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Javier E

The future belongs to Right-wing progressives - UnHerd - 0 views

unherd.com/...ngs-to-right-wing-progressives

technopoly utopianism right-wing fascism progressive culture politics crisis UK US

shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • the only subset of Right-wing thought in the West today that doesn’t feel moribund is actively anti-conservative. The liveliest corner of the Anglophone Right is scornful of cultural conservatism and nostalgia, instead combining an optimistic view of technology with a qualified embrace of global migration and an uncompromising approach to public order.
  • in much the same way as the Western Left seized on Venezuela under Chávez as a totemic worked example of this vision, so too the radical Right today has its template for the future: El Salvador under Nayib Bukele
  • These moves have drastically reduced the murder rate in a previously notoriously dangerous country
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Since coming to power in 2019, Bukele has declared a still-to-be-rescinded state of exception, suspended the Salvadorean constitution, and locked up some 70,000 alleged gang members without due process.
  • This trait also makes him a touchstone for the Right-wing movement that I predict will replace “conservatism” in the 21st century. This outlook owes more to the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti than conservatives of the G.K. Chesterton variety
  • yet, Bukele’s strongman tactics have made him wildly popular with Salvadoreans, who doubtless enjoy a reported 70% reduction in the country’s previously extremely high murder rate. They have also made Bukele a rock star for the online Right. This group, fond of complaining about spineless leaders, fraying Western law and order, and the bleeding-away of political agency into international institutions and NGOs, regards the spectacle of a strongman leader with good social media game as something like a fantasy made flesh.
  • Arguably, it’s as much his embrace of technology that accords Bukele the mantle of poster-boy for a futuristic Right. Whether in his extremely online presence, his (admittedly not completely successful) embrace of Bitcoin as legal tender, or the high-tech, recently rebuilt National Library, funded by Beijing and serving more as showcase for futuristic technologies than as reading-room
  • Western critics, though, point to allegations that he has corrupted institutions by packing them with allies, not to mention, according to Amnesty International, “concealed and distorted public information, backed actions to undermine civic space, militarised public security, and used mass arrests and imprisonment as the sole strategies for counteracting violence in the country”.
  • is perhaps most visibly embodied in American technologists such as Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel. As a worldview, it is broadly pro-capitalist, enthusiastically pro-technology and unabashedly hierarchical, as well as sometimes also scornful of Christian-inflected concern for the weak.
  • We might call it, rudely, “space fascism”, though N.S. Lyons’s formulation “Right-wing progressivism” is probably more accurate. Among its adherents, high-tech authoritarianism is a feature, not a bug, and egalitarianism is for fools. Thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin propose an explicitly neo-monarchical model for governance; Thiel has declared that: “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.”
  • El Salvador is thus the most legible real-world instance of something like a Right-wing progressive programme in practice. And along with the tech enthusiasm and public-order toughness, the third distinctive feature of this programme can be gleaned: a desire not to end international migration, but to restrict it to elites.
  • For Right-wing progressives, polities are not necessarily premised on ethnic or cultural homogeneity — at least not for elites. Rather, this is a vision of statehood less based on affinity, history or even ethnicity, and more on a kind of opt-in, utility-maximisation model
  • As a worldview, it’s jarring to cultural conservatives, who generally value thick ties of shared history and affinity
  • Right-wing progressives generally accord greater political value to gifted, high-productivity foreigners than any slow-witted, unproductive coethnic: those within Right-wing progressive circles propose, and in some cases are already working on, opt-in startup cities and “network states” that would be, by definition, highly selective about membership.
  • As for those still wedded to the 20th-century idea that being Right-wing necessarily means ethnicity-based nationalism, they are likely to find this outlook bewildering.
  • Yet it’s still more heretical to egalitarian progressives, for whom making migration and belonging an elite privilege offends every premise of inclusion and social justice.
  • Right-wing progressives, by contrast, propose to learn from the immigration policies of polities such as Singapore and the Gulf states, and avert the political challenges posed by ethnic voting blocs by imposing tiered citizenship for low-skilled migrants, while courting the wealth and productivity of international elites
  • Bukele’s proposal suggests a pragmatic two-tier Right-wing progressive migration policy that courts rich, productive, geographically rootless international “Anywheres” of the kind long understood to have more affinity with one another than with less wealthy and more rooted “Somewheres” — but to do so while explicitly protecting cultural homogeneity on behalf of the less-mobile masses.
  • There are larger structural reasons for such pragmatism, not least that population growth is slowing or going into reverse across most of the planet.
  • At the same time, impelled by easier transportation, climate change, social-media promises of better lives elsewhere, and countless other reasons, people everywhere are on the move. As such, like a global game of musical chairs, a battle is now on for who ends up where, once the music stops — and on what terms.
  • How do you choose who is invited? And how do you keep unwanted demographics out? Within an egalitarian progressive framework, these are simply not questions that one may ask
  • Within the older, cultural conservative framework, meanwhile, all or most migration is viewed with suspicion.
  • The Right-wing progressive framework, by contrast, is upbeat about migration — provided it’s as discerning as possible, ideally granting rights only to elite incomers and filtering others aggressively by demographics, for example an assessment of the statistical likeliho
  • od of committing crime or making a net economic contribution.
  • In Britain, meanwhile, whatever happens to the Tories, I suspect we’ll see more of the Right-wing progressives. I find many of their policies unnerving, especially on the biotech side; but theirs is a political subculture with optimism and a story about the future, two traits that go a long way in politics.
criscimagnael

