 Good morning. Good morning everybody and welcome to CSIS. Thanks for joining us today for this event on the border crisis immigration reform and what we can expect moving forward. This is a Friday seems a bit casual and I think it's the right sort of context. We've had you here Doug so many times to talk about this issue. I think it's good to give continuity to this. It's still an issue that hasn't been resolved. You are the expert on the issue and we're lucky that you've accepted coming regularly here to CSIS to give your views impressions on this issue. As some of you probably remember our last event of the summer was on this issue as well. We hosted presidents of Guatemala and Honduras here at CSIS and it was or is the first event here this fall because the issue still hasn't been dealt with. I'm thrilled to have Doug with me here today as I mentioned. He's a senior associate of the America's program, the president of IBI Consultants, a great friend of mine of the program and I'm glad that he's here with us today. There's really no one better equipped to address these issues and I know he'll be able to provide exceptional insights on this issue as well. But before we delve into the immigration and border debate, I think we have to do a little to address the context around what is happening with regards to American foreign policy writ large at the moment. As you all know, on Wednesday night, President Obama addressed the nation announcing his plans for addressing the growing threat of ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and what threat this poses to U.S. and global security. It was a foreign policy defining speech, one that I expect we'll see echoed in the actions orientation of this country's foreign policy for quite a while. I bring this up not as a distraction, but rather as a point to remind us all of the environment we're currently facing and operating in with regards to foreign policy issues, broadly speaking, with something so large, so pressing as U.S. military involvement halfway around the world combating a threat to global securities on the table. It can mean that it's going to be harder for us to remember different issues, regional issues, in particular this issue that we're talking about today, immigration of Central American children, unaccompanied children, but also the security implications involved with this and what we deal with at the border. So even with what's going on around the world, this issue is still relevant. It's still important to U.S. security and our prosperity. In reality, what we'd like to see or talk about today is the policy side. Where does this issue stand in this greater context? This country has been long a destination for Latin American immigrants, especially those from Mexico and Central America. But the last 10 months have fundamentally changed the usual dynamics of immigration. We've seen over 60,000 unaccompanied alien children apprehended at the border for fiscal year 14, double the number apprehended last year. And we've seen nearly five-fold increase in family unit apprehensions along the border this year as well. This issue is frankly huge and we're, when we still haven't dealt with the issue, we still haven't found an effective way to mitigate it. Years over due immigration reform has been a topic of heated debate and sorely lacking compromise since the renewed push for reform last year with senators and congressmen unable to see eye-to-eye on the future of U.S. immigration policy. The president's supplemental request for $3.7 billion in emergency funds to deal with the current crisis at the border languished in Congress with no compromise and thus no funding before lawmakers went on their August recess. The president has repeatedly suggested that he would use executive authority wherever possible to mitigate the crisis. And though the use of executive authority for these issues has a long list of pros and cons all its own, he announced last week he would delay any action on immigration and border policy until after the midterm elections. This is November. This he viewed or he stated was given political considerations and the potential impact of executive action on hotly contested congressional seats. So this issue is still evolving. It still hasn't been dealt with. There's political issues that are still, I guess, becoming more the priority than dealing with the content and the substance of this issue. There was some talk about dealing with this during the lame duck period this winter, but more and more it seems that that's unlikely to happen. If Republicans take control of the Senate, some speculate that they'll have little incentive to compromise during the lame duck. If Democrats hold on to the Senate, Republicans will be motivated to dig in while they still can. So prospects aren't great for resolving this issue in the short term. Our government's inability to come together on this issue speaks to their own deep political divisions, not to the true importance of this issue. I'll leave it to Doug to talk about the other issues, root causes of this problem, which I believe are the sort of overwhelming reason why we should be dealing with this. I just wanted to sort of frame the issue in the broader foreign policy context. There's also a domestic imperative here. The fact that demographics are changing here in the United States is also very important in this discussion. As difficult as Americans appear to find compromising on immigration reform, over 17% of Americans identify themselves as Hispanic or Latino, and by the mid-21st century that figure is expected to double. So this issue is an international and a domestic issue, and if we don't deal with it now, we're going to have to deal with it eventually. So fixing these problems is long overdue, and Doug has the answers. So I'm going to leave it to Doug. I'm going to turn it over to him. He's going to give us his views on where the issue is right now, and hopefully we'll be able to have a lively chat about these issues, touching on the core issues, and hopefully fill in some voids on