Weekly adamisacson.com - Issue #6

This was a pretty intense week on the job, but I feel like we have a lot to show for it. As a result, though, this is going to be a pretty long e-mail. Apologies in advance! Let’s get into it.

First, this coming week could be a bit calmer. I only see one Latin America-related event happening in Washington, after scanning Congress, the think tanks, and the universities. That’s very unusual.

Thursday, October 4, 2018

That’s fine, though, because we’ve got a big public conference of our own to put together. It happens in just over two weeks. If you’re in Washington and care even a little about Colombia, please mark off October 16 on your calendar. We’ll be joined by a big group from Colombia. It includes a former senator and vice-presidential candidate, a former congressman, a transitional-justice magistrate, a truth commissioner, really smart experts and committed activists.

Two years after Colombia signed a historic peace accord with the FARC, Latin America’s largest guerrilla group, much is uncertain. Amid uneven implementation of the accord, armed and criminal groups—some made up of demobilized guerrillas—are filling territorial vacuums and encroaching on ethnic-minority communities. Murders of independent social leaders have reached epidemic proportions. A new president who had led opposition to the accord seeks to make adjustments. Complex transitional-justice cases are just getting started. Coca cultivation has reached new records. Negotiations with the ELN guerrilla group are stalled. Meanwhile, most messages from the U.S. government are about coca and the crisis in neighboring Venezuela—not consolidation of peace.

WOLA is pleased to bring to Washington a remarkable group of leaders, practitioners, and experts from Colombia. They will dive deeply into these and other current challenges in an all-day event, open to the public.

I was disappointed to see Guatemala’s military—which had briefly taken a reformist direction—aggressively, enthusiastically supporting President Jimmy Morales’s crackdown on the CICIG anti-corruption body. WOLA posted a piece I wrote about that. What’s happened with Guatemala’s army since August 31 obliterates a few halting steps that it had taken toward being a credible, accountable institution. It brings back the bad old days.

Here’s an excerpt. The whole thing is here.

It goes on like that.

Greg Weeks recorded the audio of our panel discussion at Washington University Monday night, and has posted it to his podcast. I talked about U.S. aid to Mexico and border security. (Direct link to the mp3 file)

I haven’t had a chance to read most of these yet, either.

Covered here, in another 3,200-word survey:

In August 2017, a top U.S. official told the Senate: Colombia’s government and the ex-FARC can handle coca cultivation “their way” in Nariño department; the U.S. government will do it “our way” in Antioquia. “We will then have a test.”

The UNODC’s numbers for 2017 are now out:

Not exactly passing that test. Here’s the whole story:

Filmmakers Tom Laffay, Emily Wright, and Daniel Bustos were in town Wednesday evening to screen their 20-minute documentary, “They’re Killing Us,” with lots of footage from Cauca, Colombia in the months after the FARC guerrillas disarmed. The film debuted on the website of The Atlantic at the end of May.

The video states that one social leader is being killed every four days in post-conflict Colombia. In the last few months, though, it’s more like one every day and a half to two days.

I’m pleased, at least, that the film drew a capacity crowd in the Busboys and Poets restaurant’s event space, in Washington’s U Street neighborhood, on a rainy Wednesday night. (Actually, this whole week was miserably rainy.) They had to turn people away for lack of space.

(All the coverage I saw last month was about Mexico.)

I embedded Apple Music and Spotify playlists, but there’s no way they’ll show up in an e-mail, so go here: