Atlas Obscura: How a Guatemalan Town Tackled Its Plastic Problem

Before 2016, San Pedro La Laguna was drowning in plastic pollution that was threatening the fragile ecosystem of Lake Atitlán. The dire need for change crystallized when a solid waste disposal processing plant that was expected to manage a decade of waste was halfway full within six months, mostly with single-use plastics. Rather than build a larger plant—which would’ve been an enormous financial burden on the town and further polluted the lake with debris—Mayor Mauricio Méndez decided to implement a stringent municipal law to encourage lasting, sustainable change. [...]

Villagers initially resisted, as they’d become accustomed to using materials that were now outlawed. To get rid of the single-use plastics already in circulation, leaders of the 13,000-person town went from house to house to talk with villagers about waste management. Residents were wary because they couldn’t afford to purchase biodegradable replacements. The government relieved the community members’ financial burden by collecting all plastic and styrofoam items and trading them for reusable or biodegradable alternatives, completely free-of-charge. [...]

Economic sanctions punish anyone who breaks the law. Individuals must pay 300 GTQ ($40)—a hefty amount considering Guatemala’s average lower-middle-class annual income is $1,619. Companies that use the banned materials face a fine of 15,000 GTQ ($1,940).

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The Guardian: Criminalisation of sex work normalises violence, review finds

The review, by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, found that sex workers suffering repressive policing – including arrest, imprisonment and extortion by officers – were three times more likely to experience sexual or physical violence from a client and were twice as likely to have HIV or another sexually transmitted infection as those who lived in countries where sex work was tolerated. [...]

Their health and safety were at risk not only in countries where sex work was criminalised, but also in Canada, which has introduced the “Nordic model” pioneered by Sweden, under which the client can be arrested for a criminal offence, but not the sex worker. [...]

France, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Norway, the Republic of Ireland and Sweden also criminalise the client. Guatemala, Mexico, Turkey and the US state of Nevada have regulated sex work, which allows better conditions for some, but worse for the many who operate outside the regulated arrangements. [...]

New Zealand is the only country to have decriminalised sex work, in 2003, although it is not legal for migrants. Sex workers said they were more able to refuse clients and insist on condom use, while relationships with police were better. “We always have police coming up and down the street every night,” said one woman. “We’d even have them coming over to make sure that we were all right and making sure … that we’ve got minders and that they were taking registration plates and the identity of the clients. So … it changed the whole street, it’s changed everything.”

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Jacobin Magazine: Latin America’s Re-Militarization

Law No. 13.491, passed by the Brazilian Congress in October 2017, gives military courts jurisdiction over their personnel accused of human rights violations. Prior to the law’s approval, the Ministry of Defense publicly made the case that allowing civilian courts to handle such cases would hinder policing operations. Michel Temer’s administration increasingly used the armed forces for domestic policing duties, whether in rural areas against land rights activists or in the favelas and peripheries of major cities.

Brazil’s 2008 “pacification” policy led to the deployment of military personnel to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and the militarization of policing intensified in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic games. According to Human Rights Watch, thousands of civilians are killed by the military and police each year. The new Ministry for Public Security, created in February, is led by an army general, and in May the Brazilian military was deployed in response to the nationwide truckers’ strike that blockaded highways. This was the first time the military had been used in this way since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985.[...]

Brazil is not alone in militarizing its justice system. Military courts are increasingly asserting jurisdiction throughout Latin America. In June 2015, Colombia passed a bill similar to the one adopted in Brazil, shifting jurisdiction for most crimes committed by members of the military to the military courts. The Constitutional Court struck down the first two iterations of the bill, but the government was determined to make the change and crafted a slightly narrower law that has since taken effect. Since 2005, Venezuela has been using military courts extensively to prosecute civilians involved in protests against the government. In Chile, cases of human rights violations committed by the military are still tried in military courts. [....]

Many politicians have run on platforms promising to be “tough on crime” and have deployed the military to conduct domestic policing operations, as in Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Elected leaders, seeking to deliver results for their voters in fighting drug trafficking and gang violence, are turning to their militaries and equipping them with increased legal powers.

