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Ukraine has exposed Trump’s true identity: as a vandal, an autocrat, a gangster and a fool | Jonathan Freedland
by Evelyn Reynolds 25 April 2025, 16:23
To see the true face of Donald Trump, look no further than Ukraine. Laid bare in his handling of that issue are not only his myriad weaknesses, but also the danger he poses to his own country and the wider world – to say nothing of the battered people of Ukraine itself.Don’t be fooled by the mild, vaguely theatrical rebuke Trump issued to Vladimir Putin on Thursday after Moscow unleashed a deadly wave of drone strikes on Kyiv, killing 12 and injuring dozens: “Vladimir, STOP!” Pay attention instead to the fact that, in the nearly 100 days since Trump took office, the US has essentially switched sides in the battle between Putin’s Russia and democratic Ukraine, backing the invaders against the invaded.On Friday, Trump’s real-estate buddy and special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, held talks in Moscow with Putin. But any resemblance between the US and an honest broker is purely coincidental. On the contrary, previous encounters between the two men resulted in Witkoff parroting Kremlin talking points, essentially endorsing Russia’s claim to the Ukrainian territory it seized. In that, Witkoff was merely following the lead set by his boss: the supposed peace deal Trump is now in a hurry to seal amounts to handing Putin almost everything he wants and demanding Ukraine surrender.Hence Trump’s anger on Wednesday, when he accused Volodymyr Zelenskyy of making “inflammatory statements”. What had the Ukrainian president said that was so incendiary? He had calmly pointed out that he could not do as Trump demanded and recognise Russian control of Crimea, which Russia grabbed in 2014, because it was forbidden by his country’s constitution. It’s telling that Trump should be enraged by a president who thinks constitutions have to be respected.Whether Trump succeeds in making Kyiv buckle or not, the new reality is clear. The US president is taking an axe to an international order constructed in the aftermath of a bloody world war, a system that has held, however imperfectly, since 1945. A central tenet of that order was that big states could not simply swallow up smaller ones, that unprovoked aggression and conquest would no longer be allowed to stand. Yet here is Trump bent on rewarding just such an act of conquest, not simply acquiescing in Putin’s land grab in Ukraine but conferring on it the legitimacy of approval by the world’s most powerful nation.Note how he speaks as if Putin had every right to seize the territory of his neighbour. Asked this week what concessions, if any, he had extracted from Moscow, Trump replied that Putin’s willingness to stop the war, rather than gobbling up Ukraine in its entirety, was a “pretty big concession”.This is not only a disaster for Ukraine, though it is obviously that. It is also the destruction of global architecture that has stood for many decades – and it is hardly a lone case. Trump’s tariff fetish is similarly upending a system of international trade that had made the world, and especially the US, more prosperous. The consequences are already visible, in plunging global stock markets, gloomy growth forecasts and warnings of a recession that will start in the US and then spread everywhere else.Trump’s eagerness to acquiesce in Putin’s seizure of Ukraine makes a dead letter of international law, with its prohibition of the crime of aggression, and that too points to a wider pattern. For Trump is at war with the law at home as well as abroad. Indeed, in three short months, it has become an open question whether the rule of law still operates in the US.That peril is revealed most clearly in Trump’s willingness to defy the orders of the US courts. Judges have issued multiple rulings, seeking, for example, to delay or overturn the deportation of migrants without due process, only for those judges to be ignored or targeted with personal invective from the president. For the latest Politics Weekly America podcast, I spoke to Liz Oyer, a former justice department official fired last month after she refused to restore gun-owning rights to the actor and Trump pal Mel Gibson: he had lost them when he was convicted of domestic violence in 2011. Oyer is a sober, nonpartisan former civil servant, but she told me of her fears if the Trump administration continues to refuse to comply with the law as laid down by the courts. “We will have a true crisis on our hands. They are testing the limits.”Part of Trump’s assault on the law has come in a flurry of executive orders, targeting specific, named law firms that had previously acted for his opponents. He offered the firms a choice: either be barred by presidential diktat from cases involving the federal government, or commit to giving Trump and his administration free legal advice worth tens of millions of dollars. So many firms have caved in, the president now has access to an estimated $1bn (£750m) war chest of pro bono legal services. Trump has been bragging about it, but there’s a word for what he has done: extortion.It’s a favourite weapon of Trump’s and it’s been on display in Ukraine too. Let’s not forget the “deal” Trump wants to strike with Zelenskyy: a degree of US protection in return for half of the revenue from Ukraine’s minerals, ports and infrastructure. This is not the behaviour of an ally, but a gangster.Everything Trump does, and has always done, he is doing in and to Ukraine. Recall the hyperbolic promise he made to end the war within “24 hours” of returning to the White House. It was of a piece with the inflated hype that puffed up his real-estate career – and about as reliable. The same goes for his campaign promise to end inflation on “day one”, when his tariff policy is only going to push up prices.Now he threatens to walk away from Ukraine altogether, impatient to get a deal in time for his 100th-day celebrations on Tuesday. That’s typical too: so often Trump’s grand plans turn to dust because, if he doesn’t get an instant reward, he gets bored and drifts away. Witkoff’s previous role was securing a lasting ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Now that’s fallen apart, he’s moved on to other things.Above all, Trump’s willingness to capitulate to Putin on Ukraine is a reminder not only of his own authoritarian ambitions – he likes Putin because he wants to be like Putin – but also of how serially bad a negotiator this self-styled artist of the deal really is. He declared tariff war on China, thinking he could squeeze the US’s great economic rival. Instead, America’s biggest retailers this week warned that their shelves could soon be empty, thanks to the havoc Trump’s tariffs are unleashing on the global supply chain. Container traffic across the Pacific from China is already down by as much as 60%, meaning Americans are not going to get the goods they’ve come to rely on. Those shortages will lead to voter anger directed at Trump. To avert it, he needs a deal with China – desperately. He goes to the table weak, facing an opponent he has made strong. So much for the maestro dealmaker.There is no mystery to Trump. It’s all plain to see – the habits of the vandal, the autocrat, the gangster and the fool – with Ukraine as clear a guide as any. Not that that is any comfort to the people of that besieged land. They don’t want to be a cautionary tale, a demonstration case of the fecklessness and menace of Donald Trump. They want to be a free, independent nation. Their great misfortune is that the mighty country that should be their most powerful friend is now in the hands of an enemy.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist and the host of the Politics Weekly America podcast
100 days of Trump’s presidency, with Jonathan Freedland and guests. On 30 April, join Jonathan Freedland, Kim Darroch, Devika Bhat and Leslie Vinjamuri as they discuss Trump’s presidency on his 100th day in office, live at Conway Hall London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live More
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Ukraine, Gaza and Iran: can Witkoff secure any wins for Trump?
