Gate Print Edition 2016-2017

THE

GATE POLITICAL REVIEW

ISSUE III

2016-2017

Editors' Note The Gate believes that politics touches the lives of everyone—not just the politicians who govern, but all people, from the most disaffected and marginalized to the elites at the centers of global power. This is the Gate's third annual print edition, an anthology of the year's best work that captures the breadth of politics from our home in Chicago to the rolling hills of Montana to our nation's capital. Beyond America’s borders, this year’s anthology includes stories analyzing bilateral relationships between global powers, psycho-oncology care in a Nigerian hospital, and painful memories from Colombia's decades-long civil conflict.

The Gate’s mission is to support, encourage, and facilitate the production of excellent student journalism in a pre-professional environment while fostering commitment to public engagement and service. The following selections are the result of the efforts of Gate staff and contributors over the past nine months to cover "All Things Politics," which means many months spent researching, traveling, conducting interviews, and, of course, writing, revising, and editing for copy. This group of dedicated and talented University of Chicago students, which includes not only the authors whose names appear on the byline, but also an editorial team that spent hours providing feedback, workshopping, and copy-editing. All contributors consistently demonstrated hard work and tenacity as they took on challenging pitches and developed them into the stories included here. To prepare these articles for the print anthology, a team of editors led by Haley Schwab spent long hours creating a layout, designing graphics, and working with the print shop.

The Gate is grateful for the unwavering support from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and the advice of Matthew Jaffe, Christine Hurley, Katrina Mertens, Ashley Jorn, Alicia Sams, Zane Maxwell, Steve Edwards, and many others as they helped to guide passionate student journalists in their efforts covering politics in all its forms. We are also indebted to David Axelrod for his support of the first annual David Axelrod Reporting Grant, which offered a reporter funding to research, interview, and write a feature-length story in an effort to provide her with the experience of a professional journalist. University of Chicago second-year Dylan Wells used this year's grant to produce an exposé of sex trafficking along the west coast of the United States; her article is featured in this anthology.

The pieces in this edition, along with hundreds of others, are always available online. We hope you will join us at www.uchicagogate.com as we continue to explore, document, and analyze all "All Things Politics."

– Haley Schwab & Liz Stark

STAFF Editors-in-Chief

Haley Schwab Liz Stark

Managing Editor

Hamza Shad

Editors

Jacob T. Gosselin Ridgley Knapp Alexandra C. Price

Copy Editor

Malloy Owen

Design

Haley Schwab Felicia Woron

Graphics

Felicia Woron

The cover photo, depicting a side street of the Medina in Rabat, Morocco, was taken by Alexandra C. Price.

www.uchicagogate.com

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table of contents 2 On The Track Dylan Wells

Recipient of the David Axelrod Reporting Grant, 2016

14

8 Exploring the Future of Memory Atticus Ballesteros

It Takes a Women's March

11 Big Sky Country Gets a Little Bluer

Emma Preston

12

A look at the Chicago Women's March through the eyes of the children who were there.

Used to 22 Getting the Failure Jacob T. Gosselin

Ridgley Knapp

The Impact of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani Ashton Hashemipour

18 What's Behind Gender Violence in Latin America Patricia Van Hissenhoven Florez

20 The Future Sub-Saharan

Psycho-Oncology Treatment Evan Eschliman

Five South Side students grapple with budget cuts and an uncertain future.

24 Djibouti: A New Factor in US-China

28

Relations Will Cohen

Scenes from the Inauguration Luke Sironski-White Images from January 20, 2017, a historic inaugural in Washington, D.C.

26

Moldova at a Crossroads: Decoding the 2016 Election Alexandra C. Price

All of the articles featured in this publication were originally published on our website, www.uchicagogate.com.

Original citations as well as additional images and information can be found there.

The image featured on this page was taken by FlyFrames Aerial Photography.

The Gate | 1

sexual exploitation along the i-5 corridor by dylan wells

2 | The Gate

T

wenty years later, Robin Miller still remembers her first night “on the track.”

Robin’s trafficker had recently brought her from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco, California, and left her wandering through the Tenderloin neighborhood to find clients. Just twenty-one years old, she was confused, terrified, and ashamed of what she was supposed to do.

