Adam Isacson

The holidays are a fading memory. This week’s going to be busy.

Congress is back, and the Trump administration has sent it a document requesting $33 billion in funding for border security over the next 10 years, including $18 billion for a wall, in return for allowing hundreds of thousands of “dreamers” to stay in the country. If there is no deal on this, the U.S. government could shut down a week from Friday.

I’ll be working on that—expect more written material and a lot of less-visible work—while moving ahead a report on Colombia’s post-conflict challenges. (It’s currently 6,700 words of semi-prose, now I’m filling it in with bits of research and turning it into proper prose.) In addition, WOLA’s annual planning process is now underway, so there will be documents to write, and some long meetings, regarding that.

I may be hard to reach at times this week, due to marathon meetings, urgent border work, or the need to shut the door and write.

It was wonderful to see relatives all over the northeastern United States during the past week’s holidays. But it’s also good to be back at work, as of today.

The first week of January is usually quiet here in Washington: Congress hasn’t really started up yet, and there are few or no events. It’s also quiet in Latin America, where most people (governing elites, anyway) are still out for the holiday.

This means I expect to spend this week doing some beginning-of-year planning, and some long uninterrupted writing. By the end of Friday, I hope to:

• Have completed a lousy but workable rough draft of a big report on Colombia’s post-conflict challenges.
• Have updated our database of U.S. security assistance programs to reflect the annual defense bill that became law on December 12.
• Have completed planning documents for my 2018 work.

It’s hard to believe there’s only two more weeks to go before the holidays effectively end 2017. (And, perhaps, before the federal government shuts down for lack of a budget deal—the current deadline is December 22.) I’ll be out visiting family between Christmas and New Year’s Day, so this is my second-to-last week of the year.

I’ll be spending it here in Washington, but with a very full schedule. Tuesday is an all-day human rights conference hosted by U.S. Southern Command. Wednesday is two NGO human rights “roundtables” with the federal government: one in the morning with Southcom, and one on Colombia in the afternoon with the State Department. There are several other meetings and events scattered across my calendar.

When not at those, I’ll be grabbing all available moments to:

• Release a new report about the U.S. border at San Diego-Tijuana, where big challenges persist that cannot be solved by “the wall.”
• Complete and distribute a shorter memo to Congress on the migration numbers that came out last week.
• Make updates to our “tracker” of border and migration legislation.
• Continue steady work on a big report on post-conflict Colombia.
• Keep updating our database of military aid programs to reflect changes wrought by the new Defense Department authorization law.
• Add a few posts to this site.

I’ll be in Washington all week. My main goal is to finish part 1 of a 2-part report on Colombia’s post-conflict challenges. Part 1 will focus on the short term items, mainly reintegration, coca, and transitional justice. Part 2 will go into an especially thorny long-term item: bringing governance to historically ungoverned regions.

I’ve also got a close eye on the legislative debate over the 2018 budget, which must be passed by Friday and is hung up in part on Trump’s border wall and DACA. I aim to have a piece out by mid-week about the border wall prototypes just built in San Diego and how irrelevant they are. But the big legislative battle is likely to get postponed to the week of December 18-22.

When not writing, I’ve already got 15 meetings and events on the calendar, which is likely to fill up more. And the electoral crisis in Honduras also looms large.

I flew to south Texas on Sunday, where a few of us from WOLA will be until Wednesday evening. It’s a quick trip to do some more field research on border security.

I’ll be back in Washington, in the office, on Thursday and Friday. Hopefully by then, we’ll have posted a long piece taking the pulse of Colombia’s transitional justice system, which I drafted on the plane.

It’s Thanksgiving week in the United States. This is the second most widely celebrated holiday of the year here, after Christmas. Nearly everything will be closed Thursday, and—except for retail—also on Friday. I’ll be away for the holiday, though not traveling far this time.

Washington will be quiet all week. The House and Senate are out of session. I don’t see any Latin America-related events happening here during this truncated week.

It’s a week to focus on writing and research. We’ve got three drafts in semi-written state right now: a memo explaining what happened last week with Colombia’s post-conflict transitional justice system; a memo about the relevance of the border wall prototypes under construction in San Diego, California; and a big, slow-moving overview of Colombia’s post-conflict challenges.