by Evelyn Reynolds 25 April 2025, 11:19
Donald Trump’s version of Pax Americana, the idea that the US can through coercion impose order on the world, is facing its moment of truth in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran.In the words of the former CIA director William Burns, it is in “one of those plastic moments” in international relations that come along maybe twice a century where the future could take many possible forms.The US’s aim has been to keep the three era-defining simultaneous sets of negotiations entirely separate, and to – as much as possible – shape their outcome alone. The approach is similar to the trade talks, where the intention is for supplicant countries to come to Washington individually bearing gifts in return for access to US markets.The administration may have felt it had little choice given the urgency, but whether it was wise to launch three such ambitious peace missions, and a global trade war, at the same time is debatable.It is true each of the three conflicts are discrete in that they have distinctive causes, contexts and dynamics, but they are becoming more intertwined than seemed apparent at the outset, in part because there is so much resistance building in Europe and elsewhere about the world order Donald Trump envisages, and his chosen methods.In diplomacy nothing is hermetically sealed – everything is inter-connected, especially since there is a common thread between the three talks in the personality of the property developer Steven Witkoff, Trump’s great friend who is leading the US talks in each case, flitting from Moscow to Muscat.View image in fullscreenTo solve these three conflicts simultaneously would be a daunting task for anyone, but it is especially for a man entirely new to diplomacy and, judging by some of his remarks, also equally new to history.Witkoff has strengths, not least that he is trusted by Trump. He also knows the president’s mind – and what should be taken at face value. He is loyal, so much so that he admits he worshipped Trump in New York so profoundly that he wanted to become him. He will not be pursuing any other agenda but the president’s.But he is also stretched, and there are basic issues of competence. Diplomats are reeling from big cuts to the state department budget and there is still an absence of experienced staffers. Witkoff simply does not have the institutional memory available to his opposite numbers in Iran, Israel and Russia. For instance, most of the Iranian negotiating team, led by the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, are veterans of the 2013-15 talks that led to the original Iran nuclear deal.Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s chief foreign policy adviser, who attended the first Russian-US talks this year in Saudi Arabia, spent 10 years in the US as Russian ambassador. He was accompanied by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund who then visited the US on 2 April.In the follow-up talks in Istanbul on 10 April, Aleksandr Darchiev, who has spent 33 years in the Russian foreign ministry and is Russian ambassador to the US, was pitted against a team led by Sonata Coulter, the new deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who does not share Trump’s benign view of Russia.View image in fullscreenAs to the Gaza issue, Benjamin Netanyahu has lived the Palestinian conflict since he became Israel’s ambassador to the UN in 1984.Richard Nephew, a former US Iran negotiator, says the cuts to state department means the US “is at risk of losing a generation of expertise … It’s beyond tragedy. It’s an absolutely devastating national security blow with the evisceration of these folks. The damage could be permanent, we have to acknowledge this.”One withering European diplomat says: “It is as if Witkoff is trying to play three dimensional chess with chess grandmasters on three chessboards simultaneously, not having played the game before.”Bluntly, Witkoff knows he needs to secure a diplomatic win for his impatient boss. But the longer the three conflicts continue, the more entangled they become with one another, the more Trump’s credibility is questioned. Already, according to a Reuters Ipsos poll published this month, 59% of Americans think Trump is costing their country its credibility on the global stage.The risk for Trump is that the decision to address so much so quickly ends up not being a show of American strength but the opposite – the public erosion of a super power.In the hurry to seal a deal with Iran inside two months, Trump, unlike in all previous nuclear talks with Tehran, has barred complicating European interests from the negotiation room.To Iran’s relief, Witkoff has not tabled an agenda that strays beyond stopping Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb. He has not raised Iran’s supply of drones to Russia for use in Ukraine. Nor has he tabled demands that Iran end arms supplies to its proxies fighting Israel.That has alarmed Israel, and to a lesser extent Europe, which sees Iran’s desire to have sanctions lifted as a rare opportunity to extract concessions from Tehran. Israel’s strategic affairs minister, Ron Dermer, and Mossad’s head, David Barnea, met Witkoff last Friday in Paris to try to persuade him that when he met the Iran negotiating team the next day in Rome, he had to demand the dismantling of Tehran’s civil nuclear programme.Witkoff refused, and amid many contradictory statements the administration has reverted to insisting that Iran import the necessary enriched uranium for its civil nuclear programme, rather than enrich it domestically.Russia, in a sign of Trump’s trust, might again become the repository of Iran’s stocks of highly enriched uranium, as it was after the 2015 deal.Israel is also wary of Trump’s aggrandisement of Russia. The Israeli thinktank INSS published a report this week detailing how Russia, in search of anti-western allies in the global south for its Ukraine war, has shown opportunistic political support not just to Iran but to Hamas. Israel will also be uneasy if Russia maintains its role in Syria.But if Trump has upset Netanyahu over Iran, he is keeping him sweet by giving him all he asks on Gaza.Initially, Witkoff received glowing accolades about how tough he had been with Netanyahu in his initial meeting in January. It was claimed that Witkoff ordered the Israeli president to meet him on a Saturday breaking the Sabbath and directed him to agree a ceasefire that he had refused to give to Joe Biden’s team for months.As a result, as Trump entered the White House on 19 January, he hailed the “EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November, as it signalled to the entire World that my Administration would seek Peace and negotiate deals to ensure the safety of all Americans, and our Allies”.But Netanyahu, as was widely predicted in the region, found a reason not to open talks on the second phase of the ceasefire deal – the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza in exchange for a permanent end to the fighting.Witkoff came up with compromises to extend the ceasefire but Netanyahu rejected them, resuming the assault on Hamas on 19 March. The US envoy merely described Israel’s decision as “unfortunate, in some respects, but also falls into the had-to-be bucket”.View image in fullscreenNow Trump’s refusal to put any pressure on Israel to lift its six-week-old ban on aid entering Gaza is informing Europe’s rift with