AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Guatemala's Electoral Crossroads

When Guatemalans vote for their next president on June 25, they will get the chance to choose from nearly two dozen names. But three notable aspirants won’t be on the ballot: conservative outsider and poll frontrunner Carlos Pineda, indigenous leader Thelma Cabrera, and the fson of a former president Roberto Arzú. With all three eliminated from the competition by the country’s courts, they are urging Guatemalans to void their ballots and calling their disqualifications “electoral fraud.”

“There are three [contenders] that might be very dangerous for those who are governing right now. And these are the three who have been eliminated,” says Juan Luis Font, an award-winning Guatemalan journalist with over three decades experience at outlets such as Canal Antigua, Revista ContraPoder, Emisoras Unidas, and the recently shuttered elPeriódico. Although Font continues to cover his country’s political scene from the United States with ConCriterio, he is among the dozens of Guatemalan journalists, prosecutors, and judges forced into exile in recent years amid a backlash against anti-corruption efforts. 

What Font and others have faced reflects a difficult moment for Guatemalan democracy—that coincides with this round of elections. Voters, who will select a replacement for current President Alejandro Giammattei as well as all 160 legislators, are also largely pessimistic: 83 percent say the country’s general situation has worsened over the past three years, and only 16 percent trust the electoral tribunal. 

Font explains to AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis that this competition is a battle between those with an authoritarian philosophy of governance and those who support democracy and “would like to have a republic back in Guatemala.” He also notes that, with security a top concern and young voters looking for solutions, many are looking to the mano dura tactics being carried out by the government of Nayib Bukele in neighboring El Salvador as a model.

So who are the top candidates? Font shares the background of poll leaders Sandra Torres, a former first lady; Edmond Mulet, ex-head of Congress and UN diplomat, and Zury Ríos, a long-time legislator and daughter of a military dictator. He also explains why the center-right Mulet appears to be the greatest beneficiary from Pineda’s elimination and that the support he gains could propel him into what will be a likely August runoff. “He's a diplomat [who has been] positively viewed by international community,” says Font. “And he seems to be a little bit more in favor of respecting human rights and democratic principles in the country.”

This podcast was produced by Executive Producer Luisa Leme and Associate Producer Jon Orbach. Carin Zissis is the host. 

The music in this episode is "El arpómetro de Carlos," by P. Coulon and H. Martínez, performed by Ángel Tolosa for Americas Society. Learn more about upcoming concerts: musicoftheamericas.org

AS/COA Online | The China-Taiwan Tussle in the Americas

In March 2023, Honduras picked a side. Its government switched diplomatic recognition of Taiwan to China, leaving Taipei with just 13 diplomatic allies worldwide.

Taiwan has had a separate government since 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party took control in Beijing, even though China considers it a renegade province. Over the course of the past 75 years, and particularly since the UN dropped recognition of Taiwan in 1971, Taipei has seen its list of allies dwindle. More than half of those allies—seven in total—are located half a world away in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the two East Asian countries have engaged in bouts of dollar diplomacy to curry favor.

And increasingly, China’s economic might is winning countries over. “Honduras is a perfect example of how, from a lot of Latin American and Caribbean countries’ perspective, there is no economic security versus national security. From their perspective, economic security is national security,” explains Associate Director of Research at Florida International University’s Jack D. Gordon Institute of Public Policy Leland Lazarus.

With Chinese investment in Latin America reaching $130 billion between 2005 and 2020, the country has become South America's top trading partner and 21 Latin American countries have joined Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. This year’s elections in Paraguay and Guatemala, which are the two biggest economies that still support Taiwan, have made East Asian relations an unlikely campaign issue in both countries; the top opposition candidate in Paraguay has said he’d switch sides and in Guatemala, the Taiwanese president visited in April to shore up support.

If those two countries opted for China, Taiwan would be left with just Caribbean allies in the region.

Amid a flood of Chinese investment dollars and the promise of access to its huge market, why do countries stick with Taipei? “Part of it is just the affinity between democracies, but another part of it is that in the Caribbean economies, what Taiwan is able to provide is sufficient for the economic growth and needs of those Caribbean countries,” says Lazarus. “I want to caveat that—for now. It’s sufficient for now.”

One reason for the caveat is that wealthy Chinese individuals have been attaining Caribbean citizenship. “It’s not outside the realm of possibility that within maybe five years, 10 years or so, that those new citizens could exert political or economic pressure to have those countries switch diplomatic recognition,” says Leland, who’s held roles in the U.S. Southern Command and the U.S. foreign service, as well as having been based in Barbados, China, and Panama.

Morever, China has undertaken military actions of Taiwan’s shores, sparking tensions between Beijing and Washington, which supports Taiwan while recognizing China. So what is the U.S. role? “Certainly from Taiwan's perspective, the allies that remain…are still so important in advocating for Taiwan's participation in international organizations,” says Lazarus. But he points out that even countries that have switched ties recognition can continue to have strong economic and cultural ties. “[The United States] should continue to show the power of our example in terms of our ironclad commitment to Taiwan,” says Lazarus, adding that, “More and more countries really recognize that if there is some sort of conflict over the Taiwan Strait, that would be absolutely catastrophic for the global economy.”

