Tag: America

America ends its longest battle, finishes Kabul withdrawal

Post author By
Post date August 31, 2021

A handout photo of a C-17 Globemaster III aircraft at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul.

Handout | Getty Images News

WASHINGTON – America’s longest war is over.

The United States has ended its withdrawal efforts from the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, the Pentagon announced on Monday, effectively ending a two-decade conflict that began not long after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Following the Pentagon’s announcement, President Joe Biden thanked the American military in a statement Monday evening and said he would speak to the nation on Tuesday afternoon about his decision not to extend the U.S. mission in Afghanistan beyond August 31.

“In the past 17 days, our forces conducted the largest airlift in US history, evacuating over 120,000 US citizens, citizens of our allies and Afghan allies of the United States,” the president said in the statement.

“They did it with unmatched courage, professionalism and determination. Now our 20-year military presence in Afghanistan has come to an end.”

In the last week of the withdrawal, ISIS-K terrorists killed 13 US soldiers and dozens of Afghans in an attack outside the airport. US forces hit back and launched strikes to thwart other attacks.

The last C-17 military cargo aircraft left Hamid Karzai International Airport on Monday afternoon Eastern Time, according to U.S. Marine Corps General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, last two weeks.

McKenzie, who oversees US military operations in the region, said the Taliban had no direct knowledge of the timing of the US military’s departure, adding that local commanders “have chosen to keep this information very limited” .

“But they were very helpful and useful to us when we shut down,” McKenzie said of the Taliban.

McKenzie said there were no Americans on the last five flights from Kabul.

“We couldn’t get any Americans out, this operation probably ended about 12 hours before we moved out. We’ll continue the operations and would have been ready to get them until the last minute, but none of them made it to the airport,” said McKenzie .

The four-star general added that there were no more evacuees at the airfield when the last C-17 took off and confirmed that all US soldiers and troops of the Afghan armed forces and their families were also flown out of the air on Monday.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said later Monday that fewer than 200 Americans are still seeking evacuation.

“Our commitment to you and all Americans in Afghanistan and around the world continues. The protection and well-being of Americans abroad remains the most important and long-lasting mission of the State Department,” said the country’s top diplomat in an evening address.

Early Monday, US and Allied forces evacuated 1,200 people from the Afghan capital on 26 military cargo plane flights in 24 hours, according to the latest White House figures.

About 122,800 people have been evacuated since the end of July, including about 6,000 U.S. citizens and their families.

“A new chapter of American engagement in Afghanistan has begun. It is one in which we will lead with our diplomacy. The military mission has ended. A new diplomatic mission has begun,” said Blinken.

Blinken added that the US has suspended its diplomatic presence in Kabul and will move those operations to Doha, Qatar.

“We will remain vigilant in monitoring threats ourselves and maintain robust counter-terrorism capabilities in the region to neutralize those threats if necessary – as we have done in recent days through striking ISIS brokers and even threats in Afghanistan and locations around the world.” Environment have demonstrated the world in which we have no armed forces on the ground, “said Blinken.

The Taliban are returning to power

Taliban fighters patrol the Wazir Akbar Khan district in the city of Kabul, Afghanistan on Wednesday, August 18, 2021.

Rahmat Gül | AP

The US began its war in Afghanistan in October 2001, weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Back then, the Taliban offered refuge to al-Qaeda, the group that launched the devastating terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Since then, around 2,500 US soldiers have died in the conflict, which also killed more than 100,000 Afghan soldiers, police officers and civilians.

Now the Taliban are back in power.

In the final weeks of a planned exodus of foreign troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban achieved a number of shocking successes on the battlefield.

The Taliban occupied Bagram Air Base, a sprawling and once staunch US military facility, less than two months after US commanders handed it over to the Afghan National Security and Defense Force.

In 2012, at its peak, Bagram looked through more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers. It was the largest US military facility in Afghanistan.

As the Taliban approached the capital, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and western nations rushed to evacuate embassies amid deteriorating security conditions.

Biden ordered thousands of US soldiers to be sent to Kabul to help evacuate US embassy staff and secure the airport.

Meanwhile, thousands of Afghans swarmed over the airport tarmac to flee Taliban rule.

Although the Afghan military, long supported by US and NATO coalition forces, is vastly outnumbered, the Taliban captured the presidential palace in Kabul on August 15.

In April, Biden ordered the full withdrawal of about 3,000 US troops from Afghanistan by September 11th. He later announced an updated schedule that said the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan would end by August 31.

After the Taliban takeover, Biden defended his decision that the US would leave the war-torn country.

“I am fully behind my decision. After 20 years I have learned the hard way that there was never a good time to withdraw the US armed forces,” said Biden a day after the Taliban collapsed Afghanistan.

“American troops cannot and should not fight in a war and die in a war that the Afghan armed forces are unwilling to wage for themselves,” Biden said. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. We couldn’t give them the will to fight for that future,” he added.

Last US casualties in the war in Afghanistan

In this U.S. Air Force image, flag-draped transfer cases line the interior of a transport aircraft prior to a graceful transfer at Dover Air Force Base, Del. The fallen soldiers were killed while assisting evacuations in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Jason Minto | US Air Force

The Pentagon on Saturday released the names of the 13 US soldiers killed after a suicide bomber detonated an explosive near the gates of Kabul airport.

The August 26 attack that killed 11 Marines, one Marine and one Army soldier is currently under investigation.

On Sunday, the President and First Lady Jill Biden traveled to Dover Air Force Base to meet privately with the families of the fallen before watching the graceful handover of American flag-draped coffins from a C-17 military cargo plane to a vehicle .

A dignified transfer is a solemn process in which the remains of fallen soldiers are transported from an airplane to a waiting vehicle. It is carried out for every U.S. soldier killed in action.

The remains of the soldiers were flown from Kabul to Kuwait and then to Germany before arriving in Dover.

On Sunday, Biden took part in a dignified transfer for the first time since taking office.

United States President Joe Biden will attend the dignified transfer of the remains of a fallen soldier at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware on August 29, 2021

Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley also attended the dignified transfer, along with U.S. Marine Corps Commander Gen. David Berger, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday and US Air Force Col. Chip Hollinger, who oversaw the military logistics of the transfer.

The fallen include:

Marine Corps Staff Sgt.Din T. Hoover, 31, from Salt Lake City, Utah

Marine Corps Sgt.Johanny Rosariopichardo, 25, from Lawrence, Massachusetts

Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee, 23, from Sacramento, California

Marine Corps Cpl. Hunter Lopez, 22, from Indio, California

Marine Corps Cpl. Daegan W. Page, 23, of Omaha, Nebraska

Marine Corps Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez, 22, of Logansport, Indiana

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza, 20, from Rio Bravo, Texas

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, 20, from St. Charles, Missouri

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum, 20, of Jackson, Wyoming

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola, 20, from Rancho Cucamonga, California

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui, 20, of Norco, California

Navy Hospitalman Maxton W. Soviak, 22, from Berlin Heights, Ohio

Army Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss, 23, of Corryton, Tennessee.

Tags America, Ends, finishes, Kabul, longest, War, withdrawal

Health

Covid vaccine mandates sweep throughout company America as delta surges

Post author By
Post date August 9, 2021

United Airlines ramp services worker John Dalessandro receives a COVID-19 vaccine at United’s onsite clinic at O’Hare International Airport on March 09, 2021 in Chicago, Illinois.

Scott Olson | Getty Images

The U.S. government may not require that everyone get Covid-19 vaccines, but large employers across corporate America are stepping into the void.

More than a dozen large U.S. corporations, including Walmart, Google, Tyson Foods and United Airlines, have recently announced vaccine mandates for some or all of their workers.

“With rapidly rising COVID-19 case counts of contagious, dangerous variants leading to increasing rates of severe illness and hospitalization among the U.S. unvaccinated population, this is the right time to take the next step to ensure a fully vaccinated workforce,” Dr. Claudia Coplein, Tyson’s chief medical officer, said in a statement Tuesday.

The U.S. reported a seven-day average of more than 108,600 new cases per day as of Sunday, up 36% from a week earlier, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. With 83% of sequenced coronavirus cases nationwide stemming from the delta variant, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, vaccinations are seen by health officials and corporate management as the safest way to get employees who have been working remotely back to the office.

Though some employers now unilaterally mandate vaccines, most have limited the scope of their guidance to certain offices or specific groups of workers.

Google and Facebook have mandated Covid immunizations for anyone returning to their U.S. offices. Walmart, which has 1.6 million U.S. employees, has imposed a vaccine mandate for all corporate and management staff, while store employees must wear masks in high-risk counties.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon outlined the retailer’s plans to keep “gradually coming back into our office spaces with the idea of being closer to pre-pandemic levels after Labor Day.”

In April 2020, a Gallup poll found that 70% of employees surveyed were working from home. Companies are attempting to bring their workforce back into the office, but some have already begun pushing back their return dates as Covid case counts surge. Late last month, Google postponed its return to office deadline to Oct. 18, a delay of more than a month.

“Although I’m not a big fan of mandates, we need to use a variety of incentives to encourage as many people as possible to practice effective infection control,” said Dr. Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center. “If that’s the best or only way to motivate some people, then that’s one tool in our toolbox.”

United Airlines said Friday that all of its roughly 67,000-person U.S. employees must provide proof that they are vaccinated against Covid no later than Oct. 25, becoming the country’s first major airline to issue such a mandate. Employees risk termination if they don’t comply, though United said there will be exemptions for religious or medical reasons.

“We know some of you will disagree with this decision to require the vaccine for all United employees,” United Airlines’ CEO Scott Kirby and the airline’s president, Brett Hart, wrote to employees announcing the vaccine requirement. “But, we have no greater responsibility to you and your colleagues than to ensure your safety when you’re at work, and the facts are crystal clear: everyone is safer when everyone is vaccinated.”

Budget carrier Frontier Airlines followed suit hours later with its own mandate but said employees either need to show proof of inoculation by Oct. 1 or take regular Covid tests.

For better or worse, vaccines and other tools to fight the virus such as masks, have become controversial in the U.S. But health officials say the measures are necessary to save lives.

