 Welcome to the fourth annual Great Decision series, co-sponsored by Mead Public Library and the Sheboygan Branch of the American Association of University Women, an organization dedicated to empowering women and girls and advancing equity through advocacy, education, and research. Because of the pandemic, we are presenting our sessions virtually this year and are grateful to WSCS for filming the six programs. We will miss the audience participation but hope to be able to return to live presentations again next year in the Roka Room at Mead. Great Decisions is a project of the Foreign Policy Association, which also publishes a book with information about the eight timely topics. We will not be offering books for sale this year, but you can call 800-477-5836 to order one for $32 or a DVD for $40. That's 800-477-5836. As always, we are indebted to Mead librarian Jeannie Gartman for arranging the schedule of these programs. The topic for tonight is U.S. Relations with the Northern Triangle and will be presented by Elise Cohen. Dr. Elise Cohen is Associate Professor of Political Science at UW-Green Bay. She earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of Delaware and her BA in International Relations from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on refugees, human rights, and U.S. foreign policy and has been published in journals such as Ethics and International Affairs, Politics and Religion, International Relations, and the International Journal of Human Rights. Dr. Cohen. Thank you for joining me. I'm gonna be discussing U.S. Relations with the Northern Triangle. And I've subtitled my presentation, The Foreign Policy, Roots of Migration. And the hope is that we'll be able to dig a little bit deeper into some of the root causes of the issues that are often labeled problems that we might think of in the course of this presentation more as symptoms. So I'm Dr. Elise Cohen. I'm with the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay where I'm an Associate Professor of Political Science. Just trying to move forward here. There we go. I have pulled up a map of the Northern Triangle countries just to help us get oriented around the regional geography. When we talk about the Northern Triangle countries, we're talking about these three countries that you see on the map, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. And the Northern Triangle countries often get lumped together because they have similarly high levels of violence and poverty. And because a lot of the migration that we've seen from families and unaccompanied children in recent years has come predominantly from these three Central American countries. With that in mind, we want to be careful not to conflate or equate them because they are still three different countries with somewhat different histories and different trajectories. So that's just something to keep in mind while we're focusing on all three of them tonight. We're also trying to bear in mind that they do have important differences. So to get started with a bit of a broader, more historical context, we can think about American empire and the role of race. And this is actually a cartoon that you see this image from Puck Magazine from the early 1900s, around 1901. And it can give us a little bit of a window into perceptions of the entire region of the Latin American Caribbean region from the American point of view. What we see in this Puck Magazine cartoon is Uncle Sam is pictured waving his finger at a little brown boy who has a hat on that says Cuba. And he's saying, that's right, my boy, go ahead. But remember, I'll always keep a father's eye on you. And so what we can take away from this window into early 1900s thinking about the Latin American Caribbean region is there was a very paternalistic point of view that the region is sort of childlike and backwards and it needs help and assistance and guidance from a father-like figure, which here we see as the United States kind of embodied in Uncle Sam. And we also can see the superiority where the American Uncle Sam is looking down on the little boy building his castle of independence, the sand castle says independence. And this helps us get a sense of the fact that at the turn of the century, in the early 1900s, American Empire was very much debated around the role of race. And there were assumptions that white races were superior and that the Latino and Latin American peoples were racially inferior. And that was part of the view that they were backwards and needed the guidance of some sort of a Western civilized power like the United States. Now that will be important to keep in mind because for decades beyond the early 1900s, a sort of racialized paternalistic view of the entire region will continue to shape American policymakers, officials, commentators, even how academics view the region. So if we fast forward to the 1960s, we see Thomas Mann played a very crucial role as a U.S. diplomat in shaping U.S. foreign policy, particularly to the Northern Triangle countries. So Ambassador Thomas Mann had lots of roles. One of them was Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs. And that's when he had this sort of famous quote, well now famous or infamous, you might say. Let me just pull up the quote for you. There we go. Where he said, I know my Latinos. They understand only two things, a buck in the pocket and a kick in the, you know what? What we can take from this quote, which again is now sort of infamously linked with Thomas Mann and U.S. foreign policy towards the Northern Triangle, is that racialized paternalistic view continue to persist? And a sort of over generalizing of the entire region that oversimplified who the people living there are as Ambassador Thomas Mann and then Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs said, they really understand only two things, either bribing them through some sort of economic assistance to get them to do what the U.S. wants them to do, or using brutality, using coercion and the harshness of physical violence. There was an important foreign policy doctrine termed the man doctrine. And it was coined the man doctrine around 1964, linked with this idea that dictators