» Maps

March 2, 2024 — 0

More Asylum Appointments, Please

1,450 CBP One appointments is far from enough. And why are so many in dangerous Tamaulipas, Mexico? And why so few in Arizona?

Figure 1: Number of CBP One Appointments per City (February 2024)

Tijuana CBP One: 385
Mexicali CBP One: 75
Nogales CBP One: 100
Ciudad Juárez CBP One: 200
Piedras Negras CBP One: 60
Nuevo Laredo CBP One: 55
Reynosa CBP One: 195
Matamoros CBP One: 380

The latest quarterly “Asylum Processing at the U.S.-Mexico Border” report is out, from Stephanie Leutert and Caitlyn Yates at the University of Texas Strauss Center. It is the resource to find out about U.S. asylum availability for migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border’s ports of entry, the length of waitlists, shelters, and security threats.

As it has done since June, after TItle 42 ended, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) offers 1,450 daily appointments at the ports of entry for migrants who wish to turn themselves in to U.S. authorities. The process involves making an appointment using the CBP One smartphone app.

Three points, just from this map:

1,450 sounds like a lot of daily appointments. Still, it is less than a third—in some months, less than a quarter—of the number who give up on this app-driven process (or don’t even know about it), and instead cross the Rio Grande or seek a break in the border wall, then wait for Border Patrol to apprehend them. For those who resist doing that and stick with the app, wait times in northern Mexico now routinely run a few months.
CBP grants 43 percent of these appointments in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, the only border state that has a State Department Level 4 travel warning because of organized crime violence. Criminal groups in Tamaulipas specialize in kidnapping migrants, while corrupt Mexican agents and officials collude—and everyone, surely including CBP, knows it.
Also, recall that Border Patrol’s Tucson, Arizona sector is the agency’s busiest right now, with hundreds of asylum seekers at a time turning themselves in to agents in the desert. You’d think Border Patrol agents would be the first ones pushing CBP to increase Nogales, Arizona CBP One appointments beyond a measly 100. Those 100—7 percent of the total—are the only ones available in the roughly 600 miles between Calexico, California and El Paso, Texas.

Mexico’s suspicious aircraft detections point to Venezuela

This is from the Mexican Presidency’s latest security report (October 20, page 61). It looks like Zulia, Venezuela has been the main jumping-off point for aircraft suspected of smuggling drugs toward Mexico.

Venezuela meanwhile claims to have destroyed 37 suspect aircraft so far this year:

Precipitada a tierra aeronave TANCOL Nro. 37 del año 2022. El territorio venezolano no será usado como plataforma para el narcotráfico internacional ! Debe destacarse que van 6 aeronaves en 5 días, tratando de violar infructuosamente nuestra soberanía nacional. pic.twitter.com/zM2b6aEgpD
— GJ. Domingo Hernández Lárez (@dhernandezlarez) November 9, 2022

November 7, 2022 — 0

Graphics on organized crime in Mexico

El Heraldo de Chihuahua published this map of organized crime dominance and territorial conflict along the U.S.-Mexico border in the state of Chihuahua, which extends from New Mexico to Texas’s Big Bend National Park. It names five criminal groups affiliated with two larger “cartels” (Sinaloa and the regional/local Juárez Cartel). The article’s text mentions seven local criminal groups. It does not mention the large and growing Jalisco Cartel.

Tijuana’s Revista Zeta, which has a long record of courageous reporting on organized crime in Mexico, published this table of “Cartels Recognized by the Attorney-General’s Office (FGR),” attempting to show which local criminal groups (“criminal cells”) are affiliated with which larger national cartels. Like the El Heraldo map, this table shows the Sinaloa (Pacífico) and Juárez (Carrillo Fuentes) cartels active in Chihuahua, naming four local criminal groups.

The table shows the remarkable fragmentation of criminal groups that has resulted from years of “mano dura” and “high-value targeting” strategies, which have weakened or divided cartel leaderships but done little to prevent vast territories from being fertile ground for organized crime.

June 27, 2022 — 0

Dysfunction

I just updated this slide for a talk I’m giving tomorrow, and… wow. The U.S. government has confirmed ambassadors serving in South American countries containing less than a quarter of South America’s population. (105 million out of 431 million people, according to WolframAlpha.)

There’s something to keep in mind the next time you hear a U.S. official, or U.S. senator whose job it is to confirm nominees, rending their garments about China’s growing influence in the hemisphere.

January 26, 2019 — 0

This just screams “phone wallpaper”

“A promotional map of the Pan-American Highway produced by Standard Oil,” from “The Collection of Eric Rutkow” in the New York Times’ review of Rutkow’s new history of the Pan-American Highway.

May 7, 2018 — 0

Colombia’s ungoverned, conflictive margins

While looking for a graphic to use in a presentation for tomorrow, I found this cartogram of Colombia’s population at a site called World Mapper. A cartogram re-sizes territories on a map, usually using software, to reflect an attribute. This one shows what Colombia’s map might look like if each pixel contained an equal number of people.

From worldmapper.org.

The map shows what a heavily urban country Colombia is. About 77 percent urban in 2016, according to the World Bank.

The parts of the country that have most suffered the conflict, including those where coca is most heavily planted, are all scrunched down to almost nothing. They are rural, and often marginal to the country’s civic and economic life. (I added the red labels pointing out some of those regions.)

