Weekly adamisacson.com - Issue #61

WOLA Podcast: Understanding Colombia’s Latest Wave of Social Protest

I recorded a very good conversation with my colleague Gimena Sánchez, who I don’t think has slept since Colombia’s protests—and the government’s crackdown—began on April 28. She does a masterful job explaining what’s going on. Here’s the text of the podcast landing page at wola.org:

Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli

This conversation, recorded on May 13, explains the different factors contributing to the crisis at the country enters its third week of protests and the number of dead or missing—almost entirely protestors—continues to increase. It also touches on the larger context of protests that were already taking place in Colombia’s more rural/indigenous area, paramilitary responses to the protestors, and contextualizes indigenous frustration in Colombia. The discussion ends with the prospect for change in Colombia, and how the Biden administration has responded so far.

Latin America Today Apple PodcastsSpotifyiHeartRadiomain feed is here

At the New York Times: Colombia Is in Turmoil. Biden Must Push It Toward Dialogue.

Like many of you, I’m saddened and worried to see what Colombia is going through: only four years ago, the FARC were laying down their weapons and it felt much more like a time of possibility. The present crisis offers renewed possibility, though: through real dialogue. The U.S. government can help by isolating some very powerful people in the country who oppose that, especially in the governing party. Read my column that ran at nytimes.com on May 12.

Colombia peace update: May 15, 2021

During at least the first half of 2021, we’re producing weekly updates in English about peace accord implementation and related topics. Get these in your e-mail by signing up to this Google group.

Nationwide protest updates

Violence trends

The security forces’ response to Colombia’s nationwide protests became less lethal over the past week. Three people involved in protests were killed in the 8 days between May 7 and 14, increasing the overall confirmed toll from 39 to 42, according to a database maintained by the non-governmental organizations Temblores and Indepaz.

Heavy, and often outraged, international scrutiny of the police and military response has likely contributed to restraint. So has a reduction in the protests’ overall intensity, as formal negotiations begin. While large turnouts continue in Bogotá, Medellín, and elsewhere, they are not consistently large every single day. Colombia’s southwest, though, remains very active, especially the cities of Cali, Valle del Cauca; Popayán, Cauca; Neiva, Huila; and Pasto, Nariño.

As of 11:30pm on May 12, Temblores had counted 39 killings committed by security forces; 1,055 “arbitrary detentions,” 442 “violent interventions in the framework of peaceful protests” including 133 uses of lethal firearms and 30 protesters suffering eye damage, and 16 cases of sexual violence.

Hundreds of people are still missing, with most probably in police custody. Sebastian Lanz, the co-director of Temblores, told Vice that some are being charged with crimes, but others “have ended up in unauthorized ‘clandestine’ detention centers where ‘there is no legal authority to verify the human rights situation there,’” or in “special centers for protection“ where people may be held without charges for up to 12 hours.

Geography of protest

Activity remains widespread geographically. On May 12, the protests’ two-week mark, the Defense Ministry’s “Unified Command Post” counted 170 protest activities in 391 of Colombia’s 1,123 municipalities (counties). That day, Defense Minister Diego Molano said that protesters continued to block 80 roads around the country.

In Cali early in the week, protesters maintained blockades stopping most road traffic in and out of the city. Some of these protesters were members of an Indigenous minga (“coming together”) that brought thousands from Cauca, to the south of Cali, to show solidarity with protesters in Colombia’s third-largest city. The blockades generated reports of shortages of goods in Cali, including gasoline, and an inability to get export cargo to Buenaventura, Colombia’s busiest port.

The Defense Ministry deployed 10,000 police and 2,100 soldiers to Cali. Most road blockades were lifted peacefully, but the military and police used heavy force in Siloé, a neighborhood in western Cali that has seen many casualties. On May 9, assailants in civilian clothes shot at indigenous protesters in broad daylight, wounding eight. The minga pulled back to Cauca on May 12, citing government plans for “an armed police and paramilitary attack against our delegations” if it stayed in Cali.

