 Violence and insecurity are rampant in El Salvador and Guatemala and especially in Honduras, the three countries where the lion's share of the children originate. Drug trafficking gangs control vast tracts of territory and fill the space left by weak governments without the capacity to extend their authority and enforce the rule of law. The violence these gangs wreak is brutal and is indiscriminate. Women are disproportionately targeted as gangs work to draw them in early on controlling schools, recruiting middle school children as mules and traffickers and threatening children and their families with violence, rape and murder should they refuse to participate. This morning when Senator Cain I think at the hearing on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked Secretary or Ambassador Shannon and Mr. Schwartz about the biggest problem that are causing these children to come to the United States they were unequivocal and their answer and their answer was the driver was violence. So as Ambassador Shannon argued we cannot solve this problem alone we need to build partnerships and some of this has been echoed by different leaders in Central America in particular I think the president of Honduras and his foreign minister called for broader US cooperation with Central American countries to address the insecurity and violence that fuels these migration patterns and their statement they referenced existing US partnerships that might serve as a working model for Central America, Merida Initiative, Plunk Columbia and they said that these programs have been incredibly useful and effective in reducing violence and insecurity but they also said that Plunk Columbia has driven violence northward and that the Merida Initiative drove violence south. Now I don't agree completely with all of these things but I think that there are credible cases to be made that there is an effect to our effectiveness in these programs and a lack of I guess coordination maybe also a willingness and I think Doug's going to talk a little bit about this by governments in Central America to deal with some of these issues that are also part of this discussion. So now the US is feeling the effects of this storm, US financial support for counter narcotics and security initiatives in South America could be better. The recent supplemental request isn't insignificant but it's still barely what is needed to deal with the root causes of this issue. The fear that drives these young migrants makes the situation a unique one and one arguably outside the realm of normal immigration policy. As Ambassador Shannon said this morning this is a humanitarian crisis not an immigration one. Perhaps the most compelling case for identifying the crisis this way can be made by regional numbers. The migrants aren't just flooding into the United States throughout the entire region asylum applications are up by about 400% as children pour out of Honduras and Salvador and Guatemala into Nicaragua, Panama and Mexico as well. These we often view as sources of immigrants are becoming destinations as children seek refugee or seek refuge outside of their home communities. And there's a huge parallel between areas of violence and communities of origin. So dealing with the causes that drive these children Northwood is a humanitarian thing to do. And in reality it's also the economic policy option as well. While dealing with the widespread violence and insecurity or while dealing with it will not be cheap it must be done. Throwing money at the border at improving immigrant enforcement will only delay the inevitable. It's part of the problem sure it is but we also need to think about the root causes of why these kids will continue coming. So with all that in mind I'm going to turn it over to Doug. Again he is the authority on these issues he'll be able to speak with great deal of authority. I'm sorry with a great deal of knowledge and experience on these issues particularly on the very causes that are making kids come to the United States. Before he begins I just want to remind you that we're all on the record today. We're being webcast. So after Doug's remarks and I'm going to ask him a couple of questions as follow-ups I'm going to open it up to the audience for questions as well. I would ask that you identify yourself and I understand that this is a very emotional issue for some people and people are very passionate about this issue as well. I would ask that any comments be brief and that you get on with your questions but without further ado Doug the floor is yours. Well thank you very much and thank you Carl for that very generous introduction and for your time to come and listen to this. What I think I bring to the discussion that maybe is a little bit lacking is spending a lot of time on the ground particularly in very violent areas and in dealing with gangs and others on a fairly ongoing basis and I think at heart it really is a tremendously complex issue and one of the things one has to have in mind going forward is that nothing in the short term is going to change the situation. There's nothing we can do or that the governments there can do or are willing to do that will significantly change the equation in people's minds and I think the question is why. Why is it that people are suddenly willing and I don't think any parent any family lightly takes the decision to send their kids on a potentially lethal journey that just doesn't happen even if you're really not a good parent even if you're really not a good relative you don't do that lightly and yet people are doing it by the thousands and I think a couple years ago I wrote a long piece that caused a lot of people some unhappiness where I argued that the rule of law that the Central America Northern Triangle had essentially passed the tipping point it had gone from being a functional but perhaps weak democratic systems in the Northern Triangle to systems that no longer functioned with a tipping point because of gang violence because of government incompetence because of massive corruption but primarily because of the complete collapse of the rule of law those countries no longer provided their citizens with any positive incentive to be identified with their own government to view their government as capable of handling anything to view the police forces anything other than occupying forces and thugs and therefore you're going to see a series of consequences I didn't I was not smart enough to see the child exodus is one of them but I argued that you'd see much more migration many other things coming out of this process because people have simply reached the point where nothing works and when nothing works you begin to take desperate decisions and when nothing works in this context it means your life is at risk in those of the lives of your child is at risk and particularly in the Northern Triangle you see the entire rule of law hollowed out and justice largely become a transactional notion whoever can pay the most for whatever verdict they want in whatever case regardless of right or wrong will likely win that case and when that happens and you have no recourse to the police what do you what is the inevitable result that we see across the globe and other circumstances people take justice into their own hands violence skyrockets