Gang violence and economic development in El Salvador

Carin Zissis has an op-ed in US News & World Report on Learning From a Troubled Gang Truce which is fine except that it is short on actual lessons.

Douglas Farah has a troubling report on What the Kids are Fleeing: Gang Violence Spikes in Central America with Fusion.

Some jailed gang leaders have been granted generous concessions, including sophisticated military training behind bars prisons. Fusion had access to several hours of videos of outside trainers teaching incarcerated Salvadoran gangbangers new tactics in hand-to-hand combat, small-unit maneuvering and other specialized activities.

Seriously, military training? That's not the only thing going on that, if true, should send some officials to jail.


And some economic stories from the left: CISPES on US Conditioning Of Development Aid Meets Resistance In El Salvador and Voices on the Border on The Price for a $277 Million MCC Grant. Here's Voices

The MCC program is popular with a lot of Salvadorans and politicians who see it as free money for development projects. But a growing number of environmentalists, unions, and communities argue that the Embassy’s conditions are too high a price to pay for development projects they don’t want anyway. And many see the conditions as an encroachment on El Salvador’s sovereignty.

In other coastal development news, the Inter-American Development Bank approved a $40 million loan aimed at improving the competitiveness of 30 towns along the coast.

There are numerous concerns with the environmental, economic and social impact of the proposed plans to develop the country's coastal and maritime areas. I imagine that they can't reopen FOMILENIO II or postpone a vote on it for two years in order to seriously rethink if this is what's best for El Salvador but it sure would be nice, no? It doesn't sound like the US or El Salvador is happy about the circumstances of the proposed compact.

CISPES also has a post on El Salvador’s Right And Media Reject Tax Reforms.

The Irish are coming....to Nicaragua

Helping hand: a Sandinista picks coffee with a farm worker in 1986. Photograph: Cindy Karp/Time & Life Pictures/Getty

The Irish Times is running a series on the Irish who traveled to Nicaragua during the 1980s to support the Sandinistas revolution. Here's an excerpt from The coffee-picking Irish.

The Irish brigades had one unexpected advantage over the others, says Circles Robinson. “The idea of there being a war wasn’t so strange to the Irish, and this made it easier for them to adapt. Those [Irish] brigades stood out as not being very demanding. They were satisfied with the conditions and with doing their best.”

There seems to be a consensus among those who dealt with them that the true value of the Irish effort lay outside coffee picking. Thomson says brigadistas went home with a much deeper commitment to Nicaragua.

“The idea was they would go back and work much better within solidarity than they had done before. Maybe they came only out of interest, but when they went back a lot of them worked for quite a while in solidarity.”

 And here is another piece with individual stories of those who traveled to Central America with ‘What I learned was personal, not political.’ Here's one story from Gerry McGrath, Dublin-based solicitor, who traveled to Nicaragua in 1989.

“What I learned was personal, not political: live in a hut with 30 people for a month and learn to be tolerant or you will explode. I didn’t find it particularly difficult, [as I was] very fit and healthy. There was a lot of gunfire at night, which was worrying if you dwelt on it. “I think the revolution was waning by that stage: people were weary of war. Our contribution [was] marginal. We contributed a lot to the people of the small UPE [state production unit] where we worked, but then we went off and left them. “I don’t know what propaganda value the Sandinista government got from us. It was harder for the US to bomb the place when we were there.”

The successful efforts of the brigadistas shouldn't be measured in the amount of coffee picked. They trips were more designed to promote global solidarity with individual Nicaraguans and the Sandinista revolution. They also had the added benefit of making it less likely that the Contras would bomb the cooperatives on which they were working.

Venezuela Divided on Al Jazeera America

As the Venezuelan government faces charges of human rights violations, Fault Lines travels to Caracas to find out what’s really going on in the streets.

A year after President Hugo Chávez’s death, Venezuela is in turmoil—and more polarized than ever. Since February, one wing of the country’s opposition has erected barricades in the streets and fought battles with security forces in an effort to force Chávezs successor, Nicolás Maduro, from power. On the other side of the political divide, government supporters have vowed they’ll do whatever it takes to protect Chávez’s so-called “Bolivarian revolution.” More than 40 people on both sides have been killed in the violence.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan and international human rights organizations are mounting a case against the Maduro government, alleging systemic abuses by security forces—and by pro-government groups known as colectivos.  

As the U.S. Congress debates whether to sanction Venezuelan government officials, Fault Lines travels to Caracas and asks: Is the country in the midst of an authoritarian crackdown, or a clash between people with radically different visions for the future of their country?

“Venezuela Divided” airs June 28th at 7:00p ET on Al Jazeera America.

Local businessmen tackle malnutrition in Guatemala

PBS News Hour has a new report on efforts to tackle child nutrition in Guatemala. If anyone has traveled through the Western Highlands at all, one see acres and acres of fresh vegetables being grown commercially and in people's backyards. Yet, the region has malnutrition rates around 70 percent.

