Secretary mcaleenan emailed his speech to press after he left with a note attached. And were going to baa to go back to the conference with a panel discussion, possible regional approaches to solving it. This is live coverage on cspan2. To send volunteers to texas to the two major detention facilities that are housing women with children, detaining women and children to help prepare the women for credible fear interviews and to do other work to assist the families. In our hemisphere and in particular, its examining one of the main things that what theyre looking at is this see third country issue whichbrings us to our panel. Because we thought it would be a Good Opportunity to hear from these experts with respect to the humanitarian and migration crisis that has been going on in Central America and the need for regional approaches. We have three experts who will give us different analysis to help address different parts of this problem and that is ive asked anthony fontez, an expert on human insecurity in Central America to talk to us about those challenging issues, what is the insecurity situation . What are the challenges in trying to address it. There have been some attempts , not major attempts but steve is the expert and im going to let him talk about those things. Our community would benefit more from understanding whats going on in the region in these countries in particular. Then fortunately we also have marie meyer whose end expert on migrant rights at the Washington Office and she has been laboring for many years in focusing on the Protection Systems in mexico to the extent it exists and she can talk to us about what thats like. You heard this morning that because of the new transit, the third policy that the Trump Administration has put out more recently to try to deter asylumseekers from coming to the United States, a policy is that people in transit are now have to apply for asylum on their way. Thats what the goal is to reedit so we will hear about what that means in a country which has had, well, we will hear from the experts. I wont say more and finally fortunately we have carol who is the deputy Regional Representative for the us and caribbean. At the un and high commissioner for refugees process. And she will be talking about the regional approach, the approaches i should say that would benefit the abilities of our entire International Community to protect refugees who are fleeing for a very serious harm. Both in terms of the Refugee Convention and putting a declaration which extends protection to refugees whoare freeing from very serious violent civil war. This is a regional crisis. There are Central American countries that have received many refugees as well and who are trying to or could use some help inaddressing those needs. So thank you very much everybody for coming. We will have time for of course q and a so let us begin with lesser fontez will talk to us about the security situation in the country is particularly focused on in Central America and thank you for being here thank you so much for putting on this amazing venue. Its one of the great methods of confirmation happening in america so astory , in july 2016 i spoke with a 20yearoldguatemalan man will not whos looking to cross from the United States. For people like me he said, my country is like a cage with no way out. We are waiting with dozens of other Central Americans on freight trains and we allknow this journey is dangerous. We might fail, we might even die but these are scope at the end of it. So in the little time that i have im going to try to get an overview of the forces that have made people like wilmer feel so trapped and hopeless in their native lands and what might be done to resolve these issues. Although in my initial thought ill probably about the challenges and get to some of those solutions in the q a. All right. So im going to focus on the making of Central American cage to push the metaphor. To understand the complex race to poverty, violence and todrive immigration from the region. My training focusing on everything lived experience of extreme time insecurity and carry and in the stock im going to try to lay my fieldwork with some of the macro processes that help explain general transit immigration over the last couple of decades so the evolution of violence and insecurity, the persistence of poverty in the region and how poverty and intos insecurity intertwined and pushing individual cases about migration trends in general. So the first thing to understand about the region is that Northern Triangles long been a place where globally circulating violence insecurity seem to become distilled and with terrifying intensity. So what is now known as the old violence in people studying the northern triangle at the height of the cold war over armed military governments in guatemala and el salvador trained, funded and getting covered by the United States engage in massive atrocities against mostly civilian populations who are suspected of supporting insurgencies against illegal governments. These insurgency into being because regional elites refuse to allow citizenry to engage in the most basic Political Activities from elections, forming unions or learning to read. Rather than being the cause of the social movements calling for division of economic and political opportunities coming from a diverse range of voices , the over armed militaries in the 1970s and 80s resorted to mass disappearance of sorts campaign that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and bloodied theater was guatemala where ive done most of my work. They strove the first massive waves of refugees out of the region seeking refuge in mexico and the