the impunity rate in these countries for homicides is above 95% in every country which means if you want to kill somebody your chances of getting caught are less than 5% which is a good incentive to keep to keep going to do whatever you were going to do and on top of that you have the merging issues that Carl mentioned where you have Mexico pushing Columbia pushing and Central America sort of caught in the middle this has led to a series of I think really devastating consequences the one of them the most obvious one that people talk about a lot I think often without much knowledge is the gang issue the gangs are begin have become much more influential I think the gangs three years ago had very little relationship with transnational organized crime and had very little relationship with major drug cartels I would argue that the vast majority still don't but that you have seen over time the ability of certain clicas certain specific groups particularly along the northern northwestern tier of El Salvador to become much more and to follow much more plugged in to the local transport these the networks and what you see in San Pedro Sula where I was last month in a really devastating sort of survey of the city the gangs will tell you they're actually looking now for those relationships they're actively pursuing the chance to hook up but particularly with the scene a lower cartel what does that entail and I think if you have if you have that going on in a collapsed state where there's no where the rule of law no longer functions repression we had the mano dura we had the mano super dura all of which failed miserably because none of the other issues were were addressed going going with that led in part to the gang truth which I would argue in El Salvador when you had the truth signed two years ago is probably the driving force of much of the instability in the rise in the gang violence you're seeing now because it was at that point through that process that the gangs understood they could exercise political power they could make demands on the government they could control large blocks of votes they had politicians coming and courting them in the last elections and so that changed the dynamic radically and how they viewed themselves and in their in their political environment locally and I think another thing that's this tremendously sort of depressing is you know if you follow the gangs at all you know your life in a gang is likely to be relatively short you cycle in and out in a relatively short period of time which is one of the reasons why you can rise in the ranks of the gangs very quickly because there's job openings at the top often that come come available in unexpected circumstances and so your ability to to move up the food chain is fast but if you talk to the old gang members now there's the lament that you hear of older generations everywhere these kids just don't get it you know kids they're lost ethos of the gang they become much more violent they don't respect the limits that the gangs traditionally had had and this is largely because when I was with the gangs in San Pedro Sula nobody I talked with was over 23 years old they were they were all and they were exercising command structures they weren't they weren't in Salvador you usually have them in their late 20s early 30s a lot of them have been in different places San Pedro Sula I think is a very different animal I think you have the amount of weapons that flows through there and the caliber of weapons they have is enough to start another war that you see four to blow up each other's houses is it completely different dynamic than what you've seen elsewhere and you have kids who really you know there's there's we've always said this about gangs it's like you know they're gonna live live hard die fast and you know they don't it's not I think it's that's greatly accentuated the new generation they really don't have the expect expectation of living to be 25 which means that they feel like they can do pretty much anything in that time period and it is true and you and they'll talk about you know they are recruiting younger and younger children which if you live in a neighborhood in which particularly painful to listen to them talk about and to see the reality on the ground is if you have a daughter they will pick her up when she's 11 or 12 and gang rape or into the gang that is the reality in vast sectors of San Pedro Sula and where gangs control so if you're if you're a parent you're gonna want to do something about that you have two options you know they'll come to you and say you know we want your kid either your daughter or your son in or you pay us a lot of money or we kill you those are the options that you get and most of them don't have a lot of money most of them of the people I talked a lot of people who sneak out of the neighborhoods in the middle of the night and what you're seeing is very similar to what you see saw and see without what is in the worst moment we have huge neighborhoods now abandoned people just leave their neighborhoods where they lived because they can't live there anymore and you have this whole third emerging force third or probably third fourth and fifth emerging forces in these areas now of people who call themselves anti-socialists they claim to be anti-pandita they're all out of the pandillas they want to they but they claim to provide security in the neighborhoods they you know they'll brag you oh in our neighborhood you can leave your car and you know if anybody comes you know we'll take care of it that inevitably leads to vigilante killings and things go to hell really fast no matter how what their intentions are when they start out and if in the you know the really shocking thing is that they really view both the gangs enjoy it but the civilians they have no recourse there's no one in the police they can go to particularly in San Pedro Sula they'll tell you they can rent a police uniform and badge and gun for four hundred dollars a night set up to attend us and what they want to do they want to kill somebody they'll set up to attend where they know that person will come they'll pick him up and then those hang around for a few hours to charge taxes to people who go by rape people pick them up and I said you know why would anybody stop when they see and they said because they don't know for real cops if the real cops to shoot them if they tried to run the written and we'll shoot them too so they can't tell the difference right it's just like it's like this never never land of a black hole where where people live when where the gangs are really strong and on top of that sort of on the ground issues you have the massive influence now of the transport these the networks growing ever closer particularly the scene a lower cartel having more money which means more money to buy into the political system more money to corrupt the political system more money to collapse what little is left of the judicial systems so that if you want to bring a charge and the gangs will tell you this and every one of them that I talked to in the different clicas had a police commander that they could go to he will give them what they want but then the other clica will have someone else and then the other gang will have someone else entirely so and one