RSN: FOCUS: Colombian Mercenaries and the Assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse

 

 

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FOCUS: Colombian Mercenaries and the Assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse
Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept
Devereaux writes: "The U.S. government - and Joe Biden himself - has made repeat appearances in the history that gave rise to Colombia's hired guns."

The U.S. government — and Joe Biden himself — has made repeat appearances in the history that gave rise to Colombia’s hired guns.

he men sat on a tile floor, many wearing tan combat boots, most with their hands cuffed behind their backs. The table before them was piled with weapons, passports, and bulletproof vests. Soldiers in black balaclavas stood guard nearby, rifles ready. They were Colombian mercenaries, Haitian authorities said, dispatched in a brazen international plot orchestrated through a Florida-based security firm that culminated in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and plunged the nation into uncertainty and terror.

Eighteen Colombians, most of them former soldiers, some hailing from elite units, have been arrested in connection with the July 7 assassination. Three others were killed in the aftermath of the assault, while five more are reportedly still at large. Two Haitian Americans, one a former U.S. government informant, turned themselves in hours after the attack, claiming that they were translators aiding an effort to serve an arrest warrant on the president and transfer him to the presidential palace, not to kill him.

Nearly three weeks after the Colombians’ arrest, the mystery surrounding their activities in Haiti has only deepened. As The Intercept recently reported, at least seven of the alleged assassins received U.S. training during their military careers. According to a U.S. official, between 2001 and 2015, the soldiers received instruction in both Colombia and the U.S. on skills ranging from military leadership and professional development to counternarcotics and counterterrorism. As experts on Latin American security were quick to point out, with the U.S. administering more than 107,640 trainings of Colombian security personnel in the past two decades, it was more likely than not that at least some of Moïse’s alleged killers would have received U.S. instruction at some point.

The Colombians’ presence in Haiti has opened a rare window into a murky private security world that extends from the U.S. into Latin America and the Caribbean, highlighting the outsize role that veterans of Colombia’s security forces play in the global mercenary sphere. While the full story surrounding Moïse’s assassination has yet to be told, one thread is clear: Through three of the most consequential conflicts of the past century — the Cold War, the drug war, and the war on terror — the interlocking relationship between U.S. and Colombian security forces has produced a generation of hired guns, some of whom, for the right price, can turn an entire country upside down.

The decade-and-a-half in which Moïse’s alleged assassins received U.S. training is critical to understanding this evolution. They were the Plan Colombia years, a period in which the U.S. pumped $10 billion in counternarcotics aid into Colombia, a sum that far surpassed military aid to any other country in the region — in fact, only Israel and Egypt received more — and helped turn Colombia’s military into Latin America’s most advanced government fighting force. For many U.S. and Colombian officials, Plan Colombia has become shorthand for American intervention done right, an example of Washington throwing its support behind a committed partner who, through great sacrifice and determination, overcame the existential threat of narco disintegration. “I’m the guy who put together Plan Colombia,” President Joe Biden boasted to the Des Moines Register a year before his inauguration, harkening back to his extensive work in bringing the program to life. For others, however, Plan Colombia was an abomination, a horrifying and emblematic example of counterinsurgency cloaked in a supply-side international drug war strategy that produced waves of extrajudicial killings, staggering environmental destruction, and a market of Colombian mercenaries available to the highest bidder.

The Intercept spoke to a former U.S. military official who worked extensively with the Colombians on implementing the program. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to their ongoing work for another element of the U.S. government, described how the joint U.S.-Colombian mission evolved over time and how the war on terror, both operationally and through the ubiquitous privatization of combat operations, influenced that evolution. For companies looking for arms for hire, they explained, Colombians have something their would-be competitors lack: combat experience in one of the world’s longest civil wars.

“The contractors will know that a guy couldn’t be in the Colombian army for 20 years without having demonstrated or having gone through a series of training schools, some of them taught by the U.S.,” the official said. “When guys are in a combat situation, they become more serious about what they’re doing. If you’re in a peaceful country where nothing’s happening, your weapon doesn’t have to work. But if you’re in Colombia, the attack might happen tonight. So these guys have these experiences. They’ve seen the elephant, if you will.”

Plan Colombia

In August 2000, President Bill Clinton made a visit to the Colombian city of Cartagena. He was in town to announce the first $1.3 billion installment in a controversial aid package that had been held up in Congress. His presence drew thousands of protesters into the streets of Bogotá, and yet, ABC News reported at the time, the president “seemed unconcerned as he walked through the dockyard commander center in the Caribbean port city.”

In addition to the throngs of soldiers and police officers providing physical security, Clinton touched down in Cartagena armed with the information included in a lengthy Senate report, published months earlier. The report had called for increased assistance to the Colombian army and national police. “Never before in recent history has there been such an opportunity to strike at all aspects of the drug trade at the source,” it said. The author of the document was Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware.

Though Plan Colombia is typically viewed in the U.S. through the prism of the drug war, the security package was implemented against the backdrop of a much longer conflict involving leftist insurgent movements, proto-mercenary right-wing paramilitaries, and the Colombian state — it is a story in which the U.S. government, and Biden himself, has made repeat appearances.

The modern history of the relationship can be traced back to 1962, when U.S. Army Brig. Gen. William Yarborough was dispatched to Colombia to assess the nation’s counterinsurgency situation. The years prior had seen more than 200,000 Colombians, most of them peasant farmers, killed at the hands of the land-owning elite. In a secret memo to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Yarborough, the commander of the Pentagon’s Special Warfare Center and one of the most famous Green Berets of all time, advocated for the creation of armed civilian units with a mandate to “execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents.” He added: “It should be backed by the United States.”

Two years after the visit, in the spring of 1964, the formation of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the National Liberation Army, ELN, marked the beginning of Colombia’s internal conflict. Decades later, Human Rights Watch observed in a report how Yarborough’s prescription directly informed the Colombian military’s response to the insurgency, particularly in its embrace of irregular, armed paramilitaries, including those that became death squads.

Washington’s interest in Colombia kicked up again in the 1980s, as U.S. demand for cocaine deepened and lawmakers saw new opportunities in the war on drugs that the Nixon administration had declared a decade earlier. With politicians on both sides of the aisle demanding that more be done to stop the flow of drugs at the source, President Ronald Reagan signed a secret directive in 1986 declaring drug trafficking a national security threat, thus opening the door for expanded military operations in Colombia. It was critical to make “every American understand a very real link between drugs and terrorism,” then-Vice President George H.W. Bush said at the time. Two years later, the Berlin Wall fell. The Cold War ended. Bush became commander in chief and the drug war marched on. As one U.S. general put it in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1989: “With peace breaking out all over, it might give us something to do.”

For many U.S. military officials, doing something meant boarding a plane to Colombia, where a multifaceted conflict featuring guerillas, paramilitaries, drug trafficking organizations, and the government raged through the early 1990s. Decades before being dispatched on a mission to kill Osama bin Laden, members of the Pentagon’s elite Joint Special Operations Command were on the ground in Colombia, aiding the government’s search for cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. The hunt ended on December 2, 1993, with the drug lord shot dead in Medellín. The following year, as the various groups with a stake in Colombia’s internal conflict vied for survival and control of an unfathomably lucrative illicit market, lawmakers loosened regulations governing the creation of private security companies. The decision, combined with world historic events on the horizon, would help pave the way for hundreds of Colombian security firms in the years to come.