in the region could still receive U.S. support as long as they pursued American interests, as long as they supported American economic interests and anti-communism. So regardless of how those dictators in the Northern Triangle countries treated their own people, the United States should continue to support them if they supported our economic interests and anti-communism first and foremost. This was not really new. There was a consensus, a bipartisan consensus on anti-communism, but the man doctrine was really specific to U.S. foreign policy dealings with the Northern Triangle Central America. We'll fast forward a little bit more, few more decades to see how the racialized views that oversimplify the region over generalize Latin America, Central America continue to shape American views of the region. Samuel Huntington's famous political scientist who has now passed away, famous for his book The Clash of Civilizations. But he also authored this piece for the foreign policy magazine in the early 2000s. And this is a quote that we can find quite relevant for understanding the persistence of that racialized view of the region. So I'll just read the quote along with you here that you see on the screen. The single most immediate and most serious challenge to America's traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America. Will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture? Now that quote is taken from his article entitled The Hispanic Challenge. And he, like many policy makers and officials in the US government, viewed that as a challenge. The fact that there were large numbers of migrants approaching the US border, the Southern border, coming from Latin America in general, particularly Mexico at that time, but also the entire region was really generalized by this. That there's something that's not just about the economy or even security, but there's really something about identity. Professor Huntington said, it's a challenge to America's identity that migrants from Latin America would come into the country. And we can also see at the end of his quote, the particular identity challenge is that somehow Latinos migrating would undermine what he termed the Anglo-Protestant culture. That there's a specific kind of Protestant Christianity at the roots of American identity and that it's Anglo-Protestant. So this is giving us that through line of connection of the racialized views that have really shaped the big picture of how policy makers, commentators, even academics approach problems associated with the Northern Triangle or with Latin American migration. That can help give us some historical perspective. So I'm going to advance now or try to. And I'm not sure what you are seeing on the screen there. I may have gone a little too far since I couldn't see the screen. Sorry about that. We're still figuring this out. So now I can see the screen with you and I've pulled up the US intervention so that we can talk about some of the history of how the policies actually unfolded in the region. Again, with that context of very racialized views and attitudes towards the region. And also, of course, during the Cold War, anti-communism as the number one foreign policy lens shaping a lot of US actions in different regions of the world, including the Northern Triangle. So to begin, we see the CIA coup in Guatemala as a really critical juncture. This was in 1954. And I'm trying to give some additional information in case you would like to do more reading about some of these issues on your own. There's a book called PB Success. And a lot of articles, a lot you can find even online about Operation PB Success. That was the name of the coup operation to remove the democratically elected president from Guatemala in 1954. In part because his policies regarding nationalizing land were viewed as threatening. They were linked with perhaps being left wing socialist, which then was lumped in with the threat of communism. But in particular, they were very threatening to the United Fruit Company, US corporation, and therefore the US economic interests in Guatemala. So after 1954, when the US directly intervenes by overthrowing the democratically elected leader, we see for decades there will be terrible civil war violence in Guatemala, over 75,000 Guatemalans losing their life in the civil war violence. Another example of US intervention through the lens of anti-communism was the US backing of right wing, meaning very anti-communist death squads. And death squad seems like a very loaded term. The reason that term is often used to describe what happened is because of the scale of the violence. So some of these military intelligence units or military battalions in northern triangle countries would carry out, in effect, massacres. El Mosote is one of the most famous that you could, again, look further into if you're interested in the history of these foreign interventions. El Mosote, we saw around 1,200 people slaughtered in this Salvadoran village in 1981 as part of this right wing anti-communist operation. But many that were killed were actually ordinary villagers, civilians, and they were suspected of maybe harboring or cooperating with left wing individuals. But we can see El Mosote kind of standing out as one very vivid, very tragic example, and the battalion that carried out El Mosote did have training and backing from the US military at that time. Another infamous example, there we go, is in Honduras. Not only Honduras as a staging ground for the anti-Sandinista contras, which many people have heard of the contras before, but also carrying out atrocities on Honduran people in the name of anti-communism with tacit or even explicit support from the US military. Battalion 316 is one of those examples you could, again, look into a bit more if you're interested in the history of this. Battalion 316 was notorious not only for extrajudicial killings and torture and the disappearances of Honduran dissenters, but also because it was trained by CIA and FBI instructors. Some of that instruction occurred in the US and the desert in the Southwest. Some of it occurred in Honduras. So there's a lot more, but in a sort of quicker nutshell as we're moving