The Mexico School Children Disappearance Ten Years Later

The Impunity Cascade: Ayotzinapa at Ten Years ayotzi 9 A protestor is pictured outside of the National Palace in Mexico City on the 9th anniversary of the disappearance of the 43 students, September 26, 2023. Photograph courtesy Héctor Guerrero/El País 10th Anniversary Brings No Closure to Families of Victims The National Crisis of Forced Disappearance in Mexico Continues Published: Sep 26, 2024 Edited by Kate Doyle and Claire Dorfman For more information, contact: 202-994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu Subjects Crime and Narcotics Human Rights and Genocide Political Crimes and Abuse of Power Regions Mexico and Central America Project Mexico Conference poster for Atrocities and Memory in North America: Ayotzinapa Ten Years On, organized by the University College London. Conference poster for Atrocities and Memory in North America: Ayotzinapa Ten Years On, organized by University College London, September 19-20, 2024. UCL Kate Doyle presented her keynote speech at the conference Atrocities and Memory in North America: Ayotzinapa Ten Years On, organized by University College London, September 19, 2024. Washington, D.C., September 26, 2024 - On the 10th anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in Iguala, Mexico, the National Security Archive posts a keynote speech given by Senior Analyst Kate Doyle at an event organized by University College London to commemorate the tragedy and to spotlight ongoing impunity for state actors involved in the crime and the cover-up. The violent attacks of that night and the repeated obstruction of efforts to obtain justice are together emblematic of the human rights crisis in Mexico. The disappearances remain an open wound for the victims’ families and the country as a whole, where more than 100,000 people have vanished without a trace. Sadly, President López Obrador will complete his presidential term without having provided closure for the families of the Aytozinapa students—one of his key campaign promises. The two-day conference at UCL brought together key investigators, analysts, and academics involved in the case. In her address, Doyle said it was the “anniversary of impunity,” explaining how the Ayotzinapa case illustrates the phenomenon of macro-criminality, where security forces, organized crime and economic elites “collaborate and generate criminal networks together that rely on extortion, trafficking, illicit weapons trade, and other forms of corruption in order to profit and thrive.” Related to this, Doyle argued, is a system of macro-impunity, where these same actors “cooperate to ensure that a justice system cannot function.” Since 2015, the National Security Archive has filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests for U.S. documents related to the case of the 43 students, the “war on drugs” and its consequences, and U.S. security assistance to Mexico. In 2020, Kate Doyle and the National Security Archive partnered with reporter Anayansi Díaz-Cortes and Reveal News from the Center for Investigative Reporting to develop the podcast series “After Ayotzinapa,” released in January 2022. Two months later, the Spanish-language version, “Después de Ayotzinapa,” was released in co-production with Adonde Media. The National Security Archive continues to investigate the case with our partners at Centro Prodh and Reveal. Visit our Ayotzinapa Investigations page to learn more about the case and the National Security Archive’s investigative and advocacy work. The Impunity Cascade: Ayotzinapa and the Triumph of Justice September 19, 2024 By Kate Doyle, Senior Analyst, National Security Archive One decade ago, Ernesto Guerrero, 23 years old, one of the students at the Ayotzinapa teacher-training college who survived September 26, 2014, described the aftermath of the first sustained attacks by police on three buses stuck at Calle Juan N. Álvarez in Iguala. The intense gunfire had finally stopped, and the police cars were gone. One student lay sprawled in the middle of the street with a critical head wound. Another had several fingers shot off, a third was shot in the face. A group of some twenty students had been forced off the buses and taken away in the backs of police trucks. Journalist John Gibler later published Ernesto’s testimony in his book, I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us, a collection of oral histories about the night of Iguala. Ernesto told John, “We students tried to cordon off the area and protect it as best we could. We put rocks and sticks around the bullet shells and other evidence so that no one would pick them up or step on them, so when the detectives arrived… But they never came.” The Mexican government’s first response to the disappearance of the 43 was to construct a cover-up. President Enrique Peña Nieto and his senior officials maintained the validity of their “historical truth” until the day they left power. On December 1, 2018, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office with the very public pledge to solve Ayotzinapa. López Obrador decreed the creation of a truth commission to be headed by his most senior human rights official, Alejandro Encinas. A human rights lawyer with the United Nations, Omar Gómez Trejo, was named special prosecutor. The president went further, ordering all federal agencies (including the Army, Marines, national intelligence, and federal police) to provide any assistance required by the investigation, including access to their personnel and their archives. Within 18 months, Gómez Trejo had undertaken a major housecleaning of his office, replacing career cronies with younger, committed investigators and prosecutors, many from outside the government. He and Encinas had searched dozens of sites and located the remains of two students. Arrest warrants were obtained for more than 80 suspects. The group of independent experts (GIEI) was invited back into the case. It was exciting to see the work that was getting done, the resources invested, the new technologies available, the searches underway, the multiple meetings, the assurances to parents, the skills and knowledge and expertise being poured into this case. To solve it and to find the boys. So it’s hard to believe we are gathering today to mark ten years since one of the most shocking human rights atrocities to ever take place in Mexico and contemplating how completely the case has collapsed. It turns out, those early advances were the exceptions that proved the rule. Once the investigation began to find evidence of a military role in the crimes, President López Obrador became disaffected and the government’s cooperation began to wither – then curdled into open hostility. In 2022, the special prosecutor left the country in fear for his life. The commission head, Alejandro Encinas, resigned after learning he had been under military surveillance through Pegasus spyware. The GIEI jumped ship in 2023, accusing the Army and the Center for National Intelligence of sabotaging the investigation. No more students have been found. There have been no trials and no convictions. No truth, no justice. This is the anniversary of impunity. The title of my talk is half-borrowed from the title of an influential book published in 2011 by Harvard scholar Kathryn Sikkink called The Justice Cascade. In it, Sikkink proposed that with the end of the Cold War, some nations began organizing what had previously been impossible to imagine – criminal trials of the perpetrators of human rights abuses. According to her research, once the political logic of the Cold War vanished, a powerful desire for truth, memory, and justice began to emerge in countries around the world, and specifically the desire to hold individuals criminally responsible for grave human rights violations. This global trend, as Sikkink identified it, took place within the context of the much broader arena of transitional justice, which included forms of truth-telling and memorialization, but the focus of her book was on the trials. Human rights trials were periodic and highly dispersed at first, but by the early 2000s turned into a flood – the cascade of her title. They were not homogeneous; they could be national courtrooms, regional bodies, special tribunals, cases of universal jurisdiction, all the way to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. My entire career at the Archive has been focused on the post-Cold War consensus in the Americas that the recovery of historical