标签： South America

JOHANNESBURG – Authorities in the southern African kingdom of Eswatini have confirmed that two additional Latin American migrants deported from the United States have entered the country, marking the fifth group of deportees transferred under a controversial bilateral agreement that has sparked fierce condemnation from human rights organizations across the globe. In a statement released late Thursday, Eswatini’s government confirmed the pair are classified as “third-party nationals”, meaning they are not citizens of Eswatini, and their arrival followed prearranged consultations and terms set by Washington and Mbabane. This latest arrival comes after the first group of deportees was sent to the landlocked nation back in July 2025. Several earlier deportees transferred to Eswatini have already been moved onward to their home countries: a Jamaican national was repatriated to Jamaica in September, while a Cambodian man who spent five months detained in a maximum-security Eswatini prison was released for repatriation in March. Eswatini officials have not released any identifying information about the two most recent arrivals, nor have they disclosed their full nationalities (beyond confirming they are from Latin America) or how long they will be required to stay in the country. According to immigration advocates, this latest transfer is part of a broader, often underreported network of secret agreements struck by the Trump administration as part of its aggressive nationwide immigration crackdown. Through these deals, the U.S. has deported thousands of migrants to more than 20 countries that are not the migrants’ countries of origin. Around 11 of these third-country deportation agreements are with sub-Saharan African nations, including Rwanda, Ghana, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Sierra Leone, and the Central African Republic. Immigration legal experts warn that the practice functions as a deliberate legal loophole, allowing the U.S. to indirectly send asylum seekers back to the high-risk countries they originally fled, circumventing international refugee protection laws. The Trump administration’s selection of partner nations for the scheme has also drawn sharp scrutiny, as many of the African countries selected, Eswatini included, are widely labeled as repressive regimes with documented poor human rights records. Eswatini is ruled by King Mswati III, who has faced persistent international accusations of violently cracking down on domestic pro-democracy opposition movements and civil society organizing. The program has expanded rapidly in recent months: Liberia has emerged as a key hub for the Trump administration’s third-country deportation strategy after agreeing to accept up to 1,200 migrants, one of the largest caps for any partner nation, and welcomed its first cohort of deportees earlier this month. In July 2025, Jamaica’s government confirmed that two of the three Jamaican citizens previously deported to Eswatini had formally rejected offers to be repatriated to their Caribbean home. Locally and regionally, pro-democracy groups and civil rights organizations have mounted sustained opposition to Eswatini’s secret deal with the U.S., organizing cross-border protests, filing legal challenges to the agreement in domestic and regional courts, and building widespread public opposition to the policy. The controversial scheme continues to draw international condemnation for its disregard for migrant rights and its reliance on partnerships with repressive governments.

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA – A damning new report released Monday by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has exposed a sharp, alarming resurgence in the recruitment of children by drug trafficking gangs and breakaway rebel factions across Colombia, with minors now being trained to carry out high-risk, lethal operations including piloting explosive-laden drones. The international human rights watchdog documents that criminal networks have increasingly turned to social media platforms as a fertile recruiting ground, as they battle to seize control of remote rural territories where they generate billions in illegal revenue from drug trafficking, extortion, and unregulated artisanal mining.

“Armed groups in Colombia are recruiting children with complete impunity,” stated Juanita Goebertus, HRW’s Americas Division Director. “Colombia’s child protection systems are failing vulnerable communities, and social media platforms have emerged as a far more effective recruiting tool than any traditional tactic these groups have used before.”

The troubling trend reverses years of progress that followed Colombia’s landmark 2016 peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest rebel insurgency. That agreement dramatically reduced nationwide violence and cut rates of child recruitment for nearly a decade after FARC guerrillas demobilized and withdrew from contested rural areas. However, the power vacuum left by FARC’s exit has drawn a patchwork of smaller rebel holdouts, splinter factions, and drug cartels, which are now fighting violent territorial wars in regions where state law enforcement and social support infrastructure remain severely underdeveloped.

Data from Colombia’s own national Human Rights Defenders’ Office confirms the accelerating crisis: at least 1,500 children have been forcibly or coercively recruited by armed groups since 2021, with 625 new cases reported in the first half of 2024 alone. That number already surpasses the peak annual recruitment count of 1,320 recorded in 1999, at the height of Colombia’s decades-long civil conflict between the military and FARC, according to data from the country’s National Truth Commission.

Historically, armed groups in Colombia have deployed recruited children for low-stakes supporting roles including carrying messages, gathering intelligence on military movements, cooking for combat units, and frontline skirmishes. Girls are frequently targeted for sexual exploitation by group commanders, a longstanding abuse that persists today. But HRW’s investigation confirms a dangerous new evolution of the crisis: minors are now being actively trained in drone warfare, as armed groups increasingly rely on remotely piloted explosive devices to attack rival factions, police outposts, and military bases.

