12 October 22
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A multigenerational network of activists is getting abortion pills across the Mexican border to Americans.
Anna wasn’t a fainthearted woman—someone who had recently approached her for pills noted her “cottage-core vibes” and steely calm—but she wasn’t reckless, either. She and other women defying abortion bans had turned to a model developed by Verónica Cruz, a prominent Mexican activist. Until last year, abortion was considered a crime in most of Mexico, the second-biggest Catholic country in the world, and women there had become adept at providing safe abortions in secrecy. (Given the legal exposure, pseudonyms have been used for Anna and other American women who let me into their underground networks.)
By the time the pregnant woman for whom Anna was waiting walked up, the trailhead was quiet enough to make the chirping of birds seem jarring. As Anna pulled a plastic bag of pills from her pocket and settled across from the pregnant woman at a picnic table, she registered the fear on the woman’s face. Her distress, as Anna understood it, was less about a breach of Texas law than about the possibility that her husband, who was violent, might find out what she was doing. Hands shaking, the woman told Anna that she was already raising three children and had been trying to save enough money to remove them from a dangerous home. The prospect of having another child, she said, was like “getting a death sentence.” She couldn’t vanish from her household for a day without explanation, travel to a state where abortion is legal, and pay seven hundred dollars to a doctor for a prescription. Anna’s pills, which were free, were her best option. Taking the baggie and some instructions on how to take the medication, the woman thanked Anna and fled the park, hoping that her husband would never realize she’d been gone.
The town of San Miguel de Allende, in central Mexico, is known as the birthplace of legendary independence leaders. It is just as famous for its charm: cobblestone streets, Baroque churches, bright houses, and lively cantinas once frequented by Mexican muralists and Beat poets. Some Americans visit for a week and decide to stay. Among those expats is Liz, a retired Southern woman in her seventies. On the morning of June 24th, as she was making coffee in a kitchen where photographs of her great-grandchildren covered the fridge, she heard on the radio that the constitutional right to abortion in the United States had ended. She maneuvered her walker to a nearby chair and sank down. She felt as she had as a child, in a house by the sea where she’d once lived, when a hurricane she’d been dreading made landfall. It was awful, yes, but knowing what was coming had given her a chance to gather her courage and make a plan.
Five years earlier, Liz had met Verónica Cruz, who runs a nonprofit called Las Libres—the Free Ones—out of the city of Guanajuato, some fifty miles west of San Miguel. At the time, Cruz was defying Mexican law by helping women—mostly poor women—abort at home. In part because activists like Cruz successfully reduced the stigma of abortion, the Supreme Court of Mexico decriminalized it in September, 2021. That same month, Texas moved in the opposite direction: a state law known as S.B. 8 banned nearly all abortions past the sixth week. Since then, Cruz had widened her remit, supplying free abortion pills to undocumented women in Texas.
Liz figured that, with Roe overturned and states from Arkansas to South Dakota implementing abortion restrictions, the demand for Mexican abortion pills would soar. If she lacked Cruz’s decades of experience working on the cusp between the lawful and the criminal, she was neither too old nor too diminished to take a risk. She picked up the phone to call Cruz and then some friends, to find out which of them would be game to join an underground network.
Locals called expats like Liz “the Old Hippies,” in English. In early July, weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision negated Roe, six of them joined Liz on her terrace for hibiscus tea and a talk with Cruz. Most of the Americans were over sixty and recalled what life was like before the 1973 Roe ruling. One tactic Liz remembered for ending an unwanted pregnancy was to alternate between a tub of ice-cold water and a tub as scalding as you could bear it. Those who tried this method suffered, then usually had a baby anyway. Liz had a baby, too, as a teen-ager. Although she had cheered when the Roe decision was announced, knowing how many lives it would change, it had come too late to change hers.
Cruz, the fifty-one-year-old daughter of farmers, has appraising dark eyes and a booming voice, and is direct by nature. She asked the Old Hippies if they would raise money and buy pills in Mexico that would be distributed across the border. Cruz paused to let an Old Hippie translate for those whose Spanish was weak.
Medication abortion in the United States is typically a two-day process that involves taking mifepristone, which blocks progesterone, and misoprostol, which causes uterine contractions. The Food and Drug Administration approves the use of this two-pill regimen under a doctor’s supervision up until the tenth week of pregnancy. A prescription, which can be obtained in states where abortion is legal, is required. In Mexico, Cruz explained, misoprostol is sold over the counter. Mifepristone still requires a prescription, but Cruz had found suppliers, and when she ran short she relied solely on misoprostol, which can cause an abortion on its own.
Immediately after Dobbs, Cruz said, her existing crew of volunteers had slipped enough medication across the border to help two thousand American women have abortions. If the Old Hippies agreed to aid distributors in abortion-ban states, Cruz told them, Las Libres could help many more women. Each cell in the supply chain would know little about the other cells—safer for everyone that way.
Several Old Hippies wondered aloud about consequences, as the legal terrain was decidedly unsettled. In Louisiana, anyone who “knowingly performs” a medication abortion is subject to a five-year prison sentence and a fifty-thousand-dollar fine. In Oklahoma, it’s a ten-year sentence and a hundred thousand dollar fine. More such laws were likely to come, although no criminal convictions had yet been reported. If charged, an Old Hippie told Cruz, they might end up at the mercy of a district attorney in, say, Mississippi, facing years of jail time. But Liz was an optimist—“You have to be,” she always said—and by meeting’s end everyone in the room had signed on to her plan.
To avoid what Liz called the “gringo price,” she recruited her housekeeper to call more than two dozen pharmacies in San Miguel and find out what they had in stock, at what cost. Then the Old Hippies tried to buy all the pills they could. One pharmacist agreed to sell more than a hundred boxes but cancelled the order at the last minute without explanation. A second pharmacist demanded a prescription for misoprostol, something not required by Mexican law; an Old Hippie had to persuade her doctor to prescribe it for an ulcer, a condition that she didn’t really have but for which the drug was also used. It was a relief when a third pharmacist agreed to sell more than a hundred and fifty boxes with no questions asked.
Many of the pickups were handled by Diana, another Old Hippie, who at pharmacies gravitated to younger female clerks—less judgmental about her purchases, perhaps, than older men. On the day that she unpacked the last of the hundred and fifty boxes on her kitchen counter, she burst into tears. Every box contained more than enough pills for two abortions, and she saw in the stockpile before her hundreds of younger women who would be helped. “All of a sudden,” Diana said, “I realized what we’re all doing.” Those boxes just needed to get to the States, but that part of the relay would be left to others, as Diana, Liz, and other Old Hippies planned their next buy.
Six weeks later, sitting at a long table in a house on a hill in Guanajuato, Cruz counselled a woman in Georgia by phone while responding to a text from Arkansas: “I would like help with a medication.” A window behind Cruz overlooked a lemon grove, and around the table were colleagues—some social workers, some lawyers, most of them young—fielding questions from pregnant women on both sides of the border. The atmosphere was convivial, and taped on one wall was a phonetic cheat sheet for those with limited English: “Jai, dis is Las Libres. Can ay jelp iu?”