through this history, these are just a few examples where we can see the violence associated with US anti-communist foreign policy and kind of the perpetuation of the man doctrine, right, which even if these very brutal desk-squad military units were carrying out atrocities and human rights abuses, as long as they were anti-communist and helping the US meet its political and economic interests in the region, they would be tolerated or even supported by the US government. This is a quote from a political scientist who has done research particularly on the use of coercive tactics, Dr. Jacqueline Hazelton. And Dr. Hazelton writes about El Salvador where the government was systematically targeting civilians in the 1980s as part of that anti-communist approach. So I'll just read along with you here. The military attacked them using bombing and shelling, indiscriminate capture, torture, systematic destruction of homes and crops and forced relocation to cities and camps where the inhabitants were easier to control. It treated civilians in insurgent dominated areas like combatants. This is from Dr. Hazelton's article on the hearts and minds fallacy. Again, if you're interested to research a bit more on your own into the history of US foreign policy in El Salvador. And so what we are getting from this is that the government was targeting civilians. The US ambassador was aware of this. US government and military personnel were aware of this. And it disrupted not only the social communal fabric but it disrupted the trust of the Salvadoran people for their own government and law enforcement authorities. And that's really something that we can see continue through today. So it's important to understand that history. So I'm going to advance now to talk a little bit about what's going on in the United States because some of these atrocities are obviously quite disturbing and it's problematic to think that the US government was enabling these types of behaviors. But if we remind ourselves of what was going on in the US domestic political environment, we had stopping communism as the ultimate goal. Communists as being our main enemy, meaning the United States main enemy. So you can see the top picture with President Reagan sporting his T-shirt that says, stop communism, Central America. So even having a T-shirt that emphasized that priority of anti-communism to shape US views of the region and of Central America in general. Below that, I've also given you an archival photograph of President Richard Nixon the decade before Reagan came to power. Because even before Reagan's presidency when we saw anti-communism dominating his approach to foreign policy in the region, we already had President Richard Nixon declare a quote war on drugs as early as 1971. So what we have now is a combination of anti-communism with a war on drugs so that both of those will work in tandem to shape not only the general public, American views of the region, but policy makers, their approach. That this is really something we need to meet with force and a heavy hand because it's not only an anti-communist battle, but it's actually a quote war on drugs. And so the war on drugs will work together with the anti-communist approach to militarize the environment of the Central American countries. Just trying to advance here, there we go. It was largely bipartisan that we had support for anti-communism, but there was resistance among an increasing number of Americans, particularly more liberal oriented Americans that were affiliated with churches and what was known as the sanctuary movement. Churches, synagogues were very involved in offering refuge to fleeing Central Americans, especially Salvadorans, who were trying to get away from that violence, civil war, the context of the death squats that we were just discussing. And so there was already a growing sense within the United States, despite the war on drugs and the anti-communism, that these really bad things are going on just to the south of us that we do have some culpability or responsibility in. So we should offer refuge and protection to the civilians that are fleeing that violence. If we fast forward to a more contemporary context, we can weave all of this history together to see that some of the legacies of the approaches, both the man doctrine, encouraging dictatorship and human rights abuses, as long as it was anti-communist and supported US economic interests, we can see the corruption that lingers, which continues to erode public trust in Central American institutions. So the institutions themselves remain very weak. This is just giving you a little view of the corruption perceptions index of 2019. And we can see some of the worst corruption trends are in the Northern Triangle countries in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. So what we're getting from that study is that the people living in those countries have hardly any trust in the law enforcement, in the security, in the court system, in the political offices in those states because they know that many of those security forces are underpaid and take bribes and that the judiciaries are not independent but are in many cases linked heavily with the political office holders and with criminal organizations. We also have a problem that continues because the infrastructure was so destroyed by the Civil War violence of the Cold War decades and by the dictators eroding human rights at such a high level that the drug cartels were able to move in and take over some areas and sort of act like the government where the government was absent. So I'm showing you now a map of downtown San Salvador where you can see these are areas that are under control not of the El Salvador government or San Salvador local officials but actually controlled by various drug cartels and gangs. So some of these like Mara Salvatrucha that are more famous and you may have already heard of and we can kind of see these cartels or these gangs controlling entire neighborhood blocks. What's interesting is during the coronavirus some of these Salvadoran gangs have been very strict in enforcing curfew and public health and safety regulations so there has been a lot of compliance