01 July 22
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The maternal death figures are even more severe for Black people
CU Boulder researchers focused on how maternal mortality is impacted by abortion because data shows staying pregnant carries a higher risk of death than having an abortion, according to the university.
The research is particularly timely following last week’s reversal of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court, which triggered abortion bans in multiple states. In Colorado, the procedure remains legal as legislators this year enshrined the right to abortion access in state law.
Some Congressional Republicans already are discussing a bill to ban abortion nationwide after 15 weeks.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 0.41 deaths per 100,000 legal abortions from 2013 to 2018. In 2020, 861 women in the U.S. were identified as dying of maternal causes, compared with 754 in 2019, according to CDC data. The maternal death rate was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020, the research said.
“The prior estimates relied on abortion rates, births and maternal mortality rates as of five years ago,” said Amanda Stevenson, CU Boulder assistant professor sociology and lead author of the research. “Since then, abortions have increased, births have decreased and maternal mortality rates have worsened.”
Stevenson and CU Boulder coauthors Leslie Root and Jane Menken estimate that in the first year following a nationwide abortion ban, the number of maternal deaths would increase 13%, from 861 to 969. In following years, the researchers estimated maternal deaths would increase by 210 to more than 1,070 — a 24% increase.
The maternal death figures are even more severe for the Black population, whose expected increase in maternal deaths if abortion were to be outlawed in every state rose from 18% to 39%.
“There is a robust network of Black-led research demonstrating how we can better support Black pregnant people who are at 2-to-3 times greater risk of dying because they’re pregnant compared to other groups,” Stevenson said.
Some states that already have high maternal mortality and moderate to high abortion rates, such as Florida and Georgia, were estimated to see maternal deaths increase by 29%, the researchers found.
Conversely, in states that already have made accessing abortion difficult, such as Nebraska, Missouri and West Virginia, researches expected to see little to no change.
The researchers pointed out 26 states where abortion bans following the Supreme Court’s Roe reversal are expected: Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Oklahoma, Arizona, Ohio, Texas, Montana, Tennessee, Louisiana, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Indiana, Alabama, Iowa, South Carolina, Arkansas, Nebraska, Kentucky, Idaho, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming, South Dakota, Missouri.
They estimated if no abortions were allowed in these states in 2020, there would have been 64 more maternal deaths.
To counteract these deaths, the researchers said helping people in states where abortion is illegal access reproductive care, investing in maternal health and addressing the inequalities that generate “astronomically high levels of maternal mortality” can help support pregnant people in the U.S.
The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed countries, according to data provided by the Commonwealth Fund. In 2018, there were 17 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the U.S. — a ratio more than double that of most other high-income countries, the Commonwealth Fund data showed. In the Netherlands, Norway and New Zealand, the maternal mortality ratio was three per 100,000 or fewer, according to the Commonwealth data.
“Our estimates highlight how we can prevent the post-Dobbs bans on abortion from increasing the already tragically high numbers of deaths due to pregnancy in the U.S.,” Stevenson said. “Pregnancy shouldn’t kill people — in fact, in other rich countries it very rarely does.”
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the mall presented "no threat to the Russian army" and had "no strategic value." (photo: Efrem Lukatsky)
Video of the attack before daybreak showed the charred ruins of buildings in the small town of Serhiivka, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Odesa. The Ukrainian president’s office said warplanes fired three missiles that struck an apartment building and a campsite.
Ukrainian authorities interpreted the attack as payback for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Snake Island a day earlier, though Moscow portrayed their departure as a “goodwill gesture” to help unblock exports of grain.
Russian forces took control of the island in the opening days of the war in the apparent hope of using it as a staging ground for an assault on Odesa, Ukraine’s biggest port and the headquarters of its navy.
“The occupiers cannot win on the battlefield, so they resort to vile killing of civilians,” said Ivan Bakanov, head of Ukraine’s security service, the SBU. “After the enemy was dislodged from Snake Island, he decided to respond with the cynical shelling of civilian targets.”
Large numbers of civilians were killed in Russian bombardments earlier in the war, including at a hospital, a theater used as a shelter, and a train station. Until this week, mass casualties involving residents appeared to become less frequent as Moscow concentrated on capturing eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Russian missiles struck the Kyiv region last weekend after weeks of relative calm around the capital, and an airstrike Monday on a shopping mall in the central city of Kremenchuk killed at least 19 people.
Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy expressed outrage over Friday’s attack.
“These missiles, Kh-22, were designed to destroy aircraft carriers and other large warships, and the Russian army used them against an ordinary nine-story building with ordinary civilian people,” he said.
Twenty-one people were killed, including children, said Serhii Bratchuk, a spokesman for the regional administration. Thirty-eight others, including six children and a pregnant woman, were reported hospitalized. Most of the victims were in the apartment building, Ukrainian emergency officials said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reiterated that Moscow is not targeting residential areas.
Oleh Zhdanov, an independent Ukrainian military analyst, said the Russian pullback from Snake Island bears “colossal psychological significance” for Ukraine.
“Snake Island is key for controlling the Black Sea and could help cover the Russian attack if the Kremlin opted for an amphibious landing operation in Odesa or elsewhere in the region,” he said. “Now those plans are pushed back.”
Ukraine’s military claimed a barrage of its artillery and missiles forced the Russians to flee the island in two small speedboats. The exact number of troops withdrawn was not disclosed.
Early in the war, the island became a symbol of Ukrainian defiance. When a Russian warship demanded that its defenders surrender, they supposedly replied: “Go (expletive) yourself.”
Zelenskyy said that although the pullout did not guarantee the Black Sea region’s safety, it would “significantly limit” Russian activities there.
In eastern Ukraine, Russian forces kept up their push to encircle the city of Lysychansk, the last stronghold of resistance in Luhansk, one of two provinces that make up the Donbas.
“The shelling of the city is very intensive,” Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai said. “The occupiers are destroying one house after another with heavy artillery and other weapons. Residents of Lysychansk are hiding in basements almost round the clock.”
Haidai said the Russians were fighting for control of an oil refinery on the city’s edge. But Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said Russian and separatist forces had taken control of the refinery as well as a mine and a gelatin factory.
Ukraine’s presidential office said Russian strikes in the past 24 hours also killed civilians in eastern Ukraine — four in the northeastern Kharkiv region and another four in Donetsk province.
People protest in favor of abortion in front of the Colorado State Capitol in Denver, Monday, June 27, 2022. (photo: Jintak Han/The Denver Post)
The maternal death figures are even more severe for Black people
CU Boulder researchers focused on how maternal mortality is impacted by abortion because data shows staying pregnant carries a higher risk of death than having an abortion, according to the university.
The research is particularly timely following last week’s reversal of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court, which triggered abortion bans in multiple states. In Colorado, the procedure remains legal as legislators this year enshrined the right to abortion access in state law.