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CityLab: On Weaponizing Migration

The menace that has triggered this show of force is an unarmed group of migrants—at least half of whom are women and children—several hundred miles away. Most are attempting to flee violence and escape poverty in Central America; a smaller subset are people who have been previously deported from the U.S., and want to return to their families in America. Such migrant caravans aren’t new: In the past, activists from Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a group that has been providing humanitarian aide and legal help to migrants for 15 years, have assembled these groups in order to ensure safer passage to the U.S. and draw attention to the conditions they face in their home countries.[...]

Historians trace the origins of today’s refugee crisis from Central America to the Cold War policies of President Ronald Reagan. The rhetoric has parallels too. In 1983, Reagan warned Americans that if they rejected his plan to send military and economic aid to Central America, “a tidal wave of refugees” would come crashing onto the borders. “This time they’ll be ‘feet people’ and not ‘boat people’ —swarming into our country,” he said at the time. More recently, Barack Obama and David Cameron have also used words like “waves” and “swarms” to suggest vast numbers of outsiders coming ashore, overwhelming American towns and cities. [...]

In an interview with Public Radio International, Professor Gregory Lee at the University of Lyon called this narrative of a nation being consumed by refugees the “inundation” metaphor. His own research explores its usage in the context of immigration restrictions on Asians in the late 19th and early 20th century. The passage of these laws required the portrayal of Asians as the unassimilable other—a group that would drain American society and pose existential threats to its culture. Hence, the racist, dehumanizing terms “yellow peril” and “Asiatic horde.” Fast forward to post-9/11 America, and the same tropes persist for Muslim and Arabs living in the U.S.[...]

When it comes to migration, Americans across the political isle share misconceptions. Simply correcting them will not be enough. “What those who seek to oppose Trump’s migration policies need is a compelling narrative of their own,” Greenhill writes in Foreign Affairs, “one that takes voter concerns seriously, defining problems responsibly and offering comprehensible and attainable solutions.“

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The Intercept‎: El Salvador Is Trying to Stop Gang Violence. But the Trump Administration Keeps Pushing Failed “Iron Fist” Policing.

But while Trump and many in his administration act as though Salvadoran gangs exist due to a lack of toughness, parts of the U.S. federal government in Central America — which for years enabled the implementation of exactly the kind of policy Trump calls for now — have recognized that mano dura has failed. “It’s a policy that did not have positive results,” said Enrique Roig, former coordinator of the Central America Regional Security Initiative for the U.S. Agency for International Development, a major vehicle for U.S. funds to the region. “The whole intention to focus more on the prevention side, on respectful law enforcement,” was to correct the mistakes of the past, like “the use of incarceration as the main method of dealing with the problem.” It is also meant to build “relationships of trust between communities and police, so people in communities actually report crime, and police know what’s happening by responding in a way that’s respectful of human rights.” [...]

El Salvador, like most countries, has long had disaffected kids in poor communities who create gangs – Salvadoran anthropologist Juan José Martínez D’Aubuisson dates the earliest gangs to the 1950s, when state modernization prompted a disorganized mass internal migration to urban centers. What appeared were neighborhood or schoolyard crews defending their honor and territory with fistfights and knives. Throughout the mid-1990s and early 2000s, the homegrown crews meshed with the violent legacy of a recently ended civil war — and with U.S. street gang culture, which arrived among the tens of thousands of Salvadorans deported from the United States during that time. According to the FBI, many of those deportees were members of two gangs formed in the U.S. and composed mostly of embattled Salvadoran war refugees: the Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, and Barrio 18. [...]

That policy was backed by law in October 2012, when the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated MS-13 a “transnational criminal organization,” adding the gang to a list alongside terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. Many experts dispute the extent and reach of the gangs’ transnational activities, including cross-border drug trafficking, arguing that most cliques are made up of kids from the country’s poorest neighborhoods who barely manage to feed themselves. Still, the designation set into motion a chain of possibilities for the U.S. government. For one thing, it enabled INL to open a field office in the country, which would be impossible without the presence of an officially designated transnational criminal group. In 2016, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement built an entire cross-border strategy around the designation, “deploying special agents to El Salvador” who would work with the Salvadoran National Civil Police to chase the gang’s assets and act on a “free flow of actionable intelligence between ICE and our host country law enforcement partners.” [...]

