The Difficult – if Not Impossible – Game of Bolivian Politics

By Santiago Anria and Kenneth Roberts*

Jeanine_Añez_Bolivia

Jeanine Añez, January 2020/ Wikimedia Commons/ Creative Commons License (not modified)

Evo Morales’ shocking resignation in November 2019 laid bare Bolivia’s deep social and political divisions – which the increasingly tense impasse over elections is making much worse. Morales’s denouement marked the culmination of political decay traceable to at least 2016, when he and the MAS lost a referendum on re-election and ignored the results. Their insistence on re-election sharply polarized politics, became a focal point for opposition, and left the government vulnerable to a violent conservative backlash.

  • After Morales’s ouster – some call it a coup, others a popular revolt – a relatively unknown figure, Jeanine Áñez, became interim president with a narrow mandate to call elections and promote social pacification. She revealed, however, a personal ambition to stay in the presidency and a commitment to prevent the return of Morales and the MAS by any means, reflecting a raw animosity that was latent in important segments of Bolivia since Morales first came to power in 2006. She brought the Bible “back in the presidential palace” and militated against Morales, deeming him Bolivia’s “number one enemy,” and attempted to fracture and demobilize his social base.
  • Elections have been postponed several times due to the COVID‑19 pandemic. National protests and highway closures by peasant and labor allies of the MAS have surged in the past week, and Áñez’s sinking popularity provides reasons for her attempts to delay the electoral process. Road blockades by movements that back the MAS – and also by grass-roots groups that operate with independence from MAS – demanding elections and COVID assistance are giving rise to worrying threats and direct action by vigilante groups, which in many cases are promoted or at least tolerated by the government.

Similar to the “impossible game” described by Guillermo O’Donnell in post-1955 Argentina, the political field is sharply divided into two major antagonistic camps – masistas and anti-masistas – and neither can govern effectively while excluding the other.

  • Under Áñez, the anti-masista camp has splintered into at least two groups with clearly distinctive class and regional bases of support, but with the shared goal of preventing the return of Morales and the MAS. Through legal channels, Áñez and allied elite agro-industrial groups have pressured electoral authorities to ban MAS presidential candidate Luis Arce. (The MAS used similar draconian measures at least once in the past to exclude candidates.) Credible human rights reports show that MAS leaders, supporters, and allied social organizations have been harassed, intimidated, and violently repressed by state and paramilitary forces.
  • Such attempts to suppress the MAS, Bolivia’s largest party and one with deep societal roots, have spurred social mobilization, conflict, and instability. They also have motivated the MAS to unite, adjust its structures, and recover at least partially after its dramatic political defeat. Polls show that although the MAS no longer commands supermajorities, it could win an election in the first round due to the sharp fragmentation and mutual antagonism within the anti-masista camp. The ongoing popular mobilizations and street confrontations, however, can also undermine the MAS’s electoral reach, especially in urban segments.

Carlos Mesa, who came in second but did not qualify for the runoff under the official, but contested, vote count in the election last October that culminated in Morales’s downfall, is claiming the political center and has emerged as the candidate of the anti-masista urban middle class in the country’s western region. He is currently polling second (behind MAS presidential candidate Luis Arce) but, alienated from the MAS and repelled by Áñez’s authoritarian turn and mismanagement of the pandemic, will have difficulty building a majority. His past experience as Bolivia’s president also shows he is not especially savvy navigating troubled waters.

If elections are held this year, whoever wins the presidency will not “take it all” and will likely have to deal with a divided Congress, a highly mobilized and sharply polarized society, and a deep economic and public health crisis. Bolivia appears to be headed to a difficult – if not impossible – game with highly unpredictable consequences. Continued attempts to undo Morales’s legacy and restrict the participation of the MAS risk sending the country further down an uncertain and perilous road to prolonged violence and conflict.

  • The strength of the social movements backing the MAS make the stakes in this “impossible game” especially high, but Bolivia is not the only country in Latin America where recent efforts have been made to ban specific parties or candidates from participating in elections. Former Brazilian President Lula’s imprisonment on highly contested corruption charges prevented him from running for president at a time when he was leading in the polls, clearing the path for the far-right anti-establishment candidacy of Jair Bolsonaro. Ecuador and Peru both face political conflict over the electoral participation or proscription of parties associated with former president Rafael Correa, in the former, and Keiko Fujimori, in the latter.
  • Adjudicating the misdeeds that supposedly justify these disqualifications inevitably politicizes the judiciary and other oversight institutions, and the exclusion of major political currents from participating in democratic politics is deeply polarizing. The electoral proscriptions of Peronism in Argentina and the APRA party in Peru historically suggest that it is virtually impossible to stabilize democratic institutions when a country’s largest and best-organized political forces are banned from participation because elite groups, who are smaller and less densely organized, find them threatening. The Bolivian case is surely different from post-1955 Argentina, but Áñez’s backers and the MAS should not ignore the historical experiences of the region that suggest these games rarely end well.

August 12, 2020

*Santiago Anria is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies at Dickinson College, and Kenneth Roberts is Professor of Government and Director of Latin American Studies at Cornell University.

