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To begin our coverage of day two of the historic nomination hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, we discuss the attacks by Republicans on her work defending suspects at Guantánamo Bay prison. Given that Jackson was one of hundreds of legal professionals in a project that exposed the lies and brutality undergirding Guantánamo, “to criticize her work in that project is nonsensical to me,” says Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center of Constitutional Rights, who has represented people held at Guantánamo and defended their rights. “Her work should be valorized.”
JUDGE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: After 9/11, there were also lawyers who recognized that our nation’s values were under attack, that we couldn’t let the terrorists win by changing who we were fundamentally. And what that meant was that the people who were being accused by our government of having engaged in actions related to this, under our constitutional scheme, were entitled to representation, were entitled to be treated fairly. That’s what makes our system the best in the world. That’s what makes us exemplary.
I was in the Federal Public Defender’s Office when the Supreme Court — excuse me, right after the Supreme Court decided that individuals who were detained at Guantánamo Bay by the president could seek review of their detention. And those cases started coming in. And federal public defenders don’t get to pick their clients; they have to represent whoever comes in, and it’s a service. That’s what you do as a federal public defender: You are standing up for the constitutional value of representation.
AMY GOODMAN: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was later grilled by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham about her time representing people detained at Guantánamo. This is part of their exchange.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: So, as you rightfully are proud of your service as a public defender, and you represented Gitmo detainees, which is part of our system, I want you to understand, and the nation to understand, what’s been happening at Gitmo. What’s the recidivism rate at Gitmo?
JUDGE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: Senator, I’m not aware.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: It’s 31%. How does that strike you?
JUDGE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: Any —
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Is that high, low, about right?
JUDGE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: I don’t know how it strikes me overall.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: You know how it strikes me? It strikes me as terrible.
JUDGE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: Yes, that’s what I was going to say.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: OK, good. We found common ground. Of the 229 detainees released from Gitmo — of 729 released, 229 have gone back to the fight. … Would you say that our system in terms of releasing people needs to be relooked at?
JUDGE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: Senator, what I’d say is that that’s not a job for the courts in this way, that —
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: As an American, does that bother you?
JUDGE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: Well, obviously, Senator, any repeated criminal behavior or repeated attacks, acts of war bother me as an American.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Yeah, well, it bothers me.
AMY GOODMAN: After this exchange, Republican Senator John Cornyn used his time to try to accuse Judge Jackson of calling former President George W. Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld war criminals in a court filing.
SEN. JOHN CORNYN: Talking about when you were representing a member of the Taliban, and the Department of Defense identified him as an intelligence officer for the Taliban, and you referred to the secretary of defense and the sitting president of the United States as war criminals. Why would you do something like that? It seems so out of character.
JUDGE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: Well, Senator, I don’t remember that particular reference in — I was representing my clients and making arguments. I’d have to take a look at what you meant. I did not intend to disparage the president or the secretary of defense.
AMY GOODMAN: In a minute, we’ll look at other topics raised in Tuesday’s confirmation hearings for President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, like sentencing in child pornography cases, issues of abortion and other issues, but we’re going to begin with these points on Guantánamo as we’re joined by Baher Azmy — he’s legal director of the Center of Constitutional Rights, where for the past two decades he’s been part of the legal team challenging the U.S. government over the rights of Guantánamo detainees — and Alexis Hoag, who’s a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and a former federal public defender. And we’re going to talk about the significance of Ketanji Brown Jackson being a former public defender.
But we’re going to start with Baher Azmy on the content of the accusations. Can you talk about the judge’s record on these Guantánamo cases and the allegations made by both Cornyn and Lindsey Graham?
BAHER AZMY: Sure. Thank you, Amy.
So, Judge Jackson was one of many hundreds of lawyers who joined a project to challenge this remarkable authoritarian experiment in Guantánamo that purported to — that actually held exclusively Muslim prisoners in an island, without any protections of law, where they were subject to persistent torture and arbitrary detention based on the executive say-so. So, to sort of criticize her work in that project is nonsensical to me. She’s operating in the highest traditions of the law. And it’s lawyers in the legal project that exposed so many of the underlying lies in Guantánamo, lies about dangerousness, lies about humane treatment, lies about national security and compliance with law. So, her work should be valorized.
You know, in terms of — you know, Lindsey Graham is, like, living in a post-9/11 fever dream where he continually wants to fight these old battles. The 31% recidivism number is this made-up Soviet-style number designed to mask, again, fundamental lies about Guantánamo. The overwhelming majority have absolutely nothing to do with initiating any fighting, let alone returning to the battlefield. And, you know, it’s just sort of perpetuating this mythology that men there were dangerous. In our overwhelming experience, men who left Guantánamo left as the project was designed to do: left them broken, not angry.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Baher, I’d like to follow up on that, on this whole issue of the recidivism rate Lindsey Graham mentioned. First of all, as you allude to, most of the people in Guantánamo had never been — or, none had been convicted, or very few were actually convicted of a crime, so that even the issue of recidivism, when a person has not been convicted, is suspect. But also, even if you take Lindsey Graham’s number of 31%, I looked up what the recidivism rate is in the United States for prisoners in general, and two-thirds of people who serve in U.S. prisons are arrested again within three years, and three-quarters within nine years. So, the, quote, “recidivism rate” of people in the United States is far worse than even what Lindsey Graham is saying about these prisoners.
BAHER AZMY: Yes. This is really a made-up number. It’s garbage in, garbage out, like most of the Guantánamo project. You’re right. It starts with an assumption that people committed a crime to begin with. There was no — there were no criminal convictions. That’s the data we should be focusing on. And under the government’s own statistics, only 8% — evidence, only 8% were ever accused of being members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, as we all, I hope, know by now. The overwhelming majority were picked up as a result of bounties and shipped to Guantánamo, where — officials later secretly recognized, and lawyers ultimately exposed, had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism. And this 31% number, it’s really — it’s preposterous on its own terms. It includes individuals — this particular number includes individuals who — for example, Uyghurs — were released and spoke to The New York Times. That’s the notion of returning to the fight that this number captures. Under our analysis, at most, there have been 12 who have done — a dozen or so who have actually sort of engaged in any sort of combatant activities after being released, out of 779.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the essential facts to understand about Judge Jackson’s work on Guantánamo cases?
BAHER AZMY: Yeah. So, she is one of many hundreds of individuals, from sort of every thread of the legal profession — federal public defenders; big corporate law firms; NGOs, like my organization, the Center for Constitutional Rights, which was responsible for coordinating a lot of these legal efforts; academics; and, ultimately, a global movement — to challenge this profoundly extraconstitutional project of arbitrary detention and abuse there. And what she was doing by representing individual detainees was challenging the executive branch to ensure that any kind of detention of human beings is done pursuant to law and not just executive fiat. And in so doing, she was part of a really — a project that exposed so many of the lies and brutality undergirding Guantánamo. And I think that’s an obviously useful perspective that connects the law to the lived experience of individuals who are harmed by the law. And I hope that will be a useful perspective on the court.