HRW researchers verified multiple public social media videos showing children operating explosive-laden drones, and conducted interviews with family protection officers who work directly with children that have escaped armed groups or participated in government demobilization programs. The report notes that armed groups deliberately manipulate child recruits, framing drone operation as a recreational game rather than a deadly act of armed conflict to reduce resistance.

Colombian government data underscores the growing lethality of drone attacks: between January and May 2024, armed groups carried out 121 drone strikes across the country, leaving 21 people dead and 145 more injured.

The report also highlights the key role of social media in modern recruitment, echoing longstanding warnings first raised by the United Nations. HRW researchers identified dozens of public social media accounts that deliberately glorify life in rebel and criminal groups, framing participation as an attractive, glamorous lifestyle to vulnerable children in marginalized rural communities. In many cases, the algorithms powering major platforms including Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok actively amplified this harmful content, pushing it to child users’ feeds and expanding its reach, the investigation found.

In responses to HRW’s inquiry, both Meta and TikTok stated that their community policies prohibit content that promotes organized violence and child recruitment, and confirmed that they had removed all accounts flagged by the human rights organization. Still, the persistent spread of this content points to ongoing gaps in platform enforcement.

The investigation also identifies the Ivan Mordisco faction, a FARC holdout group that rejected the 2016 peace accord, as the worst perpetrator of child recruitment, with most of its activity concentrated in Colombia’s southwestern Cauca region. A key demographic analysis from HRW found that despite Indigenous people making up just 4% of Colombia’s total population, nearly half of all child recruitment cases recorded since 2021 involved Indigenous children, leaving this already marginalized community disproportionately impacted by the crisis. Girls also account for 40% of all recruited minors, the data shows.

HRW has issued two key sets of recommendations to address the growing crisis. First, the organization is calling on the Colombian national government to allocate additional funding and resources to prosecute armed group members who recruit children, while expanding prevention programs and social services in high-risk rural areas to protect vulnerable minors. As of Monday, the Colombian government had not issued a public response to the report’s findings. Second, HRW is urging social media platforms to create simple, accessible reporting channels for users to flag content linked to child recruitment, and to preserve content and account data that can be used as evidence in criminal prosecutions of recruiters.

After a roughly eight-week pause in operations, the U.S. military has resumed its controversial counter-narcotics offensive in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, carrying out a lethal strike that killed two people the department identifies as drug traffickers, the Department of Defense announced Monday.

This latest action pushes the cumulative death toll from the nearly year-long campaign, which has targeted alleged smuggling vessels off Latin America’s Caribbean coast and in the Eastern Pacific across more than 60 strikes, past 210, according to official tallies.

In a social media statement, U.S. Southern Command confirmed that its forces “executed a lethal kinetic strike on a low-profile vessel operating along established narcotrafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific.” Consistent with nearly all previous official announcements about strikes in the region, the Pentagon has not released any public evidence confirming the targeted vessel was actually transporting illicit narcotics. Monday’s strike is the first confirmed offensive action the U.S. has announced since the devastating back-to-back June 24 earthquakes that killed thousands across Central America and the Caribbean.

Gen. Francis Donovan, commander of U.S. Southern Command, reaffirmed the military’s commitment to the campaign in remarks following the strike: “We are committed to imposing total systemic friction on narco-terrorists — disrupting their operations, dismantling their leadership, and eliminating cartel terror across the region.”

The resumed strike comes as the Trump administration pushes to expand its counter-cartel offensive from maritime waters onto land across multiple Latin American nations, negotiating bilateral access agreements with regional allies. Earlier this month, during an official visit to Panama, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras had agreed to permit joint U.S. military counter-criminal operations on their sovereign territory. Guatemalan officials quickly issued a formal denial that any such agreement had been reached. Ecuador previously launched joint land-based counter-narcotics missions alongside U.S. forces back in March.

President Donald Trump has framed the United States as being in an “armed conflict” with transnational Latin American drug cartels, justifying the escalating maritime strikes as a necessary measure to cut off the flow of illicit drugs into the U.S. and curb the rising number of fatal overdoses that claim thousands of American lives annually. To date, however, the administration has released little verifiable evidence to back its claims that those killed in the strikes are indeed “narcoterrorists.”

The campaign has faced growing pushback from legal and policy critics, who have raised questions both about the legality of the cross-border maritime strikes and their overall public health impact. Critics point out that the vast majority of fentanyl, the drug responsible for the majority of fatal overdoses in the U.S., is trafficked overland through Mexico, not smuggled by small boats across the Eastern Pacific. Fentanyl is primarily produced in Mexico using precursor chemicals imported from China and India, making maritime smuggling of finished drugs a secondary threat.

Since the strikes launched in early September of last year, the campaign has drawn intense scrutiny from Democratic members of Congress and military legal scholars. In May, the Pentagon’s independent inspector general announced it would launch a review to assess whether U.S. military forces followed established official targeting protocols when carrying out the strikes. The inspector general’s office clarified, however, that the evaluation will only examine compliance with the military’s standard six-phase Joint Targeting Cycle, and will not assess the broader legality of the strike campaign itself.