A road blockade in Buga, along the Pan-American Highway north of Cali, was the site of bitter, prolonged clashesbetween protesters and a combined police-military force on May 13. No deaths were reported. In fact, the Temblores and Indepaz database shows no new deaths in the Cali metropolitan area since May 7. Still, of the 42 fatalities on this list, 29 happened in Cali or the neighboring municipality of Yumbo.

In Cauca’s departmental capital of Popayán on May 12, police threw to the ground and sexually abused a 17-year-old girl who had been using her phone to record abuse during a protest. The girl was taken to an “Immediate Reaction Unit” (URI)—a facility of the Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía)—where she reported what was done to her. After being freed hours later, the girl reportedly took her own life. Popayán human rights lawyer Lizeth Montero said that a total of three underage girls denounced sexual abuse at the hands of police on May 12.

News of the abuse spurred angry protests in Popayán on May 14, during which some protesters burned down the URI where the girl had been taken. During the police response, an ESMAD anti-riot policeman fired a projectile, possibly a tear-gas canister, into the neck of 22-year-old college student Sebastián Quintero Múnera, killing him.

Rural areas appear to be joining the protests in increasing numbers. About 5,000 coca-growers from rural Cauca converged on Popayán to demand that the government comply with peace accord commitments to assist with the transition to licit crops, and that the government abandon plans to restart a program to eradicate coca by fumigating fields with herbicides from aircraft.

Casualties

Lucas Villa, a 37-year-old activist who was known for his ebullient nature—he appeared often in videos dancing during protests—died in a hospital in Pereira, Risaralda, on May 10. A gunman on a motorcycle hit Villa with eight bulletsduring a peaceful protest in Pereira on May 5.

The Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía) is seeking aggravated homicide charges against a Cali motorcycle police officer who, in a much-shared April 28 video, repeatedly shot and killed a 17-year-old who had run up and kicked him. This is the fourth case of a protest-related fatality for which the Fiscalía has filed charges. On May 12 Prosecutor General Francisco Barbosa told Colombia’s House of Representatives that the Fiscalía had counted 14 homicides so far; by that date Temblores and Indepaz had confirmed 41, including 1 policeman.

Investigations haven’t moved in the case of Maycolt Stiven Florido, a Bogotá barber attacked April 30, on video, by 12 police who accused him wrongly of throwing stones. The police knocked out three of Florido’s teeth, among other injuries, while stealing the equivalent of US$135 and his mobile phone.

Negotiations are getting underway

President Duque met on May 10 with the Comité del Paro, the group of mostly union leaders that called for the initial April 28 protests. The three hour exploratory meeting yielded little other than a government announcement that it is willing to open a process of negotiations with the Comité, managed on the government side by High Commissioner for Peace Miguel Ceballos.

President Duque announced on May 11 that the government would pay tuition for public university students who come from the bottom three levels of the government’s six-layer income system. The measure would waive tuition for 97 percent of students in public universities.

On May 14 the Comité del Paro, after a long meeting with mediators from the UN and the Catholic Church Episcopal Conference, agreed to the negotiations framework proposed by the government, and the first round of talks is to occur on May 16.

“If the National Government thinks that this process will be managed under the same scheme of the ‘great national conversation’ of late 2019 [after November 2019 protests], consisting of listening, taking notes, and then sitting in front of a computer to see what can be accommodated in the government’s plan and then coming out with what seems feasible, this new dialogue won’t calm things down either,” warned an El Espectador editorial.

An El Tiempo analysis outlines some of the points that a dialogue between the government and protest leaders would be likely to cover. They include basic income guarantees; affordable college education; reopening of schools closed by the pandemic; suspending forced coca eradication, especially fumigation; ending gender, ethnic, and sexual-orientation discrimination; withdrawing a controversial health care reform; and more participation in the national Covid vaccination plan.

La Silla Vacía profiles the 20 members of the Comité del Paro, finding the group to be overwhelmingly male and representative mainly of workers in the formal economy. The Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), organizers of the “minga” (coming together) that brought thousands of its members to Cali, issued a statement declaring that it does not feel represented by the Comité del Paro.

134 environmental groups signed a statement supporting the protests. They added a list of demands including securing communities’ prior and informed consent, opposing large extractive projects, and opposing coca eradication with the herbicide glyphosate.