AMY GOODMAN: And the specific people that she represented, the four people, have since been released. Also, this issue that Cornyn said she called them war criminals, she actually didn’t use that word. In the brief — and I’m looking — there are number of pieces on this, this one in The New York Times: “The petitions each named Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld — along with two senior military officers who oversaw the Guantánamo detention operation — in their official capacities as respondents. And, they said, such officials’ acts in ordering or condoning the alleged torture and other inhumane treatment of the detainees ‘constitute war crimes and/or crimes against humanity in violation of the law of nations under the Alien Tort Statute.’” If you could end with that, Baher Azmy, the accusations against Bush and Rumsfeld and the government for how prisoners were treated?
BAHER AZMY: Yeah. So, in her petition, she alleged what we know to be true, that individuals detained in Guantánamo were subject to torture. And what follows from that, under well-established international law, including international law [inaudible] was responsible for promulgating, particularly after Nuremberg, those constitute war crimes. So, it’s a bit of a sort of fallacious gotcha in the hearing to say she sort of literally accused them of war crimes. But I want to be clear: Donald Rumsfeld is credibly accused of war crimes, and he’s never been held accountable for that, although we brought a case in German courts accusing him of war crimes in Guantánamo and elsewhere. And as we, you know, focus on the devastation and destruction in Ukraine, it’s worth remembering the onslaught of devastation and destruction brought by Bush and Rumsfeld in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
AMY GOODMAN: Baher Azmy is legal director of the Center of Constitutional Rights.
People stand in line last week to withdraw U.S. dollars and euros from an ATM in St. Petersburg, Russia. (photo: Dmitri Lovetsky/AP)
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As Russian troops rain terror on Ukrainians, Vladimir Putin’s ministers claim they want a negotiated peace. But with victory out of reach, the Kremlin’s war is turning to the home front, to quash dissenting antiwar voices within Russia.
By the end of the third week of the war, rumors had begun circulating in Russia on the possibility of a peace deal. Such claims stemmed from the participants of the official negotiations and from high-ranking functionaries. “Of course, we’d much prefer for all of it to happen much faster; that’s the sincere aspiration of the Russian side. We want to get to peace as soon as possible,” head of the Russian negotiators and ex-culture minister Vladimir Medinsky averred. Even foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said he has “a particular hope for compromise being reached.”
If the word “compromise” started appearing in the speeches of Russian bureaucrats and diplomats, this didn’t come out of the blue. The war has been unfolding in ways that defied Russian strategists’ expectations. Moscow came to realize that it could no longer count on having a “small victorious war” with the enemy’s quick capitulation. The question is: How significant are the concessions that the Kremlin will now have to make? The other side understand this, too.
Ihor Zhovkva, the deputy chief of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, has told journalists that if at first Moscow used the language of ultimatums, urging “Ukraine to give up, lay down its arms, and have the president sign a capitulation — now, Russia has a different tone.” Presidential adviser and one of the leading negotiators Oleksiy Arestovych has announced that the Ukrainian side is taking the initiative in the negotiations:
We’re not ready to give up anything. Instead, we lay out quite rigorous terms. We clearly understand that if we get less than we had before the war, it’s a defeat for us. We put forward some terms, which we can’t reveal yet. . . . I can say that these terms will please the Ukrainian people fighting for freedom.
But perhaps most surprising is that these words — anxiety-inducing for Russia’s rulers — were published in Russian media today entirely under the control of the censorship bureau. This gave rise to rumors in the “patriotic camp” that some of the people in power have moved toward what they deem a “capitulationist position.” For instance, the nationalist Igor Strelkov, who occupied the Donbas town of Sloviansk in 2014 — the immediate trigger for the war that followed — has said as much. Meanwhile, new signals keep coming from the top of the Russian government that Moscow is ready for some hefty concessions, as compared to the ultimatums of the first days of the war. First, foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova startled everyone by announcing that Russia isn’t planning to oust the current Ukrainian government (earlier, Putin had directly stated the opposite). Then, the head of the Russian foreign ministry’s department for the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Alexey Polishchuk, uttered the even more blasphemous thought that the issue of returning DPR and LPR to Ukraine remains open and it must be “decided by the republics’ citizens.” The RT website published these words.
Moscow’s negotiating positions look worse right now than they did before the war. Essentially, what’s meant here is defeat, even if it will be softened by mutual concessions that will be difficult for Ukraine. For the radical “patriotic camp,” this will mean a catastrophe. Those actively supporting the war are already speaking of a “new Khasavyurt.” The term refers to the peace deal signed with Chechen separatists in 1996, which they consider “shameful” for Russia because it agreed to withdraw troops from Chechnya and granted the separatists recognition (albeit temporarily). Boris Yeltsin’s government accepted defeat in the First Chechen War back then. These self-styled “patriots” also speak of a “Minsk-3” process analogous to the failed peace talks of 2014 and 2015.
Save an outright conquest of Ukraine, turning it into a part of the new “Russian Empire,” it is clear that any compromise peace deal on the Ukrainian front will include some harsh consequences for the Russian government.
At least 200,000 soldiers will return home from the front traumatized by the war. They will have observed everything that the Kremlin media are now silent about: the patriotic uprising of the Ukrainian people; the hatred for the occupiers; the massive destruction and civilian casualties; the severe losses incurred by the Russian military that the home front leadership was silent about; and the overall feeling of a lost, unjust war.
The soldiers will be followed by a certain amount of “pro-Russian” politicians and activists in Ukraine itself, who placed their bets on the Russian Federation and will have to flee. They’ll add a flavor of betrayal to the retreat. But the few Ukrainian collaborators will be joined by the rather numerous Russian patriots and nationalists, for whom the refusal of “war until the victorious end” means national treason.
But those are all trivial matters in view of the overall result: in exchange for vague diplomatic gains — the hypothetical neutral status of Ukraine and, perhaps, recognition of Crimea as Russian — the country will receive a collapsed economy, a devalued currency, sanctions, a united and adversarial West, and the pain of its human losses. The effects of all this seem set to replace Putin’s previously high ratings with a “black hole” — a giant gravitational pull of hatred toward the president who has dragged the country into this disaster.
Peace at Any Cost
And yet, Russia’s ruling class has many reasons to seek peace, even if it comes at a high cost. The main one lies in the fact that this cost will only increase with time.
According to the most optimistic prognoses by government experts, Russia is expected to see an 8 percent fall in GDP this year — that is, even if the war ends soon. Unemployment is expected to double. Inflation will be at a 20-25 percent annual rate. But if the war drags on, these evaluations might become a pipe dream. A possible deal with Iran and global economic recession might lower oil prices and weaken the EU’s dependence on Russia’s fossil fuels. Then Russia can expect a more extensive financial crisis — up to a 30 percent fall in GDP, according to some estimates.
In addition to a possibly catastrophic plunge in the authorities’ credibility among ordinary people, there’s also the threat of the rapid collapse of the regime and its administrative machine. The antiwar action by state television employee Marina Ovsyannikova, who appeared on a livestream with a poster calling for an end to the war, shows that even the propaganda machine is in deep crisis right now. As a result, many journalists are quitting TV channels, including first-rate “stars.” Another major figure to resign was a high-level government official — the ex-deputy prime minister and chairman of the Skolkovo Foundation, Arkady Dvorkovich. But the bigger danger is more insidious.
