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Alan W. Dowd is a Senior Fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes on the full range of topics relating to national defense, foreign policy and international security. Dowd’s commentaries and essays have appeared in Policy Review, Parameters, Military Officer, The American Legion Magazine, The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, The Claremont Review of Books, World Politics Review, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Jerusalem Post, The Financial Times Deutschland, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Examiner, The Detroit News, The Sacramento Bee, The Vancouver Sun, The National Post, The Landing Zone, Current, The World & I, The American Enterprise, Fraser Forum, American Outlook, The American and the online editions of Weekly Standard, National Review and American Interest. Beyond his work in opinion journalism, Dowd has served as an adjunct professor and university lecturer; congressional aide; and administrator, researcher and writer at leading think tanks, including the Hudson Institute, Sagamore Institute and Fraser Institute. An award-winning writer, Dowd has been interviewed by Fox News Channel, Cox News Service, The Washington Times, The National Post, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and numerous radio programs across North America. In addition, his work has been quoted by and/or reprinted in The Guardian, CBS News, BBC News and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dowd holds degrees from Butler University and Indiana University. Follow him at twitter.com/alanwdowd.

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Scott Tilley is a Senior Fellow at the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes the “Technical Power” column, focusing on the societal and national security implications of advanced technology in cybersecurity, space, and foreign relations.

He is an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Previously, he was with the University of California, Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, and IBM. His research and teaching were in the areas of computer science, software & systems engineering, educational technology, the design of communication, and business information systems.

He is president and founder of the Center for Technology & Society, president and co-founder of Big Data Florida, past president of INCOSE Space Coast, and a Space Coast Writers’ Guild Fellow.

He has authored over 150 academic papers and has published 28 books (technical and non-technical), most recently Systems Analysis & Design (Cengage, 2020), SPACE (Anthology Alliance, 2019), and Technical Justice (CTS Press, 2019). He wrote the “Technology Today” column for FLORIDA TODAY from 2010 to 2018.

He is a popular public speaker, having delivered numerous keynote presentations and “Tech Talks” for a general audience. Recent examples include the role of big data in the space program, a four-part series on machine learning, and a four-part series on fake news.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Victoria (1995).

Contact him at stilley@cts.today.

Migration through the Darian Gap is cut off following the capture of the boat captains in Colombia.

Friday, March 1, 2024

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Source: Story by MEGAN JANETSKY, Associated Press

Darién_Gapmap_source_Wikipedia

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The flow of thousands of migrants daily through the treacherous migratory highway, the Darien Gap, has been cut off following the capture of a number of boat captains who had been ferrying the migrants to the starting point of their jungle trek.

The stoppage began when Colombian law enforcement captured two boat captains in the northern city of Necoclí on Monday. The companies that employed them halted all transport services in protest, effectively cutting off the officially estimated 2,000 people a day that enter the jungled passage hoping to reach the United States.

It has led to a build up of as many as 8,000 people waiting to cross between Colombia and Panama, the Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office confirmed Thursday. The office, a governmental human rights watchdog, has warned that the buildup could “overwhelm the health system, food supply, among other things."

“We can't wait until things collapse and it ends in a violation of human rights” of already vulnerable migrant populations, said Carlos Camargo Assis, the head of the office.

The chaos has once again underscored the long road ahead for officials in Latin America and the United States as they struggle to take on record levels of migration, and unravel the increasingly lucrative migrant trafficking industry.

President Joe Biden has pressured Colombia and other Latin American nations to crack down on regional migration headed to the U.S. southern border. While many Latin American countries have boosted enforcement, the jungles of the Darien Gap have remained a lawless swath of the migratory route north, largely controlled by Colombia’s most powerful drug gang, the Gulf Clan.

Last year, more than 500,000 people crossed the Darien Gap, many traveling from Venezuela, and other Latin American, African and Asian countries. From there, migrants wind up through Central America and Mexico and land on the U.S. Mexico border, where authorities came across migrants 2.5 million times in 2023.

The unprecedented influx of people has returned to the spotlight in the lead-up to the November 2024, and both Biden and former president Donald Trump planned to pay visits to the border on Friday.

The captured boat captains had been transporting more than 150 migrants from Necoclí across a stretch of the Caribbean to another Colombian city from which they began their trek north, Colombia's Prosecutor's Office said Wednesday.

The captains worked for two tourist transport companies, which prosecutors said were a front for transporting migrants, charging between $140 to $300 a head for traveling just a handful of miles by sea.

Such companies take advantage of migrants' vulnerability to line their own pockets, said one official with the Prosecutor's Office, who asked not to be named because he wasn't authorized to speak on the matter.

"They charge them absurd amounts of money (to travel) without even the basic security conditions. They pack them in like canned sardines," the official said in an interview with The Associated Press. “They trick them, they lie to them.”

He said the captures were meant to send a warning to those involved in trafficking, and to “break the chain” of the illegal industry of transporting migrants, which has grown more lucrative as migration has surged in the Americas. But he said the system in the Darien Gap is now so entrenched that he worries that when they capture one trafficker, “two more pop up."

With no clear end to the stoppage in site, the Ombudsman’s Office expressed concern that things could only get worse. The small population 20,000 town of Necoclí faced a similar build up of more than 10,000 migrants three years before, effectively collapsing the city.

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