memory, truth-telling, transparency, and trials would not only strengthen democratic governance but also support social movements through recognition of their struggles, information about what truly happened, and accountability. I still believe this. But it’s clear that the narrative of The Justice Cascade fails to address other powerful and insidious forces at work, even in those countries that convened the truth commissions, built the monuments, held the trials. I think, for example, of Guatemala, which shortly after the historic genocide trial of Ríos Montt careened into an aggressive authoritarian government that quickly dismembered the very justice system that had carried out that and other paradigmatic human rights trials. Obviously, individual criminal accountability through a justice system in and of itself does not lead to political, social, or economic justice. Furthermore, while The Justice Cascade posits impunity as the opposite of individual accountability – in other words, impunity is literally when a person goes unpunished for a crime they committed – there’s another, more ferocious kind of impunity, a structural impunity, that is not addressed. We could call it macro-impunity, in direct response to what has become a whole new field of violence studies in the Americas, called “macrocriminality.” Using the definition given by María Luisa Quintero (former Director of Investigations and Litigation at CICIG), macrocriminality is a system that functions at the intersection of three spheres: 1) the classic “criminal” (organized crime group), 2) economic, business (private interests, private companies), 3) and the public (agents of the State, whether police, judges, prosecutors, politicians, etc.). The three spheres collaborate and generate criminal networks together that rely on extortion, trafficking, illicit weapons trade, and other forms of corruption in order to profit and thrive. So we could say that macro-impunity would operate in a similar fashion, as those networks of actors from the public, private, and classically “criminal” spheres cooperate to ensure that a justice system cannot function. In other words, macro-criminality is the crime, macro-impunity is the cover-up. And the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students is now a caso paradigmatico – not of Mexico’s ability to solve a complex human rights case for the very first time, as I know Prosecutor Gómez Trejo and his team had hoped and believed – but a paradigmatic case of macro-impunity. In order to better understand the contemporary problem of macro impunity, we need to look at the history of impunity in the Americas – which for me starts in the United States, after the Second World War. As the Cold War began, the United States instrumentalized “national security doctrine” in order to protect US interests, and military governments south of the border largely signed on to the anti-communist project, converting it into the Dirty Wars of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. US support for repression in the hemisphere took many forms: military assistance, training in our military schools, weapons grants, and “technical assistance,” which meant access to advanced computers as well as surveillance and intelligence technologies. Physical and psychological torture techniques were recast as “interrogation methods” and formalized in official US military training manuals. The rest of the hemisphere knew this – the Mexicans, the Central and South Americans, they knew it; we trained their militaries for decades in the art of what US defense strategists called “internal security”: how to identify and eliminate the enemy hiding inside civil society. Most US citizens did not know it or refused to know it. They were spared the firsthand experience of the Dirty Wars, of course. And the United States government was careful to shroud kidnapping, torture, and assassination programs in secrecy – especially at home. If there were activists and human rights groups and investigative journalists, a few members of Congress, who exposed the consequences of the US-supported counterinsurgency programs, most Americans accepted the propaganda manufactured by Washington that explained that the wars south of our border were dirty because that’s just how it was in Latin America. Latin America was made up of communist terrorists and brutal militaries, it was in their nature, a history of bloodshed going back hundreds of years. Even in internal, classified communications, US officials promoted this framing. “Guatemala is a violent society,” wrote one State Department analyst 38 years ago in a secret report on forced disappearance. “The conscious acceptance and use of violence as an instrument of politics contribute to the extraordinary levels of murder, kidnapping, and disappearances.” The analyst was referring to human rights violations committed by Guatemalan army officers and units the US had backed for decades. The United States had less direct influence on the Mexican military because Mexico’s insistence on sovereignty kept the Pentagon mostly out of its defense affairs. At the same time, Washington had confidence in the ability of the PRI to control subversion, with or without US military assistance. As a CIA secret intelligence estimate on “Security Conditions in Mexico” explained in 1966, “The government party virtually monopolizes politics and is an outstanding force for stability. Top government leaders are strong, determined men, conversant with the uses of power. Security forces are tough and well-trained; when so ordered, they carry out missions without overmuch regard for legalisms.” “Without overmuch regard for legalisms”: That’s the CIA signaling impunity as a strategic advantage in Mexico. 1966 is about when Mexico’s Dirty War began, according to the truth commission, which issued its first report last month. By the mid-1970s, when political repression in Mexico reached its most intensive phase, US human rights policy was taking shape in Washington. As early as 1973, Congress began conditioning military assistance to countries on their human rights records. The Department of State instituted a new human rights reporting requirement for embassies around the world, and in 1977 compiled the first annual State Department Human Rights Report. But Congress and later President Carter’s new commitment to human rights coexisted uneasily alongside US national security objectives in Mexico (and the rest of the Americas). Read the now-declassified communiqués sent by the US Embassy in Mexico City to Washington during those years and you can track how the US government sanitized Embassy reports of human rights abuses under the Echeverría regime for public consumption. In 1976, for example, political officer John Hamilton addressed the prevalence of torture in Mexico’s criminal investigations system. “Torture and other similar violations of human rights frequently occur immediately after arrest during police interrogation… These violations occur in all kinds of instances, both in normal criminal arrests and in politically motivated detentions…. Although the Government of Mexico clearly does not condone this officially or publicly, it just as clearly tolerates the abuse so long as it does not result in embarrassing public disclosures. It undoubtedly is also limited in its ability to change this centuries old pattern.” Although Hamilton used his best bland and bureaucratic language to describe the abusive practices of a close ally, the State Department’s first annual human rights report, issued one year later, stripped his references to torture and other violations altogether and pointed instead to the “strong enforcement actions” taken by Echeverría’s government against suspected terrorists. The truth was US interests lay elsewhere. In 2003, I interviewed Lawrence Sternfield, the former CIA chief of station in Mexico who served in the mid to late 1970s. When I asked him about the CIA’s concerns about the excesses of the Dirty War at that time, Sternfield told me: "There was absolutely no mention of human rights while I was there. Not one word was spoken about it with my counterparts. It wasn't something that we broached or they broached. The relationship we had with the DFS was about pure intelligence gathering. This was the height of the Cold War, and our efforts were focused against the Soviet target. Not that we weren't aware that the Mexicans were doing bad things when they picked up people. But we didn't raise that with