In his Guardian column, French economist Thomas Piketty tapped into the most sensitive issue for the Russian ruling class. To make Russia stop the “special military operation” in Ukraine, the West would only need to freeze or confiscate the assets of 20,000 Russian millionaires, who own over €10 million each in European and American residencies. Putin, some of his relatives, and dozens of Russian oligarchs and high-ranking officials are already on the sanction lists; however, Piketty explains, “the problem is that the freezes applied so far remain largely symbolic. They only concern a few dozen people and can be circumvented by using nominees. . . .”
At this point, most Russian fat cats and bureaucrats feel safe, using the help of financial intermediaries managing their assets. To rid them of this possibility, an international financial register must be created to track the existing portfolios of real estate and financial assets of the families that run Russia, no matter how they’re juridically formalized and who runs them. “Threatened with ruin and a ban on visiting the west,” writes Piketty, “let’s bet that this group would be able to make itself heard by the Kremlin.” Of course, at this point, the Western rich resist such measures because their “interests are much more closely linked to those of the Russian and Chinese oligarchs than is sometimes claimed.” But the war dragging on or shifting to the total destruction of Ukrainian cities might cause the West to give up on their fetishization of the “sacred right to property” — when it concerns Russian millionaires, at least.
According to the French economist’s calculations, only around 100,000 Russians own assets of €2 million or more in the West. Essentially, this is Russia’s ruling class. These are the people holding up the economy, the infrastructure, the civil order, the administrative apparatus, the media — the whole government machine of Putin’s Russia. If he becomes a source of pain for them rather than a guarantor of privileges, there will be nothing to replace their loyalty with. The Kremlin’s oligarchy will be suspended in midair. Even the Kremlin understands as much. Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov has called the Western measures against the Russian oligarchs an assault on the “sanctity of property rights.” But what’s most important is that the members of the Russian elite also see the danger.
Putin’s goddaughter Ksenia Sobchak, who remains part of the moderate, ultraliberal opposition to her godfather, threw a telling fit on March 17. “Biden made a speech before the congress, which can be summed up as: ‘People in Ukraine are dying, therefore . . . (drum roll!) We’ll take away the oligarchs’ yachts,’” she wrote. “Am I the only one who thinks that this is disgusting ‘revolutionary practicality,’ where the social contract is above the law? We’ve turned into characters from Ayn Rand.” Despite their indignation over Biden’s “communist” threats, members of the Russian elite understand with unprecedented clarity that their real problem is preserving Putin’s power.
The only way for the country’s estranged elites to not let the whole government apparatus collapse is to end the war as soon as possible — in turn returning their own peace of mind.
Putin Turns His Imperialist War Into a Civil War
Faced with the mounting doubts — if not outright opposition — domestically, the authorities’ fear is palpable. “The collective West is trying to split the society, speculating on military losses, the socioeconomic consequences of the sanctions, tries to provoke civil resistance in Russia,” Putin himself declared in a televised address. He called those who “due to their slave mentality” align themselves with the West the “fifth column” and “national traitors.” He also promised that the people “will spit out such traitors and bastards, like a fly that accidentally flew into one’s mouth.” For now, it’s not as much about grassroots opposition but the disaffected members of the elite. However, it is clear that Putin’s front is shifting slowly from Ukraine to Russia itself.
Whatever the situation on the battlefields, the importance of this “inner front” will only grow. A poorly camouflaged defeat and a “shameful peace” will surely lead to a tightening of the screws of dictatorial control, lest the anger of yesterday’s patriots explodes. But the continuation of the war, too, will cause the government to demonstrate unprecedented, brutal cruelty toward all dissenting voices, so that today’s depression and fear does not turn into tomorrow’s uprising.
This points to a critical condition for achieving any semblance of peace in this part of the world. So long as antiwar activists are being arrested and beaten, the threat of further bloodbaths remains. Only radical democratization, in Russia and beyond, will allow for a lasting peace and friendly relations among the peoples of the ex-Soviet space.
This democratization starts with obvious steps: the immediate liberation of all political prisoners, the abandonment of censorship and political violence, and the opening up of the electoral arena. But it must invariably move further. For not only Putin and his inner circle bear the responsibility for today’s catastrophe. The whole ruling class — its high-ranking officials, its judicial establishment, generals, loyalist politicians, and oligarchs — has played its part in creating this hell. It cannot keep on ruling the country further, even if it does pay the price of capitulation before the West. The billions it has pumped out of Russia and Ukraine must be returned to the people on the receiving end of war and dictatorship. It is they who will create the new “social contract” that Ksenia Sobchak and her godfather are so afraid of.
This is why the critical condition for peace must be an immediate, exhaustive, and uncompromising democratization within Russia itself. This is what the Left, and all who want to stop this war, must strive for.
Central American migrants walk along the Mexican bank of the Rio Bravo, which divides the cities of Eagle Pass, Texas, and Piedras Negras, Mexico, on Feb. 17, 2019. (photo: Julio Cesar Aguilar/Getty)
The U.S. government’s militarized response to the 2019 crisis made it much worse, advocates say.
Conditions inside the large, dark shelter were dire, and migrants grew sick and staged protests. The Mexican government had detained them, seemingly at the behest of the United States, and then engaged in a citywide effort to severely limit the number of people approaching the border to levy an asylum claim, a practice known as “metering” that was later deemed illegal by a U.S. federal judge.
Meanwhile, the U.S. launched a heavily militarized response to the relatively small buildup of asylum-seekers, with multiple state and federal agencies getting involved, including Army combat units. At the same time, U.S. Customs and Border Protection was planning the implementation of the Migrant Protection Protocols program, also known as “Remain in Mexico,” which forces asylum-seekers to wait out their claims in dangerous Mexican border cities.
Around 1,000 pages of newly uncovered CBP documents, including internal emails and daily situational reports, offer an unprecedented view of the lengths the U.S. and Mexican governments went at that time to surveil, detain, and deport migrants on their way to the U.S.-Mexico border. The documents, which were obtained via Freedom of Information Act litigation by immigration attorneys and advocates and provided to The Intercept, show how the authorities paid specific attention to the asylum-seekers in Piedras Negras and that CBP was aware of both the miserable conditions inside the factory where they were held and how the binational policies were pushing people to make deadly clandestine border crossings.
Andrew Case, senior counsel for LatinoJustice, told The Intercept that the documents tell “a harrowing story about how CBP was made aware of a humanitarian crisis and, rather than address it, worsened it by adopting a military posture and implementing the MPP program.” CBP did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Three years later, the Biden administration continues to implement some of the most sweeping Trump-era anti-asylum policies, including an expanded version of MPP, in close collaboration with the government of Mexico. During a recent meeting between U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the two nations discussed, among other objectives, their “shared commitment to stemming irregular migration [and] creating viable legal pathways.” But more than a year into Joe Biden’s presidency, both the United States and Mexico continue to crack down on migrants and have done effectively nothing to open up pathways to safely and legally migrate.
While Biden ended MPP upon entering office, a court ordered his administration to restart it — a process that has so far been marred with chaos. Biden has also resisted widespread demands to rescind Title 42, an antiquated public health code that the government has used since March 2020 to summarily expel migrants without giving them a chance to apply for asylum. Facing increasing pressure from a host of critics, including members of Congress and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Biden administration is possibly considering letting Title 42 expire in April.
Though anti-migration policies and the deliberate weakening of asylum protections are well documented in both the United States and Mexico, the documents expose the intricate details of how CBP coordinated with multiple countries and multiple U.S. agencies to seal the southern border.