“To leave it up to the individual is to say that there are people who are going to make a choice that puts co-workers at risk,” said Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “So I think it’s a responsible, important, necessary thing to do.”

Even companies with the most expansive mandates are required by law to allow some exceptions.

Facebook’s vice president of people, Lori Goler, said the company of nearly 59,000 global employees will have a process in place for people who can’t be vaccinated for medical or other reasons and that it’s working with experts “to ensure our return to office plans prioritize everyone’s health and safety.”

The Alphabet Workers Union, which represents over 800 employees across Google and its parent company, expressed concern over the exceptions to Google’s vaccine mandate, saying the company has provided insufficient details surrounding the exemption process. A spokesperson for the union said the mandate exists “to convince white collar workers to come back to the office,” while “a boatload of people” remain unvaccinated.

Google did not respond to a request for comment. Alphabet employed over 135,000 employees worldwide as of last year.

Other companies have faced pushback from unions on their vaccine directives. After Tyson announced last week that all 120,000 of its office and plant personnel must get vaccinated, United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents 24,000 Tyson meatpacking workers, voiced reservations about mandating vaccines that lack the FDA’s full approval.

“UFCW will be meeting with Tyson in the coming weeks to discuss this vaccine mandate and to ensure that the rights of these workers are protected, and this policy is fairly implemented,” UFCW International President Marc Perrone said in a statement. Perrone added that he wanted to ensure Tyson’s union workers receive paid time off to receive and adjust to the vaccine.

United and its pilots’ union, the Air Line Pilots Association, agreed earlier this year not to implement a vaccine mandate for its nearly 13,000 aviators. United offered extra pay to pilots who received the vaccine and up to three days off for flight attendants. More than 90% of the pilots and about 80% of flight attendants are inoculated, the company said. The union said that some aviators who don’t plan to get vaccinated should talk with their pilot chief.

“The vaccine requirement represents an employment change we believe warrants further negotiations to ensure our safety, welfare, and bargaining rights are maintained, the pilots union said.

Other airlines including American, Southwest and Delta said they have not made any changes to their policies to encourage, but not mandate, vaccines for their employees. In May, Delta was the first major carrier to require the vaccine for new employees. United had followed suit. American and Delta have offered incentives like extra time off for employees who get vaccinated. Delta says more than 73% of its staff is vaccinated.

When asked how it would react to a potential companywide requirement, Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, which represents some 15,000 pilots at American, said: “Our position is it’s a personal choice between pilots and their medical professional. As the bargaining agent for the pilots, any change to the conditions of employment must be discussed with the representative union.” The union last week, however, urged pilots to get vaccinated and estimated in a staff note that about 60% of them are inoculated.

By mandating inoculations, corporate America is taking action in a way federal legislators cannot, said Dorit Reiss, a professor at UC Hastings College of the Law. Outside of requiring vaccines for its own employees, Reiss said the federal government “probably doesn’t have the power to say everybody in the U.S. has to get vaccinated or pay a fine.”

But insurance agencies might, a recent op-ed by Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal and Glenn Kramon in The New York Times suggests. In the model of policies that deny coverage for injuries sustained during dangerous activities, the authors indicate that insurers could start “penalizing the unvaccinated” because their refusal to immunize poses a threat to public health. Rosenthal is editor in chief of Kaiser Health News and Kramon is a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Companies also have the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on their side, said Thomas Lenz, a professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. As long as their mandates abide by the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the commission said in May, companies could require “all employees physically entering the workplace to be vaccinated” against the coronavirus.

Despite the EEOC’s guidance, some businesses are still refraining from issuing mandates for fear of alienating their personnel, Lenz said.

“We see that employers are as concerned with what they perceive as a skill shortage, a labor shortage, as anything in deciding whether to mandate the vaccinations,” Lenz said. “And for that reason, employers don’t want to scare people away, as they feel they might be able to accommodate and keep the workforce in some other way.”

-CNBC’s Nate Rattner contributed reporting.

Tags America, Corporate, Covid, Delta, Mandates, Surges, Sweep, Vaccine

Health

Who Are the Unvaccinated in America? There’s No One Reply.

Post author By
Post date August 5, 2021

As coronavirus cases rise across the United States, the fight against the pandemic is focused on an estimated 93 million people who are eligible for shots but have chosen not to get them. These are the Americans who are most vulnerable to serious illness from the highly contagious Delta variant and most likely to carry the virus, spreading it further.

It turns out, though, that this is not a single set of Americans, but in many ways two.

In one group are those who say they are adamant in their refusal of the coronavirus vaccines; they include a mix of people but tend to be disproportionately white, rural, evangelical Christian and politically conservative, surveys show.

In the other are those who say they are open to getting a shot but have been putting it off or want to wait and see before making a decision; they are a broad range of people, but tend to be a more diverse and urban group, including many younger people, Black and Latino Americans, and Democrats.

With cases surging and hospitalizations rising, health officials are making progress in inoculating this second group, who surveys suggest account for less than half of all unvaccinated adults in the United States.

Credit…Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

“I heard a news story several weeks ago now, about the Epsilon variant, which is hitting one of the countries in South America. So, I don’t want to get a vaccine now, necessarily, if I don’t have to, and then get a different vaccine nine months from now.”

Steven Harris, 58, who said he believes that the antibodies he has from getting Covid-19 are sufficiently protective.

The problem is the same surveys show that the group firmly opposed to the vaccines outnumbers those willing to be swayed. And unless the nation finds a way to persuade the unwavering, escaping the virus’s grip will be a long way off, because they make up as much as 20 percent of the adult population.

Interviews this past week with dozens of people in 17 states presented a portrait of the unvaccinated in the United States, people driven by a wide mix of sometimes overlapping fears, conspiracy theories, concern about safety and generalized skepticism of powerful institutions tied to the vaccines, including the pharmaceutical industry and the federal government.

Myrna Patterson, 85, a Democrat from Rochester, N.Y., who works at a hospital, said she could not shake her worry that the vaccines were produced too quickly. “Is it really worth me taking it?” Ms. Patterson said. “How do they know that it will kill the virus, and if it’s really good for humans to be taking this vaccine?”

Hannah Reid, 30, a mother of four and a certified sommelier in Oregon who is an unaffiliated voter, said she had long been apprehensive about vaccines: Her young children get many but not all pediatric shots. She says her Christian faith has also made her comfortable with not yet getting a Covid-19 shot, which she thinks is too new, the conversation around it too noisy and bombastic.

Alex Garcia, 25, who is not tied to any political party and works in landscaping in Texas, said he believed he was too young and healthy to need a vaccine. “My immune system could fight it,” Mr. Garcia said. He said he did not worry about infecting his unvaccinated 86-year-old grandmother, either.

About 30 percent of the adult population in the United States has yet to receive a shot, and about 58 percent of those age 12 through 17 have yet to receive a shot.

Part of the challenge is that the unvaccinated live in communities dotted throughout the United States, in both lightly and densely populated counties. Though some states like Missouri and Arkansas have significantly lagged the nation in vaccination rates, unvaccinated Americans are, to varying degrees, everywhere: In Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago, 51 percent of residents are fully vaccinated. Los Angeles County is barely higher, at 53 percent. In Wake County, N.C., part of the liberal, high-tech Research Triangle area, the vaccination rate is 55 percent.

The rate of vaccinations across the country has slowed significantly since April, but there are signs in recent days of a new rise in shots being distributed, with upticks in vaccinations particularly in states like Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri, where cases have grown. As of Friday, about 652,000 doses, on average, were being given each day, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; that was up from recent weeks, when the country hovered just above 500,000 shots a day. Nationwide, about 97 percent of people hospitalized with Covid-19 are unvaccinated, federal data shows.

How many people eventually decide to get shots could help determine the course of the virus and severity of illnesses across the country, so efforts to convince the unvaccinated — both the group that is waiting and watching and the vehemently opposed — have gained steam with advertising campaigns, incentives and new mandates. Some experts have estimated that 90 percent or more of the total population — adults and children — would need to be fully vaccinated for the country to reach a possibly elusive herd immunity threshold of protection against the coronavirus.

So far excluded from the debate over vaccination are 48 million unvaccinated children under 12, who are too young to be eligible for a shot until at least fall. They make up 15 percent of the total population in the United States. Once they are eligible, it is uncertain how many will get shots; even some vaccinated parents are hesitant to inoculate their children, surveys show.

Doctors say they are working to convince reluctant Americans, sometimes in long conversations that unravel falsehoods about vaccines.

Dr. Laolu Fayanju, a family medicine doctor in Ohio, has encountered patients on both ends of the spectrum: those who are insistent in their refusal to be vaccinated, and others who agree to a shot after he painstakingly lays out facts.

Never did he expect that so many Americans would still be resisting a shot this many months into the vaccination effort.

“I vacillate between anguish and anger,” Dr. Fayanju said. “We live in an era of unprecedented scientific breakthroughs and expertise. But we’re also stymied by the forces of misinformation that undermine the true knowledge that is out there.”

Already Vaccinated

In the first weeks of the nation’s vaccination effort, health officials could not distribute shots quickly enough to millions who rushed for them, beginning with health care employees, essential workers and older Americans, who were particularly at risk of dying from the coronavirus, which has killed more than 600,000 people across the country.

Over time, the people choosing vaccines shifted markedly, according to C.D.C. data, which captures race and ethnicity for about 60 percent of vaccine recipients.

White people, who were vaccinated at a higher rate than Black and Hispanic people earlier this year, make up a larger share of the vaccinated population than the overall population, but that share has been shrinking.

Credit…Alisha Jucevic for The New York Times

“I hope this is just like the polio vaccine, where we can say, in a few years, praise God, what a gift to humanity — that this Covid vaccine saved so many people, and has proved long term to be such a good gift. So I hope that’s the case, but I think we kind of want to see it through.”

Hannah Reid, 30. If the F.D.A. approves the vaccines, she said she and her husband will feel somewhat less apprehensive but will continue to do their own research and pray.