Trump. Marking 50 days of the ban this week, France, Germany and the UK issued a strongly worded statement describing the denial of aid as intolerable.The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is calling for a coordinated European recognition of the state of Palestine, and Saudi Arabia is insisting the US does not attack Iran’s nuclear sites.Witkoff, by contrast, has been silent about Gaza’s fate and the collapse of the “EPIC ceasefire”.But if European diplomats think Witkoff was naive in dealing with Netanyahu, it is nothing to the scorn they hold for his handling of Putin.The anger is partly because Europeans had thought that, after the Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s public row with Trump in the Oval Office, they had restored Ukraine’s standing in Washington by persuading Kyiv to back the full ceasefire that the US first proposed on 11 March.View image in fullscreenThe talks in Paris last week between Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, and European leaders also gave Europe a chance to point out it was Putin that was stalling over a ceasefire.But instead of putting any countervailing pressure on Russia to accept a ceasefire, Witkoff switched strategy. In the words of Bruno Tertrais, a non-resident fellow at the Institut of Montaigne, Witkoff is “is now presenting a final peace plan, very favourable to the aggressor, even before the start of the negotiations, which had been due to take place after a ceasefire”.No European government has yet criticised Trump’s lopsided plan in public since, with few cards to play, the immediate necessity is to try to prevent Trump acting on his threat to walk away. At the very least, Europe will argue that if Trump wants Ukraine’s resources, he has to back up a European force patrolling a ceasefire, an issue that receives only sketchy reference in the US peace plan.The Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, addressing the country’s parliament on Wednesday, pointed to the necessity of these security guarantees. “Any arrangement with the Kremlin will only last so long as the Russian elite dreads the consequences of its breach,” he said.View image in fullscreenBut in a sense, Trump and Putin, according to Fiona Hill at the Brookings Institution, a Russia specialist in Trump’s first administration, may already have moved beyond the details of their Ukrainian settlement as they focus on their wider plan to restore the Russian-US relationship.It would be an era of great power collusion, not great power competition in which Gaza, Iran and Ukraine would be sites from which the US and Russia could profit.Writing on Truth Social about a phone call with Putin in February, Trump reported” “We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II … We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together.”Witkoff has also mused about what form this cooperation might take. “Shared sea lanes, maybe send [liquefied natural] gas into Europe together, maybe collaborate on AI together,” he said, adding: “Who doesn’t want to see a world like that?” More
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Disabled people detained by Ice sound alarm over overcrowded jails
by Evelyn Reynolds 25 April 2025, 11:00
In his three months locked up at Stewart detention center in Lumpkin, Georgia, Rodney Taylor has missed meals and showers, lived with increasing pain in his hips, developed a swollen thumb on his right hand and blisters on the stumps where his two legs were amputated when he was a toddler.Taylor’s mother brought him to the US from Liberia on a medical visa as a small child. He went through 16 operations and is a double amputee. He has two fingers on his right hand. Now 46, he has lived in the US nearly his entire life, works as a barber, is active in promoting cancer awareness in his community, and recently got engaged.Nonetheless, his immigration status is unresolved, and despite having an application for residence – commonly known as a “green card” – pending, on 15 January Ice agents arrived at his Loganville, Georgia home and took him to Stewart.The reason, according to his attorney, who shared paperwork from his case with the Guardian: a burglary conviction he received as a teenager and which the state of Georgia pardoned him for in 2010.View image in fullscreenHis case is one of an untold number of people with disabilities and other serious health issues who are being swept up in the current administration’s “mass deportation” efforts. These efforts are carried out in extreme overcrowding at the hundred-plus detention centers like Stewart across the nation.They also happen without the benefit of two federal offices that formerly provided oversight for healthcare and other issues, and now a situation is unfolding where detainees with disabilities like Taylor are increasingly at risk of life-altering outcomes and even death, experts say.“It’s the perfect storm for abuses to occur – including negligence,” said Joseph Nwadiuko, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who researches the immigration detention system. “Deaths are much more likely … [and] we haven’t thought about the healthcare implications of what’s developing,” he said.The immigration detention system was already a precarious, potentially unsafe place for detainees with disabilities, according to experts and a handful of current and former employees with the Department of Homeland Security – Ice’s parent agency.But when the current administration closed the office for civil rights and civil liberties (CRCL) and the office of the immigration detention ombudsman (Oido) last month, detainees such as Taylor were left with less protection than ever – at a time when nearly 48,000 detainees are locked up nationwide, the highest number since October 2019.“It’s all happening in the dark,” said Sarah Owings, Taylor’s attorney, speaking of conditions facing her client and others like him.Taylor spoke to the Guardian from Stewart. When he was detained in front of his house, he was only days away from picking up new prosthetic legs; the ones he was using were too tight. Then the detention center gave him shoes that didn’t fit the legs and trying to walk “felt like walking on concrete on my knees”, he said.In addition, the prosthetic legs have batteries that require eight hours of charging a day. But after being locked up at Stewart, he didn’t even see a doctor for three days, and in the ensuing months, the facility has never been able to arrange for eight hours of charging, allowing only several hours at a time. The result: the batteries die and the legs don’t bend, creating more pain in Taylor’s hips.Taylor and Owings sought a medical leave, in order to see the doctor who could at least fit him for the new prosthetic legs – and were denied. A second petition is “under review”, he said.In the meantime, walking to the cafeteria to eat has proved too painful. Other detainees brought him meals for awhile, but often had to argue with guards for permission. A case manager took over the chore, often arriving at least an hour after meals.Staff also offered Taylor a wheelchair – but he can’t push it, as his right hand only has two fingers, and his thumb has swollen and become painful since he was detained.Taylor’s case was one of several featured in a CNN story about people facing possible deportation after decades of living in the US. Afterwards, he said, “the warden came to me and said, ‘Tell me what you need.’” He told him about his legs and thumb. “I haven’t heard a response yet,” Taylor said. “It’s stressful.”Taylor told the Guardian he was not the only detainee at Stewart with medical issues. He met another detainee who suffered an infection and couldn’t walk; the man had to wait about a month to get crutches.