The Texas Department of Public Safety, the Eagle Pass Police Department, the Army’s 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade (most recently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan for, among other missions, “deliberate and hasty air assault capabilities”), and the Texas National Guard all participated in the response to what CBP officials called a possible “mass migration event,” the documents show. CBP special agents were called in and a mobile processing center was moved from Washington, D.C., to Eagle Pass. CBP also mobilized manned and unmanned aircraft and established a no-fly zone. An Army brigadier general met with CBP leadership to be briefed on the “current caravan situation.”
On the other side of the border, Mexico’s immigration agency, abbreviated as INM, municipal Piedras Negras police, various units of the Coahuila (the Mexican state where Piedras Negras is located) police, the Mexican federal police, and a federal intelligence agency all worked to block, corral, and deport the migrants. According to the documents, the “controlled metering of small groups” continued by “mutual agreement of CBP, INM, and City of Piedras Negras Officials.”
While the U.S. agencies were most heavily focused on activity near the border, CBP was also closely monitoring groups of migrants from as far south as the Darién Gap in Panama, with a clear intent to deter them. The Department of Homeland Security’s “Human Smuggling Cell,” as the Human Smuggling and Trafficking Center was referred to in internal emails, analyzed nearly 10,000 records from migrants who were processed in southern Mexico and coordinated with the governments of Colombia and Panama to track the migrants.
It was, as Human Rights Watch researcher Ari Sawyer put it, a “transnational effort to shut down asylum.”
First Arrival
In and around the factory in Piedras Negras, which some of the migrants claim they were “tricked” into entering, at least 500 Mexican federal police officers guarded the migrants, with local police, state police, and soldiers similarly tasked with maintaining security.
Despite Mexican agencies’ quick mobilization to install bathrooms and internet in the factory-turned-refugee camp, according to CBP’s reports, conditions remained poor: cramped, without privacy or proper sanitation facilities, and quickly overrun by various health risks.
According to attorneys, there were between 200 and 400 children inside the makeshift shelter. Health issues inside, according to CBP’s own reports, included a miscarriage, HIV, hepatitis B, skin fungus with open wounds, chicken pox, bronchitis, stomach issues, and colds.
Corralled into the squalid factory, some migrants burned their temporary Mexican visas in protest. And as actual asylum processing at the port of entry in Eagle Pass ground to a halt, an unknown number of migrants scaled the walls or otherwise escaped the factory to seek safety elsewhere.
The border town of Piedras Negras, similarly to others, struggles with safety and security problems due to its proximity to the U.S. and the fight over territory by numerous organized crime groups. Migrants and asylum-seekers are especially vulnerable. In 2011, just 45 minutes south of Piedras Negras, the Zetas organized crime syndicate massacred hundreds in the town of Allende. And in 2019, just an hour away from Piedras Negras in the town of Villa Unión, 23 people were killed during a confrontation between police and the Cártel del Noreste.
Within less than a week of migrants being forced into the makeshift shelter, CBP officials reported knowledge of what they called a “riot” inside. On February 5, a situational report stated that the migrants were “very frustrated with not being let out. Additional [Mexican] military has recently shown up at the shelter.” The Texas National Guard, meanwhile, kept peering on from across the border, “deployed with body armor and binoculars.”
On February 6, a CBP situational report noted that migrants felt like they were being “held like prisoners.” That same day, the Coahuila Human Rights Commission “reminded officials that it is illegal to hold migrants against their will for more than 48 hours,” according to a CBP email from February 7. And yet the migrants were kept in the factory for another 11 days.
A February 9 CBP situational report noted that 47 unaccompanied minors were due to be deported back to Honduras from Mexico “since they have no family members in the US.” The presence of family members is not a requirement for seeking asylum in the United States and should have no bearing on a migrant’s claim to stay in Mexico. In at least one instance, CBP agents separated a family, processing a Guatemalan father and son separately, according to the documents.
While advocates and attorneys were largely barred from entering the makeshift shelter, CBP had an inside view, and a situational report from February 11 captured CBP’s willingness to overlook clear dangers. “No one has been released from the shelter as of today,” the report reads, and “for the most part, the situation at the shelter remains calm.” The same report, however, notes that “a deceased male subject was found directly behind the shelter buried in a shallow grave.” At least three bodies were found in the Rio Grande during a two-week period, according to press releases from the Maverick County Sheriff’s Department across the border and the CBP documents.
By February 14, CBP began referring to the migrants in the shelter as “detainees.” They also referred to them as “bodies.” Only a few migrants with visas provided by the Mexican government were allowed to periodically leave the facility. The INM itself began “metering its distribution of visitor cards” — temporary Mexican visas afforded to migrants heading to the United States — according to one email that cites the U.S. State Department.
A flyer that was created by Piedras Negras authorities and is included in a situational report features a map of the border and describes the town as its “most guarded” section. The flyer, circulated for migrants in custody to “share or post,” also stated that the U.S. had “shielded” the bridge at Eagle Pass and that the government had deployed more than 800 agents “to block the entry of migrants.”
Abundant evidence, including a 2020 Homeland Security report, shows that closing off ports of entry to migrants does not stop them from crossing but rather pushes them to try crossing the border elsewhere, often spiking profits for smuggling rings.
The internal CBP emails include multiple acknowledgments that the slowdown of asylum processing incentivized migrants to make increasingly desperate crossing attempts, even to collaborate with drug traffickers to get across the border. The documents admit that migrants wanted “to be free to travel to international bridges to begin their asylum procedures.” In other words, they wanted to follow the law.
Attorney Andrew Free, a human rights lawyer and transparency advocate, described the situation as “an international conspiracy to violate the principle of non-refoulement,” the primary pillar of asylum, which is a commitment not to not send anybody back into danger.
Safety’s Gauntlet
As many of the migrants were trapped inside the factory, their only hope — besides attempting a clandestine crossing — was a hastily concocted procedure of taking a number and waiting their turn to be permitted access to the port of entry.
The man in charge of organizing the list of migrants was Héctor Menchaca. Appointed by the Piedras Negras mayor to act as liaison between the migrants and CBP, Menchaca collected information from hundreds of migrants, delivered to him through WhatsApp. He acted as the point person for CBP during that time. In a January 15 email, Paul Del Rincon, the director of the Eagle Pass port of entry, wrote that Menchaca was the new “POC for anything and everything migrants.”
Menchaca continued to hold the title of chief of the Municipal Liaison Office up until he resigned last month; in that role, he attended weekly meetings with CBP, he told The Intercept in January. As of last September, Del Rincon remained the Eagle Pass port director. The assistant port director, Pete Macias, also remains in his position. CBP did not respond to questions about Menchacha, Del Rincon, and Macias.
For attorneys and advocates working on the border, the fact that a single person was responsible for this processing raises red flags. “Any time you make access to the U.S. immigration system go through a single person or organization, you’re giving that person enormous power,” said a migrant advocate present in 2019, who requested not be named for fear of retaliation.
Some of the Mexican officials watching over the migrants were part of Fuerza Coahuila, a body within the Coahuila State Police that has faced hundreds of complaints of human rights abuses, including forced disappearances. In the same year the caravan arrived to Piedras Negras, over 300 complaints involving human rights violations — including robbery, torture, and murder — were filed against Fuerza Coahuila. The Coahuila State Department of Public Security, which oversees the state police, did not respond to a request for comment.