Some Congressional Republicans already are discussing a bill to ban abortion nationwide after 15 weeks.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 0.41 deaths per 100,000 legal abortions from 2013 to 2018. In 2020, 861 women in the U.S. were identified as dying of maternal causes, compared with 754 in 2019, according to CDC data. The maternal death rate was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020, the research said.
“The prior estimates relied on abortion rates, births and maternal mortality rates as of five years ago,” said Amanda Stevenson, CU Boulder assistant professor sociology and lead author of the research. “Since then, abortions have increased, births have decreased and maternal mortality rates have worsened.”
Stevenson and CU Boulder coauthors Leslie Root and Jane Menken estimate that in the first year following a nationwide abortion ban, the number of maternal deaths would increase 13%, from 861 to 969. In following years, the researchers estimated maternal deaths would increase by 210 to more than 1,070 — a 24% increase.
The maternal death figures are even more severe for the Black population, whose expected increase in maternal deaths if abortion were to be outlawed in every state rose from 18% to 39%.
“There is a robust network of Black-led research demonstrating how we can better support Black pregnant people who are at 2-to-3 times greater risk of dying because they’re pregnant compared to other groups,” Stevenson said.
Some states that already have high maternal mortality and moderate to high abortion rates, such as Florida and Georgia, were estimated to see maternal deaths increase by 29%, the researchers found.
Conversely, in states that already have made accessing abortion difficult, such as Nebraska, Missouri and West Virginia, researches expected to see little to no change.
The researchers pointed out 26 states where abortion bans following the Supreme Court’s Roe reversal are expected: Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Oklahoma, Arizona, Ohio, Texas, Montana, Tennessee, Louisiana, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Indiana, Alabama, Iowa, South Carolina, Arkansas, Nebraska, Kentucky, Idaho, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming, South Dakota, Missouri.
They estimated if no abortions were allowed in these states in 2020, there would have been 64 more maternal deaths.
To counteract these deaths, the researchers said helping people in states where abortion is illegal access reproductive care, investing in maternal health and addressing the inequalities that generate “astronomically high levels of maternal mortality” can help support pregnant people in the U.S.
The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed countries, according to data provided by the Commonwealth Fund. In 2018, there were 17 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the U.S. — a ratio more than double that of most other high-income countries, the Commonwealth Fund data showed. In the Netherlands, Norway and New Zealand, the maternal mortality ratio was three per 100,000 or fewer, according to the Commonwealth data.
“Our estimates highlight how we can prevent the post-Dobbs bans on abortion from increasing the already tragically high numbers of deaths due to pregnancy in the U.S.,” Stevenson said. “Pregnancy shouldn’t kill people — in fact, in other rich countries it very rarely does.”
Thousands of people gathered in New York City and across the country to show their support for abortion rights nearly two weeks after the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. (photo: Anna Watts/The New York Times)
And this is only the beginning.
All of Democrats and the left’s worst fears about the makeup of the Court have come true in the last six years: Republicans blocking Merrick Garland from even having a Senate hearing; Donald Trump’s win in the 2016 election and the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch instead; the retirement of Anthony Kennedy and Brett Kavanaugh as his replacement; and finally, the extremely inopportune death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg just weeks before the 2020 election, and her rapid replacement with Amy Coney Barrett.
And over the past several weeks, as the Court has handed down one opinion after another, the consequences of the new right-wing supermajority have become very, very real: The death of the national right to have an abortion, the effective end to the executive branch’s ability to fight climate change, the hamstringing of state efforts to regulate guns, an erosion of the separation of church and state and tribal sovereignty, Miranda rights turning into Miranda privileges, and more.
And if the cases the Court has already chosen to take up next year are any indication, it’s not getting better anytime soon. But first, let’s assess the damage.
Abortion
Almost from the time the Roe v. Wade decision was handed down in 1973, religious conservatives have slowly but steadily ground away at the protections afforded by the decision, by increasingly limiting access to abortions. They’d been successful at dramatically weakening the right—in cases like Planned Parenthood v. Casey—but on Friday, the 6-3 conservative majority killed the whole thing.
Writing for the 6-3 majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in an opinion effectively identical to the draft that leaked in May, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the Constitution “does not confer a right to abortion,” and that “the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
The decision threw abortion rights in America into pure chaos. Several states had pre-existing bans they argued were now back in effect, while more than a dozen had banned abortion in recent years in preparation for the day Roe was overturned. Numerous states, including Texas and Louisiana, have seen bans blocked temporarily by courts.
The Dobbs decision could also portend the Court trampling over more rights. In a solo concurrence to the decision, Justice Clarence Thomas also fired a warning shot at other cases decided on the basis of “substantive due process” found in the 14th Amendment, as Roe once was: Griswold v. Connecticut, which guaranteed the right to use contraceptives without state interference; Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned homophobic anti-sodomy laws; and Obergefell v. Hodges, which made same-sex marriage legal nationwide.
Ken Paxton, the hard-right Texas attorney general, has already said he is “certainly willing and able” to defend the state’s sodomy ban, which was never formally removed from Texas law.
Oh, and about that “people’s elected representatives” thing: The Court announced Thursday that it’s taking up a case from North Carolina in its next term that would make state legislatures the sole authority on federal election laws, superseding the authority of state courts (and thus state constitutions). Such a ruling would harken back to Jim Crow, and would mean that pretty soon, it might not even matter how hard you vote.
Gun control
While the Supreme Court believes that “the people’s elected representatives” are the only body to be trusted with women’s health choices, the same apparently does not apply to guns.
In the 6-3 New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen decision, Thomas wrote that New York’s concealed carry law, which has existed for more than a century, violates both the Second and 14th Amendments by “preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms in public.”
The decision came down on the same day that the Senate passed a bipartisan gun safety bill, the first time it had done so in decades—in response to mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas and, yes, Buffalo, New York. Now-retired Justice Stephen Breyer noted as much in his dissent: “Since the start of this year (2022), there have been 277 reported mass shootings—an average of more than one per day. Gun violence has now surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents.”
In response to the ruling, the Democratic-controlled New York state legislature, backed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, is preparing a ban on carrying concealed weapons in government buildings, playgrounds, public transit, and more.
Climate change
In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, handed down on the final day of the Court’s term, the majority struck down the Obama-era EPA’s Clean Power Plan, ruling that the only way the EPA can regulate greenhouse gases is with the explicit approval of Congress—effectively arguing that Congress is responsible for both making laws and directing exactly how they should be enforced.
“Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the opinion, joined by the five other conservatives.
“But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme…a decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body.”
On a practical level, little will change immediately — the Clean Power Plan was stayed by the Supreme Court and ultimately never even implemented, as Motherboard noted when the decision came down Thursday. But this means that to specifically target climate change, Congress would have to specifically pass a plan to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, something it’s never done–and probably never will do, so long as the filibuster exists and coal shill Sen. Joe Manchin is key to the Democratic Senate majority.
