07 March 22
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The West has mobilized vast economic weaponry against Russia. But sanctions do not always produce meaningful or timely change.
Yet sanctions generate meaningful change only about forty per cent of the time. Years of sanctions failed in North Korea, Venezuela, and Iraq. Cuba has faced layers of U.S. trade and arms embargoes since 1960. The Communist regime is still in power. The Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, faced multiple sanctions for his brutal repression after the Arab Spring uprising, in 2011, turned into a civil war. Hundreds of thousands have died, yet Assad is still firmly entrenched in Damascus. Sanctions are often sagas. Success in South Africa took three decades. The Iran model, which the U.S. has invoked for Russia, has had gyrating effects. Sanctions also produce heartbreak. The agony is the differential in timing. A gun, shell, or bomb can kill in seconds. Sanctions take a comparative eon in the scheme of war or a humanitarian crisis. “They rarely work,” Benn Steil, of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “But, when they do work, they tend to take a very long time.”
The main flaws are usually the exemptions, known as carve-outs, that provide financial lifelines. Humanitarian goods—food, medical equipment, education materials—are generally exempt. But enforcement of sanctions on everything else is up to individual nations, which can amend or bend the rules for their own economic needs. In 1966, the U.N. for the first time issued sanctions that sought regime change after Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, declared independence from Britain to preserve white-minority rule. The Security Council imposed an economic embargo on Rhodesia, but only on ninety per cent of the country’s exports. For years, the U.S. Congress approved an additional carve-out that allowed the import of Rhodesian chromium, a key component in American jet engines, cars, and stainless steel. (Rhodesia was then one of three major world suppliers; the Soviet Union was another.) It took more than a decade—of civil war and sanctions—for the Rhodesian regime to cede power to a democratically elected government. Along the way, some twenty thousand died.
Russia benefits from a similar carve-out—for now. Western sanctions allow it to keep selling energy, the largest source of Moscow’s revenues. Last year, Russia earned a hundred and nineteen billion dollars from oil-and-gas sales—when the price averaged only sixty-nine dollars a barrel. This month, prices soared to a hundred and fifteen dollars a barrel. Even if the West, under mounting pressure, does opt to sanction Russian energy resources, it could backfire—creating an oil crisis in the West and driving up prices globally, while Russia simply switches to other buyers. (Many countries, notably China, have not cut off trade with Russia.)
South Africa, during the era of racial apartheid, was widely considered a rare sanctions success story, Steil told me. In 1962, a resolution by the U.N. General Assembly called on member states to sever all diplomatic, military, and economic ties. Yet carve-outs in subsequent international sanctions again diluted their effect. International sanctions excluded “strategic materials,” as well as coal, diamonds, and some forms of gold, which South Africa produced in abundance. As a result, sanctions had minimal impact on the daily life of ruling whites. Over time, South Africa became more self-sufficient. Facing an embargo on energy imports, it developed a world-class system to make oil from coal. Once dependent on arms imports, it ramped up production and became a net exporter. And, for all the pressure and cut-offs, South Africa was still able to develop its first nuclear device in 1982, and by 1989 it had six bombs. The white government finally released Nelson Mandela in 1990. Amid tectonic global political shifts, apartheid ended—three decades after the first sanctions.
Iraq was one of the worst sanctions failures, demonstrating that dictators willing to starve their people and isolate their countries can simply ignore them. In 1990, President Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked invasion of Kuwait spawned the same kind of international fury visible today over Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. Within four days of Iraq’s attack, the U.N. imposed sanctions that banned world trade with Baghdad. Saddam refused to withdraw. Six months later, a U.S.-led military assault expelled Iraqi forces, but the Iraqi leader refused to comply with the terms of the ceasefire. Sanctions dragged on. The toll was horrific. By 1997, a third of Iraqi children were malnourished, according to unicef. In 1999, the Red Cross reported that the economy of Iraq—which once had one of the highest standards of living in the oil-rich Middle East—was “in tatters.” The suffering had little impact on Saddam; he balked at coöperating with U.N. inspectors charged with monitoring his weapons of mass destruction. In 2003, the U.S. launched a second invasion—and Saddam was eventually caught and executed. Dictators often ignore sanctions, no matter the cost to themselves or their states. Putin, so far, seems not to care, either.
Sanctions and embargoes on North Korea, first imposed after the Korean War in the nineteen-fifties, have been a total failure. Over three generations, the Kim dynasty has only become more belligerent, better armed, and more obstinate. In 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went to Pyongyang to offer a deal—some sanctions relief and humanitarian aid in exchange for limits on its ambitious ballistic-missile program. North Korea was emerging from a historic four-year famine that reportedly killed millions, but the talks failed. Four subsequent U.S. Presidents imposed ever-tougher sanctions on North Korea. The world’s most isolated regime is now estimated to have dozens of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles to fire them across Asia and the Pacific.