But it was INM that was running operations. Migrants and human rights groups have continually raised concerns about elements of the Mexican immigration agency: 105 INM agents are currently being investigated for misconduct by the agency, and agents have been accused of turning over migrants to criminal smuggling networks. An INM communications official did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.
During the migrants’ time in Piedras Negras, Mexican officials and CBP were in near-constant contact, sharing “intelligence” on the migrants detained in the abandoned factory in Mexico. In the documents, CBP notes the exact numbers of migrants in the makeshift shelter and the number of migrants with alleged gang affiliations, as determined by INM. As Mexican officials were conducting “hotel sweeps” and “operations picking up migrants within the city,” they also allegedly identified three “caravan organizers” and shared the intel with CBP.
According to the documents, Mexico also revoked the humanitarian visas it granted to some of the migrants not only if they attempted to cross into the United States but also if they merely approached the Rio Grande. Mexican security forces also staged multiple exercises with armed agents, temporarily shutting down border crossings into the United States in preparation for a possible “massive crossing of Central Americans.” Another email states that INM “stopped registering migrants after acknowledging that the humanitarian visitor card created a pull factor.” In other words, the Mexican government was prioritizing U.S. efforts to block asylum over the safety of migrants traveling through Mexico.
Mexican officials also arrested and transferred migrants away from the border and “deported” hundreds of them, according to the CBP documents. There is no indication in the records that Mexico was conducting anything resembling asylum interviews with the migrants before expelling them. “The U.S. government was all too happy to see Mexico perform quick and dirty expulsions,” Sawyer, of Human Rights Watch, said.
Besides the inherent cruelty of the actions taken against a vulnerable population, Shannon Fyfe, an assistant professor at George Mason University and expert in international law, told The Intercept that “crimes against humanity may have been committed against Central American migrants.”
Fyfe specified that “the documents suggest that these abuses were knowingly and systematically perpetrated, meaning that the government officials had both knowledge of the systematic nature of their actions, as well as the illegality of the particular acts they were committing.” Whether a court or government attempts to seek justice for the victims or accountability for the perpetrators of these possible crimes is unclear. What is clear is that similar actions, driven by near-identical policies, have become the de facto U.S. response to migration.
Gun owner with holstered gun at belt. (photo: Tim Clayton/Getty)
Lawsuit accuses Colorado group linked to Mike Lindell of violating the Ku Klux Klan Act and voting rights laws
The lawsuit alleges that the U.S. Election Integrity Plan — led by Shawn Smith, an ally of former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell — is sending armed members door-to-door in areas with large numbers of voters of color, questioning people about how they voted and taking photographs of their homes.
The lawsuit, which is backed by the state chapter of the NAACP, the League of Women Voters and Mi Familia Vota, alleges that the "voter intimidation" campaign violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a post-Civil War law aimed at preventing white vigilantes from terrorizing Black people to stop them from voting.
The lawsuit cites the "County & Local Organizing Playbook" used by the group, which instructs members to "undertake citizen audit activities to either refute or confirm serious allegations of election malfeasance" in order to "support future legal action." The group, some of whose members are armed, has been going door-to-door in El Paso, Mesa and Weld counties in Colorado, using public voter lists to identify areas where they believe ballots were fraudulently cast, the Colorado Times Recorder reported last year. The report prompted an alert from Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who warned voters of unofficial canvassing efforts and urged residents to report harassment and threats to local law enforcement or the Justice Department.
"Defendants' objectives are clear. By planning to, threatening to, and actually deploying armed agents to knock on doors throughout the state of Colorado, USEIP is engaged in voter intimidation," the lawsuit states. "USEIP's public-facing actions are a clear signal to Colorado voters — especially voters of color — that to vote in an upcoming election means facing interrogation by potentially armed and threatening USEIP agents at their doorstep thereafter."
The lawsuit claims that some members have worn "badges" and falsely accused voters of fraud.
"Sometimes armed and donning badges to present an appearance of government officiality, USEIP agents interrogate voters about their addresses, whether they participated in the 2020 election, and — if so — how they cast their vote," the complaint says. "It is reported that multiple agents have claimed to be from 'the county,' and have, without any evidence, falsely accused the residents of casting fraudulent ballots."
The voting rights groups say the group's efforts to seek out areas where they believe voter fraud occurred has largely focused on high-density housing areas and communities experiencing a growth in the number of minority voters.
"No one should have to be afraid to go to the polls or fear that doing so will mean being threatened in their own homes," Courtney Hostetler, senior counsel for Free Speech for People and one of the lawyers leading the lawsuit, said in a statement. "Free and fair elections can only occur when people know that they are able to safely vote without reprisal or intimidation."
The group's "playbook" thanks Lindell, a leading election conspiracy theorist. Smith, the group's founder, attended Lindell's election conspiracy-laden "symposium" last year in South Dakota along with former Colorado election clerk Tina Peters, who was indicted earlier this month for her role in leaking sensitive voting system data that was published by QAnon conspiracy theorists and right-wing websites. Griswold's office said earlier this year that Smith had also convinced another election official, Elbert County Clerk and Recorder Dallas Schroeder, to make copies of his office's hard drives that he later gave to "unauthorized people in violation of Election Rules."
Shawn Smith, the head of USEIP last month led a "lock her up" chant while discussing Griswold at a rally and said that "if you're involved in election fraud, you deserve to hang."
He can also be seen in a video among a group of violent Trump supporters who clashed with police outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He was accompanied by Colorado state Rep. Ron Hanks, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate who has also pushed false election claims.
Smith is also the president of another "election integrity" group called Cause of America, also funded by Lindell, which Smith announced on Bannon's "War Room" podcast.
USEIP appears to have fully embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory. Its website and the first page of its "playbook" include the slogan "We Are the Plan," frequently associated with QAnon believers. During a presentation organized by Sherronna Bishop, the former campaign manager for Rep. Lauren Boebert, USEIP leader Cory Anderson (who is also a member of the anti-government Three Percenter militia) described the briefing as "being red-pilled," according to the Times Recorder. (That expression, originally drawn from "The Matrix," is popular among QAnon followers and other far-right conspiracy theorists.)
The lawsuit names Smith, as well as co-founders Holly Kasun and Ashe Epp, who was also at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
It alleges that their attempted canvassing for election fraud evidence had the "purpose and effect of intimidating Coloradans from voting, trying to vote, helping others to vote, supporting or advocating for certain political beliefs, or exercising the right to speak, peaceably assemble, or petition the government for redress of grievances, in violation of Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act." The suit also accuses the group of violating a section of the Ku Klux Klan Act that bans "conspiracy to interfere with civil rights."
"Sadly, efforts to intimidate voters are nothing new," NAACP general counsel Janette McCarthy Wallace said in a statement. "The NAACP has a long and proud history of opposing those who would seek to thwart democracy. We could not sit idly by and allow voters to potentially be bullied out of exercising their rights."
The lawsuit does not offer specific examples of voters being intimidated or harassed by armed canvassers, but last year USEIP leader Charity McPike urged armed members to provide "security" for the group.