Journalists in El Salvador Targeted With Spyware Intended for Criminals - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vador-journalists-spyware.html

shared by criscimagnael on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • El Salvador’s leading news outlet, El Faro, said on Wednesday that the phones of a majority of its employees had been hacked with the spyware Pegasus, which has been used by governments to monitor human rights activists, journalists and dissidents.
  • the spyware had been installed on the phones of 22 reporters, editors and other employees between July 2020 and November 2021.
  • El Faro was investigating the Salvadoran government’s clandestine connections to the country’s gangs and corruption scandals. The government has denied any connection to local gangs.
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  • “It’s completely unacceptable to spy on journalists,” said Carlos Dada, the founder and director of El Faro. “It endangers our sources, it limits our work and it also endangers our families.”
  • An El Faro journalist’s phone had been reinfected with the spyware over 40 times, the most persistent hacking attempt by Pegasus yet to be discovered.
  • Revelations that Pegasus software has been used to unjustly spy in El Salvador may not come as a complete surprise, but there is no match to our outrage.”
  • El Salvador’s government denied responsibility, and a spokesperson with NSO Group would not say whether Pegasus spyware had been provided to El Salvador’s governments, past or present.
  • “The government of El Salvador is investigating the possible use of Pegasus,”
  • a prized Israeli technology company whose spyware has long been under scrutiny for its ability to capture all activity on a smartphone — including a user’s keystrokes, location data, sound and video recordings, photos, contacts and encrypted information — and for mounting allegations of misuse by repressive governments.
  • The spokesman added that the company does not know who the targets of its customers are, but that NSO works to ensure that its tools are used only for authorized purposes.
  • The Biden administration blacklisted NSO Group in November, stating that the company had knowingly supplied spyware used by foreign governments to “maliciously target” the phones of human rights activists, journalists and others.
  • After the American government blacklisted NSO Group, the company promised that Pegasus was only licensed to governments with good human rights records.
  • But in December it was announced that the iPhones of 11 American Embassy employees working in Uganda had been hacked using Pegasus spyware.
  • In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for NSO Group, who declined to provide their name, maintained the company only provides its software to legitimate intelligence agencies and to law enforcement agencies to fight criminals and terrorists.
  • In August it was revealed that Pegasus had been secretly installed on the smartphones of at least three dozen journalists, activists and business executives across the world, including close associates of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
  • The Israeli military has also been criticized for its human rights violations at home and abroad.
  • El Salvador has been criticized for intimidating and censoring local media.
  • El Salvador’s president, Mr. Bukele, has come under withering criticism from the United States government and rights groups for using the military to interfere with the legislature and to suspend Supreme Court judges and the attorney general.
Javier E

Human Rights Watch El Salvador report: 138 deportees killed - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-91ab-ce439aa5c7c1_story.html

salvador refugees gang murder crisis history

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • At least 138 Salvadorans have been killed in the past seven years after being deported by U.S. authorities, a rights group said Wednesday in a report that highlighted the risk of returning migrants to the Central American nation.
  • “U.S. authorities knew or should have known they were going to return these people to harm,” Parker told The Washington Post. “Therefore they should not have done it.
  • Many of those killed after their return to El Salvador were targeted by gangs, which control huge swaths of the country.
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  • Human Rights Watch also identified 70 cases of deportees who disappeared after their return or suffered sexual violence, torture or other abuse, often by gangs.
  • The 138 cases included Salvadorans who had fled their homeland trying to escape the grip of gangs, as well as police who had been hounded by gangs and sought shelter in the United States. The majority were slain within a year of their return.
  • The number of Salvadorans seeking asylum in the United States skyrocketed as violence surged in their country — from about 5,600 in 2012 to more than 60,000 in 2017.
  • Homicides have declined sharply in El Salvador since 2015, plunging last year to 2,390 — or about 36 per 100,000 people.
  • But that’s still about seven times the U.S. rate, and thousands more people disappeared in 2019. Gangs and security forces both kill their victims secretly and hide the bodies to avoid prosecution.
Javier E

How El Salvador's State of Emergency Has Impacted the Crime Rate - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-state-of-emergency-crime.html