Cruz’s work had long been funded by American nonprofits, and after Dobbs the phone number of her organization was passed around by informal networks of activists. Cruz said that she was now getting fifty requests a day from the U.S. for abortion pills. Some women created fake profiles on Instagram to get in touch with her, or sent messages on WhatsApp or Signal, or called her in the middle of the night.
The evasiveness and fear that she sensed when communicating with Americans reminded her of how Mexican women spoke of abortion when she was growing up. Her mother worked on a farm, harvesting corn, and the only way she and her girlfriends alluded to abortion and miscarriage was with the expression malas camas—“bad beds.” Such euphemisms were necessary in part because women in the state of Guanajuato could face up to three years in prison for ending a pregnancy, and so could the medical personnel who assisted them. Before last year’s Mexican Supreme Court decision, abortion, in all cases except for rape, was deemed a criminal act in Guanajuato, where state law presumed that life began at the moment of conception. There is no reliable estimate of how many women died annually from secret abortions; authorities and family members often blamed the deaths on infection or hemorrhage.
In 1995, Cruz had completed training as a social worker and was helping Indigenous farmers improve their crop yields and distribution when, in a coffee shop, she heard an older woman discussing abortion in a way she hadn’t heard in school. The woman, who had attended a United Nations conference on reproductive rights, was speaking about abortion unapologetically, as a matter of public health that disproportionately affected poor women and curtailed their rights. Cruz was surprised, and energized.
Word had been getting out, first in Brazil and then across Latin America, about an expensive American drug that allowed a person to end a pregnancy at home. Manufactured by Pfizer under the name Cytotec and otherwise known as misoprostol, it was available over the counter in Mexico to treat gastric ulcers—to this day, the only use of the drug that Pfizer supports. (“The industry has never been an ally of women’s struggles,” said Raffaela Schiavon, a respected obstetrician-gynecologist in Mexico City.) Cytotec came in boxes of twenty-eight pills. Pregnant women who could afford it consulted other women who had had abortions and calibrated the dosage that would suit their bodies and stages of pregnancy. Some women took four or eight pills orally, and others inserted pills vaginally. When the abortions were done, Cruz had noticed, they’d typically toss out the remainder of the pills—a small fact that would later change the course of her work.
Mexican supporters of abortion rights were, and remain, up against a coalition of conservative politicians and leaders of the Catholic Church. When, in 2000, Guanajuato state legislators voted to make abortion illegal even for rape victims, subjecting them to years in prison, Cruz joined other activists to protest. But she wanted to do more than march on a statehouse—she wanted to make sure that rape victims could still get abortions. She started Las Libres and began asking those who bought boxes of misoprostol for an abortion to set aside the remainder of the pills for women who had been raped. Cruz recalled, “We said, ‘Keep them, and next time someone comes to us you’ll give them the pills and talk about your experience.’ ” The idea was to make abortion not just more accessible but less frightening. A pregnant woman could meet someone who had survived an abortion and gone on with her life. Cruz called the woman who shared her pills and her experience an acompañante—a person who accompanies another.
Eventually, opposition to the new state law became so great that the governor vetoed it, at which point Cruz decided to take her activism a step further and help women in Guanajuato who wanted an abortion for any reason at all. The acompañantes she recruited would bring pills and tips about how to use them, providing comfort and answering questions during the abortion process. Because the acompañante figure did not explicitly appear in Mexican criminal codes, Cruz argued that such a person would be immune to prosecution.
According to Georgina Sánchez, an academic at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur who has researched medication abortion in Mexico, some feminists were skeptical about the acompañamiento model. Ordinary citizens would have to shoulder the state’s responsibility to provide health care to women, and acompañantes would become vulnerable to the whims of authorities. They, and Cruz, might end up in jail. “Me being me,” Cruz recalled, “I told them, ‘Well, you’ll have to get me out!’ ” The way Cruz saw it, women had a moral duty to stand up for one another when the state failed to guarantee their rights.
“At first, women would come to us and say, under their breath, ‘I need an abortion,’ ” Cruz told me. But she began convening meetings in bars and cafés, where she spoke emphatically about abortion as a right to be asserted, not a clandestine affair. “It was our way of saying, ‘Don’t be afraid. You have nothing to be ashamed of,’ ” Cruz said, adding, “There were times when the waitresses would come by afterward and say, ‘How did you say one takes the pills?’ ”
The acompañante movement grew, and so did Cruz’s influence. Working with a team of lawyers, she visited ten jails in the state of Guanajuato, in search of women being held for abortion-related crimes. They found nine women charged with infanticide when circumstances suggested miscarriage or other birth complications. Most of the women had been given sentences ranging from twenty-five to thirty years and had already spent more than four years behind bars. Javier Cruz Angulo, a criminal lawyer who worked with Cruz, said that not all of them could read or write, and that “none of them fully understood why they had been prosecuted.” In 2010, Las Libres finally helped secure the release of all nine women, and Cruz went on to investigate similar convictions in other states.
In those states and elsewhere in Mexico, grassroots organizations were also campaigning for the liberalization of abortion laws. The capital, Mexico City, had already decriminalized abortion, in 2007. After sustained campaigns, the state of Oaxaca followed, in 2019, and in 2021 so did Hidalgo and Veracruz—just before the Supreme Court declared the criminalizing of abortion unconstitutional. “We are all pro-life,” the chief justice, Arturo Zaldívar, said, “only some of us are in favor of allowing women to live a life in which their dignity is respected, and they can exercise their rights fully.” The evening of the decision, which was unanimous, a 7.1-magnitude earthquake shook the capital—to some anti-abortionists, a sign of divine wrath.
In the following months, after S.B. 8 took effect in Texas and Cruz began sharing pills with activists there, she came to understand that she and some of her U.S. colleagues differed in their idea of what being an acompañante entailed. The Americans had been driving people to clinics and helping pay for the procedure for years; now they were planning to travel farther, to states with fewer restrictions. The Mexicans’ experience of aiding women had little to do with clinics. Rather, their model was one that Cruz believed her American contacts would need in the years ahead: a process of aborting that, in addition to being medically safe and effective (as a study of the acompañamiento practice in Argentina and Nigeria, published in The Lancet Global Health, had recently found it to be), also minimized the risk of criminal prosecution. If women avoided doctors and medical establishments and followed the blueprint of Las Libres, Cruz said, “there wouldn’t be a single trace. If the woman getting the abortion kept it to herself, no one would ever find out.”
In the Americas, one of the privileges of advanced age is getting the benefit of the doubt at security checkpoints. The first person to run the Old Hippies’ pills over the border was a gray-maned, soft-spoken Social Security recipient named Rosie. She would pave the way for the second border crosser, an octogenarian.