That analysis remained sidelined until 2015, when thousands of Central American children fleeing violence showed up at the southern U.S. border. Faced with the children, the Obama administration investigated the causes of emigration. In all three countries, it found systemic corruption. In Guatemala, there were conflicts over natural resources that were sometimes drug-fueled and often disproportionately affected native people; in Honduras and El Salvador, what stuck out was violence from narcos and gangs. The administration’s investigation led to a new openness toward tertiary prevention — a shocking move on the ground in El Salvador. Jones from Catholic Relief Services remembered thinking at the time that State Department visitors “are very open right now. … They are seriously exploring what can we fund that will work.”

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The Atlantic: There Is No Immigration Crisis

I think this argument is wrong. It’s wrong because it conflates good politics with good policy. It may be true that Democrats would benefit politically by taking a harder line on illegal immigration, as Bill Clinton benefitted in the 1990s by taking a harder line on welfare and crime. I’m not sure. The contention is plausible but difficult to prove. Regardless, family detention is a terrible response to a largely fictitious crisis. It would be lovely if shrewd politics and sound policy always went hand in hand. But it’s important for commentators to acknowledge that, often, they don’t. [...]

There’s some truth to this. As the Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner has shown, using data from the American National Election Study, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney among voters with negative views of undocumented immigrants. And, crucially, he did no worse among voters with positive views. In Klinkner’s words, “Trump won in 2016 by mobilizing the minority of Americans with anti-immigration views—but only because he avoided an offsetting counter-mobilization by the majority of Americans with pro-immigration views.” [...]

Frum, Sullivan, and Zakaria think Democrats need a middle path. They should oppose Trump’s most brutal policies while more clearly acknowledging public anxiety about illegal immigration and endorsing measures to stop it. The theory, presumably, is that such a strategy could lure back some white voters who flipped from Obama to Trump over immigration without depressing turnout among the Democrats’ pro-immigrant, young, progressive, and minority base. In the hands of a gifted candidate, this might work. Bill Clinton appeased white voters in 1992 and 1996 with his punitive stances on welfare and crime while still galvanizing a large liberal and African American turnout. Barack Obama took a harder rhetorical line against illegal immigration in 2012 than Hillary Clinton took in 2016 yet won a larger share of the Latino vote. As I’ve noted previously, Democrats might benefit from emphasizing the virtues of assimilation, and focusing on helping immigrants learning English, thus counteracting Trump’s claim that immigration undermines national unity. [...]

This is misleading. Over the last decade, illegal immigration has been going down. Between 1983 and 2006, according to the Border Patrol, the United States apprehended roughly one million—and sometimes as many as 1.5 million—undocumented immigrants per year along America’s southwest border (where the vast majority of undocumented migrants cross). That number steadily dwindled during Obama’s presidency. In fiscal year 2016 (which began in October 2015 and ended in September 2016), it was 408,000—less than half the number in 2009.  [...]

But the evidence for this argument is weak. In a 2007 study of undocumented Mexican migrants, Wayne A. Cornelius of the University of California at San Diego and Idean Salehyan of the University of North Texas found that “tougher border controls have had remarkably little influence on the propensity to migrate illegally to the USA.” Surveying the academic literature for The Washington Post this March, Anna Oltman of the University of Wisconsin at Madison noted that, “researchers increasingly find that deterrence has only a weak effect on reducing unauthorized immigration.” A weak effect isn’t no effect. Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies probably contributed to the drop in border crossings last year. Yet those numbers are now returning to their pre-Trump levels. In early April, in an effort to push them back down, the Trump administration announced that it would separate parents and children. Yet the number of apprehensions in both April and May was almost identical to the number in March.

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The Atlantic: Nikki Haley's New Best Friends at the UN

The invite list includes seven countries, mainly on Pacific islands and in Central America, plus one in Africa, that joined the U.S. and Israel in voting “no.” That’s not necessarily the set of guests one would expect at an American influence party, since America’s main treaty allies in Europe and Asia didn’t vote with Washington. (Also invited were the 35 countries that abstained, even though some, like Canada, reportedly abstained as a snub to the U.S. One hundred and twenty-eight countries voted “yes” and will not be invited.) But the friends list may not be so much a reflection of American influence as Haley’s invitation would suggest. In most of the cases, Israeli diplomacy has been softening the ground for this decision for years, even as President Donald Trump’s America First policy alienates world leaders. The vote, in other words, may say more about Israel’s global standing than America’s. [...]

