Azam Ahmed Reports for the NY Times:
. . . .
Shootouts, armed raids and last-minute pleas to stop the bloodshed formed the central threads of their stories. MS-13 wanted the neighborhood to sell drugs. The other gangs wanted it to extort and steal. But the members of Casa Blanca had promised never to let their neighborhood fall prey to that again. And they would die for it, if they had to.
Almost no one was trying to stop the coming war — not the police, not the government, not even the young men themselves. The only person working to prevent it was a part-time pastor who had no church of his own and bounced around the neighborhood in a beat-up yellow hatchback, risking his life to calm the warring factions.
“I’m not in favor of any gang,” said the pastor, Daniel Pacheco, rushing to the Casa Blanca members after the shooting. “I’m in favor of life.”
The struggle to protect the neighborhood — roughly four blocks of single-story houses, overgrown lots and a few stores selling chips and soda — encapsulates the inescapable violence that entraps and expels millions of people across Latin America.
Since the turn of this century, more than 2.5 million people have been killed in the homicide crisis gripping Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Igarapé Institute, a research group that tracks violence worldwide.
The region accounts for just 8 percent of the global population, yet 38 percent of the world’s murders. It has 17 of the 20 deadliest nations on earth.
And in just seven Latin American countries — Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Venezuela — violence has killed more people than the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen combined.
Most of the world’s most dangerous
cities are in Latin America
Latin America
Africa
U.S.
Other
SAFER CITIES
MORE DANGEROUS
Cancún,
Mexico
Kingston,
Jamaica
San Pedro Sula,
Honduras
San Salvador
London
Los Angeles
Paris
Tokyo
Istanbul
Los Cabos,
Mexico
Tijuana,
Mexico
Bogotá,
Colombia
St. Louis
Moscow
New Orleans
6.2 global avg.
0
40
60
80
100
120
Average homicide rate per 100k people
By Allison McCann
Source: Igarapé Institute and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Cities include the 50 highest homicide rates in the world and a group of prominent others for comparison, all with populations of at least 250,000. Average homicide rates are from 2016-2018 or the latest data available.
The violence is all the more striking because the civil wars and military dictatorships that once seized Latin America have almost all ended — decades ago, in many cases. Most of the region has trudged, often very successfully, along the prescribed path to democracy. Yet the killings continue at a staggering rate.
They come in many forms: state-sanctioned deaths by overzealous armed forces; the murder of women in domestic disputes, a consequence of pervasive gender inequality; the ceaseless exchange of drugs and guns with the United States.
Underpinning nearly every killing is a climate of impunity that, in some countries, leaves more than 95 percent of homicides unsolved. And the state is a guarantor of the phenomenon — governments hollowed out by corruption are either incapable or unwilling to apply the rule of law, enabling criminal networks to dictate the lives of millions.
For the masses fleeing violence and poverty in Central America, the United States is both a cause and solution — the author of countless woes and a chance to escape them.
Frustrated with the stream of migrants treading north, President Trump has vowed to cut aid to the most violent Central American nations, threatening hundreds of millions of dollars meant to address the roots of the exodus.
But the surviving members of Casa Blanca, who once numbered in the dozens, do not want to flee, like tens of thousands of their countrymen have. They say they have jobs to keep, children to feed, families, neighbors and loved ones to protect.
“There is only one way for this to end,” said Reinaldo. “Either they kill us or we kill them.”
. . . .
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For the full version of Azam’s report and a much better chart graphic, go to the above link!
Trump’s complete lack of humanity, empathy, and his constant racist-inspired lies and misrepresentations about refugees and asylum seekers are truly reprehensible.
But, he and his henchmen like Stephen Miller are by no means the entire problem.
Every day in U.S. Immigration Court, DHS attorneys make demonstrably false representations minimizing the truly horrible conditions in the Northern Triangle, particularly for women. Every day, some U.S. Immigration Judges betray their oaths of office by accepting those false representations and using them, along with an unfairly skewed anti-asylum view of the law, to deny asylum cases that should be granted.
And, perhaps worst of all, every day some life-tenured Article III Circuit Judges turn a blind eye to the legal travesty and due process disaster taking place throughout our corrupted Immigration Courts by rubber stamping results that would be totally unacceptable in any other type of litigation and which don’t even pass the “straight face test.” I guess “out of sight is out of mind,” and the wrongfully deported are “out of sight” (or maybe dead, in hiding, or duressed into joining or cooperating with gangs after the U.S. failed to protect them)
But, there are folks our there resisting this malfeasance and dereliction of duty. Among other things, they are memorializing what is happening and making a record of where the “modern day Jim Crows” and their enablers stand and what they have done to their fellow human beings in the name of “expedience” and an “Alfred E. Neuman (“What Me Worry”)” view of the law and our legal system.
Donald Trump is horrible. But, his racism and infliction of lasting damage on our country and on humanity depend on too many judges and other supposedly responsible public officials supporting, acquiescing, enabling, or minimizing his inhumane, dishonest, counterproductive, and often illegal actions.
An appropriate response by an honest, competent Administration with integrity would be:
- Establish legal precedents recognizing those fleeing politicized gang violence, domestic violence, and violence directed at famnilies as refugees;
- Establish precedents incorporating the Article III decisions emphasizing the concept of “mixed motive” in determining “nexus” under asylum and withholding of removal laws;
- Establish precedents granting temporary withholding of removal under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”) to those who face torture at the hands of the gangs or Northern Triangle governments (or both), but who can’t establish the convoluted “nexus” for asylum, with a rebuttable presumption that the countries of the Northern Triangle will “acquiesce” in the torture;
- Liberally use Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”) for nationals from Northern Triangle countries which perhaps would make large-scale asylum adjudication less of a priority and allow most cases to be dealt with in due course through the Asylum Offices rather than clogging Immigration Court dockets;
- Work to insure that applicants for protection have assistance of counsel in developing and presenting their claims (which would also dramatically increase fairness and efficiency).
PWS
05-05-19