When Rosie first met Cruz, she was too intimidated to speak; the activist, she said, seemed “like a rock star to me.” But she returned home from the meeting brimming with purpose. Pouring her husband a glass of red wine, she said, “Honey, I’m going to be sneaking some pills across the border.” Her husband did not take this news calmly. What if the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, decided to make an example out of some grandma? What if all their savings went toward hiring lawyers and bailing Rosie out of jail? “Our retirement money is limited,” he told her. “What the heck are you doing?” Her kids, mercifully, were indifferent. “They don’t take their parents very seriously,” Rosie explained. No matter. Because she happened to reside in Mexico, she had an opportunity to change the lives, and maybe even save the lives, of younger women. “I have never felt so important,” she said.
Rosie’s specific assignment was to pick up a cache of pills, travel across the border, and mail them to a volunteer in Texas, who, in turn, would deliver the pills to women who had asked for them. Rosie had been told that crossing the border was necessary because packages sent from within the United States receive less scrutiny than those sent from abroad. Of course, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has its own rules and levels of scrutiny for goods entering the country. It requires that any medication brought into the U.S. have a doctor’s note or prescription and tells travellers not to carry more than a ninety-day supply.
Rosie had been crossing the border for twenty years, and, as she planned her first journey with abortion pills, she realized that although Border Patrol agents had sometimes searched her luggage and X-rayed her car, they had never opened her toiletry kit. It was there that she tucked two plastic bottles containing three hundred and thirty-six pills of misoprostol. She placed the kit in an overnight bag, said goodbye to her husband, got in her pickup truck, and headed to Texas.
Not long afterward, she walked into a post office, the sound of rattling accompanying each step—hundreds of pills in plastic bottles, seeming to announce themselves from her bag. Unnerved by the noise, she packed the pill bottles into a box, approached a clerk at the counter, and reflexively pulled out a credit card to pay the postage. As the printer spat out her receipt, it dawned on her that she’d created the sort of paper trail illicit suppliers like herself were supposed to avoid.
The recipient of the box was a Las Libres associate elsewhere in Texas, and Rosie had left the return address blank. Back home, searching the Internet, she learned that the lack of a return address was a red flag to postal inspectors—“like the kind of thing a drug dealer would send,” she said. Mailing pills within Texas to facilitate a self-induced abortion there is a felony punishable by up to two years in prison. If the pills eventually wound up in Mississippi, she could face up to five years in prison and additional charges for racketeering.
Two days later, the package arrived safely at its destination, and only then was Rosie able to sleep. Waking up the following morning, she wanted to do it again. Before long, her husband would be raising money for misoprostol buys, and associates in the syndicate would be referring to her by the nickname Pills on Wheels.
Three months in, the Old Hippies of San Miguel de Allende had raised ten thousand dollars to buy abortion pills—a decent haul, in the estimation of Liz, the great-grandmother, given that they had to persuade people to part with their money while sharing little about what would be done with it. Keeping donors ignorant was crucial because, post-Roe, giving money to a network like theirs could be construed as a crime.
The end of Roe had emboldened conservative activists and politicians in the U.S. After the court ruling, the Department of Health and Human Services assured doctors from states where bans had taken effect that they would not face prosecution under federal law for performing an abortion when the mother’s life was on the line—a decision that prompted Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, to sue the federal government.
Now that clinics in abortion-ban states had closed, conservative activists were targeting nonprofits that gave women money to travel for the procedure. These funds were now “criminal organizations,” in the words of Briscoe Cain, a Texas state congressman. As Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California at Davis, points out, one lesson of S.B. 8 is that a threat of legal consequences is enough to empty a state of abortion providers, regardless of whether there are prosecutions. This summer, many abortion funds in Texas ceased operation.
Conservative lawmakers were also threatening private companies, among them Lyft, that promised to reimburse employees for out-of-state travel to get abortions. Writing to an international law firm, Sidley Austin, which has offices in Houston and Dallas, eleven legislators warned it not to help employees “murder their unborn children.” Texas criminal prohibitions, the legislators said, extended to medication abortions, “even if the drugs were dispensed by an out-of-state abortionist.”
One of the best-known attempts to prosecute a ring of abortion providers in the United States occurred in 1972, when seven women belonging to a group known as the Jane Collective were arrested in Chicago. Members of the collective, which evolved from the efforts of a University of Chicago student to help a friend’s sister secure an underground abortion, lacked medical training; however, they had taught themselves to do the procedure according to clinical safety standards. Their hope was to improve the odds of pregnant women surviving what the historian Alicia Gutierrez-Romine calls “abortion roulette.” For most of the last century, women of means who sought to end a pregnancy turned to obstetricians and gynecologists who, for a steep price, performed illegal abortions on the side, while women with fewer resources risked having a vital organ punctured or bleeding to death. The Janes had done thousands of abortions in the years before the seven women were arrested. Charged with performing and conspiring to perform abortions, each of them faced a sentence of more than a hundred years in prison if convicted. However, when Roe was announced, in January, 1973, the charges against them were dropped.
It’s not yet clear whether, after Dobbs, authorities will choose to prosecute people for involvement in networks like Cruz’s. Amy O’Donnell, a spokesperson for the Texas Alliance for Life, argues that state law already allows for the extradition on felony charges of those who bring abortion drugs into Texas from other states. However, extradition of people who reside outside the country is a federal matter and, she speculates, would likely not happen without the election of a President with anti-abortion views.
Even within Texas and other states with strong laws against abortion facilitators, the politics of enforcing penalties is complex, in part because the belief that abortion equals murder doesn’t appear to be widespread. A survey released last month found that, among Texas voters, sixty per cent favored abortion being “available in all or most cases,” while only ten per cent supported banning abortion completely. In this political context, David Donatti, a civil-rights attorney at the A.C.L.U. of Texas, says, “conservative legislators would benefit just as much from pretending no abortions are happening as they would from prosecuting abortions.”
Early on in her American mission, trying to assess the sorts of risks volunteers might encounter crossing the border with pills, Verónica Cruz arranged a trial run. Five hundred pills arrived in Texas unhindered. Her methods for determining whether the people she chose to make the runs were sincere and not setting her up for trouble were somewhat less concrete. She made those decisions, she said, “by feeling.” When Claire, a California woman who spent part of the year in Mexico, heard about the network and contacted Cruz about becoming a pill runner, she didn’t get an assignment immediately. Instead, Cruz came to her house in San Miguel and spent hours “sniffing me out,” Claire said. Claire didn’t know about the Old Hippies and didn’t need to. As Cruz said once she came to trust Claire, one person could be a network of her own.
Claire slipped her first batch of pills into the States in May, and mailed packages to women all over the country. Three months later, shortly before her second run, she dashed through an artisan market, past a woman charring corn over an open flame, to a stall that sold flower-shaped earrings crafted by Huichol people in the Sierra Madre mountains. Each piece was made of colorful glass beads.
“Hola, ¿cuánto cuesta? ”
“Cincuenta pesos.”