In a land of plenty, a reporter’s snapshots of malnutrition

How Guatemala finally ‘woke up’ to its malnutrition crisis

And just in time for the publication of another report that finds Guatemala at the bottom of the regional list for investing in its youth.

I'm glad that President Perez Molina has made Zero Hunger a key program and really seems interested in tackling child malnutrition. However, I guess I haven't read much positive about the program or about any recent successes in improving Guatemalan children's heath. I don't imagine that it is something that changes overnight but the lack of good news is disappointing.

Obama nominee as next ambassador to Honduras clears another hurdle

Earlier this year, President Barack Obama designated James Nealon as his choice to be the next US Ambassador to Honduras. Nealon is a career diplomat who has served as chief of mission to Ottawa, Montevideo, and Peru. He currently serves as Civilian Deputy to the Commander and Foreign Policy Advisor at the U.S. Southern Command in Doral, Florida. On June 24, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee cleared his nomination and his name will now be added to the backlogged list of nominations awaiting a Senate vote. Perhaps early 2015?

Nealon had previously been nominated by the president to serve as ambassador to Bolivia but comments he made about the Bolivian and Venezuelan governments and released by WikiLeaks while he was serving as ambassador to Peru torpedoed his next posting.

No word yet on who the presidents hopes to fill the ambassadorial appointments to Guatemala and Costa Rica. I don't buy the US doesn't pay attention to Central America meme traveling the blogosphere but the lack of urgency to filling our ambassadorial posts in the region doesn't help. Given the tide turning against US policy towards Cuba, however, perhaps it is now possible to nominate someone to the region who has criticized the embargo or who has in the past not shown themselves tough enough again the Castro government. In the past, those characteristics or experiences made one's appointment unlikely.

Voluntourism in Guatemala

Every year, thousands of young highschool and college students pack their bags for the summer and head off to developing countries to volunteer. They work at schools, orphanages, clinics and sometimes weaving cooperatives in Guatemala. This type of travel - often referred to as Voluntourism - has received a lot of attention and criticism lately. The most common complaint being that the volunteers often benefit from their experiences at the expense of the community they are trying to help. Even satirical magazines, like The Onion have weighed in on the debate. Another article jokes "A rural Tanzanian village is celebrating a major milestone today: being featured in its 500th Medical School Admissions Essay."

Rebecca Lee Nelson, a graduate student in the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, discusses voluntourism in the context of her dissertation research in Guatemala for Vern Clothing. Vern Clothing is a business which "creates handwoven products sourced directly from weaving cooperatives in the Guatemalan highlands." 

You can read Rebecca's thoughts here.

High-End Coffee and Smallholding Growers in Guatemala

Kencaf

Edward Fischer and Bart Victor of Vanderbilt University have a relatively new article in the Latin American Research Review on High-End Coffee and Smallholding Growers in Guatemala that I found quite interesting.

Here's the abstract:

Coffee production in Guatemala has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last twenty-five years. Changing tastes among northern consumers have driven new demand for high-quality Strictly Hard Bean coffees that are grown above 4,500 feet. As a result, many of the large, lower-altitude plantations long synonymous with coffee in Guatemala have abandoned production, moving into rubber, African palm, and other crops. At least 50,000 mostly smallholding farmers in the highlands have begun growing coffee to fill this market niche.

Building on a capabilities approach to development, this article examines how smallholding Guatemalan producers' desires for a better future orient their engagement with this new market. Most of these small producers live in very modest circumstances with limited resources and opportunities. Yet, as they describe it, coffee represents an opportunity in a context of few opportunities, an imperfect means to a marginally better life.

While reading the article, I began to wonder whether the roya that is hitting Central American coffee has impacted coffee production across the board or whether the effects are felt differently at different levels of elevation. While in Kenya, I was also wondering who benefits from Central America's hardship. Coffee and tea are some of Kenya's most important exports.

Also, many of the farmers that have entered the high end coffee market over the last twenty years in Guatemala have done so almost as a side business. They are not committed to coffee production so much as they are doing it to provide a little extra for their families. Many of these new producers are indigenous people in the Western Highlands, the source of a great deal of out-migration to the US.

Getting From Insurgency to Politics in WPR

Johanna Söderström, a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Government, Uppsala University, has a good post on Getting From Insurgency to Politics that brings up a host of issues surrounding civil war resolution including the transformation of armed groups to political parties and the demobilization of non-state and state-based groups (the military).

A large part of ending civil wars and insurgencies is about finding new political solutions to old political conflicts. One such political solution and instrument has at times been to convert armed groups into political parties. Convincing former warring parties to enter formalized democratic politics is not an easy task however, and even when armed groups transform into political parties, the challenges for long-term democracy continue.