questions that you might have as well. So without further ado, Doug, the floor is yours. Well, thank you, Carl, and thank you for that very generous introduction. Thank you for coming. I think one of the things, going back and forth to Central America a lot these days, is watching the Central Americans watch us, and our inability to deal with things that we keep demanding that they deal with on policy issues. And this connect is not lost on them. The fact that we can't come up with a policy while we're beating them on the heads to come up with policies themselves that mitigate circumstances is, I think, a real problem and a problem of perception that makes their willingness, especially in the Northern Triangle, the willingness of those governments to take serious action even less than it was initially because they don't see anything happening on our end of the show either. And the other thing I just find really striking is how completely this issue fell off the agenda as soon as it fell off the front pages. It just, as soon as it stopped being written about, it disappeared. And on the ground, yes, there are fewer unaccompanied minors. Coming to the dynamics have shifted a little bit, but the fundamental problems are all still there. And as soon as people could stop talking about it, they did, which was really striking to me as a driver of policy. And I think that probably explains why both the administration and Congress stopped talking about it as soon as they could because nobody wants to deal with a very prickly issue. But I think that going forward, you have to look, if you look at with the dynamics driving Central America, none of them are better either. And I think if you look across the region, none of the countries in the Northern Triangle are making particularly serious efforts. Mexico has agreed to start doing some things which would push, which would keep some of the traffic further south instead of getting into Mexico and then into the United States. But one of the things, and I was talking with some folks who are up from El Salvador last night who monitor these issues, one of the things that's really, I think, will make exacerbate the problem that those countries have not gotten a handle on is the consolidation of the territorial control of the gangs. And if you look at these guys who deal with the security level, the more official level of the gang issue, we're talking about how for the first time they're seeing the gangs' exercise in parts of El Salvador, serious territorial control, not in the sense that they just control it like they've always done the clique because they've controlled the comunas and they find people. They're setting up their own judicial systems. They're telling people, they're setting up their own public transportation systems and not letting the buses in. They're using, they're running their own pickup trucks and their own buses back and forth. They've always been involved in the transportation business and extorting the transportation business. Now they're going into the business themselves in a different way. They're doing a whole series of governance things that they hadn't done before, which to me speaks to the consolidation of those groups. And it's not all of the clicas everywhere doing this. But there are specific clicas in specific parts of El Salvador, which have generally been the leading clicas on how the rest of the gang goes. And so I think that as that happens and as the rule of law continues to disintegrate, I think the Santas Seren government in El Salvador has been very slow off the mark on the security issues. Benito Lara, they're the Minister of Public Security, from outside at least gives in from the people who work with him who I was talking to, it seems to me way over his head. He's not, doesn't understand. They didn't, the FMLN went into this as if they didn't realize the gangs were going to be a problem, which is rather striking because it was the issue of the campaign and they didn't seem to actually think about it getting into office much. And I think you see the same thing in Honduras. I think Guatemala is a little more coherent in trying to come up with a strategy that may not adhere to the rule of law as much as one would like, but a strategy nonetheless. Honduras I think is learning, has learned very well how to speak a language that the policy people in Washington understand and like because it sounds very much like we'd like to hear, but I don't think there's much substance to it. So I think across the region, the problems that you see are getting worse, the driving factors are getting worse, exacerbated, and there's very little engagement except for initially, you know, Biden goes to Guatemala, we do a few things, and then the engagement essentially stops. And there's some new, one of the things that I was reading last night, the Woodrow Wilson Institute has put two new papers on the CARSI in Guatemala and Honduras and none of is very optimistic. I mean, the programs we have put a lot of money into are not producing the results that one would expect or had hoped for going in. So I think there are a series of things that haven't changed or are getting worse. And I think the danger on the Washington side is we're pretending like we didn't have the first crisis or that things are resolved and moving forward when essentially everything's either stagnant or worse. So I think the panorama is not overly optimistic and as you said, the chances of actually moving on this end are relatively slim. But how bad do you think this can get if it's left unattended? I mean, lots of questions come up. Is this an issue of improving on the frameworks that we already have or is this an issue also of addressing or adding more issues or more ways of dealing with this issue in a broader sense? So is CARSI good enough to do that or do we have to sort of reinvent this policy? I hate to talk about reinvention because that's a long-term process but I do think that we essentially have to reinvent. I mean, I think we've talked about at least privately you and I have talked