Two dollars and fifty cents. Paying in cash, she bought twenty pairs of earrings—sunflowers, camellias, roses—to camouflage the abortion pills she’d be bringing back to the U.S. She would put the earrings in cardboard jewelry boxes that had a layer of cotton padding. The earrings would go on top of the cotton, and the pills would be embedded inside, the better to keep a husband or parent from finding them. But Claire, who had had two abortions herself, liked the idea of placing earrings in every package for reasons other than discretion. “It’s so stressful to be pregnant when you don’t want to be,” she said. “You have all these hormones going, you don’t like the way your body feels, you just want it to be over, and so I thought, It’d be nice to get a pair of earrings when you’re in that kind of mood. You know, an abortion and a present!”
She made her way out of the market, past portable shrines for the Virgin of Guadalupe and hearts of blown glass, and ran home, where Cruz was waiting at her door, navy-blue backpack in hand. “Little earrings,” Claire called out, “para las chicas! ”
At the kitchen counter, Cruz unzipped the backpack and pulled out blister packs of mifepristone and misoprostol, and Claire took a pair of scissors from a drawer. They cut open each of the packs, combining six pills of misoprostol with one of mifepristone—usually sufficient for one abortion. Each envelope would also contain instructions on the abortion process which Cruz and Claire had written together. The notes ended, “Hugs, the pill fairy.”
The pills that Claire and other fairies would be sending remained cheaper to obtain from a Mexican pharmacy than from a doctor in the U.S. But, after Dobbs, the price of a box of Pfizer pills in several establishments in San Miguel de Allende had markedly increased. In one pharmacy, the price rose from about two thousand pesos per box to more than three thousand, or from roughly a hundred dollars to a hundred and sixty. The cost of generic misoprostol fluctuated wildly—forty-five dollars in one pharmacy, seventeen in another—and at the nearby Costco you could encounter two different prices for the drug in a single day. If the inflation seen in San Miguel pharmacies suggested private-sector opportunism, it might also have reflected well-meaning expats dominating the market, clearing the shelves on behalf of Americans and, in the process, jacking up the price of abortion for Mexican women—an ethical dilemma that some of Cruz’s associates had yet to think deeply about.
As they divvied up pills, Claire mentioned to Cruz that crossing the border with pharmaceuticals was not, for her, a big deal. “I have Global Entry,” she said. “I’ve never been stopped by customs in my life.” But, when she’d asked a friend if she would consider joining her as a pill runner, the friend had responded, “I’m Black. I can’t do that. Isn’t that obvious to you?”
On Claire’s first mission, she’d sent pills to women in seven states where, if her actions were discovered, they could be seen as a crime. But she was given less to paranoia than to curiosity. Preparing to send her first lot of pills, she had Googled the addresses where they would land: trailer parks, run-down apartments, a house valued at thirty-four thousand dollars. She’d envisioned women with other children and tapped-out bank accounts who couldn’t travel out of state for an abortion. She had to force herself not to Google any further, should authorities uncover the digital footprint she now regretted having created. This time, she had resolved simply to cross the border, mail the earrings and pills in an envelope with a fake return address, pay the post office in cash, take a photo of the tracking number, and destroy all receipts. She would later delete the photo of the tracking number, too.
Finishing up, as salsa music drifted in from another room, Claire asked Cruz about the varieties of civil disobedience that led the Mexican Supreme Court to decriminalize abortion. Cruz told her that she thought of herself as part of an ant colony: one of countless workers toiling beneath an unbroken surface, carving intricate paths toward their goal. “Was all of this hidden from the public eye?” Claire wondered. Cruz shook her head. From the start, Las Libres members defied the system openly. In the United States, as in Mexico, Cruz predicted, the more people who got involved in the movement, the harder it would be for anyone to stop it.
A few days later, as Cruz trained future acompañantes in Yucatán, Claire packed abortion pills and earrings in a carry-on alongside her perfume, oregano-oil capsules, and shea butter and caught an early-morning bus to the airport in Mexico City.
“Bringing anything back, Ma’am?” the customs agent asked when she arrived in San Francisco.
“Just some souvenirs.”
Handing her passport back, the agent said, “Welcome home.”
When you risk years in prison to distribute abortion pills to women who wouldn’t otherwise be able to access them in Texas, you tend to appreciate more straightforward aspects of existence. So Anna delighted in an okra plant in her small garden that, by September, had sprung up to twice her height. Her tomatoes were thriving, as were the rosemary and parsley, and one day, as she picked up some jalapeño seeds left over from a seasonal planting, it occurred to her to hide pills in a packet of seeds. You never knew which recipient might have a patch of dirt in which to plant them.
It had taken some time for Las Libres to find collaborators like Anna. After S.B. 8 went into effect, Cruz and her colleagues identified thirty abortion-rights groups in Texas that they thought might be interested in receiving pills from Mexico. The first meeting of the Mexican and American activists had been awkward, though. The Mexicans had gathered in a conference room; the Texans joined the meeting individually, via Zoom. Most of their cameras were off, and the sound was bad. At the end of the meeting, when Cruz asked who was interested in collaborating, only one person raised her hand. There followed a long silence, until one of the Texans unmuted her sound. “The law has won,” she said. “They accomplished what they wanted: scare us to the point where we feel there is nothing to be done.” Only later did messages from some of the participants begin to trickle in, on Signal. They had been reluctant to assert their intention on a video call, but they were ready to work with Cruz.
Anna’s first move had been to post on social media that she could be of help to women in need—a post that never mentioned abortion directly. She said the same to strangers and friends in bars and cafés, just as Cruz used to do in Mexico, even as the penalties she might face increased.
Many of Anna’s pills almost certainly came from the Old Hippies of San Miguel de Allende, but she eschewed such precise information, for her own protection and that of others. She found mailing the pills especially nerve-racking; for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, she chose as a fake return address a shopping mall where, in third grade, she’d made a joyful trip with her mom to get her ears pierced. It was better to hand off the pills in person, she thought, because those exchanges were harder for authorities to track and safer for women who lived in homes where an envelope with a dubious return address might be opened by the wrong hands.
She’d set a hard rule for herself, early on: to meet pregnant women only in parks or other public spaces that could not easily be linked back to her neighborhood or her job. Some days, self-conscious about her disguise, she thought she’d be the last person in Texas still wearing a mask outside. Other days, sympathetic, she decided hard rules could be broken, as when she capitulated to the grandmother of an eighth grader who insisted that the only place she’d feel safe collecting pills was in Anna’s own home.
The pregnant eighth grader seemed almost in shock when she arrived with her grandmother and an aunt, who were furious at the girl. “It was, like, ‘You fucking idiot! You have a child in you! How did we get here?!’ ” Anna said. In the living room, lights dim and blinds closed, Anna tried to ignore the tension and focus on practical details: what to expect as the abortion progressed, and what to do if complications ensued. “If you have two regular menstrual pads and you’re soaking them front to back, side to side, completely full of blood, for two hours in a row—that would be too much blood,” she said. Across the room, Anna recalled, three sets of eyes widened. She quickly added, “Medication abortion is very safe.”