Research related to the political integration or reintegration of armed groups has been quite extensive. But political integration of armed groups is only one facet of a larger question about political integration of various entities after war. This larger question concerns not only armed groups, but also the political integration of former members of the military elite, as well as the political and democratic role of former rank-and-file combatants. Importantly, the challenges, justifications and explanations for successful outcomes within these categories are not interchangeable, even if the processes relate to and impact on each other. 

Political reintegration in the aftermath of war should therefore be divided into three areas: first, the transformation of the military elite into a political elite; second, the transformation of armed groups into political parties; and third, the transformation of individual rank-and-file combatants into citizens. Underlying all of these outcomes is the idea that each set of actors should operate in a democratic fashion and embrace democratic norms. Often this last leg is the main challenge, as former combatants and commanders and the new political parties may become politically functional but not necessarily democratically functional.

The questions that Johanna asks are related to the conference in Nairobi I traveled to earlier this month. How important is the transformation of armed groups into political actors for peace and stability in the postwar? Why are some some groups more successful than others at transforming into nonviolent political actors? And, finally, what role should the international community play in assisting armed groups in their attempted transformations?

The scholarly community has been looking at these first two questions, primarily through a series of case studies and comparative case studies. I've most looked at the Central American transitions but others have worked on the M-19 in Colombia and the Tupamaros in Uruguay as well as dozens of other groups around the world. Carrie Manning and Ian Smith have been putting together a data set on global transformations as well and that should be helpful in understanding some patterns over time and space.

The characteristics related to the armed group (number of combatants, popular support, and prior political experience) seem to be better predictors of successful transformations than institutional/environmental variables (electoral rules, national economic conditions). However, as in the case of the URNG in Guatemala, electoral rules can be quite important for smaller groups making such a transformation. Had the URNG been competing under the Hare method of translating votes to seats instead of D'Hondt, the new political party might have picked up several additional seats in 1999 and its future might have looked quite different.

Are the successful transformations of armed groups into political parties necessary for peace? I don't know. We seem to be operating under that assumption but I'm not sure that it has been necessarily tested. And what role should the international community play in helping armed groups transform? That's a tricky one. As Johanna smartly points out

The main challenge is that the process of transforming armed groups into political parties risks solidifying the political conflict that fueled the armed struggle to begin with, hindering society’s ability to move beyond these conflicts. Thus, the post-war society may have to deal with politics structured around the same divisions and issues for a long time to come. This could effectively freeze the conflict and potentially hinder other political actors and parties from developing.

Hence, this agenda or policy option can be pursued too vigorously if the creation of political parties on the basis of former armed groups restricts the political arena from including other political parties and if the conflict lines are not resolved, but simply reinforced through these parties. An armed group turned political party may develop a rich political agenda, diversify and change over the years, but if it fails to do so, it becomes an impediment to the development of democratic politics. At the same time, this potential tradeoff also speaks to the main justification for such transformation: It allows the various actors to channel the grievances that fueled the conflict and address the conflict’s causes in a nonviolent manner.

I lean towards providing support to the entire political system (institutional support and support to all political actors) rather than a specific focus on the armed actor at least as it comes to what the UNDP is thinking right now but I could be persuaded otherwise.

That's all well and good but what happens to the families who paid $6,000-$8,000 to have their children sent to the US?

The Washington Post and CNN look at some of the initiatives that the White House plans to launch to deal with the humanitarian crisis. Here's the White House press release describing what it intends to do. From the Washington Post:

In addition to tougher enforcement efforts, the administration announced Friday that it would invest $9.6 million to help Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras repatriate those sent home from the United States, along with new aid to help improve security in those countries.

That's all well and good but what happens to the families who paid $6,000-$8,000 to have their children sent to the US? I'm not sure what the conditions of the trip were but either they still owe the money (perhaps half) or they've paid for multiple attempts and the returned children will be sent north once again.

Fox News Latino has an article that is pretty much just an interview with Dan Restrepo, a former chief adviser to the Obama administration on Latin America, entitled Former Obama Adviser: Central America Exacerbating The Child Migration Crisis. Restrepo echoes some of the sentiments that I've expressed on this blog regarding the failure on the part of the Central American political and economic elites to do their part in helping to transform the region into a more democratic and prosperous one.

“It’s convenient when the president of Honduras blames the United States and our drug culture,” Restrepo said in an interview with Fox News Latino. “The Honduran economic and political elite have systematically and historically failed the people of Honduras.”

The same is true to varying degrees in Guatemala and El Salvador, said Restrepo, who served as principal adviser to Obama from 2008 to 2012 on Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada.