guy was saying you know those those damn ms-13 guys you know they have a colonel and he does this and that and you know he protects in the police only protect them they're always going after us and he said you know my colonel just got transferred you know this is really bad I don't know what we're gonna do but he didn't see the irony of having one of his own while he was complaining about what other what the other groups were doing and I think the the is it in that mix that you have increasing resources flowing in which is the other thing I think it's one of the main drivers you're no longer talking about kids who are making I think I've told Carl the story before when I first started doing the gang truce stuff in 2012 I was seeing about the leadership you know the gang in prison and we're saying you know so I said how much do you charge to guard a load across the northern tier there from point A to point B and they thought really hard and they were really pleased and those had recharged $600 like that was the biggest number they could think of they now realize they could charge $6,000 or $60,000 or $600,000 the orders and magnitude of the resources flowing in and their ability to think in much different ways and much more broadly and recognize the the value of what they can provide and what they do is grown astronomically which means they have more resources at the same time the states have been I think remarkably incompetent in dealing with this over a period of years there is a constant lament and I think it's true that there are lack of resources the government's on the resource I would argue that if half of the corruption were stopped they would have resources to do an enormous amount and if they had the political will and if they were thinking about it in my experience the general tendency is to think that this is all the problem of the United States you've seen as far as I can tell the northern tier nothing at a governmental level of any of the three governments to actually try to begin to address this issue in their own way with root causes so yes I think it's very easy to say and I think there's in there so a lot of truth in it that this is larger this is a US problem without a doubt we have their co-responsibility there are all those things but if you're not willing to take the resources they're being siphoned out of your coffers by the most extraordinary amounts I mean you read the amounts of money that the Funes government El Salvador walked out the door with unbelievable and the hundreds of millions of dollars okay you could take a faction of that reinvested in your own country and be and I think you know Honduras went through a really dark period it may be pulling out a little bit now Guatemala was bad enough so that they accepted international oversight this he seek to come in and in deal with their cases because they were simply unable to prosecute their own their own people that's all sort of dissipated as well so I think yes there's a cause the co-responsibility but I think that the countries themselves have to view the fact that their children are and their people are taking these enormous risks to leave as a problem for them to I think it's probably the worst indictment a government can have when your people want to walk out the door and tremendously risky circumstances across the desert and view that as preferable to living in the country you govern in which is supposed to be a democracy I think that should set off some alarm bells and make you think okay what the hell has happened here why are we in this situation I cannot tell those alarm bells are going off so I think the overall situation if you've read and followed any my stuff on Central America you can tell them a bit of a pessimist I don't see I don't see many lights at the end of the tunnel and I think that some of the worst assumptions that I and some other folks made about the direction things were going have sadly turned out to be true and probably understated in some cases and I think you know I think the the new government El Salvador has a chance to do new and different things I think they are reforming bringing back the better police that that the foolish government administration had kicked out they're doing some things in their internal intelligence structures some things I think with a lot better people a lot less corruption at the cupola at least the upper levels of the police and intelligence which I think will be very beneficial or could be very beneficial if there's political will to back them but I think that if you if you know on the ground there for and especially in the neighborhoods where their kids with these kids live I mean one of the guys I was talking to and Honduras is you know one the well-known hitman there and when he and he told me he sent his kids out of the country to go to Billy's he didn't send to the US sent a police to and I was like so the top hitman can't protect his own kids you have a serious problem right this is like this is like never never land so I think that when we look at this and the idea of what the US should do and I'm not a I'm not a policy person I think that the only comment I would make if you we've we have done car seat for the last few years we put in 200 and some odd million into the that process by every statistical measure of the situation in the region and northern triangles worse than when we started homicides are up impunity rates are up kidnappings are up child migration is certainly up all of the man in the prison population overpopulation are all up so I think if the if we want to talk about putting more resources into the region one has to sit back and fundamentally rethink what we're doing if we're doing putting more into the same things that have produced at best nothing and at worst negative results you might want to rethink what you're actually doing and where that aid is going I think one of the huge problems that we face in the region is very difficult in the current political configurations to find interlocutors that you can trust in work with embedded units and that sort of thing I think we've had a lot of really bad experience over time and recently with work in vetted units Honduras maybe turning the corner a bit on that so there's no there's no easy solution because the countries essentially have to have the political to begin turning around the situation internally so that other aid can actually be meaningful as it flows in and I think on the gang issue one has to fundamentally rethink I mean my people came to think I was radically anti-truths in my in my thinking and it's actually not true I think that everything else has failed I think my problem with the truth no solider was the way it was done totally non-transparent negotiating with narcos behind it that I think is not a not a valid model for what you want to do and I think the results are evident but I think we do have to be willing to fundamentally rethink maybe a truce or incorporation of different things has to happen with gangs that now exercise real political power and may be able to be brought into a system in a different way I think that we have to start with the fundamental recognition that everything else has failed everything we've done has has failed so what does that mean it means you have to