The eighth grader’s procedure went smoothly, but the grandmother told Anna some weeks later that the girl was still depressed: “She’s just walking around in a big hoodie all the time, even though she’s not pregnant anymore.” Anna felt haunted by all she hadn’t been able to do for the girl. “In other states, or under another law system, her grandmother could have taken her to a sexual- and reproductive-health clinic, where they could have had a conversation with her, taught her about condoms, given her birth control, and sent her home feeling empowered with more information,” she said. “Instead, she had to go to some random person’s house. I’m sure they did not feel safe or comfortable here.”
If Anna was sometimes frustrated and uncertain, she appreciated that sensible counsel was coming from Mexico at a moment that flipped “the narrative that America is this beacon of democracy and hope and progress.” She had begun to see herself as part of an age-old global tradition: women helping other women with their reproductive-health concerns because they knew they couldn’t count on institutions for protection. As Gutierrez-Romine, the historian, notes, physicians began functioning as “gatekeepers” for women seeking to end their pregnancies only in the nineteenth century.
In this new era of criminalized underground abortions, doctors were still occasionally required, though. One morning, Anna delivered pills to a slight woman in her thirties, a friend of a friend, who was eight weeks pregnant. When they were going over the instructions, the woman mentioned that her health had been precarious. Anna reassured her that the risk of developing an infection or hemorrhaging was low—less than one per cent in each case, studies showed. But, within an hour of taking the medication, the woman texted Anna that she was feeling dizzy. She’d thrown up, and her palms were itchy. She was at her parents’ house, the woman told Anna, and no one there was aware that she was having an abortion. She texted Anna again shortly afterward to say that she had lost consciousness twice.
Panicking, Anna advised her to rush to the nearest emergency room. Eventually, the woman confided to her mother, “I took some pills. We’re going to the hospital. And you cannot tell them that I took some pills.” For the next four hours, Anna heard nothing. None of the tricks she used to calm herself—Wordle, Spelling Bee, mindless scrolling through her friends’ feeds on Instagram—worked. She was sick with fear that the woman had died.
Midafternoon, a text arrived: “I’m stable.” The woman explained, “I was hooked up to all these I.V.s, so I couldn’t text you. Let’s go out for drinks in a couple of weeks.”
That night, in tears, Anna told a friend, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore. I thought I had killed somebody.” Her friend reminded her that the people who had failed this woman, and others, were the officials who had stripped them of their right to reproductive care under medical supervision.
In June, the day before Roe’s overturning, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an editorial warning of an imminent crisis of abortion access, citing research indicating that maternal mortality would rise by at least twenty per cent. The authors estimated a rise of maternal mortality among Black people of upward of thirty per cent. The biennial maternal-mortality report in Texas, due to be released last month, has been delayed until after the midterm elections.
Not long ago, on a Thursday morning, a Texas woman named Sarah sat on her toilet, watching a pregnancy test develop a second red line. She was pregnant—a big problem given the complex circumstances of her life at that moment, among them the needs of the toddler daughter just outside the bathroom door. Still inside, she texted a friend for advice. The friend suggested contacting Plan C, a project that links U.S. women and abortion-pill providers around the world. Within minutes, Sarah had chosen a provider in Austria, paid a hundred and seven dollars by credit card, had a “telehealth appointment” with a doctor she never actually spoke to, and ordered a set of abortion pills that would be mailed to her from India. The problem was that the pills could take almost a month to get to Texas. She couldn’t bear to wait that long.
Her friend, concerned, was also texting other people. “I might have a local contact,” she wrote a few minutes later. By eleven-thirty that same morning, in a quiet working-class neighborhood, Anna was handing Sarah a plastic bag of pills.
Afterward, Sarah’s abortion complete, the toddler laid claim to the party hats a few of her mother’s friends had brought over to keep her cheerful during a process they’d taken to calling a “Texas miscarriage.” (Just in case “Zuckerberg is tracking our texts,” Sarah said, half in jest.) Empty cans of White Claw the friends had also brought were in the recycling bin. Sometimes, Sarah grieved. She could imagine wanting a second child at a different time in her life, but she also knew that she was fortunate. Many other women in states where abortions had been banned didn’t have the support of friends like hers.
Weeks later, when the package she’d ordered from India arrived and she was stowing the abortion pills in a drawer, it suddenly occurred to her that nothing but stray fear stood in the way of her doing what Anna did. She didn’t know Verónica Cruz or the Old Hippies or Claire or anyone besides Anna who worked with them, but she imagined an expanding constellation of women, operating in secret and in concert, to help other women. “Try to arrest all of us!” Sarah said to herself. She grabbed her phone and texted Anna: “Hey! How do I start doing what you do?”
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Workers restore the railway tracks Sunday on the Kerch bridge that links Crimea to Russia, a day after it was damaged by a blast. Officials say car and train traffic has resumed over the bridge. (photo: Getty)
According to Russia's Federal Security Service, the FSB, its agents arrested five Russian citizens as well as two Ukrainians and an Armenian national suspected in the bridge blast.
In a statement, the FSB said the individuals helped load 22 tons of explosives into a truck in the Ukrainian city of Odesa. The vehicle then went through several other countries before entering Russia and exploding on the Kerch bridge Saturday morning, killing several people and briefly rendering the bridge unusable.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has blamed Ukraine's intelligence services for carrying out what he has called a terrorist attack. The Kremlin leader has responded with a massive series of Russian airstrikes across Ukraine that began Monday — the largest wave since the earliest days of the invasion.
Many Ukrainian officials celebrated the attack on the Kerch bridge, but others have suggested it might have been an inside job. An image of a blood-stained Ukrainian ID card allegedly belonging to one of the suspects circulated on Russian social media, but it was rife with typos and inconsistencies.
Ukraine's security services called suggestions of Ukrainian involvement "all fake, and in the service of Putin."
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Police and protesters converge during a demonstration, Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020, in Louisville, Ky. (photo: John Minchillo/AP)
Former Louisville officer Kelly Goodlett admitted in federal court that she and another officer falsified information in the warrant. That confirmed to many, including U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, that Taylor never should have been visited by armed officers on March 13, 2020.
Protest leaders who took to the streets of Kentucky’s largest city after she was fatally shot by police say Goodlett’s confession confirms their suspicions that Louisville police can’t be trusted and that systemic issues run deep. They say officers abused demonstrators after the botched raid, and that her fatal shooting is just one of many reasons why the community remains wary.
“What bothers me so incredibly is that so many lives were lost because of this lie,” said Hannah Drake, a Louisville poet and leader in a push for justice after Taylor’s death. “They don’t even understand the far-reaching tentacles of what they did.”
More than once during that long, hot summer, individual officers escalated rather than calmed a situation.
Days before a Black man was shot dead by a National Guard member in his restaurant’s kitchen, an officer who wounded the man’s niece taunted demonstrators on social media, daring them to challenge police. Another Louisville officer faces a federal charge over hitting a kneeling protester in the back of the head with a baton.
“We were right to protest,” Louisville Urban League President Sadiqa Reynolds tweeted shortly after Goodlett’s plea. “People are dead and lives upended because of a pile of lies.”
