The News Roundup is a regular feature of the blog where we select news articles from various sources around the web, with the goal of providing an overview of the weekly conversation about the countries where MCC works in the region. Quotes in italics are drawn directly from sources and do not necessarily reflect the position of MCC.
There’s a Bigger Problem at the Border Than Trump’s Proposed Wall
In 1994, the threat wasn’t “terrorism.” In part, the call for more hardened, militarized borders came in response, among other things, to a never-ending drug war. It also came from US officials who anticipated the displacement of millions of Mexicans after the implementation of the new North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which, ironically, was aimed at eliminating barriers to trade and investment across North America. And the expectations of those officials proved well justified. The ensuing upheavals in Mexico, as analyst Marco Antonio Velázquez Navarrete explained to me, were like the aftermath of a war or natural disaster. Small farmers couldn’t compete against highly subsidized US agribusiness giants like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. Mexican small business owners were bankrupted by the likes of Walmart, Sam’s Club, and other corporate powers. Mining by foreign companies extended across vast swaths of Mexico, causing territorial conflicts and poisoning the land. The unprecedented and desperate migration that followed came up against what might be considered the other side of the Clinton doctrine of open trade: walls, increased border agents, increased patrolling, and new surveillance technologies meant to cut off traditional crossing spots in urban areas like El Paso, San Diego, Brownsville, and Nogales.
SHOULD THE U.S. STILL BE SENDING MILITARY AID TO HONDURAS?
Last week, the journalist Sonia Nazario wrote an Op-Ed in the Times criticizing American efforts to cut off aid money. She pointed to a number of programs in Honduras that have benefitted from aid, and that have had an undeniable impact at a local level, offering relief to communities beleaguered by gang violence and police corruption. But her arguments, which center on non-military aid, didn’t address the government’s systematic abuses. “There’s a great deal of evidence that the U.S. is funding violence creation by the government on a grand scale,” Dana Frank, a Honduras expert at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told me. “Members of the Honduran élite and the government officials they work with know quite well that the corrupt criminal-justice system largely guarantees them impunity, and they continue to test what they can get away with, including widespread violence by state security forces. They have a long history of all kinds of astonishingly open criminal behavior.”
How the Most Dangerous Place on Earth Got Safer
Two years ago, some 18,000 unaccompanied Honduran children showed up on the United States border. Now community leaders say the number of youngsters heading north from this neighborhood has been cut by more than half. Honduras has dropped from first place to third among Central American countries sending unaccompanied children to the United States illegally…..The funding for violence prevention in Honduras — which this year cost between $95 million and $110 million — has also come under attack from the left. This summer, a bill was introduced in Congress to suspend security aid to Honduras because of corruption and human rights violations. These concerns are legitimate, but cutting our support would be a mistake. What we really need to do is double down on the programs that are working and replicate them elsewhere. Even as fewer children are coming to the United States from Honduras, the overall number from Central America could set a record this year. What is working in Honduras may offer hope to Guatemala, El Salvador and other countries in crisis.
The ultimate challenge for Haiti — and many other small countries — is how to gain a measure of control over their own destinies, especially when they are in the “back yard” of powerful nations, dependent on foreign aid and are forced to deal with internal divisions. One way the U.N. could make restitution is to fulfill its pledge to rebuild Haiti’s sanitation system and begin planning a removal of the peacekeeping force. Those who want to help Haiti should begin consulting and involving Haitians at home and abroad in their grand plans.
U.N. Admits Role in Cholera Epidemic in Haiti
For the first time since a cholera epidemic believed to be imported by United Nations peacekeepers began killing thousands of Haitians nearly six years ago, the office of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has acknowledged that the United Nations played a role in the initial outbreak and that a “significant new set of U.N. actions” will be needed to respond to the crisis. The deputy spokesman for the secretary general, Farhan Haq, said in an email this week that “over the past year, the U.N. has become convinced that it needs to do much more regarding its own involvement in the initial outbreak and the suffering of those affected by cholera.” He added that a “new response will be presented publicly within the next two months, once it has been fully elaborated, agreed with the Haitian authorities and discussed with member states.”
Colombia’s Remarkable Peace Process
The life of every Colombian alive today has been defined, to varying degrees, by violence. The government has been at war with Marxist-inspired guerrilla groups for more than five decades, a ruinous conflict rooted in earlier cycles of violence. This week, the government of Colombia and the nation’s largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, reached adeal under which the militants promise to disarm and join the political system. If the peace accord is approved by voters in a plebiscite in October, Colombians will have a remarkable chance to realize the potential of a nation that has suffered from decades of violence, entrenched inequality and weak institutions. It is an opportunity Colombians should embrace.
Many Colombians would want punishment for the FARC. But also, with the same fervor, we would have to ask the same punishment for all responsible. State agents who deviated from their mission, and third parties who financed serious crimes and massacres. The violence of the other cannot justify one’s own violence. With the application of transitional justice, and with the launching of mechanisms for truth and reparations, what is sought is that this society may understand that there is no such thing as “good violence.” That the only legitimate reaction against crime is the democratic power of the state. That straying beyond this path brings the unleashing of violence that feeds on itself and perpetuates the confrontation. Non-repetition is something that we demand of the FARC with firmness. But this should also be a great national commitment. Nobody in the future should encourage forms of the poorly named “private justice.
The Colombian peace agreement has a big emphasis on the lives of women. Here’s how.
Yet peace processes and transitional justice mechanisms clearly delineate between conflict and peace. There are specific benefits and resources set aside for armed actors demobilizing or conflict-affected populations that hold the legal status of victims. What does this mean for those who suffer harm during the transition from violence, or in settings that aren’t labeled as conflict-related — such as domestic violence or acts of urban violence? A feminist approach to transitional justice and peace-building — which would trouble the separation of violence into public and private, conflict-related or domestic — can help evaluate how these experiences of violence ought to be acknowledged and demonstrate the consequences of seeking justice, in ways that existing frameworks have difficulty capturing.
Bolivian deputy interior minister beaten to death by miners
Moises Flores, the director of a mining radio station, later told local radio: “We have been able to see close up that vice-minister Illanes was dead. Colleagues told us that he had died of a beating.” Protests by miners in Bolivia demanding changes to laws turned violent this week after a highway was blockaded. Two workers were killed on Wednesday after being shot by police, and the government said 17 police officers had been wounded. The National Federation of Mining Cooperatives of Bolivia (Fencomin), once a strong ally of the leftwing president, Evo Morales, began what it said would be an indefinite protest after negotiations over mining legislation failed. Protesters have been demanding more mining concessions, the right to work for private companies, and greater union representation.