about this. I think if you look at the money that's gone into CARSI in the last three or four years, by every metric the country you see in the CARSI money are in worse shape than they were when the money started going in in terms of homicide rates, incarceration rates, overcrowding, impunity, judicial reform, all of those things are worse. So I think that if you spend a significant amount of money and you see the opposite results of what you're expecting, you don't continue the policy. But that calls into question. I mean, my fundamental and what I've written about and what we've talked about in the past, I think that the governance issues for the governments of the Northern Triangle are so dire that you essentially have governments that are no longer either the strongest force in their countries, don't have the political will to take on these things or so corrupted from inside in so many different ways that makes it impossible to deal with them. So I think to me that one of the huge issues is who are the interlocutors that you could engage with as the U.S. government if you want to support true reform efforts. And I think to me that is the huge challenge because we have, I think, improving police in El Salvador. I think one thing that the FMLN has done is brought back some of the better police that have been purged out in the end of the FUNES government. I think you have a few signs of progress where you could work, but generally the police as institutions in all the three countries are not very reliable. The new studies on CARSI were talking about the inability of the vetted units to do what they were intended to do over time. I have been a big proponent of vetted units. I found that very disheartening to read out that vetted units were not doing that. The judiciary structures are completely non-functional in all three countries and the corruption is massive and there is no indication or very little indication of the political will of those governments to tackle those issues writ large. And until there is that I am not sure where we would be putting money into on a policy level. So it is a framework. And if we don't deal with these issues, if this sort of inability from Washington continues, what will we be facing? Will it be more kids coming over or is it general erosion of governments in Central America and then just them being taken over by different elements, different security threats? I would say probably both. I think that what the driving factors there in places like San Pedro School or places in certain parts of San Salvador, the communities around San Salvador, the violence is really, they really are war zones. And these kids really, I mean, one of the things that the FML, the gangs have been doing across the region is essentially shutting down schools. You are losing what little education systems there were because they begin extorting in the schools when they are 11, 12 years old, they take over the schools and then kids just stop going. They flee or they are incorporated into gangs and they stop going. So the factors, the sort of multiplication factors internally as these types of things proliferate for the countries are horrendous. The long-term consequences are really, and those are the kids, a lot of those ones are the ones that want to come down. They can't live there anymore. They are desperate and they are coming across the border. So I think as things get worse there, I think what we are seeing now, this is my sense, is this little pause where we said, no, no, no, don't come. And the government said, no, no, no, don't come. So people said, well, okay, but you know, it's not going to last for very long because the situation there is going to get, is getting worse and the same factor will be pushing people and I think we are going to see another, an ongoing, another wave. A lot of folks talk about the different roles that neighboring countries can play. Most importantly, the role that Mexico can play in dealing with this issue. How would you assess that? Has it been a, from what you know and what you hear and conversations that you've had with other officials, are they doing all that they can do to sort of work with us on some of these issues with the United States? Are they doing what they need to do on their southern border? Do they deal with the potential security problems that sort of this flow, unchecked flow of people could present not only to the United States but also their immediate concern, which is Mexico, right? What kind of job are they doing? Well, I think, you know, one of the things that's, I think, policy and a lot of people in the U.S. don't understand is that that's, none of that migration is viewed as illegal down there. It's a normal way of life and it's not particularly, nobody thinks, oh my God, people are moving through it. You know, they've moved through for a long, long time. They're going to keep moving through again. So the sense of alarm, I think, is coming from Mexico is they're seeing a significant strengthening of the alliances between the Central American gangs and like the Bajos, Decas and Doblalos and things on their border, which is a security problem for them. And as the gangs take over, have taken over some of the main human movement roots, then they're seeing this ability of these groups to combine lessons learned and form up in ways that they hadn't before. And that is, I think, from their point of view, significant. So that's gotten their attention. And I think that we have been asking them to do a lot at a time when they're doing a lot of other things. And so it's not a high priority for them and it's just not culturally something you do. You don't stop migrants from going through Mexico, right? It's just that you've never had to do that before. So I think that they're doing more and they're putting some resources in there, but they're also in the middle of a rather significant political transformation of their own. I think that as the criminalized elements and as the gang elements become more visible and more a real threat to them, that they