them." As one former US ambassador told me a few years ago, “It’s always the fault of the United States!” But whether or not we want to make a direct, causal link between the hundreds of Mexican military officers who trained at the School of the Americas and the methods they used to crush dissent at home, we can recognize the erasure of the Dirty War in the official US record as a cover-up of Mexican repression in exchange for policy priorities that mattered more. Washington’s willingness to read authoritarian rule as an “outstanding force for stability” and to christen human rights abuses as “strong enforcement actions” point to what was actually important to US policy makers. Mexico has always considered itself exceptional, and when the era of transitional justice dawned in the early 1990s it became the exception in how countries in the hemisphere grappled with legacies of political violence. There would be no truth commission. Memorialization was left to the victims and their families. No human rights trials would be held. Upon taking office in 2000, President Vicente Fox took the important decision to order an opening of Dirty War archives. When it came to truth-telling and accountability, however, he fell back on the old impunity playbook. With great fanfare he announced the creation of a special prosecutor’s office to investigate past human rights crimes and prosecute those responsible, but the effort was an expensive simulation that ended with a whimper. FEMOSPP – the fake transitional justice effort – was dissolved in November of 2006, and days later Felipe Calderón was sworn into office as Mexico’s new President. One of his first acts in office was to declare war on the drug cartels and call in the military to assist. The common critique of the war on drugs rejects the emphasis on punitive measures: drug addiction should not be criminalized and the effort to stop narcotics production should not be militarized. But maybe we should look at it from a different perspective. How does the war on drugs itself produce criminality? Can we draw a line connecting the drug war and the disappearance of 43 college students in Guerrero? Let’s recall the 1990s, when the United States crafted the “kingpin strategy” to combat violent drug trafficking organizations. It resulted in the takedown of major drug lords in Mexico. Analysts of counternarcotics policies have demonstrated that – like any corporate break-up – when the monopoly is dismantled, the dominant cartel fragments into smaller trafficking groups which, in their search for territory and market share, burrow into local communities and use any combination they can of bribes, favoritism, intimidation, and coercion, to extreme violence to increase their power. One cartel dismantled under the kingpin strategy was Beltrán Leyva. After breaking with the Sinaloa Cartel, Arturo Beltrán Leyva and his brothers created a powerful, thriving criminal business that trafficked millions of dollars of narcotics annually. In order to protect it, they bribed national-level government officials such as Mexico’s drug czar and the head of the Attorney General’s organized crime division, SEIDO. In 2008, the US declared Arturo a kingpin, and the Treasury Department sanctioned him. In 2009 he was shot and killed by Mexican Marines, effectively destroying the organization. At least seven splinter groups took its place (according to InSight Crime) and competed with each other for territory. One of them was Guerreros Unidos, which from 2010 began controlling plazas in parts of Morelos, Estado de México and northern Guerrero. By 2014, Guerreros Unidos was a pretty successful transnational drug trafficking organization. It wasn’t bribing Mexico’s drug czar but, according to investigators, they were bribing state officials in Guerrero, local mayors, municipal police, the head of the Guerrero office of the federal police, the commanders of two military bases, and employees of the bus companies that ferried their heroin from Iguala to Chicago, Illinois every day, returning with dollars. Then the attacks of September 26 happened. Let’s read what Enrique Peña Nieto’s government declared about the night of Iguala. In the Informe de Caso Iguala, the official story released in 2016 (full of misleading and false information), the government described the attacks and then concluded, “These unfortunate events alerted us to abuse of power, corruption, and infiltration of some municipal police forces by criminal organizations in Guerrero’s northern zone.” The response of the authorities to the disappearance of the 43 was not investigation but containment. The human rights atrocity was characterized as a common crime (kidnapping, homicide). Some municipal police were “corrupt” and acted in collusion with local thugs. A bone was planted and found, suspects detained and tortured, the official story became the historical truth, and as far as President Enrique Peña Nieto and everyone who reported to him were concerned, the case was closed. Containment was necessary because it masked a monster. For every action that unfolded on the night of September 26-27 – as described by then-Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam and his chief of investigations, Tomás Zerón – there were countless other actions taken by people who were invisible in the official story. It took time and courageous effort on the part of the survivors and the parents of the missing students, the new investigating team, the forensic experts, and the GIEI, but the true dimensions of the atrocity began to be revealed. We learned of the complicities of the military battalions in Iguala, the Federal Police, state police, Ministeriales, Transit Police. The bus companies. The meetings held with the President to coordinate strategy, the roles of the Attorney General, Zerón, the Marines, Defense Secretary Cienfuegos. These weren’t the people who seized the students, hustled them into the backs of trucks, and took them to their fates. These were the people who concocted a cover story and then did everything in their power to ensure the facts about that night would be suppressed. Because the truth about the night would expose the criminal networks that bound Guerreros Unidos not just to local police but to state and federal officials, to members of the Army, the Marines, to private companies. The truth would rearrange accepted definitions of who is the criminal and what is corruption. As the students were being stalked and surveilled, then attacked in Iguala, thousands of miles away the DEA was wrapping up a criminal investigation it had launched in Chicago against a group of Mexican heroin traffickers who belonged to a gang called Guerreros Unidos. In December 2014 – just a few weeks before the Peña Nieto government would close the case with the verdad histórica – eight GU members were indicted, drawing on thousands of hours of surveillance over the course of a year and a half, and hundreds and hundreds of pages of intercepted text messages sent between the group in Chicago and their co-conspirators in northern Guerrero. The messages contained running conversations about the mechanics of operating a heroin trafficking business. There were references to the passenger buses the GU used to transport drugs over the border into the US – the buses the students were riding in when they were attacked by police. Discussions of the system of roadblocks and lookouts maintained by collaborating police officers that kept the shipments safe. The traffickers planned meetings with municipal presidents, compared which officials got what bribes, name-dropped army commanders and other military officers on the payroll. They borrowed police cars to run errands without interference. They guided Marine patrols to the hide-outs of rival gangs to ensure their elimination. They organized special dinners for officers they were courting for favor. They complained about the greedy soldiers, who always asked for more no matter how much they gave them. The investigators in Mexico and the GIEI didn’t see most of the intercepted messages until 2022. Despite the notoriety of the Ayotzinapa case, the Justice Department refused to share them for years, claiming they didn’t contain evidence related to planning or carrying out the students’ disappearance. When the National Security Archive got involved in 2017, it was at the request of the parents’ lawyers from Centro Prodh, who were trying to figure out how to obtain the DEA intercepts. We filed FOIAs and sued the