In her dissent, Justice Elana Kagan noted the absurdity of the decision. “The subject matter of the regulation here makes the Court’s intervention all the more troubling,” Kagan wrote, joined by liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Breyer. “Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change.”
“Yet the Court today prevents congressionally authorized agency action to curb power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”
Separation of church and state
The Court decided two cases in the last few weeks that continue the top its crusade of tearing down the very clear Constitutional barriers between the state and religion in the name of religious freedom.
In Carson v. Makin, the conservative majority struck down a decades-old Maine law prohibiting public funding for “sectarian” schools. In Maine, the most rural state in the country, some communities have no public secondary schools, and so they were able to choose between sending their children to private, “nonsectarian” schools or a public school in another community.
But in a 6-3 decision, the Court said that this law was a violation of the First Amendment. (The schools in question, by the way, are openly discriminatory towards LGBTQ people.)
And in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, a school prayer case handed down earlier this week, the Court found that the government could not prohibit a high school assistant football coach in Washington from publicly praying at the 50 yard line.
The coach, Joseph Kennedy, was placed on paid leave after several warnings and attempts from the school to find a solution respecting his religious freedom as well as the district from a lawsuit. Ultimately, his contract was not renewed. The school’s principal later testified in court that a parent complained that their son “felt compelled to participate” because if he didn’t, “he felt he wouldn’t get to play as much.”
The Supreme Court couldn’t even agree on the facts of this case. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the coach “lost his job as a high school football coach because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks,” while in her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that “misconstrues the facts.”
“The court ignores this history [of the case],” Sotomayor wrote. “The court also ignores the severe disruption to school events caused by Kennedy’s conduct.”
Rights of criminal defendants
If you’ve ever been arrested or even watched a cop show, you likely know what Miranda rights are. Miranda v. Arizona, a case decided in 1966, required police to inform arrestees of their rights to counsel and to not self-incriminate (“You have a right to remain silent,” etc).
The ruling in Vega v. Tekoh, handed down last week, does not completely eliminate Miranda rights. But one of the only ways that a defendant who’s been deprived of this right can enforce it is by suing a police officer, and in Vega v. Tekoh, the Court—led by Alito—found that “a violation of Miranda is not itself a violation of the Fifth Amendment,” and that “we see no justification for expanding Miranda to confer a right to sue”—effectively restricting the potential consequences for a cop who violates a defendant’s civil rights.
“Sometimes, as a result [of a statement obtained without informing the defendant of their rights], a defendant will be wrongly convicted and spend years in prison,” Kagan wrote in her dissent. “He may succeed, on appeal or in habeas, in getting the conviction reversed. But then, what remedy does he have for all the harm he has suffered?”
It gets worse. In another case decided in May, Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, a 6-3 majority led by Thomas ruled that federal courts can’t order evidentiary hearings on whether a convicted defendant had ineffective counsel if those claims of ineffective counsel weren’t first raised during the state criminal proceedings.
This effectively means that the Supreme Court believes at least some form of wrongful convictions are OK now. At the very least, if you’re wrongfully convicted because your lawyer is bad, you better figure that out while your case is in the state courts. In her dissent, Sotomayor called the decision “perverse” and “illogical,” and said the decision “makes illusory the protections of the Sixth Amendment.”
“Many, if not most, individuals in this position will have no recourse and no opportunity for relief. The responsibility for this devastating outcome lies not with Congress, but with this Court.”
Tribal sovereignty
In 2020’s McGirt v. Oklahoma, the Supreme Court ruled that the state government could not prosecute a member of a federally-recognized tribe for crimes that occurred within the jurisdiction of that tribe’s reservation. In the process, the Court—led by Gorsuch, an ally of liberals on tribal rights cases—ruled that roughly half of Oklahoma is tribal land, including much of the city of Tulsa.
But Barrett’s elevation to the Supreme Court has tilted the balance of the Court, even on tribal cases, back to the conservatives. And this week, in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, the Supreme Court narrowed the McGirt decision by holding that the state can, in fact, prosecute non-Native Americans for crimes allegedly committed on tribal land.
In his dissent, joined by the three liberals, Gorsuch blasted the decision, which was authored by Kavanaugh. “Now, at the bidding of Oklahoma’s executive branch, this Court…defies Congress’s statutes requiring tribal consent, offers its own consent in place of the Tribe’s, and allows Oklahoma to intrude on a feature of tribal sovereignty recognized since the founding,” Gorsuch wrote.
“One can only hope the political branches and future courts will do their duty to honor this Nation’s promises even as we have failed today to do our own.”
You've been duped if you believe this is DEMOCRACY!
MAKE SURE YOU DON'T MISS THIS PART:
excerpt:
According to a report from Greenpeace, “Koch Family Foundations have spent $145,555,197 directly financing 90 groups that have attacked climate change science and policy solutions, from 1997-2018.”
A number of the front groups with long ties to Charles Koch filed amicus briefs in the case, pushing for the very outcome that six members of the court dutifully handed them.
The Cato Institute, a nonprofit that was actually secretly owned by Charles Koch, his late brother, David, and a handful of others for decades, told the Supreme Court this in the amicus brief that it filed together with the Mountain States Legal Foundation....
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The Supreme Court’s EPA Decision Is One More Win for Charles Koch’s Dystopian America
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 1, 2022 ~
Imagine a country that allows a private fossil fuels conglomerate (or its billionaire boss, Charles Koch, the 17th richest person in the world according to Forbes) to get away with the following:
Meet secretly with big political donors twice a year to plot a coordinated strategy to put their chosen people in public office;
Meet at his private club with a sitting Supreme Court justice who will then rule on key legislation that benefits his interests;
Fund an organization that then sluices money to the wife of the Supreme Court Justice;
Run a highly sophisticated voter registration database, data mining and get-out-the-vote operation called i360, in order to pack Congress with people who will pursue an antiregulatory agenda;
Install dozens of its lawyers and operatives into the highest offices of the federal government;
Run a sprawling, opaque trading operation that could potentially be raising the prices of the fossil fuel products it sells via the futures market;
Continue to operate major factories in Russia, ignoring sanctions and a murderous regime waging an unprovoked war on Ukraine, until a pressure campaign forced it to say it will look for an exit strategy;
Fund a sprawling network of taxpayer-subsidized front groups to deny climate change and foment hate;
Provide funding to groups involved in sending a mob to attack the seat of government of its own home country on January 6;
Fund groups that use dark money and propaganda to put lifetime justices on the highest court to pass legislation friendly to the fossil fuels conglomerate.
If this sounds like some kind of dystopian novel, welcome to the United States of Koch, circa 2022. Even the comedians at Saturday Night Live get it. SNL Weekend Update co-anchor, Colin Jost, offered this take in May:
“Is it me or does every story sound like the opening voiceover in a Mad Max movie? The year is 2022. A virus rages across the planet. Digital money has collapsed. Infants have nothing to eat. Women are forced to breed. Men are ready to die for gasoline….”
