Reform in Mexico: A Threat to Democracy (RSVP required).
2:30-4:00 at the Wilson Center and wilsoncenter.org: Nicaragua’s Political Crisis and Its Impact on the United States (RSVP required).
5:00-7:00 at IPS Zoom: Free the Water Defenders (RSVP required).
1:00-2:00 at the Wilson Center: Corruption, Accountability and Democracy in Brazil: Challenges and Solutions (RSVP required).
Thursday, April 6, 2023
11:00-12:30 at George Washington University: Resurgence Of Militarism: Views From The Global South And Implications For The United States (RSVP required).
I just sat and recorded an episode of the solo podcast that I created when I started this website six years ago. Apparently, this is the first episode I’ve recorded since July 2017.
There’s no good reason for that: it doesn’t take very long to do. (Perhaps it should—this recording is very unpolished.) But this is a good way to get thoughts together without having to crank out something essay-length.
This episode is a response to recent calls to add Mexican organized crime groups to the U.S. terrorist list, and to start carrying out U.S. military operations against these groups on Mexican soil.
As I say in the recording, both are dumb ideas that won’t make much difference and could be counter-productive. Confronting organized crime with the tools of counter-terrorism or counter-insurgency won’t eradicate organized crime. It may ensnare a lot of American drug dealers and bankers as “material supporters of terrorism,” and it may cause criminal groups to fragment and change names. But the territories were organized crime currently operates will remain territories where organized crime still operates.
Neither proposal gets at the problem of impunity for state collusion with organized crime. Unlike “terrorist” groups or insurgencies, Latin America’s organized crime groups thrive because of their corrupt links to people inside government, and inside security forces. As long as these links persist, “get-tough” efforts like the terrorist list or military strikes will have only marginal impact.
You can download the podcast episode here. The podcast’s page is here and the whole feed is here.
1:30-5:00 at Race and Equality Zoom: Mecanismo sobre Raza en el Sistema Universal de Derechos Humanos: Estrategias y Próximos Pasos en Brasil (RSVP required).
2:00 at 2359 Rayburn House Office Building and online: Hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs on Fiscal Year 2024 Request for the Department of State.
I took the Latin America-specific items out of the administration’s PDF and present them in a Google Sheet with two tabs, one sorted by country and one sorted by program.
This isn’t quite all of U.S. aid. The budget request mentions some global aid programs (probably including some refugee aid) that also channel resources to the Western Hemisphere, without specifying how much individual regions and countries are getting. So that would be additional. In addition, probably 200 or 300 million dollars in assistance goes to the region’s security forces through the Defense budget, and that’s neither reported well nor reflected here.
So the real 2024 total for Latin America could be closer to $4 billion. At first glance I don’t see any dramatic changes in the proposed assistance, which has followed the same general outlines since Barack Obama’s second term.
10:00 at Global Americans Zoom: Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean – Unpacking Emerging Trends and the 2022 Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index (RSVP required).
10:00-11:00 at the Atlantic Council and atlanticcouncil.org: Open for business? Investing in northern Central America (RSVP required).
Thursday, May 9, 2023
8:30-5:00 at Johns Hopkins SAIS and online: 5th Annual Forum on Security Challenges in Latin America (RSVP required).
9:30-11:00 at stimson.org: The Biden Administration’s New US Conventional Arms Transfer Policy (RSVP required).
11:00 at migrationpolicy.org: Migration in the Caribbean: Challenges and Opportunities for a Changing Region (RSVP required).
Friday, March 10, 2023
2:00-3:30 at American University: Book Talk: The Foreign Policy of The Latin American States – Approaches, Methodologies and Cases (RSVP required).
12:00-1:20 at drclas.harvard.edu: Intentional Polarization: Why do populist presidents in Latin America often turn to extremist public policies? (RSVP required).
2:00-3:30 at thedialogue.org: Social Protection And Disability (RSVP required).
10:00-11:00 at the Wilson Center and wilsoncenter.org: Putting Peru Back Together (RSVP required).
2:00-4:10 at stimson.org: Forum on the Arms Trade Annual Conference (RSVP required).
3:00-4:30 at INCAE Zoom: Experiencias exitosas en gobierno digital y auditoría social (RSVP required).
6:00-7:30 at csis.org: Turning up the Heat on Geothermal Energy in Latin America (RSVP required).
Wednesday, February 22, 2023
9:00-10:30 at wilsoncenter.org: Greening BRI Governance in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Beyond (RSVP required).
9:30-11:30 at csis.org: Promise and Peril: Migration Management Technologies in West Africa and Central America (RSVP required).
11:00-12:30 at FIU Washington DC and Zoom: A Look Inside Venezuela with Julio Borges and Paola de Alemán (RSVP required).
12:30-2:00 at wola.org: Reckoning with Indigenous and Afro Descendant Truth: the Ethnic Chapter of Colombia’s Truth Commission Report Webinar (RSVP required).
6:00-7:30 at George Washington University: Assessing the U.S. – Mexico Security Cooperation (RSVP required).
Thursday, February 23, 2023
12:00 at globalinitiative.net: Gobernanza punitiva y derechos humanos en Centroamérica (RSVP required).
4:00-5:00 at Georgetown University: Peaceful Borders and Illicit Transnational Flows: The Case of the Americas (RSVP required).
5:00-7:00 at George Washington University: A Conversation with Ambassador Juan Jose Gomez Camacho (RSVP required).
Saturday, February 25, 2023
5:00-7:00 at Busboys and Poets 14th Street: Indigenous Cinematic Resistance in the Amazon (RSVP required).
10:00-11:00 at Georgetown University Zoom: A Conversation with Robert W. Thomas, Chargé d’Affaires of the United States Embassy in Santo Domingo (RSVP required).
3:00-4:00 at the Wilson Center: Reflections on President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Visit to Washington (RSVP required).
11:00-12:30 at George Washington University Zoom: Multidimensional Quality of Employment in Latin America (RSVP required).
12:30-6:00 at George Washington University: Peru in Flames: Discussing Ways Forward with Former President of Peru Francisco Sagasti (RSVP required).
3:00-5:00 at American University: A Conversation with the Author of Unintended Consequences of Peace: Peaceful Borders and Illicit Transnational Flows** (RSVP required).
“Well armed gold miners” have kept food and medical care from reaching the Yanomami reservation in Brazil’s Amazon. An official calls for military intervention
“The shift away from crop eradication means that the success of Petro’s anti-narcotic efforts now hinges on other measures, of which there are few details.” Cites WOLA
Gustavo Petro and Chris Dodd meet at the CELAC summit. Drug policy and extradition of armed-group leaders engaged in negotiations appear to be on the agenda
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