“These countries don’t have the rule of law or policing situation to deal with transnational crime,” said Restrepo, who is a senior fellow at Center for American Progress. “The wealthy families, a small number of economic classes, have enjoyed success, and have significant political influence. But they haven’t gone about the hard work of working toward a state that functions.”

Perhaps after Restrepo and Biden's pushing back against the narrative that the immigration crisis is all the US' fault, we can now move back to the rhetoric of partnership. The immigration crisis has been caused by both historic and more contemporary events and decisions, structural conditions and individual choices, in the US and in the region. It's going to take decades of the US and Central America working together (as well as Mexico) to establish the conditions in the US and the region so that Central Americans will not have to desperately resort to sending/bringing their children to the US with coyotes. We have a shared future and the sooner we realize that the more quickly we can move to adopt policies that will work for the 21st Century.

How many unaccompanied minors from Central America?

In December I wrote that over 50,000 Guatemalans were deported from the US in 2013. That was a 25% increase over 2012. Another ~30,000 were returned to Guatemala via land presumably after having been picked up somewhere in Mexico. However, that number was approximately  10,000 less than 2012. So if the numbers are correct, the number of Guatemalans sent back from Mexico and the US combined in 2013 was the same as 2012.

I do wonder whether some of the same accounting methods are in play when counting the number of unaccompanied minors picked up across the US border. The numbers are probably up but they are also up because the Mexican authorities did a poorer job stopping migrants from getting across its northern border.

It's still a crisis that needs to be managed in the short- and long-term but what do you think? Has anyone looked at the combined number of unaccompanied minors caught in the US and Mexico?

And what exactly is VP Biden going to say to Guatemalan Pres OPM?

Let's just imagine Vice President Joe Biden going to Guatemala and saying to President Otto Perez Molina:

You've dragged your feet on cooperating with the joint UN-Guatemala venture International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), forced out two commissioners, and have made it clear that you will not support extending its mandate even though it is widely believed to have contributed to strengthening the rule of in Guatemala.

You and other members of the political and economic elite have forced Claudia Paz y Paz from the attorney general position, sanctioned Yasmin Barrios, and weakened the rule of law with the shenanigans surrounding the overturn of the Rios Montt conviction.

You put our ambassador on a hit list during the trial or, at best, did nothing to challenge those who did.

You are pursuing drug reforms which we are against.

You've failed to improve workers rights and have forced the USTR to take you to task under CAFTA-DR.

We're not perfect but how again have you been a good partner that we should go out of our way to help?

Yes, we know you are not Honduras but that's not good enough.

Okay, he's not going to say that and he shouldn't.

Center for American Progress' 5 Things You Need to Know About Unaccompanied Children

Philip E. Wolgin, a Senior Policy Analyst for Immigration at the Center for American Progress and Angela Maria Kelley, the Vice President for Immigration Policy at CAP as well, have a good overview on 5 Things You Need to Know About Unaccompanied Children. I put some comments in parentheses.

1. Violence is causing these children to flee: "Interviewing more than 400 unaccompanied minors, researchers found that many of them had fled forcible ‘join or die’ gang recruitment or gang threats against themselves and their families." (Of course. However, the increase in unaccompanied minors began in 2012 - another year in which the murder rate decreased in Guatemala and was cut nearly in half in El Salvador. I don't quite see a sharp increase in violence in 2011 or 2012 that would explain the sharp increase in unaccompanied minors.)

2. Smugglers and traffickers prey on these children, who are increasingly younger and female: "While some of these children do have relatives in the United States, reuniting with family was the primary goal for less than one-third according to researcher Elizabeth Kennedy." (Smugglers and human traffickers are encouraging the migration of the region's youth. Over 90 percent of the children have family members in the US. However, when asked only one-third or so say that family reunification is a reason for emigrating. The violence in Central America is bad and there is no need to minimize it. However, I wouldn't take the escaping violence number at face value compared to the family reunification. I don't think that there is much of a question that youth migrating to the US get treated differently if they say that they are escaping recruitment into gang violence (asylum worthy) versus family reunification.)

3. This is a regional crisis. "According to the UNHCR, asylum requests from Honduran, El Salvadoran, and Guatemalan nationals have increased 712 percent in the neighboring nations of Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Belize since 2009."

4. There are no free passes into the United States as unaccompanied minors can be deported. "...every child who arrives in the United States is put into deportation proceedings. They are not given a green card or granted any kind of legal status."

5. Some in Congress are playing politics with a humanitarian issue." The uptick in the number of children fleeing for their lives began well before DACA’s creation and has been due solely to their exodus from the violence-stricken countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras." (I don't think that there's too much evidence for this statement. The following chart from Mother Jones shows that the surge in unaccompanied minors from Central America was flat from 2008 through the end of 2010 before increasing in 2011. Yes, that was months before DACA's creation but the surge in unaccompanied minors seems to be relatively recent and not driven by a surge in violence.