are taking more measures and assessing that. And they're talking a lot for a little bit that I know I've run the first time with the Colombians a lot about how to handle this type of relationship between criminal organizations that are now spreading. But I don't think that they have a huge interest in stopping migrants just because we would like them to. We've had conversations sort of, you know, not public ones about the different threats within Central America and over lunch I remember we talked about a specific area in Central America where there seems to be a lot of traffic, border areas between countries. Do these countries have the capacity or capability to deal with these threats, how they've presented themselves in their countries? Do they deal with, for instance, I mean, there's a lot of border conflict or a lot of areas on the border that are unattended by governments. What in the short term will be able to be done to deal with that? Is that possible in the short term? Where do you see that sort of the outgrowth of that problem going? Well, I don't think it's possible in the short term and I'm not sure that's something they should spend a lot of time on. Primarily because I think that unless there is, at least in the Northern Triangle, I would say all of Central America, a common vision of what they should be doing, trying to control each country, trying to control the individual border is not going to matter much because the spaces are so small and you have such, you know, centuries of people moving across these artificial borders and smuggling stuff back and forth. And I think, you know, one of the huge issues, again, is just as people we consider illegal, migrants moving across, that they don't consider abnormal or illegal, the smuggling of goods and services across in a lot of the most border areas is used perfectly elicit. In their mind, they are the elicit ones in the state if it were to try to stop them or elicit actors for taking their livelihood away. So it's a very different perspective. I think what the greater, much more effective would be to have a common vision and a common protocol for pursuing gangs. We know that some of the Sinaloa folks, if they're discovered in Solero, will be in Honduras within two hours and it doesn't matter what you do on the actual border, even if you're dealing with Punto Ciego, you know, they'll fly. I mean, there's no way to stop that movement in that small area of these people going back and forth. So I would say that one of the things that we really need to engage in and what I don't think we have engaged in is trying to come up with a joint coherent policy in which all three countries can buy into on shared security, on threats that they agree are threats to all three nations and that they have an agreement on how to deal with them. If they're, you know, can you do hot pursuit across the border? They truly, and they've talked about this and never done it, a multinational, meaning Northern Triangle, force that could then act in all three countries on certain issues, narcotics trafficking, gangs, human smuggling, especially if it's the Chinese or other groups coming through where they make a lot more money than they do on Central Americans, et cetera. And none of that has really gotten off the ground, but we don't seem to be thinking about it and trying to turn it over to folks in the audience for questions, and I know from my staff that we have some tweeted questions, so let me start with those and then we'll get to some questions from the audience. In response to your comments on the political will of the Central American government, one of our followers asked, the Central American presidents were here in July, what came of those meetings? From what I can tell, they fell into great vacuum. There was not a lot of follow-up. They all agreed it was a major problem. We said, please help. And they said, okay. And then everybody went home and went about their business and then we went back to Iraq and they went back to their local issues. That's what I was talking about, the lack of sustained engagement on a senior policy level with senior policy folks down there as multiple countries, not individual countries, I think it's not been followed through on. Any questions here in the front here? Hi, I'm Jessica Barrett from the Pan American Development Foundation. Two questions. One, you mentioned the need to find the trusted interlocutors for the U.S. government. Could you talk a little bit about, in your experience, who those interlocutors might be? Are they local government officials? At which level are we looking at? And then also, thinking about the private sector and the role that they played in, for example, Mexico and Juarez and Montede, do you see any similar types of engagement with the private sector in any of these three countries? Any opportunities to form these kinds of coalitions around violence? Or is the trust just not there at all? I think the last, the second question is really important on the private sector and why they're not engaging more is they're not. And I think that that is one of the, and I do it as much and more maybe more than most. I think one can make very harsh assessments about what the government has not done. But I think I often don't, and I think talk about the private sector and what they could and should do and what they're not doing, which is I think equally, it's, it's a phenomenon, stopping the process from going forward, right? They're not willing, and there are reasons for it, historic and I think your current reason, and it's very hard, for example, and I'll solve it or to attract investment or get people put more money into businesses when the gangs are constantly expanding and they can't move their people safely back and forth to factories and when you have across the region huge amounts of narco money now coming in and undercutting as they go into the laundering business in ever more serious ways and if you're a narco and you want to set up a business and you don't care if you make a profit because you're just laundering