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Democratic Tests in Honduras and Nicaragua

AS/COA Online · Democratic Tests in Honduras and Nicaragua

Two Central American countries will go to the polls in November for potentially combustive elections that will test the quality of democracy in the region…

…If Honduran dissatisfaction with democracy runs high, the problem is particularly acute among young voters. A poll conducted prior to Honduras’ March 2021 primaries found that 61 percent of millennials didn’t plan on voting, and the same portion wanted to leave the country due to a lack of economic opportunities.

Combating young voters’ apathy is a primary goal for Juan Pablo Sabillon, founder of El Milenio, a non-partisan platform that seeks to motivate and inform Honduras’ sizable youth vote. Sabillon was inspired to create El Milenio during the unrest following the 2017 election when the San Pedro Sula native was, he said, “literally watching my city burn.” He recognized that the election had disenfranchised young voters, saying, “Basically the inspiration [for El Milenio] was really just the absence of a platform or a forum where young people could engage in civilized dialogue.”

With an eye to the 2021 vote, El Milenio shares election information through podcasts and social media, as well as launching Emil, a WhatsApp bot voters can use to learn about legislative candidates’ platforms to help them distinguish between the plethora of names on the ballot. “The decisions that most greatly impact hundreds every day are taken in Congress and people don’t know anything about their candidates,” Sabillon told AS/COA’s Carin Zissis. “We talked with hundreds young people and, yes, corruption is a concern. But they just don’t know the basic information about a candidate.” 

For Sabillon, this election is a make-or-break one for Honduras. He explained that the country spent years building its democracy only to witness backsliding over the past dozen years, concluding: “If we don't achieve a Congress that can help improve checks and balances, pick a new judiciary, and enforce rule of law—or even rebuild the rule of law—Honduras is going to go through very tough times.”

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Rewriting Mexico's Security and Energy Agendas

AS/COA Online · Rewriting Mexico’s Security and Energy Agendas

October opened up with big moves in areas high on Mexico’s agenda: security and energy. Both issues are among the most crucial to the country’s future.

On October 8, the Mexican capital played host to senior U.S. cabinet officials for a meeting that spelled the end of the 13-year-old, $3 billion security pact known as the Merida Initiative. A new agreement—with a rather lengthy name that commemorates 200 years of bilateral ties— was announced: the U.S. Mexico Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities. The two governments are slated to release a three-year plan for the Bicentennial Framework in January 2022. Until its release, the broad strokes of the meeting give a hint of how much will shift.

“For a lot of us who study U.S.-Mexico security cooperation, it feels more like a rebranding than a true change,” says Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, the head of a security research programs at the Center for U.S.-Mexican studies at the University of California, San Diego and the co-founder of the Mexico Violence Resource Project. She tells AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis that the announced agreement comes after a year of bumpy security relations, particularly following the U.S. arrest of Mexico’s former defense minister, Salvador Cienfuegos, in 2020. But she notes that during the Obama administration, cooperation had already moved on from focusing on narcotics to building rule of law and guaranteeing safe communities.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t shifts in priorities. The fact that Mexican officials emphasized gun smuggling and U.S. officials focused on fentanyl represents the need to tackle “twin tragedies,” says Farfán-Méndez, given the hundreds of thousands of homicides linked to Mexico’s drug war since it began 14 years ago and the approximately 90,000 overdose deaths in the United States in 2020. “I think that to the extent that both governments could show that they care about loss of life on the other side of the border, that that could really go a long way in getting working agreements between both countries,” Farfán-Méndez concludes.

And, while she says “the jury is still out” as to whether each country’s security agencies can resolve feuds under the new framework, the two sides are playing ball. “We're on first base now,” she says. “There's a lot of help that needs to happen from other teammates and in other areas to get things going. But I think, after going through innings with no real play, now we're at least on base.”

If security is a topic of cautious cooperation, energy is an area of discord. On October 1, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, introduced a constitutional reform that would give the state-owned electricity firm, CFE, control over 54 percent of the power market, effectively backpedaling on aspects of a 2013 reform that opened up Mexico’s energy sector to private and foreign investment. AMLO’s reform would also end the independence of the energy regulatory agencies by absorbing them into ministries and giving the government exclusive rights to lithium extraction.

Analysts and members of the business sector say the reform would endanger future private investment by canceling contracts and rebuilding a state monopoly. It would also risk international environmental agreements by favoring less efficient power generation resulting in an increase in prices for consumers. “One of the most important things that I would say about this initiative is that it is very clear on what it wants to strike down, but it's not particularly clear on what it wants to build and what it wants to accomplish as a whole for the Mexican people,” says Montserrat Ramiro, a former commissioner for the Energy Regulatory Commission, or CRE—one of the autonomous agencies that could meet its demise if the electricity reform passes.

That “if” is key. AMLO’s coalition doesn’t have the legislative seats needed to pass the reform on its own, though the president has sought to win over members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which was the very party that ushered in the landmark 2013 reform. Moreover, the reform could result in legal battles connected to the USMCA trade pact, explains Ramiro, who has held senior energy-focused roles at institutions such as the OECD and Mexican Institute for Competitiveness.