The authors are correct in arguing that we need to work on both short- and long-term solutions although they really only focus on the short-term. As I said the other day, we need to be thinking in terms of decades. However, I'm not that optimistic (I'm still trying to be) that things are going to get too much better until the US reforms its immigration laws to facilitate the freer movement of people from the region and supports some form of drug reform and the Central American governments somehow surprise us with good governance and an economic plan.

Salvadoran Constitutional Court demonstrates independence once again...to the detriment of the FMLN

The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court ruled that Eugenio Chicas' election as president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal Court was unconstitutional. Chicas is president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal Court and a member of the FMLN Political Commission (not a low level FMLN support but, yes, a member of the powerful political commission). CISPES has an English-language write-up on the developments.

The ruling, issued on Friday, September 14, has dubious legal underpinnings and apparent political motives. El Salvador’s Constitution states that the political parties that received the most votes in the last presidential election propose TSE candidates to Legislative Assembly for election, and that candidates for the presidency of the TSE are proposed by the party that received the greatest number of votes. In an astounding leap of logic, the Chamber noted that the Constitution does not expressly stipulate that the candidates be members of said parties, thus justifying their fundamental claim that party membership inherently compromises the qualifications and performance of public functionaries—an assertion with no constitutional basis. In addition to unseating Chicas, the Court went even further, ruling that the Legislative Assembly could no longer elect any person with partisan affiliation to the TSE or any other national court.

The magistrates ruled against the recommendations of the Attorney General and the Legislative Assembly, both of which submitted briefs insisting that partisan affiliation by no means undermines public officials, and that functionaries should rather be evaluated according to their actions and decisions. Legislative Assembly representatives had also denounced the Court for overreaching its jurisdiction. President Sánchez Cerén’s Chief of Staff Roberto Lorenzana blasted the sentence, saying it political affiliation “is a Constitutional right that cannot be thwarted by four judges; it is a right protected by international treaties that El Salvador has ratified, like the International Pact on Civil and Political Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights.”

For twenty-five years, we've heard that court officials should not have strong political party affiliations. That was actually one of the goals to the judicial reforms that helped pave the way for the FMLN to transform to a political party and to participate in democratic politics. The Courts turned a blind-eye to electoral fraud, government repression, and economic crimes throughout the 1970s and 1980s which is something that led to calls to depoliticize the courts and electoral agencies at all levels.

I don't know whether the Court's decision was legally "dubious;" it seems consistent with what Salvadorans have called for. What I am sure many pro-FMLN people are frustrated with is the fact that it is only with the FMLN occupying the presidency and the largest number of congressional seats that the Constitutional Court seems interested in demonstrating its independence.

Santos' election is all for nothing if the voters do not eventually support the peace process through the consulta popular.

In a show of support for the Colombia peace process, voters turned out on Sunday to re-elect Juan Manuel Santos by a margin of 6 percent over his anti-peace competitor Óscar Iván Zuluaga. Michael Shifter takes a look at why Santos emerged victorious and what it means for ongoing talks with the FARC in Foreign Policy.

Moreover, for Santos the problem is that, by all measures, a significant number of Colombians remain dead-set against what they see as the excessively lenient terms and conditions that could well be negotiated. Santos has promised to submit any final accord to a national referendum or "consulta popular" (what might be regarded as the "third round" of this electoral cycle). His gamble is that, once the agreement is ironed out, most Colombians -- eager to see the conflict end and move on in peace -- will eventually come around. Whether it will work out the way the government envisions (especially with Uribe in the Senate, pounding away) remains to be seen.

I'd just say that the government and guerrillas cannot wait until the agreements are in place before trying to convince the Colombian people to support them. We have a two-level game going on during the negotiations, perhaps even a more complicated one than that. While the FARC and Colombian government negotiate in Havana, they need to ensure that what they agree to is supported by the coalitions that the represent and that the final accords are accepted by the Colombian people which we will find out when the accords go up for a vote. They need to take what the people will support into consideration while negotiating and, at the same time, trying to move public opinion in support of the proposals.

Santos' election is all for nothing if the voters do not eventually support the peace process through the consulta popular.

Other takes on the Colombian elections come from Boz (mandate is a little strong here), Greg (FARC negotiations are more likely to succeed this time with US support; negotiations during Bush administration were not supported by the US), and Geoffrey.

Biden to travel to Guatemala to discuss humanitarian crisis

The White House has announced that Vice President Joe Biden will travel to Guatemala this week to discuss the recent drastic surge in unaccompanied minors traveling from the region to the United States. He will meet with presidents Otto Perez Molina and Salvador Sanchez Ceren (it appears) as well as a high-level representative from Honduras.

Vice President Joe Biden will head to Guatemala this week to make it clear that unaccompanied children flooding into the U.S. from Central America are not eligible for a path to citizenship and may be subject to deportation.