As he would proclaim on the campaign trail decades later, Biden’s relationship to the conflict in Colombia ran deep. In the 1980s, he had been a fierce critic of the Reagan administration’s drug war policies, arguing that the U.S. wasn’t doing enough to cut off the Colombian cocaine flow and that the White House showed insufficient support for law enforcement, as well as advocating for increased Pentagon and CIA involvement in the drug war.

In April 2000, Biden flew to Colombia to conduct a survey of the state of U.S. counternarcotics operations in the country. The result of Biden’s visit was his May 2000 report, in which he articulated his strong support for then-President Andrés Pastrana’s Plan Colombia. Announced in 1999, the plan sought $7.5 billion in international aid to support Colombia’s progress on a range of issues, including the peace process with the FARC, the economy, counternarcotics, justice system reform, and “democratization and social development.” It was the drug part that seemed to capture the bulk of Biden’s attention.

“There is, to be sure, no guarantee that this plan will work in significantly reducing narcotics trafficking. Anybody who says they are certain that it will succeed is either lying or is a fool,” Biden wrote. “But in my 28 years in the Senate, I have been deeply involved in studying and debating narcotics policy. I strongly believe that at this moment, with this president in Bogota, we have a real opportunity to make a significant difference against the drug trade in Colombia. That opportunity could slip away unless we seize this rare enforcement moment.”

Biden’s warning was received. Announcing the first round of aid, Clinton assured critics and skeptics in Colombia and the U.S. that their fears were misplaced. “This is not Vietnam, neither is it Yankee imperialism,” Clinton said at the time. “There won’t be American involvement in a shooting war because they don’t want it and because we don’t want it.” Pastrana echoed those assurances in an interview with ABC. “I don’t think there is any chance that the military advisers are going to be involved in the real war in Colombia,” he said. “And they will never be.”

Thirteen months later, everything changed.

The Melding of Two Wars

The September 11 attacks shifted the paradigm through which the U.S. approached the drug war in Colombia. In decades past, the Colombian army had largely left the issue of drug enforcement to its counterparts in the national police, focusing instead on its counterinsurgency war against the FARC and others. U.S. personnel on the ground, meanwhile, were under orders to focus strictly on the drug trafficking. “We didn’t want to go down the slippery slope of getting involved in an internal conflict in a country,” said the official who spoke to The Intercept. But then, they added, “when the towers fell in 2001, we did that Global War on Terrorism.”

Like his father before him, President George W. Bush drew a direct link between drugs and terrorism. “Terrorists use drug profits to fund their cells to commit acts of murder,” the president said just three months after the attacks. “If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America.” In the years immediately before the September 11 attacks, the size and power of the FARC had increased substantially, due in no small part to the hundreds of millions of dollars the group was collecting through the taxation of coca growers, extortion, and kidnapping.

A year before Plan Colombia funding was approved in the U.S., a trio of research organizations — the Transnational Institute in the Netherlands, Acción Andina in Bolivia, and the Washington Office on Latin America in Washington, D.C. — published a report documenting how the group’s expansion fueled a perception of a rising “narcoguerrilla” threat in Colombia. The reality on the ground was more complicated. “In sum, the guerillas’ military growth is not limited to their increased ability to generate revenues through extortion, kidnapping or threats to local authorities and sectors of the civilian population,” the report said. “Their armed capability has grown because of their ability to take military — more than political — advantage of cracks in a highly decayed regime that requires reforms of the existing socio-economic and institutional framework.” Nonetheless, the FARC’s nexus to drug trafficking and political violence — more so than that of Colombia’s right-wing paramilitaries — would provide the basis for a new U.S. approach to Colombia post-9/11.

“The Colombian armed forces, they didn’t get involved in the counternarcotic aspect — they said, ‘Hey, that’s a policing mission.’ But we had told them, ‘Well, look, that train has left the station,’” said the U.S. official. “The armed forces said, ‘Yeah, you’re right. This is the time to become involved in this because the lines have blurred here.’”

With Plan Colombia in place and the drug war and the war on terror thoroughly blended into a single amorphous effort, thousands of U.S. personnel and private contractors began streaming into Bogotá, transforming the embassy there into the largest in the world. In 2003, a plane carrying a crew of contractors conducting a coca spraying operation crashed in a jungle controlled by the FARC. Four Americans were taken hostage. The prohibitions on U.S.-Colombian intelligence sharing on FARC camps, which by that point were happening on a “case-by-case basis,” according to the U.S. official, fell away. “Our mission was to find them,” they said. “They were held for five years in the jungle there, and so that loosened things up a little bit.”

In the wake of the hostage-taking, the Bush administration approved a CIA covert action program in which U.S. intelligence, most of it coming from National Security Agency intercepts, would be used to direct Colombian military bombing operations against FARC targets. The program, which continued under the Obama administration, remained secret for a decade before being revealed by Washington Post investigative reporter Dana Priest in 2013. Priest detailed how government lawyers in Washington fused the legal rationales that undergirded “high-value targeting” operations in the war on terror with Reagan’s declaration of drug trafficking as a national security threat to justify the covert bombing campaign.

“The Colombian military got to the point where they were doing these HVT missions, one after the other, after the other, and that is what brought the FARC to the peace table,” the U.S. official said. “I think that was an outcome from Plan Colombia.” It wasn’t the only one.

As the Colombians’ relationship to the U.S. deepened through the mid-2000s, their mercenary stock rose accordingly. In 2011, the New York Times revealed that Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, the world’s most infamous mercenary army, had recruited hundreds of Colombians to serve as the private shock troops of the United Arab Emirates. Four years later, the UAE’s private Colombian forces began turning up on battlefields in Yemen. As Bloomberg reported in 2015, “An experienced former Colombian soldier can earn $90 per day in the Middle East, compared with about $375 per month back home in the regular army.” Nonstate actors also tapped into the Colombian mercenary market, with ex-Colombian special forces members reportedly providing training to Mexican drug cartels.

Sanho Tree, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, began working on issues surrounding Plan Colombia when it was first being debated in the late 1990s. Mercenaries have long been a part of the Colombian security story, he explained, “but it was the Iraq War that gave them a real shot in the arm,” where they provided private VIP and site security. “I was screaming bloody murder about this during the Iraq occupation,” Tree told The Intercept. “We’re pumping all this money into Plan Colombia, and meanwhile, we’re hemorrhaging soldiers who go and turn mercenary so they make lots more money in Iraq.”

“At the end of the day, if you can’t guarantee the loyalty of the people you’re going to train, don’t train them,” he said. “They’ve ended up working for death squads, the paramilitaries, the narco traffickers. They work for anybody.”

While the stories of mercenary armies in the Middle East and narco training in Mexico grab headlines, most of what happens in the world of international private security is far less sensational, often involving bodyguard work, the guarding of critical infrastructure, or simply standing outside a gas station with a shotgun to ward off petty thieves. In comments to reporters earlier this month, Colombian President Iván Duque said investigators believe that a core group of seven of the Colombian mercenaries killed or captured in Haiti knew they were on an assassination mission; the others may not have been aware.

Family members of several of the Colombians have insisted that their loved ones believed they were taking a job to protect a VIP for the potentially life-changing sum of $2,500 to $3,500 a month.

“Colombia uniquely has this large number of well-trained people who, once they reach a certain age or level, get drummed out of the service, if they don’t quit early,” Adam Isacson, WOLA’s director of the Defense Oversight program, told The Intercept. “Obviously we’ve got a lot of retired special forces and stuff here in the states, but they all seem to find jobs, a lot of them just over the river in northern Virginia as consultants and stuff, but Colombia doesn’t have that. A lot of these guys actually make a crappy living once they leave the military.”