El Salvador repression gangs emergency

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • Between January and the end of October, 463 people were killed in El Salvador, a 50 percent drop compared with the same period last year,
  • The emerging picture underscores a fundamental tension: In a country traumatized by chronic gang warfare, the crackdown has brought a respite from the violence, outweighing fears of democratic backsliding and giving an increasingly autocratic leader leverage to carry out his policies.
  • Extortion, a key revenue stream for gangs, has also appeared to have plunged. According to the country’s security minister, extortion cases have fallen by 80 percent since the state of emergency began. The figure is difficult to verify independently, but several business leaders interviewed by The New York Times said extortion had gone down significantly.
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  • While a lack of transparency by the Bukele government makes it hard to assess the credibility of official crime data, experts say there is little doubt that there has been a notable reduction in violence since the start of the emergency decree.
  • “This crackdown has been unprecedented,” said Tiziano Breda, Central America analyst at the International Crisis Group, an independent research organization. “Without a doubt this has weakened the gangs.”
  • if criminal groups have been crippled, so too have many of El Salvador’s civil liberties.
  • “Similar policies of mass incarceration and an iron fist in El Salvador and the rest of the region have shown that in the long term they don’t achieve sustainable results and bring back surges of violence,”
  • Mr. Bukele’s approval ratings, according to polls, have remained above 80 percent, suggesting that many Salvadorans crave greater safety, even if it means a more repressive system.
  • “They were so desperate because of the levels of violence and the control of the gangs,” said José Miguel Cruz, an expert on El Salvador’s gang violence at Florida International University, “that they will accept that sort of deal with the devil.”
  • even if there is less violence in El Salvador, such a dip is likely to be temporary without addressing the root causes, including grinding poverty and corruption, some analysts warn.
  • And indiscriminately imprisoning young men who may have done nothing wrong alongside gang members could result in a large population of disaffected youth who might make easier recruits for gangs.
  • Since March, the Legislative Assembly, controlled by Mr. Bukele’s party, has approved legislation allowing judges to imprison children as young as 12, limiting freedom of expression, expanding the use of pretrial detention and permitting prosecutors and judges to try people in absentia.
  • The state of emergency has been used as a blunt instrument, according to the Human Rights Watch report, with police commanders establishing a quota system requiring officers to arrest a certain number of people every day.
  • The prison system is at a breaking point, with close to 100,000 people behind bars as of November, more than three times the capacity of the country’s penal system
  • At least 90 people have died in custody since the state of emergency began
  • The crackdown has swept up not just gang members, but also children, women and the physically and mentally disabled. Some residents in poor neighborhoods who once feared gang members, say they are more fearful of the Salvadoran police.
  • “The government can do many worse things to you,”
  • Ms. Solórzano’s younger brother Adrián, 30, was arrested in April and accused of terrorism. “It was a shock when the police arrived and said that they had to take him away,” she said, adding that her brother had done nothing wrong.
  • Then on July 5, representatives from a funeral home came to the family’s home and gave them the news: Adrián was dead, strangled to death while in custody. It was unclear how he was killed or by whom.
bluekoenig

Killed in El Salvador: An American Story | Retro Report | The New York Times - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

politics US history culture crisis war civil war war crimes retro report

shared by bluekoenig on 08 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 08 Jan 20
     
    During the Civil War in El Salvador in the 1980's, four American churchwomen, who were in El Salvador for human rights work and services, were brutally murdered on the side of a road. These women were later found to have been attacked by government military guardsmen due to their work with the poor. Two top El Salvadorian generals were found to have covered up their murders as well as countless other crimes committed by the El Salvadorian government and military throughout the Civil War. The US withdrew aid for El Salvador before eventually intervening in the Civil War, and worked to hold those who murdered the church women and several other Americans responsible. The two Salvadorian generals were also convicted by the US after they were found seeking asylum in Florida.
criscimagnael

El Salvador Releases 3 Women Serving Long Prison Sentences for Abortions - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-salvador-abortion-bukele.html

shared by criscimagnael on 27 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • The three women, who had suffered obstetric emergencies, had been sentenced to 30 years in prison under the nation’s strict anti-abortion laws.
  • resident Nayib Bukele’s government has freed three Salvadoran women who were sentenced to 30 years in prison under the nation’s strict anti-abortion laws after suffering obstetric emergencies, according to abortion rights groups.
  • Morena Herrera of the Citizen’s Group for the Depenalization of Abortion said late Friday that the group was told one woman would be set free at presidential order, but when they went to the prison to greet her, three were released.
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  • Ms. Herrera said she had no additional information about the decision, though she noted that petitions were pending before the Supreme Court to commute the women’s sentences.
  • The three are among at least 17 Salvadoran women activists consider unjustly convicted and imprisoned following obstetric emergencies and who have been at the center of a campaign against El Salvador’s absolute law against abortions.
  • “We are grateful that our petitions are being heard and we trust that President Bukele is going to work to achieve freedom for the rest of the innocent women,” said Paula Avila-Guillén, executive director of the Washington-based Women’s Equality Center.
  • El Salvador is among four countries in Latin America that ban abortion in all cases, including when the life of the mother is at risk and in cases of rape. The others are Nicaragua, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. Charges of homicide are often brought in abortion cases.
  • In December of last year, Argentina legalized abortion, and in September of this year, Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion.
anonymous

El Salvador's President Proposes Using Bitcoin As Legal Tender : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...yptocurrency-money-el-salvador

shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • El Salvador President Nayib Bukele announced in a recorded message played at a Bitcoin conference in Miami Saturday that next week he will send proposed legislation to the country's congress that would make the cryptocurrency legal tender in the Central American nation.
  • "Next week I will send to Congress a bill that will make Bitcoin a legal tender in El Salvador," Bukele said. "In the short term this will generate jobs and help provide financial inclusion to thousands outside the formal economy and in the medium and long term we hope that this small decision can help us push humanity at least a tiny bit into the right direction."
  • The U.S. dollar is El Salvador's official currency.
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  • Bukele in subsequent messages on Twitter noted that Bitcoin could be "the fastest growing way to transfer 6 billion dollars a year in remittances." He said that a big chunk of those money transfers were currently lost to intermediaries and with Bitcoin more than a million low-income families could benefit.
  • He also said 70% of El Salvador's population does not have a bank account and works in the informal economy. Bitcoin could improve financial inclusion, he said.
sarahbalick

Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...t-at-sea-436-days-book-extract

lost at sea

shared by sarahbalick on 11 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months
  • s they motored across the lagoon in the Marshall Islands, deep in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the policemen stared at the specimen laid out on the deck before them.
  • Salvador Alvarenga, a 36-year-old fisherman from El Salvador, had left the coast of Mexico in a small boat with a young crewmate 14 months earlier. Now he was being taken to Ebon Atoll, the southernmost tip of the Marshall Islands, and the closest town to where he had washed ashore. He was 6,700 miles from the place he had set out from. He had drifted for 438 days.
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  • I was so hungry that I was eating my own fingernails, swallowing all the little pieces Salvador Alvarenga Days later, Alvarenga faced the world’s press. Dressed in a baggy brown sweatshirt that disguised his reedy torso, he disembarked from a police boat slowly but unaided. Expecting a gaunt and bedridden victim,
  • a ripple of disbelief went through the crowd. Alvarenga cracked a quick smile and waved to the cameras. Several observers noted a similarity to the Tom Hanks character in the movie Cast Away. The photo of the bearded fisherman shuffling ashore went viral. Briefly, Alvarenga became a household name.
  • Later, I would sit with Alvarenga for many hours, back at his home in El Salvador, as he described in detail the brutal realities of living at sea for more than a year. Over the course of more than 40 interviews, he described his extraordinary survival at sea. This is his story.
  • Alvarenga’s boat, at 25 feet, was as long as two pick-up trucks and as wide as one. With no raised structure, no glass and no running lights, it was virtually invisible at sea. On the deck, a fibreglass crate the size of a refrigerator was full of fresh fish: tuna, mahimahi and sharks, their catch after a two-day trip. If they could bring it ashore, they would have enough money to survive for a week.
  • “Calm down, man, give me your coordinates,” Willy responded, from the beachside docks in Costa Azul. “We have no GPS, it’s not functioning.” “Lay an anchor,” Willy ordered. “We have no anchor,” Alvarenga said. He had noticed it was missing before setting off, but didn’t think he needed it on a deep-sea mission. “OK, we are coming to get you,” Willy responded. “Come now, I am really getting fucked out here,” Alvarenga shouted. These were his final words to shore.
  • Furious, he picked up a heavy club normally used to kill fish and began to bash the broken engine
lilyrashkind

Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin describes attempts to phone gunman during school massacre -... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ayor-interview-school-shooting

US politics

shared by lilyrashkind on 02 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • In an interview with The Washington Post, McLaughlin (R) said he rushed to Hillcrest Funeral Home about 15 minutes after “the first call” reporting that 18-year-old Salvador Ramos had crashed his pickup truck nearby. He found himself standing near an official he identified only as “the negotiator,” while frightened parents gathered outside the school and police waited well over an hour to storm the classroom.
  • He said he doesn’t believe the negotiator was aware there were children calling 911 and asking police to save them while the gunman was in the classroom. The mayor said he was not aware of those calls, nor did he hear shots fired from inside the school, across the street.
  • In the recent Texas primary for governor, he opted not to endorse the Republican incumbent, Gov. Greg Abbott, labeling him a “fraud” over his approach to the border and immigration. And he has appeared on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” multiple times to lambaste the Border Patrol’s release of migrants into the streets of Uvalde and lament that he cannot get a call back from the state’s two Republican senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.
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  • McLaughlin said he has not been in touch with Pete Arredondo, the embattled head of the Uvalde school district’s police department, who served as the incident commander during the shooting and has been criticized for not sending officers in sooner.Arredondo has not spoken publicly about the incident, telling CNN on Wednesday that he would do so after more time has passed and the victims of the massacre are buried.
  • Last week, Abbott said he was “misled” by law enforcement authorities about the series of events that took place.
  • “Why should any of us be afraid of expanding background checks? There’s nothing wrong with that, I don’t have anything to hide,” said McLaughlin, who has also long pushed to build a psychiatric hospital in Uvalde.
  • During the interview on Wednesday, however, McLaughlin took a much more conciliatory tone, urging compromise between Republicans and Democrats to find a set of laws that “work for everyone.”
  • “The briefing that the governor and the lieutenant governor and everybody else in that room [had] ... was given by the DPS, not local law enforcement,” McLaughlin said.“They’ve had three press conferences,” he added. “In all three press conferences, something has changed.”
  • In his letter to Patrick, who presides over the Senate, and House Speaker Dade Phelan (R), Abbott asked that both chambers form committees to explore five issues: school safety; mental health; social media; police training; and firearm safety.“As leaders, we must come together at this time to provide solutions to protect all Texans,” Abbott said in his letter.
  • Abbott also announced new instructions for the Texas School Safety Center, a research center focused on campus safety and security that is statutorily responsible for auditing schools for safety processes and establishing best practices.
  • According to a letter Abbott sent to education officials, the governor said the San Marcos-based safety center should start conducting “random intruder detection audits,” designed to find weaknesses in campus security systems.
  • McLaughlin said he could not imagine the school returning to normal operations.“I hope we tear it down to the ground,” he said. “I would never expect a teacher, a student, anyone to go walk back in that building.”
malonema1

GOP senator: Trump did not make 's---hole' comment | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...-did-not-make-shithole-comment