money and you can take a 10% loss, you're going to put the private sector out of business fairly quickly and they're doing that as we saw them do at a certain phase in Columbia, they hit the same dynamic. So there are reasons, but I think there's also in Central America the tendency of the really rich in the business class to just sort of walk away or to come back to Miami and just sort of pack up and I mean a couple years ago, I don't know what the current statistics were, but I think it was 2012 or 2013, the private sector in El Salvador created 1,000 new jobs. That is like the most pathetic thing you can think of, right? I mean that 1,000 new jobs, there's very little willingness to have all the other real risk factors. The first question was on the interlocutors. I think it's very difficult to find and I think every once in a while someone like Claudia Pasipas comes along in Guatemala, everybody gets on board. We're there, the EU's there, she's making documentable progress and she gets too close to certain interests and boom, she's gone. Despite what we wanted, despite what the EU wanted, everybody was on board supporting her and her team, it certainly wasn't just her and then suddenly she, that's not enough. So that case actually gave me a lot of pause because I thought, okay, here was one person that everyone could agree on that that was something that was making a significant dent in impunity in their case were actually being tried, cases were actually getting convictions, they had a whole team set up to do different things within the fiscal year and it was really quite impressive and all the international support was not enough to keep them from knocking her out when they wanted to knock her out. Which then to me demonstrates how incredibly difficult it is to get to the real root cause of this or to real change because she was okay as long as she was more or less not touching core interests and then she was touching core interests and that was the end of that. And what's the message to everyone else who might ever want to do that? Don't. Just don't. So I think that's why I think the problem is so real. There are NGOs but then you have the same problem you have in Iraq and elsewhere if you're only funding the non-government agencies instead of strengthening government institutions you're also not getting at the core thing but you can't trust the government so it's a very difficult series of choices. Computer. Good morning Greek talk. Sergio de la Pena Independent Consultant. How is it that we don't get more information on where these kids are going? I know that for example in the state of Virginia there are easily over 2,000 children that have been dropped off in Texas I believe that number is somewhere in the vicinity of over 4,000 and there's a lack of transparency by the federal government in its relations with the state government and letting know where these kids are going and how much they're being expedited through the screening process for health issues. So the first question is why are they so why do we have such a lack of transparency? And the second one is can you address the potential repercussions of having some of these children get through that are properly screened and then later you end up in a situation where you could have somebody carrying some sort of communicable disease that could be tied to them. For example in the Midwest right now there's a pulmonary virus or some sort of bacteria that's going around that's making kids sick and just to give you a little anecdote I went and assisted the Chilean Carabinero Adache here in Washington to get his kid into Fairfax County school systems. I went through all sorts of loops trying to accommodate the requirements at Fairfax County had to get this person who's here on diplomatic status into school and it took about two weeks because they had to go back to Chile get a whole slew of vaccinations that they had given to this child in her medical records they had to be translated and then they had to be submitted and the parents went through all these nut rolls but yet here you have a situation where these kids are being put into school now the word on the street is that they're using things such as the homeless laws so that they can get around some of these things and it's creating a terrible mess especially with county school systems that have to do a budget and all of a sudden they're being overwhelmed. Unfortunately it's not something I know much about. I mean I don't know why there's lack of transparency. I haven't dealt with it on the US side so I don't know how that system is supposed to work and how it's actually working. It's for the kids coming across you know I think that there probably are some health issues and things and I don't know what the process is if you come from in the country and you want to put your kid in and you're not a US citizen into the school system but I haven't had to deal with that. I would guess, I know that there is some screening and stuff going on I know that when we talked about this earlier I understand the concern about overwhelming local resources by the amount of kids coming in or people coming in the community is going to have to pay for some of the systems have to absorb and I understand that that causes a great deal of anxiety and anger in some communities that they have a lot and to me that's what makes such a difficult problem because I also understand from down there why these kids are coming up and what the significant push factors are for them when you decide and I don't think it's an easy decision for any parent anywhere no matter what the relationship is like to send their kid on that kind of a journey just because everybody given the history of all of the migration everybody knows what that trip is like and it's not fun and no 12 year old should be ever asked to do that so it's a measure of the absolute desperation when you see these kids coming up so that's why I think it's such a difficult problem to solve really important things to weigh out and how that weighs out is really difficult