Now add this to the list, the taxpayer-funded federal agency, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), can no longer protect the environment and the planet from greenhouse gases, thanks to Koch front groups that maneuvered a case to the U.S. Supreme Court, even though it wasn’t ripe for review, and got precisely the decision they wanted yesterday in a 6-3 decision handed down by justices installed by groups backed with Koch money.
The case, West Virginia vs EPA, et al, was brought by two red states and coal companies.
Legal scholars believe the decision may have the broader impact of limiting the authority of other federal agencies to take regulatory action without specific congressional approval. The decision will certainly open the floodgates to more of these kinds of challenges, which is certainly a secondary win for Koch and his minions.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote the dissenting opinion on behalf of herself, Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Stephen Breyer, who retired yesterday. Kagan wrote:
“Today, the Court strips the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time,’ noting that “The Earth is now warmer than at any time ‘in the history of modern civilization,’ with the six warmest years on record all occurring in the last decade.”
Kagan directly challenged the majority’s view that the EPA did not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases, writing: “Congress charged EPA with addressing those potentially catastrophic harms, including through regulation of fossil-fuel-fired power plants. Section 111 of the Clean Air Act directs EPA to regulate stationary sources of any substance that ‘causes, or contributes significantly to, air pollution’ and that ‘may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.’ 42 U. S. C. §7411(b)(1)(A). Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases fit that description…”
Kagan also explained how the Supreme Court has been doing the bidding of the fossil fuels industry going back to the Obama administration, writing: “This Court has obstructed EPA’s effort from the beginning. Right after the Obama administration issued the Clean Power Plan, the Court stayed its implementation. That action was unprecedented: Never before had the Court stayed a regulation then under review in the lower courts….”
According to a report from Greenpeace, “Koch Family Foundations have spent $145,555,197 directly financing 90 groups that have attacked climate change science and policy solutions, from 1997-2018.”
A number of the front groups with long ties to Charles Koch filed amicus briefs in the case, pushing for the very outcome that six members of the court dutifully handed them.
The Cato Institute, a nonprofit that was actually secretly owned by Charles Koch, his late brother, David, and a handful of others for decades, told the Supreme Court this in the amicus brief that it filed together with the Mountain States Legal Foundation:
“This case is illustrative of an alarming trend whereby presidents turn to implied authority, typically in long-extant statutes, to achieve what Congress fails to do.”
That sentence is particularly nauseating because Koch packed the Trump administration with his own operatives. A Koch front group, Freedom Partners, quickly provided the Trump administration with a list of regulations it wanted gutted – like U.S. participation in the Paris Climate accord (which Trump revoked on June 1, 2017 after barely four months in office) and numerous EPA rules. Freedom Partners threatened those lawmakers who didn’t get on board, writing that “Freedom Partners will hold lawmakers who oppose regulatory relief accountable for their positions.”
Why did Koch have it out for the EPA? Koch Industries has been serially charged, including a criminal conviction, with dangerously polluting the environment. On January 13, 2000, the Justice Department and the EPA announced the largest civil fine ever imposed against Koch Industries to resolve claims related to its “more than 300 oil spills from its pipelines and oil facilities in six states.” The company agreed to pay a $30 million civil penalty and spend $5 million on environmental projects. Daniel Schulman documented Koch Industries’ history of environmental abuses in his 2014 book, Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.
So in the dystopian world of Koch, it’s just fine for Presidents to do the bidding of the fossil fuels industry but it’s not okay for a President or Congress to attempt to enforce the laws that regulate a dangerous, polluting industry.
Another front group widely associated with Koch is Americans for Prosperity (AFP). Koch previously attempted to distance itself from the group until a video emerged of David Koch addressing an AFP gathering and telling the audience that his brother, Charles, and he provided the funds to start AFP.
AFP also filed an amicus in the EPA case, producing this particularly vomitous passage:
“In this country, all government power must flow from its proper source: We the People. Our system of government relies on the consent of the governed, memorialized in the Constitution.”
Another Koch-linked group, the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), also filed an amicus brief in the case. The NCLA is where Jeffrey Clark went to work after leaving the Trump administration. (Clark is the environmental lawyer who worked at the Justice Department under Trump and was involved in plotting the coup attempt on January 6.) NCLA hired Clark despite the likelihood that Clark would be facing a long criminal investigation and potential conviction. NCLA named Clark the Chief of Litigation and Director of Strategy. (According to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Clark now has a new job.)
The NCLA has received millions of dollars from Charles Koch related entities. The Charles G. Koch Foundation gave NCLA $1 million in each of the years 2017, 2018 and 2019. The Charles Koch Institute gave NCLA $1 million in 2020. Donors Trust, a dark money nonprofit with a multitude of ties to Charles Koch, gave NCLA more than $2 million in total from 2018 through 2020. The information comes from publicly-available 990 tax filings.
The NCLA had the audacity to write the following in its amicus brief:
“When enacting the Constitution, the people gave to Congress, and to Congress alone, the power to legislate, most centrally the power to make binding rules—those limiting their liberty. The location of this power in Congress was essential because of the fundamental principles of consent and the separation of powers. But it is not only these underlying principles that should guide this Court in barring any relocation of legislative power. Both the drafting debates and the Constitution’s very text make clear that legislative power cannot be shared or otherwise transferred.”
Let that settle in for a moment. NCLA hires a man who was engaged in an effort to overthrow the government as its Chief of Litigation and it’s lecturing the Supreme Court justices on what the framers of the Constitution had in mind.
Brian Rosner, Senior Litigation Counsel for the NCLA released this Orwellian statement yesterday on news of the Supreme Court decision going its way:
“At heart, this decision is a victory for democracy: the major decisions affecting people’s lives are to be made by the people’s representatives in Congress, not by unelected bureaucrats. Just in time for the anniversary of our nation’s freedom, the Court has gifted the American people a renewal of their democracy.”
A “renewal of their democracy,” got that, from the same Koch network that has been subverting democracy for more than four decades.
Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, released the following statement yesterday on the Supreme Court’s decision:
“Let’s be clear about what is at the heart of the matter – the Supreme Court has sided with corporate power and polluters over the people and the planet. Stripping the Environmental Protection Agency of its ability to regulate under the Clean Air Act hobbles the agency’s ability to protect Americans’ health. This decision will not just impact the EPA. The reasoning in this case will set us back decades in the fight against climate change and will reverberate throughout our government, making it harder to protect families and communities. This court continues to legislate from the bench in increasingly dangerous ways, and it’s up to Congress and the President to act as checks on them as the founders intended. I’ll be working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to ensure that today’s decision does not impede our nation’s response to the climate crisis.”