"We are attempting to line up security. However, anyone who carries protection might want to let us know so we can offer your cell phone numbers to those who are concerned," McPike said, according to Colorado Pols.
"No voter should ever feel threatened in the safety of their own homes," Celina Stewart, League of Women Voters chief counsel, said in a statement. "The nefarious actions of the USEIP are a blatant form of voter intimidation used to target and with the intent to silence Colorado voters of color, which is in clear violation of the Voting Rights Act."
The USEIP is also working with the Colorado Republican Party on its "Election Integrity Operations," according to the Times Recorder. A USEIP member is in charge of the GOP's program and has given joint presentations with Epp, the group's co-founder. Heidi Ganahl, the leading Republican candidate for Colorado governor, promoted the group during a recent event, declaring that they are "doing great things."
USEIP did not respond to a request for comment. The group's website says it plans to expand to other states, including Arizona, Georgia and New Hampshire. Its training materials are already being used by conspiracy theorists in Utah who call themselves the Utah Voter Verification Project, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
Residents in Hurricane, Utah, alerted Washington County officials in December that members of the group, who refused to identify themselves, showed up at their doors with personal voter information, according to the report. The members also recorded voters without their consent.
"We can record anyone without telling them. We don't need permission," one unidentified trainer told the outlet. The group's training manual also stressed that "you do not have to identify yourself at all."
The goal of the Utah group appears to be to collect affidavits from voters who claim to have evidence of illegal votes. In the wake of Trump's 2020 defeat, his legal team attempted to submit voter affidavits to prove their debunked allegations, but those efforts were almost entirely rejected by judges and discredited by election officials.
There has been no credible evidence of voter fraud in Utah, which Trump won by more than 20 points. Republican Gov. Spencer Cox and Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson condemned those who are spreading "misinformation" about the election and dismissed claims of fraud as "absolute falsehoods."
Other Trump supporters have tried similar door-to-door audits. Cyber Ninjas, the bankrupt company that led Arizona's failed "forensic audit," sought to send canvassers door-to-door in Maricopa County but ultimately relented after the Justice Department warned that such an effort would violate federal laws against voter intimidation.
Another group called the New Mexico Audit Force also sent its members door-to-door in heavily Republican Otero County, which had already spent $50,000 on an "audit" confirming that Trump had won the county by more than 25 points. The House Oversight Committee last Thursday announced a probe of the effort, warning that the audit "illegally interferes with Americans' right to vote by spreading disinformation about elections and intimidating voters."
USEIP also appears to have had trouble vetting its volunteers. The group's training manual says that the group intends to check volunteers' social media and called on them for a "gut check," saying leaders had "learned (roundaboutly) that there were a couple of people in our group, who were volunteering for our events, who had a criminal history of sexual misconduct," and adding, "it's unfortunate that we must check volunteers for pedophilic leanings."
Roma refugee Maria Todorovich. (photo: Sophia Smith Galer)
At a refugee centre for Roma people in Moldova, VICE World News saw rotting food and people with no way out.
Manejul centre, which accommodated over 10,000 refugees since war broke out, has hosted many members of the Roma community with nowhere to go, just like Todorovich. It closed its doors the day after VICE World News visited. Refugees are being housed elsewhere, but Manejul’s health standards and treatment of the Roma has raised serious concerns for discrimination they may face elsewhere Moldova.
Todorovich, who is from Donetsk, was among a number of undocumented refugees from Ukraine sheltering at the centre in Moldova’s capital.
Like Todorovich, most of the refugees in the centre, came from Ukraine’s 400,000-strong Roma community, an ethnic minority that is routinely discriminated against across Europe. Few people here had the biometric passports that were needed to travel onwards; many would jump at the chance of a bus but when asked for a passport, would be forced to return to Manejul and unpack. As a result, many spent weeks here in a sports stadium without sanitation, food hygiene or heating. Aid workers believe they were being given worse treatment than other people fleeing Ukraine because of their Roma ethnicity.
Todorovich tried several times to get a Ukrainian passport that would let her and her four children travel out of Moldova. The only evidence of her Ukrainian identity are ripped up documents, held together only by her hands, which show her photograph and the names of all her kids. One of the only Moldovan volunteers to be found in the entire building, a tired man called Vlad, asked what he can do for her; she had already spent five days at the Ukrainian embassy for a passport, only to be left hanging again and again. She spent three weeks at Manejul. Her four children who are with her have had no school since leaving home, while a son and a daughter remain back in Ukraine. Things were so bad that Todorovich even considered returning to Donetsk.
Vlad – who didn’t give his surname – had a sore throat from the cold weeks volunteering in this massive space with poor heating. A few nurses and health staff floating around between Swiss and Israeli humanitarian efforts said that lots of the residents have suffered from food poisoning. In the kitchen, a box of rotting apples and donated food left outside of the fridge suggest why. Martina Paletova, a Czech nurse, said that last week she witnessed residents opening up yoghurt pots that looked congealed.
It was a very different scene compared with other government centres, such as Moldexpo, which was first an exhibition centre, then a COVID centre and is now a refugee shelter for women and children. Volunteers flit about, washing machines are a constant background hum and there is information all over the walls about services and transport options available to refugees. Here, everyone is given a small room, a stark contrast to the Manejul centre, where mattresses were piled up into bed forts to give some privacy. On VICE World News’ second visit, there was only one volunteer for the entire building.
“Many monitoring reports from Roma civil society at the Moldova side indicate a clear differential treatment and approach by border and national authorities towards Ukrainian Roma and other [minorities],” says Isabela Mihalache from ERGO Brussels, which is monitoring the situation of Roma refugees from Ukraine. She has been contacted about the poor standards at Manejul several times.
“It is concerning. In Ukraine before the war started there were 400,000 Roma living [there], out of which I think 35,000 Roma are stateless and a lot of them that don’t have documents. Not just birth certificates – anything. Because there has been an unwillingness, a failure of national and local authorities to put Roma people in legality. So many Roma now without identity documents that have crossed the border are at risk of becoming stateless, for which it is much more difficult to get international protection.”
Increasingly, humanitarian corridors appear to be opening, and some NGOs report that undocumented Roma have been able to pass through to other countries. But weeks have already passed in which thousands of Roma coming through the border have not been monitored properly or guided by appropriate NGOs.
The day after VICE World News visited the centre, it was closed down, creating more uncertainty for groups trying to assist the Roma. Non-profit Khalsa Aid had been donating food, but was told to stop last week as the centre was closing despite it still accommodating several families. The remaining 80 refugees in the camp have been shifted to other temporary centres, local authorities announced on Wednesday.
Hope4, an NGO run by Chris and Zoe Lomas who moved to Moldova from the UK originally to support orphans and tackle trafficking, has been responding to the refugee crisis by raising donations, some of which they used to purchase utilities for the centre like fridges. When Chris Lomas saw the food left out, he opened the fridge to see that it was hardly being used.
“I've visited the centre on a number of occasions, and find it cold, dirty and ill equipped,” he said.
“What constitutes a refugee centre? The presence of beds, or an environment that provides for all the basic needs of the desperate. Where you're placed in Moldova will depend on how comfortable or uncomfortable your stay is. The Manejul centre is perhaps one of the poorer examples, and perhaps whether unintentional or otherwise, the one ethnic minorities find themselves shipped to.”