“Unless you’re dying or bleeding out … they’re not going to come,” he said a guard told him and several others. “They think, ‘Everybody is getting deported soon … and fixing your issue is not our concern – getting you outta here is our concern. Why spend all this extra money?’” said Taylor.The situation is the same at other Ice detention facilities, several experts told the Guardian. They mentioned Krome, in Miami, Florida, where at least three detainees have died in recent months and others with conditions such as HIV have gone weeks without medicine.Amy Zeidan, a professor of emergency medicine at Atlanta’s Emory University who has researched healthcare in the immigration detention system, said that increasing overcrowding also worsens a chronic workforce shortage. “They don’t have enough qualified people,” she said. “They don’t have the people they need to provide appropriate care.”These conditions “are emblematic of the system” under the current administration, said a DHS staffer who preferred anonymity to avoid retaliation.Michelle Brané was the ombudsman at the Oido until the office of 100-plus employees was shut down, doing away with inspections of immigration detention facilities – both announced and unannounced; responses to complaints; and policy recommendations for improving such aspects of detention as healthcare. Her office “deescalated situations that are now being exacerbated [by] … increasing detentions”, she said.The DHS sees things differently.“These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining [the department’s] mission,” said a DHS spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, in March, regarding shuttering the Oido and the CRCL, which handled more in-depth investigations of healthcare and other issues. Ice did not respond to a query from the Guardian.This attitude, said Brané, shows a “disdain for meeting basic humane conditions”, adding that her office was “created by statute and funded by Congress”.The former ombudsman is concerned about the situation facing detainees with disabilities and other serious health issues. “Ultimately, I’m worried people will die, or suffer irreparable harm – and dying shouldn’t be the point at which we start caring,” she said. “We shouldn’t be a country that is willingly mistreating people.” More
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Want to beat authoritarianism? Look to Latin America | Greg Grandin
by Evelyn Reynolds 25 April 2025, 10:00
Inspiration on how to beat back authoritarianism is in short supply, but those searching for hope in these dark times might consider Latin America.It’s not the first place that comes to mind when thinking about democracy, associated as it is with coups, death squads, dictatorships, inequality, drug violence and now a country, El Salvador, offering itself up to Donald Trump as an offshore prison colony for deportees.It is a bleak place in many ways, especially for the jobless and the poor who flee their home countries in search of a better life somewhere else, often in the United States. The bleakness, though, only highlights the paradox: for all its maladies, for all its rightwing dictators and leftwing caudillos, for all its failings when it comes to democratic institutions, the region’s democratic spirit is surprisingly vital.Other areas of the world emerged broken from the cold war, roiled by resource conflicts, religious fundamentalism and ethnic hatreds. Think of the bloody Balkans of the 1990s or 1994’s Rwandan genocide.Not Latin America, where, by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, most of its anti-communist dictatorships had given way to constitutional rule. With the jackboot off their necks, reformers went on the offensive, seeking to redeem not just democracy but social democracy.Today, in the United States at least, the concept of democracy is generally defined minimally, as comprising regularly held elections, a commitment to due process to protect individual rights, and institutional stability. But earlier, in the middle of the last century, a more robust vision that included economic rights prevailed – that indeed the second world war was fought not just against fascism but for social democracy. “Necessitous men are not free men,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt liked to say. Reporting from Europe in late 1945, William Shirer described a groundswell demand for social democracy, in an article headlined: Germany is finished, communists distrusted, majority wants socialism.Latin America joined in the demand, and by 1945 nearly every country understood citizenship as entailing both individual and social rights. Latin Americans broadened classical liberalism’s “right to life” to mean a right to a healthy life, which obligated the state to provide healthcare. “Democracy, political as well as social and economic,” wrote Hernán Santa Cruz, a childhood friend of Salvador Allende and a Chilean UN delegate who helped Eleanor Roosevelt draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “comprises, in my mind, an indivisible whole”.That whole was shattered to pieces by the death-squad terror of the cold war, much of it patronized by Washington, followed by the free-market neoliberal economics pushed on Latin America during that war.Yet once the repression abated and citizens were free to vote their preference, they began to elect social democrats as presidents, men and women who represented a variety of historical social movements: feminists, trade unionists, peasant organizers, Indigenous rights campaigners, heterodox economists, environmentalists and liberation theologians. Today, a large majority of Latin Americans live in countries governed by the center left. Despite the best efforts of Friedrich von Hayek and his libertarian followers in the region to convince them otherwise, most Latin Americans do not believe that welfare turns citizens into serfs.Pankaj Mishra, in his survey of the horrors inflicted on Palestinians, has written about the “profound rupture” in the “moral history of the world” since 1945. No region has done more to heal that rupture than Latin America.And no region has had as much experience beating back fascists, long after the second world war had ended, than Latin America. Rightwing authoritarians, gripped by the same obsessions that move Trump supporters in the United States, have some momentum, though they haven’t been able to escalate occasional electoral victories, including in Argentina and Ecuador, into a full-on continental kulturkampf.Center-left democrats hold the right at bay by putting forth an expansive social-democratic agenda, one flexible enough to include demands for sexual and racial equality. As the US rolls back abortion rights, momentum in Latin America moves in the other direction – Argentina, Mexico and Colombia either decriminalizing or legalizing abortion. Gay marriage and same-sex civil unions have been recognized in 11 countries.Spasms of ethnonationalist rage gripped much of the world the 1990s – Indonesia’s 1998 anti-Chinese rampage, for example. In contrast, Indigenous peoples in countries including Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and Guatemala burst into politics as the best bearers of the social democratic tradition, adding environmentalism and cultural rights to the standard menu of economic demands. Today, many countries have retreated behind an aggrieved nationalism. For the most part, Latin Americans have not. Their reaction to the depredations of corporate globalization is rarely expressed in xenophobic, antisemitic or conspiratorial tropes, as a struggle against “globalists”. Nationalism in Latin America has long been understood as a gateway to universalism.Frontline activists stand unbowed before police batons and paramilitary guns. In 2022, Latin America clocked the world’s highest murder rate of environmental activists. Unionists, students, journalists, and women’s and peasant rights activists are assassinated at a regular clip. Yet organizing continues. In Brazil during the four-year presidency of the Trump-like Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023), the Landless Workers’ Movement, already the largest social movement in the world, grew even larger.When it comes to interstate relations, Latin America is one of the most peaceful regions. There is no nuclear competition, thanks to one of the most successful arms control treaties in history, the 1967 Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.In 1945, Latin American diplomats drew on their long history in opposing Washington’s interventionism to play a key role in founding the liberal multilateral order, the global system of governance now upended by Trump. Most importantly, the region’s leaders insisted that nations should be organized around the premise of cooperation, not competition, that diplomacy should be used to settle differences, and that war should be a last resort. Their post-cold war counterparts have loudly defended these principles, first against George W Bush during the war on terror, and more recently against Joe Biden and Trump, insisting that the art of diplomacy must be relearned. “Brazil has no enemies,” the country’s defense minister once said, notable considering that the Pentagon has marked out the entire globe as a battlefield.Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, among others, have criticized the return to power politics and balance-of-power diplomacy. If the past teaches anything, they say, it is that opening a belligerent multi-front balance of power – with the United States pushing against China, pushing against Russia, with all countries, everywhere, angling for dominance – will lead to more confrontation, more war. As with the United States’s shapeshifting, amorphous domestic culture war, there is no clear endgame to this new era of militarized economic competition, of war by proxy and privateer, which only increases the odds of conflict spinning out of control.One need not romanticize Latin America. To recognize the strength of the social democratic ideal in Latin America does not require one to celebrate all those who call themselves socialists, in Nicaragua and Venezuela, for example. And even those we might celebrate, such as Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum or Chile’s Gabriel Boric, preside over states loaded with significant amount of repressive power, often directed at some of their country’s most vulnerable, such as Mapuche activists in southern Chile.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut there is no other region of the world that so persistently continues to insist on taking the Enlightenment at its word, whose leftwing politicians and social movements win by advancing a program of universal humanism. Trump has transformed the United States government into a predator-state, a tormenter of citizens and non-citizens alike. Latin American social democrats – Lula in Brazil and Mexico’s Sheinbaum, Uruguay’s Yamandú Orsi, and Petro in Colombia, among others – do what they can to use state power to fulfill an obligation: the ideal that all people should live in dignity.The forcefulness in which Latin American leaders such as Lula and Sheinbaum defend social rights contrasts with the timidity of the Democratic party. Biden did pass legislation suggesting it was breaking with the old neoliberal order. But Biden’s team couldn’t find its voice, unable to link a reinvestment in national industry with a renewed commitment to social citizenship. Democrats are shrill in denouncing Trump’s extremism even as they are timid in offering an alternative.Confronted with a existential crisis that people feel in their bones, the Democratic party puts forth weak-tea fixes in an enervating technocratic jargon, its counselors saying the lesson of Kamala Harris’s loss is that the party has to think even smaller, has to shake off its activist constituencies and move to the center.A recent op-ed in the New York Times urged Democrats to lay out their own Project 2029, to counter the conservative thinktank Heritage Foundation’s influential Project 2025. What did the author of the op-ed believe should be in this new project? A call for national healthcare? No. Affordable housing? No. Paid vacations, universal childcare or an increase in the minimum wage? None of that. He suggested that the Democrats promise to streamline regulations and improve “the quality” of “customer-service interactions”.Woodrow Wilson imagined a world without war. FDR imagined a world without fear or want. Today’s would-be governing liberals in the United States imagine nothing. They treat the promise of a humane future – or of any future at all – like a weight from the past, hard to bear, easy to toss aside.Democrats in the United States can’t simply mimic social democrats in Latin America; they operate in vastly different political contexts. But Latin America is a useful mirror, reflecting the considerable distance Democrats in the US have drifted from New Deal values. They might want to read Roosevelt’s Faith of the Americas speech, where he said that the best way to defuse extremism was to use government action to ensure “a more abundant life to the peoples of the whole world”.Latin America social democrats today – and not the Democratic party in the United States – are the true heirs of FDR’s vision. They know that if democracy is to be something more than a heraldic device, it must confront entrenched power. Latin American reformers know that the way to beat today’s new fascists is the same as it was in the 1930s and 1940s: by welding liberalism to a forceful agenda of social rights, by promising, in a voice simple, clear and sure, to improve the material conditions of people’s lives.“People have to have hope again,” as Lula put it in his most recent successful run for re-election, “and a full belly, with morning coffee and lunch and dinner”.What’s giving me hope nowWhat gives me hope is that in a place like Latin America, where the forces of reaction are so fierce, social movements led by feminists, peasants, first peoples, and gay and trans activists continue to fight back against fierce repression with enormous courage. Political theorists like to measure “democracy” according to institutional stability and free elections, and by that standard, many places in Latin America come up short. But if we measure democracy by courage, by a tenacity to continue to fight for universal, humane values, for a more sustainable, more equal, more human world, then Latin America carries forward the democratic ideal.