...

A senior White House official attributed the flood of children to violence and a lack of economic opportunity in the region. But the official acknowledged there also is a "misperception of US immigration policy."

The official, who spoke on a condition of anonymity to discuss Biden's upcoming trip, said the children are not subject to President Obama's decision in 2012 to allow some undocumented immigrants who came to America as minors to defer deportation. It only applies to children brought to the US as minors before June 2007 -- but critics have pointed to the policy as a lure for some immmigrants.

In a related story Shannon O'Neill argues that Immigration Reform Is Dead, Precisely When We Need It Most at Foreign Policy.

These children's desperation also comes in part from other aspects of our broken immigration system. The hardening of the border -- doubling the boots on the ground and the Border Patrol's budget over the last decade -- has made it both more expensive and more dangerous to cross into the United States. This has meant that many undocumented migrants in the United States instead stay, or stay longer, putting down roots rather than continuing a more traditional pattern of coming and going that scholars dub circular migration. Now here for the longer term, they want their loved ones beside them.

Fox News Latino also has a story on Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez blaming the US for the crisis because of its weak immigration laws, weak drug laws, and lack of assistance to Honduras and Central America - you know, Honduras is fighting the good fight all on its own. At least, that's the content of the entire story.

I'm not sure how effective Biden is going to be at changing peoples' perceptions about what will happen to unaccompanied minors should they reach the US. All that I read is that it is nearly impossible to reverse such misconceptions.

Colombian peace to cause a change in drug war

Oliver Kaplan has a post up with Foreign Policy's Democracy Lab on Colombia Calls a Draw in the War on Drugs that is well worth checking out.

In Colombia, the drug war may soon be coming to an end. In early May, negotiators from the Colombian government and the rebel group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) reached an agreement on drug trafficking as part of their effort to end the country's 50-year old conflict. Shifting away from old, controversial methods like crop fumigation, the new deal focuses on substituting crops, taking on organized crime and cartels, and treating drugs as a public health issue to treat addicts and reduce demand. It's a historic move -- and good news for President Juan Manuel Santos, who faces an increasingly popular opposition candidate in second-round elections on June 15.

...

The global drug problem is larger than Colombia. Yet Colombians and observers around the world are hoping that this deal on drugs will have the power to truly tackle the drug trade, move the country toward peace, and promote the inclusion of marginalized populations into the formal economy and mainstream social life. The prospects for broader success hinge in part on factors beyond Colombia's control -- but could be greatly bolstered if other countries follow Colombia's lead.

Oliver presents a host of ways in which a government-FARC deal could have positive repercussions throughout Colombian society and the region. I'm hopeful but I guess I'm not as optimistic given the limited transformative powers of the Guatemalan, Salvadoran, and Nicaraguan peace agreements. They were each impressive in their own right but still left much to be desired.

In Colombia, I've also heard that there is (potentially) a great deal of oil and other natural resources located in land controlled by the FARC. For some reason, I keep thinking Guatemala here and the conflict over natural resources. Colombia and Guatemala are today two of the world's most dangerous countries for labor, land and other human rights activists, and I can see these demobilized and demilitarized areas entering into a new era of conflict.

Central American youth migrants

Tim has a good overview of what we think is happening surrounding the flood of Central American youth migrants northward.

Youth minors from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are increasingly being apprehended at the US southern border. Obviously, unaccompanied minors are heading north for a variety of reasons - little economic opportunity in the region, violence and the threat of violence, one or more parents already live in the US, and the perception that the minors will receive preferential treatment if/when captured in the US.

One related reason that I heard on TV the other night was that coyotes were making a sales pitch to their potential customers. They were telling Central Americans that now might be their last best time to send their children to the US. Even though the minors won't be able to take advantage of last year's Senate immigration bill or from Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, coyotes might be telling Central Americans the opposite.

Here's what President Salvador Sanchez Ceren said during his inauguration:

Quoting Pope Francis on his recent trip to Brazil, he urged El Salvador’s youth, “not to be afraid to dream big.” Young adults are one of the country’s largest demographics; nearly 50% of the population is under the age of 24, due in part to high migration rates out of El Salvador. “To the youth: I invite you to be participants in this government. Not only because you are the present and the future but because you should be the dynamic force in the work of public policy. The well-being of the children and the youth is the well-being of all of society, ” said Sánchez Cerén.

And just the other day, Sanchez Ceren said that his government will prosecute coyotes involved in taking Salvadorans north and provide opportunities so that they do not feel that they will have to leave the country.

We are nearly twenty-five years into the end of the region's Cold War conflicts and thousands of Central Americans still need to leave their homes each day in search of safety, opportunity and family in the US. Some minor reforms might make things better but until the US seriously reforms its immigration laws to facilitate the freer movement of people from Mexico and Central America to the US and supports some form of drug decriminalization and/or regulation and the Central American governments somehow surprise us with good governance and an economic plan, I'm just not optimistic that things are going to get much better anytime soon. Ask me again in ten or twenty years.