The U.S. official echoed that sentiment: “When these guys hit their 22- or 25-year mark and they retire, they look for jobs, and what sort of skill sets do they have?”

“Our two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they created this phenomenon,” they said. “I think we’re in a contract world now.”

Blowback

On Thursday, the Biden administration announced the appointment of a special envoy to Haiti in the wake the Moïse assassination. Ambassador Daniel Foote served as deputy chief of mission in Port-au-Prince from 2011 to 2012. Before that, he was the State Department’s top counternarcotics official in Colombia. Following a stint in Afghanistan, Foote became one of the department’s lead drug war officials worldwide, serving two years as deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement.

In a statement, the State Department said the veteran foreign service officer will “engage with Haitian and international partners to facilitate long-term peace and stability and support efforts to hold free and fair presidential and legislative elections,” coordinate the efforts of U.S. federal agencies and officials, and “support the Haitian people and Haiti’s democratic institutions in the aftermath of the tragic assassination of Jovenel Moïse.”

To understand how Colombian mercenaries became the force that they did — shaping the events in Haiti today — requires an understanding of the conflict that shaped them. “The drug war in Colombia is a real war — here it’s used as a metaphor,” said Toby Muse, author of “Kilo: Inside the Cocaine Cartels” and a longtime Colombia correspondent, now based in the United Sates.

That conflict, intertwined as it’s been with the government’s counterinsurgency war against the FARC and others, has caused mass internal displacement and featured grave human rights abuses committed by the same Colombian security forces whose veterans so often find work in the mercenary realm. Among the most shocking of the government’s crimes in recent years is the “false positives” scandal, in which the military is believed to have murdered more than 6,400 civilians over a six-year period in the early 2000s in an effort to falsely inflate its tally of left-wing insurgents killed on the battlefield. Colombian officials have denied that the wave of extrajudicial killings ever took place. At least one of the Colombians currently in custody in Haiti, Francisco Eladio Uribe, was investigated in connection with the scandal, though his wife has claimed that he was exonerated.

“I think people don’t understand how inhumane that was,” Muse told The Intercept. “That these soldiers were killing innocent civilians, dressing them up as guerillas, and they could do it to receive just a few extra holiday days.”

Ironically, a campaign that wasn’t supposed to reproduce the Vietnam experience would be defined, in large part, by its resurrection of one of the war’s more punishing and destructive tactics: aerial fumigation. While Nixon had deployed fumigation in the borderlands of the U.S. and Mexico in the 1970s, Plan Colombia took the practice to a whole new level. The costs have been severe: millions of acres of rainforest coated with dangerous chemicals; ecosystems and food sources destroyed; unborn children lost in the womb. The growers, meanwhile, have simply learned to adapt. Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer.

In the U.S., the national conversation around the drug war has progressed by leaps and bounds in recent years, with a widening recognition of the enormous social costs that result from prohibition domestically. The consequences of that same model abroad, however, have generally received less mainstream airtime — or at least not what one might expect for a multigenerational, transnational history of violence underwritten by billions of U.S. tax dollars that has cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people their lives.

Within U.S. borders, the drug war is rarely seen as an extension of U.S. foreign policy with the capacity to produce significant blowback. Biden, however, certainly understood that possibility when he appeared on the Senate floor on June 21, 2000, to advocate for Plan Colombia — he just imagined the potential negative consequences would result from a lack of action, not the other way around. “Mr. President, my mom had an expression,” Biden said as he began his address that day. “She would say, ‘Joey, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’”

The speech served as message and a warning: that the U.S. could both fund and support drug treatment while at the same time significantly ramping up its military involvement in Colombia — and that if it did not, there would be hell to pay. “Folks, if they lose, mark my words, we are going to reap the whirlwind in this hemisphere on matters that go far beyond drugs,” Biden said. “It will include terrorism, it will include whole cadres of issues we have not thought about.”

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RSN: Andy Borowitz | Republicans Protest Lack of Rioters on January 6th Commission

 

25 July 21

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Andy Borowitz | Republicans Protest Lack of Rioters on January 6th Commission
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Casting a dark cloud over the select committee investigating the January 6th insurrection, congressional Republicans protested, in no uncertain terms, the panel's 'utter lack of rioters.'"

The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 

asting a dark cloud over the select committee investigating the January 6th insurrection, congressional Republicans protested, in no uncertain terms, the panel’s “utter lack of rioters.”

Leading the charge was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who called the commission “little more than a gussied-up festival of anti-riot propaganda.”

“Nancy Pelosi’s handpicked Democratic panel members all have one thing in common: none of them took part in the riot,” McCarthy said. “Without an equal number of rioters on the panel, we’ll never get to hear both sides of this thing.”

McCarthy said that he had drawn up a list of potential rioters to serve on the commission, including the “QAnon Shaman,” Jake Angeli.

“I’ve spoken to the Shaman, and he’s up for it,” McCarthy said. “He just got his fur pelts dry-cleaned.”

The House Minority Leader warned Pelosi against proceeding with the commission if it had no rioter representation. “It could have a chilling effect on all future riots,” he said.

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Tom Barrack. (photo: Al Seib/LA Times)

Trump Ally Tom Barrack Strikes a $250 Million Bail Deal to Get Out of Jail
Erum Salam, Guardian UK
Salam writes: "Tom Barrack, a longtime ally of Donald Trump who chaired the former president's inaugural committee, posted $250m bail with a $5m cash security and was released from custody in California on Friday."

om Barrack, a longtime ally of Donald Trump who chaired the former president’s inaugural committee, posted $250m bail with a $5m cash security and was released from custody in California on Friday.

Barrack was arrested for conspiring to illegally exert influence over US foreign policy on behalf of the United Arab Emirates. According to the US Department of Justice, Barrack, one of three men accused, failed to register as a foreign agent.

Barrack, a billionaire, has long been close to Trump. In his book Fire and Fury, the journalist Michael Wolff characterised the two men and the financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was later convicted of sex trafficking before killing himself in custody, as a “set of nightlife musketeers” in the 1980s and 1990s.

Barrack also faces a charge of obstructing justice and making false statements to the FBI about making decisions that favored the UAE.

Barrack and Matthew Grimes, 27, will be arraigned in a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, on Monday. A spokesman for Barrack said he would plead not guilty. Barrack was ordered to wear an ankle monitor and prevented from transferring money overseas.

The third man charged, Rashid Sultan Rashid Al Malik Alshahhi, 43, has left the US.

Barrack is a dual citizen of the US and Lebanon whom prosecutors flagged as a flight risk due to his close ties to the two Middle Eastern countries, which have no extradition arrangements with the US, and his possession of a private plane.

Barrack stepped down from his investment company, Colony Capital, last April. In Washington, the Trump inauguration he chaired is the subject of a civil investigation over possible misuse of funds.

Speculation continues about whether figures close to Trump in legal jeopardy – and now unable to hope for a pardon – might be tempted to turn on the former president.

Prosecutors in New York have brought taxation-related charges against the Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg, formerly its chief financial officer. Both pleaded not guilty.

Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is being investigated over his work as an unregistered foreign agent and ties to controversial Ukrainian agents.

In May, federal agents raided Giuliani’s New York apartment. The former mayor of New York has also lost his licences to practise law in New York and Washington DC.

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'Fifty years ago this summer, President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs.' (photo: OCC)

50-Year War on Drugs Imprisoned Millions of Black Americans
Aaron Morrison, Associated Press
Morrison writes: "Landscaping was hardly his lifelong dream."

As a teenager, Alton Lucas believed basketball or music would pluck him out of North Carolina and take him around the world. In the late 1980s, he was the right-hand man to his musical best friend, Youtha Anthony Fowler, who many hip hop and R&B heads know as DJ Nabs.