Some Louisville officers have been disciplined, fired, and even charged with crimes for abusing protesters, in addition to the four officers now charged federally in relation to the botched raid. But the problems can’t be blamed on a few rogue officers, according to a lawsuit brought by Taylor’s white neighbors, who were nearly hit by gunfire during the raid.
They accuse the department of having a “warrior culture” and cultivating an “us vs. them” mentality. In a lawsuit, the family of the man shot at the restaurant alleges that police aggression during a curfew instigated his death.
Louisville is working on numerous reforms, implementing a new 911 diversion program, increasing leadership reviews of search warrant requests and improving officer training. The city has outlawed “no knock” warrants, conducted an independent audit and paid Taylor’s mother $12 million in a civil settlement. A new police chief, Erika Shields, was hired in 2021.
Such reforms have been implemented amid a continuing U.S. Department of Justice investigation of LMPD’s policing practices, which could land at any moment.
The chief called Taylor’s death “horrific,” and said in an interview with The Associated Press that she welcomes the federal investigations, which led to charges against Goodlett and the other officers. “I think we’re in an important place that was necessary to get to, before we move on,” she said.
Mayor Greg Fischer, whose 12-year run ends this year, said city officials turned the probes over to state and federal officials “because the community rightfully was saying LMPD should not be investigating LMPD, and I agree with that.”
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s investigation then ended without any officers being charged directly in Taylor’s death. It took federal prosecutors to convict Goodlett — she pleaded guilty to conspiracy and admitted to helping create a phony link between Taylor and a wanted drug dealer. Goodlett resigned the day before her charges were announced in August and awaits sentencing next month.
In August court filings, federal prosecutors said another former officer, Joshua Jaynes, inserted the crucial information into the warrant request that drew Taylor into the narcotic squad’s investigation — claiming that a postal inspector had verified that the drug dealer was receiving packages at Taylor’s apartment.
Goodlett and Jaynes knew that was false, as did their sergeant, Kyle Meany, when he signed off on the request, Garland said.
“Breonna Taylor should be alive today,” Garland said.
Goodlett, Jaynes and Meany were all fired, as was a fourth officer, Brett Hankison, who faces federal charges for blindly firing into Taylor’s home through a side door and window. He was exonerated on similar state charges earlier this year. Jaynes and Meany are being tried together. That trial, along with Hankison’s, is scheduled for next year. Goodlett is expected to testify against Jaynes.
Metro Council President David James, a former police officer, said that to restore trust, Louisville’s Black community “just wants the police to treat them the same way they would treat people in another part of the city.”
No incident highlighted the racial divide more than the fatal shooting of Black restaurant owner David McAtee as police sought to enforce the city’s curfew in a predominantly African American neighborhood far from the center of the Taylor protests.
Just before midnight on May 31, 2020, Louisville officers and Kentucky National Guard members were sent to a gathering spot near McAtee’s YaYa’s BBQ “for a show of force (and) intimidation,” McAtee’s family alleges in a lawsuit.
A few nights earlier, officer Katie Crews had been photographed in a line of police as a protester offered her a handful of flowers. Crews posted the image on social media, writing that she hoped the protester was hurting from the pepper balls she “got lit up with a little later on.”
“Come back and get ya some more ole girl, I’ll be on the line again tonight,” Crews wrote.
When officers marched toward McAtee’s restaurant, Crews escalated the tension by firing non-lethal pepper balls at the crowd, an LMPD investigation found. Many people rushed into McAtee’s kitchen, where his niece was shot in the neck by Crews with the non-lethal rounds.
That prompted McAtee to pull a pistol from his hip and fire a shot. Seeing that, Crews and other officers switched to live rounds and McAtee, leaning out his kitchen door, was fatally shot in the chest by a National Guard member. The deadly force was found to be justified, but the police chief was fired by Fischer because the Louisville officers involved had failed to turn on their body cameras, just as they did during the Taylor raid.
Crews later admitted that no one in the crowd had been disorderly. She was fired by Shields in February. Now she faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of a federal charge of using unreasonable force.
James, the Metro Council president and former officer, groaned while recalling McAtee’s death, saying he was saddened because he knew him and had eaten his food. The “extremely unfortunate and tragic” shooting has stuck with him as an example of bad policing, he said.
Drake, the poet and activist, said more systemic changes are needed. In the meantime, she said authorities should apologize for their treatment of protesters, and drop any cases against people arrested for demonstrating that summer. Hundreds have been cleared, but some remain criminally charged. Knowing it was all so unnecessary only deepens the pain, she said.
“We could have avoided all this,” Drake said. “And I think that’s where the pain comes from — we were right!”
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A view of the US Capitol before a news conference to discuss student-debt cancellation on September 29, 2022. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty)
The administration is in a high-stakes rush to launch its portal for borrowers before the midterms.
The form looks simple enough, requiring only basic biographical information: first and last name, Social Security number, birthdate, email address, and phone number. It asks about your income, since higher earners aren’t eligible, but doesn’t require any documentation—just check a box to swear, “under penalty of perjury,” that you didn’t make more than $125,000 in 2020 or 2021, and you’re set (the limit is $250,000 for joint tax filers). The application is in English and Spanish. That’s it.
What’s still missing, critically, is a date for the site to go live. Meeting attendees were told that the administration still expects the site to roll out some time in October. But whenever it finally debuts, there will be enormous stakes riding on how smoothly it works.
Democrats are banking on student debt forgiveness as a major component of their midterm messaging to motivate younger voters, who are famously hard to turn out for non-presidential elections and have been notoriously cool toward Biden. The White House’s own estimates claim that 40 million Americans will be eligible for the debt relief program, almost all of whom will have to apply. It has suggested that the new web site will reach 75 percent of them.
That means that 30 million people will be storming the Department of Education domain, many of them all at once—an incredible surge of web traffic. If the site crashes, breaks, or is otherwise inoperable, many voters’ final experience before election day will be not of zero balances, but of the maddening experience of being unable to access the debt cancellation the party has promised them. Rather than bring more young Democrats to the polls, a website that bricks could keep them away.
Building a website able to sustain that amount of traffic will take a massive lift, and the federal government’s track record on such tasks is not pretty. Healthcare.gov, the page associated with the rollout of Obamacare, crashed after being overwhelmed by just 2.8 million visitors on the first day in October 2013. That was more than 3.5 years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and still the web presence was catastrophically underpowered. The debacle dogged the program’s reputation for years.
Now, the Biden administration’s site will realistically need to shoulder ten times that much traffic to support a program that they announced not even two months ago.
For student debt relief groups, some of which have criticized Biden’s relief plan for being too narrow , the implementation issue is now a peak concern. “The relief is already sort of skimpy, the application just makes things more regressive. Not to mention the questions about the accessibility of the form, is the website crashing or not, does it load, are there bugs? It’s not like the Education Department is used to people flooding its website,” said Braxton Brewington, press secretary of the Debt Collective, a group that has pushed for universal, automatic debt relief.
Even a functioning website will require substantial support systems to be in place, from back-end technicians to call centers. “We’ve already seen student loan services literally tell people to stop calling about this. That’s just one servicer, and they have professional call centers,” added Brewington.