Political fallout

Foreign Minister Claudia Blum resigned after 18 months in office, amid a steady drumbeat of international communications voicing concern about the severity of the government’s response to protests. “The country will reject external pronouncements that do not reflect objectivity and seek to fuel polarization in the country,” Blum had said a week earlier. The comment was not well received. Blum was the second cabinet minister to quit since the protests began. Alberto Carrasquilla, the author of the proposed tax hike that first detonated the protests, resigned as finance minister on May 3.

A Datexco telephone poll of 700 adults found 75 percent in favor of the national strike, 15 percent against, and 10 percent with no opinion. 82 percent disapproved of the government’s management of the situation.

President Duque told the New York Times “he did not believe the police department needed significant reform. He said that the police have a ‘zero tolerance’ policy toward abuse, and pointed to the fact that the police inspector general has opened at least 65 investigations into alleged misconduct.”

Conspiracy hypotheses

National Police Commander Gen. Jorge Luis Vargas is among authorities who insist that the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas, along with both of Colombia’s principal networks of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) dissident bands, are behind disturbances. While members of these groups may be taking advantage of disorder to pursue drug trafficking and other criminality, sources in the security forces tell El Espectador that evidence does not point to them playing a leading or coordinating role.

“What we are seeing here,” Gen. Vargas told El Tiempo’s María Isabel Rueda, “is a systematic attack against the police. This has happened in Chile and in other countries around the world, including the United States. There are organized systematic attacks, platforms in foreign countries, with a lot of false news and disinformation, that want to attack the Police for its role in crime containment, not public and peaceful demonstration.” He added, “In the ELN’s computers, in those of the FARC dissidents, we have found intentions to systematically attack the credibility of the police.”

Former president Álvaro Uribe, the maximum leader of President Iván Duque’s Centro Democrático party, called on May 13 for a greater military role in maintaining order during the protests, during an address before Colombia’s House of Representatives. Uribe warned that people exercising their right to “legitimate defense” might begin “the organization of private justice, with all its cruelty and the deinstitutionalization that the country had overcome.”

El Espectador recounted leaked audio of a Google Meet conversation between legislators from the governing Centro Democrático party and business leaders from Pereira, Risaralda. The CD legislators rejected any negotiation with groups carrying out road blockages and suggested boycotting advertising for all media outlets whose reporting has been unfavorable to the government and the security forces.

Business-sector representatives on this call recalled the “dissipated molecular revolution” thesis, popularized by a Nazi-sympathizing Chilean polemicist and advanced by former president Uribe, which contends that even peaceful protest is part of a dispersed, transnational leftist plot to overthrow the government. “They are looking to take over a government and I feel that businessmen have remained quiet on this issue. We need to support the institutional framework, because they have taken advantage of us, light years, in letting the outside world know what is happening in Colombia.”

Economics

Of the 11 million Colombians between ages 14 and 28, 3 million (27 percent) are neither employed nor in school. These “ni-nis” are heavily represented in the ongoing protests.

The Ministry of Finance said that the protests are costing the economy about half a trillion pesos (US$135 million) per day.

Comments and analyses

55 Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging the State Department to more forcefully denounce police brutality in Colombia, to freeze police aid and sales of crowd control equipment, and to promote dialogue.

The leads of the Colombian government’s negotiating team during the 2012-16 peace process with the FARC, Humberto de la Calle and Sergio Jaramillo, published a series of 10 recommendations in El Tiempo outlining how dialogue might go forward, suggesting a big role for young members of Congress and the use of mechanisms envisioned in the peace accord. “If we were able to reach an agreement between the government and the FARC, our institutions can do the same with the citizenry. But this requires, in addition to political will and respect for the other side, methods to reach agreements and guarantees for the participants.”

“One way to move forward is to stop thinking about the peace agreement in terms of concessions made to the much-disliked former FARC combatants,” reads an Americas Quarterly analysis from former finance minister Mauricio Cárdenas. “The peace agreement is about building a new social contract, where marginalized groups will have more political representation while bringing the state in, in the form of roads and schools, to some parts of Colombia for the first time in our history.”

“By helping Colombia move toward dialogue,” WOLA’s Adam Isacson writes in a May 12 New York Times column, “the Biden administration would be developing a template for engaging with counterparts throughout Latin America, where several countries battered by the virus are confronting authoritarian populism amid stark social divides.”