But rather than jet-setting with Fowler, Lucas discovered drugs and the drug trade at the height of the so-called war on drugs. Addicted to crack cocaine and involved in trafficking the drug, he faced decades-long imprisonment at a time when the drug abuse and violence plaguing major cities and working class Black communities were not seen as the public health issue that opioids are today.

By chance, Lucas received a rare bit of mercy. He got the kind of help that many Black and Latino Americans struggling through the crack epidemic did not: treatment, early release and what many would consider a fresh start.

“I started the landscaping company, to be honest with you, because nobody would hire me because I have a felony,” said Lucas. His Sunflower Landscaping got a boost in 2019 with the help of Inmates to Entrepreneurs, a national nonprofit assisting people with criminal backgrounds by providing practical entrepreneurship education.

Lucas was caught up in a system that imposes lifetime limits on most people who have served time for drug crimes, with little thought given to their ability to rehabilitate. In addition to being denied employment, those with criminal records can be limited in their access to business and educational loans, housing, child custody rights, voting rights and gun rights.

It’s a system that was born when Lucas was barely out of diapers.

Fifty years ago this summer, President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Today, with the U.S. mired in a deadly opioid epidemic that did not abate during the coronavirus pandemic’s worst days, it is questionable whether anyone won the war.

Yet the loser is clear: Black and Latino Americans, their families and their communities. A key weapon was the imposition of mandatory minimums in prison sentencing. Decades later those harsh federal and state penalties led to an increase in the prison industrial complex that saw millions of people, primarily of color, locked up and shut out of the American dream.

An Associated Press review of federal and state incarceration data shows that, between 1975 and 2019, the U.S. prison population jumped from 240,593 to 1.43 million Americans. Among them, about 1 in 5 people were incarcerated with a drug offense listed as their most serious crime.

The racial disparities reveal the war’s uneven toll. Following the passage of stiffer penalties for crack cocaine and other drugs, the Black incarceration rate in America exploded from about 600 per 100,000 people in 1970 to 1,808 in 2000. In the same timespan, the rate for the Latino population grew from 208 per 100,000 people to 615, while the white incarceration rate grew from 103 per 100,000 people to 242.

Gilberto Gonzalez, a retired special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration who worked for more than 20 years taking down drug dealers and traffickers in the U.S., Mexico and in South America, said he’ll never forget being cheered on by residents in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood near Los Angeles as he led away drug traffickers in handcuffs.

“That gave me a sense of the reality of the people that live in these neighborhoods, that are powerless because they’re afraid that the drug dealers that control the street, that control the neighborhood are going to do them and their children harm,” said Gonzalez, 64, who detailed his field experiences in the recently released memoir “Narco Legenda.”

“We realized then that, along with dismantling (drug trafficking) organizations, there was also a real need to clean up communities, to go to where the crime was and help people that are helpless,” he said.

Still, the law enforcement approach has led to many long-lasting consequences for people who have since reformed. Lucas still wonders what would happen for him and his family if he no longer carried the weight of a drug-related conviction on his record.

Even with his sunny disposition and close to 30 years of sober living, Lucas, at age 54, cannot pass most criminal background checks. His wife, whom he’d met two decades ago at a fatherhood counseling conference, said his past had barred him from doing things as innocuous as chaperoning their children on school field trips.

“It’s almost like a life sentence,” he said.

Although Nixon declared the war on drugs on June 17, 1971, the U.S. already had lots of practice imposing drug prohibitions that had racially skewed impacts. The arrival of Chinese migrants in the 1800s saw the rise of criminalizing opium that migrants brought with them. Cannabis went from being called “reefer” to “marijuana,” as a way to associate the plant with Mexican migrants arriving in the U.S. in the 1930s.

By the time Nixon sought reelection amid the anti-Vietnam War and Black power movements, criminalizing heroin was a way to target activists and hippies. One of Nixon’s domestic policy aides, John Ehrlichman, admitted as much about the war on drugs in a 22-year-old interview published by Harper’s Magazine in 2016.

Experts say Nixon’s successors, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, leveraged drug war policies in the following decades to their own political advantage, cementing the drug war’s legacy. The explosion of the U.S. incarceration rate, the expansion of public and private prison systems and the militarization of local police forces are all outgrowths of the drug war.

Federal policies, such as mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offenses, were mirrored in state legislatures. Lawmakers also adopted felony disenfranchisement, while also imposing employment and other social barriers for people caught in drug sweeps.

The domestic anti-drug policies were widely accepted, mostly because the use of illicit drugs, including crack cocaine in the late 1980s, was accompanied by an alarming spike in homicides and other violent crimes nationwide. Those policies had the backing of Black clergy and the Congressional Black Caucus, the group of African-American lawmakers whose constituents demanded solutions and resources to stem the violent heroin and crack scourges.

“I think people often flatten this conversation,” said Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit organization pushing decriminalization and safe drug use policies.

“If you’re a Black leader 30 years ago, you’re grabbing for the first (solution) in front of you,” said Frederique, who is Black. “A lot of folks in our community said, ‘OK, get these drug dealers out of our communities, get this crack out of our neighborhood. But also, give us treatment so we can help folks.’”

The heavy hand of law enforcement came without addiction prevention resources, she said.

Use of crack rose sharply in 1985, and peaked in 1989, before quickly declining in the early 1990s, according to a Harvard study.

Drug sales and use were concentrated in cities, particularly those with large Black and Latino populations, although there were spikes in use among white populations, too. Between 1984 and 1989, crack was associated with a doubling of homicides of Black males aged 14 to 17. By the year 2000, the correlation between crack cocaine and violence faded amid waning profits from street sales.

Roland Fryer, an author of the Harvard study and a professor of economics, said the effects of the crack epidemic on a generation of Black families and Black children still haven’t been thoroughly documented. A lack of accountability for the war on drugs bred mistrust of government and law enforcement in the community, he said.

“People ask why Black people don’t trust (public) institutions,” said Fryer, who is Black. “It’s because we have watched how we’ve treated opioids — it’s a public health concern. But crack (cocaine) was, ‘lock them up and throw away the key, what we need is tougher sentencing.’”

Another major player in creating hysteria around drug use during the crack era: the media. On June 17, 1986, 15 years to the day after Nixon declared the drug war, NBA draftee Len Bias died of a cocaine-induced heart attack on the University of Maryland campus.

Coverage was frenzied and coupled with racist depictions of crack addiction in mostly Black and Latino communities. Within weeks of Bias’s death, the U.S. House of Representatives drafted the Anti-Abuse Act of 1986.

The law, passed and signed by Reagan that October, imposed mandatory federal sentences of 20 years to life in prison for violating drug laws. The law also made possession and sale of crack rocks harsher than that of powder cocaine.

The basketball player’s death could have been one of the off-ramps in Lucas’s spiral into crack addiction and dealing. By then, he could make $10,000 in four to five hours selling the drug.

“One of the things that I thought would help me, that I thought would be my rehab, was when Len Bias died,” Lucas said. “I thought, if they showed me evidence (he) died from an overdose of smoking crack cocaine, as much as I loved Len Bias, that I would give it up.”

“I did not quit,” he said.

He was first introduced to crack cocaine in 1986, but kept his drug use largely hidden from his friends and family.

“What I didn’t know at the time was that this was a different type of chemical entering my brain and it was going to change me forever,” Lucas said. “Here I am on the verge of being the right-hand man to DJ Nabs, to literally travel the world. That’s how bad the drug did me.”