radically rethink and I'll settle I'll just finish my side of this by saying one thing I see is tremendously dangerous and that is the great split in perceived priorities between the United States and our policy and what people on the ground there want to see our primary policy is still focused on counter-narcotics and stemming the flow of illicit drugs into this country their primary violence and the driving force of what any rational politician down there is doing is to lessen the violence and those two are not particularly compatible and at this point I think that if you if you look at how some of the Central American responses have been they seem irrational where they really pissed off policy makers it's stupid if you look at it from their point of view they need to get the violence down and it's going to probably be in ways that we a lot of people in Washington will not particularly like and I think you have to have room in we have to have room in our heads to acknowledge these are rational responses to really dire and unsettling circumstances that may require us to fundamentally rethink and we have to find a way to have some overlap between what our national agenda in the region is and what they're driving political imperatives are and right now there's almost no overlap which is why they're increasingly willing to tell us to just take a hike because we are no longer looking at the same set problem set as being a priority. So I'll leave it there and take it away. Great. Well, thanks Doug for that set of really comprehensive remarks. I'm going to ask you to drill down on a couple of things. One is you mentioned the willingness of countries in the region to work with us on different issues, violence or security. You've had experience with this in Plan Colombia and I'm assuming some as well on on the Merida initiative. Could you describe a little bit what that willingness looks like? I think it's important to sort of give an example to countries in the region. So they understand when we mean willingness and cooperative solutions going forward. What does it look like? So can you tell me a little bit about what that experience is like with Columbia? Well, I guess in my mind, the thing that fundamentally changed Columbia in terms of the visible political will was when they decided to begin taxing their own people to pay for their own war. One of the things that in the study that Carl and I did last year, earlier this year, and doing the research that was what was shocking to me was that at no point in Plan Colombia did US military aid cover more than 24% of the Colombian military budget and is now down to about 4%, which means what it means the Colombians assumed the responsibility in ways that were very painful. And it may involve, you know, really rich people who had never paid taxes, who didn't want to pay taxes, starting to pay taxes. And it meant ultimately that they had a sustainable model for a long period of time that allowed them to carry out a series of events over more than a decade into what you're now seeing the result of. I think if you look at the taxation rates, I don't remember what they are off the top of my head anymore, but Central America has the lowest taxation rates in the world. I think Guatemala particularly specifically drives something with below 20% of its revenues from taxes. It's impossible to run a country like that, and you can't really expect the outside world to keep putting in money when you're when you don't assume that responsibility on your own. So I think that that would be one of the key things. The other thing I think that they were willing to do at great cost internally was really purged the police and military and corruption. They were fortunate to have a series of very good leaders in the police, who they gave extraordinary powers to who were able to weed. I think Naranjo got rid of at one time 2,500 folks. He didn't have to explain it purely on suspicion of corruption because you looked at their income, you looked at how they lived, you said, okay, this can't possibly be goodbye. They didn't have to prove it in a court a lot, which allowed for a fairly unfortunately, they had responsible people doing this without a lot of personal vendettas and other things going on. But I think the willingness to build a professional force and they were tremendously concerned as they went forward about the state providing positive state services. What do you have in Central America? There's virtually no positive state presence. If the state is there, it terrifies people often, more often than than they're viewed as beneficial. I think Columbia has done an enormous amount in changing that dynamic of how their, how the state itself and how the repressive apparatus of the state is perceived by people and the ability not in certainly not across the board and there are multiple problems without a doubt. But I think that they've come a tremendously long way in 10 years to which I would argue that, and a judicial system that has recovered a significant degree of credibility. Second last question, I think a lot of folks will want to chime in here and have questions. Broadly speaking, when you look at transnational crime, you see the movement of goods and people and extortion. You see that all by land, by ocean, by air. Is there a portion here that needs to be improved on the South Com side? Do we need more assets, maritime assets? Do we need to figure a new approach to dealing with the movement of people and things and goods that are coming out of Central America to other parts of the region? Well, I think the testimony of General Kelly has posture statement earlier this year I thought was an extraordinary posture statement for a combatant commander, which was that essentially they can watch a whole lot of things and can act on a tiny fraction of them. They can watch the cocaine go by, they can listen to farce on ships going through the Caribbean and have no idea of what's being said and have no capacity to stop. They have to pick their targets very, very carefully and they have less and less cooperation. I was talking with the NARCO a year ago, more than a year ago in Honduras, when I was doing the piece on, had we reached a tipping point, this is one of the things that convinced me that we had. I said to this guy, my sense is that something is different in Central America now. It's no longer what it was, that something's changed, you guys are doing a lot better. And he laughed, he said, you're right, something has changed. And I said, what? He said, we're no longer afraid of the United States. He said, we know they're not going to do anything. And that has opened the doors for us. The feeling, even though I think it's not in touch too, and I think DEA and others have done a lot of really interesting things in Honduras and elsewhere. But our absence, I think, on the ability to provide resources, the lack of ability of who to give it to, if we did have resources and the inability to act on the vast majority of stuff we do see going by, is a encouraging factor for the transnational organized crime groups as they move through there, because they simply feel like there's no goalie in the goal. You know, they're just met the end of all this. There's no reaction. I'm going to open it up to questions