In a May 13 WOLA podcast, Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli explains why she’s optimistic that ongoing protests “can allow for more diverse voices to take up leadership in the country” and why she rates the US government’s response so far as “3 or 4 out of 10.”

Government acknowledges outreach efforts to the ELN

The Duque government’s high commissioner for peace, Miguel Ceballos, announced that the government has approved or participated in 32 meetings over the past 17 months “to verify the ELN’s true will to seek peace.” Outreach, Ceballos said, has included 22 meetings with intermediaries in the Vatican Nunciature in Bogotá, 6 meetings with intermediaries in the presidential palace, often with President Duque’s participation, and 4 trips to Havana, at which Catholic Church and UN representatives spoke to ELN leaders. The OAS mission in Colombia (MAPP-OEA) also took part in some of the meetings.

A few top ELN leaders remain in Cuba after a January 2019 bombing at Colombia’s police academy in Bogotá brought an end to an earlier peace process. Though protocols for the end of those talks called for their low-profile return to Colombia, the Duque government refused to allow that and demanded their extradition. In the meantime, the ELN ex-negotiators remain in Cuba and available for exploratory talks.

The first Cuba “good offices” trip took place in February 2020, when Father Darío Echeverri, who for years has played an important go-between role in peace efforts, traveled to Havana in representation of the Vatican. Echeverri was accompanied by Carlos Ruiz Massieu, head of the UN Verification Mission in Colombia. Subsequent meetings in Cuba took place in September and November 2020 and March 2021.

At the time, the Duque government, with Ceballos playing the most vocal role, was ramping up diplomatic pressure on Cuba to extradite the ELN leaders stranded on the island. This week Pablo Beltrán, a top ELN leader and former negotiator who is among those still in Havana, told El Tiempo that Colombia’s government has been a reluctant participant in the exploratory talks, giving most credit to the Church and the international community.

FARC dissidents still fighting Venezuelan forces, and each other, in Apure, Venezuela

Venezuelan officials say that 16 soldiers and at least 9 FARC dissident fighters have been killed since fighting broke out March 21 across the border from Arauca, Colombia, in the Venezuelan state of Apure. Sporadic fighting continues on Venezuelan soil between Venezuelan forces and a FARC dissident group, which announced this week that it is holding about eight Venezuelan soldiers captive. Though information is spotty, an NGO reports that fighting is also now occurring in Venezuela between the two FARC dissident groups active in the zone.

The panorama in Apure is confusing. In addition to the ELN guerrillas, which are very present but appear uninvolved in the current combat, are “dissidents” led by ex-guerrillas who rejected the FARC peace process. Their rank-and-file includes many new recruits with no FARC background.

The dissidents are affiliated with two national networks. The first, the 10th Front, is part of the “1st Front” structure headed by alias Gentil Duarte, a mid-level FARC leader who rejected the 2016 peace accord and never demobilized. The Gentil Duarte network is the largest FARC dissident organization in the country. The second is the “Segunda Marquetalia” (Marquetalia is the site of the 1964 army attack that led to the FARC’s origin), headed by alias Iván Márquez, who was the FARC’s chief negotiator in Havana and destined for a Senate seat. Márquez rearmed, along with several other hardline FARC members, in 2019.

Numerous analysts cited in past updates have alleged that the Venezuelan regime is targeting the 10th Front—for unclear reasons—and favoring the Segunda Marquetalia.

The Venezuelan NGO FundaRedes reported on May 8 that 10 Venezuelan soldiers had gone missing in Apure following combat with the 10th Front. On May 11 the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed that it had received a communication from the 10th Front indicating that it was holding eight Venezuelan soldiers who had been captured during fighting on April 23, and was looking for a way to hand them over. Tarazona posted this letter to his Twitter account, as well as proof-of-life video of some of the captives.

“In addition to a military defeat on April 23, the government today has [suffered] a communications defeat due to its determination to manage the situation in Apure without transparency before the families of the military and the country,” tweeted Marino Alvarado of the Venezuelan human rights group Provea. “Maduro, [Minister of Defense Gen.] Vladimir Padrino, and Adm. Remigio Ceballos [strategic operational commander of the armed forces] owe the country an explanation. A serious minister in the face of such a military and communications disaster would resign.”