Trump US culture

shared by malonema1 on 14 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • I’m telling you he did not use that word, George. And I’m telling you it’s a gross misrepresentation. How many times do you want me to say that?” Perdue said after host George Stephanopoulos pressed him for an answer.Perdue was one of several lawmakers participating in a meeting with Trump last week when the president reportedly referred to immigrants from African nations, El Salvador and Haiti as coming from "shithole countries."
  • Trump allies see 's***hole' controversy as overblownTrump allies see 's***hole' controversy as overblownPlay VideoPlayMute0:00/0:43Loaded: 0%0:00Progress: 0%Stream TypeLIVE-0:43 SharePlayback Rate1xChaptersChaptersDescriptionsdescriptions off, selectedCaptions
  • "Following comments by the President, I said my piece directly to him yesterday. The President and all those attending the meeting know what I said and how I feel. I've always believed that America is an idea, not defined by its people but by its ideals," Graham said. 
anonymous

Biden assigning Harris to lead diplomatic efforts in Central America to address immigra... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • President Joe Biden is tasking Vice President Kamala Harris with overseeing efforts with Central American countries to stem the flow of migrants to the US southern border, the first major issue Biden has assigned directly to his No. 2.
  • The task mimics Biden's own efforts in 2014 and 2015, when he was asked by then-President Barack Obama to lead diplomatic efforts in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador after a surge of unaccompanied minors from those countries began arriving in the US.Migrants are again arriving at the border at increased levels, causing a scramble by the administration to accommodate them and a political problem for the White House.
  • Officials said Harris would focus her efforts on stemming the current flow of migrants and on developing a larger strategic partnership with Central American countries based on respect and shared values.
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  • The vice president, until now, had not been tasked with a key portfolio issue distinct from Biden. Instead, she acted as a "full partner" to Biden, appearing often physically alongside him on all the administration's efforts, including their self-proclaimed top priority of managing the coronavirus pandemic.
  • Those close to Harris said foreign policy and national security are key areas she wants to develop in her portfolio, and she's taken steps to beef up her experience since taking office, including by speaking with foreign foreign leaders.
  • During her own presidential run, Harris said she would expand the use of deferred action immigration programs and utilize executive actions to remove the threat of deportation of millions of undocumented people in the US if elected president.She said earlier Wednesday in an interview with CBS News that the White House was frustrated by the current situation.
  • Officials said Harris would rely on her experience as attorney general and senator from California, a border state, to inform her diplomatic efforts.
  • They said she would be supported by officials from the Cabinet, including the State Department and USAID, and was likely speak with the leaders of key countries, though did not have specific phone calls to preview.Officials said Biden brought Harris into the new role because of an inherent level of trust.
  • Still, a separate official said Harris would approach the matter differently than Biden, who traveled to Guatemala City in 2015 for a trilateral meeting with the leaders of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras in part to develop solutions to issue of migrants from those countries coming en masse to the United States.
hannahcarter11

Kamala Harris' team tries to distance her from fraught situation at the border - CNNPol... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Kamala Harris immigration

shared by hannahcarter11 on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • In the weeks since the President asked her to take charge of immigration from Central America, Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff have sought to make one thing clear: She does not manage the southern border.
  • Two White House officials familiar with the dynamic said Harris and her aides have emphasized internally that they want to focus on conditions in Central America that push migrants to the US southern border, as President Joe Biden tasked her to do. A record number of unaccompanied children crossed into the US this spring, and the throngs of desperate minors present a heart-rending problem as well as a political one.
  • After the announcement, Harris' aides appeared to "panic," according to one of the officials, out of concern that her assignment was being mischaracterized and could be politically damaging if she were linked to the border, which at the time was facing a growing number of arrivals.
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  • One of the officials said Harris appears eager for a portfolio that will allow her to achieve political victories, especially in foreign policy, an area where she is far less experienced than Biden.
  • Harris' performance is critical to her future political career, which could well include a run for president. It's also of special concern right now as she prepares to depart for a trip to Guatemala and Mexico next week as part of this project. It will be her first official foray into in-person, in-country talks about the troubles that push Central American migrants toward the US.
  • Harris and her staff have made it clear that they want to focus narrowly on diplomatic efforts in Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, where they believe they are more likely to achieve tangible results in addressing the root causes of migration, like economic despair, said the officials.
  • "Everything you're doing in Central America is always towards an eye on the border and what's happening in the United States," said Cris Ramon, an immigration consultant. "With the current dynamics in migration, what's happening at the US-Mexico border has implications in the Northern Triangle and vice versa."
  • Tens of thousands migrants from Central America arrive at the US-Mexico border monthly. In April, of the 178,622 migrants encountered by US Customs and Border Protection, 79,190, or roughly 44%, were from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, according to the agency's data, the very countries where Harris is supposed to be addressing migration to the US.
  • The pandemic has taken a dramatic toll on Latin America, where Covid-19 cases and deaths soared and economies once projected to grow have been decimated. The region was also hit with two devastating hurricanes last year.
  • The decline in economic growth in 2020, according to the Congressional Research Service, is expected to worsen income inequality and poverty in the region. That, combined with pent-up demands and the perception of the Biden administration being more lenient, has fueled people trying to cross the US-Mexico border.
  • Harris' role -- which mimics that of Biden under President Barack Obama -- is intended to target what's driving people to the US.
  • But following Biden's announcement, both the President and vice president's staff clarified repeatedly that Harris would be focused solely on diplomatic efforts to stem the current flow of migrants and develop a larger strategic partnership with Central America.
  • Harris has stressed that her role is to address the "root causes" of migration beginning in the Northern Triangle countries and Mexico, rather than the "symptoms" of it manifesting at the border, which are being addressed by the Homeland Security secretary. Without a diplomatic push in those countries, "we are just in a perpetual system of only dealing with the symptoms," she said in April.
  • Immigration advocates and regional experts who have participated in roundtables with the vice president describe Harris asking detailed questions on a variety of issues, like agricultural science and water irrigation strategies to tackle food insecurity and infrastructure needs.
  • Internally, Harris has been intimately involved in the crafting of a regional strategy, communicating regularly with National Security Council officials. Cabinet members, along with other administration officials, are also putting together proposals on the administration's root-causes strategy, which Harris is expected to discuss while in Mexico and Guatemala in June, a senior administration official previously told CNN.
aidenborst