government in federal court. Nothing a non-profit research institute could do succeeded in prying them loose, and they weren’t released until the President of Mexico asked the Vice President of the United States for them when Kamala Harris visited Mexico in late 2021. That helped. So did Mexico’s decision to extradite one of the accused Guerreros Unidos chiefs – Adán Casarrubias Salgado – to Chicago in May 2022. The messages were released to the special prosecutor a few weeks later. I once asked a senior diplomat who was serving in the embassy when the boys were taken how the US viewed the Mexican government’s efforts to solve the case. He had sent a team of FBI agents to Iguala to provide technical assistance, and they returned to Mexico City with bad news. “The investigation was so disorganized,” he told me. “Mexicans had very poor practices, like not protecting the crime scenes. It was a bit frustrating for us since we had spent years and millions of dollars in training them in police and criminal investigation techniques!” Unfortunately, the kind of impunity that protects criminal networks in Mexico can’t be improved with better police techniques. Not because the “drug lords” or the “cartels” are so powerful that they’re impervious to even the most skilled investigators. But because they’re part of a criminal system that includes the police chief we just trained or the Marine commander we invited to Washington for a conference on drug interdiction. Or a defense secretary like Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, awarded with the Pentagon’s Legion of Merit in 2018 for his “extraordinary contributions in strengthening the relationships between the militaries of Mexico and the United States.” In 2015, Cienfuegos refused to allow the soldiers stationed in Iguala to be questioned by investigators, a position he held until his retirement three years later. In 2020, he was arrested by DEA agents in Los Angeles on charges of drug trafficking. US policy needs to recalibrate. The United States backed Calderón’s militarization plan with the Mérida Initiative, which pushed hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons, helicopters, vehicles, intelligence and other assistance to the Army and Marines for their cooperation in going after the traffickers. Today, the military is linked to multiple human rights violations that have gone mostly unpunished, and Sedena has more power to exercise civilian law enforcement than US laws would ever allow at home. But Washington continues to encourage the military’s lead role in the drug war. We’ve trained thousands of Mexican soldiers and Marines in counternarcotics – including members of the 27th Infantry Battalion, based in Iguala, in the weeks before the students were taken. Why didn’t the US Justice Department release the intercepted messages to investigators for eight years, when they contained powerful evidence of the web of complicities that lay behind the disappearance of the students and the subsequent cover-up? The fact is, the Office of the US Attorney in Northern Illinois is concerned with targeting the heroin trade in the streets of Chicago and charging individuals for their roles in it – not macro-criminality in Mexico. By the same token, the hundreds of FOIA requests the Archive filed for information about Ayotzinapa have been met with silence: denials, continuing secrecy, extensive redactions, even of unclassified documents. From a US policy perspective, allowing even the most modest critique of Mexico’s actions in this case threatens bilateral relations on two of the most politically charged issues in Washington today: counternarcotics and migration. And so far, the US hasn’t been willing to take that risk. There are other unintended consequences of the Chicago case on the Ayotzinapa investigation, rarely mentioned. When Adán Casarrubias was extradited to face trafficking charges, his defense lawyer got him a plea deal. As a result, there will be no public trial, and Casarrubias will never be compelled to speak about his role in Guerreros Unidos or say what he knew about the attacks against the students, their disappearance, or their collective fate. For the parents, that is a missed opportunity. To borrow (and paraphrase) again from Kathryn Sikkink, in contrast to the “justice cascade,” the impunity cascade implies the growing legitimacy of the norm that accepts the lack of criminal accountability for human rights abuses and the absence of prosecutions. “The term captures how the idea started as a small stream, but later caught on suddenly, sweeping along many actors in its wake.” The ways the logic and procedures of the US drug war feed impunity and strengthen it make the United State a partner in impunity with Mexico. Impunity-complicit. But as we’ve seen, impunity has its own history. The impunity of the Dirty War flowed naturally into the impunity of today’s permanent violence of the Drug War. As John Gibler pointed out in the Afterword to his collection of oral histories – responding to Ernesto’s story about protecting the evidence after his companions were disappeared – it was the students who believed in the rule of law, who treated the site of attacks as a crime scene and protected evidence they knew the authorities would need to investigate properly. Even in Mexico, even in 2014, the urge to believe in justice existed, that justice was a real possibility. That’s true today. The parents have to believe that their sons will be found and justice is possible. And we do too. But if we don’t challenge the militarized enforcement apparatus managed by the US and Mexico that produces criminality and reinforces impunity, we’re left with… rocks and sticks. Waiting for the detectives. Thank you.

Fujimori's Ghost Haunts Peru

The Ghosts of Leaders Past Peru The recent death of Alberto Fujimori, 86, who served as president of Peru in the 1990s, was a milestone in the South American country’s political history. Fujimori gained respect when he first took office for his neoliberal economic policies and his tough stance against left-wing terrorists who waged a war against the central government from 1980 to 2000. Eventually, as the Washington Post reported, Fujimori’s oppressive governance and corruption caught up with him. In 1998, he was convicted of human rights violations and sent to prison for 25 years. He was released from jail in 2023 due to his advanced age and health, but he was still facing charges dating back to his years in power. Even with his passing, however, Fujimori’s legacy lingers. Peru’s government recently passed a law, for example, giving legal immunity to Fujimori and members of the security forces for human rights abuses committed before 2002. The law was a gift for the president and his allies, the Associated Press wrote. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk panned the legislation. “Lack of accountability for these crimes, whenever committed, risks endangering the rights to truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-recurrence for thousands of victims of grave violations in Peru,” Türk said, according to Agence France-Press. Interestingly, lawmakers who passed the law and President Dina Boluarte, who signed it, arguably lack the legitimacy to do so. Their popularity ratings are among the lowest in the world – 10 percent in Boluarte’s case, World Politics Review noted. Boluarte took office because she was vice president when ex-President Pedro Castillo was impeached. Small, fragmented parties dominate the Peruvian Congress. Boluarte began her administration ignominiously when security forces killed 50 demonstrators who had taken to the streets to protest the ousting of Castillo. She claims she was not involved in the decision-making that led to those deaths. Amnesty International disagrees. Before Boluarte, incidentally, Peru had six different presidents in six years, underscoring how all managed to violate the law while none had sufficient popular backing to remain in office. Meanwhile, the true leaders of the country, according to the Economist, are right-wing and centrist lawmakers in Congress. Because Boluarte has no vice president, they don’t want to oust her because the country’s constitution states that new elections must be held if she leaves office. Voters would almost certainly fire these lawmakers if they had a chance. The result is a bevy of laws, like the amnesty legislation, that critics say are eroding Peruvian democracy, Al Jazeera explained – just like Fujimori did.