with pandemic related health policies but we can see it's a problem when we think about the government because it's showing us that the government is so ineffective has so little trust and ability to govern that we actually see it's not the state government but it's like these drug cartels are their own state within the state of El Salvador. Another problem that has been really troublesome in terms of public trust in the institutions is that during the war on drugs that as we discussed came with Nixon and continued and was accelerated under the Reagan presidency and into the Clinton and Bush years. The war on drugs played a really important role in militarizing local law enforcement and combined with the sort of anti-communist climate of the 70s and 80s we saw that law enforcement really acted less like what we might imagine as police in certain neighborhoods in the US but more like actual militaries. And there was a high level of violence associated with how law enforcement engaged with their own citizens in these countries. So sometimes the worst human rights abuses that we have seen have been perpetrated not only by the drug cartels against civilians but also by the law enforcement, security authorities against the civilians. So the civilians in these Northern Triangle countries end up caught between on one hand the drug cartels that are maybe forcibly seeking to recruit them or extort them, kidnap or threaten their families. And on the other hand, if they might turn to the police for help that the police would also be corrupt and maybe use violence against them or would request payment in order to protect them. This is helping link us to the migration issues. Why is it that we have seen those numbers of people trying to cross the US Southern border increasing? Why have we seen families and unaccompanied minors fleeing that region in Central America? Because after 2014 it was really Central American families and children that were surpassing what used to be the typical migrant crossing the border who was a male who was from Mexico became much more families and the Northern Triangle countries as the origin for migration. Well, one of them is the death threats that come from those gangs, that if they do not cooperate and if they do not participate in the gang activities or go along with what the cartels in the neighborhood want them to do, their family or their own life is threatened. Another common reason that we see asylum seekers requesting asylum, meaning requesting protection as what we would then call a refugee status in the US, is being forcibly recruited. So it may be even distinct from cooperating with the gang, but actually forcibly that they must join the gang or else they will face punishment and retaliation on their family members. Another leading cause of asylum claims for the groups that work with the asylum sinkers and have even carried out a lot of studies on these asylum-seeking individuals since 2014 is sexual violence, gender-based violence. And we know that during the coronavirus, sexual violence, during the coronavirus has been getting worse. And that has happened in a lot of places including the Northern Triangle countries. So some of these things that we're talking about now they have really intensified just in the last five months as we're in this new context of having the pandemic. And I'm just looking for my slide here to go back. Okay, and kidnapping and extortion are other common tactics that the cartels use. Police abuse, as we mentioned, even the law enforcement is not viewed as a source of trust but as a human rights abuser and violator. So what we get from this list is that a lot of these sources of violence, they're not traditional what we would call war violence. They're outside of war but they still have, in many ways, the same effect on the people living there as if it were an actual state aggressor where the government is aggressive against its own people. The problem is that many of these then may not meet the eligibility requirements for asylum and for receiving refugee status, for example. When we kind of think of the big picture, there are a few ways we can summarize why the Northern Triangle violence has continued for so long and why these structural conditions often worsen rather than getting better. The first is, of course, the economic context. So there's a lot of focus on economic growth. If only we can get GDP growth up in these Northern Triangle countries or if only the aid packages of foreign assistance will stimulate the economies in the right way that we could address the deep levels of poverty that are often driving forces for all of these other factors. The problem is that even when we have seen economic growth and lots of foreign aid that may go to governments, the economic inequality continues to worsen. And so we see this wealth gap between what may be basically a slum, a really terrible living conditions without having adequate sanitation and adequate infrastructure of public services to be healthy, with mansions that have swimming pools and a very luxurious way of life, but just for a very few number of people that have connections that could be connections to a few of the corporations in those countries that are controlled often by the same circles of people and families, or that could be because they are related to the drug cartel and criminal organizations. And so that's part of the problem. It's very complicated to see the economic impact because it doesn't automatically translate to growth for all classes of people. It usually is very concentrated, where those who already have a lot of wealth are reaping the majority of the benefits when there's a GDP growth or some kind of economic stimulation. Another factor that is an overarching context for why the conditions have worsened is the environmental context. So if we look at this map here, we can see El Corridor Seco, which means the dry corridor. And it happens to overlap with several of the Northern Triangle countries territories. The dry corridor has been worsening in terms of the level and intensity and the length of the droughts. And that is linked to broader issues that scientists associate with the changing