By 1988, Fowler’s music career had outgrown Durham. He and Lucas moved to Atlanta and, a few years later, Fowler signed a deal to become the official touring DJ for the hip hop group Kris Kross under famed music producer Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def record label. Fowler and the group went on to open for pop music icon Michael Jackson on the European leg of the “Dangerous” tour.

Lucas, who began trafficking crack cocaine between Georgia and North Carolina, never joined his best friend on the road. Instead, he slipped further into his addiction and returned to Durham, where he took a short-lived job as a preschool instructor.

When he lacked the money to procure drugs to sell or to use, Lucas resorted to robbing businesses for quick cash. He claims that he was never armed when he robbed “soft targets,” like fast food restaurants and convenience stores.

Lucas spent four and a half years in state prison for larceny after robbing several businesses to feed his addiction. Because his crimes were considered nonviolent, Lucas learned in prison that he was eligible for an addiction treatment program that would let him out early. But if he violated the terms of his release or failed to complete the treatment, Lucas would serve more than a decade in prison on separate drug trafficking charges under a deal with the court.

He accepted the deal.

After his release from prison and his graduation from the treatment program, Fowler paid out of his pocket to have his friend’s fines and fees cleared. That’s how Lucas regained his voting rights.

On a recent Saturday, the two best friends met up to talk in depth about the secret that Lucas intentionally kept from Fowler. The DJ learned of his friend’s addiction after seeing a Durham newspaper clipping that detailed the string of robberies.

Sitting in Fowler’s home, Lucas told his friend that he doesn’t regret not being on the road or missing out on the fringe benefits from touring.

“All I needed was to be around you,” Lucas said.

“Right,” Fowler replied, choking up and wiping tears from his eyes.

Lucas continued: “You know, when I was around you, when there was a party or whatnot, my job, just out of instinct, was to watch your back.”

In a separate interview, Fowler, who is a few years younger than Lucas, said, “I just wanted my brother on the road with me. To help protect me. To help me be strong. And I had to do it by my damn self. And I didn’t like that. That’s what it was.”

Not everyone was as lucky as Lucas. Often, a drug offense conviction in combination with a violent gun offense carried much steeper penalties. At the heights of the war on drugs, federal law allowed violent drug offenders to be prosecuted in gang conspiracy cases, which often pinned homicides on groups of defendants, sometimes irrespective of who pulled the trigger.

These cases resulted in sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, a punishment disproportionately doled out to Black and Latino gang defendants.

That’s the case for Bill Underwood, who was a successful R&B and hip hop music promoter in New York City in the late ’70s through the ’80s, before his 33-year incarceration. A judge granted him compassionate release from federal custody in January, noting his lauded reputation as a mentor to young men in prison and his high-risk exposure to COVID-19 at age 67.

As the AP reported in 1990, Underwood was found guilty and sentenced to life without parole for racketeering, racketeering conspiracy and narcotics conspiracy, as part of a prosecution that accused his gang of committing six murders and of controlling street-level drug distribution.

“I actually short-changed myself, and my family and my people, by doing what I did,” said Underwood, who acknowledges playing a large part in the multimillion-dollar heroin trade, as a leader of a violent Harlem gang from the 1970s through the 1980s.

Underwood is now a senior fellow with The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit pushing for an end to life imprisonment. He testified to Congress in June that his punishment was excessive.

“As human beings, we are capable of painful yet transformative self reflection, maturity, and growth, and to deny a person this opportunity is to deny them their humanity,” he said in the testimony.

Though he feels the system is broken, Brett Roman Williams, a Philadelphia-based independent filmmaker and anti-gun violence advocate, said a lack of counseling and support for people re-entering society after incarceration has serious consequences.

Williams grew up watching his older brother, Derrick, serve time in prison for a serious drug offense. But in 2016, his brother — who discouraged young people from making choices similar to his own — was killed by gunfire in Philadelphia less than three weeks after he left prison, where he had been held on a parole violation.

“We do need reform, we do need opportunities and equity within our system of economics. But we all have choices,” Williams said, adding that those were “the principles that my brother stood on.”

Rep. Cori Bush of St. Louis, following similar action by several members of Congress before her, last month introduced legislation to decriminalize all drugs and invest in substance abuse treatment.

“Growing up in St. Louis, the War on Drugs disappeared Black people, not drug use,” Bush, who is Black, wrote in a statement sent to the AP. “Over the course of two years, I lost 40 to 50 friends to incarceration or death because of the War on Drugs. We became so accustomed to loss and trauma that it was our normal.”

The deleterious impacts of the drug war have, for years, drawn calls for reform and abolition from mostly left-leaning elected officials and social justice advocates. Many of them say that in order to begin to unwind or undo the war on drugs, all narcotics must be decriminalized or legalized, with science-based regulation.

Drug abuse prevention advocates, however, claim that broad drug legalization poses more risks to Americans than it would any benefits.

Provisional data released in December from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show overdose deaths from illicit drug use continued to rise amid the global COVID-19 pandemic. And according to the latest Drug Enforcement Administration narcotics threat assessment released in March, the availability of drugs such as fentanyl, heroin and cocaine remained high or plateaued last year. Domestic and transnational drug trade organizations generate tens of billions of dollars in illicit proceeds from sales annually in the U.S., the DEA said.

“Many people think drug prevention is ‘just say no,’ like Nancy Reagan did in the ’80s, and we know that did not work,” said Becky Vance, CEO of the Texas-based agency Drug Prevention Resources, which has advocated for evidenced-based anti-drug and alcohol abuse education for more than 85 years.

“As a person in long-term recovery, I know firsthand the harms of addiction,” said Vance, who opposes blanket recreational legalization of illicit drugs. “I believe there has to be another way, without legalizing drugs, to reform the criminal justice system and get rid of the inequities.”

Frederique, of the Drug Policy Alliance, said reckoning with the war on drugs must start with reparations for the generations senselessly swept up and destabilized by racially biased policing.

“This was an intentional policy choice,” Frederique said. “We don’t want to end the war on drugs, and then in 50 years be working on something else that does the same thing. That is the cycle that we’re in.”

“It has always been about control,” Frederique added.

As much as the legacy of the war on drugs is a tragedy, it is also a story about the resilience of people disproportionately targeted by drug policies, said Donovan Ramsey, a journalist and author of the forthcoming book, “When Crack Was King.”

“Even with all of that, it’s still important to recognize and to celebrate that we (Black people) survived the crack epidemic and we survived it with very little help from the federal government and local governments,” Ramsey told the AP.

Fowler thinks the war on drugs didn’t ruin Lucas’ life. “I think he went through it at the right time, truth be told, because he was young enough. Luke’s got more good behind him than bad,” the DJ said.

Lucas sees beauty in making things better, including in his business. But he still dreams of the day when his past isn’t held against him.

“It was the beautification of doing the landscaping that kind of attracted me, because it was like the affirmation that my soul needed,” he said.

“I liked to do something and look back at it and say, ‘Wow, that looks good.’ It’s not just going to wash away in a couple of days. It takes nourishment and upkeep.”

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Ilhan Omar. (photo: Mandel Ngan/Getty Images)

Rep. Ilhan Omar Questions Biden's First Airstrike on Somalia
Ryan Grim and Sara Sirota, The Intercept
Excerpt: "Rep. Ilhan Omar is challenging the Biden administration's justification for its Tuesday airstrike in Somalia, which the Pentagon claimed was targeted against suspected members of al-Shabab."