U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers observe Nigerien armed forces during Exercise Flintlock in Niger, March 9, 2017. (photo: U.S. Africa Command)
Exclusive documents and interviews reveal the sweeping scope of classified 127e operations.
While The Intercept and other outlets have previously reported on the Pentagon’s use of the secretive 127e authority in multiple African countries, a new document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act offers the first official confirmation that at least 14 127e programs were also active in the greater Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region as recently as 2020. In total, between 2017 and 2020, U.S. commandos conducted at least 23 separate 127e programs across the world.
Separately, Joseph Votel, a retired four-star Army general who headed both Special Operations Command and Central Command, which oversees U.S. military efforts in the Middle East, confirmed the existence of previously unrevealed 127e “counterterrorism” efforts in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.
Another former senior defense official, who requested anonymity to discuss a classified program, confirmed that an earlier version of the 127e program had also been in place in Iraq. A 127e program in Tunisia, code-named Obsidian Tower, which has never been acknowledged by the Pentagon or previously identified as a use of the 127e authority, resulted in combat by U.S. forces alongside local surrogates in 2017, according to another set of documents obtained by The Intercept. A third document, a secret memo that was redacted and declassified for release to The Intercept, sheds light on hallmarks of the program, including use of the authority to provide access to areas of the world otherwise inaccessible even to the most elite U.S. troops.
The documents and interviews provide the most detailed picture yet of an obscure funding authority that allows American commandos to conduct counterterrorism operations “by, with, and through” foreign and irregular partner forces around the world. Basic information about these missions — where they are conducted, their frequency and targets, and the foreign forces the U.S. relies on to carry them out — are unknown even to most members of relevant congressional committees and key State Department personnel.
Through 127e, the U.S. arms, trains, and provides intelligence to foreign forces. But unlike traditional foreign assistance programs, which are primarily intended to build local capacity, 127e partners are then dispatched on U.S.-directed missions, targeting U.S. enemies to achieve U.S. aims. “The foreign participants in a 127-echo program are filling gaps that we don’t have enough Americans to fill,” a former senior defense official involved with the program told The Intercept. “If someone were to call a 127-echo program a proxy operation, it would be hard to argue with them.”
Retired generals with intimate knowledge of the 127e program — known in military parlance as “127-echo” — say that it is extremely effective in targeting militant groups while reducing risk to U.S. forces. But experts told The Intercept that use of the little-known authority raises grave accountability and oversight concerns and potentially violates the U.S. Constitution.
One of the documents obtained by The Intercept puts the cost of 127e operations between 2017 and 2020 at $310 million, a fraction of U.S. military spending over that time period but a significant increase from the $25 million budget allocated to the program when it was first authorized, under a different name, in 2005.
While critics contend that, due to a lack of oversight, 127e programs risk involving the United States in human rights abuses and entangling the U.S. in foreign conflicts unbeknownst to Congress and the American people, former commanders say the 127e authority is crucial to combating terrorism.
“I think this is an invaluable authority,” Votel told The Intercept. “It provides the ability to pursue U.S. counterterrorism objectives with local forces that can be tailored to the unique circumstances of the specific area of operations.”
The 127e authority first faced significant scrutiny after four U.S. soldiers were killed by Islamic State militants during a 2017 ambush in Niger and several high-ranking senators claimed to know little about U.S. operations there. Previous reporting, by The Intercept and others, has documented 127e efforts in multiple African countries, including a partnership with a notoriously abusive unit of the Cameroonian military that continued long after its members were connected to mass atrocities.
For more than a year, the White House has failed to provide The Intercept with substantive comment about operations by U.S. commandos outside conventional war zones and specifically failed to address the use of 127e programs. Asked for a general comment about the utility of the 127e authority and its role in the administration’s counterterrorism strategy, Patrick Evans, a National Security Council spokesperson, replied: “These all fall under the Department of Defense.” The Pentagon and Special Operations Command refuse to comment on the 127e authority. “We do not provide information about 127e programs because they are classified,” SOCOM spokesperson Ken McGraw told The Intercept.
Critics of 127e warn that in addition to the risk of unanticipated military escalation and the potential costs of engaging in up to a dozen conflicts around the world, some operations may amount to an unlawful use of force. Because most members of Congress — including those directly responsible for overseeing foreign affairs — have no input and little visibility into where and how the programs are run, 127e-related hostilities can lack the congressional authorization required by the U.S. Constitution, argued Katherine Ebright, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice.
“There’s reason to suspect the Department of Defense has used 127e partners to engage in combat beyond the scope of any authorization for use of military force or permissible self-defense,” Ebright told The Intercept, noting substantial confusion at the Pentagon and in Congress over a stipulation that 127e programs support only authorized ongoing military operations. “That kind of unauthorized use of force, even through partners rather than U.S. soldiers themselves, would contravene constitutional principles.”
Global Proxy War
The origins of the 127e program can be traced back to the earliest days of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, as commandos and CIA personnel sought to support the Afghan Northern Alliance in its fight against the Taliban. Army Special Operations Command soon realized that it lacked the authority to provide direct payments to its new proxies and was forced to rely on CIA funding. This prompted a broader push by SOCOM to secure the ability to support foreign forces in so-called missions, a military corollary to the CIA’s use of militia surrogates. First known as Section 1208, the authority was also deployed in the early years of the Iraq invasion, according to a former senior defense official. It was ultimately enshrined in U.S. law under U.S.C. Title 10 § 127e.
127e is one of several virtually unknown authorities granted to the Defense Department by Congress over the last two decades that allow U.S. commandos to conduct operations on the fringes of war and with minimal outside oversight. While 127e focuses on “counterterrorism,” other authorities allow elite forces — Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and Marine Raiders among them — to conduct clandestine intelligence and counterintelligence operations or assist foreign forces in irregular warfare, primarily in the context of so-called great power competition. In April, top Special Operations officials unveiled a new “Vision and Strategy” framework that appears to endorse continued reliance on the 127e concept by leveraging “burden sharing partnerships to achieve objectives within an acceptable level of risk.”
Gen. Richard D. Clarke, the current Special Operations commander, testified before Congress in 2019 that 127e programs “directly resulted in the capture or killing of thousands of terrorists, disrupted terrorist networks and activities, and denied terrorists operating space across a wide range of operating environments, at a fraction of the cost of other programs.”
Clarke’s claims cannot be verified. A SOCOM spokesperson told The Intercept that the command does not have figures on those captured or killed during 127e missions. It is also not known how many foreign forces and civilians have been killed in these operations, but a former defense official confirmed to The Intercept that there have been U.S. casualties, even as U.S. troops are traditionally expected to stay behind “last cover and concealment” during a foreign partner’s operations.
The documents obtained by The Intercept tout the importance of the authority, particularly in providing U.S. special operators a way into difficult-to-access areas. According to a memo, one 127e program provided “the only human physical access to areas,” with local partners “focused on finding, fixing, and finishing” enemy forces. Another 127e program targeting Al Qaeda and its affiliates similarly allowed commandos to project “combat power into previously-inaccessible VEO [violent extremist organization] safe havens.”