climate and environmental change. And so not only are storms and hurricanes intensifying in that region that overlaps with the Northern Triangle countries, but also the droughts that result in crop harvest decline and that destroy a lot of the sources of food for the people. And so you can see in the picture of this very malnourished child, the Guatemalan child, which is a famous photograph showing malnourishment in Guatemala, that this is directly related, that we can't really divorce the economic factors of poverty from the fact that there are these very hard hit areas of farming and areas of destruction related to the changing climate. The war on drugs, as we've already talked about a couple of times, is another factor that has really continued across different US administrations so that we can see heavily militarized police forces that were given extra weaponry and extra sort of military style approaches and training because it was not just counter narcotics, but a war. And so this encourages a war-like thinking and a war-like approach to how the law enforcement interacts with people. And that is part of the reason that the people in those countries have such little trust in their own law enforcement, is that heavy military presence that they feel is often just as dangerous for their livelihoods and for human rights abuses as the drug cartels in the treatment of them. We can also see another part of the picture that often gets left out of this discussion, which is the demand for those drugs and that the demand is of course very much driven by US consumption. There has been increased consumption and demand, for example, for cocaine among American users. And so that is something where once again, we can't really divorce the influence of the US or the separateness of these economies because the US demand for drugs in some cases plays a crucial role in fueling violence among the drug cartels in the region. This is sort of an overview where we can see a study, it's called gauging the misery of countries gripped by gangs, but it's really focused on the three Northern Triangle countries, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, just with a window into some of the areas of life that are so harmful and toxic for daily living in those places. Again, helping us understand, get like a fuller portrait of why people would want to flee those areas. So we can see the international homicide rate in this slide and El Salvador is famous for having one of the highest murder rates per capita in the world. Now again, it's not the Afghanistan context where an armed militant group designated a terrorist by the US government is carrying out the violence, but it still has the same effect on the Salvadoran people that you might make a parallel to what life is like living in a place where the Taliban is able to wield governance and force. So we have that problem where it's not officially a terrorist group or not officially a war by the state, but the conditions are much the same for the people living there. We can also see the incarceration rate, which is very high, not as high as the US per capita, but El Salvador, we can see it's been climbing. This is part of the militarization. It shows us when the incarceration rise is growing in that way that they are not finding social solutions to problems, but increasingly the solution to the problems and the crime is just to remove those people and incapacitate them from society. And so that's usually a pretty important indicator for knowing that there is not really adequate social programming in place to help address the root causes of crime. We can also see the gun deaths rate, the poverty rates that are very high, particularly if you look at the poverty rate, Honduras stands out with about half of the population at the poverty threshold in recent years. Now all of this that you are looking at where the study was just giving you a snapshot of 15 years has gotten much worse with the pandemic, with the coronavirus. So unemployment has grown, poverty has grown. In some cases the violence levels went down after the pandemic among gangs in terms of gang violence. In other cases violence has gone up and particularly gender-based violence has gone up. So I've mentioned a couple of times that these are not official war conditions, but they have similar effects on the people that are living in these countries. So Salian Madrano is known for this term of de facto refugees, arguing that really we should call Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Honduran people de facto refugees, meaning yes they don't meet the legal definition, but in practice, which is what de facto means, in practice in truth they are no different from other types of political refugees fleeing official wars in countries that are war zones. And part of what Salian Madrano says is that even though it's unconventional non-war violence, the level of trauma is the same and the level of fear, of persecution is the same. It's just a matter of if you're going to adhere to the refugee convention, or if you're going to think of it more in practical terms of what is the purpose of giving asylum. I'm showing you now the legal definition for asylum and refugee status and that's why Salian Madrano says we often can't call them official refugees. It's because the refugee convention pictured here has this definition, well who qualifies as a quote refugee, someone unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. And so this has been a debate for a long time in US policy regarding migration from the Northern Triangle is just something like gang-initiated violence. Does that qualify to meet the definition in the refugee convention? And what about gender-based violence? And there are many interpretations that say well yes, gender-based violence is being targeted because one is a member of a social group based on their gender or their gender identity. But what we see recently is a rollback of some of those interpretations with US asylum law actually narrowing it and restricting it and proposing that gender-based violence and something like a fleeing gang violence should not qualify for asylum and refugee status. So that is