A Second Senior Prison Official Assassinated In Ecuador

The director of Ecuador's biggest prison was killed in an armed attack on Thursday, the second such killing in under two weeks in the Latin American country, the SNAI prison agency said. Maria Daniela Icaza, director of the infamous Litoral penitentiary in the port city Guayaqui l died of injuries sustained "following an armed attack on the road" leading to the nearby town of Daule, the agency said. She died while being taken to hospital, the agency said in a WhatsApp message, adding that an official from the prison service who was travelling with her was injured in the incident. "We convey our deepest condolences," the agency wrote on social media . Ecuador's prisons are among the most dangerous in the world, and many have been taken over by drug gangs. The penitentiaries have been under military control since January, when President Daniel Noboa declared a state of "internal armed conflict" after a brutal wave of violence, sparked by the jailbreak of a powerful crime boss. In January, gunmen stormed and opened fire in a TV studio and bandits threatened random executions of civilians and security forces. A prosecutor investigating the assault was later shot dead . Icaza's death comes nine days after the head of a prison in the Amazonian province of Sucumbios, Alex Guevara, was killed, also in an armed attack while travelling by car. Two other workers who were with him were wounded after unknown assailants raked his vehicle with gunfire. And two weeks ago, two prison officers in Guayaquil were murdered on their way to work. Ecuador registered a record 47 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, up from a rate of six murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2018. Once considered a bastion of peace in Latin America, Ecuador has been plunged into crisis by the rapid spread of transnational cartels that use its ports -- mainly Guayaquil -- to ship drugs to the United States and Europe. Noboa's government claims that its offensive against organized crime has reduced homicides. Between January and September this year, 4,236 murders were reported, while in the same period in 2023, there were 5,112, according to the interior ministry. Noboa said he is targeting 22 criminal groups, the most powerful of which are Los Choneros, Los Lobos, and Tiguerones. In June, the U.S. sanctioned Los Lobos and its leader, Wilmer Geovanny Chavarria Barre, who also goes by "Pipo." U.S. officials have deemed Los Lobos the largest drug trafficking ring in Ecuador and said the gang "contributes significantly to the violence gripping the country."

Brasil's Government Foghts to Stop Deforestation In The Amazon

Rich, Dark Earth Amazon Rainforest If the fabled fountain of youth exists, modern society might be destroying it. In the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, centenarians in indigenous tribes remain spry, hiking barefoot for miles through rough, dangerous terrain after years of active lifestyles and healthy eating. Varî Vãti Marubo of the Marubo tribe, for example, could be 107 or 120 years old. When she was a little girl, she and her family would run from white explorers in the jungle. Now, her friends and neighbors pursue traditional modern careers and share their experiences on social media. The lifestyle that cultivated her longevity and that of other indigenous folks is disappearing. “Since our birth, we’ve kept the traditions alive,” she told the New York Times. “But now I see everything changing. Many young people have forgotten the wisdom of our elders.” Marubo represents the human side of what’s being lost every day in the rainforest. The Brazilian government recently announced that deforestation in the Amazon in the 12 months through August occurred at around half the rate of the prior year, and marked the lowest rate since 2016. The success in reducing deforestation stemmed from Brazilian officials using satellites and rigorous inspection programs that focused on areas where deforestation was most rampant, University of Toronto researchers wrote. Authorities have also cracked down on those who clear land illegally, too. For example, a Brazilian court recently ordered a rancher to pay $50 million for destroying part of the jungle, the Guardian noted. The fee included penalties for emitting carbon into the air. But loggers and others still cleared 1,700 square miles – the size of Rhode Island – in the year through August, the Associated Press reported. The disappearance of this massive carbon sink has major implications for the world when greenhouse gases are causing climate change, the Council on Foreign Relations explained. Illegal gold mining is also taking its toll. Greenpeace recently revealed that 5,000 miners were operating in the rural Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, Reuters reported. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has sought to end illegal mining and deforestation by deploying the military, but the territory to cover is enormous and the financial incentive to break the law is very high. Climate change is also a problem. The Amazon saw more forest fires in August than at any other time since 2020, according to Voice of America. Ranchers often light the fires to clear land. But less rain and drier conditions cause them to spread out of control. Experts estimated that almost 40,000 fires occurred in August. Meanwhile, these developments come as scientists say the Amazon may actually store more carbon than originally thought. “Rich soil in the Amazon cultivated over centuries by Indigenous communities may store billions of tons of carbon,” New Scientist wrote. As a result, the “Nutrient-rich ‘dark earth’ soil may store an amount of carbon nearly equivalent to annual CO2 emissions in the US.”

Trump’s DANGEROUS STUNT in OHIO Gets QUICKLY EXPOSED

The CIA In Chile 50 Years Later

The CIA-in-Chile Scandal at 50 Hersh, NYT article, Kissinger collage Kissinger Misled President, Cabinet and Reporters on CIA Role in Chile, Documents Show; Told Journalist Ted Koppel the Issue Was “Total Nonsense” New York Times Exposé Prompted White House Anger, Panic Over Revelations Secret White House Memo Documented Kissinger’s Attitude: “I Don’t See Why We Have to Sit Around and Let a Country Go Communist Due to the Irresponsibility of its Own People” Archive Calls for Release of Still-Secret Colby Testimony and Church Committee Records Published: Sep 6, 2024 Briefing Book # 870 Edited by Peter Kornbluh For more information, contact: 202-994-7000 or peter.kornbluh@gmail.com Subjects Covert Action Regions South America Events Chile – Coup d’État, 1973 Project Chile Colby CIA Director William Colby secretly testified before the House Armed Services Committee on April 22, 1974, on covert operations in Chile. Harrington Massachusetts Congressman Michael J. Harrington read a classified transcript of Colby's secret testimony and summarized it in a letter to Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, William Fulbright. Levinson Jerome Levinson, a ranking staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. leaked a copy of the Harrington's letter to New York Times investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, in early September 1974. BOOKS book The Pinochet File by Peter Kornbluh, The New Press, Updated edition (September 11, 2013) book cover Pinochet desclasificado by Peter Kornbluh, Un Dia en La Vida/Editorial Catalonia (August, 2023) The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents by John Dinges, The New Press (August 1, 2012) Los Anos del Condor book cover Los años del Cóndor (Spanish Edition) by John Dinges, DEBATE (June 1, 2021) Chile en el corazón book cover Chile en el corazón (Spanish Edition) by John Dinges, DEBATE (September 1, 2023) Washington, D.C., September 9, 2024 – Fifty years ago, as the New York Times prepared to break a major exposé on CIA covert operations in Chile, the architect of those operations, Henry Kissinger, misled President Gerald Ford about clandestine U.S. efforts to undermine the elected government of Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende, documents posted today by the National Security Archive show. The covert operations were “designed to keep the democratic process going,” Kissinger briefed Ford in the Oval Office two days before the article appeared fifty years ago this week. According to Kissinger, “there was no attempt at a coup.” “I saw the Chile story,” Ford told Kissinger on September 9, 1974. “Are there any repercussions?” Kissinger replied: “Not really.” In fact, the front-page story written by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh—“C.I.A. Chief Tells House Of $8 Million Campaign Against Allende in ‘70-’73”—set in motion the biggest scandal on covert operations the intelligence community had ever experienced. Hersh’s September 8, 1974, article