Even if the reform does not come to fruition, Ramiro expects AMLO will keep seeking ways to solidify a statist approach to the country’s energy sector. “I think he will just continue to say whatever is best for his political messaging, which he is a genius at—that is absolutely uncontroversial,” she says. “We will still be debating false accusations on either the energy companies or CFE itself and what our future is… And, and it will just keep on going until another government comes in.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: A Pre-Midterm Pulse Check on the Mexican Electorate

AS/COA Online · A Pre-Midterm Pulse Check on the Mexican Electorate

With 21,000 seats up for grabs across all 32 states, Mexico’s June 6 midterms will be of huge importance. Not only will voters select candidates for a record number of posts, but they’ll also get the chance to signal their assessment of the political movement of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—better known as AMLO—even if he’s not on the ballot. Will his newcomer party, Morena, build on its sweep of the 2018 elections? And what are the chances Morena’s coalition will win a supermajority in the Chamber of Deputies, where all 500 seats are up for grabs?

“In every single midterm election since 1997, the governing party has lost support and lost presence in the lower chamber of Congress,” says Dr. Alejandro Moreno, head of public opinion polling at El Financiero. He explains polls indicate Morena is unlikely to buck that trend. Still, he tells AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis that support for AMLO’s party is similar to where it was in the last election, even if there have been shifts in where that support is coming from. “The younger voters, who were the first and most immediate supporters of López Obrador, are the first ones to abandon him,” says Moreno, who adds that a rise in support among older voters is compensating for that loss.

He also says that Morena’s supporters are made up increasingly of rural voters with lower education levels who previously backed the once-mighty Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). “2018 was more like a rare manifestation of the vote rather than a realignment for the future,” notes Moreno, who points out that both rural and urban middle class voters—two groups that in the past diverged—came together for AMLO in that vote. Now he says: “Things seem to be going back to how they were before.”

"Polls offer this opportunity to have an X-ray of the electorate."

But some aspects of this election are new, and one example is the heightened divisions. “We haven't seen this level of political polarization in the country that I can remember [since I started doing] polls in Mexico,” says Moreno, who is also a political scientist at the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, or ITAM. Why? Voters are less attached to major political parties, which is coupled, he says, with “the president following—for good or bad, I'm not going to judge, just to describe—a polarizing strategy.” Meanwhile, parties that in the past were what Moreno describes as “historical adversaries” have formed alliances in this election to take on the governing party. “Now it's everyone against Morena and its allies.”

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: How the Pandemic Boosted Financial Inclusion

AS/COA Online · How the Pandemic Boosted Financial Inclusion

For a year now, shuttered businesses and quarantine restrictions have moved many of our interactions—economic or otherwise—online. That means a silver lining for Latin America and the Caribbean, where more than 200 million people were unbanked as of early 2020. In Brazil, emergency aid disbursements resulted in the country’s unbanked population dropping by 73 percent, says Luz Gomez, director for Latin America and the Caribbean at Mastercard’s Center for Inclusive Growth. “There were all these existing trends to digital financial services that were happening all around Latin America that have been really accelerated,” she explains.

“[The pandemic] basically had the effect of doing what we could have achieved in 10 years and compressing that into one year,” says her colleague Arturo Franco. He notes that building access to financial services can lead to tangible improvements in people’s lives, particularly by lifting people out of informality. “What we have seen over the last decade is that financial inclusion doesn’t just help boost economic growth. It can also reduce poverty and inequality,” says the Center’s vice president for data & insights. “It can improve the productivity of business and, ultimately, insure people against economic shocks, like the ones we are going through right now.”

From helping to digitize payments to coffee growers in Colombia or assessing why Mexico’s tiendita owners stick to cash payments, Gomez covers the complex, multi-sectoral aspects of financial inclusion and the need to involve institutions ranging from fintechs to traditional banks to coops. With that approach mind, the next step is to build on the momentum gained during the pandemic. “Let’s not miss this opportunity,” says Gomez, who suggests using the current moment to prepare for the next emergency. “It’s also about building a robust ecosystem that's more attuned to serving the underserved.”

Franco notes that the Center is launching a research institute at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico that will work in partnership with universities in Colombia and Chile to better understand challenges to financial inclusion in the region. On this front, the pandemic is also spurring discussion. Says Franco: “People don't really want to change too much when things look like they're working out, but this is a moment where people are more open to structural change.”

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Vaccines and Variants a Year into the Pandemic

AS/COA Online · Vaccines and Variants a Year into the Pandemic

February marks a year since the first coronavirus cases were confirmed in the Americas and the virus has left a scar, claiming more than a million lives. Now the pandemic has entered a new phase, one in which countries are trying to roll out vaccines as variants threaten to undermine the protection those vaccines offer.

“We are encountering a problem that nobody is safe until everybody is safe,” says Dr. Roselyn Lemus-Martin, a COVID-19 researcher with a PhD in molecular biology from Oxford University. She explains that Latin America—and the world at large—is in a race against time to get as many people immunized as possible before the variants spread. “With these new variants, it’s going to take us a while to get to herd immunity.”

Meanwhile, a lack of transparency about vaccines can undermine public confidence in immunizations. Lemus-Martin has gained an audience in Mexico for her use of social media to explain the science behind both vaccines and variants, as well as how mechanisms such as COVAX work. She tells AS/COA’s Carin Zissis why there was a concern with Russia’s Sputnik V—for which countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, and Mexico have acquired contracts—and how a new article in The Lancet is “good news for Latin America” as a study found that the vaccine has a 91.6 percent efficacy rate.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: What’s on the Horizon for U.S.-Mexico Ties in a Biden Administration

AS/COA Online · What’s on the Horizon for U.S.-Mexico Ties in a Biden Administration

As Joe Biden moves into the Oval Office, he’s made immigration a priority item for his administration. It’s also a top issue on the agenda for relations with Mexico—but it’s definitely not the only one.