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Guyana: Victory for CARICOM?

By Wazim Mowla*

David Arthur Granger, Former President of the Republic of Guyana.

David Arthur Granger, Former President of the Republic of Guyana/ Flickr/ Creative Commons License (not modified)

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) played the critical role in bringing Guyana’s five-month political impasse over the March general elections to an end – without compromising on its longstanding principle of non-intervention – but the threat of broader international sanctions was certainly key. The grouping, which has 15 member states and five associate members, conducted the vote recount, demanded by all of Guyana’s opposition parties, and certified that Presidential challenger Mohamed Irfaan Ali of the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) won. After local and international stakeholders accepted the legitimacy of the recount, CARICOM’s institutions and individual leaders were increasingly forceful in calling for the incumbent President, David Granger, to concede defeat.

  • The initial tabulation of votes gave victory to Granger but was contested as fraudulent by the opposition parties and international observers. A high-level CARICOM team of Caribbean Prime Ministers brokered the recount agreement between Granger and opposition leader Bharrat Jagdeo. CARICOM sent a three-person team to scrutinize the recount and produced the widely accepted elections observation report, which the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), an institution of CARICOM, upheld. Granger refused to concede, however, accusing CARICOM of interfering and showing bias. He launched scathing attacks on CARICOM’s current chair, St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, who joined other CARICOM leaders in speaking out against the then-government.
  • CARICOM was not alone in demanding that Granger accept the election results. In mid-July, U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo called on him to “step aside” and announced restrictions on the U.S. visas of “individuals responsible for or complicit in undermining democracy in Guyana.” During an Organization of American States Permanent Council discussion on the Guyana crisis several days later, Secretary General Luis Almagro forcefully called for the incumbent administration to accept the recount, in which OAS observers also had a role. He said that “Guyana’s democracy remains hostage” to Granger and individuals doing his bidding.

The prime ministers who spearheaded CARICOM’s efforts in Guyana emphasized the organization’s interest in protecting democracy throughout the region, which they saw as threatened by Granger’s behavior. After the CCJ ruling on the recount, Chairman Gonsalves stated that there was a “rogue clique within Guyana [that] cannot be allowed to disrespect or disregard, with impunity, the clear unambiguous ruling of the CCJ. The time for decisive action is shortly.”

  • Keeping U.S. unilateralism at bay – consistent with CARICOM’s fundamental principles of non-intervention and sovereignty – was another important reason for CARICOM’s activism. Gonsalves saw an opportunity to promote CARICOM as a viable and sovereign organization that was capable of solving problems within its own community. He and other CARICOM leaders privately expressed concern that the longer Granger and his supporters refused to leave office, the more likely the Caribbean would see history repeat itself in the form of U.S. intervention.

CARICOM was heavily invested and influential during the crisis, and its leaders clearly deserve great credit for getting Granger to step aside so President Ali could be sworn in on August 2 and inaugurated last weekend. The long delay, however, suggests that the organization did not have enough leverage by itself to force Granger’s hand – and that pressure from the Commonwealth of Nations, the OAS, and the United States was also decisive. The additional foreign actors acquiesced in CARICOM’s authority in Guyana’s situation and based their actions on the organization’s elections reports and the CCJ ruling. CARICOM was vindicated in its insistence that the Guyana crisis remain a “community affair.”

  • If Granger had not conceded, CARICOM’s credibility and ability to hold its member states accountable during periods of democratic backsliding would have faced damaging blows. The organization would have faced an existential decision – to push even harder and potentially exceed the mandate of its Civil Society Charter, or to pull back and lose credibility. Under such a scenario, the United States and the OAS would eventually have escalated pressure, and Guyana probably would have achieved its transfer of power. But CARICOM and democratic institutions throughout the region would have emerged weaker. As Ali’s inauguration brings this stage of the Guyana crisis to a close, CARICOM has passed the test, with some outside help, and validated, for now, its fundamental belief that problems should be solved “in the family.”

August 10, 2020

* Wazim Mowla is a graduate student at American University, specializing in Caribbean Studies.

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Tough Times in Latin America

By Andrés Serbin*

Protests in Chile

Protests in Chile/ Diego Correa/ Flickr/ Creative Commons License (not modified)

The year 2019 was an annus horribilis for Latin America, but 2020 – with its pandemic and economic slowdown – has more seriously worsened an array of structural challenges that will prompt even greater instability in the post-pandemic era. Last year’s meager and slowing economic growth, barely reaching 0.1 percent, prompted social protests that shook governments on both the left and right, driving a reconfiguration of the political map of the region. This year’s challenges will affect countries differently and more deeply.

  • The Informe Iberoamérica 2020, recently published by the Fundación Alternativas in Madrid, warns of the current and looming challenges to the region. Preexisting inequality has already been affecting stability, as have the growing demands and expectations, associated with advances made in previous years, of greater redistribution, and better public policies. The worst economic performance in 60 years deepened the structural problems of a region that has generally failed to diversify and develop productive structures and overcome its excessive dependency on exports of raw materials (and on Chinese demand for them). Low confidence in political institutions and disillusionment with political elites and leaders’ ability to meet citizens’ needs (and those leaders’ subsequent delegitimization) signal a crisis of representation and steps backward for democracy.