Anyone get the feeling Colombia is like Guatemala?

In 1995, the Guatemalan government was engaged in talks with the URNG in order to end the country's three-decade-plus civil war. Today, the Colombian government is working to end the five decade conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Both conflicts saw the deaths of over 200,000 citizens killed.

The 1995 elections were a pre-referendum on the negotiated settlement/surrender that would come the next year. While all Guatemalan political parties committed themselves to continuing to pursue peace with the URNG, it was obvious that the path to peace would be much more difficult should the FRG's Alfonso Portillo emerge victorious. Instead, the pro-peace PAN and Alvaro Arzu emerged with a 51 to 49 percent victory and the peace process continued.

One of the reasons why we believe the Guatemalan and Colombia wars lasted so long is that, unlike the Salvadoran conflict, the elites in both countries were against them (See Rettberg 2007). While the Colombia elite is by no means fully behind the peace process, there is greater support from them than there has been in the past. Elements of the military are split as well. There were important relationships between the Guatemalan guerrillas and the country's military at the individual level that I'm not sure exists in Colombia which could prove problematic if/when snags develop.

Unlike the last serious effort at peace in Colombia, the US is behind these negotiations as well. The US and the international community were fully supportive of the peace process in Guatemala, perhaps more than Guatemalans.

The accords were celebrated in Guatemala one year after the 1995 elections. At that point, the URNG turned its attention towards transforming itself into a political party. It was an overwhelming challenge made more difficult by the fact that it had to simultaneously lobby for society to go out and vote in support of constitutional reforms in 1998. Like Guatemala and unlike El Salvador, Colombians will have to approve several aspects of the peace agreement through the ballot box. In Guatemala, the accords failed as the country's elites demagogued the issued and convinced people that their passage would forever divide the country along ethnic lines. In Colombia, it is possible that the pro-peace Santos wins, the accords are signed, and then the people vote against them - just like in Guatemala!

In Guatemala, the weakened guerrillas never seriously considered rearming because of the failed to approve the constitutional reforms or to implement other aspects of the peace accords. I don't know if that would be the case in Colombia where the guerrillas are much stronger than their Guatemalan counterparts.

Finally, with the arrival of victims of the armed conflict at the table in the Colombian negotiations, the situation reminds me to a certain extent with the Guatemalan case where civil society was involved through the Assembly of Civil Society (ASC). The ASC was much more supportive of the Guatemalan guerrillas but the involvement of more than just the rebels, government, military, elite, and international community a la El Salvador is notable.

I lean towards supporting a faulty peace than continued war (I'm a softy at heart). However, I asked someone recently if it was better that Santos lose the election this weekend rather than have him win and then have the peace defeated at the ballot box. Both scenarios are dangerous. While the election is what everyone should be focusing on at this moment, they cannot ignore the groundwork that is going to be needed to convince the Colombian people to go along with the peace, to transform the FARC into a nonviolent political actor, and to help Colombia take one more step towards being the region's most interesting country.

El Salvador's defense minister investigated for arms trafficking

El Salvador's Attorney General Luis Martinez has launched an investigation into Minister of Defense David Munguia Payes on the alleged charge of arms trafficking. Munguia Payes was a key player in the "Friends of Mauricio" group, the MS-13 / 18th Street gang truce, and overall security policy. Martinez is also investigating Munguia Payes and Raul Mijango on issues related to the gang truce.

I've obviously soured a bit on Munguia Payes but I wasn't expecting arms trafficking allegations. As I wrote in the WPR article, I was disappointed with his continued appointment as Minister of Defense. The US government soured on the general after he facilitated the March 2012 gang truce. I don't know if they had these concerns about arms trafficking but I wouldn't be surprised. While this is a legal issue for the attorney general, President Salvador Sanchez needs to take the offensive here - put the general on desk duty or something before the matter is sorted out.

More arrests in Guatemalan anthropologist's murder

On Tuesday, Guatemalan authorities arrested three additional suspects in the 1990 murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack (two men are already serving time). Mack's research involved documenting human rights abuses committed against the country's indigenous. She was stabbed over two dozen times in front of her home in Guatemala City on September 11th.

One of those arrested was a former police officer who led the investigation into Mack's death while details on the other two men were unavailable. However, the Myrna Mack Foundation released a statement indicating that the "arrests are related to the slaying of Jose Merida Escobar, a police investigator who determined the anthropologist's killing had been ordered by the government. Merida Escobar was killed in 1991, shortly after revealing his findings to a court." The police did not address the foundation's description of the arrests.