Harris aiming to deepen US relationship with Guatemala and Mexico on first foreign trip... - 0 views

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US politics crisis policy Culture Kamala-Harris Guatemala Mexico

shared by aidenborst on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Kamala Harris will try to deepen the United States' "strategic partnership and bilateral relationship" with Guatemala and Mexico on her first foreign trip as vice president, according to her senior staff members.
  • "The goal of the vice president's trip is to deepen our strategic partnership and bilateral relationship with both the Guatemalan and Mexican governments to advance a comprehensive strategy to tackle the causes of migration," said Symone Sanders, Harris' chief spokesperson and senior adviser, in a call with reporters Tuesday night.
  • The vice president and her staff have made it clear that they want to focus narrowly on diplomatic efforts in Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, where they believe they are more likely to achieve tangible results in addressing the root causes of migration, like economic despair, according to two White House officials familiar with the dynamic.
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  • "We will also engage community leaders, workers, young innovators and entrepreneurs, and others about ways to provide economic security, address the core factors of migration, and to give people the hope for a better life at home," Sanders added.
  • The vice president will meet with Guatemalan community leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs as well as greet and thank US embassy staff, per Mazin Alfaqih, special adviser to the vice president for the Northern Triangle.
  • "The vice president's strategy is built around catalyzing efforts across the United States government, regional governments," Sanders said, "as well as private sectors and philanthropic sectors and international partners."
  • In next week's bilateral meeting, Harris will discuss with Giammattei "ways to increase economic opportunities in Guatemala, strengthen rule of law and deepen bilateral law enforcement cooperation," Alfaqih told reporters. Already in their virtual bilateral, the two sides agreed to increase the number of border security personnel, among other agreements. The US will also increase the number of its own security forces on the ground to provide training, Alfaqih said.
  • In the vice president's meeting with Mexico's President, Harris will look to build on the two countries' previous agreements to secure the US-Mexico border and work to bolster economic opportunities in the region while establishing "further areas of collaboration," the officials said.
  • Sanders wouldn't say whether Covid-19 vaccines would be a topic of discussion in both countries during the visit, just that they would discuss "Covid cooperation."
  • The vice president has yet to call the leaders of El Salvador and Honduras, as both have underlying issues that have dogged US efforts in the region for years and her staff is finding the best way to engage. Those delayed talks show just one aspect of the challenges in this task.
  • "We have to give people some sense of hope that if they stay, that help is on the way," Harris told CNN's Dana Bash in April. "It's not going to be solved overnight; it's a complex issue. If this were easy, it would've been handled years ago."
ethanshilling

U.S. Aid to Central America Hasn't Slowed Migration. Can Kamala Harris? - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-migration-kamala-harris.html

america biden

shared by ethanshilling on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • An American contractor went to a small town in the Guatemalan mountains with an ambitious goal: to ignite the local economy, and hopefully even persuade people not to migrate north to the United States.
  • Pedro Aguilar, a coffee farmer who hadn’t asked for the training and didn’t see how it would keep anyone from heading for the border, looked confused. Eyeing the U.S. government logo on the pamphlet, he began waving it around, asking if anyone had a phone number to call the Americans “and tell them what our needs really are.”
  • As vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr. led an enormous push to deter people from crossing into the United States by devoting hundreds of millions of dollars to Central America, hoping to make the region more tolerable for the poor — so that fewer would abandon it.
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  • Now, as President Biden, he is doubling down on that strategy once again and assigning his own vice president, Kamala Harris, the prickly challenge of carrying out his plan to commit $4 billion in a remarkably similar approach as she travels to the region Sunday.
  • But the numbers tell a different story. After years of the United States flooding Central America with aid, migration from the region soared in 2019 and is on the upswing once more.
  • Ms. Harris, who has little foreign policy experience and no history in the region, has already been criticized for not visiting the border.
  • The political risks are evident, including the obvious pitfalls of investing billions in a region where the president of Honduras has been linked to drug traffickers and accused of embezzling American aid money, the leader of El Salvador has been denounced for trampling democratic norms and the government of Guatemala has been criticized for persecuting officials fighting corruption.
  • “We’ve looked extensively at different programs that have been approached,” said Nancy McEldowney, a longtime diplomat who serves as Ms. Harris’s national security adviser.
  • Foreign aid is often a difficult, and at times flawed, tool for achieving American interests abroad, but it’s unclear whether there are any simple alternatives for the Biden administration.
  • From 2016 to 2020, 80 percent of the American-financed development projects in Central America were entrusted to American contractors, according to data provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
  • “It’s an incredibly not-transparent situation,” said Eric Olson, an expert on foreign aid to Central America at the Seattle International Foundation. “It’s like this is a national secret.”
  • Even when aid money reached Guatemala in recent years, it often brought little change, according to interviews with dozens who worked with or received assistance from U.S.-financed projects in the country’s western highlands.
  • For decades, migration to the United States followed a pattern: Aside from some spikes in migration from Central America after civil wars or natural disasters, it was mostly single Mexicans who headed north in search of better jobs and pay.
  • Aid workers kept coming to deliver lots of seminars on topics in which the farmers were already well versed, they said, such as planting new varieties of coffee beans, and then left.
peterconnelly