The political polarization generated by this ominous combination of factors is not only worsening ideological fractures in society; it is reducing the region’s ability to develop responses to an international situation that also entails a complex transition: the rivalry between the United States and China is not the only driver of this process.

  • These and other extraregional actors, including Russia, Turkey, Iran, and most recently India, are increasingly making Latin America and the Caribbean, despite the region’s apparent peripheral importance, into a battlefield of geopolitical and geo-economic confrontation that is complicating its struggle to maintain some degree of autonomy from external pressures and to diversify its foreign policies.
  • Three other related factors are aggravating this multi-faceted crisis. The corruption that has traditionally characterized the elites has spread throughout Latin American societies. Military forces are reappearing as political actors in a process that is threatening weakened democratic institutions and giving rise to diverse authoritarian models. Organized crime in its various incarnations – from trafficking in drugs to trafficking in humans – is expanding.

Within this context, to the challenge of leading during a pandemic are added several monumental tasks. Leaders will confront a recession and economic crisis that threatens to ravage the most vulnerable sectors and harm the whole of society. They will be confronted by demands to restore the resilience of democracy and its weakened institutions through strategies and public policies that reflect citizens’ needs.

  • More than ever before, the region’s leaders have an incentive to develop coordinated regional strategies that efficiently deal with these problems as well as other global challenges in ways that promote Latin American and Caribbean international integration with greater autonomy and diversification. Challenges in tough times demand complex, sophisticated social contracts and a deeper regional consensus – all difficult to achieve in a polarized and fragmented region, particularly while grappling with the combined and divisive impact of the pandemic and the economic crisis.

August 3, 2020

* Andrés Serbin is an international analyst and president of the Regional Coordinator of Economic and Social Research (CRIES), a network of more than 70 research centers, think tanks, NGOs, and other organizations focused on Latin America and the Caribbean. This article is adapted from one published in Clarín.

 

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by clalsstaff on August 3, 2020  •  Permalink
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El Salvador: What Makes Gang Members Defect?

By José Miguel Cruz and Jonathan D. Rosen*

A member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang displays his tattoos inside the Chelatenango prison in El Salvador.

A member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang displays his tattoos inside the Chelatenango prison in El Salvador./ Flickr/ Creative Commons License (not modified)

In El Salvador, gang members do not quit their gangs and stop their criminal behavior in a single, clear-cut event, but rather through a process of interaction with a viable alternative, particularly religious groups. The gangs exert control over their members through a combination of benefits – such as employment, an identity, and security – and coercion and fear of the consequences of disloyalty. The gangs exert overwhelming influence over the social environment and regulate members’ lives and peer relationships on the street and in the prisons, where government policies enable them to have near-total control of individuals. Escaping that control is a difficult and dangerous process.

  • Our research, including a 112-question survey of nearly 1,200 active and former gang members in El Salvador and 24 in-depth interviews, shows that a number of factors fuel members’ desire to defect, but that exiting a gang first requires a cognitive shift that anticipates a life outside the group. The disengagement process starts with first doubts, including a critical assessment of one’s current actions, and is followed by “ anticipatory socialization” – an examination and gradual embrace of a new role. Specific experiences and activities help shape the new identity, and the process culminates in a post-exit validation.

Our surveys reveal that members grow more disillusioned with the gangs the longer they are in them. In interviews, they speak of traumatic events, such as armed threats against their families, as increasing their desire to leave – as well as their fear of the consequences of defection. Certain important life events can also influence gang members’ calculus but, according to our survey and interviews, are of secondary importance. Marriage, the reestablishment of significant relationships, parenthood, and employment are catalysts for reducing criminal behavior, but they are not themselves decisive. Age is also a factor, with adolescence being the period in which social embeddedness can be deepest, but longevity can weaken it.

  • Religious affiliation emerged as the single strongest predictor of members’ disengagement intentions. Our research confirmed that most active members who express the intention to defect are Evangelical Christians. Those individuals are two times more likely to consider leaving the gang than those without religious affiliation. Importantly, religious participation enables them to see others who have effectively and safely separated from gangs, making potential defectors three times more likely to harbor such intentions.
  • Evangelicalism seems to be the only kind of disengagement approved by the gangs. Indeed, a gang member who defected when he was 25 years old told us, “The only way that you can leave is through the Church.” Another said, “If you are a true Christian, [the gang leaders] do not harm you. But if you become a Christian just for the sake of leaving the gang, they order to kill you or beat you up.”

Life events that in other countries serve as “hooks for change” – incidents that prompt members to defect – do not appear to be as relevant in the initial stages of disengagement in El Salvador. Drivers that other studies show to be key, such as finding a job, establishing a stable relationship, or having a child, have less impact in El Salvador apparently because of the gangs’ pervasive influence in people’s daily lives – influence difficult to escape. These events do not necessarily occur outside the reach of the gangs, which often control the environment under which deserters have to survive. In addition, time in prison, which in many contexts increases members’ desire to quit, does not stimulate defections because the gangs’ near-total control over Salvadoran prisons makes defection there nearly impossible.