FundaRedes also reported that 10th Front and Segunda Marquetalia fighters engaged in combat on May 12 in the town of Bruzual, more than 100 miles inside Venezuelan territory in northwestern Apure. Fundaredes claims that the fighting killed four and wounded several others. Combat between the 10th Front and Segunda Marquetalia has been rare in both Colombia and Venezuela, but appears to be growing more frequent.

Links

• Citing a failure to provide prior advance consultation, a court in Nariño suspended all forced coca eradication in Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities’ lands in Tumaco and nine other municipalities along Nariño’s Pacific coast. (Tumaco was sixth among Colombia’s largest coca-producing municipalities in 2019.) The ruling prohibits the on-the-ground manual forced eradication that security forces and eradicators have been carrying out. Colombia’s Constitutional Court will soon rule on two other legal challenges (tutelas) to the Duque government’s imminent restart of glyphosate fumigation from aircraft. Those challenges, too, argue insufficient consultation with ethnic communities.
• On May 11 the UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution adding to the mandate of the UN Verification Mission in Colombia. The Mission is now charged also with verifying the sentences handed down by the transitional justice tribunal (Special Jurisdiction for Peace, or JEP). These sentences, up to eight years in duration, are likely to be “restrictions of rights and liberties” and/or “works and tasks with restorative and restorative content,” referred by the Spanish acronym TOAR. The Security Council resolution came several days after seven top FARC leaders took the historic step of pleading guilty to the JEP’s charges of masterminding thousands of kidnappings.
• In testimony before the JEP, retired Army captain Adolfo Guevara told how he collaborated with the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) paramilitary network’s Northern Bloc while serving in active duty in 2002. “He not only narrated how he executed people to ‘legalize’ them as ‘positives’ in the Gaula [anti-kidnapping unit in] Magdalena in 2002,” El Tiempo reports, “but also assured that his actions were known and required by other military units.” Guevara alleged that Gen. Mario Montoya, who went on to head Colombia’s army in the mid-2000s, collaborated with the paramilitaries.
• Colombia’s navy reported seizing nine semi-submersible drug trafficking vessels along its coasts and waters so far this year.

Weekly Border Update: May 14, 2021

With this series of weekly updates, WOLA seeks to cover the most important developments at the U.S.-Mexico border. See past weekly updates here.

Migration at the border flattened out in April

Despite spring normally being a time of greater migration, Border Patrol’s “encounters” with undocumented migrants crept up by only 2.5 percent from March to April. The surprisingly slow growth comes after encounters increased 30 percent in February and 73 percent in March.

With 173,460 migrants encountered, April 2021 was still Border Patrol’s heaviest month in 21 years (180,050 in April 2000). That number, though, counts “encounters” and not individual “people.” There is much double-counting: “CBP has reported that about 40 percent of the adults it arrests are ‘recidivists’ or repeat offenders,” according to the Washington Post.

That is a far higher recidivism rate than in recent years: it ranged from 7 to 16 percent between 2013 and 2019. Border Patrol first started reporting this rate in 2005, when it estimated 25 percent; the highest total before now was 29 percent recidivism in 2007.

Repeat crossings are more frequent now because of the pandemic border closure measure, known as “Title 42,” that the Trump administration put in place in March 2020 and the Biden administration has continued (public health expertshave strongly criticized the “Title 42” measures as having no basis in protecting public health). In the name of preventing the spread of COVID-19, Border Patrol has been quickly expelling most migrants, usually with no opportunity to ask for asylum. This means most migrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are expelled across the border into Mexico.

Border Patrol expelled 63 percent of migrants it encountered in April, the same proportion as March. In December 2020, the Trump administration’s last full month in office, expulsions stood at 85 percent.

Expulsion is a hardship for protection-seeking migrants, who normally seek to turn themselves in to CBP or Border Patrol. For migrants who wish to avoid being apprehended, though, expulsion has made the process easier: if they are caught, they get taken back across the border within hours, usually without even seeing the inside of a Border Patrol station, and in many cases try to cross again.