In a letter to the White House, the Somali-born Democrat demands answers about the legality and purpose of the attack.

ep. Ilhan Omar is challenging the Biden administration’s justification for its Tuesday airstrike in Somalia, which the Pentagon claimed was targeted against suspected members of al-Shabab. The Minnesota Democrat is also hitting the White House for a failure to make promised and appropriated reparation payments to families of civilians killed in American airstrikes, according to a letter to President Joe Biden that was provided to The Intercept. The strike was the first in Somalia since Biden took office and came amid the White House’s stated plans, put forward by national security adviser Jake Sullivan in January, to limit drone operations while the administration reviews its counterterrorism policy. Omar, who grew up in Somalia before spending four years in a Kenyan refugee camp, represents a district with a heavy Somali American population.

The airstrike near the city of Galkayo targeted militants in al-Shabab, an insurgency group based in Somalia that the U.S. has long fought as part of its so-called global war on terror. Sullivan’s directive instructed the military and CIA to gain White House permission before launching attacks in places like Somalia and Yemen.

Since then, the administration has rejected requests by U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, to strike al-Shabab targets. But according to the New York Times, Tuesday’s attack occurred without White House approval. In this case, the militants were supposedly attacking members of an elite U.S.-trained Somali commando force called Danab, and Pentagon spokesperson Cindi King said AFRICOM had the power to authorize the response independently under the military’s “collective self-defense” justification. No U.S. troops were actually with the Danab commandos when the attack occurred, as they were advising the unit remotely.

Omar found the rationale unpersuasive. “As you know,” she wrote in the letter, “‘collective self-defense’ is a term with variable meanings in national and international law, and especially in the context of your ongoing review of airstrike authorities, its use merits further explanation in this case. This is also an important and timely matter since it seems suggestive of your Administration’s broader approach to airstrikes in Somalia.”

The strike on Somalia occurred amid growing mobilization in the House of Representatives and Senate to reclaim oversight of the extensive war powers the White House has amassed since 9/11. On Tuesday, Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced the National Security Powers Act to assert congressional authority over the deployment of force, export of weaponry, and declaration of national emergencies.

Last month, the House voted to repeal the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, that greenlighted the war in Iraq and that Trump used to justify assassinating Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani. But the far more consequential approval — and thus the more difficult one to repeal — is the 2001 AUMF that authorized the war in Afghanistan and that the U.S. has continuously invoked to defend airstrikes against alleged terrorists around the world, driving activists to seek its reversal. Its repeal would, however, still be far from a guarantee that the White House will defer to Congress. Just last month, Biden claimed that Article II of the Constitution offers him self-defense authorities that would rationalize airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in Syria and Iraq.

Aside from the question of legality, Omar suggested that the strikes aren’t even effective on their own terms.

Citing an airstrike effort that began under the Trump administration, Omar noted that “the increase in strikes corresponded with an almost doubling of terrorist attacks on civilians committed by Al-Shabaab,” the precise opposite of the administration’s stated goals.

“It is critical that we realize we are not going to simply drone the Al-Shabaab problem to death,” Omar wrote, “and that any kinetic action is part of a broader strategy focused first and foremost on the security of Somali people and the stability of the Somali state.”

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Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

Voters Prevail in Missouri: 275,000 to Gain Access to Health Care
Jason Rosenbaum and Rachel Lippmann, NPR
Excerpt: "Thursday, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that an additional 275,000 low-income individuals in the state are again eligible for publicly-funded health care."

hursday, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that an additional 275,000 low-income individuals in the state are again eligible for publicly-funded health care.

Missouri voters successfully pushed through a state constitutional amendment on the ballot last August to adopt Medicaid expansion, but the Republican-dominated legislature refused to implement it, prompting Gov. Mike Parson, also a Republican, to pull the plug on plans to bolster the health care program.

(Thirty-eight states, including red ones, have either expanded Medicaid or are in the process of expanding it.)

The question before the Missouri justices was whether the 2020 ballot item required lawmakers to appropriate money, which would have been a violation of state law. In a unanimous opinion, the state Supreme Court ruled that was not the case — that new Medicaid recipients would join the existing pool of Medicaid recipients in the state and that lawmakers would have to decide what to do when the current appropriation runs out.

The decision does not mean newly eligible Missourians can access benefits immediately. In May, Gov. Mike Parson withdrew federal paperwork that set up the enrollment process. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lowell Pearson, one of the attorneys for three women seeking to get access to Medicaid, said the ruling was a total victory for his clients. "On August 4 last year, the voters said 'we want these people to get Medicaid,' " Pearson said. "We're a major step closer to them getting it."

The amendment, which passed with 53% of the vote, makes adults between the ages of 19 and 65 eligible for Medicaid if they make 133% of the federal poverty level — or about $35,200 for a family of four. It also prohibits the state from enacting work requirements for Medicaid recipients. Currently, very few adults who have no dependents are eligible for Medicaid.

Amy Blouin, the president of the Missouri Budget Project, which supports expansion, said in a statement she hoped expansion would be implemented quickly.

"As a result of the Supreme Court's ruling, Missourians across the state will finally be able to realize the health and economic benefits of Medicaid expansion," she said.

"State after state has shown that in addition to providing insurance to those eligible, expansion is a fiscal and economic boon to state economies and budgets," Blouin said.

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'Cubans confront a collapsing economy, shortages of food, scarcity of medicines, all in a time of a national health emergency - and with the United States applying punitive sanctions with the intent of making everything worse.' (photo: AP)

The Many Faces of Regime Change in Cuba
Louis A. Perez Jr., Jacobin
Perez Jr. writes: "Cubans confront a host of problems amid a national health emergency - and the Biden administrative is only adding to punitive sanctions with the intent to make everything worse."

fter months of casual indifference to conditions in Cuba, the Biden administration reacted with purposeful swiftness to support street protests on the island. “We stand with the Cuban people,” President Biden pronounced. A talking point was born.

“The Biden-Harris administration stands by the Cuban people,” secretary of state Antony Blinken followed. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Robert Menéndez also joined to emphasize “the need for the United States to continue to stand with the Cuban people.”

For more than a hundred and twenty years, the United States has “stood with the Cuban people” — or, perhaps more correctly, has stood over the Cuban people. Cuba seems always to be at the receiving end of American history. To stand with the Cuban people has meant armed intervention, military occupation, regime change, and political meddling — all normal events in US-Cuba relations in the sixty years before the triumph of the Cuban revolution. In the sixty years after the revolution, standing with the Cuban people has meant diplomatic isolation, armed invasion, covert operations, and economic sanctions.

It is the policy of economic sanctions — the embargo — officially designated as an “economic denial program,” that gives the lie to US claims of beneficent concern for the Cuban people. Sanctions developed early into a full-blown policy protocol in pursuit of regime change, designed to deprive Cubans of needed goods and services, to induce scarcity and foment shortages, to inflict hardship and deepen adversity.

Nor should it be supposed that the Cuban people were the unintended “collateral damage” of the embargo. On the contrary, the Cuban people have been the target. Sanctions were designed from the outset to produce economic havoc as a way to foment popular discontent, to politicize hunger in the hope that, driven by despair and motivated by want, the Cuban people would rise up to topple the government.

The declassification of government records provides insight into the calculus of sanctions as a means of regime change. The “economic denial program” was planned to “weaken [the Cuban government] economically,” a State Department briefing paper explained, to “promote internal dissension; erode its internal political support . . . [and] seek to create conditions conducive to incipient rebellion.” Sanctions promised to create “the necessary preconditions for nationalist upheaval inside Cuba,” the Department of State Bureau of Intelligence and Research predicted, thereupon to produce the downfall of the Cuban government “as a result of internal stresses and in response to forces largely, if not wholly, unattributable to the U.S.”