  • With Evangelical Pentecostalism providing the most viable – and the only gang-tolerated – way out, government and non-governmental organizations seeking to encourage defections may be tempted to promote the churches and fund their outreach to gang members. Our research suggests, however, that the crucial point might not only be the religious orientation of churches, but their ability to share the social spaces that the gang inhabits. To the extent that other NGOs can also access those spaces and being accepted by the community, they may give gang members some additional opportunities for disengagement – subject of our ongoing research.
  • Identity-based theory attributes the defectors’ actions to the emotional experience of guilt and conversion, but the differential associations – particularly meeting other successful defectors – provided by affiliation with the religious groups turn out to be significantly more important. Gang members yearn for the alternative social support systems that family, employment, and new neighbors – and government programs – cannot provide.

July 27, 2020

* José Miguel Cruz is Professor and Director of Research at the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center, Florida International University, and Jonathan D. Rosen is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Holy Family University. Their full article is Mara Forever? Factors associated with gang disengagement in El Salvador.

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OAS: More of the Same in Almagro’s Second Term?

By Fulton Armstrong

Luis Almagro, OAS Secretary General

Luis Almagro, OAS Secretary General/ OEA – OAS/ Flickr/ Creative Commons License (not modified)

OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro pledged “an active OAS with clear objectives on the regional political and democratic agenda” upon his inauguration to a second term on May 27, but unfulfilled priorities of his first term and the COVID‑19 crisis appear likely to overshadow any new initiatives. In his address, Almagro boasted that the OAS is “once again the Organization that is the main political forum of the Americas” and said it “must normalize democracy as the ideal political system for the Hemisphere, without discussion or exceptions.” He also spoke of the need to strengthen social inclusion and support “those most vulnerable to poverty who face injustice and discrimination.” He did not use the occasion to announce any concrete proposals.

  • The pandemic has made evident how fragile democracy in the region is. Several governments in the Americas have resorted to undemocratic practices and temporary breaks in Constitutional order. In Puerto Rico, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Peru, and Chile, police have used disproportionate violence to control protests or enforce pandemic regulations. Although the OAS General Secretariat issued guidelines on how to apply extraordinary measures in a manner that complies with the Inter-American Democratic Charter, the organization has been silent on violations.

Almagro’s deeply personal role in efforts to promote regime change in Venezuela dominated his first-term agenda but did not yield concrete results. His initiatives to drive change in Nicaragua have also failed to achieve stated goals. Even though many member nations are deeply critical of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, critics argue that Almagro’s actions, often without formal consultation with the Permanent Council, have been excessive and harmed the OAS’s credibility – particularly at a time that the United States has been pushing parallel efforts as part of a revival of its 19th-century Monroe Doctrine.

  • Almagro’s inaction in other areas has raised doubts in some quarters about his and the OAS’s impartiality. He has been silent on the excesses of Brazilian President Bolsonaro in political and environmental matters; on human rights violations during Chile’s protests last year; and on U.S. and Mexican cooperation on migration, which many experts say have led to systematic violation of asylum-seekers’ rights. He acquiesced in Honduras’s decision to shut down MACCIH, the anti-corruption and anti-impunity mechanism he personally helped fashion, suggesting that his commitment to the transparency and accountability it was supposed to force was weaker than his rhetoric. The OAS’s assessments of the Bolivian elections last October, which gave an international imprimatur to the military removal of President Evo Morales, has also raised questions about whether his commitment is to democratic process or regime change in left-leaning countries.
  • The OAS has also been largely missing in action in facing the health and economic threats posed by COVID‑19. Central America, through SICA, tried to develop a subregional strategy in the early days of the pandemic, and Mercosur presidents had important conversations about possible measures to take. Almagro said recently that the OAS had been “quick to leverage our platform for greater coordination … between the states for sharing best practices and models for a successful response,” but the organization has largely remained on the sidelines.

Many of Latin America’s problems are structural, have deep historic roots, and defy ready solutions that any Secretary General could drive. Almagro’s statements suggest continuation of the relatively narrow focus of his first term – heavy on driving political change in leftist countries that coincide with policy priorities of the United States and right-leaning governments in the hemisphere. Reducing poverty and increasing inclusion seem significantly lower priorities. Leftist and left-leaning governments will continue to grumble about the tilt toward interventionism under Almagro, notably his endorsement in principle of military action to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, but fatigue and more compelling issues, such as the pandemic, probably will blunt challenges to his approach.

  • The pandemic, however, is a good opportunity for the OAS to pivot toward implementation of a collective defense of democracy that reduces partiality, confrontation, and ideological drifts; stresses impartiality, mediation, and neutrality; and addresses the underlying challenges of economic and political inequality. 