The daily vaccination rate per capita among Asian Americans started out comparable to that among white people, then accelerated when availability opened to all age groups, and now slightly surpasses white people. Black and Hispanic people were being vaccinated at a lower per capita rate than other groups at the beginning, but since April, the vaccination rate for Hispanic people began to rise above other groups.

Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans and Alaskan Natives, who make up a smaller proportion of the overall population, have surpassed other groups in total percentage vaccinated, but still include large numbers of unvaccinated people.

Figuring out exactly who is not vaccinated is more complicated; federal authorities have mainly tracked the people getting shots — not those who have not gotten them. But several surveys of adults — from the Kaiser Family Foundation, AP-NORC, Morning Consult, Civis Analytics, the Ad Council and the Census Bureau — together present a sense of the range of who the unvaccinated are, an essential set of data as health officials seek to convince reluctant Americans.

Updated

Aug. 4, 2021, 9:35 p.m. ET

‘Wait-and-Sees’

About 10 percent of American adults have made it clear in interviews, discussions with family members and conversations with survey researchers that under certain circumstances, they are open to be convinced to get a vaccine.

With the help of a friend who is a nurse, Lakeshia Drew, 41, of Kansas City, Mo., has been on her own journey for weeks. Ms. Drew, who voted for President Biden but is unaffiliated with a political party, said she was learning all she could about the risks that the coronavirus carries, and how a vaccine could protect her from getting critically ill.

As the Delta variant has spiked case numbers in her area, she has decided that her family will need to get vaccinated before receiving every last answer to its questions.

“It’s gone from ‘We aren’t getting it’ to ‘OK, if I get more information I’m going to get it,’” she said of the shot. “I would rather get it than to bury any one of my children or to have them bury me.”

Ms. Drew and other people in the so-called wait-and-see group tend to be younger and harbor more concerns about the safety of the vaccines. They may be worried that the vaccines are too new, or about what friends have told them about side effects.

In one Kaiser survey, 44 percent said they would be more likely to get a vaccine once it is fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Currently, the three coronavirus vaccines being offered in the United States have only been granted an emergency use authorization, a step short of full approval.

“It’s kind of like the known versus the unknown for some of those people,” said Mollyann Brodie, an executive vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, who runs the group’s survey research. “Fear is a hard thing to overcome, and there has been a lot of fearmongering with relation to the vaccine, and there is a lot of stuff that isn’t known about it.”

Some adults under 50, in particular, suggest that the risk of an unknown vaccine feels greater than the uncertainty of its benefits.

Don Driscoll, 38, who is from Pittsburgh and calls himself a socially liberal Republican, said he has opted for now against vaccination because of safety concerns.

“I don’t think there’s a conspiracy, I don’t think Bill Gates is shooting microchips into my veins,” he said. “I don’t think the Democrats want to kill half the population. I am just not an early adopter of anything, really.”

Some people who have yet to get vaccinated say they have encountered obstacles to obtaining shots, are worried about hidden costs or are waiting until they can get a shot from someone they trust. But the share of unvaccinated Americans who are held up because of issues of convenience is shrinking, survey research shows.

Understand the State of Vaccine Mandates in the U.S.

For some Latino immigrants, fear of immigration authorities has been a roadblock.

For instance, grass-roots organizers recently hosted a vaccine clinic at a supermarket in Merced, a city in California’s fertile Central Valley that draws farmworkers from Mexico. But some residents say they were turned away by the health care workers administering the vaccines because they did not have government-issued IDs — although officials have said that only proof of age should be required.

“For the undocumented, their fears are not the vaccine but the record keeping that goes along with it,” said Dr. Richard Pan, a pediatrician and Democratic state senator in California who has gone into neighborhoods to knock on doors and urge people to get inoculated.

A substantial share of the wait-and-see group — more than 40 percent in the Kaiser survey — says it would be motivated by vaccine mandates.

But San Francisco became one of the first cities to impose a vaccine mandate for its nearly 35,000 city workers, and immediately encountered resistance from labor unions and other organizations.

“I don’t believe in mandates of any kind,” said Sherman Tillman, the president of the San Francisco Black Firefighters Association, who described himself as a conservative Democrat. “I don’t believe that governments should force our workers to do anything about their bodies and health. I think it’s an individual choice.”

Credit…Chase Castor for The New York Times

“If it was really a pandemic, we wouldn’t have to be reminded daily of it. If we were in a pandemic, we would know it automatically. We wouldn’t have to have it shoved down our throats 24/7.”

Reba Dilts, 28, who cited her history of health issues as part of her reason to not get vaccinated. She also had Covid-19 and said she believes that the pandemic was not the crisis others said it was.

Other people who have skipped vaccinations so far but said they might be persuaded said they planned to rely on advice from their own doctors — whenever their next checkup might be.

Candice Nelson, a personal assistant in Spartanburg, S.C., has suffered medical challenges before. She is a cancer survivor who endured chemotherapy. And she had Covid-19 several months ago, spending three days in a hospital to recover.

Yet she is in no hurry to receive a vaccine — until she can discuss it with the doctor who treated her cancer at their next appointment. Her employer has asked her to be vaccinated and is pressuring her for an answer.

“I’ll go with what my doctor says,” she said, adding that she would also be responsive to a requirement at her job.

The C.D.C. recommends vaccines even for people who have been infected with the virus. Some evidence suggests a prior infection offers less protection than a vaccine, particularly against variants like Delta.

Firmly Opposed

For Troy Maturin, from Abbeville, La., the rapid spread of the Delta variant through his state does not make him more interested in getting the vaccine. To the contrary: He takes it as further evidence, he said, that the vaccines are a government plot.

“They’d have to Taser me, drag me out, and give it to me while I’m unaware of it,” Mr. Maturin, a 50-year-old auto parts salesman who described himself as conservative, said at the suggestion of a mandate.

Mr. Maturin belongs to the group of unvaccinated Americans who are unlikely to say they could be persuaded with improved convenience or even requirements. They are far less concerned about getting seriously ill with Covid-19, and much more likely to say they do not trust the government or the pharmaceutical companies that have developed the shots. They are not opposed to all vaccinations, but very few of them get annual flu shots.

Several studies have suggested that a Republican Party affiliation is among the best predictors of membership in this group. But the demographics of the group also overlap with key Republican constituencies. People who say they will never get a Covid-19 vaccine are disproportionately likely to be white and to live in rural areas. They are overrepresented in the South and the Midwest.

Pete Sims, 82, recalls ducking mandatory vaccines during his time in the Air Force in the late 1950s.

Servicemen would periodically line up, hold out a vaccination card, get it stamped and when their turn came, hold out their arms.

Moments before the injection, Mr. Sims always managed to take a bathroom break. He said he would emerge after his turn had passed.

Now he lives in Houston and identifies as more of a libertarian than a Republican, though he voted for Donald J. Trump in November. But Mr. Sims was emphatic that his politics have not shaped his near lifelong antipathy to vaccines.

“It has to do with my civil rights,” he said. “The United States government’s main job is to protect me from foreign and domestic enemies. Not my health. I’m in charge of my health.”

Angelique White, 28, a hairstylist in Romulus, Mich., is firm in her decision not to be vaccinated, despite pressure from her boyfriend to get the shot. Ms. White, who is a Jehovah’s Witness and does not vote, had several cousins who died from Covid-19. But she believes that years ago, when she and her twin sister became violently ill, they were reacting to a flu shot. They never got another vaccine.

“I wear my mask, I sanitize my hands and do it like that,” Ms. White said. “I think I’ll be fine.”

She has not spoken with her doctor or pastor about the vaccines. There is no need, she said: Her mind is made up and she has moved on.

Reporting was contributed by Sophie Kasakove, Rick Rojas, Albert Sun, Ashley Wu, Ana Facio-Krajcer, Danielle Ivory and Amy Schoenfeld Walker. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Tags America, answer, Unvaccinated

Politics

Why America Isn’t Getting the Jan. 6 Investigation It Wants

Post author By
Post date July 24, 2021

Some of this sentiment reflects how conservative media has covered — or, perhaps, not covered — the siege. The events of Jan. 6 have been mentioned about four times as often on CNN and MSNBC as on Fox News, according to an analysis of television news clips. And it certainly reflects how dominant partisanship has become in our politics.

But these beliefs also show how difficult it will be for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to persuade large parts of the country that her select committee is conducting a truthful and nonpartisan investigation into the Jan. 6 riot. Republicans in Congress can opt out of participating in a bipartisan investigation into one of the most shocking events in the history of American politics with little fear of backlash from their base. In fact, many of their voters don’t want to hear much about the Jan. 6 attack at all.

Others are clearly looking for their leaders to defend rioters’ actions that day. That’s partly why Ms. Pelosi rejected two of Representative Kevin McCarthy’s picks for the committee, prompting Mr. McCarthy, the minority leader, to pull all of his Republican nominations from the panel.

Those two selections, Representatives Jim Banks of Indiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio, had openly expressed hostility to the mission of the committee and trafficked in revisionist history about the siege, and they may be material witnesses to the events leading up to that day.

Would keeping Mr. Jordan and Mr. Banks on the committee have helped build credibility for the effort among Republican voters? That seems unlikely, given that both had already broadcast their intention to undermine the effort.

Ms. Pelosi can still argue that her panel is bipartisan. It will include Representative Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, and reports suggest that she could add Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, also a Republican. Both lawmakers are reviled by their party’s base for attacking Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the election and are unlikely to be seen as credible messengers by many Republicans.

Mr. McCarthy, meanwhile, has vowed to conduct his own investigation.

So after months of negotiation, the end result is likely to be two panels, one led by Democrats and the other by Republicans. It’s a situation that encapsulates our divided political moment: Whatever the process, the testimony or the findings, the results of either committee are unlikely to be trusted by voters from the opposing party. And reaching any kind of national consensus about what happened on that awful day feels like as much of a fantasy as any false-flag conspiracy theory.

Tags America, investigation, isnt, Jan

Health

Covid circumstances are surging once more in Latin America and the U.S., WHO officers warn

Post author By
Post date July 14, 2021

People hold their arms after receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) as part of a government plan to vaccinate Mexican border residents on the common border with the United States in Tijuana, Mexico, Dec. June 2021.