In fact, during the waning days of the Donald Trump presidency, there were some bumps in the road when it came to his administration’s generally strong ties with the Mexican government. On January 15, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, released evidence from the U.S. investigation into Mexican former Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos and suggested the case was fabricated. Later that night, the U.S. Department of Justice defended the investigation and said Mexico violated a treaty by releasing the documents. The agency also expressed disappointment that Mexico wasn’t pursuing the case against the retired general.  

“I think this poses an interesting challenge for the Biden administration on what to do next,” says Dr. Sergio Alcocer, president of Mexico’s Council on Foreign Relations, or COMEXI, who explains that, with matters such as the Cienfuegos case, AMLO is making decisions with an eye toward his country’s midterm elections in June 2021 and bolstering his relationship with Mexico’s military. With that in mind, Alcocer suggests it could be hard to delve deep into solving tougher bilateral issues until Mexico’s electoral period concludes. Moreover, he notes that Biden and AMLO will have different approaches, with the incoming U.S. president focused on taking an active role on the global stage while his Mexican counterpart stays focused on issues at home. “López Obrador has said the best foreign policy is interior policy.”

"Probably—being very pragmatic, both of them—the best would be to meet at the border."

Alcocer, who served as deputy minister for North America in Mexico’s Foreign Ministry during the time Biden was vice president, shared insights for what both governments should expect in terms of working with each other. “Biden knows very well what's going on in Latin America,” he says, adding: “Mexico, in my opinion, needs to realize that the one that benefits the most with a good relation between the United States and Mexico, is Mexico.”

Given that AMLO rarely leaves his country, where will the two leaders first meet in person? Alcocer suggests a symbolic choice. “The best would be to meet at the border,” he says. “This would be a very interesting place for Biden to say, ‘We don't want a wall. We don't need a wall.’" 

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: On the Ground during Chile's Year of Change

AS/COA Online · On the Ground during Chile’s Year of Change

Unrest, a pandemic, polarization, and an election. In 2020, those words might get a person thinking of countries ranging from Bolivia to the United States. But, in this episode of Latin America in Focus, Santiago-based journalist John Bartlett takes listeners through Chile’s year of transformation, from October 2019 protests sparked by a transit-fare hike through a pandemic lockdown to the October 25 referendum that saw 78 percent of voters back the rewriting of the country’s dictatorship-era Constitution.

On the other hand, it wasn’t supposed to take a year. The March 2020 arrival of the coronavirus pandemic led to the postponement of the April plebiscite until October. Still, the delay and the lockdow, didn’t stifle the push for a new Magna Carta. “I think more than anything what it did was given Chileans a vital moment of introspection,” Bartlett tells AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis. “There were several things that happened during the lockdown that really put the emphasis back on some of the demands and social movement. People talking about healthcare, for example,” he explains, noting questions raised about higher death rates in public hospitals rather than private ones amid concerns about inequality that sparked the movement in the first place.

“[Remittances] are filling an important welfare gap.”

— Roy Germano

For Bartlett, who covered the past year’s events for outlets such as The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and The Washington Post, shifting rules presented the hurdles that come with shifting quarantine zones. At one point, he says, “[In] the building I live in you could leave by one door and be free to do whatever you want and leave by the other door and be in full lockdown.”

The challenges aren’t over yet. Now Chile needs to elect members of a constituent assembly and draft the document for another 2022 referendum and, in the middle of it all, will hold a 2021 presidential vote. But, for Bartlett, there are reasons for optimism. “Chile is an incredibly divided country. It’s no secret that open proponents of the dictatorship are active in all spheres of life,” he says. But the process also allows the country to go through a type of “healing” and an exchange of ideas for what comes next. Says Bartlett: “I'm looking forward to covering it over the next couple of years and seeing what will happen.”

Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Katie Hopkins produced this episode.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: A Look at How Migrant Money Cushions Economies

AS/COA Online · A Look at How Migrant Money Cushions Economies

The pandemic is bearing down on Latin American and Caribbean economies. Beyond the daunting GDP contraction figures, people are struggling to make ends meet, and many depend on remittances—the cash that family members living and working abroad send home.

But how secure is that cashflow? In April, the World Bank predicted that remittances worldwide could see their biggest drop in recent history. In Latin America, the experience was mixed in the first half of the year, from record growth in Mexico, to a rebound in Guatemala, to an overall decrease in Colombia. 

As Dr. Manuel Orozco told AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis, although there was some cashflow decline in the region overall, migrants appear to have been better prepared than expected and with more solid savings than during the 2008–2009 global recession. On top of that, there’s an empathy factor. “Migrants realized that the conditions of the pandemic in their homelands were perhaps worse than they were in the United States,” says Orozco, director of the Center for Migration and Economic Stabilization at Creative Associates International. In the case of Mexico, he says that historically about 65 percent of migrants sent cash home, but that figure rose to roughly 80 percent with the pandemic. And cash from migrants “has helped cushion the external shocks form the global recession,” says Orozco, noting that in countries such as El Salvador, with a population of 6.5 million people, 1 in 2 households receive remittances.

How migrants send money to their families is changing, too. Remitly, which allows people to send money home via a mobile app, saw its customers triple from May 2019 to May 2020. “What we’ve seen is a massive shift to customers trusting digital solutions to send money home because maybe they either can’t or don’t feel comfortable getting to that physical, cash-based remittance location,” Remitly CEO and Co-founder Matt Oppenheimer told AS/COA’s Elizabeth Gonzalez, adding that, for Remitly’s users, “it is of such paramount importance…to send money home to their families during what is obviously a global pandemic.”