Salvadoran authorities are committing 'massive' human rights violations, with nearly 2%... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

human rights cnn authorities

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Salvadoran authorities have committed "massive" human rights violations, including thousands of arbitrary detentions and violations of due process, torture, and ill-treatment, according to a new report from Amnesty International.
  • The report, released Thursday, found that since late March, nearly 2% of the country has been detained, with at least 18 people having died in state custody.
  • More than 36,000 people have been detained since
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  • "Hopefully, just as they care because we have captured criminals, they would care about our children, about our elderly, about our working people, about the innocent Salvadorans who have suffered at the hands of those same criminals," he said during a speech before the Legislative Assembly.
  • In one instance, a 16-year-old, who was arrested in April and held for 13 days for being an alleged member of an illegal group, was chained to a wall of the detention center, where he said he was beaten by police. Later, he was transferred to youth detention center, where he was beaten by gang members, who he said also threw a bag of urine at his head, it said.
  • Many of the detainees are being held without due process "purely because the authorities view them as having been identified as criminals in the stigmatizing speeches of President Bukele's government, because they have tattoos, are accused by a third party of having alleged links to a gang, are related to someone who belongs to a gang, have a previous criminal record of some kind, or simply because they live in an area under gang control, which are precisely the areas with high levels of marginalization and that have historically been abandoned by the state," according to Amnesty.
  • Bukele, the self-proclaimed "world's coolest dictator," took office in June 2019 with broad support, after promising to stand tough against gang violence
anonymous

Opinion | What Happens When Abortion Is Banned? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tion-banned-latin-america.html

opinion US politics culture

shared by anonymous on 01 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • The world of illegal abortion today looks nothing like it did 45 years ago.
  • It is vastly safer than it was in the past, thanks to a revolution that has replaced back alleys with blister packs ordered online. But this revolution has come with unexpected consequences — for the doctor-patient relationship and for law enforcement.
  • Abortifacient drugs have become so readily available in places like Chile and El Salvador that today it is impossible to enforce abortion bans. That was also the case in Ireland, where by some accounts, before last week’s legalization vote, at least two Irish women a day were self-administering abortions using pills.
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  • Efforts to restrict access to misoprostol will fail not simply because it costs pennies to make, but also because it saves lives. The World Health Organization lists misoprostol as an “essential medicine” for treating miscarriages, and it is credited with dramatically reducing deaths from illegal abortions.
  • If a woman takes the wrong drug or the wrong dosage, particularly too late in pregnancy, she is likely to wind up in the emergency room, bleeding. There is no ready way for doctors to tell the difference between the hemorrhaging from a natural miscarriage and that from an induced abortion. But that hasn’t stopped governments from tasking them with trying.
  • Not only does this policy violate near-universal norms of patient confidentiality, but because doctors have no reliable way to tell a natural miscarriage from an abortion, reports are made on the basis of suspicion. Who do doctors tend to suspect most readily? Poor women.
  • The effects of poverty follow the woman from the hospital to the courthouse: In case after case, Salvadoran judges have wrongly convicted poor women of crimes when the only real evidence against them is that they had a miscarriage.
  • Americans should care what happens under Latin American abortion bans not just for the sake of the women who live there but also because they provide a glimpse of what could be our future.
  • Doctors will find themselves torn between strong norms protecting confidentiality and the pressure to report their patients, and the pressure to treat women themselves as criminals is likely to grow, intensifying an existing pattern of charging poor minority women with crimes arising from miscarriages, stillbirths or perceived risks taken while pregnant.
  • People of good faith on both sides of the abortion war know that the best way to lower abortion rates is to deal with what causes women to want to abort in the first place. Rather than ending abortion, criminalizing abortion will merely create new ways in which the state can intensify the misery of the poorest among us.
Javier E

More Guns = More Killing - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...more-guns-more-killing.html

guns control violence international comparative latin america

shared by Javier E on 07 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • I recently visited some Latin American countries that mesh with the N.R.A.’s vision of the promised land, where guards with guns grace every office lobby, storefront, A.T.M., restaurant and gas station. It has not made those countries safer or saner.
  • Despite the ubiquitous presence of “good guys” with guns, countries like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia and Venezuela have some of the highest homicide rates in the world.
  • Scientific studies have consistently found that places with more guns have more violent deaths, both homicides and suicides. Women and children are more likely to die if there’s a gun in the house. The more guns in an area, the higher the local suicide rates. “Generally, if you live in a civilized society, more guns mean more death,” said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. “There is no evidence that having more guns reduces crime. None at all.”
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  • All that has spawned a thriving security industry — the good guys with guns that grace every street corner — though experts say it is often unclear if their presence is making crime better or worse. In many countries, the armed guards have only six weeks of training.
  • Indeed, even as some Americans propose expanding our gun culture into elementary schools, some Latin American cities are trying to rein in theirs. Bogotá’s new mayor, Gustavo Petro, has forbidden residents to carry weapons on streets, in cars or in any public space since last February, and the murder rate has dropped 50 percent to a 27-year low. He said, “Guns are not a defense, they are a risk.”
  • United Nations studies in Central America showed that people who used a gun to defend against an armed assault were far more likely to be injured or killed than if they had no weapon.
  • “If you’re living in a ‘Mad Max’ world, where criminals have free rein and there’s no government to stop them, then I’d want to be armed,” said Dr. Hemenway of Harvard. “But we’re not in that circumstance. We’re a developed, stable country.”
davisem