July 20, 2020

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The Bolsonaro-Trump Relationship: Costs for Brazilian Values and Interests

By Laís Forti Thomaz and Tullo Vigevani*

Bolsonaro and Trump

Jair Bolsonaro (L) shakes hands with Donald Trump (R) at the White House in 2019/ Palácio do Planalto/ Flickr/ Creative Commons License (not modified)

New priorities in Brazil-U.S. bilateral relations since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in January 2019 have shifted the country away from its longstanding diplomatic values. In his eagerness to demonstrate a strong capacity to reach international deals, Bolsonaro has made concessions in talks that haven’t produced concrete benefits for Brazil.

  • Talks on a proposed merger of Boeing and Embraer ended when the U.S. company walked away from the table. Negotiations with the United States on the use of U.S. technology in space launches from the Alcântara Launch Center have been inconclusive – even after reaching the Alcântara Technological Safeguards Agreement (AST) and the Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation Agreement (RDT&E). Brazil granted a visa waiver to U.S. travelers without any reciprocity for Brazilian citizens visiting the United States. Even the government’s interest in joining the OECD has been controversial: its candidacy required Brazil to abandon its developing-country status at the WTO, and the Trump Administration then gave priority for OECD accession to Argentina.
  • In trade, for years Brazil has been one of the few countries in the world that has maintained a steady deficit with the United States. The expansion of quotas on ethanol and wheat from Brazil in favor of the U.S. (without opening the market for Brazilian agricultural commodities like sugar) and steel and aluminum tariffs are examples of unbalanced trade issues. The Brazil-U.S. Commission on Economic and Trade Relations has been negotiating various rules, but tariffs are not on the table. USTR Robert Lighthizer has stated, moreover, that the Administration doesn’t have “any plans right now for an FTA with Brazil.” A new “mini” trade deal supported by the Brazil-U.S. Business Council and the American Chamber of Commerce in Brazil may be forthcoming, but there is no evidence that it will better distribute the benefits of trade between the two countries.
  • When Trump mentions countries with the worst performance in combating COVID-19, he highlights Brazil and supports measures to prevent Brazilians from entering the United States.

The Bolsonaro Administration does not appear troubled by these failures, despite Brazil’s unilateral concessions, because they parallel the President’s worldview. Bolsonaro’s philosophical approach to foreign affairs is not far from the idea of the Monroe Doctrine and the realist theories that prevailed during the Cold War, but this time against China. The inclusion of Brazil as a major non-NATO ally can be seen in this logic. His team considers a close relationship with the Trump Administration as essential to Brazil in order to achieve its economic, strategic, and political objectives.

  • Bolsonaro and his advisors may also believe their responsibility is diluted by the fact that most of the recent agreements emerge from negotiations that started in previous Administrations, especially during Michel Temer’s 28 months in office preceding Bolsonaro’s inauguration in 2019. But the way that Bolsonaro concluded these agreements reversed key elements of traditional Brazilian diplomacy. Among them are the prominence of the advocacy of multilateralism, opposition to any kind of unilateralism, and respect for international law and sovereignty. Former Brazilian foreign ministers serving presidents of all major political parties since 1990 have issued a statement regretting this shift away from Brazilian allegiance to international institutions.

As with his embrace of chloroquine as a COVID‑19 treatment, Bolsonaro seems to believe that Trump’s solutions to bi-national problems are in Brazil’s interest. The resulting alignment with Washington borders on subservience – harming Brazil’s other strategic partnerships and strong foreign policy principles. Brazil is drifting away from Latin America, especially Argentina, as well as from the BRICS countries. The government is also neglecting Mercosur, despite the collective’s recent agreement with the European Union. Some European countries, concerned about Brazilian government policies on the environment and Amazon rainforest preservation, have been questioning Bolsonaro’s attitudes and cooling on the deal. While the Brazilian Constitution gives priority to peaceful relations with all countries, members of the Bolsonaro cabinet have suggested supporting a possible invasion of Venezuela.

  • The lack of concrete benefits for Brazil from the U.S. relationship does not appear likely to drive a reassessment of Bolsonaro’s approach. Similarly, the government’s Trump-like confrontations with a large part of the international community, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations (UN), show no sign of diminishing despite their high costs. Brazil and the United States have been strategic partners – as Presidents Lula da Silva and George W. Bush reaffirmed in 2005 when establishing a new strategic dialogue – yet the two countries’ current presidents have disrupted the terms of this relationship in ways that will take years, if not decades, to mend.

July 13, 2020

*Laís F. Thomaz is Professor at the Federal University of Goiás (UFG). Tullo Vigevani is Professor at the State University of São Paulo (Unesp) and researcher of the Center of Contemporary Culture Studies (CEDEC). Both are researchers at the National Institute of Science and Technology for Studies on the United States (INCT-INEU).

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U.S. Fails to Consider “Best Interests” of Child Migrants

By Eric Hershberg*

Child sitting down on a grass field

The lack of a “best interests” standard in the U.S. Government’s handling of child migrants subjects the children to enduring harm and skews their chances of fair adjudication of their immigration cases. Its absence is aggravated by recent U.S. policies under which a majority of children and families are unable to present protection claims which they are legally entitled to make.