Aside from how migrants get the money into their loved ones’ hands, in a region where many work informally and don’t have access to government assistance, remittances don’t just pay the bills—they can help keep the peace. “The idea is that migrants, in a sense, replace the state in so far as providing social insurance to their family members back in their origin countries…that remittances are filling that welfare gap,” says Dr. Roy Germano, author of Outsourcing Welfare: How the Money Immigrants Send Home Contributes to Stability in Developing Countries. “By providing an economic buffer to people, remittances have the potential to reduce civil unrest and political instability,” says Germano, also the filmmaker behind the award-winning documentary, The Other Side of Immigration, and a senior research scholar at the New York University School of Law. 

Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Elizabeth Gonzalez produced this episode.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: The Strange Case of El Salvador's Plummeting Homicide Rate

AS/COA Online · The Strange Case of El Salvador's Plummeting Homicide Rate

In the year since Nayib Bukele's June 2019 presidential inauguration, El Salvador's murder rate plunged, dropping by roughly 60 percent. That’s a major feat in a country that just five years ago had the highest homicide rate in the world. The precipitous drop in violence is one of the main factors fueling remarkably high approval ratings for Bukele, Latin America’s youngest head of state—a 39-year-old who campaigned as a Twitter-savvy outsider and ended the two-party grip on power dominating Salvadoran politics since the end of the country’s civil war.

Then, at the end of April 2020, murders once again spiraled out of control. With 85 homicides over the course of just five days, the government’s ability to keep the peace seemed vulnerable once again to the power plays of El Salvador’s gangs. The president acted swiftly, enforcing 24-hour lockdowns in prisons and welding metal sheets onto cell doors to prevent incarcerated gang members from communicating. Bukele also drew international attention and condemnation for tweeting photos of large numbers of imprisoned gang members locked together in human chains in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s still a very fragile and very easily reversible equilibrium.”

This kind of mano dura response to gangs predates the current government. “Before Bukele took the presidency…homicide levels were already on a downward trend, which was mainly due to basically all-out war that was waged by the state security forces against gangs, combined with very tough measures in prisons that hindered the communications between gangs in jails and outside jails,” Tiziano Breda, Central America analyst with the International Crisis Group (ICG), tells AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis.

Still, the rate has dropped to record lows under Bukele, with the government crediting its security strategy, known as the Territorial Control Plan. Breda expressed doubts, saying: “Most of the measures that have been taken resemble the attempts from previous administrations, which didn’t provide these stark and immediate results.”

So how did Bukele do it? In a July 2020 report titled Miracle or Mirage? Gangs and Plunging Gang Violence, the ICG suggests there are other reasons behind plummeting crime. “We think it’s more likely to be the gangs’ decision to scale back the use of violence…probably as part of an informal understanding between gangs and authorities,” says Breda. This wouldn’t be the first time a Salvadoran government negotiated a gang truce. The 2015 surge in violence took place after the last truce fell apart.But there are reasons why this time around provides a new opportunity, says Breda, who notes that Bukele’s popularity means he has a great deal of political capital to engage in dialogue with the gangs. To some degree there’s little choice; gangs are active in 90 percent of El Salvador and involve some 400,000 people in a country with a population of 6.5 million. Interacting with gangs is “unavoidable” on a local level even when entering or exiting communities, says Breda, who adds that how Bukele decides to wield his influence has much to do with him having an eye on next year’s legislative elections.

Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Luisa Leme produced this episode.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Shining a Light on Police Abuse in Mexico

Photo by C. Zissis

AS/COA Online · Shining a Light on Police Abuse In Mexico

Earlier this month, as demonstrators across the United States took to the streets in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and to oppose police violence, Mexico was witnessing protests of its own.

On May 4, police detained a construction worker named Giovanni López just outside of Guadalajara because he wasn’t wearing facemask amid the coronavirus pandemic. He later turned up dead, his body showing signs of torture. While the types of bodycams that have frequently exposed police violence in the United States are not widely used in Mexico, López’s family had recorded a video of the police taking him and they released it to the public in hopes of speeding justice. The video went viral in early June, and protests erupted, primarily in Guadalajara and Mexico City. Three municipal police officers were arrested for the extrajudicial killing.

The case of Giovanni López drew attention to a problem in Mexico’s criminal justice system: police abuse is highly prevalent and rarely reported, let alone investigated. A 2019 World Justice Project (WJP) Report based on a survey of nearly 52,000 people found that only about 10 percent of cases of police torture get reported in Mexico, while nearly 8 in 10 prison inmates experience some form of violence or ill treatment at the hands of police. Torture—which can range from a bag over the head, to threats against family members, to electroshocks, to sexual violence—is frequently used to extract confessions.

“Mexico is using torture and ill treatment as investigative tools.”

“Mexico is using torture and ill treatment as investigative tools,” the report’s co-author and WJP Senior Researcher Roberto Hernández told AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis. Hernández also co-directed the Emmy Award-winning film Presunto culpable (Presumed Guilty). On top of being Mexico’s most-watched documentary to date, the film exposed why the country’s criminal justice system so frequently leads to the conviction of innocent people and, after its theatrical release nearly a decade ago, helped usher in a judicial reform.