The Biden Administration said that the new sanctions on Russia were based on the “Iran model.” But four decades of embargoes and sanctions on Tehran have repeatedly failed to change the regime’s calculus. The U.S. first imposed sanctions after fifty-two American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, in 1979; it took fourteen months to free them. More sanctions were imposed in the mid-nineteen-eighties for state sponsorship of terrorism. Sanctions were intensified in the nineteen-nineties and again in 2005, amid suspicions about Iran’s ambition to make a nuclear bomb. In 2013, Tehran, under a new President, finally agreed to negotiate. “I racked up about a million frequent-flier miles to get this much concerted action on Iran,” Stuart Levey, the Treasury official who orchestrated sanctions on Iran, told me.
Sanctions, however, are also subject to the whims of domestic politics. Three years into the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Donald Trump abandoned it and imposed more than a thousand new sanctions on Tehran. His goal was to get Iran to negotiate a broader deal. He failed abysmally. In retaliation, Iran breached limits on its nuclear program.
Sanctions rarely change a regime’s ideology or behavior. Russia will, no doubt, face severe economic pain for its invasion of Ukraine. Putin “grossly underestimated” the political will of the West to enact such a complex set of sanctions, including on Putin, Steil told me. In a joint statement on Friday, the G-7 warned that it will continue to impose “severe” sanctions. The group of the world’s most powerful economies demanded that Russia end its invasion. But history shows that the economic weapon is a limited one. And sanctions alone are unlikely to get the ruthless thug in Moscow to stop.
A customer and employee are seen March 2 in a Moscow office of Sberbank, one of the sanctioned Russian entities. (photo: Pavel Golovkin/AP)
Even after the annexation of Crimea and the hacking of the DNC, firms took on major Russia clients. Then came the sanctions.
Over the past eight years, firms doing legal, lobbying, and PR work reported payments of roughly $18 million to do work for six Russian entities: Sberbank, Gazprombank, Nord Stream 2 AG, Vnesheconombank, VTB Bank, and the Russian Direct Investment Fund.
Those six entities have now been targeted by sanctions from the Biden administration. And, virtually overnight, any remaining ties they had with D.C. lobbying shops have been severed.
The termination of those contracts may be one of many ripple effects from the war currently being waged by Russia against Ukraine. But for good government advocates, it represents a potentially watershed moment on K Street, while posing a number of key questions: Why did it take sanctions to make the firms drop their clients and, if the administration lifts those sanctions, how long will it be before K Street jumps back in the game?
“What took so long?” asked Ben Freeman, director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy. “In most cases, the firms representing these Russian clients — they knew exactly who they were working with. They knew they were working with folks that were very close to Putin. They knew exactly who these financial sector clients were. … They knew exactly what they were doing, and that didn’t stop them.”
“It almost took the start of World War III for them to actually drop their clients,” he added.
K Street firms who benefited from Russian cash over the past decade were not violating any law. It is proper for countries and companies of varying levels of nefariousness to purchase representation in the halls of Congress and the corridors of power in D.C., provided they abide by disclosure and ethics rules. The recent terminations of the contracts were in response to U.S. sanctions on those companies — not, necessarily, moral judgments that the firms themselves made about serving clients tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
For that reason, lobbying experts suspect that the same Russian institutions will find representation once again from lobbying shops eager to accept their hefty payments when the sanctions are lifted. A number of groups cut ties with Saudi Arabia amid pressure in the wake of the 2018 slaying of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But some retained their Saudi clients, and the country has found itself a slate of new firms in the intervening years.
The lobbyists who had represented Russian interests were far from persona non grata in Washington, D.C. In fact, many carried clout in the nation’s capital. Former Rep. John E. Sweeney (R-N.Y.) represented Vnesheconombank. Former Rep. Toby Moffett (D-Conn.) and former Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) represented Sovcombank.
Though foreign nationals cannot contribute to U.S. elections, lobbyists for those entities are under no such restrictions. And, as such, they continued to give. Vincent Roberti, a former lobbyist for Nord Stream 2 AG whose firm’s website, until recently, said he advised President Joe Biden’s 2008 presidential campaign — a detail that has since been scrubbed from his online bio — gave $100,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in November 2019 as a “headquarters/building fund contribution,” according to the Federal Election Commission. He also gave $46,100 to the Nancy Pelosi Victory Fund in 2019, among other contributions in recent years.
Roberti’s firm was paid more than $9 million to lobby on issues “related to the U.S. position toward the Nord Stream 2 pipeline,” including potential sanctions.
“Our engagement with Nord Stream 2 was never about or on behalf of Russia,” a spokesperson for Roberti Global said in a statement. “Rather it was an engagement with a commercial entity with Western European management and debtholders that worked to support Western Europe’s effort to control its own energy needs. We terminated our engagement on the Nord Stream 2 project in accordance with US sanctions.”
Up until the past two weeks, that type of money flow barely registered as politically problematic. But activists said that it shouldn’t have taken the invasion of Ukraine — as horrifying a specter as it is — to have set off alarms about K Street’s ties to the Russian Federation and Russian financial institutions. Jeff Hauser, founder of the left-leaning watchdog group Revolving Door Project, questioned whether the current crisis would finally be a wake-up call for lobbying firms as they decide whether to get into business with problematic companies and political leaders. He suspects not.