so I don't know about the kids with disease and stuff I don't know in the transparency I'm not sure another thing on that issue I'm sure that there are children who are sick but it doesn't represent or isn't representative of the overwhelming majority when these discussions occur I think we have to sort of walk a fine line and not sort of labeling these children as being sort of vessels of sicknesses or illnesses I think the issues that you raised are important ones overwhelming local governments is an important issue we wouldn't want folks to be expedited and then find out that they had a terrible disease I think it's important to be able to do those things it's just that within the context of this discussion that is so heated labeling all of these kids based on what you might find with a couple is something that you want to be careful with I'm not saying that you're doing that but I think that it's important to sort of mention that in the discussion which makes me think about another issue as well which is who's coming in and where they're going is a general question and we know that there's folks that are coming because they're running away from violence we know that there are folks that are coming because they feel that there'll be a better economic opportunity in the United States looking for a better life but we also know that there's folks that might be infiltrated that have to do with the MADAS and we also know that and I want to get your reaction to this and when I used to work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the people would come in for labor or for different issues to the United States people that weren't interested in harming the US but that the bad guys in coordination with the MADAS could use those same ways of getting into the United States to do bad things and my question to you is now within this big framework of ISIS of heightened concerns of terrorism again coming back in Europe and in the United States to be to take advantage of opportunities or interested in opportunities to work with international terrorist organizations they know how to get into the United States they are willing to do all kinds of things as we've discussed trafficking of people trafficking of illicit goods would they be willing or interested or could we foresee a scenario when MADAS are working together with international terrorist organizations to get something into the United States I don't think we've seen that yet what's clear to me is that the MADAS have a very clear idea of how the asylum system works and how to take advantage of it and that they use it now is it the vast majority even a small percent I don't know what percent of them do but in talking with them they have a strategy of taking advantage of this influx this wave that was coming in they're aware of it they know how it works and all the MADAS I think for dealing with other groups outside of themselves it's very difficult for them because their primary loyalty and identification is to the MADAS to their clica and then to the MADAS you're already hearing reports of conflicts between other groups coming in particularly Russian organized crime to the region running up against the MADAS and not being able to reach out because they're very if you look at how they deal with the transportistas and the Sinaloa cartel it's specific clicas that have territory that those particular groups need to get to nobody goes looking to work with the MADAS because they're nice people because they're not you don't search them out with a strong understanding that unless you have overwhelming force that you can call on against them that they will kill you in a heartbeat as soon as it's their advantage so I don't think I think that much more worrisome would be the traditional Coyote Networks the Sinaloa related set the related groups that move particularly large numbers of Chinese that they move now and what they call Chinese they may be multiple other nationalities that are folks from the Indian subcontinent although they never look at their passwords they don't actually know what country they're from they say oh the Hindus and the Chinese great breakdowns it doesn't tell you much but except that there are a lot of them coming and those networks are used to moving people who are not like themselves across the board the MADAS tax things they have their own networks to move themselves as far as I know as a partner would be very difficult let me take some more questions are there more questions gentlemen in the back here the glasses Guillermo Céspedes currently with creative associates until recently was the deputy mayor of Los Angeles in charge of their gang strategy so this is an issue that I've been tracking for many years first of all thank you for your fresh perspective on Central America haven't heard that before and I think it's really kind of on the button my question is this over the years it appears to me that this evolved or has evolved into a transnational issue but it seems that the term transnational is used exclusively in relation to law enforcement do you think this new framework that you think may have to evolve would include a transnational approach that was more balanced that included social programs as well as law enforcement because we are now dealing with a transnational family structure as it relates to Central America so transnationalism it's not just in relation to crime it's relation to other social programs so is this something that you could see emerging as a potential framework for looking at this issue because it's not it's a back and forth problem especially with LA some of history suggests that some of these issues both maras were born in Rampart and it's not popular but we did export them so at some point it seems to me that do you think that lens of people can we start looking at this problem as a transnational issue rather than an issue of Central America that's an interesting question I think one of the the huge things as you well know is the trans family issue you have people down there and you have a tradition of coming