The “only foreseeable means of alienating internal support,” the Department of State offered, “is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. . . . Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba . . . [to deny] money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

The embargo has remained in place for more than sixty years. At times expanded, at other times contracted. But never lifted. The degree to which US sanctions are implicated in current protest demonstrations in Cuba is a matter of debate, of course. But that the embargo has contributed — to a greater or lesser extent — to hardship in Cuba can hardly be gainsaid; that has been its intent. And now that hardship has produced popular protests and demonstrations. That, too, is in the “playbook” of the embargo.

But the embargo has had a far more insidious impact on the political culture of Cuba. The Cuban government is not unaware of the United States’ desired policy outcomes from the sanctions. They understand well its subversive reach and interventionist thrust, and have responded accordingly, if not always consistently.

Such a nakedly hostile US policy, which has been ongoing and periodically reaffirmed over such a lengthy period of time, designed purposely to sow chaos, has in fact served Cuban authorities well, providing a readily available target that can be blamed for homegrown economic mismanagement and resource misallocation. The embargo provides a refuge for blamelessness and immunity from accountability. The tendency to attribute the consequences of ill-conceived policies to the embargo has developed into a standing master narrative of Cuban government.

But it is more complicated still. Not a few within the Cuban government view popular protests warily, seeing them as a function of US policy and its intended outcomes. It is no small irony, in fact, that the embargo has so often served to compromise the “authenticity” of popular protest, to ensure that protests are seen as acts in the service of regime change and depicted as a threat to national security.

The degree to which the political intent of the embargo is imputed to popular protest often serves to drive the official narrative. That is, protests are depicted less as an expression of domestic discontent than as an act of US subversion, instantly discrediting the legitimacy of protest and the credibility of protesters. The embargo serves to plunge Cuban politics at all levels into a Kafkaesque netherworld, where the authenticity of domestic actors is challenged and transformed into the duplicity of foreign agents. In Cuba, the popular adage warns, nothing appears to be what it seems.

Few dispute the validity of Cuban grievances. A long-suffering people often subject to capricious policies and arbitrary practices, an officialdom often appearing oblivious and unresponsive to the needs of a population confronting deepening hardship. Shortages of food. Lack of medicines. Scarcity of basic goods. Soaring prices. Widening social inequalities. Deepening racial disparities.

Difficulties have mounted, compounding continuously over many years, for which there are few readily available remedies. An economy that reorganized itself during the late 1990s and early 2000s around tourist receipts has collapsed as a result of the pandemic. A loss of foreign exchange with ominous implications for a country that imports 70 percent of its food supplies.

The Trump administration revived the most punitive elements of US sanctions, limiting family remittances to $1,000 per quarter per person, prohibiting remittances to family members of government officials and members of the Communist Party, and prohibiting remittances in the form of donations to Cuban nationals. The Trump administration prohibited the processing of remittances through any entities on a “Cuba restricted list,” an action that resulted in Western Union ceasing its operations in Cuba in November 2020.

And as a final spiteful, gratuitous gesture, the outgoing Trump administration returned Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism. At the precise moment the Cuban people were reeling from greater shortages, increased rationing, and declining services, the United States imposed a new series of sanctions. It is impossible to react in any way other than with blank incredulity to State Department spokesperson Ned Price’s comment that Cuban humanitarian needs “are profound because of not anything the United States has done.”

Cubans confront all at once a collapsing economy, diminished remittances, restricted emigration opportunities, inflation, shortages of food, scarcity of medicines, all in a time of a national health emergency — and with the United States applying punitive sanctions with the intent of making everything worse. Of course, the Cuban people have the right to peaceful protest. Of course, the Cuban government must redress Cuban grievances.

Of course, the United States must end its deadly and destructive policy of subversion.

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Firefighters from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection's Placerville station battle the Sugar Fire, part of the Beckwourth Complex Fire, in Doyle, California, on July 9. (photo: Noah Berger/AP)

Underpaid Firefighters, Overstretched Budgets: The US Isn't Prepared for Fires Fueled by Climate Change
Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post
Kaplan writes: "On the heels of one of the worst wildfire years on record, the federal government is struggling to recruit and retain staff as firefighters grapple with low wages, trauma and burnout from increasingly long and intense fire seasons."

Biden announces more resources for tackling wildfires, but experts say a new approach is needed

Heat waves have toppled temperature records across the nation, and firefighters are actively battling 48 large blazes that have consumed more than half a million acres in 12 states. But land management agencies are carrying out fire mitigation measures at a fraction of the pace required, and the funds needed to make communities more resilient are one-seventh of what the government has supplied.

“We’re burning up, we’re choking up, we aren’t just heating up,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) told President Biden at a meeting with Cabinet officials and Western governors Wednesday. “Across the board we have to disabuse ourselves of the old timelines and the old frames of engagement. … We can’t just double down.”

Yet fire experts say the escalation of wildfires, fueled by climate change, demands an equally dramatic transformation in the nation’s response — from revamping the federal firefighting workforce to the management of public lands to the siting and construction of homes.

“As our seasons are getting worse and worse … it feels like we’ve reached a tipping point,” said Kelly Martin, a wildfire veteran and president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. “We need a new approach.”

The West’s hot, dry start to summer has already been devastating, to people as well as trees.

On Thursday, authorities across the Pacific Northwest and western Canada said they were investigating at least 500 suspected deaths from heat illness that occurred amid the week’s record-shattering temperatures.

Thousands of residents had to be rapidly evacuated from the sprawling Lava Fire, south of the Oregon-California border, when extreme heat and strong winds caused the blaze to explode.

Many people are still missing after a fast-moving wildfire overwhelmed the tiny mountain village of Lytton, British Columbia, on Wednesday — just a day after it notched Canada’s highest-ever temperature of 121 degrees Fahrenheit.

“This is becoming a regular cycle, and we know it’s getting worse,” Biden said Wednesday. “In fact, the threat of Western wildfires this year is as severe as it’s ever been.”

‘Always doing more with less’

When Martin started her career with the U.S. Forest Service more than three decades ago, the agency had a “warlike” approach to handling wildfires. Crews used bulldozers and other equipment to cut through vegetation and create barriers that could contain an approaching front. Helicopters and big air tankers dropped retardant from high above the flames. Although land managers knew fire was an important part of most Western ecosystems, they were also under pressure to stop blazes before they reached the area’s growing population centers.

“And we were very successful at it,” Martin said. To this day, more than 95 percent of fires are suppressed before they reach communities.

But by the time Martin retired as chief of fire and aviation at Yosemite National Park last year, climate change had fundamentally altered the nature of wildfire, making the blazes that did escape containment increasingly costly and dangerous to fight.

In most forest types, the proportion of fires that are “high severity” (killing the majority of vegetation) has at least doubled in recent decades. Firefighters are seeing more and more “extreme fire behavior” — whirling “fire tornadoes,” crown fires that spew embers into the wind and blazes that move so fast and burn so hot they create their own weather.

In 2018, a veteran Redding, Calif., firefighter was killed when a vortex the size of several football fields swept down upon him as he evacuated residents ahead of the catastrophic Carr Fire.

“Watching what the current wildland firefighters are faced with, last year and this year, it is exponentially greater in terms of risk and trauma,” Martin said.

The U.S. government is the nation’s biggest employer of what are known as “wildland” firefighters. Most are temporary workers, their salaries as low as $13.45 per hour for a starting forestry technician. They spend summers traveling the country, working 16-hour days, 12 days at a time, often relying on overtime and hazard pay to make ends meet.