“The Democrats who continue to work with these lobbyists who’ve been working with Russia since 2016 underscores the fact that the Democratic Party itself — the victim of 2016 — didn’t take it seriously enough,” Hauser said. “People are not being treated as persona non grata for working closely with Putin-aligned business interests. If you were working with a Putin-associated oligarch in 2017 to 2022 that meant that you were fundamentally not that offended by Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election.”
The work that K Street did for Russian business was, on occasion, directly tied to shielding companies from the type of financial punishment they’re now experiencing. Sweeney spoke with former White House chiefs of staff Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows, among others, regarding U.S. sanctions against Russia on behalf of Vnesheconombank, or VEB, according to a filing with the Department of Justice. The Treasury Department said the institution and another sanctioned entity, Promsvyazbank Public Joint Stock Company, “play specific roles to prop up Russia’s defense capability and its economy.”
In a letter to Peter Harrell, senior director for international economics and competitiveness at the National Security Council, just last month, a lobbyist at the firm Mercury defended Sovcombank in an effort to fight “any unwarranted imposition of sanctions,” saying that the bank only has five individual account holders — all business owners and entrepreneurs — with total deposits above $10 million. Vitter, referring to himself as a “Former Senator,” followed up with an unnamed recipient, according to a disclosure from Mercury, in which he argued against Sovcombank being named in sanctions legislation before Congress.
The contract with Mercury did not begin until Jan. 26 of this year, right as the White House was warning of a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine and as lawmakers were considering preemptive sanctions legislation. Under the contract, the firm would receive $90,000 per month and a $5,000 one-time compliance fee. The administration still sanctioned Sovcombank and its subsidiaries.
Sidley Austin, which has reported $2,120,867.41 in payments from VTB Bank since 2016, said it provided “a weekly policy memorandum explaining developments in U.S.-Russia relations” for the bank, which is majority-owned by the government of the Russian Federation. A contract dated April 2015 noted that the firm would provide counsel and lobbying before Congress and the administration “regarding the imposition of sanctions by the US government on Russian-affiliated banks.” The Treasury has called VTB a “critical artery of Russia’s financial system.” Its lobbyists included former Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and George W. Madison, former Treasury Department general counsel under President Barack Obama.
A number of firms ended their work with Russian entities far before the recent sanctions were announced. Sweeney formally terminated his relationship with Vnesheconombank in 2020. The firm Squire Patton Boggs was paid $1.5 million between 2014 and 2017 to work on behalf of Gazprombank. The firm reported lobbying around “Banking laws and regulations including applicable sanctions.” Though Squire Patton Boggs has not reported activity on behalf of the institution since 2017, the relationship is not formally terminated, according to public disclosures. A spokesperson for the firm declined to comment.
But the decision to work on behalf of these clients in the first place is now being questioned, as the rest of the political system reassesses the recent history of U.S.-Russian relations. Daniel Vajdich, president of Yorktown Solutions, a firm which represents Ukraine’s state-owned energy industry, called work on behalf of Russian state interests or oligarchs “nothing short of treasonous.”
“Can you accept that by taking on this thing you’re also doing something that is immoral? And some people can,” said Adrian Karatnycky, senior adviser to KARV Communications, a New York-based firm that represents the Ukrainian oil and gas industry (KARV at one point also represented a Saudi client). “A lot of people that are considered to be morally upstanding citizens do — when cash comes — kind of unusual things.”
Vice President Kamala Harris marches on the Edmund Pettus Bridge after speaking in Selma, Ala., on Sunday. (photo: Brynn Anderson/AP)
Under a blazing blue sky, Harris linked arms with rank-and-file activists from the civil rights movement and led thousands across the bridge where, on March 7, 1965, white state troopers attacked Black voting rights marchers attempting to cross. The images of violence at the Edmund Pettus Bridge — originally named for a Confederate general — shocked the nation and helped galvanize support for passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Harris called the site hallowed ground on which people fought for the "most fundamental right of America citizenship: the right to vote."
"Today, we stand on this bridge at a different time," Harris said in a speech before the gathered crowd. "We again, however, find ourselves caught in between. Between injustice and justice. Between disappointment and determination. Still in a fight to form a more perfect union. And nowhere is that more clear than when it comes to the ongoing fight to secure the freedom to vote."
The attack on marchers who were advocating for civil rights became a defining moment
The nation's first female vice president — as well as the first African American and Indian American in the role — spoke of marchers whose "peaceful protest was met with crushing violence. They were kneeling when the state troopers charged. They were praying when the billy clubs struck."
Among those peaceful demonstrators who police beat and tear-gassed was young activist John Lewis, who went on to become a longtime Georgia congressman.
President Joe Biden on Sunday renewed his call for the passage of voting legislation, saying the groundbreaking 1965 Voting Rights Act "has been weakened not by brute force, but by insidious court decisions."
The proposed legislation is named for Lewis, who died in 2020, and is part of a broader elections package that collapsed in the U.S. Senate in February.
"In Selma, the blood of John Lewis and so many other courageous Americans sanctified a noble struggle. We are determined to honor that legacy by passing legislation to protect the right to vote and uphold the integrity of our elections," Biden said in a statement.