led directly to the formation of a special Senate committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, that conducted the first major investigation of CIA covert actions in Chile and elsewhere and that was the first congressional body to evaluate the role of secret, clandestine operations in a democratic society. The political repercussions forced President Ford to publicly acknowledge the CIA operations in Chile while forcefully denying they had anything to do with fomenting a coup. The president’s White House lawyer subsequently advised Ford that his statement “was not fully consistent with the facts because all the facts had not been made known to you.” At a September 16th press conference, Gerald Ford became the first president to publicly acknowledge and defend CIA covert operations, which he characterized as limited to protecting Chilean democratic institutions from the threat of Allende. He stated that the CIA actions were "in the best interest of the people in Chile, and certainly in our best interest." (See timecode 11:55 in tape for Ford's statement.) Ford's White House lawyer subsequently informed him that he had misrepresented the facts on the CIA role in Chile "because all the facts were not made known to you." The Senate investigation, which also revealed CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, and a similar investigative effort in the House of Representatives led to legislation to enhance checks and balances on CIA operations and curtail the ability of future presidents to “plausibly deny” covert action programs abroad. White House documents reveal the acute consternation expressed by Ford and Kissinger that covert operations might be restrained. “We need a CIA and we need covert operations,” Ford told his Cabinet nine days after the Times exposé was published. The article and a flood of follow up CIA stories by Hersh, as Kissinger later conceded in his memoirs, “had the effect of a burning match in a gasoline depot.” Stern's report and Kissinger's remarks THE LEAK THAT CHANGED HISTORY The Hersh story was based on a summary of secret testimony by CIA director William Colby and a legendary agency official, David Atlee Phillips, who provided an overview of covert operations against Allende in Chile during an executive session of the House Armed Services Committee on April 22, 1974. According to the summary, Colby informed the Committee that between 1962 and 1973, the ultra-secret “40 Committee,” which oversaw covert operations, had authorized the CIA to spend $11 million in Chile, including $8 million to “destabilize” the Allende government and “to precipitate its downfall.” The summary stated that “the agency activities were viewed as a prototype, or laboratory experiment, to test the techniques of heavy financial investment in efforts to discredit and bring down a government.” The summary was drafted by a liberal congressman from Massachusetts, Michael J. Harrington, who had heard about Colby’s TOP SECRET testimony and requested special permission to review it. Harrington read the 48-page hearing transcript twice—on June 5, and June 12, 1974—and realized Colby’s testimony clearly contradicted previous denials by Kissinger and top CIA officials (during earlier hearings on the CIA and ITT’s operations in Chile) that there had been any covert efforts to undermine Allende. Harrington shared his concern that CIA officers had committed perjury with Senator Frank Church’s staff director, Jerome Levinson. In his unpublished memoir, Levinson recalled that Harrington “asked what I thought he should do.” Levinson recommended that Harrington write a letter to the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator William Fulbright, requesting a full inquiry into the CIA’s role in Chile. On July 18, 1974, Harrington sent a lengthy letter to Fulbright, providing a summary of the secret CIA testimony and concluding that Congress and the American people “have a right to learn what was done in our name in Chile.” After it became clear that Fulbright was not inclined to order a major investigation into the CIA role in Chile, Levinson decided to take the audacious step of calling attention to Colby’s still-secret testimony: he leaked the Harrington letter to Seymour Hersh. In early September, after lunch with Hersh at Jean-Pierre’s, a swanky D.C. restaurant, Levinson slipped Hersh a copy of the Harrington letter. On September 5, 1974, Hersh began calling State Department officials for comment on his forthcoming scoop, setting in motion a flurry of White House meetings, briefings and reports on what information Hersh might have obtained. On September 8, the Times published the story on the front page of its Sunday newspaper, generating a major scandal and eventually resulting in the prosecution of former CIA director Richard Helms for lying to Congress. telcon REACTION OF THE CIA’s CHILEAN AGENTS The leak of Colby’s testimony forced the CIA to urgently contact its Chilean agents to ascertain the repercussions of the Hersh revelations on its network of assets and informants. In a revealing secret report four days after the Times article appeared, the CIA station transmitted the reactions of several Chilean operatives—identified by codenames such as FUBARGAIN, FUPOCKET and FUBRIG—who were embedded inside the Chilean military, the Chilean Christian Democrat political party, and the El Mercurio newspaper, which the CIA had financed as a bullhorn of opposition to the government of Salvador Allende. “Following Station agents were contacted, period 8-10 September, in connection with referenced revelations,” the Santiago Station informed CIA headquarters. The agent codenamed “FUBRIG-2 “took the news calmly but was most concerned about implications of efforts of revelations and expressed opinion that system in Washington should be changed to prevent such leaks,” the CIA reported. “He was relieved that El Mercurio was not mentioned by name.” According to this cable, the agent inside the Chilean military, FUBARGAIN-1, told the CIA that “General Pinochet did not seem very upset but [had] commented … that the disclosure ‘seemed to be a dumb thing to do.’” But the same agent told the CIA that other younger Chilean military officers interpreted the leak as a deliberate attempt to “damage [the] Junta and falsely cast doubt on their independence and role in bringing down Allende.” “Sum is that Chilean officer corps becoming increasingly baffled and resentful about U.S., according to this source.” STILL-SECRET DOCUMENTS Fifty years after the scandal broke over CIA operations in Chile, Colby’s original testimony before the House Armed Services Committee remains classified, as does the entire 48-page transcript of the closed hearing. Last year, the Chilean government officially requested that the Biden administration declassify those records as a gesture of “declassification diplomacy” for the 50th anniversary of the coup, but the CIA proved to be uncooperative. “For the sake of historical accountability, it is imperative that the CIA declassify Colby’s testimony on Chile, as well as other relevant documentation,” stated Peter Kornbluh who directs the Archive’s Chile Documentation Project. As the 50th anniversary of the formation of the special Senate Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities approaches in January 2025, the Archive also called on Senate leaders to initiate the release the Church Committee’s voluminous investigative archives on Chile and other countries targeted for covert regime change operations. “A half century of secrecy surrounding these records,” Kornbluh noted, “must come to an end.” The Documents Document 1 U.S. Congress, Letter to Senator William Fulbright, [Representative Michael J. Harrington’s summary of secret testimony of CIA Director William Colby on covert operations in Chile], July 18, 1974 Jul 18, 1974 Source U.S. Congress In April 1974, CIA director William Colby appeared at a closed, executive session of the House Armed Services Committee and provided a lengthy summary of CIA covert operations in Chile between 1970 and 1973. Representative Michael J. Harrington, a liberal congressman from Massachusetts, obtained permission from committee chairman Lucian Nedzi to review Colby’s classified testimony. Harrington then wrote this summary of the testimony in the form of a letter to the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William Fulbright. The summary describes the CIA’s $8 million clandestine campaign to “destabilize,” according to Harrington, the elected government of Salvador Allende. It identifies, for the first time, the “40 Committee” chaired by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger as overseeing these covert operations to undermine Allende. When Senator Fulbright failed to respond to Harrington’s call for hearings and a major investigation into CIA operations in Chile, in