United States and even though they been engaged for a long time i think of parallels and echoes from that time with the situation that Central Americans face now although now the kinds of violence that is taking place are very different. Since the end of the cold war, the rise of what scholars call the new violence is has really hit hard in the northern triangle , honduras, guatemala and el salvador. Across latin america democracy has been accompanied by the rise of criminal chaos and in the words of as described by many observers in the region and this new violence is difficult to pick apart. The legacy of Armed Conflicts are important based on the cold war order. And Armed Conflict did not bring peace as we would imagine it so through the 1990s guatemala, el salvador and honduras thought sharp rise in criminal violence concentrated in large urban centers, guatemala center, san salvador, etc. And this new violence in many ways is far harder to diagnose. Government officials and outside observers dated Digital Homicide attends and most of the 21st century honduras registered the highest number of murders proportional to the population in the world coming in the top five consistently until the last few years where things have gotten moderately better at least in the counting of dead bodies. But in a sense, heres the 20 18th homicide map of guatemala. You can see the concentration of highest murder rates in Border Regions and ill talk about that in a second, it has much to do with the drug trade and the competition between different organizations or control of lucrative border crossings. El salvador is primarily affected by gangrelated violence although again, the gangs themselves are not as clearcut as the media and many outside observers and Law Enforcement tend to be. Violence is more equally spread the country and then honduras is in many ways in between guatemala and el salvador in terms of who is driving violence. Major issues of Gang Violence in urban centers as well as along major Drug Trafficking corridors in the northern western parts of the country. So homicide count is all well and good as a way of gauging whats happening in terms of violence but in a sense the body counts obscure more than they reveal. As hard and fast as the numbers may see what makes this violence so terrifying to so many is his profound uncertainty. Across the region less than fivepercent of Violent Crimes ever make it to trial , making the northern triangle a great place to commit murder to paraphrase a observation. Forces of order and disorder often make distorted reflections of each other so i guess the law appears helpless and at worst complicit making the list of suspects of murder and extortion, kidnapping and robbery long and badly defined and Police Exchange places with kidnapping rings, gangs and so on that theyre supposedto be bringing to justice. Its more a massacre, torture, dismemberment and other spectacular forms of violence that are literally made or media consumption, make murder register far and wide beyond a particular locale so the cacophony of public reaction, sensationalist media reporting, politicians grandstanding the rumors and violence circulating in communities works the fear of this violence into every realm of public life. So this uncertainty, this general sense that no one is to be trusted i think explains why for example even as homicide rates across the region apparently dropped especially if you check out this image up here, essentially cut in half a number of people murdered per hundred thousand per year between 2013 and 2018. General levels of fear, paranoia and per se pervasive insecurity remains very high. In fact almost untouched but general population has no trust that their governments can effectively combat climb much less count the dead and understand the statements in the underworld coexist in the symbiotic relationships with each other. So especially in honduras and guatemala theres a strong sense Estate Agents are key players in the reproduction of impurity as they are with estimates of the proportion of police and organized crime ranging between 30 and 60 percent of the total area this makes for a particularly volatile and powerful island actor ecosystem, the those at the top are widely considered to be Drug Trafficking organizations. This is a map from 2016. I couldnt find one from more recently that was at telling but things havent changed much. The estimation of the number of noncommercial boating incidents connecting the Southern Cone to the northern triangle and its a way of measuring the amount of cocaine goingthrough the region. So the impunity that criminal actors especially Drug Trafficking organizations enjoy is truly aweinspiring. And the drug traffickers are probably at the height of the top end of the violent actor foodchain in this part of the world area over the last 30 years us war on drugs is with the flow of cocaine and a host of other commodities through under us and guatemala away from the caribbean even since 2006 of mexico. And into primarily honduras and guatemala. Today Police Report upwards of 90 percent of cocaine consumed by the insatiable north american nose comes through honduras and guatemala and territory area and the profits and power of Drug Trafficking circulate at every level. So this is an image drawnfrom the work of my friend Stephen Dudley at inside prime , and it details the connection between a man in the bunch of la who was one of the lead traffickers until this capture five or six years ago in the western part of guatemala. And the details the level of his interaction and involvement and infiltration of the various levels of government , Civil