There have been new voting restrictions put in place since 1965
Democrats are unsuccessfully trying to update the landmark law and pass additional measures to make it more convenient for people to vote. A key provision of the law was tossed out by a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Among those gathered Sunday were women who had fled beatings in the 1965 march. Seated near the stage ahead of Harris' speech, they said having Harrison as vice president seemed unimaginable 57 years ago.
"That's why we marched," said Betty Boynton, the daughter-in-law of voting rights activist Amelia Boynton.
"I was at the tail end and all of the sudden I saw these horses. Oh my goodness, and all of the sudden ... I saw smoke. I didn't know what tear gas was. There were beating people" Boynton said.
But Boynton said the anniversary is tempered by fears of the impact of new voting restrictions being enacted.
"And now they are trying to take our voting rights from us. I wouldn't think in 2022 we would have to do all over again what we did in 1965," Boynton said.
Ora Bell Shannon, 90, of Selma, was a young mother during the march and ran from the bridge with her children. Ahead of Bloody Sunday, she and other Black citizens stood in line for days at a time trying to register to vote in the then white-controlled city, facing impossible voter tests and long lines.
"They knew you wouldn't be able to pass the test," Shannon recalled.
A Supreme Court ruling in 2013 opened the door for states to pass more restrictions
The U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 gutted a portion of the 1965 law that required certain states with a history of discrimination in voting, mainly in the South, to get U.S. Justice Department approval before changing the way they hold elections.
The supporters of the end of preclearance said the requirement — while necessary in the 1960s — was was no longer needed. Voting rights activists have warned the end of preclearance is emboldening states to pass a new wave of voting restrictions.
The sweeping legislation called the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act would restore the preclearance requirement and the put nationwide standards for how elections operate — such as making Election Day a national holiday and allowing early voting nationwide — stablish rules for redistricting criteria.
SELMA, Ala. — Vice President Kamala Harris visited Selma, Alabama on Sunday to commemorate a defining moment in the fight for the right to vote, making her trip as congressional efforts to restore the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act have faltered.
Under a blazing blue sky, Harris took the stage at the foot of the bridge where in 1965 white state troopers attacked Black voting rights marchers attempting to cross. Harris called the site hallowed ground on which people fought for the "most fundamental right of America citizenship: the right to vote."
"Today, we stand on this bridge at a different time," Harris said before a cheering crowd of thousands. "We again, however, find ourselves caught in between. Between injustice and justice. Between disappointment and determination. Still in a fight to form a more perfect union. And nowhere is that more clear than when it comes to the ongoing fight to secure the freedom to vote."
The nation's first female vice president — as well as the first African American and Indian American in the role — spoke of marchers whose "peaceful protest was met with crushing violence. They were kneeling when the state troopers charged. They were praying when the billy clubs struck."
On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, state troopers beat and tear-gassed peaceful demonstrators, including young activist John Lewis, who later became a longtime Georgia congressman. The images of violence at the Edmund Pettus Bridge — originally named for a Confederate general — shocked the nation and helped galvanize support for passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Fifty-seven years later, Democrats are unsuccessfully trying to update the landmark law and pass additional measures to make it more convenient for people to vote. A key provision of the law was tossed out by a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
"In a moment of great uncertainty, those marches pressed forward and they crossed," Harris said. "We must do the same. We must lock our arms and march forward. We will not let setbacks stop us. We know that honoring the legacy of those who marched then demands that we continue to push Congress to pass federal voting rights legislation."
President Joe Biden on Sunday renewed his call for the passage of voting legislation.
"The battle for the soul of America has many fronts. The right to vote is the most fundamental," Biden said in a White House statement.
In Selma, a crowd gathered hours before Harris was scheduled to speak. Rank-and-file activists of the civil rights movement, including women who fled the beatings of Bloody Sunday, were seated near the stage. The milestone of Harris becoming the nation's first Black female vice president seemed unimaginable in 1965, they said.
"That's why we marched," Betty Boynton, the daughter-in-law of voting rights activist Amelia Boynton, said.
"I was at the tail end and all of the sudden I saw these horses. Oh my goodness, and all of the sudden ... I saw smoke. I didn't know what tear gas was. There were beating people" Boynton said.
But Boynton said Sunday's anniversary is tempered by fears of the impact of new voting restrictions being enacted.
"And now they are trying to take our voting rights from us. I wouldn't think in 2022 we would have to do all over again what we did in 1965," Boynton said.
Ora Bell Shannon, 90, of Selma, was a young mother during the march and ran from the bridge with her children. Ahead of Bloody Sunday, she and other Black citizens stood in line for days at a time trying to register to vote in the then white-controlled city, facing impossible voter tests and long lines.
"They knew you wouldn't be able to pass the test," Shannon recalled.
Biden said the strength of the groundbreaking 1965 Voting Rights Act "has been weakened not by brute force, but by insidious court decisions."
The legislation, named for Lewis, who died in 2020, is part of a broader elections package that collapsed in the U.S. Senate in February.
"In Selma, the blood of John Lewis and so many other courageous Americans sanctified a noble struggle. We are determined to honor that legacy by passing legislation to protect the right to vote and uphold the integrity of our elections, including the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act," Biden said in a statement.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 gutted a portion of the 1965 law that required certain states with a history of discrimination in voting, mainly in the South, to get U.S. Justice Department approval before changing the way they hold elections.