Some documents obtained via FOIA are so heavily redacted that it is difficult to identify the countries where the programs took place and the forces with which the U.S. partnered. The Intercept previously identified the BIR, or Rapid Intervention Battalion, as the notorious Cameroonian military unit with which the U.S. ran a 127e program. The Intercept has now identified another previously unknown partnership with the G2 Strike Force, or G2SF, an elite special unit of the Lebanese military with which the U.S. partnered to target ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliates in Lebanon.
Votel confirmed that the 127e in Lebanon was code-named Lion Hunter. He also acknowledged previously unknown 127e programs in Syria; Yemen, known as Yukon Hunter; and Egypt, code-named Enigma Hunter, where U.S. Special Operations forces partnered with the Egyptian military to target ISIS militants in the Sinai Peninsula. He said that the chief of the Egyptian military intelligence service provided “strong support” for Enigma Hunter and that American troops did not accompany their local partners into combat there, as is common in other African countries.
The U.S. has a long history of assistance to both the Egyptian and Lebanese militaries, but the use of Egyptian and Lebanese forces as proxies for U.S. counterterrorism missions marked a significant development in those relationships, several experts noted.
Two experts on Lebanese security noted that the G2SF is an elite, secretive unit mostly tasked with intelligence work and that it was not surprising that it was the unit chosen for the 127e program by U.S. Special Operations, with which it already enjoyed a strong relationship. One noted that unlike other elements of the country’s security forces, the unit was “far less politicized.”
The situation is more complex in Egypt, where the military has for decades relied on billions of dollars in U.S. security assistance but resisted U.S. efforts to track how that assistance is used.
While Sinai is subject to a near-total media blackout, human rights groups have documented widespread abuses by the Egyptian military there, including “arbitrary arrests, forced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings, and possibly unlawful air and ground attacks against civilians.”
“There are legitimate issues with the U.S. partnering with some units of the Egyptian military,” said Seth Binder, director of advocacy at the Project on Middle East Democracy. “There has been great documentation, by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, of numerous human rights abuses in the Sinai by the Egyptian military. Are these the same units we’re partnering with to carry out operations? That’s a real concern.”
The Egyptian Embassy in the United States did not respond to a request for comment, but in a joint statement last fall, U.S. and Egyptian officials committed to “discussing best practices in reducing civilian harm in military operations” — a tacit admission that civilian harm remained an issue. Requests for interviews with the embassies of Iraq, Tunisia, and Yemen, as well as Lebanon’s Ministry of Defense, went unanswered.
No Vetting, No Oversight
While the documents obtained by The Intercept offer clues about the scope and contours of the 127e program, much remains unknown to both the public and members of Congress. Relevant reports required by law are classified at a level that prevents most congressional staffers from accessing them. A government official familiar with the program, who requested anonymity to discuss it, estimated that only a handful of people on Congress’s armed services and intelligence committees read such reports. Congressional foreign affairs and relations committees — even though they have primary responsibility for deciding where the U.S. is at war and can use force — do not receive them. And most congressional representatives and staff with clearance to access the reports do not know to ask for them. “It’s true that any member of Congress could read any of these reports, but I mean, they don’t even know they exist,” the government official added. “It was designed to prevent oversight.”
But it is not just Congress that’s largely kept in the dark about the program: Officials at the State Department with the relevant expertise are also often unaware. While 127e requires signoff by the chief of mission in the country where the program is carried out, detailed information is rarely shared by those diplomats with officials in Washington.
The lack of oversight across levels of the U.S. government is in part the result of the extreme secrecy with which defense officials have shielded their authority over the program — and of the scant pushback they have faced. “It’s State not knowing what they don’t know, so they don’t even know to ask. It’s the ambassadors being sort of wowed by these four-star generals who come in and say, ‘If you don’t let us do this, everyone’s going to die,’” the government official said. “DOD views this as a small, tiny program that doesn’t have foreign policy implications, so, ‘Let’s just do it. The less people get in our way, the easier.’”
Sarah Harrison, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group and formerly associate general counsel at the Defense Department’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs, echoed that assessment. “HASC and SASC appear opposed to increasing oversight of 127-echo. They are not inclined to change the statute to strengthen State’s oversight, nor are they adequately sharing documents related to the program with personal [congressional] staff,” she said, using the acronyms of the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee. “This may seem like an arcane, bureaucratic issue, but it really matters for oversight of the 127-echo program and all other programs that are run in secret.”
Those programs include an authority, known as Section 1202, that first appeared in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act and provides “support to foreign forces, irregular forces, groups, or individuals” that are taking part in irregular warfare and are explicitly focused on so-called near-peer competitors. Congress has also authorized the secretary of defense to “expend up to $15,000,000 in any fiscal year for clandestine activities for any purpose the Secretary determines to be proper for preparation of the environment for operations of a confidential nature” under 10 USC § 127f, or “127 foxtrot.” Section 1057 authority similarly allows for intelligence and counterintelligence activities in response to threats of a “confidential, extraordinary, or emergency nature.”
“This has been sort of the story for a lot of these DOD-run programs,” said Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, a grassroots-funded U.S. foreign policy think tank. “The Special Operations community likes autonomy a lot. They don’t like going through bureaucracy, so they always invent authorities, trying to find ways around having their operations delayed for any reason.”
“The problem is this stuff is so normalized,” he added. “There should be more attention paid to these train-and-equip authorities, whether it’s special forces or DOD regular, because it’s really kind of a PR-friendly way to sell endless war.”
An 18th Street Gang member who goes by the name Clavo, which means "nail." He is the leader of an area known as La Fosa (the Graveyard). He says this is where many bodies were dumped during El Salvador's 12-year civil war in the late 1980s, which left 75,000 people dead. (photo: Adam Desidero/ABC News)
A short visit to the auspiciously named San Salvador neighbourhood, ’10 de Octubre’.
I met Alfredo, who works at a barely remunerated job at a San Salvador school, when I spent three months in the country just prior to the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. We bonded over a shared affinity for excessively shabby venues to drink beer and an excessive dislike of the United States – my homeland, where Alfredo had travelled years earlier on someone’s else’s passport but had promptly determined that poverty in El Salvador was preferable to the “American dream”.
Despite my nagging requests for a tour of his intriguingly titled neighbourhood, I would not visit Alfredo at his own home until April of 2022. I returned to El Salvador for one month just in time to experience the newly inaugurated state of emergency – the response by exuberantly totalitarian president and Twitter aficionado Nayib Bukele to the spike in homicides in late March that had followed the breakdown in negotiations between his administration and the Salvadoran gangs.
When Alfredo picked me up from the airport in a borrowed car on April 12, he lamented that drinking at the shabby bars downtown was no longer the same now that stormtrooper-type security forces demanded your identity card every other second and made you lift your shirt to verify you had no gang tattoos.