I hope to finish at least two of those this week, and make progress on the third.

Then on Sunday, a few of us will be getting on a plane for McAllen, Texas. We’ll be spending the first three days of the week doing some research in the Rio Grande Valley sector of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Six months ago, when my daughter won Washington DC’s spelling bee, one of her prizes was plane tickets to anywhere in the country. She chose Orlando because she’s a big Harry Potter fan. So that’s where I’ll be on Thursday and Friday of this week, taking some vacation days.

Monday through Wednesday I’ll be in the office with a long list of tasks and several can’t-miss meetings to navigate around. The work will focus on organizing our October 16 conference on Colombia peace accord implementation an upcoming report about Colombia, and a few efforts to counter Trump’s border-security proposals.

For the first time since August 7, I’m starting a Monday here in Washington after having worked on Friday here in Washington. This means I won’t be spending as much of this week trying to catch up from travel. My calendar is also lighter.

So this week I hope to:

• Publish an “explainer” about the four bits of border security legislation we have our eye on (the wall, the Border Patrol increase, the ICE deportation force increase, and DACA).
• Do a brief piece on Colombia’s ex-combatant reintegration program (or lack thereof).
• Put together much of a mid-October conference on Colombia.
• Do some sort of comparison of the House and Senate foreign aid bills.
• Write a substantial chunk of a big report on Colombia’s peace process.
• Record a WOLA podcast.
• Record a solo podcast for this site.

That’s a long list for one week; events could sidetrack me. But it’s good to start out ambitiously.

The week after Labor Day is always a crazy one in Washington. Congress comes back from a long recess with a month to approve a budget. Things in the news just generally start happening at a faster pace with the summer over. (Though this summer was pretty frenetic.) Universities are back in session.

This week is going to be rapid-fire. I’m coming back to it after 8 days in Colombia, with my office still in disarray from renovations during the second half of August. I’m spending this Labor Day trying to get re-organized, from e-mails I couldn’t get to while traveling, to accumulated receipts, to a teetering stack of incoming paper, to a to-do list that needs updating and re-thinking. That, along with numerous check-ins with co-workers, will probably occupy most of my time through Wednesday or so.

Then, to figure out what to work on first. Finishing my big half-done Colombia report? Carrying out a new blitz of congressional meetings on the foreign aid bill (to be marked up in the Senate Thursday) and the border wall? (Or perhaps Hurricane Harvey, which hit while I was in Colombia, has stopped the wall for now?) Scrambling to organize a big Colombia conference in mid-October? Throwing all our energy into saving DACA?

A lot to figure out. I’ve only been back in the U.S. for 48 hours, but must hit the ground running.

This is an odd week: WOLA is undergoing renovation, and I’ll be working from home after Monday. I’ll also be off Friday and next Monday—the family is taking a long weekend to see the solar eclipse somewhere near the Tennessee-North Carolina border.

While I’m here, I’ll be working on a big upcoming Colombia report and continuing to organize an end-of-month visit to Colombia. I expect that my work will be 90% focused on Colombia, other than a meeting or two on Capitol Hill to talk about border security. And this afternoon, when I pack up my office in advance of the work crew.

August is here, which in Washington means fewer meetings and a chance to catch up on writing and research. This week I’ll be doing a lot of that. A big report on the current moment in Colombia’s “post-conflict” is slowly taking shape, but I don’t plan to finish/publish it until September. I’ll also be nailing down plans for an end-of-month visit to Colombia with a member of Congress.

I look forward to a week of keeping strange hours as I write thousands of words.

I’m back from vacation. The transition has been smooth so far, in part because I paid too much attention to work while I was out.

I’m here in Washington all week, and I expect to focus mainly, but not exclusively, on border security work. The Homeland Security appropriations bill is in committee in the House tomorrow. While we’ve done all we can to influence the outcome, the Republican majority that drafts the bill is going to accede to the White House’s wishes. This is an opportunity to make noise and strategize for next steps. Expect a written analysis this week.