Greg Grandin, the C Vann Woodward professor of history at Yale, is the author of the recently published, America, América: A New History of the New World, from which parts of this essay were based. More
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Bill Maher calls Larry David’s satire of his Trump dinner ‘kind of insulting to 6 million dead Jews’
by Evelyn Reynolds 25 April 2025, 02:02
Bill Maher has responded to Larry David’s satirical essay in the New York Times that compared Maher’s glowing account of having dinner with Donald Trump to dining with Adolf Hitler.Maher, a vocal critic of Trump in the past, had dinner with the US president and a group of his high-profile supporters, including their mutual friend Kid Rock, on 31 March. On an episode of his talkshow Real Time on 11 April, Maher described Trump as “gracious” and “much more self-aware than he lets on”, saying: “Everything I’ve ever not liked about him was – I swear to God – absent, at least on this night with this guy.”The New York Times then published a satirical piece written by the Curb Your Enthusiasm creator, a first-person account from a critic of Hitler who accepts a dinner invitation from the Führer and ends up deciding “we’re not that different, after all”.“I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship,” David wrote.“But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side – even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.”Appearing on Piers Morgan’s talkshow Uncensored on Thursday, Maher said: “First of all, it’s kind of insulting to 6 million dead Jews … It’s an argument you kind of lost just to start it. Look, maybe it’s not completely logically fair, but Hitler has really kind of got to stay in his own place. He is the GOAT of evil.”Maher told Morgan he considered David a friend, and didn’t know about the piece until his publicist told him it had been published. “This wasn’t my favourite moment of our friendship,” he said.“Nobody has been harder, and more prescient, I must say, about Donald Trump than me. I don’t need to be lectured on who Donald Trump is. Just the fact that I met him in person didn’t change that. The fact that I reported honestly is not a sin either.”Maher told Morgan he didn’t want to “make this constantly personal with me and Larry”, saying: “We might be friends again.”“I can take a shot and I can also take it when people disagree with me. That’s not exactly the way I would’ve done it.“Again, the irony: let’s go back to what my original thing was. There’s got to be a better way than hurling insults and not talking to people. If I can talk to Trump, I can talk to Larry David too.” More
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California’s economy surpasses Japan’s as it becomes fourth largest in world
by Evelyn Reynolds 24 April 2025, 21:08
California’s economy has surpassed Japan’s, making the Golden state the fourth largest economy in the world, governor Gavin Newsom announced on Thursday.The state’s nominal GDP reached $4.1tn, according to data from the International Monetary Fund and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, edging out Japan’s $4.02tn nominal GDP. California now ranks behind the US at $29.18tn, China at $18.74tn and Germany at $4.65tn.Along with the tech and entertainment industry capitals, the state, which has a population of nearly 40 million people, is the center for US manufacturing output and is the country’s largest agricultural producer.“California isn’t just keeping pace with the world – we’re setting the pace. Our economy is thriving because we invest in people, prioritize sustainability, and believe in the power of innovation,” Newsom said in a statement.The state has outperformed the world’s top economies with a growth rate in 2024 of 6% compared with the US’s 5.3%, China’s 2.6% and Germany’s 2.9%. This week’s new rankings come six years after California surpassed the United Kingdom and became the world’s fifth largest economy.Newsom noted, however, that the Trump administration’s agenda endangers California’s economic interests.“And, while we celebrate this success, we recognize that our progress is threatened by the reckless tariff policies of the current federal administration. California’s economy powers the nation, and it must be protected.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCalifornia last week became the first state to sue the federal government over Donald Trump’s tariff policies, and has argued that the president’s actions are unlawful and that constitution explicitly grants Congress the power to impose tariffs.“No state is poised to lose more than the state of California,” Newsom said during a press conference announcing the lawsuit. “It’s a serious and sober moment, and I’d be … lying to you if I said it can be quickly undone.”California is a major contributor to economic growth nationally, with the money it sends to the federal government outpacing what it receives in federal funding by $83bn, according to a statement from Newsom’s office.Despite an enormous shortage of affordable housing that has fueled a homelessness crisis in the state, the population has grown in recent years. Meanwhile, last year the state reported its tourism spending had hit an all-time high – though California has seen a drop in some areas.Canadian tourism in California was down 12% in February compared with the same month last year amid Trump’s tariff war. In response, the state has announced a new campaign to draw Canadians back, while one city has put up pro-Canada signs across its downtown. More
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DNC chair rebukes David Hogg over plan to primary ‘out of touch’ Democrats
by Evelyn Reynolds 24 April 2025, 20:22
Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, has announced a proposal requiring party officials to remain neutral in primary elections, challenging activist David Hogg to choose between his vice-chair post and his pledge to unseat “asleep-at-the-wheel” incumbents.As Democrats scramble to rebuild their tarnished brand after a devastating loss to Donald Trump in 2024, party officials are escalating a confrontation with the 25-year-old progressive activist who was elected to serve as a vice-chair in February.“If you want to challenge incumbents, you’re more than free to do that, but just not as an officer of the DNC, because our job is to be neutral arbiters,” Martin said on a call with reporters on Thursday. “We can’t be both the referee and also the player at the same time. You have to make a decision.”Martin officially presented the neutrality pledge on Thursday, days after Hogg announced plans to spend $20m to primary “out-of-touch” and “ineffective” Democratic incumbents through his grassroots organization Leaders We Deserve – an unprecedented move for a high-ranking party official.The effort has put Hogg on a collision course with his own party, which has traditionally not opposed incumbents, preferring instead to use its resources against Republicans.Martin emphasized that he had “great respect” for Hogg, who became an outspoken gun safety advocate after surviving the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. “But it’s important for us to maintain the trust that we have built with Democratic voters and to keep our thumb off the scale as party officers,” he added.“We hope that he realizes that he got elected to be an officer of the DNC, which means that we remain neutral,” Jane Kleeb, the Nebraska Democratic party chair and president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, said on the call. She said many state parties already forbid officials from “putting our thumb on the scale” in Democratic primaries.“Voters get to decide who our candidates are, not party officials,” she said.If approved by DNC members at the party’s August meeting, the resolution would in effect force Hogg to choose between remaining a national party vice-chair or step aside from Leaders We Deserve, which he co-founded.The standoff comes as Democrats’ popularity has fallen dramatically, even as approval of the president drops. Since Trump’s return to power, liberal voters have swarmed town halls, rallies and protests to vent their disapproval of the Trump administration – but also a pent-up desire for generational change in Democratic leadership.