something else to keep in mind as we think about the policy approach. So now I will advance a little bit of contemporary debate as we move along and thinking how these issues link together. Back in the 1960s there was what was known as the Alliance for Progress as kind of a regional approach for how the US aid packages could address multiple countries in Central America at once. Well under the Obama administration we actually had a similar name for a policy that was sort of regionally based. It was called the Alliance for Prosperity. And the idea of the Alliance for Prosperity was that through billions of dollars of US foreign aid to the Northern Triangle countries there could be a way to address the root causes of the migration coming along the southern border and recognizing a lot of that is related to the economics and the violent conditions of the region. The Alliance for Prosperity took a while to get off the ground under the Obama administration and by the time it was sort of in place and the funding had been distributed to the various local NGOs and international organizations and US organizations in the region there really wasn't much time left before the change in administrations from Obama to Trump. So those who criticized the Alliance for Progress said well it didn't go far enough or they did not efficiently enough give that foreign aid directly to civil society local partners on the ground in the Northern Triangle countries. Those who defended say it was actually starting to make a difference and there were social outcomes that were helping to prevent some of the root causes of migration. It just ran out of time too soon. So the Alliance for Prosperity under Obama remains debated regarding what it did right and what it could have done better or did wrong. But what we saw with the Trump administration is the second part of the bullet point there is the idea that foreign aid should be cut as punishment to the Northern Triangle governments and Trump wanted to distinguish himself as president from his predecessor from Obama saying rather than giving all this aid we need to use a harsher stick rather than a carrot of giving foreign assistance we should say actually we're gonna take it away if you do not stop the flow of migration coming to the southern border. That was heavily criticized in some cases in a very bipartisan way including by Republicans who have a long history of working with the Northern Triangle. There was some praise that there's not enough change being made and so we should see something to force these governments to wake up and do better at implementing change. What do we kind of see today is the sense that the Alliance for Prosperity had a lot of good things about it that just need to be redone in a way that maybe partners with local businesses more it goes more directly to civil society instead of international organizations in the region. Biden as a candidate has some kind of similar iteration of rebooting the Alliance for Prosperity to make it better and Trump says that the Alliance for Prosperity is just such a brand associated with the predecessor there really should be a full change there should be a very different approach and has not been too supportive of that previous approach. So that remains a debate and will likely continue especially after the pandemic of how aid should be addressed should it be a carrot stick approach or should it just be focused and allocated in different ways to make a difference on the ground. Another thing that we can see here is the economic growth problem where it tends to get oversimplified that that aid or that even the economy is doing better again pre coronavirus we would have as the context of that then the country should do better as a whole right and the levels of violence should go down but because of that economic inequality issue that we were just mentioning a little bit ago that isn't what we see. So until there's really a focus on how the wealth and the economic growth is distributed those who follow the region closely think it's unlikely that just having economic growth in those countries will be the magic formula that makes the root causes for migration disappear or that somehow the violence lessens because of economic growth. It's about how the economic wealth ends up being allocated within those societies that that's really crucial. And then this last visual here is getting back to the problem that is very hard to address and very hard for ordinary people to even understand but it's the weak institutions and the weak rule of law that persist regardless of economic growth or regardless of aid packages sometimes. And so I have this little visual to kind of help us with understanding what does that really mean? To say a weak rule of law or weak institutions in the Northern Triangle and what we see is first of all accountability and so the accountability idea is that even if someone is holding political office they should be held to the same standards of following the law as citizens in the country ordinary people. And that's not what we've seen in the Northern Triangle countries and it's well known for the civilians who live there that many of the government officials are sort of above the law because of the corruption. In some cases some of the human rights abusers that were part of Battalion 316 in Honduras or part of those policies that enabled death squads actually got positions of political power in more contemporary government office and if not in political office then in the drug cartels or in the criminal trafficking organizations. So that's one of the problems is accountability and if we don't see a focus on improving accountability that government officials will be held accountable when they break the law it's likely that we will see the conditions continue. Second is are the laws just? Are the laws clear, publicized, stable, applied evenly to everyone regardless of how wealthy they are or regardless of what connections their family has? Third we see is the government transparent and open so that everyone can understand there's not a emergency laws or lack of transparency, opaque processes that ordinary people can't really understand. Why was