The House will also mark up the foreign aid bill on Wednesday, so we’ll probably have some analysis of that done as well. The bill will not cut foreign aid as drastically as the Trump administration wants, but the House bill still calls for some painful steps that we can hopefully avoid later in the legislative process.

I also hope to finish a memo on U.S.-Colombia relations following the theme of the podcast I recorded last week. And to do a lot of research. It’s nice to be back on the job.

This is sort of a truncated week, followed by some vacation. I leave town mid-day Thursday, visiting family for the July 4 week. I’m taking off the following week as well. This is the first extended time off since Christmas, and while I plan to post to this site as often as always, I look forward to the slower pace.

While I’m here this week, I won’t be in my office very much. On Monday, I’m speaking on a panel at a non-public State Department about Colombia, which goes nearly all day. On Tuesday we’re interviewing several program assistant candidates. And on Wednesday we’ve got an all-day media training. I’m doing a few more interviews Thursday, then it’s off to New York.

The legislative push continues this week, largely on border-security work. As of now I’ve got eight meetings scheduled on Capitol Hill, and that may increase.

When I’m not doing that, I expect to complete two pieces of shorter written work: an update on U.S. policy toward Colombia (such as it is right now), an explainer about a border-security hiring surge, and another (in final edits, awaiting release) about drug flows in the Americas. I’ll finish a book chapter about coca cultivation today. I want to put out podcasts both here and at wola.org. And I want to get started on a super-brief report about what we saw in May at the San Diego-Tijuana border.

OK, that’s more tasks than there are hours for, especially with a pretty heavy meeting schedule. We’ll see how much my team and I manage to get done.

I’m here in Washington all week, and in order to take advantage, I’ve drawn up a much-too-ambitious to-do list. Expect to see a couple of WOLA memos about border security this week (or a bit later depending on editing), and more content here on this site.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of congressional hearings this week, and at the end of the week the Trump administration is hosting a summit in Miami with Central American leaders. I expect to do some congressional and media work on both.

My schedule is meeting-heavy on Monday and Tuesday, then—as of now at least—it lightens up Wednesday through Friday. I hope it stays light, as I’ve got some long-term writing projects I’d like to push forward.

All is chaos this week, again. But by Friday or so, everything should settle down for a several-week stretch of time.

Last week, accompanying my daughter at the National Spelling Bee reduced my available work time by half. Saturday and yesterday, I drove to New York state and back for a big family gathering. So I’ve spent very little time at a computer keyboard lately, and right now I’m not even current about what’s happened in Latin America since Friday.

That won’t improve much this week. I have 10 hours of meetings today and Tuesday, then WOLA’s entire staff leaves Washington Wednesday and Thursday for its annual planning retreat. Posting here will be haphazard and sporadic.

Some “normality” will return on Friday, and for the rest of June, as I intend to stay here in Washington and complete a lot of research, writing, and legislative work.

Bizarrely, I’m writing from a hotel room about 20 minutes from my house. My daughter is one of 290 contestants in the National Spelling Bee. As she’s representing the District of Columbia, we’ve come the shortest distance to compete. It’s nice, though, that we’ve been given a hotel room at the site of the event, just like all the other kids.

After Monday, which is a national holiday in the United States, I’ll be splitting my time this week between the Spelling Bee, our home, and the office. On the calendar I have meetings with funders and several meetings on Capitol Hill to discuss what we’re working on with legislative staff. I’ll post things here when I get a chance.

The last week before Memorial Day tends to be one of the busiest of the year in Washington, especially in Congress. This week, not only are there six congressional hearings with some relevance for our work, but the White House, probably tomorrow, will be sending Congress its 2018 budget request.

We’ll soon have an official sense of how deeply the Trump administration plans to cut diplomacy and foreign aid in Latin America in order to pay for increased defense and border security spending. I’ll be watching the State Department and Homeland Security Department budget pages, and writing up an analysis of the numbers, and the dangers they portend, as quickly as possible.

Expect a lot of posts here this week, about that and other topics. I hope to turn out both a personal podcast and a WOLA podcast, among other content both here and at WOLA’s website.

After spending last week at the California-Baja California border, I’ve got several weeks ahead with no travel planned. I look forward to getting a lot of research done, and doing a lot of “policy advocacy.”