from folks here in the audience. We could just get a microphone up here in front, just quickly. Right here. Diane and I are from the Wilson Center. Two questions, one for Doug and one for our policy man. Doug, you have been, your authority has been taken away by our moderator, but I'm about to give it back to you. You are an authority on gangs, on illicit organizations. I want to ask you what is the role of the private sector in Central America and the northern part in reintegrating these men and women, children as they come back. For the policy man with authority, where the United Nations to declare the northern triangle a refugee situation, what would be the implications for the US government in applying standard refugee processes for dealing with the children and their mothers? I think the private sector question is, I think, tremendously important, and that's something I skipped over unintentionally. I think that, you know, they have been incredibly reluctant to either pay taxes or reincorporate and create job opportunities for people, even when they're looking for them. It's not an easy question, and I understand that for them, but if you ask, you know, I was talking to some businessmen that I've known for a long time on El Salvador, how much do you spend on private security? Their own selves, you know, $35,000, $40,000, $50,000 a year. So, you know, if you could pay $10,000 in taxes and create a viable police force, you wouldn't have to do that, right? You could actually save money, but if you look at the statistics on the private security forces versus police forces in the three-country cuts region, it varies from country to country. It's about double private police force, if not more. So, I think that they're caught, I think, in fairness to them in a situation where they feel paying taxes goes to corruption, but they've never paid taxes and they've never shown any willingness to, and they think, well, if we pay now, it's just going to get stolen, which there's some truth to that, but you can also take measures to improve governance as you pay as you pay taxes. One guy told me it wasn't, it was in 2012 that the total private sector job creation in El Salvador had been 1,000 jobs. And I was like, 1,000 jobs? I mean, there are the public sector and most of the informal sector, but formal jobs that they had created, which is abysmal and unforgivable. And I think that one of the things that you see as a willingness of the really wealthy and to just simply leave the country again. They did it during the wars and they do it now, as opposed to getting down in the weeds and trying to actually solve a problem with some risks to themselves in their resources. But there's another huge problem and that is that the narcos in the region are at the point now where they have so much money that they need to start investing in legitimate businesses. And what you see across the region, but particularly the Northern Triangle, is as the narcos come in, they can undercut any legitimate business by a significant amount because they don't care if they make money on their businesses, right? They're there to lend their money. So if you have a 6% profit margin and someone can sell the same product at 20% less and you know that they're taking a loss but they don't care, that puts you out of business. And you see in droves private sector people being put out of business by narco businesses coming in to directly compete with them in ways that we would consider to be not legitimate competition. But if you have a million dollars and you only need 800,000 back to make your, you know, to make what you want out of it, you can put a lot of businesses out of business and that's happening. So they're shrinking and they're in a very difficult situation. In regarding your question. Right. What was interesting about today's hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is that you had very few members of Congress talking about this issue as a humanitarian issue. It was more dealing with the immediate concern which was the border. Why do I say this? Because I think there is a view from folks towards this issue to look at it more as a security issue and as a sort of quasi immigration issue. When in reality a lot of this has to do with migration. A lot of this has to do with some fallout from policies that we've had. We need to be more comprehensive in how we deal with this. I think that having a body like the UN for political issues might affect some folks cross the aisle in one way and another group of folks in another way. Folks look at the UN in different ways. Some reject it and some embrace it more. So there's that added sort of side to it. But more than anything and more importantly I think that it might force people here to reevaluate a little bit what our policies have been and it might force a broader conversation on how to deal with some of these issues. We no longer can sort of stand aside and see have the kind of participation that we have with Southcom or we're just watching things happen. That can't happen. That's one issue. The other issue is that the core issues that are making these children come are issues that affect us directly security wise, directly economically but also voting. And this is one of these issues that's what I call intermestic because a lot of the people that are in this country who have family members that are affected are looking at public officials and looking at how they're reacting to these issues and it affects their votes. So this issue in particular has angles all over the place and I don't know if the UN issue would actually make people react more but I do think that more and more more members and more decision makers are starting to look at how broad this issue truly is. Let me just get a microphone. Sergio, I've been a consultant. It's a great, great brief and obviously I have a pretty broad depth of the subject matter. Could you address what it is that is unique in the spikes that you've had of the migration flows? Because obviously there's been violence in that region for a long time. During the civil wars where more people were getting killed there wasn't this massive flow going through. Now you also have the involvement of the Mexican government that by some reports say that Peña Nieto has allowed migrants from Central America to get through Mexico within 72 hours and that's, that may be what's generating this but what is it that's unique about the tremendous spike that's happened in the last six months because the numbers have troubled, quadrupled. Yeah. I think that, well one I think that there are a lot more people being killed now than there were in the war. I think that that's one of the saddest things about the region is that the war has actually looked back on many cases as a good time, as a better time than what they're living and I think that's one of the tragedies of the region. I think the spike was driven by several things. One is that it was, I think the gangs have become more violent and as they've pushed down the people's ability to absorb or tolerate this kind of violence has snapped. They sort of reached just a mental breaking point and there's no question that the coyotes are putting out the word to get your kids. Now is the time to send your kids. You can do it. Without a doubt