The supporters of the end of preclearance said the requirement — while necessary in the 1960s — was was no longer needed. Voting rights activists have warned the end of preclearance is emboldening states to pass a new wave of voting restrictions.
The sweeping legislation called the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act would restore the preclearance requirement and the put nationwide standards for how elections operate — such as making Election Day a national holiday and allowing early voting nationwide — stablish rules for redistricting criteria.
Duwamish Tribal Services Executive Director Jolene Haas holds up her hands, a traditional gesture of gratitude, on the banks of the Duwamish River in Seattle on Sept. 21, 2019. (photo: Thomson Reuters Foundation/Gregory Scruggs/Getty Images)
"This is the first place where the white people would have come around and seen native people," says Workman as he gazed across the water recently.
Workman traces his lineage all the way back to Chief Seattle, the Native leader known for welcoming the first white people to these shores more than 150 years ago. Workman sometimes questions what his grandpa of many generations ago was thinking. Chief Seattle signed a treaty with these colonizers in 1855 called the Treaty of Point Elliott. The terms of the treaty granted benefits to the signatories in a nation-to-nation contract.
Workman is an elder in the Duwamish tribe, which he says comprises about 600 people. The Duwamish have been fighting a legal battle for decades with the federal government make good on treaty. They're asking for federal recognition.
Federally-recognized tribes can be eligible for benefits including land, health care, revenue streams from casinos, and education. The Duwamish say that these resources would be game changers for them.
"I could have gone to school to be a teacher," says Desiree Fagan, a Duwamish tribal member. Fagan attended a technical school after high school; as a young, single mother, she says didn't have resources for a four-year degree. But she's always wondered how things might have gone differently if she had more access to college financial aid through tribal enrollment.
The struggle persists with the next generation as well, she says. Her eldest son is in his first year of college. Fagan says he did receive one private scholarship for $2,500. "But 2,500 dollars versus fully paid tuition with federally-recognized tribes, that's a huge difference."
Fagan's family trace their lineage back through her great grandma.
Proven lineage or unfulfilled treaties are not enough to get federal recognition
But proven lineage or unfulfilled treaties are not alone enough to meet the federal government's requirements for federal recognition. "Where the problem sits is that they [the criteria] don't account for historical reality," says Josh Reid, a historian of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington.
Reid says the longer tribes go unrecognized, the more elusive recognition becomes. That's because in order to earn recognition today, the U.S. wants tribes to show long-standing records of things like land or internal government. "That can be really challenging when you are burned out of your homeland or your lands are just simply taken," Reid says.
That's exactly what the Duwamish argue happened to them after colonization.
"The BIA and the Department of the Interior have consistently been hostile to the recognition of the tribe," says Bart Freedman. An attorney with the firm K…L Gates, Freedman has been working for the tribe for over a decade on their legal battle.
Freedman wears a T-shirt under his suit coat that says, "I Stand with the Duwamish." The cause has been taken up recently by social justice warriors across the city. Much of this is galvanized through a project called Real Rent. It's an effort to facilitate people to voluntarily pay reparations to the tribe directly.
Rosie Wilson-Briggs helped to start Real Rent in 2016. She says there is no need to wait for the federal government to take action when people can take up the issue themselves. "Oh, you live and work here now in Seattle currently?" says Wilson-Briggs. "You should be giving money to the Duwamish."
Wilson-Briggs says the project has taken on a life of its own since they started it a few years ago. More than 20,000 people are now giving monthly.
The Duwamish say Real Rent has helped them keep the lights on in their organization's longhouse, which serves as a community gathering space and place for visitors to learn about the Tribe. "It's been a godsend," Workman says.
In the years since Real Rent started, the Tribe's federally reported annual income has gone from just over $100,000 to more than $1 million.
Still, this money is nowhere near the benefit some federally recognized tribes receive. The recently passed infrastructure bill alone provides more than $13 billion for tribal communities.
Attorney Bart Freedman is hopeful the Duwamish have reached a turning point through legal action they've taken with the federal government. He says federal recognition is still very possible. The recent public support the Duwamish have received has also helped elevate this conversation across the city and with leaders at all levels of government.
The Tribe says the fight for federal recognition is about far more than money. Fundamentally, it's about preserving their identity and laying a claim to the land of their ancestors. Ken Workman says he has a deep connection to this land. "This is what it means to be Duwamish," says Workman of the bay where he grew up with his brother. "That you're attached to this place. Imprinted on this beach." Workman says it's long past time for the federal government to acknowledge that fact as well.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs did not respond to interview requests for this story.
Neighboring tribes object to Duwamish federal recognition
Not everyone in the Native community agrees with the Duwamish interpretation of history. "It's a box to check that says I did my good deed for Indian people," says Donny Stevenson, vice-chairman of the Muckleshoot Tribal Council in Auburn, Washington. "The problem is it's based on a falsehood."
The Muckleshoot Indian Tribe has long enjoyed federal recognition. About 4,000 of its members live on the Tribe's reservation southeast of Seattle. The tribe and a number of others in the area argue the Duwamish don't have adequate historical evidence for federal recognition — and arguing as much is offensive to tribes like theirs.
While Duwamish members acknowledge the lack of solidarity from other tribes hurts, they say it's not surprising. "The continued hostility between tribes is just a natural thing," Workman says.
Native people, he says, were fighting with each other long before white people showed up.
A soldier in front of a Russian tank. (photo: Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)
In the days before Russia’s all-out invasion, white Zs started showing up on Russian military hardware. Now they’re everywhere.
Now, the “Z” has become akin to a new “swastika” or symbol of hatred and is showing up everywhere supporters of Russia’s uninvited invasion of Ukraine can be found.
Kamil Galeev, a Galina Starovoitova Fellow at Woodrow Wilson Center, has been curating examples of the creepy character’s use on Twitter. “‘Z’ is a letter that Russian Military are putting on their vehicles departing to Ukraine. Some interpret ‘Z’ as ‘Za pobedy’ (for victory). Others - as ‘Zapad’ (West). Anyway, this symbol invented just a few days ago became a symbol of new Russian ideology and national identity,” he tweeted before the invasion. Now Galeev believes the symbol means Putin has taken a page out of the world’s worst tyrants, including Benito Mussolini. “To put it simply, it’s going full fascist,” he tweeted. “Authorities launched a propaganda campaign to gain popular support for their invasion of Ukraine and they’re getting lots of it.”
Indeed, the symbol is likely not directly tied to Mussolini’s fasces symbol that also sported a “Z” any more than it is a reference to the 2013 Brad Pitt film World War Z, which premiered at the Moscow film festival that year—though it could be argued that Russian troops are not so different from the zombie invasion the film is based on.
But it certainly is gaining popular appeal. Over the weekend Russian gymnast Ivan Kuliak was seen wearing a white “Z” on his leotard as he stood next to Ukraine’s Kovtun Illia, who had just won the gold in the Gymnastics World Cup event in Doha, Qatar.
Severely ill Russian children at a cancer center in the city of Kazan were reportedly made to line up in the “Z” formation for a photograph that has been widely distributed in social media. The badges of dead Ukrainian soldiers have also been photographed lined up in the “Z” formation, and the letter has shown up on flags, on trucks, and in convoys of supposed supporters of Putin’s war.
There is even a video of Russian spy Marina Butina, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to conspiracy to act as a foreign agent, drawing one on the lapel of her jacket.
It is difficult to say if the letter, which may have been first used to simply identify Russian military hardware to distinguish them from Ukrainian machines, has any other hidden meaning. The letter “Z” does not exist in Cyrillic Russian script, but it has now become the most prominent symbol of Russia’s senseless war.
Forensic technicians excavate a field on a plot of land referred to as a cartel "extermination site" where burned human remains are buried, on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022. (photo: Marco Ugarte/AP)
How many disappeared in this cartel “extermination site” on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, miles from the U.S. border? After six months of work, forensic technicians still don’t dare offer an estimate. In a single room, the compacted, burnt human remains and debris were nearly 2 feet deep.
Uncounted bone fragments were spread across 75,000 square feet of desert scrubland. Twisted wires, apparently used to tie the victims, lie scattered amid the scrub.
Each day, technicians place what they find -- bones, buttons, earrings, scraps of clothing -- in paper bags labeled with their contents: “Zone E, Point 53, Quadrant I. Bone fragments exposed to fire.”
They are sent off to the forensic lab in the state capital Ciudad Victoria, where boxes of paper bags wait their turn along with others. They will wait a long time; there are not enough resources and too many fragments, too many missing, too many dead.
At the Nuevo Laredo site -- to which The Associated Press was given access this month -- the insufficiency of investigations into Mexico’s nearly 100,000 disappearances is painfully evident. There are 52,000 unidentified people in morgues and cemeteries, not counting places like this one, where the charred remains are measured only by weight.
And people continue to disappear. And more remains are found.
“We take care of one case and 10 more arrive,” said Oswaldo Salinas, head of the Tamaulipas state attorney general’s identification team.
Meanwhile there is no progress in bringing the guilty to justice. According to recent data from Mexico’s federal auditor, of more than 1,600 investigations into disappearances by authorities or cartels opened by the attorney general’s office, none made it to the courts in 2020.
Still, the work goes on at Nuevo Laredo. If nothing else, there is the hope of helping even one family find closure, though that can take years.
That’s why a forensic technician smiled amid the devastation on a recent day: She had found an unburnt tooth, a treasure that might offer DNA to make an identification possible.
When Jorge Macías, head of the Tamaulipas state search commission, and his team first came to the Nuevo Laredo site, they had to clear brush and pick up human remains over the final 100 yards just to reach the house without destroying evidence. They found a barrel tossed in a trough, shovels and an axe with traces of blood on it. Gunfire echoed in the distance.
Nearly six months later, there are still more than 30,000 square feet of property to inspect and catalog.
The house has been cleared, but four blackened spaces used for cremation remain. In what was the bathroom, it took the technicians three weeks to carefully excavate the compacted mass of human remains, concrete and melted tires, said Salinas, who leads work at the site. Grease streaks the walls.
Macías found the Nuevo Laredo house last August when he was looking for more than 70 people who had disappeared in the first half of the year along a stretch of highway connecting Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo, the busiest trade crossing with the United States.