Jorge Duenes | Reuters

Covid infections are rapidly picking up again in the United States and Latin America as more contagious variants spread, putting the entire region at risk, World Health Organization officials said in a briefing Wednesday.

Renewed spikes of infection also exacerbate instability and violence in several Latin American and Caribbean countries, officials said, noting political upheaval in Haiti, Cuba and other nations as the Delta variant takes hold in America.

“Many countries, including the United States, are seeing a resurgence of infections in North America, the United States and Mexico are reporting spikes in new infections in most states, and many Central American nations are also seeing cases,” said Dr. Carissa Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization, WHO’s regional office for America, said Wednesday.

Central American and Caribbean countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Cuba and the Virgin Islands are also seeing an increase in new infections.

Thousands of protesters in Cuba took to the streets this week over frustrations over a troubled economy hit by food and electricity shortages. The rare protests, the largest the communist country has seen since the 1990s, come as the government struggles to contain the coronavirus pandemic and marginalize the island’s fragile health system.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on Monday that Cubans were “tired of the mismanagement of the Cuban economy, lack of adequate food and of course an adequate response to the Covid-19 pandemic”.

The seven-day average of new cases in Cuba has more than quadrupled in the last month to 5,659 in the past seven days from an average of 1,256 per day in mid-June, according to analysis of data from CNBC compiled by Johns Hopkins University . The number of deaths in the small island nation has also increased from around 10 a day a month ago to around 32, the data shows.

Overall, deaths and hospital admissions in South America have decreased in recent weeks. However, as cases pick up again, officials expect hospitalizations and deaths, often delayed by a few weeks, could soon follow.

The cases in Argentina and Colombia are at record highs as new infections surpass the level at the beginning of the pandemic, according to Etienne. Neighboring countries like Honduras and Guatemala haven’t secured enough vaccine doses to immunize even 1% of their population, which could be disastrous if increasing infections spill over from nearby countries, she said.

Colombia, along with Brazil, Cuba and Haiti, are experiencing situations where political unrest and waves of protests make it even more difficult for health workers and residents to access life-saving resources and maintain public notices promoting vaccinations.

“Increasing violence, instability and overcrowded accommodation could become active hotspots for the transmission of Covid,” said Etienne. “Limited care and violence also hamper the ability of health workers to safely care for patients in need. In some cases, patients may avoid doing so for safety concerns.”

PAHO officials are working to bring vaccines to Haiti, where the island has not yet started vaccinating its residents, despite having received 760,000 doses of the vaccines from AstraZeneca through the COVAX Facility, a WHO-supported distribution initiative of doses to low-income countries in low-income countries of the world, according to the Washington Post. Violence broke out there following the assassination of President Jovenel Moise last week.

PAHO also cautioned countries reopening their economies too early, warning that countries that have successfully deterred early waves of infection are ignoring normally necessary public health measures such as masks and social distancing and opening up to a renewed surge in cases of variant who can bypass the vaccine protection.

“In the context of Covid-19, health and well-being must be prerequisites for reactivating the economy, because if the pandemic is not brought under control, economic reactivation will be very difficult,” said Etienne.

– CNBC’s Amanda Macias contributed to this article.

Tags America, cases, Covid, Latin, Officials, surging, Warn

Politics

Inestabilidad en América Latina: Biden se ve obligado a enfrentar la realidad de la región

Post author By
Post date July 13, 2021

Se calcula que cuatro millones de refugiados han salido de Venezuela desde entonces, lo que ha generado una de las peores catástrofes humanitarias del mundo. Casi la mitad de estos venezolanos se encuentran en la vecina Colombia, que durante la primavera lidió con sus propios disturbios internos, cuando manifestantes —descontentos por la imposición de impuestos a nivel nacional y la fatiga provocada por la pandemia— se enfrentaron con fuerzas de seguridad del país.

El presidente de Colombia, Iván Duque Márquez, dijo en una entrevista realizada en mayo que no dudaba que Estados Unidos continuaría apoyando a su país, a pesar de las preocupaciones sobre las tácticas de su gobierno que ponían en riesgo derechos humanos.

Otros autócratas latinoamericanos han seguido el ejemplo de Maduro.

En Nicaragua, el presidente Daniel Ortega ha iniciado una ofensiva contra los medios de comunicación y la sociedad civil antes de las elecciones de noviembre, en las que buscará un cuarto mandato. Además de una reunión el mes pasado con cancilleres de Centroamérica, Antony J. Blinken, el secretario de Estado estadounidense, instó con discreción al máximo diplomático de Nicaragua a garantizar un voto libre y justo.

Al día siguiente, el gobierno de Ortega detuvo a una de sus opositoras políticas de más alto perfil.

Más tarde, funcionarios estadounidenses insistieron en la importancia de que el gobierno de Biden advirtiera a Nicaragua y a otros países latinoamericanos de la preocupación cada vez mayor de Estados Unidos por los desafíos a la democracia en la región. Ventrell, el funcionario del Departamento de Estado, dijo que la embestida de Ortega, un exrevolucionario y un viejo problema para Estados Unidos, era una prueba del poco apoyo que conservaba entre los votantes nicaragüenses.

Pero el gobierno de Biden es muy consciente de la naturaleza endeble de la democracia en la región.

“Seamos honestos: las democracias son frágiles. Lo reconozco absolutamente”, dijo Samantha Power, administradora de la Agencia de Estados Unidos para el Desarrollo Internacional, en un discurso el mes pasado en la Universidad Centroamericana en San Salvador.

Aseguró que los ataques a jueces, periodistas, funcionarios electorales y otras instituciones en Estados Unidos revelaron que un ataque a las libertades y las libertades civiles podría ocurrir en cualquier lugar.

Por eso, dijo Power, “es tan importante luchar contra la corrupción, luchar contra el comportamiento autocrático en cualquier lugar en el que ocurra, porque estas acciones pueden crecer con rapidez para amenazar la estabilidad, amenazar la democracia, amenazar la prosperidad”.

Tags America, Biden, enfrentar, Inestabilidad, Latina, obligado, realidad, Region

Politics

America Is Present process Seismic Modifications. Its Politics? Hardly.

Post author By
Post date July 4, 2021

In another age, the events of this season would have been nearly certain to produce a major shift in American politics — or at least a meaningful, discernible one.

Over a period of weeks, the coronavirus death rate plunged and the country considerably eased public health restrictions. President Biden announced a bipartisan deal late last month to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the country’s worn infrastructure — the most significant aisle-crossing legislative agreement in a generation, if it holds together. The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Thursday that the economy was on track to regain all of the jobs it lost during the pandemic by the middle of 2022.

And in a blow to Mr. Biden’s fractious opposition, Donald J. Trump — the dominant figure in Republican politics — faced an embarrassing legal setback just as he was resuming a schedule of campaign-style events. The Manhattan district attorney’s office charged his company, the Trump Organization, and its chief financial officer with “sweeping and audacious” financial crimes.

Not long ago, such a sequence of developments might have tested the partisan boundaries of American politics, startling voters into reconsidering their assumptions about the current president, his predecessor, the two major parties and what government can do for the American people.

These days, it is hard to imagine that such a political turning point is at hand.

“I think we’re open to small moves; I’m not sure we’re open to big moves,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. “Partisanship has made our system so sclerotic that it isn’t very responsive to real changes in the real world.”

Amid the mounting drama of the early summer, a moment of truth appears imminent. It is one that will reveal whether the American electorate is still capable of large-scale shifts in opinion, or whether the country is essentially locked into a schism for the foreseeable future, with roughly 53 percent of Americans on one side and 47 percent on the other.

Mr. Biden’s job approval has been steady in the mid-50s for most of the year, as his administration has pushed a shots-and-checks message about beating the virus and reviving the economy. His numbers are weaker on subjects like immigration and crime; Republicans have focused their criticism on those areas accordingly.

This weekend, the president and his allies have mounted something of a celebratory tour for the Fourth of July: Mr. Biden headed to Michigan, one of the vital swing states that made him president, while Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Las Vegas to mark a revival of the nation’s communal life.

On Friday, Mr. Biden stopped just short of declaring that happy days are here again, but he eagerly brandished the latest employment report showing that the economy added 850,000 jobs in June.

“The last time the economy grew at this rate was in 1984, and Ronald Reagan was telling us it’s morning in America,” Mr. Biden said. “Well, it’s getting close to afternoon here. The sun is coming out.”

Yet there is little confidence in either party that voters are about to swing behind Mr. Biden and his allies en masse, no matter how many events appear to align in his favor.

Democratic strategists see that as no fault of Mr. Biden’s, but merely the frustrating reality of political competition these days: The president — any president — might be able to chip away at voters’ skepticism of his party or their cynicism about Washington, but he cannot engineer a broad realignment in the public mood.

Mr. Mellman said the country’s political divide currently favored Mr. Biden and his party, with a small but stable majority of voters positively disposed toward the president. But even significant governing achievements — containing the coronavirus, passing a major infrastructure bill — may yield only minute adjustments in the electorate, he said.

Updated

July 2, 2021, 3:38 p.m. ET

“Getting a bipartisan bill passed, in the past, would have been a game changer,” Mr. Mellman said. “Will it be in this environment? I have my doubts.”

Russ Schriefer, a Republican strategist, offered an even blunter assessment of the chances for real movement in the electorate. He said that the receding of the pandemic had helped voters feel better about the direction the country is moving in — “the Covid reopening certainly helps with the right-track numbers” — but that he saw no evidence that it was changing the way they thought about their preferences between the parties.

“I don’t think anything has particularly changed,” Mr. Schriefer said. “If anything, since November people have retreated further and further back into their own corners.”

American voters’ stubborn resistance to external events is no great surprise, of course, to anyone who lived through the 2020 election. Last year, Mr. Trump presided over an out-of-control pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused the American economy to collapse. He humiliated the nation’s top public health officials and ridiculed basic safety measures like mask wearing; threatened to crush mass demonstrations with military force; outlined no agenda for his second term; and delivered one of the most self-destructive debate performances of any presidential candidate in modern history.