Hernández, who is also a lawyer, says there has been some progress in conjunction with the reform. For example, the system has shifted from a point in which only 7 percent of inmates say a judge was present in the courtroom to hear a case to one being present in most cases. In addition, he cites the example of a municipality called Escobedo in the northern state of Nuevo León that implemented successful policing practices, right down to using bodycams when making traffic stops, that reduced abuses. “I think it’s going to be these small examples of, if you will, islands of integrity that could set forth positive change and prove that it is possible to make these things happen in Mexico,” says Hernández.But, in the meantime, there is a lot of room for progress, from strengthening the public defense system to implementing a recommendation from Mexico’s human rights commission for police forces to use bodycams across the country. “The main problems, the persistent problems of Mexico’s criminal justice system are still there—the use of torture and ill treatment, the overuse of eyewitness testimony…the overuse of confessions,” says Hernández. “Mexico still has a long way to go.”

Available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Luisa Leme produced this episode.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Dr. Julio Frenk on the Coronavirus Pandemic in an Age of Populism

AS/COA Online · Dr. Julio Frenk on the Coronavirus Pandemic in an Age of Populism

As most of the world reels from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Julio Frenk told Latin America in Focus: “The sooner you start acting, the better.”

The president of the University of Miami, who also served as Mexico’s health minister and dean of Harvard University’s School of Public Health, says social distancing measures are crucial to stem the pandemic’s spread. “Those do work and the sooner you adopt them, even understanding that they do carry an important social and economic cost, the better off you’re going to be,” he says, pointing to time lost during the first days that COVID-19 hit Italy.

When it comes to countries’ health systems, Dr. Frenk, who has held decision-making roles during a number of pandemics, describes investing in technical competence as “fundamental” for preparedness. “It’s great to have these big hospitals and do heroic surgery to save a life, but the real core of the health system is the public health component and particularly having good epidemiological surveillance systems.” He added that this was a key aspect to controlling the 2009 swine flu epidemic. “Mexico behaved in a very responsible way, and knowing there would be serious economic consequences, immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization, and that again gave time to other countries.”

Dr. Frenk said that, for that reason, the wave of global populism since that outbreak has undermined global readiness on the public health front. “In 2009 the multilateral system was in a much better shape than today,” he told AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis. “You see that time and again, and it’s happened already with coronavirus: presidents presuming that they know better than their experts.”

He also points out what we need to learn from this pandemic. “The stock market has lost trillions of dollars in market capitalization. With a fraction of that we could have competent surveillance and preparedness systems. But again, this is the invisible part of the health system. It’s the thing that we only notice when it fails.”

“I hope this is a wakeup call for people because now it’s hitting home. You cannot engage in this sort of anti-science discourse without eventually paying the price,” says the former World Health Organization executive director. “And, by the way, the way we’re going to get out of this current pandemic is through science.”

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Mexico's Fight against Femicide Reaches a Boiling Point

Photo by C. Zissis

AS/COA Online · Mexico’s Fight against Femicide Reaches a Boiling Point

Abril. Ingrid. Fátima. Isabel. Laura. Joaquina. Florentina. Rosario. Francisca. Camila. Ten women are murdered each day in Mexico.

In a country where nearly 99 percent of crimes go unpunished, violence against women and the impunity that comes with it are sparking outrage and mobilizations—a movement reflected throughout Latin America.

This year on March 8, International Women’s Day, protests will take place across Mexico. The following day, using hashtags such as #El9NingunaSeMueve and #UnDíaSinMujeres, women around the country will strike from work and school, bringing to mind the impact of 10 lives lost daily.

Amid this clamor for justice, a question remains: how do we get results? After all, in recent years Mexico has poured resources into battling discrimination and violence against women. And yet, the femicide rate rose 138 percent from 2015 to 2019.  

“We’ve got very good legislation. Everything on paper looks great,” says Ana Pecova, executive director of EQUIS Justice for Women, a Mexico City-based organization that works to transform institutions, laws, and public policy to boost women’s access to justice. Pecova, who won a National Journalism Award in Mexico in 2016 for her op-ed “Derechos de papel” (“Paper Rights”) in Nexos magazine, says the problem is that women’s rights too often don’t stand up beyond the paper they’re printed on.

In her conversation with AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis, she explains the Kafkaesque nature of women’s services offered in Mexico, whether it be understaffed justice centers closed during hours when women are most likely to face violence, to a lack of simple tools for conducting femicide investigations. “People are simply outraged at not only the cases of violence that are happening, but also the very basic lack of access to justice, where institutions fail women at every possible moment,” Pecova says. And harsher punishments are unlikely to help. “We have no evidence that increasing penalties is going to fix the problem,” she says. “It’s just a Band-Aid. It’s just patches.”

On top of that, there’s been a shift in the violence women face since Mexico took up a militarized approach to organized crime. “Starting from 2007, everything begins to change here in Mexico and violence—violence that women face particularly—begins to become much more complex,” says Pecova, pointing to the fact that women’s murders are often more brutal than those of men and increasingly involve firearms. “Now we have a whole other phenomenon of violence that takes place in the public sphere, and we have absolutely no policy to deal with that in place. We don’t even recognize that as a factor of risk for women.”

Pecova says there is an urgent need for solid, transparent data to evaluate and improve justice for women. She also suggests looking at preventative measures that start at home or in the workplace. For example, studies show women who have jobs or live in households where chores are shared are less likely to face domestic violence. Says Pecova, “I think we’re just feeling as a society an urgent need to do something, to start implementing policies that work.”