The area was known as kilometer 26, a point on the highway and the invisible entrance to the kingdom of the Northeast cartel, a splinter of the Zetas. There are small shops with food and coffee. Men sell stolen gasoline and drugs. Strangers are filmed with cell phones. The power poles lining the highway farther north have been blasted with large-caliber weapons.
Most who disappeared here were truck drivers, cabbies, but also at least one family and various U.S. citizens. About a dozen have been found alive.
Last July, Karla Quintana, head of the National Search Commission, said the disappearances appeared to be related to a dispute between the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which was trying to enter the area, and the Northeast cartel, which wanted to keep them out. It’s not clear if the victims were smugglers of drugs or people, if some were abducted mistakenly or if the goal was simply to generate terror.
The phenomenon of Mexico’s disappearances exploded in 2006 when the government declared war on the drug cartels. For years, the government looked the other way as violence increased and families of the missing were forced to become detectives.
It wasn’t until 2018 -- the end of the last administration -- that a law passed, laying the legal foundations for the government to establish the National Search Commission. There followed local commissions in every state; protocols that separated searches from investigations, and a temporary and independent body of national and international technical experts supported by the U.N. to help clear the backlog of unidentified remains.
The official total of the missing stands at 98,356. Even without the civil wars or military dictatorships that afflicted other Latin American countries, Mexico’s disappeared are exceeded in the region only by war-torn Colombia. Unlike other countries, Mexico’s challenge still has no end: authorities and families search for people who disappeared in the 1960s and those who went missing today.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government was the first to recognize the extent of the problem, to talk of “extermination sites” and to mount effective searches.
But he also promised in 2019 that authorities would have all the resources they needed. The national commission, which was supposed to have 352 employees this year, still has just 89. And Macías’ state commission has 22 positions budgeted, but has only filled a dozen slots. There the issue isn’t money; the difficulty is finding applicants who pass background checks.
Disappearances are considered the perfect crime because without a body, there’s no crime. And the cartels are expert at ensuring that there is no body.
“If a criminal group has total control of an area they do what we call ‘kitchens,’ because they feel comfortable” burning bodies openly, Macías said. “In areas that are not theirs and where the other side could easily see the smoke, they dig graves.”
In 2009, at the other end of the border, a member of the Tijuana cartel confessed to having “cooked” some 300 victims in caustic lye. Eight years later, a report from a public university investigation center showed that what officially had been a jail in the border city of Piedras Negras, was actually a Zetas command center and crematorium.
Perhaps the largest such site was yet another border setting near the mouth of the Rio Grande called “the dungeon,” in territory controlled by the Gulf cartel. The memory still stirs Macías. The first time he went he saw “pelvis, skulls, femurs, everything just lying there and I said to myself, ‘It can’t be.’”
Authorities have recovered more than 1,100 pounds of bones at the site so far.
According to the Tamaulipas state forensic service, some 15 “extermination sites” have been found. There are also burial sites: In 2010, graves containing 191 bodies were found along one of the main migratory routes through Tamaulipas to the border. In 2014, 43 students disappeared in the southern state of Guerrero. Only three have been identified from pieces of burnt bones.
Most of the extermination sites have been found by family members who follow up leads themselves with or without the support and protection of authorities. Such search groups exist in nearly every state.
For the families, the discoveries inspire both hope and pain.
“It brings together a lot of emotions,” said a woman who has been searching for her husband since 2014 and two brothers who disappeared later. Like thousands of relatives across Mexico, she has made the search for her loved ones her life. “It makes you happy to find (a site), but at the moment you see things the way they are, you nosedive.”
The woman, who requested anonymity because of safety concerns, was present for the discovery of two sites last year. When she entered the Nuevo Laredo location with Macías, she could only cry.
A few months earlier, she had found the site in central Tamaulipas where she believes her loved ones are. That day, accompanied by the state search commission and escorted by the National Guard, they entered the brush in search of a drug camp.
“I’m not well psychologically after that,” she said as she showed photos of the deep graves where burnt remains were buried, some wrapped in barbed wire. They recovered around a thousand teeth, she said.
On a recent day in Nuevo Laredo, gloved hands sifted through the dirt, separating out bits of bone: a piece of a jaw, a skull fragment, a vertebra.
The work is hard. The forensic technicians clear brush and then dig. Some days the temperature hovers around freezing, others it’s above 100 degrees. They wear head-to-toe white protective suits and are constantly guarded.
Security is a concern, and so authorities have separated the search function from the investigations -- the cartels appear less concerned with those just looking for bones, though anything they find could eventually become evidence in a prosecution. Each day before dusk, they are escorted to a safe house and don’t leave except to return the next day to the site.
When cartel violence exploded in Tamaulipas in 2010, the capital’s morgue had space for six bodies. In a single massacre that year, a cartel killed 72 migrants. In those days, the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights denounced serious negligence in Tamaulipas’s forensic work.
Pedro Sosa, director of the state’s forensic services, said that their way of working changed radically in 2018 with the establishment of the identification team. But it’s not enough. “A single forensic anthropologist in the whole state is not compatible with all of this work.”