Mr. Trump still won 47 percent of the vote and carried 25 states. The trench lines of identity-based grievance he spent five years digging and deepening — pitting rural voters against urban ones, working-class voters against voters with college degrees, white voters against everybody else — saved him from an overwhelming repudiation.

A Pew Research Center study of the 2020 election results released this past week showed exactly what scale of voter movement is possible in the political climate of the Trump era and its immediate aftermath.

The electorate is not entirely frozen, but each little shift in one party’s favor seems offset by another small one in the opposite direction. Mr. Trump improved his performance with women and Hispanic voters compared with the 2016 election, while Mr. Biden expanded his party’s support among moderate constituencies like male voters and military veterans.

The forces that made Mr. Trump a resilient foe in 2020 may now shield him from the kind of exile that might normally be inflicted on a toppled former president enveloped in criminal investigations and facing the prospect of financial ruin. Polls show that Mr. Trump has persuaded most of his party’s base to believe a catalog of outlandish lies about the 2020 election; encouraging his admirers to ignore his legal problems is an old trick by comparison.

The divisions Mr. Trump carved into the electoral map are still apparent in other ways, too: Even as the country reopens and approaches the point of declaring victory over the coronavirus, the states lagging furthest behind in their vaccination campaigns are nearly all strongholds of the G.O.P. While Mr. Trump has encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated, his contempt for public health authorities and the culture of vaccine skepticism in the right-wing media has hindered easy progress.

Yet the social fissures that have made Mr. Trump such a durable figure have also cemented Mr. Biden as the head of a majority coalition with broad dominance of the country’s most populous areas. The Democrats do not have an overwhelming electoral majority — and certainly not a majority that can count on overcoming congressional gerrymandering, the red-state bias of the Senate and the traditional advantage for the opposition party in midterm elections — but they have a majority all the same.

And if Mr. Biden’s approach up to this point has been good enough to keep roughly 53 percent of the country solidly with him, it might not take a major political breakthrough — let alone a season of them — to reinforce that coalition by winning over just a small slice of doubters or critics. There are strategists in Mr. Biden’s coalition who hope to do considerably more than that, either by maneuvering the Democratic Party more decisively toward the political center or by competing more assertively with Republicans on themes of economic populism (or perhaps through some combination of the two).

Mr. Biden’s aides have already briefed congressional Democrats several times on their plans to lean hard into promoting the economic recovery as the governing party’s signature achievement — one they hope to reinforce further with a victory on infrastructure.

Faiz Shakir, who managed Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, said Democrats did not need to worry about making deep inroads into Mr. Trump’s base. But if Mr. Biden and his party managed to reclaim a sliver of the working-class community that had recently shifted right, he said, it would make them markedly stronger for 2022 and beyond.

“All you need to focus on is a 5 percent strategy,” Mr. Shakir said. “What 5 percent of this base do you think you can attract back?”

But Mr. Shakir warned that Democrats should not underestimate the passion that Mr. Trump’s party would bring to that fight, or the endurance of the fault lines that he had used to reorganize American politics.

“He has animated people around those social and racial, cultural, cleavages,” Mr. Shakir said of Mr. Trump. “That keeps people enthused. It’s sad but it is the case that that is going on.”

Tags America, Politics, Seismic, undergoing

World News

1+1=4? Latin America Confronts a Pandemic Schooling Disaster.

Post author By
Post date June 26, 2021

SOACHA, Kolumbien – Bereits zwei von Gloria Vásquez ‘Kindern hatten während der Pandemie die Schule abgebrochen, darunter ihre 8-jährige Ximena, die so weit zurückgefallen war, dass sie mit den grundlegendsten Arithmetiken zu kämpfen hatte.

“Eins plus eins?” Eines Nachmittags befragte Frau Vásquez ihre Tochter.

“Vier?” ahnte das kleine Mädchen hilflos.

Nun sagte sich Frau Vásquez, eine 33-jährige alleinerziehende Mutter und Motel-Haushälterin, die es nie über die fünfte Klasse geschafft hatte, sie könne nicht zulassen, dass ein drittes Kind die Schule verlässt.

“Wo ist Maicol?” fragte sie ihre Kinder und rief eines Nachts während einer anderen langen Schicht beim Bodenschrubben zu Hause an. “Studiert er?”

Maicol, 13, war es sicherlich nicht. Frustriert über die Arbeitsblätter, die ihm seine Lehrer per SMS geschickt hatten – die dem Unterricht am nächsten kommende, den seine Schule ihm seit mehr als einem Jahr geben konnte – war Maicol stattdessen seinem Onkel zur Arbeit gefolgt. Gemeinsam schleppten sie eine riesige Schubkarre durch die Straßen, wühlten durch Müll, sammelten Flaschen und Dosen, um sie für ein paar Cent pro Pfund zu verkaufen.

„Ich lerne nichts“, sagte er, als seine Mutter ihn erneut ausschimpfte, weil er zur Arbeit ging, anstatt zu studieren.

Bis weit in das zweite Jahr der Pandemie hinein steckt Lateinamerika in einer Bildungskrise. Es hat laut Unicef die längsten Schulschließungen aller Regionen der Welt erlitten, in einigen Gebieten fast 16 Monate. Während viele Schüler in wohlhabenden Ländern ins Klassenzimmer zurückgekehrt sind, befinden sich 100 Millionen Kinder in Lateinamerika immer noch im vollständigen oder teilweisen Fernunterricht – oder, wie in Maicols Fall, in einer entfernten Annäherung daran.

Die Folgen sind alarmierend, sagen Beamte und Bildungsexperten: Angesichts der von der Pandemie angeschlagenen Volkswirtschaften in der Region und der stark ausgefransten Verbindungen zum Klassenzimmer brechen Kinder in Grund- und weiterführender Schule in großer Zahl ab, manchmal um zu arbeiten, wo sie können.

Millionen Kinder in Lateinamerika könnten das Schulsystem bereits verlassen haben, schätzt die Weltbank. In Mexiko haben nach Angaben der nationalen Statistikbehörde in diesem Schuljahr 1,8 Millionen Kinder und Jugendliche wegen der Pandemie oder wirtschaftlichen Not ihre Ausbildung abgebrochen.

Ecuador verlor schätzungsweise 90.000 Grund- und Sekundarschüler. Peru sagt, es habe 170.000 verloren. Und Beamte befürchten, dass die tatsächlichen Verluste viel höher sind, da unzählige Kinder, wie Maicol, technisch gesehen immer noch eingeschrieben sind, aber Schwierigkeiten haben, durchzuhalten. Mehr als fünf Millionen Kinder in Brasilien hatten während der Pandemie keinen Zugang zu Bildung, ein Niveau, das seit mehr als 20 Jahren nicht mehr gesehen wurde, sagt Unicef.

Der verbesserte Zugang zu Bildung war eine der großen Errungenschaften des letzten halben Jahrhunderts in Lateinamerika, da die Einschreibung von Mädchen, armen Studenten und Angehörigen ethnischer und rassischer Minderheiten sprunghaft angestiegen ist und viele in die Mittelschicht gehoben wurden. Jetzt droht ein Ansturm von Schulabbrechern, Jahre hart erkämpften Fortschritts zurückzudrängen, die Ungleichheit zu verschärfen und die Region möglicherweise für die kommenden Jahrzehnte zu prägen.

„Dies ist eine Generationenkrise“, sagte Emanuela Di Gropello von der Weltbank und forderte die Regierungen auf, Kinder so schnell wie möglich in die Klassenzimmer zu bringen. “Es gibt keine Zeit zu verlieren.”

Die Pandemie hat weltweit einen entsetzlichen Tribut gefordert. Aber durch einige Maßnahmen ist Lateinamerika härter – und länger – betroffen als jeder andere Teil der Welt.

Die Region mit weniger als 10 Prozent der Weltbevölkerung macht laut einer Analyse der New York Times fast ein Drittel der weltweit registrierten Covid-Todesfälle aus. Und da die Impfraten in vielen Ländern niedrig sind – zum Teil, weil wohlhabende Nationen zuerst Impfungen für ihre eigenen Bürger gesichert haben – verwüstet das Virus die Region immer noch.

Seit Beginn der Pandemie hat Lateinamerika einige der schlimmsten Ausbrüche der Welt erlitten, doch mehrere südamerikanische Nationen verzeichnen jetzt ihre höchsten täglichen Todeszahlen der Krise, selbst nach mehr als einem Jahr unerbittlicher Verluste. Für einige Regierungen ist kein Ende in Sicht.

Aber wenn die Sperren nicht enden und die Schüler bald wieder ins Klassenzimmer zurückkehren, „werden viele Kinder vielleicht nie zurückkehren“, warnt die Weltbank. Und „diejenigen, die wieder zur Schule gehen, haben Monate oder sogar Jahre an Bildung verloren.“ Einige Analysten befürchten, dass die Region mit einer Generation verlorener Kinder konfrontiert sein könnte, ähnlich wie an Orten, die jahrelang unter Krieg leiden.

Schon vor der Pandemie war der Schulabschluss in der Nachbarschaft von Frau Vásquez keine leichte Aufgabe.

Sie und ihre Kinder leben am Ende einer unbefestigten Straße, gleich hinter Bogotá, Kolumbiens weitläufiger, von Bergen gesäumter Hauptstadt, einer zutiefst ungleichen Stadt in einer der ungleichsten Regionen der Welt. Gewalt und Kriminalität sind hier ebenso an der Tagesordnung wie der Eiswagen, der jeden Nachmittag um den Block fährt. Für einige Kinder ist die Pandemie ein weiteres Trauma in einer scheinbar endlosen Folge.

Viele Eltern in der Nachbarschaft verdienen ihren Lebensunterhalt als Recycler und durchqueren die Stadt mit hölzernen Schubkarren auf dem Rücken. Und viele ihrer Kinder haben keinen Computer, kein Internet oder Familienmitglieder, die bei der Unterrichtsarbeit helfen können. Oft gibt es nur ein Handy für die Familie, sodass sich die Schüler um den Anschluss an die Schule bemühen müssen.