the course of that case outcome as it was? And finally accessible and impartial dispute resolution and this goes back to the problem that the judicial branches in those countries are often not independent and they are subject to bribery and corruption because of that there is a break in the trust from the people and they feel that they can't even trust the legal system and the justice system to actually do justice. So those are very hard things to fix but those are largely, there's consensus that those are the kinds of things that we'll need to change to have real change in the region. So to kind of wrap up in our last few minutes of the presentation, when we think about migration which has probably been the biggest issue for the American public is the number of people crossing the border and many coming from the Northern Triangle. The main approach of US policy has focused on prevention, preventing people from crossing. There has been the remain in Mexico under the Trump administration as a great example to show us that approach of just prevent the asylum seekers or the migrants from arriving in the first place at the southern border where they then might request asylum or a cross in an unauthorized way. So the remain in Mexico program, the idea is incentives and cooperation with the Mexican government to keep the asylum seekers there in Mexico while they await and maybe even try and give them harbor in Mexico so that they don't enter the US at all. The safe third country agreements are in the last couple of years working with the Northern Triangle countries like Guatemala or Honduras to say, well, that's a safe enough country that if it's an asylum seeker from somewhere else, they can just stay in that country. They can just stay in Guatemala or stay in Honduras. And that's been a problem because as we know from the presentation, those countries are all very dangerous. None of them are really safe harbors or prepared to be safe refuges for people that are fleeing drug cartels or violence in general. We also see the growing restrictions in US policy on who's eligible really being careful to apply those criteria about, is it political persecution? And if so, then perhaps saying, you can't be eligible for asylum if you're fleeing any kind of gang violence, even if it's torture or something like that targeting the family, focusing on the fact that it's a gang based as a way to say it does not meet the eligibility requirements. We've also seen proposals to do away with gender based eligibility to be able to receive asylum, to be able to have a legal authorization to enter the US. And this is really part of a broader program that we would call prevention through deterrence. Why do we have all of those tents set up along the southern border, well before the coronavirus where people were blocked from entering? Because the idea is to prevent them from entering the United States. And prevention through deterrence is really nothing new that goes back to the Obama administration all the way back to the 1990s, the Clinton administration. There was really a focus on preventing migrants from being able to claim asylum by preventing them from reaching the US territory. And Jeff Sessions, when he was Attorney General appointed earlier in the presidency of Trump, he even explicitly kind of stated this, that the idea for some of the more controversial policies like separating families at the border and detention, treatment, et cetera, that the idea was to prevent those migrants from wanting to make the journey in the first place, which is deterrence, deterring them or preventing them from making the journey of migration. And that goes for many decades in US policy. Now, if you're interested in learning more about it just in the interest of time, a couple of book recommendations for you to hear more about the policies of deterrence are the Land of Open Graves by De Leon, which really gives a detail going back more in history of the preventing migrants from reaching the southern border and the migrant passage, a book by Noel Brigden. And so both of those would be resources to learn more. In the pandemic, as we conclude, all of these conditions have of course worsened, but we've also seen almost a halt or a slowdown in cross-border movements, of course, because of trying to contain the spread of the coronavirus. What this means for those who do meet asylum or refugee eligibility is that there has been a lack of places for them to safely resettle. And this is something that the United Nations refugee agency has called attention to, that there's really a lack of places to resettle people. These are people already registered as refugees that the UN already determined should have asylum in a safe country. So that's something that we see kind of in this last bit of news. These are a couple of news stories from recent events. The migrant population has reported that they are facing even more unemployment and worse quality of life, less access to healthcare in terms of treating or preventing the coronavirus, and that many of them have chosen not to migrate because of the coronavirus. So these are things that will continue to evolve as the pandemic runs its course. We've also seen the double threat in that second news article you see for children in Central America and the Caribbean because of the climate impact. So we've had some really brutal storms and hurricanes that have done some of the things we were talking about earlier. They have intensified and exacerbated the problems that are already there facing people for the daily life and for having adequate food security. And so when we add sort of the layered threats of the coronavirus with the climate intensification issues, we see things are definitely worse and it's really not clear how this will look once we are post-pandemic if we make it there in terms of shaping US policy. Thank you so much for your attention and it's been wonderful to speak with you virtually about this issue. I hope you learned a lot and I look forward to having a more successful health. Thank you, Dr. Cohen. And we hope that you will turn in for next week's topic which will be artificial intelligence and data. Thank you.