Produced by Luisa Leme.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Sizing Up the Start of AMLO's Presidency

Andrés Manuel López Obrador came into office on December 1 with pledges to transform Mexico. Now, as he wraps up his first 100 days in office on March 10—and despite some controversial moves to make good on his promises for change—he continues to have high levels of popularity. One reason is that the across-the-board landslide victory by López Obrador and his party MORENA left the opposition decimated. “Even if you become skeptical or disenchanted with López Obrador, you have nowhere else to go, so that keeps his approval ratings very high,” says Carlos Bravo Regidor, an associate professor and director of the journalism program at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics, or CIDE, in Mexico City.

In this episode of Latin America in Focus, Bravo Regidor talks with AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis about why violence and security will be the area where voters will want to see results first, how López Obrador—known as AMLO—handles checks and balances, and the role of history and nostalgia in AMLO’s presidency. “When he tries to position himself historically, his enemy is what he calls the neoliberal period, so what happened in Mexico between the 1980s and 2018,” says Bravo Regidor. “That period was also the period when Mexico became a democracy. And AMLO doesn’t make that distinction. For AMLO, democracy started with him.”

But that also means AMLO’s nostalgia looks back to a less globalized world, says Bravo Regidor, who writes for Reforma and Mexico.com and is a frequent radio and TV commentator. “The idea that López Obrador has of Mexico is from a previous era,” he says. “At the moment of the 2018 election, that complex society that Mexico is today ended up voting for a guy that doesn’t really reflect that complexity in his vision of the country, his vision of the world, or his policies.”

The conclusion of AMLO’s first 100 days in power also happens to coincide with the ninetieth anniversary of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the hegemonic political force in Mexico through most of the twentieth century. MORENA’s rise has drawn comparisons to the PRI, but Bravo Regidor notes that there’s a crucial difference. “MORENA has something that the PRI never had, which is democratic legitimacy. One of the weak spots of the PRI was that its democratic legitimacy was in question, and that made the PRI a lot more susceptible to opening spaces for the opposition,” explains Bravo Regidor. “The PRI knew deep down inside that that was their original sin, so to speak. MORENA doesn’t have that original sin, so that renders MORENA a lot stronger because MORENA doesn’t have to give anything away to the opposition. ‘We won, and we won by a landslide.’”

Listen to the podcast to hear more about AMLO’s position on U.S. ties and approach to Venezuela, how the president’s daily press conferences give him an “omnipresence,” and what—for Bravo Regidor—has been the biggest surprise of the new government.

This episode was produced by Luisa Leme.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: What to Expect from an AMLO Presidency

Mexico has one of the longest presidential transitions in the world. All told, it will be five months since the time that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, better known as AMLO, won the election by a landslide in July until his December 1 inauguration. Over the course of that time, observers have been trying to figure out whether he’ll end up leaning more toward being a leftist populist or a moderate pragmatist. Whichever it turns out to be, he takes office with strong approval, a majority in Congress, and little in the way of opposition. 

It’s that position of strength that has helped him, thus far, keep up warm ties with U.S. President Donald Trump, says former Mexican Ambassador to the U.S. Arturo Sarukhan. “Trump is someone who sniffs out weakness,” says Sarukhan, who notes that Trump has avoided including López Obrador in his Mexico bashing. AMLO has been doing his best to avoid a conflict with the U.S. president. “That explains why, during these very long months of a transition, he has said zilch on issues like the separation of minors from their parents, the DREAMers, DACA, and what has been going on at the border.” But a brewing crisis over how to handle a Central American migrant caravan in Tijuana will likely serve as an early test for both the López Obrador government and what Sarukhan calls an AMLO-Trump “bromance.”

“I would hope that the incoming Mexican government does not seek to appease Donald Trump on this front in exchange for nothing,” says the Americas Society board member, who adds that the new government should negotiate for development aid to handle the economic and security issues that drive Central Americans to leave their countries. “What can’t stand is a deterrence-driven only immigration policy between Mexico and the United States.”

But another reason López Obrador will seek to quell U.S.-Mexico tensions is because he plans to focus on domestic politics over international affairs. One sign of that is the transition team’s controversial decision to invite increasingly isolated Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to the inauguration. “I believe that López Obrador, much like his political and ideological DNA, has a vision of Mexico’s foreign policy anchored in the sixties and seventies,” says Sarukhan. “He has clearly said that he thinks Mexico should not be intervening in the domestic affairs of Venezuela or Cuba, for example, going back to this sacrosanct doctrine of non-intervention.”

Beyond foreign policy, the private sector got a hint of and the jitters over how the new administration will govern when the transition team held an October referendum that resulted in ending a $14 billion airport project in Mexico City. “In some ways the honeymoon is over before the wedding because a lot of things have been happening even before he takes office and the airport is a perfect example,” says Amy Glover, CEO of emerging markets corporate relations firm Speyside Mexico.

But Glover, who has 20 years of experience in public affairs and business experience with a focus on Mexico, cautions that it’s still too early to forecast how foreign investors will approach an AMLO presidency. “Mexico is just too big of an economy to really ignore,” she says.

“Let’s face it: Mexico is a country with too high of a percentage of people living in poverty,” adds Glover. “I think It’s important to remain engaged as civil society and not discount the possibility for positive change before we even get started.”