Frau Vásquez brach mit 14 die Schule ab, um ihre Geschwister großzuziehen, und es war ihr größtes Bedauern. Das Motel, das sie putzt, ist weit weg von zu Hause und zwingt sie manchmal, ihre Kinder länger als einen Tag allein zu lassen – 24 Stunden für ihre Schicht, mit mindestens vier Stunden Pendeln. Trotzdem schafft sie selten den monatlichen Mindestlohn des Landes.

Sie hatte gehofft, dass ihre Kinder – Ximena (8), Emanuel (12), Maicol (13) und Karen (15) – die sie „den Motor meines Lebens“ nennt, die Nachbarschaft verlassen würden, wenn sie nur diese nie endende Pandemie überstehen könnten mit intakter Schulbildung.

„Ich habe immer gesagt, dass wir eine schwierige Hand bekommen haben“, aber „sie haben viel Lust zu lernen“, sagte sie.

Bevor das Virus eintraf, besuchten ihre Kinder öffentliche Schulen in der Nähe und trugen die für kolumbianische Schüler typischen bunten Uniformen. Karen wollte Ärztin werden. Maicol, ein Darsteller. Emanuel, ein Polizist. Ximena war immer noch in der Entscheidung.

Bis Ende Mai waren die beiden Jungen noch offiziell in der Schule eingeschrieben, konnten aber kaum mithalten und versuchten, die Arbeitsblätter auszufüllen, die ihre Lehrer jede Woche per WhatsApp schickten. Sie haben keinen Computer, und es kostet Frau Vásquez 15 Cent pro Seite, die Aufgaben zu drucken, von denen einige Dutzende Seiten lang sind. Manchmal hat sie das Geld. Manchmal nicht.

Beide Mädchen waren ganz ausgestiegen. Ximena verlor ihren Platz in der Schule kurz vor der Pandemie im vergangenen Jahr, weil sie den Unterricht verpasst hatte, ein nicht so seltenes Ereignis in Kolumbiens überlasteten Schulen. Dann, während die Administratoren von zu Hause aus arbeiteten, sagte Frau Vásquez, sie könne nicht herausfinden, wie sie ihre Tochter wieder reinholen könne.

Karen sagte, sie habe den Kontakt zu ihren Lehrern verloren, als das Land im März 2020 gesperrt wurde. Jetzt wollte sie zurückkehren, aber ihre Familie hatte versehentlich ein von der Schule geliehenes Tablet zerbrochen. Sie hatte Angst, dass sie mit einer Geldstrafe belegt werden könnte, wenn sie versuchen würde, sich wieder einzuschreiben. Ihre Mutter hatte kein Geld zu zahlen.

Die Familie taumelte bereits, weil die Stunden von Frau Vásquez im Motel während der Krise verkürzt worden waren. Jetzt waren sie mit der Miete vier Monate im Rückstand.

Frau Vásquez machte sich besonders Sorgen um Maicol, die jeden Tag frustrierender als der letzte damit kämpfte, Arbeitsblätter über Periodensysteme und literarische Geräte zu verstehen.

In letzter Zeit, wenn er nicht gerade recycelte, suchte er nach Schrott, den er verkaufen konnte. Für ihn waren die Nächte mit seinem Onkel eine willkommene Atempause, wie ein Piratenabenteuer: neue Leute kennenlernen, nach Schätzen suchen – Spielzeug, Schuhe, Essen, Geld.

Aber Frau Vásquez, die diese Ausflüge verboten hatte, wurde wütend, als sie hörte, dass er arbeitete. Je mehr Zeit Maicol mit dem Recyclingwagen verbrachte, fürchtete sie, desto kleiner würde seine Welt werden.

Sie respektierte die Leute, die ihren Lebensunterhalt mit Müll sammelten. Sie hatte es getan, als sie mit Emanuel schwanger war. Aber sie wollte nicht, dass Maicol mit diesem Leben zufrieden war. Während ihrer Schichten im Motel, beim Putzen von Badezimmern, stellte sie sich ihre Kinder in der Zukunft vor, die hinter Computern saßen und Geschäfte führten.

„‚Schau’, würden die Leute sagen, ‚das sind Glorias Kinder’“, sagte sie. „Sie müssen nicht das gleiche Schicksal tragen wie ihre Mutter.“

Im letzten Jahr begann die Schule erst richtig, nachdem sie von der Arbeit nach Hause gekommen war. Eines Nachmittags holte sie Emanuels Lehrer einen Studienführer hervor und begann, eine Rechtschreib- und Grammatikübung zu diktieren.

„Es war einmal“, las sie.

„Es war einmal“, schrieb Emanuel, 12.

„Da war eine weiß-graue Ente –“

“Grau?” er hat gefragt.

Wenn es um Maicols fortgeschrittenere Lektionen ging, verlor sich Frau Vásquez oft selbst. Sie wusste nicht, wie man E-Mails benutzt, geschweige denn die Fläche eines Quadrats berechnet oder ihrem Sohn Planetenrotationen beibringt.

„Ich versuche, ihnen mit dem zu helfen, was ich verstehe“, sagte sie. “Es ist nicht genug.”

In letzter Zeit beschäftigte sie die Frage, wie ihre Kinder wann aufholen würden – oder wenn? — Sie kehrten jemals zum Unterricht zurück.

Der volle Bildungszoll der Pandemie wird erst bekannt, wenn die Regierungen Kinder wieder zur Schule bringen, warnen Experten. Frau Di Gropello von der Weltbank sagte, sie befürchte, dass viel mehr Kinder, insbesondere ärmere Kinder ohne Computer oder Internetverbindung, ihre Ausbildung abbrechen würden, wenn sie erkennen, wie weit sie zurückgefallen sind.

Mitte Juni kündigte das kolumbianische Bildungsministerium an, dass alle Schulen nach den Ferien im Juli zu Präsenzkursen zurückkehren würden. Obwohl das Land eine Rekordzahl von täglichen Todesfällen durch das Virus erleidet, haben Beamte festgestellt, dass die Kosten für die Schließung zu hoch sind.

Aber während die Schulleiter sich auf die Rückkehr vorbereiten, fragen sich einige, wie viele Schüler und Lehrer auftauchen werden. In Carlos Albán Holguín, einer der Schulen in der Nachbarschaft von Frau Vásquez, sagte der Schulleiter, dass einige Lehrer so viel Angst vor einer Infektion hätten, dass sie sich geweigert hätten, die erledigten Aufgaben abzuholen, die ihre Schüler abgegeben hatten.

Eines Morgens wachte Karen wie so oft vor Tagesanbruch auf, um ihrer Mutter zu helfen, sich auf ihre Schicht im Motel vorzubereiten. Seit ihrem Schulabschluss im vergangenen Jahr hatte Karen zunehmend die Rolle der Eltern übernommen, kochte und putzte für die Familie und versuchte, ihre Geschwister zu beschützen, während ihre Mutter bei der Arbeit war.

Irgendwann wurde die Verantwortung so groß, dass Karen weglief. Ihr Flug dauerte nur wenige Stunden, bis Frau Vásquez sie fand.

„Ich habe meiner Mutter gesagt, dass sie mich mehr unterstützen muss“, sagte Karen. „Dass sie mich nicht in Ruhe lassen konnte, dass ich ein Jugendlicher war und ihre Hilfe brauchte.“

Während Frau Vásquez sich in ihrem gemeinsamen Schlafzimmer schminkte, packte Karen den blauen Rucksack ihrer Mutter, schlüpfte in rosa Crocs, eine Gürteltasche, Kopfhörer und Wechselkleidung.

Auch Frau Vásquez war eines Tages zum Marsch gegangen, hatte ein Plastikhorn in die Menge geblasen und die Behörden aufgefordert, eine „würdige Bildung“ zu garantieren, die sie nannte.

Aber sie war nicht auf die Straße zurückgekehrt. Wenn ihr bei den Märschen etwas passierte, wer würde dann ihre Kinder unterstützen?

„Soll ich dir die Haare flechten?“ fragte Karen ihre Mutter.

An der Tür küsste sie Frau Vásquez zum Abschied.

Dann, nach Monaten der Härte, kam ein Sieg.

Frau Vásquez erhielt Nachrichten von den Lehrern von Maicol und Emanuel: Beide Schulen würden die Schüler in wenigen Wochen persönlich zurückbringen. Und sie fand endlich einen Platz für Ximena, die seit mehr als einem Jahr komplett aus der Schule ging.

„Ein Neuanfang“, sagte Frau Vásquez schwindelig vor Aufregung.

Karens Zukunft war weniger sicher. Sie hatte den Mut aufgebracht, die zerbrochene Tafel zurückzugeben. Die Administratoren haben ihr keine Geldstrafe auferlegt – und sie bewarb sich an einer neuen Schule.

Jetzt wartete sie darauf zu hören, ob es Platz für sie gab, und versuchte, die Sorge zu verdrängen, dass ihre Ausbildung vorbei war.

„Mir wurde gesagt, dass Bildung alles ist und ohne Bildung nichts“, sagte sie. „Und, nun, es ist wahr – ich habe es mit eigenen Augen gesehen.“

Die Berichterstattung wurde von Sofía Villamil in Bogotá und Soacha, Kolumbien, beigesteuert; José María León Cabrera in Quito, Ecuador; Miriam Castillo in Mexiko-Stadt; Mitra Taj in Lima, Peru; und Ana Ionova in Rio de Janeiro.

Tags America, Confronts, Crisis, Education, Latin, Pandemic

World News

America Might Be ‘Again’ in Europe, however How A lot Has Actually Modified?

Post author By
Post date June 11, 2021

FALMOUTH, England – Few pictures have captured the rupture of the transatlantic relationship better than that of President Donald J. Trump in 2018, arms crossed over his chest, as he saw Chancellor Angela Merkel and other frustrated leaders in their doomed endeavors the rescue of their summit resisted in Canada.

When the same leaders meet again in Cornwall, England on Friday, President Biden will reverse body language and replace stagnation with hug. But below the pictures, it’s not clear how much more open the United States will be to Europe than it was under Trump.