  • The best interests principle is nearly universally accepted. It is enshrined in a vast body of domestic law, such as when determining the home in which to place a child, and in various international human rights instruments. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which has the force of law in the 196 countries that have ratified it, states that “in all actions concerning children … the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”

The United States is the sole country not to ratify the CRC, but – as a signatory – it pledged not to act in a manner that undermines the best interests principle. Since the late 1990s, the U.S. Government has, on the whole, allowed practices incorporating best interests principles to gain considerable momentum – until the Administration of President Donald Trump brought such efforts to an abrupt halt. Soon after taking office in 2017, the Administration began stripping away the limited safeguards that leaders of both political parties had, albeit sometimes reluctantly, allowed to emerge over the previous two decades.

  • Trump Administration policies have aimed to deter child and family migrants by forcing them either to suffer confinement in increasingly inhumane conditions in detention facilities or await their case outcomes in Mexico. The Administration has steadily sought to erode the baseline protections in the 1997 “Flores Settlement,” which set standards for the detention, release, and treatment of minors. It has ignored the Flores provisions that detained children be held only in “safe and sanitary” facilities and within strict time limits. (U.S. courts having stymied the Administration’s efforts to detain children and families indefinitely.) Other policies have limited the number of migrants allowed to enter the United States each day and have forced families to wait out the immigration process in Mexico rather than be released into local communities.
  • For those children and families undeterred by these obstacles, another set of policies has stacked on requirements that effectively zero out their ability to prevail on their claims for protection. The effort began as a narrowing of the substantive criteria for asylum but, over the last year, has become a de facto ban on asylum for Central American children. Though courts again have played a critical role in thwarting many Administration’s efforts, one failed policy is quickly replaced with another even more drastic attempt to shut off all avenues for relief.

While the Trump Administration has taken rejection of the best interests principle to an extreme, no U.S. President has been willing or able to provide strong leadership in guaranteeing the protections to migrant children that U.S. domestic law affords citizens and residents. Widespread perceptions fed by the Administration that migrants are gaming the system make serious discussion of solutions extremely difficult. Policymakers and immigration officials often claim that embracing the best interests principle would create an open border. But respect for children’s best interests can co-exist with a full and fair adjudicative process. It simply guarantees children’s protection, family integrity, and wellbeing during and after a just determination process – even in the face of rejection of their petitions. Rather than updating the U.S. immigration infrastructure and building regional cooperation ensuring children’s well-being, the Trump Administration has further widened the divide between international and domestic child protection laws and U.S. immigration policy.

  • With the underlying drivers of migration remaining strong and likely to spike as the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic hits Central America, the gap between principle and policy will have ever greater consequences for children, whose best interests are increasingly trampled. The repercussions are enormous, according to numerous studies. For children who are already vulnerable, ongoing family separations are traumatic experiences with potentially long-term implications for their physical and mental health. Unsanitary conditions in detention centers were dangerous even before the pandemic. Inadequate access to food, drinking water, clean clothing, and daily necessities – soap, toothbrushes, and towels – has been well documented. Psychologists fear that these children will struggle throughout their lives, be it in the United States or in their native countries.

July 6, 2020

* Eric Hershberg is the Director of CLALS. The report In Children’s Best Interests: Charting a Child-Sensitive Approach to U.S. Immigration Policy (click here for the full report), based on a joint symposium held in February with over 300 participants. The full program and video recordings are here.

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The Perils of Quédate en Casa: COVID-19 and Gender Violence in Latin America

By Brenda Werth*

Women performing "A Rapist in Your Path" holding up signs

A Rapist in Your Path – Brasília/ Mídia NINJA/ Flickr/ Creative Commons License (not modified)

Stay-at-home orders during the COVID‑19 pandemic have had a devastating impact on women in Latin America and brought mass protests against gender violence to a screeching, and troubling, halt. Since the foundational march of NiUnaMenos in June 2015 in Buenos Aires, Latin American activists have revolutionized protest against gender violence in a spectacularly public way, bringing together hundreds of thousands of women and allies on the streets of major cities to denounce gender violence and demand protection of gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights. Since its debut last November, the flashmob Un violador en tu camino (A Rapist in Your Path), created by the Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis, has been performed in more than 200 cities around the world, decrying the role of the state and police in perpetuating gender violence.

  • Even as the coronavirus began to spread, movements against gender violence continued to expand. In March, millions of women marched to commemorate International Women’s Day to demand an end to femicide and gender inequality. In Madrid, among the posters condemning gender violence were some declaring “The patriarchy kills more than the coronavirus.” By March 15, however, Spain was on lockdown, and by the end of the month most Latin American countries had instituted either partial or total lockdowns. Suddenly, slogans condemning gender violence and demanding gender equality were replaced by the urgent message for people to stay home: “Quédate en casa.”

The stay-at-home orders have had severe consequences for women across the globe. In Latin America, where seven out of 10 femicides take place in the home, the weeks following the institution of quarantines saw surges in the reporting of domestic violence, primarily against women, children, and LGBTQ individuals. Calls to domestic violence hotlines increased 40 percent in Argentina, 60 percent in Mexico, and over 90 percent in Colombia. Financial precarity, unemployment, and lack of access to child and eldercare all exacerbated preexisting gender inequalities, creating a “perfect storm” for domestic violence.