Just the previous day, a massive security operation had gone down in 10 de Octubre itself, during which, the Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica reported, 22 alleged gang members as well as “mothers of accused gang members” had been arrested. Salvadoran security minister Gustavo Villatoro was quoted as proclaiming the territory a “breeding ground” for gang leaders from the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). A female TikToker had additionally been detained for allegedly diffusing gang propaganda.
The lead photograph in the Prensa Gráfica article features 17 men and five women surrounded by camouflaged figures in balaclavas and face masks. Most of the male detainees are shirtless; the three with conspicuous tattoos have had them conspicuously photoshopped out – an editorial undertaking that Alfredo suspected may have had something to do with Bukele’s new fantastically ambiguous law criminalising the sharing of information about gangs.
The 10 de Octubre operation boosted the number of detained “terrorists” to more than 10,000 in 15 days. By June, when the state of emergency was extended a third time, the number would reach well over 41,000 – with at least 40 detainees having died in state custody.
I resumed pestering Alfredo to let me visit him in 10 de Octubre, where, he said, the small house he shared with his teenage son, former suegra (mother-in-law), and other relatives was continuously on the receiving end of visits by police, who continuously wanted to view everyone’s identity cards – and to know if any gang members had taken up residence in the dwelling since their last visit.
As Alfredo later told me, his reluctance to welcome me to the neighbourhood had to do with his concern that, in the event of another massive security operation, he would then be tagged as a police informant. But welcome me he did one afternoon in late April.
The taxi driver who transported me at breakneck speed down the highway to 10 de Octubre – all the while blasting an inspirational religious tune about the blood of Jesus Christ – helpfully informed me, as he deposited me next to the local football field, that this was where “bad and dangerous” people lived. To be sure, it is always handy to have an appointed domestic bogeyman to detract public attention from the dangers of a government that has spontaneously done away with basic rights and civil liberties.
Alfredo rescued me from Christ’s blood and we walked the short distance to his house, passing bougainvillea bushes, a food stand, and some vans bearing the markings of the friendly neighbourhood US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). As per the INL website, the organisation’s local programmes “build the capacity of the Government of El Salvador to improve its ability to mitigate the influence of gangs, improve citizen security, and combat corruption” – a premise that might be more convincing were it not coming from the government of the country that spawned the entire gang phenomenon in the first place after backing right-wing terror during the Salvadoran civil war of 1980-92.
According to Alfredo, the INL’s manoeuvres in 10 de Octubre had included efforts to teach schoolchildren that the police were a force for good – which, he said, had not stopped all the kids from wanting to play the latter role in every game of “cops and robbers”.
Alfredo’s son was, as usual, at sports practice – although the son’s dedicated athleticism and aspiring football stardom did nothing to assuage the family’s fears that he, too, could be branded as a gang member at any minute and carted off to jail. Long before the state of emergency kicked off, Alfredo told me, a neighbour’s son – whom “we were all sure was going to be the Cristiano Ronaldo of 10 de Octubre” – had been expeditiously charged with a crime and interned for 15 years at the infamous prison known colloquially as Mariona but whose cruel official title is La Esperanza, meaning “hope”.
Inside Alfredo’s cramped and damp house, children were dashing about among decrepit sofas and hammocks, and the ex-suegra was presiding over an assortment of pots on the stove. Alfredo’s ex-wife, the daughter of the ex-suegra and mother of his son, lived as an undocumented worker in the US, and occasionally sent money for whatever technological apparatus or footwear her offspring currently desired.
The ex-suegra’s husband, who had fought in the civil war with the leftist guerrillas against crushing socioeconomic injustice, had been disappeared by the right wing during the conflict. The ex-suegra had survived the 1982 El Calabozo massacre of some 200 people, including children and the elderly, perpetrated by the elite Atlacatl Battalion, which was trained and funded by the US and which also perpetrated the notorious 1981 El Mozote massacre of an estimated 1,000 civilians.
As misfortune would have it, one of Alfredo’s own cousins had gone on to join this very battalion at the age of 17, near the end of the war, only to die some eight years later in a traffic accident. Even after the signing of the peace accords, Alfredo once told me, his cousin never went anywhere without a hand grenade, and he “saw ‘terrorists’ everywhere – even in his soup”.
Now, one “terrorist” enemy has been replaced with another, and socioeconomic injustice in El Salvador is as brutal as ever – which is perhaps one reason Bukele so fervently promotes historical amnesia. After all, if folks were to think about it too much, they might notice a pattern of right-wing terrorisation by the state under the guise of fighting terrorism.
The ex-suegra had little time to chat, as she was about to commence her daily intake of Turkish soap operas dubbed into Spanish – which had apparently become so all-consuming that, Alfredo said, he would often return home to find her engaged in shouting matches with neighbours over the latest transgression of one or another soap opera character. At any rate, he reckoned, it was a useful escape from the drama of existence under the world’s “coolest dictator”, as Bukele has described himself.
Alfredo had no desire to remain at the house that afternoon, anyway, as he had already spent more than enough time there during the pandemic on account of the “coolest” dictatorial lockdown – which had entailed things like Salvadoran security forces shooting people for going outside. Having promised to give me the grand tour of 10 de Octubre, Alfredo led me outdoors and a few hundred metres up the road in the direction of misty, shack-covered hills. We reached a roundabout, where upon Alfredo announced that the tour had ended and that it was time to turn back.
Of course, there was much more to 10 de Octubre than those few hundred metres. But El Salvador is saturated with invisible gang-related boundaries, and, for Salvadorans, crossing a given street can be a matter of life and death. If Alfredo hadn’t gone beyond that roundabout in more than 10 years, he was obviously not going to do it with some white gringa in tow.
To one side of the roundabout was a rather lackadaisical evangelical gathering accompanied by incongruously deafening music from a loudspeaker; to another side was a properly shabby establishment with a large refrigerator that appeared to contain beer. Alfredo consented to an end-of-tour drink, and we made our way over to the middle-aged woman on duty, who hastily declared that the beer truck had not made its scheduled delivery and that we could be on our way – even as various beer bottles adorned the counter.
On our return trip down the road, we found a stand selling beer, flip-flops, hair clips and other necessities. The proprietor of this stall allowed us to sit on the curb and consume our drinks, and remarked that he had not gone beyond the roundabout in more than 10 years, either, despite the presence of a lookout point with a spectacular view on the nearby hill. A thunderstorm was brewing, and lightning flashed through the Salvadoran sky. Alfredo and I ordered more beer.
Following my departure from El Salvador, Alfredo learned that the woman from the roundabout beer establishment was in fact the mother of the proprietor – who had herself been arrested under the state of emergency, Alfredo said, for being the girlfriend of a presumed gang member. Her mother was thus rightly terrified of being deemed guilty of “terrorism” by association at any moment – particularly given that Salvadoran police are being forced to fulfil daily arrest quotas.