early September 1974 a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations staff, Jerome Levinson, quietly slipped a copy of the Harrington letter to investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh. Hersh’s September 8, 1974, front page story in the New York Times—“C.I.A. Chief tells House Of $8 Million Campaign Against Allende, 70-73,”—was based on Harrington’s summary in the letter. Document 2 NSC, Kissinger Telcon, Conversation with CIA Director William Colby over impending Hersh article on the CIA in Chile, September 5, 1974 Sep 5, 1974 Source National Security Archive Kissinger Telcon collection As Hersh began to place calls to the State Department for comment before publishing his article, Henry Kissinger calls CIA Director William Colby to discuss the leak. Kissinger wants to know how Hersh got the information on the 40 Committee decisions on covert operations in Chile and what the CIA did there. Colby promises to “try to get a hold of Hersh and see what he has.” Document 3 Department of State, INR Memorandum, “Forthcoming NY Times Article on US Intelligence Activities Affecting Chile,” Secret, September 5, 1974 Sep 5, 1974 Source National Security Archive Chile Collection After State Department officials receive calls from Hersh for comment, the Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research reviews the 40 Committee decisions on Chile to assess possible damage from forthcoming revelations. INR officer James Gardner notes that the Kissinger-chaired committee overseeing covert operations had “inquired in this period about the feasibility and possibility of support to the Chilean military should it engineer a coup attempt against Allende [and] discussed the possibility of creating anti-Allende pressures by precipitating an economic crisis in Chile.” Document 4 White House, Memorandum of Conversation, “Visits; 40 Committee [redacted],” Secret, September 6, 1974 Sep 6, 1974 Source Clinton Chile Declassification Project In an Oval Office briefing for President Ford and Vice President Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger advises them on the forthcoming New York Times article. He misleadingly describes covert financial efforts to block ratification by the Chilean Congress of Allende’s elections and then states that “after the elections we put money into opposition parties and newspapers” that was “designed to keep the democratic process going.” According to Kissinger, “there was no attempt at a coup. Though there could have been if in ’70 we hadn’t failed.” Ten days later, on September 16, 1974, after the Hersh article has generated a major scandal, President Ford re-states this misrepresentation of CIA operations in Chile during a press conference. Document 5 State Department, Kissinger Telcons, [Conversations with ABC News Reporter Ted Koppel about the Hersh Article], September 9, 1974 Sep 9, 1974 Source National Security Archive Kissinger Telcon collection The day after the New York Times article on Chile is published, ABC News reporter Ted Koppel speaks to Kissinger on the phone at 4:30pm and again at 4:45pm to find out if Hersh’s story is “essentially accurate as far as it goes.” Kissinger dismisses the allegations. “Look, none of this has anything to do with a coup anyway. So this is all total nonsense,” he claims. “It has nothing to do with the coup, Ted, believe me.” Document 6 White House, Memorandum, “Potential Embarrassment re 40 Committee Descriptions,” Secret, September 11, 1974 Sep 11, 1974 Source National Security Archive Chile collection As Ford administration officials are forced to talk publicly for the first time about the 40 Committee, White House aides become concerned about the public attention and inaccurate official descriptions of this ultra-secret entity. Until now, notes this memo for deputy national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, “the name, existence and membership of the Committee has been treated as classified information and had not been officially confirmed.” Although a State Department spokesman has stated that 40 Committee covert projects are approved unanimously, the memo clarifies, there have been numerous examples of disagreement on operations in Chile, and Kissinger as chairman, has been the “final arbiter” of key decisions. Document 7 CIA, Cable, [Contact with Chilean Agents], Secret, September 12, 1974 Sep 12, 1974 Source JFK Assassination Records Act Archives The day Hersh’s article appears in the New York Times, the CIA station in Santiago, Chile, begins contacting its Chilean agents to assess any damage to their operations and their reactions to the revelations. The Station then transmits the conversations with several Chilean assets identified by codenames such as FUBARGAIN, FUPOCKET and FUBRIG—codenames which reflect their positions in the Chilean military, the Chilean Christian Democrat political party, and the El Mercurio newspaper, which the CIA financed as a bullhorn of opposition to the government of Salvador Allende. According to this report, an agent inside the Chilean military, FUBARGAIN-1, told the CIA that “General Pinochet did not seem very upset but [had] commented … that the disclosure ‘seemed to be a dumb thing to do.’” The same agent told the CIA that other younger Chilean military officers interpret the leak as a deliberate attempt to “damage [the] Junta and falsely cast doubt on their independence and role in bringing down Allende.” Document 8 White House, Memorandum of the Record, “Cabinet Meeting, September 17 - 11am, Secret, September 17, 1974 Sep 17, 1974 Source Gerald Ford Presidential Library One day after publicly acknowledging and defending CIA covert operations in Chile, President Ford holds a Cabinet meeting devoted to the issue of covert operations and the impact of the leaks about the CIA in Chile. After the President defends covert action, Kissinger briefs the cabinet on the need for covert operations and measures to stop the leaks about them. He implies that the U.S. should consider a British Official Secrets Act to restrain public information about the CIA. “We face over the world threats to democratic institutions, and we need covert action to deal with them. By their nature, we don’t talk about these,” he informs the cabinet. “So how do we deal with leaks? Britain is certainly a democracy, yet a British paper couldn’t print this stuff.” Speaking about Chile, Kissinger blames Allende’s mismanagement for the coup and denies that covert operations or economic pressures played any role. “The effort of the 40 Committee,” he falsely claims, “was not to overthrow Allende but to preserve the democratic system for the 1976 elections.” “Remember, [Allende] was an opponent of the U.S.,” he tells Ford’s Cabinet members, “and one can ask, why shouldn’t we oppose him?” Document 9 State Department, Kissinger Telcon, [Conversation with CIA Director William Colby about leaks from the Intelligence Community], September 20, 1974 Sep 20, 1974 Source National Security Archive Kissinger Telcon Collection As the New York Times publishes another Hersh article about the CIA’s role in Chile, Kissinger complains to CIA Director Colby about leaks that appear to be coming from the CIA itself. “I am getting sick and tired of the way the Intelligence Community … if this keeps up we’ll have to talk to the President to see how to keep it under control,” he admonishes Colby. “The 40 Committee has existed for years [and] the SOB leaders in this country know this is the case and they are all letting us take it as though this is a scandal.” Document 10 The White House, memorandum, “Background on Covert Operations in Chile,” Eyes Only, October 31, 1975 Oct 31, 1975 Source Gerald Ford Presidential Library As the Senate investigation into the CIA’s role in Chile progresses, it becomes clear to the White House that the Church Committee has uncovered significant wrongdoing, including the CIA-supported assassination of the Chilean commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General René Schneider, that go far beyond the official claims of the Ford administration. President Ford’s White House counsel, John Marsh, sends him a set of recommendations on unprecedented open hearings that the Committee plans to hold to publicly air the recent history of U.S. clandestine intervention against Allende. Marsh warns Ford that his account of what the CIA did in Chile, given at the September 16, 1974, press conference, misrepresented the extent and purpose of the covert operations. “It has been brought to my attention,” he advises the President, “that you should exercise extreme care because of a response you made to a press question in one of your press conferences shortly after becoming President. This question related to Chile and I am advised that the response is not fully consistent with the facts because all the facts had not been made known to you.”