The transatlantic partnership has always been less reciprocal than its proponents like to claim – a marriage in which one partner, the United States, held the nuclear umbrella. Now that China is overtaking the Soviet Union as America’s arch-rival, the two sides are less united than they were during the Cold War, a geopolitical shift that exposes longstanding tensions between them.

At the reunification of the group of 7 industrialized nations on Friday, the question arises: will this expression of solidarity be more than a diplomatic pantomime – reassuring for Europeans who are traumatized by Trump’s “America First” policy, but have to disappoint them if they do realize that? does the United States go its own way under Mr Biden?

“America’s foreign policy has not fundamentally changed,” said Tom Tugendhat, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the UK Parliament. “It’s more collaborative and inclusive, but essentially it’s the same.”

“Like all leaders,” he added, “Biden puts his own country first. How he achieved this distracted many. “

Few Europeans question the sincerity of his efforts. Even more than his former boss, Barack Obama, Mr Biden is an Atlanticist who has been involved in European affairs from the Balkans to Belfast for decades.

On Thursday he and Prime Minister Boris Johnson presented a new Atlantic Charter based on the post-World War II draft signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

In their first face-to-face meeting, Mr Biden and Mr Johnson each projected unity, each promising that his country would provide hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine to the developing world.

“I will not contradict the President in this or anything,” said Mr Johnson after Mr Biden said that both he and the newlywed Prime Minister “got married over our station.”

But the president has made China the guiding star of his foreign policy more aggressive. While American officials seek European support for these efforts, analysts said their expectations are limited given the commercial interests of Germany and other countries and the fact that Ms. Merkel and other Europeans showed no appetite for a new Cold War with Beijing.

“The Biden administration is determined to be courteous, determined to hear them, and then they will do whatever it was up to,” said Jeremy Shapiro, who worked at the State Department during the Obama administration and is now the European Council’s director of research for foreign relations in London.

“It doesn’t matter what US policy is towards Europe,” said Shapiro, summing up the prevailing opinion in the government. “We’re going to get the same amount out of them in China.”

The skepticism goes in both directions. Many European officials view Mr. Biden’s statement that “America is back” with a yellowish look, even if it is well-intentioned, in the face of the attack on the US Capitol and other threats to American democracy, not to mention Mr. Trump’s iron influence on the Republican Party.

“We live in an era of loss of confidence,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to the United States who chairs the Munich Security Conference, at which Biden was a regular speaker.

The Germans used to think that the transatlantic alliance didn’t care much whether the president was a Democrat or a Republican. Now Ischinger said: “For the first time in 70 years we are confronted with a new question: What happens when a resurrected Trump appears on the stage?”

White House officials have carefully choreographed Mr Biden’s trip to make it a summer festival of Alliance repair. But back in Washington, analysts say its staff moves show a marginalized role for Europe.

Biden in Europe

Updated

June 10, 2021, 8:08 p.m. ET

The White House has appointed prominent officials to coordinate Indo-Pacific and Middle Eastern politics in the National Security Council. There is no equivalent for Europe, nor has the government made diplomatic appointments such as a NATO ambassador or an envoy for Northern Ireland.

Mr Biden has welcomed the leaders of Japan and South Korea to the White House, but has not yet welcomed a major European leader.

On the eve of his visit to the UK, a senior American diplomat spoke bluntly to Johnson’s chief negotiator for Brexit about how the UK is handling tensions over post-Brexit trade deals in Northern Ireland.

There is a similar sense of limited expectations of Russia on both sides, even if Mr Biden meets President Vladimir V. Putin in Geneva next week. Washington-Moscow relations quickly deteriorated in the early months of the administration as the United States faced a Russian hacking operation, evidence of continued Russian interference in the 2020 presidential campaign, and Putin’s masses of troops on Russia’s border with Ukraine.

Russia’s arrest of opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny three days before Mr Biden’s inauguration set the tone for tensions to come.

Far from the “reset button” that Mr. Biden announced during his tenure as Vice President of Mr. Obama in 2009, his meeting with Mr. Putin appears to be primarily aimed at suppressing tensions with what is usually a divided Russia, so that both sides can use it avoid conflicts that could disrupt Mr Biden’s domestic political agenda.

Given what analysts are saying, Mr Putin’s calculation is that Russia will benefit from instability by sowing, they question how successful Mr Biden will be. Europe’s proximity to Russia – and Germany’s dependence on its natural gas – means that instability would pose a greater threat to Europe than it does to the United States.

“The problem with China is that it’s not our neighbor, it’s the US neighbor,” said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a think tank in London. “Russia is Europe’s neighbor, and that reality complicates it, but only to the extent that the US wants to raise the temperature.”

The government’s zigzag course on Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline that runs from Russia to Germany, has left some in Europe scratching their heads. Foreign Minister Antony J. Blinken said Mr. Biden publicly rejected the pipeline as a “bad idea”. But Mr Blinken recently declined to impose sanctions on those behind the $ 11 billion project, saying its conclusion was a “fait accompli”.

The reversal on the eve of Mr Biden’s European tour seemed designed to avoid a break with Germany, a critical ally. But in Britain, which is cracking down on Russia tougher than Germany, some officials said they were concerned that the decision would encourage Mr Putin and weaken Ukraine’s eastern border.

While the transatlantic differences with China are substantial, officials on both sides say Europe is gradually moving in Mr Biden’s direction. The European Parliament held up the ratification of a landmark investment treaty between Brussels and Beijing last month. This followed Beijing’s sanctioning of ten European Union politicians in what Europeans thought was an exaggerated reaction to the sanctions China had imposed for imprisoning Uighur minorities in Xinjiang.

The UK has leaned on the US on China, restricting Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei’s access to its 5G network. However, analysts warn that the change is motivated less by a change of heart about Beijing than by a desire not to get out of step with its most important ally after Brexit.

Some in Europe argue that Mr. Biden’s China policy is not fully worked out, noting that there was no shortage of diplomatic pantomime at Mr. Blinken’s stormy meeting with Chinese officials in Alaska in March.

Europe’s views could also develop further with the departure of Ms. Merkel, who firmly believes in a commitment to China, after 16 years in office and with French President Emmanuel Macron, who faces a difficult election campaign next year.

“The EU’s position on China has hardened over human rights issues,” said Simon Fraser, a former senior official in the UK Foreign Office. “I suspect there is a lot in common, even if different national interests come into play.”

Still, some Europeans have been put off by the way Mr Biden has portrayed competition with China in stark ideological terms – a fateful battle between democracy and autocracy in which the autocrats could win.

For leaders like Ms. Merkel, whose land sells millions of Volkswagen and BMW in China, the relationship is driven by trade and technology, not a possible military clash in the South China Sea.

“There’s a profound psychological problem at play,” said Thomas Wright, director of the Center on Europe and the United States at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Some Europeans believe the US is too nostalgic for the Cold War and too ready to return.”

These are, of course, the early days of Mr Biden’s presidency. Analysts said he had recalibrated his message on China and Russia two months ago when he told Congress that Chinese President Xi Jinping believed that “democracy cannot compete with autocracies in the 21st century.”

Charles A. Kupchan, a Georgetown University professor who worked in the Obama administration on European affairs, said Mr Biden’s goal was to prevent the creation of a Sino-Russian bloc against the West. That requires the help of allies, which is why he predicted that Mr. Biden would not only listen to Europeans, but would also listen.

“This attempt to find geopolitical dividing lines will not find much support from the American allies,” said Kupchan.

Mr Biden appears to be sensitive to these concerns. In a column in the Washington Post last Sunday in which he outlined his travel destinations, he refrained from militant references to an autocratic China. Instead, he wrote about whether the United States and its allies might face a poor challenge: “Can democracies come together to deliver real results for our people in a rapidly changing world?”

Tags America, changed, Europe

Politics

U.S. Help to Central America Hasn’t Slowed Migration. Can Kamala Harris?

Post author By
Post date June 6, 2021

SAN ANTONIO HUISTA, Guatemala — An American contractor went to a small town in the Guatemalan mountains with an ambitious goal: to ignite the local economy, and hopefully even persuade people not to migrate north to the United States.

Half an hour into his meeting with coffee growers, the contractor excitedly revealed the tool he had brought to change their lives: a pamphlet inviting the farmers to download an app to check coffee prices and “be a part of modern agriculture.”

Pedro Aguilar, a coffee farmer who hadn’t asked for the training and didn’t see how it would keep anyone from heading for the border, looked confused. Eyeing the U.S. government logo on the pamphlet, he began waving it around, asking if anyone had a phone number to call the Americans “and tell them what our needs really are.”

“They’ve never helped me,” Mr. Aguilar said after the training a few weeks ago, referring to American aid programs intended to spur the economy and prevent migration. “Where does all the money go? Where’s the aid? Who knows?”

As vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr. led an enormous push to deter people from crossing into the United States by devoting hundreds of millions of dollars to Central America, hoping to make the region more tolerable for the poor — so that fewer would abandon it.

Now, as President Biden, he is doubling down on that strategy once again and assigning his own vice president, Kamala Harris, the prickly challenge of carrying out his plan to commit $4 billion in a remarkably similar approach as she travels to the region Sunday.

“When I was vice president, I focused on providing the help needed to address these root causes of migration,” Mr. Biden said in a recent speech to Congress. “It helped keep people in their own countries instead of being forced to leave. Our plan worked.”

But the numbers tell a different story. After years of the United States flooding Central America with aid, migration from the region soared in 2019 and is on the upswing once more.

Here in Guatemala, which has received more than $1.6 billion in American aid over the last decade, poverty rates have risen, malnutrition has become a national crisis, corruption is unbridled and the country is sending more unaccompanied children to the United States than anywhere else in the world.

That is the stark reality facing Ms. Harris as she assumes responsibility for expanding the same kind of aid programs that have struggled to stem migration in the past. It is a challenge that initially frustrated her top political aides, some of whom viewed the assignment from Mr. Biden as one that would inevitably set her up for failure in the first months of her tenure.

Her allies worried that she would be expected to solve the entire immigration crisis, irked that the early reports of her new duties appeared to hold her responsible for juggling the recent surge of children crossing the border without adults.