Later this week, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos will be in Washington. We’ll have materials out for the press and Capitol Hill shortly, and I expect a flash of interest here about the direction of U.S. policy. Maintaining U.S. support for peace accord implementation is essential.

By the end of the week, I also expect we’ll have a report all but ready to publish (probably for next week) about security and migration at Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, based on fieldwork done in mid-February.

Other than that, I have a scattering of meetings with reporters and officials, and a bunch of updates waiting to add to our database now that the U.S. government’s 2017 budget has passed. I also expect to do a podcast here about some Latin America highlights in the budget. And to type up my notes about the San Diego-Tijuana border. And I need to finish edits on an academic journal article about Colombia, which is overdue.

Amid all that, I look forward to posting here often this week.

I’m leaving this afternoon for San Diego and Tijuana, where we’ll be doing research on border security and migration for the rest of the week. We’ve got meetings set up with authorities, experts, journalists, activists, and migrant shelters. A brief report on what we learn will follow.

I’ll try to post updates from the road, but regular posts like news links and daily updates will stop this week. I expect to resume regular posting on Sunday. Have a good week.

I’m giving two talks on Colombia over the next two days: one today at the Brookings Institution, and tomorrow I’m guest-teaching a human rights class at the National Defense University’s Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies.

Those and other meetings or interviews have booked up every one of my mornings this week. My afternoons are freer, and during that time I will be helping to set up our May 8-12 border research visit to San Diego and Tijuana, promoting the huge report we released last week, and producing one, perhaps two podcasts. I’ll also have an eye on the Homeland Security secretary’s announcement, scheduled for Thursday, of “A new strategy for U.S. engagement in Central America”. It could be a repackaging of what they’re already doing, or it could require action. It’s on the radar either way.

At least during the first part of the week, posting here will be lighter than usual. And it will come to a near-total stop next week when I’m traveling.

It’s going to be one of those weeks: it’s Monday morning and there’s already nearly 20 hours of meetings and events on the calendar. These include a visit from the ICRC, giving a talk at the Foreign Service Institute, a National Defense University event on Colombia’s military and the post-conflict, and a meeting to nominate recipients of an annual human rights award.

I expect the border security work to be big this week, as the federal budget expires on Friday and a fight over Trump’s wall proposal may bring the U.S. government to (or close to) a shutdown. We’ll have a lot to say as the week progresses. First, by tomorrow, I hope to put out a personal podcast explaining where all of that stands.

For now, though, my first priority is getting our giant compendium of military and police aid programs out the door. This also requires me to iron out some bugs from the transfer of our website to defenseoversight.wola.org (which, frustratingly, have kept me from posting news links this morning).

I’m in Washington all week and look forward to doing a lot of writing, research, and meetings in Congress. By the end of this week, I hope to have:

• Our huge report listing 107 U.S. military and police aid programs completely out the door. This weekend I finished what I think is the last bit of coding on the web version, and it’s time to move the entire thing to the wola.org domain.
• A near-final draft of a report on our February visits to the Mexico-Guatemala border.
• Two podcasts: a WOLA conversation about Guatemala on Tuesday, and a personal one by the end of the week.
• At least 2 meetings on Capitol Hill.
• A lot of additions to our defense oversight database.
• A lot of entries to this site.

WOLA’s Board of Directors will be meeting in Colombia, and I’ll be accompanying them Wednesday morning through Sunday night. We’ll be in Bogotá and other destinations.

I’ll still be here in Washington Monday and Tuesday, preparing for that and clearing things off of my to-do list, especially finalizing our big upcoming defense aid programs publication.

It’s a shame that I’ll miss Thursday’s annual Senate hearing with Northern and Southern Commands. This is a key oversight moment, and we’ve sent questions and notes to staff in both houses’ committees. (The House has started having these meetings privately, which I don’t like.) But I’ll be in Bogotá when the actual hearings happen. As yesterday’s “upcoming events” post indicates, there are also three hearings on border security coming up Tuesday through Thursday.

Because of travel, updates to this blog will grind to a halt on Wednesday. I do hope to post a podcast this week, though.