that. That was, and it is, you well know that a lot of those especially when you're dealing in societies that run on rumors and what people say and especially when a lot of folks are getting through initially, it fed the idea that the coyotes were more than willing because they're making a lot of money in the process that that was one of the push factors. There was this idea that, oh my God now you can do it and they were flat out lying to people and people were saying, well, okay, if this is the time I can scrape the money together off we go. But I don't think that the same rumors a year before would have had the same effect primarily because you have now gangs that show up with, you know, AK-47 assault rifles, they show up with light anti-tank weapons, they show up with all kinds of things and the level in impact is they've spread their control and their ability to act across the country, it also affects more and more people. So I think something snapped in a lot of people that they finally reached the conclusion that there was no hope in their own country and I think it's culmination of a series of other events or different events that sort of all came together in part ignited by people saying it's really bad you can get your kid out and then it was okay. And then once it starts then people just keep going for a while. And I think once it stops it'll stop a bit but I think that that's my take on what sort of sparked this. I think we have a Twitter question. Do you have your microphone? If you can come a little closer so people can hear and see. Sure, this was in response to your comments about the buy-in from the Colombian government and the need for Central American governments to do the same. One of our followers asked, but where is the line between unwillingness and lack of capacity for enforcement on the part of Central American governments? Well, I think, you know, if you look at the great hope after the Civil Wars was what and I spent a lot of time there during this time, it was the new police forces that were emerging, right? The Salvador had this great idea which is one-third former combatientes of the FMLN, one-third former security forces and one-third new folks who were at least high school education and good wages and all that stuff. Ultimately, that didn't work out so well. In fact, it went south very quickly and it took a lot of us and myself included a long time to figure out that it had gone south and why. And one of the primary reasons was because the groups that were recruited primarily from the FMLN sector and from the former police security force sector immediately began reporting out to their previous bosses in their previous structures. They had no loyalty to the institution. So very quickly, everyone had intelligence except the government and the police intelligence units were the least well informed because all the stuff was being sent out outside so you were able to maintain as we've seen in the FMLN, particularly now, you had a series of clandestine structures that just simply never disappeared and are now quite strong and active. And the same thing happened on the far right, where you had a lot of groups that maintained their kidnapping capacity, their money-moving capacity, etc. So I think that it's a tremendously difficult line to draw between within capacity. I mean, there has been capacity and in every country there are really good cops. Without a doubt, there are really good cops who risk an enormous amount every day and in every country they're shrinking minority. I think what you saw that the Funes government did in its last year in office, which is decapitate the entire, I would say, the best of the police structures for all the wrong reasons, which is now being repaired a bit by the Sanchez-Sedin government, was indicative of the risk that really good quality people face when they try to do their jobs. So I think it's a dual challenge. You have to have people that you can work with and they have to be willing to work with you and you have to put the resources in once you have that. Establishment, I think one of the things that the Plan Colombia did pretty well was the Colombians were pretty generally, they wanted some really high-tech stuff and we gave them some high-tech stuff, but they built their core capacity on stuff that they could sustain. That's why they bought Brazilian Tucans and other things, aircraft, that were much easier to maintain they could keep that within their budget. They didn't want this pie-in-the-sky stuff that they were unable to maintain when the US began drawing down and I think that all of those things played into success there and none of those factors are present in Central America at this time. Good questions. Why don't we go with Ambassador Meistow? John Meistow, retired US diplomat. Doug, you indicated that Carsey, 200 million over the past several years, has been a failure. I think, is that a failure? What was the last part? That Carsey has been a, the policy of the administration in Central America, particularly in the Northern Triangle, has been a failure because you end up with something that is not different from where you started as a matter of fact, it's worse. Could you dig into that a little bit? My question would be, is the essential thrust of the thinking behind Carsey which has to do with institutional strengthening and sharing intelligence, et cetera, is that a good way to go forward or should we just throw that out the window in favor of something else and if it's something else, then what? I don't know what the something else is. I think on paper, Carsey made a lot of sense. I think that if you look at a region where you, which taken together is the size of a mid-sized state and you have seven countries in there, the idea of trying to work with them together as a unit as opposed to each country trying to do its own thing makes a lot of sense. The reality is that the countries don't talk to each other and they don't trust each other. If you ask, I ask cops all the time in any country, if you know that you're pursuing this guy and I'll solve it or he goes, Honduras, who would you call Honduras? And they all say I have no idea. Don't know anybody over there, don't trust them. It's over. If something happens, it's largely because the US or Interpol mediates the contacts that go around there. So I don't think it was stupid. I think it was a very rational way of looking at it in a set of circumstances that did not turn out to be, I think the divisions were much bigger across countries than was anticipated. And I think that the institutions themselves fairly quickly stopped providing what they were supposed to be providing and became sort of forums for everyone to get together, travel, let's go to Guatemala for the weekend, have a Carsey meeting, yay. There was very little ability to bring that together in a way that would make a significant difference. So I think, yes, one has to rethink it. What that rethinking leads to, that's why we have Carl and people, because I can't see myself a better model. But I think it's very clear to me that the current models are really not functioning. And there are, we've talked about creating vetted units, joint vetted units, because there are all kinds of authorization problems with that, legal problems on