and going as well and it's particularly well the number of people going back was more than the people coming into the country you had this but not in balance it was economics right we had a recession they were going back home so I think it's a very I think it's very relevant can it be shifted I don't know should it be the problem that I keep going back in my own mind to the issue that you can't have it's very difficult to have three individual policies three different countries down there each country being so small but having but having a large number of people in this country it has to be a regional or it just can't really work in my mind and so I think that's to me the great if you had a consensus down there what the issues were working with some consensus up here which we also don't have in between the president the congress and different parties etc then you could probably begin to discuss in much more depth what the factors are and how to get at them but as long as you have at least three strategies on the ground down there and three strategies up here all of which makes six strategies that don't overlap very much in any way it's very difficult to imagine coming to a paradigm shift let me get a question from the audience here there's a woman over here on the left thank you my name is Catherine Mungen I had a question about the regional strategy my understanding is that the push factors and Honduras and El Salvador are largely crime and homicide issues like that in Guatemala there's also the source of migration is you see it more in rural areas with a lot of poverty if that's true how does that affect a regional three country strategy when we're seeing push factors differ from country to country to a certain extent also you hear a lot about our success in Colombia leading to this problem in the Northern Triangle with that in mind to what extent should Panama Nicaragua and Costa Rica be involved in a regional strategy I think the the second question I think the answer is a great deal because I mean I don't I'm not sure I buy I think what's happening in Mexico has much more to do with this happening in Central America I don't view the Columbia piece as particularly having a huge impact because Columbia is still experimenting a lot more goes out through Venezuela in Ecuador than it used to but I think that that's still the I think it's still the FARC and other groups that produce so I but I do think that the one thing that Columbia did show with with significant problems that addressed it was that political will matter and once when Columbia developed his own internal political will to deal with his multiple factors and there was something there to support not in the United States but a lot of other countries then were stepped in and you had I think in in terms of a very complex situation relatively successful program and I think that that key factor on the political will is what's missing in Central America if you look if I was living in Columbia during the end of the time cartel into the Cali cartel and all that it was a mess and it was but the one the other thing that made Columbia I think doable besides having really intelligent people on their side and some pretty intelligent people on our side was it was one country you were dealing with one government doing one thing in one space have all these different countries but I do think that the bleed bleed over factor from the northern triangle south into Panama and Costa Rica Nicaragua I think has is different because it has a very coherent internal structure that makes it more difficult to and frankly because they're much less democratic than the other two countries they can do things more quickly than Costa Rica is very slow to react because it goes through a democratic process and has a congress that actually matters whereas Ortega doesn't have to worry about that particularly so he can they can speed up their reaction time so I think there are chances of spilling over and you already see it to a degree certainly in Costa Rica more than any place else in my experience so I think that they should if you could get a seven country consensus on what mattered so much the better but I think trying for three is hard trying for seven may not be but I think they should certainly be involved in the discussions I think that the idea that is not going to affect them is nonsense here Ambassador Meistel thank you John Meistel I'm a retired US diplomat with a lot of experience in the region kind of a follow-up question that links to US policy your old newspaper the Washington Post had an editorial not long ago calling for a plan Colombia for the northern triangle do you could you analyze that from the Washington perspective and Carl if you could jump into that as well speaking of political will is there any political will around here to do something like that to respond to a real world crisis which affects the United States to some measurable degree do you want me to start for a little break so I can sort of theorize a little bit based on my experience in the legislative branch legislative branch as you know doesn't make foreign policy but can be helpful and also can be a nuisance right now or I would say the last time that we went through something similar regarding a large sort of framework policy towards the region was the Merida initiative and that was 2000 2007 2008 sort of the end of the Bush administration and the implementation of that started with President Obama it was very difficult at that time because of the definition of the problem we were talking about our ability to strengthen the government of Mexico to deal with the problems that existed in Mexico strengthening the judicial branch strengthening their ability to deal with the security threats their presence all over Mexico it was something that was in the making a decade before as you know Ambassador Mesto close relationship that was sort of evolving between the military and the Department of Defense was key to be able to move on the Merida initiative right now it seems that there is a willingness