  • Quarantines have proven crucial and effective in countering the health threat posed by coronavirus, but they have left victims of gender violence trapped under the same roof with their abusers. One unintended effect of quarantine is the reinforcement of the perception of domestic abuse as a private, family affair, separate from the public sphere, and excluded from the jurisdiction of the state.

Government responses to the increased domestic violence in Latin America have varied tremendously, ranging from acknowledgment to denial of the crisis.

  • Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta, Argentina’s Minister of Women, Genders and Diversity, has issued a resolution explicitly allowing individuals to leave quarantine in order to seek assistance and protection against domestic violence. The Argentine government has also collaborated in building innovative campaigns blending awareness of both pandemics – gender violence and COVID‑19. The Barbijo Rojo (red mask) campaign refers to a code word women may employ when talking to pharmacists to let them know they are at risk of harm and unable to seek out help.
  • In comparison, denial has guided Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s response. His government has failed to implement any major policy changes to address the increase in gender violence during COVID‑19, and he has maintained that 90 percent of calls to domestic violence hotlines are false. According to AMLO, Mexico does not have the same problem as other cultures with domestic violence because “the Mexican family is exceptional.” The government’s campaign to address domestic violence during quarantine, Cuenta hasta 10, asks family members to “count until ten” before expressing anger in the home. According to Lulú Barrera, the campaign lacks “gender perspective” by disregarding the structural causes of gender violence and ultimately puts women at risk by asking them to sacrifice their wellbeing to maintain peace in the home.

While the health pandemic has highlighted the dire need for movements like NiUnaMenos and messages like that of  Un violador en tu camino to continue and expand, stay-at-home orders have halted collective public mobilizations and forced women to return to the private sphere of their homes. The movements have radically transformed awareness and perceptions of gender violence over the last five years, but the current crisis, including the alarming increase in domestic violence, shows the gender-violence pandemic remains strong and could get worse. Protecting public health through stay-at-home orders should not neglect the need to protect women. Solutions must be jointly envisioned and enacted by public health experts, activists, and political leaders.

June 29, 2020

* Brenda Werth is Associate Professor and Department Chair, World Languages and Cultures, at American University.

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by clalsstaff on June 29, 2020  •  Permalink
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U.S.-Latin America Policy According to John Bolton

By Eric Hershberg and Fulton Armstrong

John Bolton

John Bolton/ Gage Skidmore/ Flickr/ Creative Commons License (not modified)

Former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton’s memoir highlights his differences with President Trump and several government agencies over tactics for achieving regime change in Venezuela. It confirms, however, that they share an embrace of the Monroe Doctrine that has survived his departure from government. The book, published this week, is Bolton’s version of his 17 months in the Trump Administration. The chapter on Venezuela is 34 pages long and, while confirming much about the Administration’s disdain for the law and longstanding practices in U.S. foreign policy, provides new insights.

  • Bolton’s pledge in November 2018 to rid the hemisphere of the “Troika of Tyranny” – Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua – reflected a consensus in the Administration, and he attributes the alliterative trope to a Trump speechwriter. But as the policy gained momentum, the Treasury Department and State Department wanted to go slow on some of the more draconian sanctions against Venezuela that he pushed.
  • Bolton puts the best face possible on Venezuelan National Assembly President Juan Guaidó and his claim to the national presidency in January 2019. He credits the Venezuelan opposition entirely for conceiving and initiating the maneuver, even though circumstantial evidence, including the advanced U.S. efforts to build international support for it, suggests otherwise.
  • Tellingly, he says his initial reaction to the country’s repeated waves of electricity outages was that it was the opposition’s work, although he then posits that they resulted from government incompetence and underinvestment, leaving open the possibility that they resulted from an intelligence operation. (Bolton would be violating his secrecy commitments if he admitted as much.)
  • Bolton reports that President Trump consistently argued that Guaidó – whom he called “this kid” – was a lightweight incapable of wrestling control from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
  • Trump was the strongest proponent of military intervention to remove the Venezuelan from office. But Trump also felt he could deal with Maduro as he did with Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-un. He flip-flopped again last weekend. On Friday he told Axios that he “would maybe think about [meeting Maduro],” suggesting openness to dialogue, but on Monday he tweeted that he “would only meet with Maduro to discuss one thing: a peaceful exit from power!”

Bolton barely registers the contributions of Latin American and European governments in support of the American position on the Venezuela issue or the advancement of a negotiated solution.

  • The position of the “Lima Group” on Venezuela gets only a passing mention, although the group’s support was arguably a historic signal of Latin American acquiescence in Washington intervention in the region. The OAS got a backhanded compliment: “Even the Organization of American States, one of the most moribund international organizations (and that’s saying something), was roused to help Guaidó.”
  • Although Norway had been arranging negotiations between Maduro and Guaidó representatives for eight months by the time Bolton resigned as National Security Advisor in September 2019, the book makes little mention of the effort. Nor does it mention U.S. actions that – by design or not – obstructed the talks. The work of Elliott Abrams, the Administration’s special envoy for Venezuela, also gets no serious treatment.