She also notes that Mexico’s Congress coming close to having gender parity in the latest election is a positive sign of strides made by Mexican women in recent years. Says Glover: “Mexico should be proud of the fact that it has so many amazing women participating in politics.”
 

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Amid Caravan Crisis, a Look at Mexico's Migration Policy

Thousands of people—many of them women and children—are making their way in migrant caravans on foot, through tear gas, and over rivers to get from Central America to the United States. "They know what they're facing when they hit Mexico, they know what they're facing with the Trump administration. And yet they keep marching and they keep moving forward," says Stephanie Leutert, director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law and a lecturer on Mexican migratory policy at the University of Texas at Austin.

Some 300,000 migrants try to make it through Mexico each year, explains Leutert, who met with AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis in Mexico City before heading to the Mexican border with Guatemala for research. Migrants who go it alone face steep smuggling fees, extortion, and kidnapping, leading some to sacrifice migrating under the radar in exchange for the safety of caravans. Says Leutert: “There is something political about what they’re doing and standing up and saying, ‘Look at our country: We don’t have a future there, we have the right to seek asylum in Mexico or the United States.’”

Mexico’s policy centers on apprehension and deportation, but it’s becoming more than just a transit point: from 2014 to 2017, the number of migrants seeking asylum there grew sevenfold, with the total expected to hit 23,000 this year. The country finds its refugee system short-staffed and overburdened while confronting a crisis that shows no signs of ebbing. On top of that, as discussed in this episode, factors like climate change only threaten to dial up the pressure.

All of this happens as Mexico prepares to inaugurate a new leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The future president has suggested offering work visas to Central Americans and calling all countries involved to increase development aid to the Northern Triangle—even as U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to cut it. But, when it comes to the complexity of handling migration, Leutert cautions: “Just like the Peña Nieto administration and the Calderón administration and the Vicente Fox administration, you’re going to see the López Obrador team hit the same challenges.”

Despite how formidable it may seem to solve the problems that spark migration, Leutert, who covers the issue for Lawfare, offers recommendations. For example, the United States could offer temporary work visas, Mexico could take a risk-management approach, and there should be a more dignified treatment of asylum-seekers overall. Because, ultimately, migrants leave Central America out of need rather than desire. “People don’t want to march in caravans,” says Leutert. “There are a lot of things that every involved country could do if they were really serious about stopping this.”

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Millennials' Big Role in the Mexican Elections

At 64, Mexican presidential frontrunner Andrés Manuel López Obrador is the oldest candidate on the ballot, but that’s not stopping 51 percent of millennials from backing him. And their support matters, because that age group has the potential to account for nearly half of the electorate on Mexico’s July 1 election day, says Pancho Parra, editor of polls for millennial-focused news site Nación321.

The fact that younger voters back López Obrador, or AMLO, to a greater degree than do other age groups may seem contradictory. Besides the age factor, millennials consider solving crime and violence to be a top issue but disagree with his proposal to give amnesty to criminals.

So why does the largest portion go for AMLO? One reason is rejection of the sitting government. In Nación321’s millennial poll, respondents were asked to qualify current President Enrique Peña Nieto with a happy or angry emoji, and 89 percent went with latter. But Parra tells AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis that AMLO’s “direct and easy” manner of speaking that compares to ex-President of Uruguay José “Pepe” Mujica—famous for his austere way of living—or former U.S. presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.

On the other hand, Mexican millennials don’t wear their politics on their sleeve. They say they wouldn’t want to post a selfie with a candidate or chat with one of them on WhatsApp. And they don’t see themselves allied with parties: 59 percent don’t identify as belonging to any party.

Parra says that 2018 marks Mexico’s first social media race, and that’s resulted in a race defined by memes and viral humor. But, in covering and polling millennials, he found they are looking toward the future rather than for quick fixes to problems like the economy and better public safety.

So what comes after the July vote? “Everything’s been promised to the young people: That they’re going to have jobs, that they’re going to be better paid,” says Parra. “But if [the next government] doesn’t accomplish those kinds of things, I think there will be a big democracy fail.”

This episode was produced by Luisa Leme.

AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Why Mexico's Election Will Redraw the Country's Political Map

The closer we get to Mexico’s election, the more Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s poll lead grows. The three-time presidential candidate better known as AMLO gets called everything from a nationalist to a firebrand to a populist. Still, he’s ahead of Ricardo Anaya, his closest challenger, by more than 20 points, per Oraculus’ poll aggregator. Many question the numbers or posit that undecided voters could make the difference on Election Day.

Do they have a point? We’ll have to see on July 1, but Jorge Buendía, director of polling firm Buendía & Laredo and founding partner of Oraculus, thinks not. “The people that are saying ‘Don’t trust the polls’ are the ones who are supporting candidates who are in second or third place,” he told AS/COA Online Editor-in-Chief Carin Zissis in Mexico City.

On top of that, Buendía explains that these elections could well redefine Mexico’s political scenario, upending past alliances and traditional political rivalries in both Mexico’s North and South. Why? Across the country, more than 3,400 seats are up for grabs—about 60 percent more than in the last general elections. And that helps MORENA, the political party that AMLO started since he lost the 2012 election, and which the frontrunner is encouraging voters to select all down their ballots. “MORENA will have a lot of jobs to offer,” says Buendía. “And the question here is, then what are going to be the checks and balances on López Obrador?”

This episode was produced by Luisa Leme.