While Team Biden needs to make sure its website works properly, it also faces pressures to get it up quickly. It’s not just the looming deadline of election day. The administration also has to worry about the pile-on of lawsuits from conservative groups trying to derail the program.
In a hearing on Wednesday afternoon in the case Nebraska v. Biden, a group of Republican Attorneys General will be seeking a preliminary injunction to halt the relief effort. Another suit in Wisconsin, alleging—I kid you not—reverse racism, has moved up to the 7th circuit. On Monday night, yet another suit was filed in Texas, drawing a judge who once struck down the Affordable Care Act.
These legal challenges have already had an impact. One reason the administration needed to create an online application was an Indiana suit, in which the plaintiffs claimed they would be harmed because the state would tax their forgiven debt as income, which forced the administration to add an opt-out option to undercut the suit.
According to an attendee of Tuesday’s meeting, the White House showed confidence in its timeline, and projected no concerns about legal detours. But the more days that tick away, the more time there is for some judge to halt the program before any debt can be forgiven.
With all those legal obstacles, “the White House has to split their focus in a way that hopefully doesn’t detract from the very high stakes technical effort in front of them,” said the meeting’s participant.
Another firm deadline fast approaches as well: the administration, as part of its cancellation announcement, set loan repayment to begin by January 2023. If the site’s unveiling gets delayed any further, that could push the forgiveness program up against payment restarting, which could even result in student borrowers getting served bills for repayment on debt that should be or will be forgiven.
Beyond the technical and legal issues, Biden’s team has bureaucratic challenges to worry about as well. The administration will have to verify the application information with their own records. And somewhere between one and five million people are expected to be required to complete a much longer income verification process, which will slow relief for some and likely result in others not getting it at all.
Some of this time pressure could maybe have been avoided if Biden had been ready to forgive loans the day he announced his program, or anticipated the need for an application process and had a website ready from the getgo. But by all accounts, the president vacillated on whether to even cancel debt at all. His late decision making hasn’t left much time to get the logistics right.
Realistically, the earliest the site could go live is two weeks before election day, and it’s possible it will be later than that (October 17 is one frequently rumored date). The final sprint in competitive House and Senate races will be underway, and Democrats will be looking for a strong closing statement to beat back Republican nattering on crime and inflation, and could desperately use a smooth rollout for a program they’re banking on to amp up younger voters. “We swear we’ll get this website working eventually” wouldn’t be much of a slogan.
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The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear an appeal to overturn a death sentence for a Black man whose jury included three white people who explicitly said they opposed interracial marriage. (photo: Geoff Livingston/Getty)
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Elena Kagan all dissented.
Though the six conservative Supreme Court justices did not provide a justification for their decision, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent saying that Andre Thomas’ 2004 conviction and death sentence “clearly violate the constitutional right to the effective assistance of counsel.” She was joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.
Thomas murdered his estranged wife, 4-year-old son, and 13-month-old stepdaughter, and attempted to kill himself while having a psychotic episode in 2004. An all-white Texas jury convicted him and recommended a death sentence the following year.
After the murders, Thomas removed both of his eyeballs in separate instances, rendering himself blind. Thomas, who began having auditory hallucinations when he was 10 years old, has since been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
One of the jurors in his case said he thought it was “wrong to have [interracial] relationships,” another said they “oppose[d] people of different racial backgrounds marrying and/or having children,” while a third said it was “harmful for the children involved because they do not have a specific race to belong to.” During jury selection, the first alternate juror also expressed opposition to both interracial and gay marriage.
Thomas’ appellate attorneys had argued that he had received ineffective counsel from his lawyer, who failed to object to the jurors, and that he had not received a fair trial from an impartial jury. The notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit upheld Thomas’ conviction, a ruling Sotomayor said she would have vacated.
“It is ultimately the duty of the courts ‘to confront racial animus in the justice system,’” Sotomayor wrote, quoting retired Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in a similar 2017 case. “That responsibility requires courts, including this one, vigilantly to safeguard the fairness of criminal trials by ensuring that jurors do not harbor, or at the very least could put aside, racially biased sentiments.”
“The errors in this case render Thomas’ death sentence not only unreliable, but unconstitutional,” Sotomayor wrote in her 15-page dissent. “I would not permit the State to execute Andre Thomas in light of the ineffective assistance that he received.”
In a statement to VICE News, Thomas’ attorney said the Supreme Court’s decision “abdicates the Court’s role and responsibility” to confront racism in the justice system, and that for Texas to “pursue his execution would be nothing but an ugly spectacle and would not make Texans safer.”
“No one who hears the story of Mr. Thomas’ life believes he is mentally competent,” lawyer Maurie Levin told VICE News. “Guiding a blind, delusional man onto Texas’ gurney would be an indelible image that would cast a permanent shadow over Texas’ reputation. Texas can keep the public safe by keeping Mr. Thomas in prison for life.”
Though the Supreme Court’s six conservatives offered no defense of their decision not to hear the appeal, the move mirrors positions they took during the last highly controversial term.
In May, the Supreme Court ruled in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez that federal courts are unable to open evidentiary hearings on claims of ineffective counsel if those claims weren’t first raised during state criminal proceedings, a decision Sotomayor also dissented from and called “perverse” and “illogical.”
And in another case during the last term, Vega v. Tekoh, the Court ruled that defendants who’ve been deprived of their Miranda rights cannot sue the police officers who deprive them of those rights. In her dissent, Kagan wrote that the Supreme Court “injures the right by denying the remedy.”
“Sometimes, as a result, a defendant will be wrongly convicted and spend years in prison,” Kagan wrote. “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?”
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Mohammed Ali, a landlord in Sohbatpur, standing in front of his flooded agricultural land. (photo: Shah Meer Baloch/The Guardian)
Floods destroyed at least 4m acres of farmland, and with large areas still under water, new crops cannot be sown
“I had invested 40 million rupees (£163,042) into different crops, mostly rice,” he said. “I lost almost everything. The floods have ruined and washed away everything.”
Khoso said he had never seen so much rain in his life, and that water was coming from everywhere. Now, he added, “I fear for a food crisis in Balochistan and beyond.”
Across the province crops, homes and livelihoods were washed away by flood waters. Agriculture is the primary source of income for many in the districts of Jaffarabad, Sohbatpur, Nasirabad and Jhal Magsi yet 70% of crops have been destroyed in the floods.
Nationwide, at least 4m acres of crops have been destroyed, part of the economic devastation estimated by the Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, at $30bn-$35bn (£27bn-£31.6bn), and while the heavy rainfall which began in July has stopped, many areas in Balochistan and Sindh provinces remain flooded. Children play and swim in fields where green crops of rice should have been swaying in the air, ready for harvest.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has warned the effects of the floods will be felt for years to come with the country “on the verge of a public health disaster”, and the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a report last week that it expected increased food insecurity.
In Sohbatpur district in Balochistan, Mohammed Ali said 500 acres of crops had been washed away.