It can take four months for the Nuevo Laredo remains to be cleaned, processed and arrive to the genetic lab. It can take longer if something urgent emerges like in January of last year, when nearly 20 people -- mostly migrants -- were incinerated in an attack near the border.
Even if they manage to extract DNA, identification isn’t assured because the profile will only automatically be crossed with a state database.
It could be years before the profile is added to one of the national databases. In 2020, the federal auditor said that that system had only 7,600 registered disappeared and 6,500 registered dead.
Though the federal law calls for a system in which various databases can interact, that doesn’t exist, said Marlene Herbig, of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Each state or federal database of fingerprints or genetic profiles is like an island, despite calls for bridges to connect them.
No one can estimate how much money is needed or how many years it could take to see significant results in Mexico’s efforts to locate and identify the disappeared.
Herbig offered a clue: A similar effort mounted on the island of Cyprus took 10 years to identify 200 disappeared in the conflict between Greece and Turkey during the latter half of the last century. And there are many thousands more missing in Mexico than there were in Cyprus.
“This issue is a monster,” Macías said.
The scientists say Amazon dieback has been having 'profound implications at a global scale.' (photo: Morley Read/Alamy)
Analysis of satellite observations show forest is losing stability with ‘profound’ global implications
Computer models have previously indicated a mass dieback of the Amazon is possible but the new analysis is based on real-world satellite observations over the past three decades.
Novel statistical analysis shows that more than 75% of the untouched forest has lost stability since the early 2000s, meaning it takes longer to recover after droughts and wildfires.
The greatest loss of stability is in areas closer to farms, roads and urban areas and in regions that are becoming drier, suggesting that forest destruction and global heating are the cause. These factors “may already have pushed the Amazon close to a critical threshold of rainforest dieback”, the scientists conclude.
The study does not enable a prediction of when the tipping point could be reached. But the researchers warned that by the time the triggering of the tipping point could be detected, it would be too late to stop it.
Once triggered, the rainforest would transform to grassland over a few decades at most, releasing huge amounts of carbon and accelerating global heating further.
Tipping points on a planetary scale are among the greatest fears of climate scientists, as they are irreversible on human timescales. In 2021, the same statistical technique revealed warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream and other key Atlantic currents, with “an almost complete loss of stability over the last century”.
A shutdown of these currents would have catastrophic consequences around the world, disrupting monsoon rains and endangering Antarctic ice sheets.
Another recent study showed that a significant part of the Greenland ice sheet is on the brink of a tipping point, which would lead to 7 metres of sea level rise over time.
“Many researchers have theorised that an Amazon tipping point could be reached, but our study provides vital empirical evidence that we are approaching that threshold,” said Prof Niklas Boers, at the Technical University of Munich in Germany.
“Seeing such a resilience loss in observations is worrying. The Amazon rainforest stores huge amounts of carbon that could be released in the case of even partial dieback.”
The scientists said Amazon dieback had “profound implications at a global scale”. Boers added: “The Amazon is definitely one of the fastest of these tipping elements in the climate system.”
The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, examined satellite data on the amount of vegetation in more than 6,000 grid cells across the untouched Amazon from 1991 to 2016.
They found that in the past 20 years areas impacted by droughts or fires took significantly longer to recover than before. This is a key sign of increasing instability because it shows the processes of restoration are getting weaker.
Drier areas of the forest lost more stability than wetter ones. “This is alarming, as the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] models project an overall drying of the Amazon region in response to global warming,” Boers said.
Areas closer to human destruction of the forest also became more unstable. Trees are crucial in producing rain, so felling them to clear land for beef and soy production creates a vicious circle of drier conditions and more tree loss.
Another study in 2021, based on data from hundreds of small plane flights, showed the Amazon now emits more carbon dioxide than it absorbs, mostly because of fires.
But Boers said the data indicated that the tipping point has not yet been crossed: “So there’s hope.” Prof Tim Lenton at Exeter University in the UK, a co-author of the study, said: “It supports efforts to reverse deforestation and degradation of the Amazon to give it back some resilience against ongoing climate change.”
Chris Jones, at the Met Office Hadley Centre in the UK, and not part of the study team, said: “This research adds compelling evidence that climate change is a risk now, and that these severe and irreversible impacts could become a reality. We have a narrow window of opportunity to take urgent action.
“The worrying conclusion [of the study] fits with other recent research on increased tree mortality, increased fires, and reduced regional carbon sinks. The IPCC report out last week assessed that risks of large scale singular events, such as Amazon dieback, are now closer than ever.”
Bernardo Flores, at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, said: “The study shows that although the forest may seem fine, with its normal structure and biodiversity, internal processes are already changing, silently, reducing the system’s capacity to persist in the long run. The approach used is interesting because it reveals early warning signals of these changes.”
Flores’s research revealed that savannas were expanding at the heart of the Amazon because of wildfires.
The government of Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has been harshly criticised for encouraging more deforestation, which soared by 22% in the year to November, the highest level since 2006.
Boers said: “It’s really complicated to say what’s going to be first: reaching a tipping point by [loss of stability] of the natural vegetation system, or just the bulldozers reaching the forest.”
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