Single adult migrants are more likely than children or families to attempt to avoid apprehension, and thus to try crossing again after being expelled. Border Patrol’s encounters with single adults increased by 12 percent from March to April, to 108,301. Trying to avoid apprehension often means taking dangerous routes, such as through remote desert areas or by sea, and it appears that more migrants are dying on U.S. soil or in U.S. waters, the Wall Street Journal reported this week.

Encounters with unaccompanied children and members of family units, though, plummeted 10 percent—a result that almost nobody foresaw in March, when children and families increased by 102 percent and 177 percent, respectively.

Border Patrol encountered 48,226 family members, down 5,000 from March. The sharpest one-month decrease was in families from Guatemala (-29 percent) and Honduras (-22 percent), while families from “other countries”—neither Mexico nor Central America’s “Northern Triangle” region—jumped by 34 percent, to 14,448.

This appears to be an outcome of the Title 42 expulsions into Mexico. 48 percent of family members from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were expelled, similar to 47 percent in March (we reported a smaller percentage a month ago, but CBP radically revised its family expulsion data). With a roughly 50-50 chance of being expelled or being allowed to petition for asylum or protection inside the United States, Central American families face a confusing set of outcomes that smugglers are exploiting, reports Lomi Kriel at ProPublica / Texas Tribune. By contrast, Border Patrol expelled just 5 percent of family members from “other countries”—often places like Cuba or Venezuela where sending expulsion flights is not currently possible.

As noted in past updates, numbers of unaccompanied children continue to drop, even though the Biden administration is not expelling non-Mexican children who arrive. Border Patrol encountered an average of 268 non-Mexican children per day between May 9-12. This is a sharp drop from the 387 average of May 2-6, and the high 400s logged in late March and the first three weeks of April.

The agency encountered 2,268 Mexican children in April, almost identical to March (2,277). While almost none were expelled under Title 42, most were quickly repatriated back to Mexico, as was the norm before the pandemic, because the 2008 law requiring that unaccompanied children go into the asylum system only applies to kids from non-contiguous countries.

Only a daily average of 493 children were being processed in Border Patrol facilities during May 9-12, down from well over 5,000 in late March and early April. Nearly all were handed over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s (ORR) network of shelters within about 24 hours. The population of unaccompanied children in ORR shelters has also dropped to 20,397, the fewest since April 19 and down from an April 29 high of 22,557.

These shelters, which include convention centers, tent facilities, and a military base, face serious challenges of crowding, living conditions, and logistics, the New York Times reported, sharing an internal “senior leader brief” showing a thorough level of data collection. This week, the Dallas Morning News found that ORR had been keeping unaccompanied children for days at a time on buses parked outside a Dallas convention center that it is using as an emergency shelter. Politico reported that the White House has been leaning hard on Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, whose department oversees ORR, to speed the pace at which the agency releases children to relatives or sponsors in the United States.

Late March predictions that ORR would need bed space for 34,000 or more children are now looking too pessimistic. With the drop in child and family migration has come a notable drop in press coverage of events at the border.

Family expulsions have generated a quiet crisis of family separation in Mexican border cities, as expelled parents, aware that unaccompanied children don’t get expelled, make the painful decision to send their children back into the United States alone. “Between January 20 and April 5, Border Patrol agents came across at least 2,121 unaccompanied migrant children who had been previously expelled,” CBS News reported. That is 24 family separations per day—one per hour.

Title 42 is easing, slightly

In April CBP expelled people 111,714 times under the Title 42 pandemic authority. On May 13 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that he did not have a timetable for lifting Title 42. Recent weeks, though, have seen some modest changes to the policy’s application to asylum seekers.

On May 12 CBS News got confirmation from CBP that the agency, citing “operational needs,” has stopped flying families from south Texas, where the bordering Mexican state of Tamaulipas has been limiting expulsions of families with small children, to other parts of the border where expulsions are easier. Since March 8, near-daily planeloads of people had been taking Central American families from McAllen, Texas to El Paso, Texas and San Diego, California. Witness at the Border, which monitors ICE flights, detected 60 of these “lateral” flights in April and 108 between March 8 and April 30, enough to expel about 10,000 people.