Ms. Harris, who has little foreign policy experience and no history in the region, has already been criticized for not visiting the border. At a recent news conference, a group of Republicans displayed a milk carton that had been mocked up to show a picture of Ms. Harris with the headline “MISSING AT THE BORDER,” even as she held a news conference with reporters detailing her plans to visit the region.

The political risks are evident, including the obvious pitfalls of investing billions in a region where the president of Honduras has been linked to drug traffickers and accused of embezzling American aid money, the leader of El Salvador has been denounced for trampling democratic norms and the government of Guatemala has been criticized for persecuting officials fighting corruption.

Even so, Ms. Harris and her advisers have warmed to the task, according to several people familiar with her thinking in the White House. They say it will give her a chance to dive squarely into foreign policy and prove that she can pass the commander-in-chief test, negotiating with world leaders on a global stage to confront one of America’s most intractable issues.

That test begins Sunday, when Ms. Harris embarks on her first international trip, to Guatemala and Mexico, where she is expected to detail efforts to reduce migration to the United States by seeking to improve conditions in those countries.

“Injustice is a root cause of migration,” Ms. Harris said during a White House meeting on May 19 with four women who fought corruption in Guatemala. “It is causing the people of the region to leave their homes involuntarily — meaning they don’t want to leave but they are fleeing.”

While White House officials say their push to help Central America can do a tremendous amount of good, there is growing recognition inside the Biden administration that all the money spent in the region has not made enough of a difference to keep people from migrating, according to several administration officials and others with knowledge of the discussions.

“We’ve looked extensively at different programs that have been approached,” said Nancy McEldowney, a longtime diplomat who serves as Ms. Harris’s national security adviser. “She obviously has learned a lot from what then-Vice President Biden did. And so we are very mindful of the need to learn of both positive and negative, what has happened in the past.”

Foreign aid is often a difficult, and at times flawed, tool for achieving American interests abroad, but it’s unclear whether there are any simple alternatives for the Biden administration. President Donald J. Trump’s solution to migration centered on draconian policies that critics denounced as unlawful and inhumane. Moreover, members of the current administration contend that Mr. Trump’s decision to freeze a portion of the aid to the region in 2019 ended up blunting the impact of the work being done to improve conditions there.

But experts say the reasons that years of aid have not curbed migration run far deeper than that. In particular, they note that much of the money is handed over to American companies, which swallow a lot of it for salaries, expenses and profits, often before any services are delivered.

From 2016 to 2020, 80 percent of the American-financed development projects in Central America were entrusted to American contractors, according to data provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The upside is that these companies have big offices capable of meeting the strict oversight requirements involved in handling millions of taxpayer dollars. The downside, critics say, is that a lot of the money disappears into those bureaucracies instead of reaching the people they’re trying to help.

Half a dozen development experts who have worked with or for the contractors said the companies could easily take about 50 percent of the aid money they receive and direct it toward overhead — including generous salaries for executives — and company profits. When asked about that figure, U.S.A.I.D. did not contest it.

“It’s a business,” said Carlos Ponce, a professor of nonprofit management at Columbia University who has worked for several U.S.-funded programs in the region. “And the same implementers win the contracts again and again, despite having implemented badly in the past, not showing any level of impact and not changing anything.”

U.S.A.I.D. would not provide an estimate of how much taxpayer money spent on specific projects in Central America gets eaten up by administrative costs, noting that the agency is “legally restricted” from sharing its partners’ “proprietary information.”

“It’s an incredibly not-transparent situation,” said Eric Olson, an expert on foreign aid to Central America at the Seattle International Foundation. “It’s like this is a national secret.”

Updated

June 4, 2021, 7:27 p.m. ET

Ms. Harris’s aides say she wants to make absolutely sure that as much assistance as possible heads directly to the communities it’s intended for.

“She is concerned to make sure that we’re getting maximum benefit for every single dollar that we spend,” Ms. McEldowney said. Asked whether that included scrutinizing the money flowing to U.S. contractors, she said, “We are looking at that issue.”

Even when aid money reached Guatemala in recent years, it often brought little change, according to interviews with dozens who worked with or received assistance from U.S.-financed projects in the country’s western highlands.

One, called the Rural Value Chains Project, spent part of its $20 million in American aid building outhouses for potato farmers — many of which were quickly abandoned or torn apart for scrap metal.

“This brings no value to people,” said Arturo Cabrera, a local government official, peeking into an unused outhouse. “It doesn’t generate income,” which is what people ultimately need, he added.

One achievement touted by Nexos Locales, a $31 million project administered by Development Alternatives Incorporated, a company based in Bethesda, Md., was creating an app to enable residents to see how their local government spent money. Aid workers said that many residents didn’t have smartphones, and that they couldn’t afford to pay for the data to use the app even if they did.

The company did not comment, directing questions to U.S.A.I.D. But several people who worked for or advised Nexos said they had grown frustrated at what they saw as wasted funding on dubious accomplishments. They described being pushed to count results like how many meetings they held and how many people attended, but had no idea whether those activities had any lasting impact.

“You felt impotent, knowing what young people or women needed, and we couldn’t do it,” said Alma López Mejía, a K’iche’ Maya Indigenous leader and a former manager at Nexos.

When aid workers started showing up one after another in the town of San Antonio Huista about six years ago, Elvia Monzón was relieved.

Then, it seemed that everyone Ms. Monzón knew had left the area, spread across a mountain range where coffee fields bask in a perfect mix of sun and rain. On clear days, you can see Mexico from the dirt road that snakes through town.

Ms. Monzón’s husband was already in the United States, and her son, then 14, begged her to take him there. When she wouldn’t, he left on his own and, his mother said, made it safely across the border.

For decades, migration to the United States followed a pattern: Aside from some spikes in migration from Central America after civil wars or natural disasters, it was mostly single Mexicans who headed north in search of better jobs and pay.

Then, in 2014, officials noticed the makings of a major shift: Record numbers of Central American children and families were crossing, fleeing gang violence and widespread hunger.

The Obama administration tackled the dicey politics of immigration in part by removing undocumented workers, earning the president the nickname “deporter in chief” from critics. But he also oversaw an infusion of new aid money that would, in theory, make countries like Guatemala more bearable for the poor. Mr. Biden was tapped to help disburse $750 million to the region.

Since then, at least three programs that won more than $100 million in U.S. funding in all have come to San Antonio Huista, hoping to make life better. Yet, in interviews, Ms. Monzón and more than a dozen other coffee farmers here could not point to many long-term benefits, despite the attention.

Aid workers kept coming to deliver lots of seminars on topics in which the farmers were already well versed, they said, such as planting new varieties of coffee beans, and then left.

“So many trainings, but at the end of the day where is the money?” asked Ms. Monzón. “The aid isn’t reaching the poor.”

U.S.A.I.D. said its programs in Central America “have had demonstrable success,” creating tens of thousands of jobs in the region in recent years, helping increase sales for small businesses and contributing to “declining migration intentions” from some Hondurans who received services.

The agency noted that American companies administering aid in the region subcontract part of their work to local groups, that no formal complaint had been filed against Nexos Locales, and that building outhouses or smartphone apps represented a small part of the efforts in Guatemala.

Some programs, like efforts to reduce violence in Honduras and El Salvador, have worked well, independent studies have found.

“All activities funded with U.S.A.I.D.’s foreign assistance benefit countries and people overseas, even if managed through agreements with U.S.-based organizations,” said Mileydi Guilarte, a deputy assistant administrator at U.S.A.I.D. working on Latin America funding.

But the government’s own assessments don’t always agree. After evaluating five years of aid spending in Central America, the Government Accountability Office rendered a blunt assessment in 2019: “Limited information is available about how U.S. assistance improved prosperity, governance, and security.”

One U.S.A.I.D. evaluation of programs intended to help Guatemalan farmers found that from 2006 to 2011, incomes rose less in the places that benefited from U.S. aid than in similar areas where there was no intervention.

Mexico has pushed for a more radical approach, urging the United States to give cash directly to Central Americans affected by two brutal hurricanes last year. But there’s also a clear possibility — that some may simply use the money to pay a smuggler for the trip across the border.

The farmers of San Antonio Huista say they know quite well what will keep their children from migrating. Right now, the vast majority of people here make their money by selling green, unprocessed coffee beans to a few giant Guatemalan companies. This is a fine way to put food on the table — assuming the weather cooperates — but it doesn’t offer much more than subsistence living.

Farmers here have long dreamed of escaping that cycle by roasting their own coffee and selling brown beans in bags to American businesses and consumers, which brings in more money.

“Instead of sending my brother, my father, my son to the United States, why not send my coffee there, and get paid in dollars?” said Esteban Lara, the leader of a local coffee cooperative.

But when they begged a U.S. government program for funding to help develop such a business, Ms. Monzón said, they were told “the money is not designed to be invested in projects like that.”

These days, groups of her neighbors are leaving for the United States every month or two. So many workers have abandoned this town that farmers are scrambling to find laborers to harvest their coffee.

One of Ms. Monzón’s oldest employees, Javier López Pérez, left with his 14-year-old son in 2019, during the last big wave of Central American migration to the United States. Mr. López said he was scaling the border wall with his son when he fell and broke his ankle.

“My son screamed, ‘Papi, no!’ and I said to him, ‘Keep going, my son,’” Mr. López said. He said his son made it to the United States, while he returned to San Antonio Huista alone.

His family was then kicked out of their home, which Mr. López had given as collateral to the person who smuggled him to the border. The house they moved into was destroyed by the two hurricanes that hit Guatemala late last year.

Ms. Monzón put Mr. López in one of her relatives’ houses, then got the community to cobble together money to pay for enough cinder blocks to build the family a place to live.

While mixing cement to bind the blocks together, one of Mr. López’s sons, Vidal, 19, confessed that he had been talking to a smuggler about making the same journey that felled his father, who was realistic at the prospect.

“I told him, ‘Son, we suffered hunger and thirst along the way, and then look at what happened to me, look at what I lost,’” Mr. López said, touching his still-mangled ankle. “But I can’t tell him what to do with his life — he’s a man now.”

Tags Aid, America, central, Harris, hasnt, Kamala, Migration, Slowed