“I lost all my investment of the season but for me more worrying is the new season,” he said. “It is October now and I can’t grow wheat as we have no dry land left. The water is receding in a very slow phase and it seems we can’t grow wheat and other crops.”
In the Larkana district of neighbouring Sindh province, Sajid Ali, said more than 70% of his crops were ruined. “People have lost their crops and some have also lost their seeds of wheat, which they had kept for new seasons in their storerooms and factories,” he said.
“The land is still under water and we can’t grow anything here for a long while.”
Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate change minister, said half of the country’s breadbasket had been wiped out in the floods. “Clearly, there will be shocks to the food security of the country. We are not sure how the sowing season will really take place with this much water or damp soil,” she told the Guardian.
According to the Atlantic Council the total damage to agriculture amounts to $3.18bn, out of which $1.63bn is from Sindh and $1.04bn from Balochistan. Livestock losses stand at $291m, out of which $125m is from Balochistan and $109m from Sindh.
“It will have immediate and medium-term impacts at least on people’s lives,” Rehman said. “We think it’s very important to be seeking food, assistance, food aid and as well as working on pipelining climate-resilient agriculture but that’s a fairly long term.”
Both Mohammed Ali in Balochistan and Sajid Ali in Sindh said they had not seen government help and the lack of shelter meant many people, including vital farm labourers, were now homeless.
Mohammed Rasool, 50, has been sleeping on the roadside for over a month with more than 250 families in Sohbatpur who worked for a landlord and former minister, Saleem Khan Khosa. Before that Rasool worked for the minister’s uncle, Zahoor Khan Khosa.
“I have been a farmer and working for the landlord since I was a child and my entire family works for them,” Rasool said. “We are all on the road. We have nothing to eat and have been living without shelter.”
He said that he had seen 2010 floods but this was worse. “This is nothing like what I have seen ever before. Not even a single house has been spared – all have been destroyed,” he said.
He added that they had approached the former minister, who told them “God is great and we will find a way”. However, Rasool said he was still waiting for his and God’s help.
Sohail Ahmed, 22, who also worked for Khosa, said that he had been working as a farmer like his elders and he could not leave as they were provided shelter and money by the landlord.
“We get a small portion of profit, which is nothing, but we have been working for decades and we can’t leave it,” said Ahmed. “There is no other work for us in the green belt. It is just farming.”
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A new peer-reviewed paper proposes the East African dugong population be listed as ‘critically endangered’ on the IUCN Red List to protect the last few hundred animals that are left. (photo: Janik Rybicka/Shutterstock)
Found in relative abundance in parts of northern Australia, dugongs are currently listed globally as ‘vulnerable’ on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. But over the past few decades their numbers in East Africa have plummeted due to indiscriminate fishing and development.
By proposing that the East African dugong population is listed as ‘critically endangered,’ a significant incentive will be established to support the long-term protection of these marine mammals.
Myself and others on the Bazaruto research team recently published a peer-reviewed paper, “Focused and inclusive actions could ensure the persistence of East Africa’s last known viable dugong subpopulation,” which proposes the East African dugong population be listed as ‘critically endangered’ on the IUCN Red List, a globally recognized measure of extinction vulnerability. The IUCN Red List uses precise criteria to evaluate the level of vulnerability of the world’s flora and fauna species so that levels of protection can be measured to prevent their extinction.
Threats to dugongs and people
Traditionally, dugongs have been anthropomorphized in many parts of the world. Europeans cited them as the inspiration for mermaids. In Africa, dugongs are known as nguva, which is Swahili for ‘mermaid’ or simply binadamu meaning ‘person.’ In Tanzania, an origin story for dugongs describes a couple who were transformed into the first dugongs as punishment. Eating dugong meat is also believed by some to imbue long life, while others claim the bones ward off evil spirits.
More importantly, dugongs, also known as ‘sea cows’ and whose closest relatives are manatees, play a vital ecological role in supporting marine biodiversity. Occurring mostly in the tropical coastal waters of the Indian and western Pacific Oceans, these solitary mammals rely on seagrass meadows for their survival. Through grazing, dugongs encourage the health and resilience of these important underwater habitats, which as a result supports a myriad of other fish, turtle, mollusk and crustacean species. This in turn provides critical support to fisheries enterprises, providing economic opportunities and food security to thousands of coastal communities.
Along the east coast of Africa, the ongoing threat from a massive increase in the use of gill nets, in which dugongs and other marine megafauna are easily entangled and drowned, is putting significant pressure on the survival of the last remaining dugongs. Development and commercial activities along the coast are impacting sensitive marine habitats, and it’s estimated that seagrass coverage has declined by approximately 20% over the past century in the tropical Indo-Pacific.
The Role of Communities in Protecting Dugongs
Made up of five islands and spanning 1,430 km2 of pristine seascape, Bazaruto Archipelago National Park encompasses terrestrial and marine habitats of exceptional ecological value. Through the co-management agreement between African Parks and Mozambique’s National Administration of Conservation Areas (ANAC), the long-term conservation of Mozambique’s unique marine biodiversity in this protected area is made possible. But the work to ensure the last remaining viable dugong subpopulation on the East African coast is not yet complete, and further action needs to take place.
By partnering with local communities, conservation organizations are better placed to understand the needs of locals while also benefitting local economies to alleviate the pressure from previously unsustainable fisheries on marine biodiversity, which is essential to protecting dugongs.
Through collaboration and engagement with island communities to enhance livelihoods through sustainable enterprise development, education and law enforcement, Bazaruto’s park management is creating a holistic approach to help restore and protect one of the most critical marine sanctuaries in the Indian Ocean.
Fishing is also being monitored, so that some areas are closed to fishing during certain times of the year, while only island communities can fish within designated areas in the park boundaries. As a result, illegal fishing has been radically reduced over recent years through improved boundary control and positive community engagement to gain respect for marine park boundaries.
Tourism initiatives are in development to create jobs and local revenue streams, while at the same time being managed so that the park’s ecological integrity is not compromised.
Preventing Extinction of East Africa’s Dugongs
With the success of this proposal to reassess and amend the East African dugong population on the IUCN Red Data List from ‘vulnerable’ to ‘critically endangered,’ far more robust efforts can be taken to ensure the survival of this last remaining population, such as ANAC’s public and private efforts to create an Environmental Protection Area to the north of the existing park where important dugong hotspots are found.
Through the successful management of Bazaruto Archipelago National Park, it’s clear that the conservation of key megafauna species, such as dugongs, is dependent on inclusive community development, strategic research and monitoring and fair law enforcement to safeguard habitats. This is only made possible when partnerships between governments, communities and management organizations are developed and maintained through trust, engagement and accountability.
Bazaruto’s management, which has demonstrably reduced illegal activity in the park, while improving the livelihoods for local communities, serves as a valuable model for the broader management of seascape’s such as it, ensuring that people and dugongs can thrive well into the future.
But without the support of a new ‘critically endangered’ listing, which should be prioritized by the IUCN, these efforts may not be enough to save East Africa’s dugongs.
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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