It’s going to be sort of a transitional week. I’ll be here in Washington:

Putting the finishing touches on a huge new publication. It’s about the 107 existing U.S. programs and authorities that can aid foreign militaries and police forces, or that involve the U.S. military providing foreign aid. 87 are Defense Department-run, compared to only 14 run by the State Department. (2 are jointly run and 4 are run by other agencies.) See the list here–this is an online draft. Tasks include finishing the introduction, fixing bugs in the online version, adding charts, helping with layout of the printed version, and the big one: moving the whole defenseassistance.org database to a new home at wola.org. This big program is nearly in the can, just in time for what will be a bruising debate this year on foreign aid versus defense spending.

Getting ready to go to Colombia next week. We’re taking our whole board of directors, who will be holding its regular meeting in Bogotá. We’ll also be in a rural area and another city. (If you’re in Colombia, know me and are reading this, I apologize if I don’t see you this time—I’ll be with this big group of about 25 people the whole time.)

Gearing up for a big campaign on the border and migration which, once I get back from Colombia and launch the defense aid report, will be my largest focus for months.

Also expect a new WOLA Podcast about the border and migration, and regular posting to this blog.

It’s going to be another busy one.

Lots of colleagues from all over the region are in town for the Inter-American Human Rights Commission hearings. I look forward to attending the Colombia hearings, plus one on U.S. border security, on Tuesday, and I’ll be at four or five other related get-togethers and conversations with visitors. (Some of them are public events—there are many happening this week.)

I’m scheduled to speak at one: the House of Representatives’ Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission is going to hold a hearing about human rights defenders in Colombia on Thursday morning. They’re still looking for a space on Capitol Hill to hold it, I’ll post that when I know it. I need to have draft oral testimony done by Wednesday, and longer written testimony a day later.

Meanwhile our publication on U.S. military aid programs is in the home stretch: I’ve got 17 more program descriptions to edit (out of 109), an introduction to write, then we go to layout. That resource is online but unadvertised at a temporary website, even as we build it. If this were a less busy week, we’d be able to finalize this and get it ready to launch. But I’m not sure this will get the hours it needs.

With so many people in town, this is a good week to re-boot the WOLA Podcast, whose “back-end” I managed to rebuild last week. Time allowing, I also hope to start a more low-key podcast on this blog.

It’s going to be another busy one here in Washington. It’s mid-March and everything is in session, from Congress to the universities. And at the end of the week, the OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission starts its semi-annual sessions, so a lot of colleagues from around the region will be in town. Just look at the list of Latin America-related events you could go to here in Washington this week, it’s huge.

In part because I had four meetings on Capitol Hill last week, I never got a chance to make any for this week. This isn’t good–I’ll follow up with one or two staff, because this is a critical time. (The 2018 top-line budget request is expected this week. Appropriators want “wish lists” and inputs on budget items by the end of the month. Northern and Southern Command should be testifying in Armed Services soon.)

But fewer meetings also means more time for writing.

Two writing projects in particular will occupy me at work.

1. We’re almost done with an encyclopedic publication explaining the 89 programs in the Defense Department budget that can provide foreign assistance. (See the draft here, as a new section of my Defense Oversight database.) We still need to give it a thorough edit and add a compelling introduction because that’s all most people will read. The gist: there are 89 Pentagon aid programs, and 20 military or police aid programs in the State Department budget. The Trump administration wants to cut the programs run by diplomats, and pass the savings to the Defense Department–where these 89 programs may end up growing, militarizing U.S. aid even further.

2. I’ve completed a draft analysis of the current spike in Colombian coca-growing. Lots of graphics and photos. That will be posted to wola.org this week, after a few rounds of edits.

I’m also hoping this is the week I revive the WOLA Podcast, replacing our creaky old open-source RSS feed-maker with a different service like LibSyn. Hope to re-launch it by getting a few WOLA colleagues around the microphone for a conversation about something. If that works, I may start a homemade, one-voice podcast to go with this site, too.

Oh yeah, and meanwhile we’re supposed to get 6-10 inches of snow Monday night through Tuesday. So everyone in this city will probably be working at home for at least a day this week.