Mihalache added that they have been able to improve monitoring at the borders, and trying to get more Roma-specific NGOs on the ground. It may make all the difference for women like Todorovich, fleeing a war zone and hoping for protection, no matter what her passport says.
Former Bogotá Mayor Gustavo Petro speaks after being elected as presidential candidate for the Historic Pact coalition in Colombia. (photo: Guillermo Legaria Schweizer/Getty)
The progressive former mayor of Bogotá wants to ban new fossil fuel exploration on day one.
Speaking to oil and gas industry executives in Houston two weeks ago, current Colombian President Iván Duque—limited to one four-year term—spoke obliquely about the choppy waters facing his party and favorite industry back home. “When we’re talking about energy security, we cannot allow those decisions to be captured by populism,” Duque told attendees at CERAWeek, the long-running energy conference held just before the most recent Colombian elections. He added that “the hydrocarbon sector is not the enemy. The enemy are the emissions.” Duque has enthusiastically supported the expansion of Colombia’s fossil fuel sector, and set out to double the country’s oil reserves when he took office. Appropriately, the main English-language news sources covering the race have been in the business press, where politicians and business interests have issued worried missives about Petro’s plans for extraction, taxing the rich, and alleviating the country’s crushing inequality: 42.5 percent of Colombians live below the poverty line, up nearly 7 percent since the start of the pandemic.
Petro isn’t proposing to end extraction immediately. As CENSAT Agua Viva researcher and former Ecopetrol engineer Andrés Gómez O. explained a few months ago on the Colombian news site Las 2 Orillas, existing reserves would continue to be exploited and contracts with refineries would be honored under his plan. (CESNAT Agua Viva is part of Friends of the Earth International, a global network of climate and environmental organizations.) Rather than a sharp break with fossil fuels, Gómez told me over WhatsApp, Petro aims to “build a road that leads Colombia, in a managed and smooth way, away from dependence on fossil fuels on an appropriate timeline: a directive aligned with the manifest urgency of effective climate action that scientists and various environmental organizations are vehemently demanding, and that explores a path away from extractivism which the Latin American left has not dared to travel.” According to the 2021 U.N.-backed Production Gap Report, the world’s governments are on track to produce double the amount of coal, oil, and gas that is consistent with keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The International Energy Agency last year found that no investments in new fossil fuel supply projects are compatible with meeting that goal.
Fossil fuels account for more than half of Colombia’s exports—replacing them will not be easy, on any timeline. Petro says he wants to transform the country into a “world power for life,” tripling tourism to the country and supporting manufacturing and small-scale agriculture. As he told the Spanish paper El Pais in a lengthy interview last September, he proposes “to end oil exploration, but not exploitation. The old coffee-growing country has been left behind and sadly we moved into oil and coal. This is unsustainable and will bring about extinction. We need to move away from an extractivist economy and move towards a productive one.”
Petro’s position on climate and extraction has certain strategic benefits in domestic politics. As he looks to solidify the Historic Pact’s parliamentary bloc, emphasizing decarbonization is an easier olive branch to the Green and liberal parties than some of Petro’s other more traditionally left programs, like land reform and a wealth tax. Climate concerns are legible to international audiences, as well as a cudgel against accusations—ever-present from the right—that Petro is plotting to turn Colombia into Venezuela.
The Wall Street Journal, for example, recently ran an op-ed focusing on Petro’s former participation in the April 19 Movement (“M19”)—a rebel group that disarmed in 1991 to participate in drafting the Colombian Constitution and transitioned to ballot box opposition. The FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) followed suit much later as a result of the 2016 peace accords that ended a half-century of civil war. While prior membership in a rebel group is not uncommon for politicians in countries with recent violent histories—former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was a guerrilla in her youth, for example—the Journal op-ed protrayed Petro as a “Chavez admirer” who has sided with “domestic terrorists.”
The reality is much more banal, says Forrest Hylton, a historian at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia-Medellín. “He’s really looking to implement a bit of state-led social democracy,” Hylton told me. “Castro’s Cuba is kind of the gift that keeps giving to the Colombian and Latin American right, and the same is true of Venezuela. They’ll continue to denounce [Petro] as a Communist, but it’s not clear how much more mileage they can get in the twenty-first century.”
While he has explicitly criticized Venezuela’s leadership for years, Petro has spoken favorably about Latin America’s Pink Tide leaders, who helmed a wave of left-wing governments elected as part of the same wave as Hugo Chávez in the 2000s. He’s eagerly sought to associate himself with the newly elected left-wing Chilean President Gabriel Boric, whose inauguration he attended last week, and has praised Bernie Sanders. Petro has outlined a more broadly left-wing, less specifically socialist program, embracing “democratic capitalism” and the full implementation of the 1991 Constitution and 2016 peace accords, which Duque has sought to “modify.” He told El Pais that his programs wouldn’t be “categorized as leftist in Europe. The necessities of Colombian society are not based on building socialism, but on building democracy and peace, period.” His “only criticism” of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, he said in the same interview, was that he “did not make any attempt to move away from an oil and coal-based economy for one based on knowledge. This is what I am proposing to Latin American progressivism.”
Petro, 61, has been a fixture of opposition politics for more than 30 years. He’s been involved in politics ever since the M19 pivoted toward the constitutional process, and is no stranger to challenging the right. He called out right-wing government connections to far-right paramilitaries as a lawmaker, consequently receiving death threats that led him to sleep with an assault rifle by his side. As mayor of the country’s capital, Petro backed several initiatives to broaden transport options and expand public goods, including challenging the Mafia’s control over garbage collection by bringing it under public ownership. In his 2018 presidential run, he collected an unprecedented 42 percent of the vote against Duque, giving him a much bigger platform to criticize that administration. “Even if he were to win, it would be an uphill battle, but I can’t think of anybody better prepared to confront it,” Hylton said. “The conservative currents in Colombian society are never to be underestimated. He’s been around too long to have any illusions about that.”
The defining figure of the Colombian right this century has been Álvaro Uribe, who ruled the country from 2002 and 2010 and continues to loom large. While he’s faced a rash of bribery and witness-tampering charges since leaving office, Uribe serves as head of the ruling Democratic Center Party and hand-picked Duque for his current post. Duque is now under investigation himself for graft. The far-right Democratic Center has been supportive of Trump, and its members over the last few days have shown a willingness to resort to some of Trump’s tactics in dismissing electoral results.
Initial results from the combined presidential primary and legislative elections on March 13 saw a strong showing for Petro but indicated that he’d lack a governing majority in the House and Senate. A subsequent count completed late last week showed that he won by even bigger margins and—critically—that the Historic Pact would be the largest force in the House and Senate. Uribe and the right have been fearmongering about alleged election fraud on social media ever since, potentially testing the waters for a coup. “This result cannot be accepted,” Uribe tweeted on Saturday—referring to alleged fraud. He’s also claimed that Venezuela is to blame. Before polls opened earlier this month, Uribiste Senator María Fernanda Cabal called for election observers with the Progressive International—including former Ecuadorian presidential candidate Andrés Arauz—to be expelled from the country on the grounds that they “came to support the candidates of Marxism and to spread lies about Colombian institutions.” After the votes were counted, Cabal echoed Uribe’s fraud claims: “If we don’t protect our democracy, we will also lose our freedom.” (Duque issued a more softly worded statement calling for a recount.)