Taiwan's President Meets With Ted Cruz in the U.S., and China Objects - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...taiwan-ted-cruz-china.html

shared by davisem on 09 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan met with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in Houston and then flew off to visit leaders in Latin America, seeking to promote her island’s cause as it gets positive signals from President-elect Donald J. Trump.
  • Ms. Tsai was looking to expand her ties to the Republican Party as it takes control of the White House and keeps its grip on Congress.
  • “We discussed our mutual opportunity to upgrade the stature of our bilateral relations in a wide-ranging discussion that addressed arms sales, diplomatic exchanges and economic relations.”
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  • Beijing’s influence in Latin America and the Caribbean is growing, and it is expected to achieve recognition from more countries, as China is the wealthier benefactor.
  • The United States does not maintain official diplomatic relations with Taiwan as a result of negotiations with Beijing that led to Washington’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China in 1979.
  • China has warned Mr. Trump against making changes to the One China policy after he takes office on Jan. 20. The warning came in response to a phone call between Ms. Tsai and Mr. Trump after his November election victory, the highest-level exchange between American and Taiwanese leaders since the end of diplomatic relations
  • “Cruz is influential above and beyond many senators, given his performance in the last election campaign. It makes sense to add Cruz, whatever his relationship is going to be with the Trump administration.”
  • “The People’s Republic of China needs to understand that in America we make decisions about meeting with visitors for ourselves,” Mr. Cruz said.
  • We will continue to meet with anyone, including the Taiwanese, as we see fit.”
  • While American leaders have vowed to defend Taiwan from attack, the United States is not legally bound to do so, despite what Mr. Cruz said. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • Beijing opposed any contact between Taiwan’s leader and “anyone from the U.S. government,” saying it threatens to hurt ties between Beijing and Washington.
  • “The U.S. is Taiwan’s most important ally and friend, and it occupies a special place in the hearts of the Chinese people,”
  • neither Mr. Trump nor anyone on his transition team would be meeting with Ms. Tsai.
  • “In general, it raises Tsai’s national and international stature to be going on trips like this,”
  • davisem on 09 Jan 17
     
    Ms. Tsai's stop in Houston preceded visits to El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, four of the 20 countries, along with the Vatican, that maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan rather than China. Last month, São Tomé and Príncipe, an island nation off the west coast of Africa, severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
rachelramirez

Zika Virus a Global Health Emergency, W.H.O. Says - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...world-health-organization.html

virus zika health Crisis

shared by rachelramirez on 02 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Zika Virus a Global Health Emergency, W.H.O. Says
  • An outbreak of the Zika virus, which is transmitted by mosquitoes, was detected in Brazil in May and has since moved into more than 20 countries in Latin America
  • Officials said research on the effects of Zika in pregnant women was underway in at least three countries: Brazil, Colombia and El Salvador.
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  • The virus was first identified in 1947 in Uganda, and for years lived mostly in monkeys. But last May in Brazil, cases began increasing drastically. The W.H.O. has estimated that four million people could be infected by the end of the year.
malonema1

Migrant caravan seeking asylum faces a tough uncertain future - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...tough-uncertain-future-n870156

US history crisis

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • TIJUANA, Mexico — More than a hundred migrants who made a grueling journey to the U.S. border were stranded on the last leg of their trip on Monday as they waited to plead their case to seek asylum after immigration officials said the crossing was at capacit
  • How long the asylum seekers will have to wait to plead their case is just the beginning of the uncertain and potentially monthslong process ahead of them. The port of entry remained at capacity Monday morning, an official with Customs and Border Protection said in a statement.
  • She broke down crying the day before after learning she would not be allowed to make her claim for asylum that day. She said she was seeking asylum after gang members came after her and her daughter because her boyfriend owed them money.
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  • Mensing said the group was prepared to wait outside the port of entry and was willing to risk the hurdles ahead because they were fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries. Many of the migrants are from Central America, predominantly Honduras.“No one is asking for some sort of immediate citizenship — the people on this caravan know that the most likely thing for them is that they will be detained indefinitely, they may be separated from their children,” said Mensing. “They’re not coming here because they think it’s easy, they’re coming here because they’re fearing for their lives.
  • The asylum seekers began their trek together near the Guatemalan border on March 25, making their way on foot, by train and by bus north through Mexico before coming to their destination at the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana. At one point the caravan numbered roughly 1,200, but its numbers have dwindled after some chose to seek asylum in Mexico and others decided not to risk turning themselves in to immigration authorities.
  • Immigration judges vary in whether they accept claims based on fear of violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Some judges permit asylum for women and children targeted by criminal gangs for recruitment, finding that they are persecuted due to "membership in a particular social group," but other judges do not
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