Now, three months after my visit to the neighbourhood, the Bukele government is still refusing to provide pertinent information to families of detained persons in 10 de Octubre and across El Salvador – and by pertinent information I mean even details like the location of their detention. The nation’s president incessantly takes to Twitter to scorn the very concept of “human rights”, and Salvadorans continue to die accordingly – such as 21-year-old musician Josué Sánchez Rivera, who was jailed in El Salvador’s Izalco prison in April and emerged a few weeks later as a battered corpse.
In the microcosm of Salvadoran dystopia in 10 de Octubre, then, it seems maybe the earthquake was the least of the problems.
Sanjay Gandhi national park in Mumbai, India, is a protected area surrounded by urbanized landscape that roughly 50 leopards call home. (photo: Steve Winter)
The two megacities are the only ones in the world where large carnivores thrive as the urban areas have encroached on natural habitats
These metropolises are the world’s only megacities of 10 million-plus where large felines – mountain lions in one, leopards in the other – thrive by breeding, hunting and maintaining territory within urban boundaries.
Long-term studies in both cities have examined how the big cats prowl through their urban jungles, and how people can best live alongside them – lessons that may be applicable to more places in coming decades.
“In the future, there’s going to be more cities like this, as urban areas further encroach on natural habitats,” said biologist Audra Huffmeyer, who studies mountain lions at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If we want to keep these large carnivores around on the planet, we have to learn to live with them.”
Freeways and fragmented habitat
Twenty years ago, scientists in Los Angeles placed a tracking collar on their first cat, a large male mountain lion dubbed P1, that defended a wide swath of the Santa Monica Mountains, a coastal range that lies within and adjacent to the city.
“P1 was as big as they get in southern California, about 150 pounds,” said Seth Riley, a National Park Service ecologist who was part of the effort. “These dominant males are the ones that breed – they won’t tolerate other adult males in their territory.”
With GPS tracking and camera traps, the scientists followed the rise and fall of P1’s dynasty for seven years, through multiple mates and litters of kittens. “2009 was the last time we knew anything about P1,” said Riley. “There must have been a fight. We found his collar, blood on a rock. And never saw him again. He was reasonably old.”
Since then, Riley has helped collar roughly 100 mountain lions in Los Angeles, building a vast database of lion behavior that’s contributed to understanding how much territory the cats need, what they eat (mostly deer), how often they cross paths with people and what may imperil their future.
As with medieval European kings, the biggest threat turned out to be inbreeding. Living in small territories separated by highways has caused some males to mate with daughters and granddaughters, who weren’t able to naturally disperse farther away. That’s led to genetic problems such as fertility issues and kinked tails.
“Based on genetic analysis, we know that P1 mated with P6, his daughter – that was the first case we documented of this very close inbreeding,” said Riley.
Leopards in urban landscape
In Mumbai, one of the world’s most densely populated cities, the leopards are packed in, too: about 50 have adapted to a space ideally suited for 20. And yet the nocturnal cats also keep mostly out of sight.
“Because these animals are so secretive, you don’t know much about them. You can’t just observe them,” said Vidya Athreya, director of Wildlife Conservation Society in India and part of a research team that recently fitted five leopards with tracking collars.
The leopards’ core range is centered around Sanjay Gandhi national park, a protected area boxed on three sides by an urbanized landscape, including a neighborhood that’s home to 100,000 people and nearly a dozen leopards.
Researchers tackled specific questions from park managers, such as how the cats cross busy roads near the park.
To get the answer, they collared a big male dubbed Maharaja. They found that it walked mostly at night and traversed over 60km (37 miles) in about a week, from the park in Mumbai to another nearby. The leopard crossed a busy state highway, using the same spot to pass, on three occasions. It also crossed a railway track.
The path chosen by Maharaja is near a new highway and a freight corridor under construction. Researchers said that knowing the big cats’ highway crossing habits can help policymakers make informed decisions about where to build animal underpasses to reduce accidents.
Living alongside big cats
In Los Angeles, long-term mountain lion research showing the harm of fragmented habitat helped fuel a successful campaign to build a wildlife crossing bridge over US Highway 101, one of the city’s busiest freeways. Construction began on 22 April.
When it’s finished in three years, the bridge will be covered in native plants and include special sound walls to minimize light and noise disturbances for nocturnal animals. It will connect the Santa Monica Mountains and Simi Hills, enlarging the dating pool for resident mountain lions.
Learning to live alongside cats is not only a matter of infrastructure decisions, but also human choices and education.
When Athreya first started advocating for coexistence with Mumbai’s leopards, she was met with skepticism and pushback from other biologists and policymakers. They thought it would be impossible for big cats to live alongside people without significant friction, or worse.
“The dominant narrative was about conflict,” she said. But she helped push the conversation to be about “negotiations, improving the situation for both wildlife and people”.
That is not to say living alongside a big predator is without perils. In Mumbai, Purvi Lote saw her first leopard when she was five, on the porch of a relative’s home. Terrified, she ran back inside to her mother. But now the nine-year-old says she isn’t as afraid of the big cats.
Like other children, she doesn’t step outdoors alone after dark. Children and even adults travel in groups at night, while blaring music from their telephones to ensure that leopards aren’t surprised. But the most fundamental rule, according to the youngster: “When you see a leopard, don’t bother it.”
Avoiding deadly conflicts
Leopards in Mumbai adapted to mainly hunt feral dogs that frequent garbage dumps outside the forest and mostly attacked people when cornered or attacked. But in 2010, 20 people in Mumbai died in leopard attacks, said Jagannath Kamble, an official at Mumbai’s protected forest.
The turning point was the realization that the understaffed forest department couldn’t just keep reacting to individual attacks by capturing and transporting leopards to forests since they returned. Instead, it decided to focus on trying to get people to coexist with the predators.
Officials roped in volunteers, non-governmental groups and the media for a public education program in 2011. Since then, fatalities have dropped steadily and no one has been killed in an attack since 2017.
The last known victim was Muttu Veli’s four-year-old daughter Darshini. Veli, an office worker who came to Mumbai in 1996, said Darshini was playing outside their home in a slum at the edge of the forest and she just didn’t return home. Eventually, her mauled body was recovered.
“My daughter is gone. She won’t come back,” he said.
In Los Angeles, there have been no human deaths attributed to mountain lions, but one non-fatal attack on a child occurred in 2021.
Both cities have learned that trying to capture, kill or relocate the cats isn’t the answer.
“Relocation and killing makes conflict worse,” said Beth Pratt, California regional director at National Wildlife Federation. “It’s better to have a stable population, than one where hierarchies and territories are disrupted.”
Avoidance is the safest strategy, she said. “These big cats are shy, they tend to avoid human contact as much as they can. They’re really extreme introverts of the animal kingdom.”
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