After pressure mounted over the weekend, registrar Alexander Vega announced on Monday afternoon that he would formally request a recount from the National Election Council, or CNE. Petro tweeted, “We are facing a real coup promoted by Uribe,” and said he would stay out of any debates “until the transparency of the vote is guaranteed.”
Petro’s success in these elections, recount notwithstanding, follows a series of extended protests in Colombia that have helped fracture the right. Mass student strikes in 2018 bled into a larger mobilization of 1.5 million Colombians in November 2019 against neoliberal fiscal reforms, environmental destruction, and persistent state-sanctioned violence against social movement leaders. A general strike was only halted because of the pandemic. Last spring—amid mounting frustrations over the government’s handling of the pandemic, and worsening inequality—an estimated 10 percent of the population across rural and urban areas participated in an uprising calling on Duque to step down. Feminist movements have been a potent force in Colombian politics, as well, and won a historic victory to decriminalize abortion in February.
“Young people with very little prospects of jobs or higher education were out literally manning barricades and controlling territory all over because the government murdered dozens of people and injured hundreds,” Hylton told me of the protests last spring, which had their epicenter in poor neighborhoods of Cali. “Riot police have been at the center of contention because they don’t allow people to peacefully demonstrate,” a right guaranteed by the country’s constitution. “They’re called in, and peaceful demonstrations ‘turn violent,’ although the violence is almost exclusively one-sided. That became really apparent and deadly in 2021,” he continued. Petro has called for Duque to be tried for crimes against humanity over the killings last spring.
Colombia is the world’s most dangerous country for human rights defenders and environmentalists. Movement groups like the Congreso de los Pueblos liken the intense criminalization of protesters and rampant extrajudicial killings to an “ongoing genocide.” More than 300 former FARC members have been killed since the peace accords were signed in 2016. In all, at least 145 Indigenous Colombian activists, rural organizers, trade unionists, and other leaders were killed last year.
The weapons used in those killings have uncomfortably close ties to the United States. The U.S. has had a major presence in Colombia for decades, and the country is a major recipient of military aid. Duque’s visit to Houston, accordingly, was part of a longer trip in the U.S. that included meeting with President Biden at the White House, where Biden named Colombia as a major “non-NATO” ally and called the country a “linchpin … to the whole hemisphere.” Pitched as a means to prosecute the “war on drugs” and target left-wing guerrillas, Plan Colombia—a $9 billion military aid package launched in 2000—would apply “war on terror” counterinsurgency tactics to the Western hemisphere and specifically to the country’s leftist guerrillas. Critics say the influx of U.S. aid has contributed to massive civilian casualties (“false positives”), widespread displacement, and the systematic killing of social movement leaders, aimed at neutralizing dissent against the neoliberal policies imposed by successive right-wing administrations. While in the U.S., Duque also met with State Department climate envoy John Kerry, who has praised Plan Colombia and even cited it as a potential model for climate action. Plan Colombia, Kerry has argued, “managed to pull Colombia back from being a failed state,” and as such is a model for reducing the effects of climate-intensified migration.
It’s likely that Petro’s vice-presidential candidate will be 40-year-old Afro-Colombian environmental organizer Francia Márquez, a 2018 winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize who has deep ties to the country’s muscular social movement. Like many activists, she’s escaped a number of near-fatal attacks for her work against illegal mining, including one where two of her bodyguards were killed. After just three months of campaigning, Márquez, a newcomer to electoral politics, mustered an impressive showing in her left-wing primary against Petro earlier this month: She earned 15 percent of the vote. Márquez—the first Afro-Colombian woman ever to run for president in Colombia—has since rejected an invitation to join the ballot of centrist candidate and former Medellín Mayor Sergio Fajardo, who won fewer votes than she did, and affirmed her commitment to the Historic Pact. In selecting her, Petro would be sending a very different signal than neighboring Brazilian presidential candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The larger-than-life left-wing former longtime Brazilian president will appear on the ballot with the business-friendly centrist Geraldo Alckmin in his contest against Jair Bolsonaro this October.
While Petro’s chances are strong, his win isn’t a foregone conclusion. Barring any dramatic changes from a potential recount, he’ll face a crowded field in first-round elections in May, with main challengers from the center and right-wing blocs, as well as candidates running outside of them. If he doesn’t win outright, he’ll face a much tougher challenge. And his ability to court the support of Greens and liberals remains an open question. There’s an ugly, if somewhat distant, history of progressive candidates being assassinated, too, including left-wing Bogotá Mayor Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, whose death sparked a 10-year civil war (La Violencia) that left more than 200,000 people dead. Petro has already survived an assassination attempt, in 2018, and travels flanked by armed guards.
Yoder writes: "And it's not the one oil executives had in mind."
And it’s not the one oil executives had in mind.
The analysis, from researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the United Kingdom, found that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) requires more stringent emissions cuts than what any country is currently considering. The report, published Tuesday, is focused on avoiding going past that 1.5-degree threshold — a sort of danger line beyond which the effects of global warming turn from catastrophic to … well, something even worse.
At this point, the Earth has already warmed by 1.1 to 1.2 degrees C (about 2 degrees F). To have decent odds of meeting this 1.5-degree goal, rich countries would have to completely phase out oil and gas production in 12 years, the report said, while poorer countries would have until 2050 to do so, because they bear less responsibility for creating the problem. The authors make clear that there’s no room for new fossil fuel production “of any kind” — no more coal mines, oil wells, or gas terminals.
The report’s vision of the “energy transition,” a phrase some use to describe the world’s path away from fossil fuels, looks radically different from what oil executives have proposed when they use the same term. The oil and gas industry has argued for the continued use of their key products and lowering emissions by capturing and storing the carbon emitted when fossil fuels are burned.
Consider some statements made by oil executives at a recent energy conference in Houston. Amin Nasser, the CEO of the biggest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco, said that “all energy sources will be needed to support a successful transition,” the New York Times reported. Meanwhile, Darren Woods, ExxonMobil’s CEO, said that his company was actually increasing oil production, but using technology to cut emissions and support “the transition to a net-zero future” — likely referring to Exxon’s foray into producing “blue hydrogen” (made from natural gas) and capturing and storing carbon.
The Tyndall Centre report dismissed any notion that either blue hydrogen or carbon capture technology could make a solid dent in fossil fuel emissions in the near future. Carbon capture and storage plants nabbed less than 0.1 percent of the world’s fossil fuel emissions in 2021, the authors wrote, pointing to the technology’s “long history of over-promising and under-delivering.” They argued that there isn’t much space for strategies to prolong the life of fossil fuels when zero-carbon alternatives, like wind and solar power, already exist at competitive prices.
Last year, the world hit a record high for carbon dioxide emissions: 36.3 billion tons, according to the International Energy Agency. The way things are going, many climate scientists think that the world will blow past its targets, with nearly half saying they think that a beyond-catastrophic 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F) of warming is likely. Under this scenario, people living in Arizona would live in temperatures 95 degrees or higher for nearly four months out of the year, coastal areas where 12 percent of the world’s population lives today would be submerged, and a full quarter of the species on Earth could go extinct. And that’s just a taste of the “something even worse.”
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