“Anybody who believes our country is in an existential moment, and who sees the sole opposition party at a record low approval with the public, should want to both change the face of our party in primaries and fix the party from the inside,” Adam Green, the co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said in a statement after the DNC call, calling Hogg one of the few national party leaders who are “meeting this important moment with boldness”.On Thursday’s call, Martin outlined a plan to ramp up its financial contributions to state parties, especially in traditionally Republican corners of the electoral map. He said all state parties would receive a baseline rate of $17,500 a month, a $5,000-a-month increase over the current DNC contribution. Parties in red states would receive an additional investment of $5,000 a month through the DNC’s Red State Fund, he said.“I’m done with Democrats myopically focusing on just a few battleground states every few years,” Martin said. “We are not simply a presidential campaign committee, the DNC is now the primary hub for building out a permanent political organizing movement across every part of the country.” More
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Trump is jailing immigrant families again. A mother, father and teen tell of ‘anguish on a daily basis’
by Evelyn Reynolds 24 April 2025, 15:00
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View image in fullscreenWhen Jade and her family first arrived at the detention facility in Karnes county, Texas, she wasn’t really sure what to think.“I guess I was confused and scared,” said the 13-year-old. Her parents were doing their best to reassure her that everything would be OK, but she knew they were in danger of being deported.She and her parents were one of the first to be sent to Karnes – one of two detention centers the Trump administration has commissioned to hold immigrant families. At first, she was the only kid – as far as she could tell – in the sprawling beige structure. Immigration officials had confiscated her family’s belongings, including her phone and her Nintendo Switch.There were a few books and games at the detention center, and a playground – but little else to distract her from her worries. “I just didn’t know what would happen to us,” she said.The Texas-based legal non-profit Raices said it was aware of at least 100 families held at Karnes since early March, after the Trump administration restarted the practice known as “family detention” – locking up children along with their parents. Those detained include families who had recently crossed into the US, as well as those swept up in cities across the country. Among the youngest detainees was a one-year-old child.Jade and her parents, Jason and Gabriela, are among the first to speak out about the conditions inside Karnes since being released. Now, back home in Mississippi, Jade said she’s still trying to make sense of what happened. “I don’t know how to explain it. It was weird,” she said. “I still feel confused and scared.”The Biden administration suspended family detention in 2021 amid growing reports of sexual harassment and violence, medical neglect and inadequate food. The Trump administration has not only reinstated the practice, but Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has said the administration would seek to challenge a longstanding settlement that limits the amount of time children can be held in detention.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said that “adults with children are housed in facilities that adequately provide for their safety, security, and medical needs”.But human rights groups and pediatricians have said that these facilities – which are operated by private prison companies – are inherently harmful. In a letter to the Trump administration, several leading healthcare and pediatric groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, emphasized that “detention itself poses a threat to child health” and “even short periods of detention can cause psychological trauma and long-term mental health risks”.View image in fullscreen“Children experience time differently than adults do, and even brief periods of detention can have long term devastating consequences on a child’s development,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. “It’s cruel.”‘I wanted to cry the whole time’Jade and her family had fled a surge of violence in Colombia in 2022, and had managed to make a good life for themselves in Mississippi.But things changed this year as the Trump administration ramped up its immigration crackdown. Jade was afraid to go to school, worried that immigration agents could come find her there, or take her parents while she was away. Jason and Gabriela had trouble finding work – employers had become squeamish about hiring workers without a legal status.“It was a very, very tough situation – it had become impossible to continue living here,” Jason told the Guardian in Spanish.So they decided to leave. Jade packed up her most prized possessions, including her Nintendo and all her favorite clothes. “I was like, I’m excited,” she said. “I’m going to Canada. I’m going to make new friends.”But they never made it to Canada.At first, they encountered Canadian border agents and tried to explain they were seeking asylum. But those agents told them they’d be ineligible, and turned them over to US border officials. “That’s when everything got out of hand,” Jason said.Agents handcuffed him and Gabriela, and drove them to Plattsburgh, New York and then Buffalo. “I wanted to cry the whole time,” Gabriela said.“Our daughter had never seen us like that – handcuffed like prisoners,” Jason added.In Buffalo, they were released from the cuffs, and sent via commercial flight to Texas. “The whole time we are trying to reassure our daughter, ‘Amor, nothing is wrong, it’s OK,’” Gabriela said. “But we didn’t have anything to distract her with, because she didn’t even have her Nintendo, her cellphone, she didn’t have her tablet, she couldn’t listen to music.”By the time they entered the detention center – a sprawling concrete facility set against the dusty landscape of Karnes county, Texas – they were exhausted. “We were in a state of shock,” Gabriela told the Guardian. “Maximum shock – because we didn’t know what would happen to us.”Jade was too young to remember the violence her family had left behind in Colombia, but Jason and Gabriela’s minds constantly flashed back to the threats and extortion they had faced. “It was anguish on a daily basis,” she said.During their first few days in detention, they didn’t know who to call for help. “How else do we fight for ourselves? We have nothing here,” Jason said. “Each day like this was torture.”Officials had confiscated all their things, and the family was given second-hand clothes and towels to use. They were able to buy minutes to make phone calls, but it was expensive.Gabriela and Jason struggled to find the words to help their daughter. “Imagine seeing your child sad because they can’t go to school. And you can’t even say, ‘Let’s go to the corner. Let’s go get ice cream. Or some chips,’” Gabriela said. “How do you explain any of this to a child? Your mom can’t do anything for you, your dad can’t do anything.”“She’s entering adolescence and everything that happens to her now will mark her. Everything that has happened could have broken her in some form, traumatized her,” she added. “That’s what distresses me as a mother.”Eventually a few other families arrived at the facility, including siblings aged three, six and eight. The youngest ones didn’t understand what was happening, so they weren’t as scared as she was – but they were just as tired, Jade said.She liked when the radio played at the detention center, especially when the Weeknd came on. “That’s my favorite singer,” she said. “I just tried to sit on the grass and listen, and look at the sky.”Relief finally came when they were able to connect with lawyers from Raices, who have been working with several families held at the detention center. Jade, Jason and Gabriela were finally released on 25 March – after about three weeks in detention – and their lawyers are now helping them seek legal status to remain in the US.All the families that were at Karnes have since been transferred to a bigger detention facility in Dilley, Texas – which is more remote.