our end to be able to create truly functional vetted units that would be multinational on their end, et cetera. So it's complicated, but I think something has to change, yes. And maybe it's not just the model, but it's commitment to the model. And if you look at funding for Carsey over the years, it's decreased. So it might not be the necessity having to reinvent the wheel as much as really being committed to keeping the funding, keeping a commitment and attention to these issues. And you know from your experience and lots of other folks that are former government people that it's hard to keep interest and commitment in Washington. It's just difficult. For instance, I mean, a lot, I fear, and this is just part of just the situation that we're in. For instance, there's a tremendous tragedy today with the Malaysian Airlines plane that was shot out of the sky by the Russians allegedly, is what they're saying, right? So all of the attention now is gonna be redirected to dealing with these issues. And there's been a lot of activity on the side in the Congress and the executive branch with the issue of immigration. Well, I wonder, is all the attention now gonna go to deal with something else? So it's that consistent attention, involvement, a couple of champions in the Congress, you know how this works, Ambassador Mesto, that are consistently working on an issue, consistently asking for fine-tuning of a policy and consistently ensuring that it receives the funding that's necessary for it to be successful. So I think there's a question up here. Thank you, Margaret Hayes, Georgetown now. What, it, I have a concern that we up here don't have a very good, really good picture and understanding of this whole question of violence and opportunity and so forth. You've talked a lot about San Pedro Sula, which if I understand is the most violent place in Honduras and so forth. In the world. In Honduras, the most violent place in the world. As you travel through these Northern Triangle countries, do you find violence localized or do you see the whole country embroiled? And could you add onto that a comment on the rest of the region, Nicaragua, Costa Rica? Are we seeing some of this phenomenon move south at all? I think the first question is actually really important because it is, I would say, particularly in Honduras, fairly focalized. There's no, the country is not on fire. If you look at the UN did a really good report on transnational organized crime in Central America, I think end of 2011 or 2012. And they have some great maps in there where they show the red, you know, and it hits the borders. If you know drug trafficking routes, it follows the drug trafficking routes. It follows the borders. And even when I was asking the gang folks, why are you doing, what's happening now in San Pedro? Why is suddenly this other, the spike in violence here? And I said, because it's, we're fighting for plazas. You know, we're looking for space. And I mean, the simple, the mathematics of it, which I think is one of the things we don't factor in very much. One of the innovation of the Mexicans in cocaine trafficking was starting to pay in kind. Columbia's never paid in kind. They paid in cash. So when you pay in kind, you have to create an internal market. If they pay me a kilo of cocaine, I have to get someone to buy that. Internally, I can't go to Miami with a kilo of cocaine. So you create these internal dynamics of consumption and violence. And if you're paying 10 people a kilo of cocaine and there are three esquinas plazas where you can fight, seven people are gonna die. That's the math of it. They're simply, that's the way it works. And you saw this in Ciudad Juarez. You see this, when you see these spirals of violence, it's almost always over. And what's happening now is the cartels are paying. They're looking, they're moving a lot more product through there. They're paying a lot more out. And so you have this tremendous violence surrounding who gets to sell that and who's gonna make money internally. And you also see, unfortunately, the consumption level skyrocketing in these countries. I think that if you look at maps, in San Pedro Sula, you have 80% of the gangs in Honduras or in San Pedro Sula. And they'll solve the door. You look at the map and they cover the entire country. So I think there, but there it's also, it's not equal across the board there either. You have certain clicas, particularly where the traffickers need. I mean, the power of the gangs derives from the control of territory. So if you're a narco and you don't need that territory, you're not gonna go look for gangs. You don't like to deal with them. They're not nice people. They're not reliable. So if you live someplace in the backside of Chacnago and your M is 13, good for you, but you're not gonna get anything because no one's gonna go through there because they don't need you. Where they're most violent and where they're most connected to the transportistas and up is in the areas that those guys need, so they have to negotiate with them because territorial control. So yes, when those factors are absent, the violence is much less. I think the question about Nicaragua and Costa Rica are interesting. I think that what you see in Nicaragua, when I was there, I was shocked. It was always for the backwater of Central America. It has more, the flights are packed. Businessmen are flooding in there. Why? Because they don't face any of the obstacles that they face in the Northern Fyinggle. I think there are a series of reasons for that, some good and some bad, that have allowed Nicaragua to pursue this route. I think that their internal security apparatus is such that you're not gonna see a great expansion of that in there. I think Costa Rica is much more in danger. They're a much more democratic society with the play by different rules and I think that they're in risk of being eaten alive. But I think that, so but I think that the gangs are now in sort of, as they say in Nicaragua, they're thinking about other things right now. They're not particularly thinking pushing south. They're thinking particularly in recreating themselves as a trans-regional structure that will be new, different, much more dangerous. And after that, they may, again, think about their expansion elsewhere. Gentlemen, right here in the middle, you can get the microphone right here. Ian, right here, he's standing right here. There you go, thanks. Matthew O. Strander with the National Conference of State Legislatures. Last week I was at the Appropriations hearing where Secretary Johnson of the Department of Homeland Security hailed the U.S. foreign policy effort saying that they had even worked with the First Lady of Guatemala to begin a television campaign telling the children to stay home. Do you think that's the kind of foreign policy effort that's one effective and if not or if so, either way, what additional efforts could the Department of Homeland Security or other foreign policy organizations within the United States apparatus make in the coming weeks? The coming weeks is very difficult. I mean, I think it's good to put out the word. I think, you know, the governments don't, none of it, well, except maybe because it's a new government, El Salvador has some credibility. I don't think that what the