Columnist Tim Steller's Fave Five of 2020

In February I traveled to Guerrero, Mexico City and Chiapas to learn more about what Mexico was doing to prevent its own residents from being forced from their homes and heading to the U.S. border. Under threat from the Trump administration, the Mexican government had taken drastic action to stop Central American migrants. 

— Tim Steller

Leonardo Bravo, Guerrero, Mexico — So many people have been forced from their homes in this highland area of southern Mexico that the mayor gives a form letter to local residents who want to seek asylum in the United States.

In the last 14 months, Mayor Ismael Cástulo Guzmán told me, he’s handed out around 600 of them. The formal document explains:

“Due to clashes between armed groups and organized crime in the area of the county of Leonardo Bravo and in the state of Guerrero during recent years, there has been a wave of violence that has kept society in fear and prevented residents from carrying out a normal way of life.”

Displaced people, forced from their homes by armed groups, can take these letters to Mexican cities on the U.S. border to help them make an asylum case.

In some of these border cities, exiles from Guerrero and neighboring Michoacán, not Central Americans, make up the bulk of the people waiting on the list to make an asylum claim. In Nogales, Sonora, early this month, 40 percent of the people waiting for asylum appointments with U.S. officials were from Guerrero.

The Mexican government, though, continues to treat migration as mainly a Central American problem.

In June, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his government reacted to threats from President Trump of closing the U.S. border and imposing tariffs by reversing his initial, more liberal migration policy.

Now, Mexican immigration agents check IDs at informal crossings on the Guatemalan border where they never did before.

Soldiers and other officials man highway checkpoints in the south and corral foreign migrants into shelters and detention centers. One shelter I visited earlier this month in Tapachula, Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border, teemed with more than 700 people in a complex meant for 250.

Read the full story here.

The great mask debate of 2020 was just beginning when I wrote this piece in May 2020. It remains shocking how many people refused the simple lessons of it.

— Tim Steller

When people think about putting on a mask to go out, many think about themselves.

Will I look stupid?

Will I look weak or afraid?

Does this dumb thing even protect me?

The key thing to remember is that it’s not about yourself — it’s about helping other people.

Especially, it’s about protecting people like Cecilia Nichols, age 11. She lives in Tucson and has cystic fibrosis, a serious disease that makes her lungs vulnerable to COVID-19 and other respiratory illness. Her sister, Jolene, died of it in December 2017.

The spread of respiratory viruses can be a life-or-death issue for vulnerable people. They are mostly staying inside, sure, but they can’t be perfectly insulated. Why wouldn’t we help to protect them as the pandemic seeps through society?

“It’s such a simple way for people to contain their potential infection,” Cecilia’s mother, Anna, said. “It’s just a considerate thing for everyone to do.”

And yet, as you undoubtedly know by now, the wearing of masks has become a flashpoint along our usual cultural divide.

Read the full column here.

The president and his allies pointed to the U.S.-Mexico border as a source of COVID-19, and suggested the wall would protect us. It turns out we were a source of COVID-19 to other countries as much as the other way around, and the wall had nothing to do with it.

— Tim Steller

Before the novel coronavirus claimed its first known American victim, President Trump was already reaching to connect the disease to the U.S.-Mexico border.

During a Feb. 28 rally in South Carolina, he contended that we needed to build more border wall to keep the virus out, though it was already in and spreading.

“We must understand that border security is also health security,” Trump argued. “We will do everything in our power to keep the infection and those carrying the infection from entering our country.”

That same day, the U.S. had 63 known cases of COVID-19, and Mexico announced its first two confirmed cases. The next day, King County, Washington, announced a death from COVID-19, at the time the first known coronavirus death in North America.

The United States started as the region’s hot spot for the new infection and has only extended its lead. In April, Guatemala’s health minister complained that the United States was deporting infected people to his country and referred to our country as the “Wuhan of the Americas.”

Nevertheless, Trump and some of his allies have continued trying to frame illegal crossings of the Mexican border as a top potential source of coronavirus in the United States.

Also on Feb. 28, nine members of Congress, including Reps. Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs of Arizona, co-signed a letter to the secretaries of Homeland Security, Defense and Health and Human Services, demanding to know what was being done about cross-border spread from illegal crossings.

Read the full story here.

Mayor Regina Romero’s reflexive progressivism led her to overlook the legitimate interests of Tucson residents who don’t agree with her in this July 2020 controversy. This blowup led in part to a recall effort against her. 

— Tim Steller

For years, police officers in departments like Tucson’s have been learning de-escalation.

They learn to slow down their response to agitated people, to respond proportionally, to lower the temperature of a confrontation, not raise it. Sometimes they fail at it, as we saw in the case of Carlos Adrian Ingram-Lopez, and we demand they do better. But it’s a valuable skill to have — and not just for police officers.

In this volatile era especially, with President Trump’s itchy Twitter finger constantly threatening escalation, it’s important for politicians to put de-escalation to work for the better of the communities they serve. Politicians such as Tucson’s new mayor, Regina Romero, for example.

On Thursday at 4:32 p.m., Romero posted on Twitter a statement about a situation that nobody in the general public had heard of. Some local citizens wanted to paint a blue line down the street on South Stone Avenue in front of the Tucson Police Department as a gesture of support for police. Romero announced she was asking City Manager Mike Ortega to reverse his decision to approve it.

In the process, she also accused a previously unknown Tucson resident of being a white supremacist and dragged City Council members and officials into a conflict.

There are various reasons why the blue line is a questionable idea, in my view, but it came after people painted “Black Lives Matter” on North Stone Avenue, and after Romero had a Black Lives Matter banner hung from the top of City Hall. You can’t turn the streets and City Hall into a canvas for political views but say only certain views are acceptable.

Read the full column here.

I was disappointed not to be able to travel to Honduras for this report, but it turns out that the great migration of recent years has placed Hondurans all over North America. They explained the role that Honduras' president has played in forcing people to migrate north, even as the U.S. embraced him.

— Tim Steller

If you spoke with any of the thousands of Honduran asylum seekers who passed through Tucson last year, you heard common reasons for their flight to the United States: violence, poverty, extortion.

If you listened carefully, you might also have heard an unfamiliar phrase: “JOH.” In Spanish it’s pronounced, more or less, “Ho,” and refers to a man’s initials.

The man is Juan Orlando Hernandez, the president of Honduras.

What Hondurans long suspected and Americans later found out was that the president of Honduras, who has functional control of all branches of government, is also deeply implicated in drug trafficking to the United States.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan revealed that in court filings against the president’s brother, Tony Hernandez, in August 2019, and witnesses testified to it in Tony Hernandez’s October 2019 trial. The president’s brother was found guilty of four crimes, including conspiring to import about 220 tons of cocaine to the United States.

Honduras had plenty of problems before Hernandez first took power in 2014, of course. But some Honduran migrants say the destruction of social protections that drove them out occurred under his watch, even as the Obama administration aided him and Trump tightened the American embrace.

Not surprisingly, a country run by organized crime became consumed by it from top to bottom. What has been surprising is the U.S. role in supporting the same government that, according to many Honduran migrants and experts, caused them to flee to the United States.

Read the full story here.