Once in El Paso and San Diego, DHS personnel were taking families to the borderline and leaving them in Mexico, often without telling them where they were or what was happening to them. Human Rights First discussed some of the families’ treatment at the hands of Border Patrol and other DHS personnel in a May 13 memo. U.S. media outlets have reported on tearful, disoriented families who had just been flown thousands of miles to be expelled.

The lateral expulsion flights have now stopped, although DHS is still busing some families from south Texas’s Rio Grande Valley region about four hours west to Laredo, in order to expel them into the organized crime-dominated border town of Nuevo Laredo. At a May 13 Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) accused DHS Secretary Mayorkas of canceling the expulsion flights in response to “left-wing groups.”

Another tiny erosion into Title 42 is a small but growing number of humanitarian exceptions for some of the most vulnerable expelled migrants who wish to seek asylum in the United States. “The latest plan is kicking off on a pilot basis,” a source told CNN, “adding that families will be put in immigration proceedings” in the United States. In recent weeks, about 35 vulnerable families a day have been exempted from expulsions, at the recommendation of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is the plaintiff in a lawsuit against DHS seeking to overturn Title 42. It is not clear to what extent that number may expand. On May 13 the ACLU agreed to the latest in a series of delays to that lawsuit; the next deadline is May 25.

Border drug seizure data

Seven months into fiscal year 2021, CBP’s reporting on drugs detected at the U.S.-Mexico border points to big increases in fentanyl and cocaine seizures, a big drop in cannabis seizures, and little change in heroin and methamphetamine seizures. As in past years, nearly all drugs are seized by CBP agents at ports of entry, with the exception of marijuana:

• Fentanyl: 6,103 pounds seized October-April, 89 percent of it at ports of entry. If this pace is maintained through September, CBP will seize 10,462 pounds of fentanyl in FY 2021, a 130 percent increase over FY 2020.
• Cocaine: 17,407 pounds seized October-April, 86 percent of it at ports of entry. If this pace is maintained through September, CBP will seize 29,841 pounds of cocaine in FY 2021, a 57 percent increase over FY 2020.
• Heroin: 3,061 pounds seized October-April, 91 percent of it at ports of entry. If this pace is maintained through September, CBP will seize 5,247 pounds of heroin in FY 2021, a 2 percent increase over FY 2020.
• Methamphetamine: 99,681 pounds seized October-April, 93 percent of it at ports of entry. If this pace is maintained through September, CBP will seize 170,882 pounds of meth in FY 2021, almost identical to FY 2020.
• Marijuana: 162,073 pounds seized October-April, 39 percent of it at ports of entry. If this pace is maintained through September, CBP will seize 277,839 pounds of marijuana in FY 2021, a 45 percent decrease from FY 2020.