Bolton is gone, but his vision for U.S.-Latin America relations, including revival of the Monroe Doctrine as rationale for Washington’s actions, remains robust. The Administration has nominated the senior director that Bolton brought to the NSC to work on the region, a protégé of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, to be President of the Inter-American Development Bank, a perch from which he can exercise influence for five years even if Trump leaves office in January 2021. If the aide is elected, it would break with the tradition of having non-U.S. presidents at the Bank. A half dozen retired Latin American presidents have expressed opposition to that, but Ecuador’s government has labeled the nomination as “very positive,” and Bolivian President Jeanine Áñez, who took office with U.S. approval after the military forced out President Evo Morales last November, has welcomed it enthusiastically.

  • The Pentagon will not be enthusiastic about military action to remove President Maduro. But some officials have referred to the two paramilitary contractors captured seven weeks ago during the ill-fated “invasion” of Venezuela and six dual-national CITGO employees arrested in 2017 for alleged corruption as “hostages” – a possible pretext for some sort of action that, as Bolton so fervently hoped during his tenure, would prompt the Venezuelan military to finally switch sides.

June 23, 2020

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by clalsstaff on June 23, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on June 23, 2020

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El Salvador: Unwilling to Face Up to the Past

By Héctor Silva Ávalos*

Mural of the martyrs of the UCA

Mural of the martyrs of the UCA/ GuanacoSolido503/ Wikimedia Commons/ Creative Commons License (not modified)

The trial of Salvadoran Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano, which began last week in Madrid, provides El Salvador a historic opportunity to learn from the past and reduce impunity in the future, but the government and elites appear unlikely to seize it. Montano is the only defendant in the trial for the murders of six Jesuit priests, five of them Spanish nationals, and two domestic staff on the campus of the Central American University in November 1989. The eight were killed by a Salvadoran Army unit trained by U.S. advisors in what was the last massacre of El Salvador’s civil war (1980-1992) and the first great cover-up by the Salvadoran judicial system of the post-war period, starting with evidence-tampering and later other obstructionism by then-President Freddy Cristiani.

  • In the 31 years since, successive presidents, attorneys general, and supreme courts have failed to prosecute the Salvadoran military high command for ordering the murder of the Jesuits and their helpers. Not even the two FMLN presidents, who governed from 2009 to 2019, took judicial action despite promises to seek justice for them. President Mauricio Funes, the first of them, actually protected a group of former high-ranking military officers that a Spanish Justice alleges were masterminds of the massacre.
  • Despite the country’s political progress since the war, the failure to bring the perpetrators to account has bred a system in which even younger Salvadorans have been raised believing that it is best not to mess with the wounds of the past. People are afraid to condemn impunity, which remains one of the country’s most enduring and democracy-threatening challenges.

President Nayib Bukele, who was elected last year as an outsider committed to ending the corruption of both the FMLN and its conservative counterpart, ARENA (1989‑2009), appears reluctant to grasp the Madrid trial as a way to promote accountability and end impunity. He so far has not made a public statement about it and in recent months has increasingly relied on the corrupt and authoritarian institutions whose legacy is on trial. Some of the police officers, lawyers, and politicians that were part of the cover-up are still active in El Salvador. Some police officials who obstructed the Jesuit investigation are now high-ranking officers in the Policía Nacional Civil (PNC) and, according to a variety of evidence, continue to promote a culture of impunity.

  • Bukele and his ARENA and FMLN counterparts in Congress are occupied in a never-ending confrontation over the COVID‑19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis. Moreover, the President’s security agenda, focused on crushing the gangs, has followed the path of his predecessors, giving the military enhanced powers and nudging the civilian police force back to its military roots. Bukele’s chief of police recently appeared in public wearing a military uniform, possibly violating laws passed in 1992 in fulfillment of the Peace Accords.

These political compromises and alliances and competing priorities seem likely to keep El Salvador from embracing the historic opportunity presented by the Madrid trial – not just to bring justice to the victims of the UCA massacre, but to address the entrenched culture of impunity that has marked Salvadoran politics and its justice system for decades.

  • The United States, the Organization of American States (OAS), and others advocating human rights and transparency also seem likely to miss the opportunity the trial gives them to promote their stated values. The views of political players in Washington today reflect the same schizophrenia visible in the 1980s – with Democrats on Capitol Hill pushing for investigations into the massacres while the Republican Administrations allied themselves with the government and military. (The George H.W. Bush Administration even acquiesced in the harassment of witnesses, including a U.S. military official, who offered important information about the Salvadoran Army’s role in the Jesuit murders.) During the Obama Administration, the State Department gave key support to the extradition of Montano to Spain. Washington risks, once again, overlooking its own responsibilities in these horrible crimes of the past and the damage done to Central America’s fragile democracies.

June 16, 2020

* Héctor Silva Ávalos is a senior researcher and editor at InSight Crime and former CLALS fellow.

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by clalsstaff on June 16, 2020  •  Permalink
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