For decades, they’ve relied on a months-long offseason to rest and recover.

But now there is no offseason; one fire year simply bleeds into the next, as winter rain and snow is delayed and diminished by climate change. About 100 families had to be evacuated from the Santa Cruz mountains in January — usually California’s wettest month — when winds re-ignited the embers of a fire that started last August.

The National Interagency Fire Center last week raised the nation’s “preparedness level” to 4, indicating more than half of the country’s firefighting resources are already committed.

“We’re always doing more with less,” said one smokejumper — a highly trained firefighter who parachutes into remote blazes. The 13-year veteran of the Forest Service spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his job.

During last summer’s deadly blazes, he would request backup only to find that 10 other fire managers also needed help. Many firefighters worked more than 1,000 hours of overtime.

The strain is untenable.

“My body is just beat up,” he said. “I feel probably 10 years older than I am. But the mental part is even crazier: Almost everyone I know on fire knows someone who has committed suicide, or has had to talk a friend off the ledge.”

His federal colleagues are leaving the government to work for utilities or state agencies such as CalFire, which offers double the starting salary. Almost a third of California’s 49 federal hotshot crews — elite groups that battle the hottest parts of forest fires — are so short-staffed that they will not be able to activate as a full unit, the smokejumper said.

Grassroots Wildland Firefighters estimates 20 percent of permanent firefighting positions at the Forest Service are unfilled.

Even if these open positions are backfilled by seasonal hires, Martin said, the temporary employees won’t be as knowledgeable or experienced as the firefighters they replace.

Forest Service spokesman John Haynes said the agency does not track the number of unfilled positions and declined to comment on the specific shortages reported by the smokejumper and Martin. Haynes said the Forest Service has about 10,000 full-time and seasonal firefighters working across the country this year, similar to years past.

At his meeting Wednesday, Biden called wages for federal firefighters “unacceptable” and announced he would be issuing bonuses that effectively raise their minimum salary to $15 an hour. He also said the government would be training National Guard members to provide “surge capacity” this fire season and would offer retention incentives to convert seasonal firefighters into full-time employees.

In addition, the draft infrastructure bill proposed by a bipartisan group of senators last week would increase the base salary for most federal firefighters by $20,000 a year.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” Martin said, but improving pay is just the start. Grassroots Wildland Firefighters advocates the creation of a National Fire Service with an expanded workforce and full-time benefits, including mental health services.

In addition, the country has to shift away from the “war on fire” mentality, Martin said — taking fewer risks with firefighters and spending more time preparing the landscape to reduce the chance of catastrophe when fires inevitably occur.

When forests become fuel

The need for more fire in Western forests compared with those elsewhere isn’t new. Since the 1970s, scientists have known that the West’s “fire-adapted” ecosystems depend on periodic fire to clear out debris and remove ailing vegetation.

The increase in fire risk wrought by human-caused warming only underscores that need. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found human-caused climate change was drying out fuels and increasing the number of days in which forests were at high risk of fire. As a result, the scientists concluded, twice as much forest burned between 1984 and 2015 as would have under normal conditions.

The shortsighted practice of stopping all fire, experts say, is no longer an option.

In a Zoom meeting with federal wildland firefighters last month, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the only way to reduce catastrophic wildfire was to “significantly increase the level of management on our forests” — including thinning out vegetation and intentionally setting fires that mimic the effects of natural burns.

Federal budgets haven’t always reflected that priority. Last year, the federal government allocated $3.6 billion to fighting fires and $590 million for vegetation management.

Biden’s latest budget request seeks to close that gap, dedicating $2.5 billion to fighting fire and $1.7 billion for hazardous fuels management and forest resilience projects.

Yet improved forest management is not a cure-all, scientists caution. For one thing, some ecosystems, such as the cool, rainy forests of the Pacific Northwest, are naturally dense and full of debris. These landscapes were so wet they only burned every few centuries, when a rare sequence of events — extreme heat and prolonged drought combined with high winds and an unlucky lightning strike — came together to set the forest ablaze.

The problem now, said Sheehan, the environmental scientist, is that climate change is making those once-rare events far more likely.

“The potential for fire goes from almost never to, you know, every several years,” he said.

Even in systems where fire suppression is responsible for fuel buildup, such as mixed conifer stands in the Rockies and Sierra Nevada, fuel treatments can’t always affect the course of a fire. This is especially true during the most severe fires, which have become even more intense as the West warms and are the cause of most deaths and destroyed homes.

Beginning in 2001, Paradise, Calif. surrounded itself with dozens of miles of fuel breaks. But when the wind-driven Camp Fire came roaring down a nearby canyon in November 2018, it burned straight through those protective barriers, killing 86 people and destroying the town.

“We as society and our political institutions have this very ingrained assumption that we can be saved from wildfires through proper treatment of the forest,” said Kimiko Barrett, who studies wildfire and community resilience at Headwaters Economics, a Montana-based environmental think tank.

“But given the severity of climate change and the scale at which fires are occurring,” she added, “how long are we going to continue to try that, without bringing in the role of human decisions?”

‘Why are these houses here?'

A growing body of research suggests the best strategy to minimize wildfires’ harmful effects is to focus on the things that people are most able to control: the location of homes, the materials used to build them and the preparedness level of the people inside.

For example, an analysis of 5,500 California structures that had been damaged or destroyed by wildfire since 2001 found the position of homes — far from roads on steep slopes or in wind-funneling canyons — was the strongest predictor of whether they would burn down, no matter the state of the forest around them.

National Institutes of Science and Technology research has found houses themselves provide some of the most significant fuel for wildfires once they move into a community. In one of Colorado’s most destructive blazes, the fire spread from structure to structure in a “cascade” of ignitions that destroyed almost 300 houses. Construction with flameproof materials, the agency said, could slow fires when they reach communities and make buildings less likely to burn.

Even small improvements to existing structures can make them safer: clearing debris from roofs, rain gutters and yards. Installing mesh screens over vents to stop embers from getting inside. Creating a perimeter of “defensible space” between the house and thick vegetation. Replacing roofs and wooden fences with materials that don’t burn.

Last year’s wildfires destroyed more than 17,000 buildings and cost the nation $16.6 billion, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.

Yet there is little regulation of where and how people build in what’s known as the “wildland urban interface.” Just four states have specific building codes for new construction in these areas, even though an estimated 40 million U.S. homes are located there. Only California and Oregon require wildfire risk to be disclosed to new home buyers, and no state has laws mandating fire-safe upgrades to existing structures.

Federal spending on community protection is even less than the budget for forest management — and far less than the demand. In 2020, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program was allocated $500 million to fund local efforts to avert all manner of disaster: fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes. The agency wound up receiving requests for $3.6 billion in applications from cities, states and tribes.

“It’s very hard to find the resources,” said Megan Fitzgerald McGowan, program manager for Firewise USA. The voluntary program, run by the National Fire Protection Association, provides guidance to communities looking to protect themselves from worsening blazes. But McGowan said the grants needed to fund this work are scarce, and often the communities most in need don’t have the wherewithal to apply.

Improvements wouldn’t just save homes — they could also save lives, said McGowan, a former wildland firefighter.

“You’d get into communities, going up a narrow dirt road, and think, ‘Why are these houses here?’ ” she said. “Like, this is not safe for me or my crew to be here.”

That’s what inspired McGowan to switch from firefighting to advocacy.

“Wildfires are happening, they’re getting worse, and there’s things we can do to make the whole thing safer,” she said. “It just takes people seeing themselves as part of the bigger community and owning their part of the wildfire solution.”

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