Links

• The Senate Homeland Security Committee held a March 13 hearing on the situation of unaccompanied minors, with DHS Secretary Mayorkas the lone witness. Committee Chairman Sen. Gary Peters (D-Michigan) noted the recent decline in arrivals of unaccompanied children and praised Border Patrol agents who were paying for toys out of their own pockets. Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada) voiced strong concerns about Title 42 expulsions, including the growing number of family separations discussed above.
• On the Republican side, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) lamented that, once in the United States, unaccompanied children are infrequently returned to their home countries, calling that an incentive for more children to come. Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), and Rick Scott (R-Florida) relied heavily on a prop: a chart of weekly apprehensions that appeared to show a sharp jump in migration after Joe Biden’s inauguration, but was simply wrong—based on a basic conflation of “apprehensions” and “encounters.” Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) said that overwhelmed Border Patrol agents had released 19,000 asylum-seeking family members into the United States without “notices to appear” in immigration court.
• Disgruntled with the Biden administration’s modest walk-back of the Trump administration’s hardline migration policies, some Border Patrol agents “are considering early retirement” or “are buying unofficial coins that say ‘U.S. Welcome Patrol,’” Reuters reports.
• A U.S. delegation led by National Security Council Western Hemisphere Director Juan González paid an in-person visit to Mexico on May 13. According to the Mexican Foreign Relations Secretariat’s release, topics covered included arms and narcotics trafficking, organized crime violence and financial flows, and “addiction as a public health problem.” The words “migration” or “border” do not appear.
• Reuters reports on how as many as 2,000 migrants, apparently misinformed about the Biden administration’s migration policies, have set up an encampment outside the busy El Chaparral pedestrian port of entry in Tijuana, across from San Ysidro, San Diego County, California. “The camp is growing increasingly dangerous, migrants and activists told Reuters, with unsanitary conditions, drug use, and gangs entering the area.”
• At Rest of World, Jeff Ernst reports on how migrant caravans—which haven’t successfully reached the United States since late 2018—are increasingly being organized by scammers trying to shake down desperate people over social media, especially in Honduras.
• El Paso Matters reports on the unique challenges faced by Indigenous migrants from Central America, many of whom speak little Spanish. “On a phone call with El Paso Matters, West Texas CBP spokesperson Landon Hutchens said that after hundreds of years since the Spanish colonization of the Americas, ‘you’d think (Indigenous immigrants) would have learned Spanish by now.’”
• A memo from Mijente and Just Futures Law warns of the civil liberties and migrant safety dangers of deploying surveillance and other technologies along the border—a measure that many border wall opponents in the Biden administration and Congress propose instead of a barrier. The memo lists some of the “Tech-Border-Industrial-Complex” corporations that would stand to gain from a big investment in drone and other surveillance technology.
• Tijuana municipal police found a cross-border “narco-tunnel” leading under the border wall into San Diego County’s Otay Mesa area. The tunnel began in a building located across the street from a Mexican National Guard barracks.
• USA Today published a long profile of Rep. Henry Cuéllar (D-Texas), whose district includes a large portion of the Texas border including Laredo. One of the most conservative Democrats in the House, Cuéllar has been a critic of the Biden administration.
• A Pew Research Center study of news coverage during the Biden administration’s first 60 days found that immigration was the subject of 11 percent of stories: 8 percent of stories in outlets with a “left-leaning audience,” and 20 percent of stories in outlets with a “right-leaning audience.”

Latin America-related online events this week

Monday, May 17

• 11:00 at Zoom: Debt, Austerity and Human Rights in Latin America (RSVP required).
• 12:00-2:00 at thedialogue.org: Evaluating the Socioemotional Competencies of Students During the Pandemic and School Reopening (RSVP required).

Tuesday, May 18

• 11:00-12:30 at USIP Zoom: Understanding the Crisis in Colombia: Perspectives from Cali on Dialogue, Justice, and Healing (RSVP required).
• 11:00-12:30 at canninghouse.org: Life, Livelihoods and Liberty (RSVP required).
• 1:00 at Zoom: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and Authoritarianism in Unrevolutionary Mexico: A Book Talk with Paul Gillingham and Gema Kloppe-Santamaría (RSVP required).
• 3:00-4:30 at thedialogue.org: The Decisions of Facebook’s Oversight Board – Implications for the Global South, particularly in Latin America (RSVP required).

Wednesday, May 19

• 9:30-10:30 at atlanticcouncil.org: What is the road ahead for Colombia? (RSVP required).
• 10:00 at appropriations.house.gov: Hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security on U.S. Customs and Border Protection Resource Management and Operational Priorities.
• 10:00 at semanajusticiafiscal.com: La política fiscal como clave para avanzar hacia la justicia ambiental y climática en América Latina (RSVP required).
• Following a 9:45 business meeting at foreign.senate.gov: Hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the nomination of Brian Nichols to be assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

Thursday, May 20

• 10:00 at appropriations.house.gov: Member Day for the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security.
• 11:30-12:30 at thedialogue.org: Colombia’s Unrest (RSVP required).
• 3:30-5:00 at wilsoncenter.org: Chile’s Constituent Assembly Elections: Deciphering the Results (RSVP required).

Friday, May 21

• 10:00-6:30 at University of Chicago Zoom: Crisis and Conflict in Colombia: Urgent Testimonies, Context and Perspective (RSVP required).
• 12:00-1:00 at wilsoncenter.org: Nicaraguan Elections and Prospects for Democracy in 2021 (RSVP required).

Some tweets that made me laugh this week