Society, evangelical churches as well as the local politics and the local businesses as well another example , this is the potatoes, one of the major Drug Trafficking organizations in honduras and its also been captured and leaders extradited although the Campaign Strategy doesnt work and we can talk more about that if we want to it only leads to more violence and competition between the surviving groups that are there. Its a multibilliondollar industry so picking up the leaders only makes the underlings more ambitious area but this also details the circulation of power and influence between Drug Trafficking organizations and the powers that be in those particular countries. Particularly salient example, this is juan orlando hernandez, hes a us partner in the signing of a ridiculous third country agreement which howard will talk about. Also his brother is facing trial in new york involving narco trafficking and has much talk that hes one orlando or as hes known in honduras hobo has received at least 1 million in funding traffickers associated with his brother allegedly. All right. The other sort of most, although one of the most visible violent actors in Central America of course our day and this is probablyan image that many of you have seen. This is since the early 90s, transnational gangs like ms 13, and queen street after the very face of crime in the region and those of you who dont know theyre born out of circular migration between the us and Central America in the 1970s through the 90s and ms 13 embodied extortion machines in the Central America. Especially in honduras, ms 13 is an important player in urban drug Market Institution and some people say taking the place of the Drug Trafficking organizations that were taken out by the usda efforts, sort of subsumed at a higher level of involvement in transnational traffic of cocaine. So gangs like ms 13 and those are an urban phenomenon but as part of my work, much of my work is been involved in tracing the evolution of gangs but if you want to understand the evolution of gangs is a way to understand evolution of violence is to meet that phantasmagorical spectacular image of a tattoo gang member who resides behind bars which by and large is a much smaller part of the gang population than it has been because of increased enforcement against people who have faced tattoos and so forth and these days an important thing to understand, gangs are embedded in the communities over which they rule you cant fall apart the police, local community and the operation of the gangs which is one of the reasons that it makes it such a terrifying phenomenon because literally its neighbors andkilling each other. So this is the gang extortion network, some 36 people into the mothers, daughters, sisters and wives of incarcerated gang members involved in the extortion network. Another gang member, member of ms 13. Another young man thats striking about this picture is he has a prototypical gang have to face but he has an image of himself painted with his patrick father. So these gangs have become the face of crime as i said and an important criminal actors ordering areas they control but theyre also a smokescreen area its important to remember. A sector invoked over and over again by political actors distract populace, distract outside observers from a host of structural factors at the outofcontrol insecurity. Theres a tendency to call the violence thats happening today nonstate violence and i think its a dangerous misnomer because or even nonpolitical violence. Its a mistake to imagine the state of guatemala and honduras as having no part in perpetuating the violence taking place today. Whether its through institutional weakness or outright complicity, agents of the state play key roles in eating off of violent impunity that drives outmigration. Theres literally almost no way todraw the state apart from the criminal underworld. All right. So now poverty. Poverty in the region remains as pressing is not quite as widespread as it was in the 1970s and 80s when as i said before massive social movements for workers and subsistence farmers help drive armed insurrection. This issue is there are no formal market jobs. In 2018 more than 300,000 Central Americans join a labor pool on the less than 4000 jobs created by the economy. These are concentrated almost entirely in urban areas so that relegates the vast majority of Central Americans especially rural Central Americans. The economies themselves depend upon the export of a few commodities and the employee tiny fraction of the workforce area that were talking sugarcane, some manufactured goods and one rising export industry is call centers for us businesses employ deportees because of their actions in english always an opportunity, right . So this general reliance on a few commodities meant for export to primarily us markets have created society between small and rich elite groups at the top and masses of the bottom with a tiny sliver of desperate middleclass clinging in the middle. Overall the region is stunning and itappears to be worsening. So one important pressure valve has always been for the last 30 years or so and growing in importance, remittances from the us. A recent study by mello roscoe the interamerican dialogue found that remittances make up 50 percent of Household Incomes one and three families in the region. One can only imagine what will happen when that lifeline starts slimming down if the present administrations actions against immigrationscontinue. So you know, this issue of this dichotomy between asylumseekers and economic migrants is something that plays into the discourse against immigrationand people are just coming to take jobs. Ther