Nicaragua Is Making Millions Of Dollars As A Gatewy For Migrants Wanting To Come To The US

Weaponizing Migration Nicaragua In Senegal, Haiti, India, China, and Libya, the hot new ticket is Nicaragua. Famed for its beaches, volcanos and rainforests, citizens of dozens of countries are attracted by a different lure: It’s become a major gateway to the United States. “In Senegal, it’s all over the streets – everyone’s talking about Nicaragua, Nicaragua, Nicaragua,” Gueva Ba, 40, of the capital Dakar, told the Associated Press. Ba paid about $10,000 to get to Nicaragua in July 2023, where he then made his way to the US border with Mexico. After crossing it, he was caught, detained and deported a few months later, along with 131 other Senegalese who had also tried their luck. Ba, like many of the tens of thousands of migrants now trying to use this route, had already tried to make it to Europe 11 times by boat from Morocco across the Mediterranean. But with Nicaragua, he knew he had a special advantage; not only did he not need a visa to land there, but more importantly, Nicaragua is actively encouraging such migration as a way to punish the US for sanctions against the repressive regime of President Daniel Ortega, in power for 28 of the past 45 years, say US officials. “The Ortega government knows they have few important policy tools at hand to confront the United States … so they have armed migration as a way to attack,” said Manuel Orozco, director of the migration at the Inter-American Dialogue, in an interview with NPR. “This is definitely a concrete example of weaponizing migration as a foreign policy.” Beyond a tit-for-tat for sanctions, Nicaragua’s government, led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), is making millions of dollars with its business of human trafficking, imposing arbitrary entry fees on the migrant arrivals that can be as much as $200 per person, as well as thousands of dollars in landing and departure fees imposed on the charters, wrote El País. And those prices are going up – arrivals from Africa now will be charged more than $1,100 to land in Nicaragua. US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols said he was “concerned” about the “dramatic” increase in flights to Nicaragua to promote migration. “No one should profit from the desperation of vulnerable migrants – not smugglers, private companies, public officials or governments,” he wrote on X. The US slapped new sanctions on Nicaragua in May over the migration issue. The numbers tell the story. Between May 2023 and May 2024, more than 1,000 flights with migrants from countries such as Libya, Morocco, Uzbekistan, India, and Tajikistan landed in the Nicaraguan capital Managua, while in a six-month period between June to November 2023, about 500 flights, mostly from Haiti and Cuba, landed there, according to the Inter-American Dialogue. At the same time, while arrests for illegal crossings on the US-Mexico border topped 6.4 million between January 2021 and January 2024 (before falling steeply later in 2024), Mexicans accounted for only about one-quarter of those arrested, the rest coming from more than 100 countries, wrote the think tank. From July to December 2023 there were more than 20,200 arrests of just Senegalese migrants for crossing the border illegally, 10 times the figure for arrests in the same period in 2022. “Migration flows to the United States have more than doubled to over eight million people annually from 2020 and 2023,” the organization wrote, adding that Nicaragua is responsible for at least 10 percent of all migration that has arrived at the Mexico-US border. The charters first began in 2021, when the Nicaraguan government opened the doors of the Augusto C. Sandino International Airport, relaxed visa requirements for African nationals and welcomed the first migrant arrivals from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Curacao, and Haiti. Today, passengers now fly from countries in South America, North Africa and Central Asia, to the country on their way to the US to avoid the dangerous crossing at the Darien Gap at the Colombian-Panamanian border, the World wrote. The Senegalese and others became part of a surge in migration at the southern border, made up for the first time of people from countries such as Mauritania, Ghana, Tajikistan and Bangladesh, who usually head towards Europe. They were able to coordinate the trip because of travel agents, smugglers and the information that comes from social media and apps like WhatsApp, and pay for the trip with electronic payments. Meanwhile, Nicaragua itself has been increasingly contributing to the flows headed toward the US border over the past few years, according to the Migration Policy Institute. It has deported hundreds of its own nationals, while the deepening repression in the country has led to thousands more deciding to head north. “Nicaragua is caught in a spiral of violence marked by the persecution of all forms of political opposition, whether real or perceived, both domestically and abroad,” said Jan Simon, the chair of a United Nations human rights group that accused the Nicaraguan regime led by Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, of “crimes against humanity.” A former police special forces officer, going only by the name Edwin, was ordered to shoot protesters during mass anti-government demonstrations in 2018. Instead, he fled, before being captured, imprisoned, raped, and severely tortured. These days, he lives in exile in Costa Rica, making ends meet with odd jobs while waiting for asylum in the US. He worries about Nicaraguan officials finding him. “There were moments of desperation when I thought: ‘It would have been better if I stayed … killed all those people,” he told the Washington Post. “But I didn’t go into the police to kill people.” Share this story

Maduro Struggles To Hang Onto Power In Venezuela

Public Enemy No. 1 Venezuela As Venezuelan authorities continue to intensify their crackdown on the political opposition following the disputed July 28 presidential elections, a court in the South American country ordered the arrest of former presidential candidate Edmundo González, the Washington Post reported. González, 75, is wanted on a slew of charges, including usurpation, forgery of public documents and sabotage, authorities said Monday. The charges are linked to González’s alleged involvement in posting alternative vote results online, which showed him defeating incumbent President Nicolás Maduro. The opposition candidate has gone into hiding to avoid arrest following the July vote. At the time, Venezuela’s electoral council – which is seen as being under Maduro’s influence – declared the incumbent as the winner of that poll, prompting accusations of fraud and irregularities. Last month, the opposition published the receipts from more than 23,000 voting machines that showed González received more than twice the number of votes as Maduro. However, the electoral council has not released detailed voting results and the Maduro administration has begun persecuting the opposition and its supporters, forcing many of them to go into hiding, according to CNN. The arrest warrant for González is expected to draw criticism from the United States and Latin American leaders. Washington and other international bodies have expressed strong opposition to Maduro’s actions and called for respect for democratic processes. The Biden administration, along with leaders from Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, has been pushing for negotiations with Maduro, though these efforts have seen limited success. Monday’s arrest warrant came shortly after the US seized a luxury aircraft allegedly purchased illegally and smuggled for Maduro’s use. Later that day, Bloomberg reported that the US Treasury Department would soon announce sanctions against 15 officials linked to Maduro.