“The bottom line is that these individuals have final deportation orders from federal judges,” said McLaughlin of the DHS. “This administration is not going to ignore the rule of law.”View image in fullscreenRaices said that assertion is “objectively untrue”.Immigration judges are not the same as federal judges. And as a result of Donald Trump’s asylum ban at the southern border, “many families have not even appeared in front of immigration judges”, said Faisal Al-Juburi of Raices.At the same time, the administration ended several legal service and education initiatives for immigrants – narrowing opportunities for families inside the center to connect with lawyers, Al-Juburi said.The immigrant rights organization also contests the DHS’s assertion that Dilley has been adequately retrofitted for children.The facility, which is run by the private prison company CoreCivic, is not a licensed childcare facility and thus a violation of the protections afforded children under the Flores Settlement Agreement, a decades-old consent decree that requires the government to hold children in the least restrictive setting and release them as quickly as possible.How family detentions began, ended, and began againThe Trump administration isn’t the first to detain families.For decades, Democratic and Republican administrations have held immigrant families in specialized facilities – and the practice has elicited widespread criticism from pediatricians and mental health experts, and lawsuits from human rights groups.The family detention system took its lasting shape in 2001, and particularly post-9/11. The Bush administration had wanted to ramp up immigrant detention, and promoted family detention as an alternative to separating families and sending children to shelters while their parents were detained.Reports of human rights abuses in these facilities quickly followed. Families with children were held in prison-like conditions, with limited privacy and access to the outdoors. There was inadequate food and medical care, and reports of sexual abuse by guards.But family detention didn’t stop. Even as advocates sued the government and campaigned to close some family facilities, the government built others.In 2014, as families and unaccompanied children began increasingly arriving at the US southern border, the Obama administration contracted with private prison companies to open the Karnes and Dilley facilities, and the US family detention program grew to its largest since the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s.Legal challenges to the practice continued. In 2015 a judge ordered the release of children with their mothers, but then the first Trump administration pushed, unsuccessfully, to indefinitely detain families.In 2018, a 21-month old toddler who became sick while being held at the Dilley detention center died of her symptoms shortly after being released.Though the Biden administration stopped detaining families in 2021 – opting instead to track immigrant families via electronic monitoring and regular check-in appointments – it left in place most of the infrastructure to restart the practice.And earlier this year, the Trump administration did just that.Karnes, which the Biden administration used to hold adults, was recommissioned to hold families. Dilley, which had closed in 2024, reopened last month.Karnes, operated by the private contractor Geo Group, is more like a traditional adult prison, retrofitted with play sets, said Javier Hidalgo, the legal director at Raices. Cinderblock walls are painted with murals of zoo animals. Families are allowed to be together during the day, but at night, mothers and children sleep together while fathers sleep in separate dorms.The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, meanwhile, is more akin to an “internment camp”, said Hidalgo. Before it was a detention center, it was a migrant labor camp. But in the end, both centers are, “essentially, jails”, he said.View image in fullscreenIn past years, the centers were commonly used to hold families newly arriving at the southern border. Officials kept families detained while evaluating their eligibility for asylum, and released them into the US if they passed an initial screening.But the Trump administration has suspended asylum requests at the border, and unauthorized crossings have dropped precipitously. Many of the families in detention now have been apprehended by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials in cities and towns across the US. Some were picked up at traffic stops, and others were arrested despite complying with orders to check in regularly with Ice.“Some of the families in detention have been here for a long time,” said Hidalgo. And it’s unclear how long the administration will be willing to detain these parents and children, including those with pending legal proceedings that could take months to resolve, he said. “Keeping them detained seems like it’s for the purpose of punishing families, and deterring them.”At least one other family held at Karnes – asylum seekers from Venezuela including a six-year-old and an eight-year-old – had also been arrested at the Canadian border, while trying to leave, according to Raices. Others included the nationals of various countries, including Brazil, Romania, Iran, Angola, Russia, Armenia and Turkey.“I’ve been working on issues of family detention for years,” said Mukherjee, who has litigated on behalf of children and families who have faced medical neglect and abuse at various facilities. “And I can’t believe we’re doing the same thing again, almost 20 years later. Reopening of family detention centers exemplifies the cruelty that is animating the Trump administration’s immigration policies.”Back in MississippiNow that she is back in Mississippi, Jade said she feels calmer, she said.“But I haven’t told most of my friends that I’m back, and I can’t take it any more,” she said. “I just told one friend, a good friend, and he said he wouldn’t tell anyone else.”She doesn’t know how to explain to them what happened to her family, or how uncertain their lives still are. It’s not like she knows how much longer they’ll get to stay in Mississippi.It could take months or longer for lawyers to work out their immigration case. In the meantime, they remain afraid of being swept up in the administration’s immigration crackdown once again.So they’ve been lying low, at home. It’s a bit barren, because the family had either sold or packed up most of their things before heading to Canada. But they are glad to be able to wear their own, freshly laundered clothes, Gabriela said.Jason was wearing a shirt printed with stars and stripes. When Jade pointed out to her dad that it also had the words “Land of the free” (“Tierra de los libres” she translated) – printed across the left side, the whole family began laughing.He’d actually bought it to wear for the Fourth of July. “Actually we have lots of shirts like this – we’re quite patriotic,” Gabriela said. They have baseball caps with flags, and red, white and blue outfits for the whole family. “We just fell in love with this country. We love the security, the people. It’s a beautiful places where we live, in Mississippi. We are actually very much in love with this place.”They never wanted to leave. “It is tough, but I have told my wife and daughter that we have to live now, because life may end tomorrow,” said Jason. “Here we have known freedom. Here we get to prolong life a little bit longer.”The Guardian is not using Jason, Gabriela and Jade’s full names in this piece to protect their privacy and safety. More

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