Similarly scrunched are all of Colombia’s border zones (except the city of Cúcuta along the border with Venezuela, bulging between Catatumbo and Arauca, where the metro population is about 800,000). Like most South American border regions, Colombia’s are sparsely populated. The Pacific Coast, similarly diminished, until the end of the 20th century was a forgotten region with a mostly Afro-Colombian and indigenous population. Today, it may be the most violent part of the country.

This image makes clear how, at least for the past 10 years or so, the rural armed conflict was something that most Colombians only saw on television. It also makes clear why neither peace accord implementation, nor drug production, nor any other rural issue leads polled voters’ concerns in the runup to May 27 presidential elections. In a mostly urban country, political reality works against doing what it takes to bring a rural conflict to a definitive end.

May 2, 2018 — 0

Amazing maps, but what a mess

It’s hard to believe anyone would even try to map out the tangled, shifting patchwork of violent groups active in “post-conflict” Colombia’s Pacific coastal region. But the Ideas for Peace Foundation (FIP), a Bogotá-based think tank, accepted the challenge.

This map, from an April 10 FIP report on rearmed FARC “dissident” groups, depicts the department of Nariño in Colombia’s southwest corner, along the border with Ecuador. Nariño and neighboring Esmeraldas, Ecuador, appear to be the busiest cocaine trafficking corridor in South America right now. Colombia’s Navy has been cited as saying that 60 percent of Colombia’s cocaine comes through here (though this sounds a bit high). It is here where the dissident group headed by alias “Guacho” (denoted on the map as “FOS”) has been causing so much mayhem.

This map, from the same FIP report, zooms in on the downtown of Tumaco, Nariño’s principal port city. In just the first 85 days of 2018, Tumaco’s urban core (population perhaps 125,000) saw 67 homicides, an annualized homicide rate well over 200 per 100,000 residents. This map of who purportedly controls which neighborhoods—with even a spot for Mexican intermediaries! (orange)—shows why.

This one, from a July 2017 report, shows Chocó department, Colombia’s poorest, in the country’s northwest corner. Here, the ELN and the Urabeños organized crime group have been fighting bitter territorial battles, and FARC dissident bands were just emerging.

On a Twitter DM with one of these maps’ creators, I joked that they’re probably already out of date. The reply was “some parts are.” In the absence of government, territorial control over illegal economies shifts constantly, with every murder of a low-level leader, every mass displacement, every fragmentation of a criminal group. This makes mapping almost impossible. It also makes living there almost impossible: the population, terrified and unprotected, suffers. Residents quietly pay extortion demands and lose children to recruitment—or they leave for somewhere else, abandoning their land, much of it Afro-Colombian community councils’ shared landholdings.

Congratulations to the team at Fundación Ideas para la Paz for putting these maps together. What a tragedy that the government has shown such a lack of urgency in filling the post-conflict territorial vacuum in a part of the country that’s crucial for both humanitarian and counter-drug priorities.

September 12, 2017 — 0

2016 suspect trafficking maps

These U.S. government maps were on display at today’s Senate Colombia hearing, but weren’t in anyone’s published testimony. Click on them to see them enlarged.

That route from southwest Colombia and Ecuador to Mexico and Guatemala is really striking.

Also striking is the relative absence of vessels headed to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, and Haiti.

June 15, 2017 — 0

Trafficking routes over time

Below this text, in reverse chronological order, are some maps from U.S. Southern Command that I’ve collected over the years. They show the tracks of aircraft or boats that Southcom and its Key West, Florida-based “Joint Interagency Task Force South” (JIATF-South) component has suspected of trafficking drugs (or other illegal things). These give you a general idea of how trafficking (I believe this is nearly all cocaine trafficking) patterns have shifted over the past 12 years.

Four things stand out:

The Eastern Pacific is the busiest route. Southcom reported earlier this year that “Eastern Pacific flow currently accounts for more than 68% of documented cocaine movement,” and the more recent maps show that clearly. Colombia’s entire Pacific coast, as well as Esmeraldas and Manabí, Ecuador, are the main launching points for maritime traffic. (Southcom estimates that, after steady decline, only 3 percent of cocaine trafficking from the Andes is aerial; the rest is maritime.) For a while, detected trafficking vessels were not going out as far as the Galápagos Islands, which requires larger boats full of fuel to be stationed in the deep ocean, but now that long-haul route is active again. These long hauls tend not to arrive in Mexico, other than Chiapas which, along with San Marcos and Retalhuleu, Guatemala, remains a very heavy destination.
Costa Rica and Panama have been increasingly inundated with maritime traffic, which now blankets their heavily touristed coasts. In the Caribbean, Puerto Rico appears to have seen a very sharp increase too.
The Venezuela-to-Honduras aerial route, from Apure to Gracias a Dios, remains active, though overall aerial trafficking is reduced.
Traffickers tend to avoid Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua. (The 2016 map reverses Haiti and the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola.) The lack of tracks detected in Cuba is total in recent years, which is remarkable.

These aren’t secret or classified, but I don’t know why Southcom and JIATF-South don’t just put these on their websites and in their reporting to Congress and the media. It’s about telling your own story.