in the executive branch of the United States government that is not matched by the context and environment that you see in the legislative branch the legislative branch is of two minds on this issue one is purely a security issue and they have one way of dealing with the security issue which has to do with impediments and strengthening the border to deal with these issues and then you have other folks that might look at this more as an immigration issue I think both sides sort of have a point but I have not seen a sort of critical mass of both parties talk about dealing with the root causes of this issue so until we can sort of get on board an agreement on some of the issues that make up this conversation and that and not just related to an ideological sort of perception of what the problem is I think it's going to be very difficult to move forward we're also entering into a an election framework election year presidential election year which is going to start much earlier because of issues having to do with the need to raise money et cetera to do big things because they will have a sort of the potential for political fallout which you won't be able to control one way or another so that's another challenge that you're going to face in this issue this is one of those intermestic issues you know it has the domestic and international side to it the domestic side is because you have such a large or a growing constituency of folks that are that originate from the region are also American and they vote so there's that side of it it's international and scope for all the reasons that Doug mentioned and the security imperative is one of the issues that makes this up but at the end of the day you know and you know this better than anyone there's a long history that the United States has in this area in the region going back to the wars in the 80s and at the beginning of the 90s and that you know we have this close relationship with this perspective it just seems sort of disturbingly strange that we wouldn't be able to on the foreign policy merits come to some sort of consensus to deal with these issues we have the contacts we have the relationships you know that to me is is bizarre we're in a conversation now and this is sort of the issue that's been out there for a while which is deal with a lot of these issues I think that probably people would be more likely to deal with or to be accepted of the use of of executive authority to deal with the crisis but not to deal with a long term policy solution to the problems that we're facing but these problems aren't going away and things are going to worsen and the question is how bad do things have to get before the legislative branch and the executive can deal with this issue it's not going away that would sort of be my comment from the legislative branch I used to work for Dick Luger Dick Luger was an internationalist that believed firmly in bipartisan governance I believe in the same thing I hope that we're able to see the same sort of situation or something like it after the fall elections but I'm not but I'm a bit negative on I don't have much to say I think one of the truly extraordinary things about Plan Colombia was that it went from Clinton through Bush through Obama which is and the results are measurable and they're there and you can see that but I'm not sure that's replicable in the current environment nor am I sure the country down there would know what to do with it I'm not sure the country the Northern Triangle countries are in a position where they could assume the responsibility that they really want to do is I mean one of the things that when Carl and I were doing the Columbia report that I was really struck by and I think I mentioned this last time at no point in Plan Colombia did the United States provide more than 24% of their military budget and by the end it's down to 4% I mean the Columbia has put an enormous amount in and that is not something that's replicable in Central America right now they owned it the Columbians have owned it any other which I think we we tried to answer are there any other questions from the audience sir right now the numbers that are coming in they've gone up from let me see between January and July those numbers are around 47 I'm sorry 54,000 and the projections are about 90,000 the numbers are down right now because of the weather but do you see do you see those numbers actually reaching 90,000 now that the weather is getting nicer and they're going to go into the fall season and everything is going to the conditions are going to change to improve that it's not normal countries to say don't come I think that we've tried to send a message don't come I think that for a variety of reasons it might be in a pause for a while partly because a lot of people spent a lot of money and didn't get the results they wanted with that money and people have been deported back which then people said oh well you know and I think there is some understanding that a lot of this whole dynamic the timing of this dynamic is driven by the coyotes and you'll be safe and is that sort of worn off I think the situation gets worse deteriorates there we'll see another wave whether we reach 90,000 now or whether there's another three months where the pause is driven by other factors other than the weather I don't know but I don't think I don't think we've seen the end of it I think we'll see a wave and if that doesn't work out so well then a few months later we'll have another wave as people keep trying still remains I think we've established that I just want to thank you guys all for coming this is an issue that we will continue doing we believe that it's very important in the region it's very important also that folks here in Washington continue being informed about what's happening and what the implications are regarding dealing with the expert on the issue that we can always call to inform us and to enlighten us on this so thank you once again Doug thank you guys all for coming and we look forward to seeing you at another one of these sessions thank you