Like the murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi eight years later, Mack's murder intimidated but did not stop those carrying out investigations into wartime human rights abuses.

In other criminal justice news, Erwin Sperisen was sentenced to life in prison following a trial in Switzerland that found him guilty of participating in the "summary execution and subsequent cover-up of the murder of seven inmates in Guatemala’s Pavón prison in September 2006." The former police chief shot and killed at least one of the victims. Little consolation to Sperisen, but he was found not guilty of executing three prisoners who had escaped another jail one year earlier.

Sperisen should have stayed in Guatemala instead of fleeing to his ancestral homeland. Former presidential candidate Alejandro Giammattei who was also involved in the Pavon murders fled to Honduras. He was arrested and spent ten months in prison before being found not guilty by Judge Carol Patricia Flores. Giammattei then ran for president in 2011 on the CASA ticket winning 1 percent of the vote, a sharp drop from the 17 percent he had captured in 2007.

Countering Convergence: Agency and Diversity Among Guatemalan NGOs

I'd like to welcome a guest post from Erin Beck based on her research on Guatemalan NGOs which recently appeared in Latin American Politics & Society (Countering Convergence: Agency and Diversity Among Guatemalan NGOs). Erin is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon.

The proliferation of nongovernmental organizations across the developing world has sparked discussions of the “NGOization” of civil society and concern that NGOs have become increasingly uniform and internally homogenous. Recently though, there has been a push to move beyond the “good NGO, bad NGO” binary (Alvarez 2009, 176) that depicts NGOs as passive and uniform.

This article responds to the call by addressing the nature and causes of diversity among Guatemalan NGOs. It begins with the historical evolution of NGOs in Guatemala since the 1960s, demonstrating that the diversity that exists today is partly a result of a historical process in which old NGOs adjusted to, and influenced, their environment at the same time that new types of NGOs were established. It then draws on long-term ethnographies of two microcredit NGOs in order to explore elements of change and continuity within NGOs that have further contributed to diversity.

Intraorganizational diversity is partly the result of strategic decisionmaking within NGOs, layering of old and new forms in unique organizational context, and these two processes’ unanticipated and unintended consequences. Agency on the part of NGOs and continued diversity within NGOs has important implications on the ground. The ability of NGOs to resist external pressures and to affect their environments means that they are important political actors that can play independent (positive or negative) roles in the process of development and democratization. Continued intraorganizational diversity also implies that people participating in different NGOs are likely to have distinct experiences, colored by unique organizational contexts. This suggests that broad assumptions about NGOs’ effects for people and communities need to be qualified.

The challenge of political transformation of armed and banned groups

I am currently attending a retreat outside Nairobi, Kenya on "The challenge of political transformation of armed and banned groups" co-sponsored by the UNDP and the Berghof Research Center. I am one of the individuals invited to talk a little about the experiences of Central and South America, a region which has seen its fair share of armed actors. Every region of the world looks like it is represented.

Tomorrow I get to speak a little more about the historical transitions in Central and South America while others will look at contemporary dynamics in Colombia. I think one other participant will discuss gangs, paramilitaries, and drug cartels which seems to be the concern for Latin America but doesn't necessarily fit within the retreats's themes (at least from my perspective).

We still have a lot to learn from the region's experience and a lot to learn how much of its experience is relevant to other conflicts. In Latin America, we have failed guerrilla groups (Tupamaros), partially successful groups (FMLN), and successful groups (FSLN) that have have all found their way to the presidency through democratic elections. In Brazil, we have more of an individual tied to an urban armed group that is now in the presidency. We also have guerrilla groups that have been moderately successful (M-19) and not so successful (URNG, Contras, and the Patriotic Union). And while all these conflicts are over, there remain ongoing conflicts in Colombia, Peru, Paraguay, and to some extent with the Zapatistas in Mexico.

It's a rich region for scholars to pursue a number of questions related to the emergence and endurance of armed groups as well as their successful and failed transitions to electoral politics. Case studies and comparative studies, local, regional, national, and transnational dynamics, the region is ripe.

Sanchez Ceren inherits security mess in El Salvador

I have a new column up at the World Politics Review that, like many others popping up in the news, criticizes Mauricio Funes' approach to security. As I've made clear, I was a supporter of the gang truce. Given the extreme violence of gangs, drug traffickers, and organized crime, the weak Salvadoran government was in no position to confront daily violence in 2012. 

I hoped that the truce would provide an opportunity for some gang members to "return" to civilian life and for the government to come up with a new plan to combat public security (see my previous Al Jazeera posts). 

Unfortunately, neither reform seems to have taken hold. There have been a few examples of gang members taking advantage of the truce to turn things around but very little in terms of security reform at the national level.

You can read the entire post here (http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/13824/el-salvador-s-new-president-must-deal-with-wreckage-of-gang-truce)