government say, I think really have that much weight anymore. I think one of the tragedies of Central America or the Northern Triangle is that the state is often not the most important actor in society any longer. They are no longer, you know, you have multiple other actors who exercise a lot more influence and people pay a lot more attention to than the government and that's not the way in the West Failing system our state should work. But I think there are increasing areas of the country where the state is entirely absent and others where they're viewed as entirely predatory. So does it help certainly? And I think that the idea, but I think it'd be much more effective if there were outreach campaigns that went much deeper in their communities to talk to people about the dangers. But I mean, and even that is silly because people know the dangers. I mean, you know, it's not nobody, after the years of immigration, people have a pretty good idea of what it takes to get across our border and the hardships and that, you know, an eight year old should not be doing it on their own, if at all. So I think that the messaging is probably somewhat important but I would say it's not gonna carry a great deal of weight down there. And what you said earlier, which is imagine how bad the situation is that you have parents that are giving this as an option to their kids. Last question, there's like one, two, why don't we do this? Why don't I just take them from you and you decide which one you want to answer. So why don't we do one, two and three and get the microphone here. The lady here, the gentleman there who has a microphone and the woman in the back there, so. Doug, I've actually read your book on Merchant of Death, remember that book? So I was wondering if you could talk about the extent to which American weapons are fueling the violence in Latin America because I know this has been talked a lot about in Mexico. I don't know if there's a trickle down effect from Mexico to, you know, El Salvador or so on. I was just wondering if you could talk about whether that's a policy issue we need to consider. Good lady up front here, we just need to get all three. All right, let me, let me, right, because we have. Thank you, Valle Varela with USAID. So my question is in terms of capacity building and the rule of law, what is international community doing in terms of, in the history and also currently or planning on helping build the capacity on rule of law and democracy in the area? And the lady in the back there, Ian. Thanks. Stefania Spira, Georgetown University. Mr. Farah, I was surprised by the allusion to the Merida Initiative and the Plan Colombia because I'm Mexican myself and I don't personally believe that Mexico can be seen as an example in terms of human rights. Mainly if we consider the human rights violation escalating after the militarization of the conflict or even when we're dealing with our victims, which we don't even know how many victims we're talking about because we can say 60, 80, 100,000 victims, we don't have a national registry. So I know, and also if we consider the problem that we have with immigrants coming from Central America, we have mass graves in Mexico. And when you deal with regions as Mitragan or Tamaulipas, I don't personally believe we can consider ourselves a model region in any way. But so my question is you mentioned you were not a policymaker or anything, but if we were to consider diversifying the, if the US were to consider providing funds to other regions beyond the militarization, what could we think of in terms of development, education, or other options for the funding? Well, first I wasn't talking about Medida at all. I was talking about Carci. I never said Medida and Mexico were a model of anything. And I was talking about that, well, that was, anyway, let's leave that, but I was not referring to Mexico as a model in the, personally not in terms of human rights and how they've executed what they're doing. On the weapons issue, I think that that's tremendously important. I think that unfortunately, I mean yes, weapons come from the United States without a doubt, but what you're seeing right now in Central America is much more other fact, coming from other places. You have a lot of weapons flowing in now from Columbia as parts of the FARC demobilized. You see a lot of AKs. You see a lot of all kinds of stuff flowing through there. So I think that, I think it's a mix which is even worse than just having a source country because it means you have multiple source countries plus caches of weapons that are leftover from the wars which don't work very well, but they're still around, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it's a very common, I think it's a driving force that the ability to acquire weapons of war assault rifles and laws and C4 is really damaging and certainly the chunk of that comes to the United States without a doubt. The other question was a capacity building. That was good. So what could AID do? Was that the question? International. I think there are a lot of models out there. I think the fundamental lacking ingredient is having governments that there's sort of a minimal level of trust with that you can begin building those things. If you have that, I think that you can see really good work that was done in West African post in post war situations, Liberia and Sierra Leone I think have done really interesting. I think Columbia and their post war, their efforts to reestablish state presence after 400 years of absence have some really interesting models. I think they're out there. I think the question is having a solid enough foundation to begin to implement those on. And then the second part of your question that wasn't many though was other types of aid. I think that AID and others, the European community, have done some really effective things. I think that in other parts of the world, I think again, the internal decomposition of the Northern Triangle is such that it's very difficult to find, I don't think we're lacking for models or ways to do things particularly. I think that they exist out. I think it's clear that rule of law teachings in schools and some other programs that have been run through state department have been very effective in changing how people view it. I think the way the mayor of Bogota, the crazy mayor of Mocus, did his civic campaigns and sort of changed the civic culture of Bogota by a whole series of very creative ways, which I thought when I was living there were the stupidest things that ever happened. This guy is great. It worked. I mean, it was an amazing thing. So I think there are multiple, I think Medellin and their post San Pedro Sula type period came up some really creative, innovative ways. So I think that there are multiple ways out if you have a sufficient foundation to begin moving forward, which I would argue is what's lacking at this point. Great. With that, I want to thank you. Thank you. You've been wonderful. I want to thank everybody who's come and the folks that are watching. We've addressed, I think, the need to deal with the root causes of this issue. I think in some detail, of course, we could also always do more. Always. But I think we've done a pretty adequate job. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.