Three of the Pacific island states almost certainly would have been invited to the friendship party in any case. The Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau have historic relationships with the U.S. dating back to the period after World War II, when they were under formal American control. They are now sovereign countries, but they have kept up close ties with the U.S. under “Free Association” agreements with Washington. Those countries get U.S. aid and other benefits, and in exchange, they vote in near lock-step with Washington at the UN. Those agreements have been in place for decades and, for the most part, still have years to run. In other words, it would have been remarkable had any of those three countries not voted with the U.S. [...]

Israel’s outreach includes the fourth Pacific state to vote “no,” Nauru, which doesn’t have the formal ties to the U.S. that its Pacific neighbors share. Nauru has only about 10,000 people and few natural resources. Its best strategic asset, arguably, is its seat at the UN. In U.S. terms, Nauru having the same UN vote as every other big country is like Wyoming having the same number of senators as California. That lets Nauru monetize its sovereignty by offering diplomacy in exchange for aid. It is one of a handful of countries that still recognizes Taiwan instead of China, a relationship that wins it badly-needed development aid. It hosts a detention camp for refugees that Australia would prefer stay outside its borders, also in exchange for aid. It recognized Russian-occupied territories in Eastern Europe as sovereign states, and gets Russian money. As of May, that put Nauru afoul of a new American law that forces the U.S. government to cut off aid to any country that recognizes those territories. Meanwhile, Israel is reaching out. Netanyahu hosted Nauru’s president in June, which is like hosting, not a senator from Wyoming, but the mayor of Cheyenne—a city that, incidentally, has six times the population of Nauru. A friendly relationship with Israel, in other words, is no surprise. [...]

But what about Togo? There too, the vote seems to be more about Israel than the U.S. Togo’s authoritarian ruler, Faure Gnassingbé, has been outspoken about his love for Israel. “I am dreaming of Israel's return to Africa and Africa's return to Israel,” he wrote in a guestbook on a visit to Israel in August, a fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proudly tweeted. Netanyahu has supported Gnassingbé through a period of political turmoil, a decision that led to the embarrassing scene of having to cancel a planned Israel-Africa summit in Togo after pro-democratic protests against Gnassingbé got out of hand. And though the U.S. provides aid to Togo as well, the Togolese were apparently frustrated by American threats to “take names” of anyone who voted yes on the measure. Togo voted no—in support of Israel—but released a statement saying it had done so “despite the threats” from Washington

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Slate: Worse Than Tuskegee

The experiments were in the news because then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had issued a public apology to the government of Guatemala for violating its citizens’ human rights. Álvaro Colom, president of Guatemala when Clinton made reconciliation efforts, announced an investigation into the matter. Then-President Barack Obama asked the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to commence a report investigating how these horrifying experiments came to be. The report has been completed, the apology long since issued. But for families like Frederico’s, compensation and treatment has still not come.

Clinton’s apology was spurred by the experiments’ discovery—made by Susan Reverby, a historian at Wellesley College, in 2003. Reverby had been researching the Tuskegee experiments, perhaps the most famous example of a breach of medical ethics in the United States. In those experiments, black men who had already contracted syphilis had been told they were being treated when they were actually receiving placebos as part of an experiment on the effectiveness of treatment. All the while, these men were being observed by doctors interested in learning how their bodies would degrade from the illness. When the reality of the experiment became clear, in the 1970s, it was immediately stopped and a major lawsuit was filed. [...]

Six months after Cutler arrived in Guatemala, he began his intentional exposure experiments within the Guatemalan army. He also thought he would try a way to get around the trickiness of infecting the men: prostitutes. In one early study, he infected prostitutes by moistening a cotton swab with pus carrying gonorrhea bacteria and inserting it into their genitals “with considerable vigor.” There is no evidence they were informed about the risk. All of them contracted the disease.

He then had them have sex with the men he wanted to study, first prisoners and then the army. (He had switched from prisoners to the army after realizing that despite being plied with free sex workers and alcohol, many prisoners believed they were growing weaker because of blood draws.) Army men were often lubricated with alcohol, too, before being set up with the prostitutes. The women were asked to have sex with multiple men in a row. In one case, one prostitute had sex with eight soldiers in a period of 71 minutes. The soldiers were never informed that this was part of a medical experiment, obliterating any possibility that consent was obtained and making the experiments ethically unsound.

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