I was walking around the Tenderloin all night, just walking, and I had to use the bathroom, so I asked at a rental car place.

They let me use the bathroom, but they made sure to tell me that I wouldn’t be able to use it again, because they knew.

I remember being so humiliated and embarrassed that they knew what I was doing. I hadn’t even done anything yet, at that point, I had just been walking around, but they knew, and I knew, and I was just sick with embarrassment.

Robin recalls wearing a pink mini-skirt and a “fluffy, pirate-looking white blouse.”

Her first buyer drove a black Honda Prelude and had been circling past the intersection of Hyde and O’Farrell for some time when a fifteen-year-old girl, who was also working the streets, arranged a deal with him on Robin’s behalf. In exchange for $80, Robin got into the man’s car, and he drove her to a place called The Hot Tubs, which rented out rooms with saunas and small beds on an hourly basis.

The man rented a room for one hour, which cost him $20. Once they got to their room, the man spoke slowly to Robin, and when she asked him why, he responded that he thought she did not speak English.

But it wasn’t because of poor language skills that Robin had kept silent—she was scared and uncertain about what to do during her first night of work. Today, she still remembers his face “as clear as day.”

The room at The Hot Tubs smelled strongly of chlorine. The floor was cement, the walls had hooks where people could hang their clothes, and the bed was more like a mat, covered in a cheap vinyl fabric.

During her hour in the room, Robin felt “disconnected” from her surroundings, like she was not actually there. She remembers this as the first moment in her life when she dissociated herself from her situation and imagined she was somewhere else in order to cope. At the end of the hour, the buyer dropped Robin back off at Hyde and O’Farrell. She does not remember the rest of the night or if she had

another “date,” because she tried to block the experience from her memory. Even now, recounting the story twenty years later, Robin chokes up while describing the disbelief and fear of her first night on the job.

Despite her efforts to forget this part of her past, Robin’s memories of her “dehumanizing and terrifying” six years “in the life” remain clear. Robin was trafficked up and down the Interstate 5 corridor, a prominent sex trafficking route that spans the west coast of North America, from Canada to Mexico. She lived in motels or on the street with her pimp, with whom she had three children. Eventually, Robin turned to crack cocaine to help her cope with the hardships of trafficking until she was able to escape.

Robin was raised in Vancouver, Washington, in what she describes as “your average, dysfunctional family.” Growing up, she had low self-esteem stemming from insecurities about her body. She started drinking when she was fourteen years old.

Shortly after, she started smoking weed, and by the time she was sixteen, she was dropping acid. Looking back, Robin says she had “problematic” relationships. She was raped by a twenty-six-year-old when she was only sixteen, but she did not realize at the time that his actions constituted sexual assault. Her parents “did not know a lot of what was happening” in her life.

Nevertheless, Robin graduated from high school and went on to attend Boise State University.

In college, Robin spent most of her time partying, and left school before finishing her degree in order to find a job at home in Vancouver. Instead, heavy drinking coupled with a desire to get “attention from men, even if it was just physical [with no] kind of substance,” continued to be the main focus in her life.

She began spending time with a family from Chicago that had recently moved to Vancouver. Many of the women in the family had been prostituted, some of the men were pimps, and most suffered from addiction. Members of the family helped convince Robin to go work at a strip club in Portland, Oregon. Immediately after her arrival in Portland, “some pimps from Las Vegas” started grooming her for prostitution and exploitation. Within two weeks of starting work at the club in August 1993, Robin was introduced to the man who would later become her pimp.

The morning after Robin met her pimp

at the strip club, she woke up in Tacoma, Washington, a two-hour drive from Portland, with little memory of what had happened. The trafficker then transported Robin to San Francisco where she was first sold, and two weeks later, her first mugshot was taken. For the next six years, Robin was trafficked by the man from the strip club from Hawaii to Phoenix to Las Vegas—but mostly “up and down the five.”

The West Coast Track Interstate 5 is the main highway running the length of the west coast of North America. It begins in Vancouver, British Columbia and ends at the US-Mexico border in Tijuana. The route winds through many of the major cities on the Pacific Coast, including Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, as well as the state capitals of Washington, Oregon, and California. The heavily-traveled passage is ideal for transporting commercial goods, but also for trafficking victims undetected from city to city and across state lines. The I-5 route makes up the majority of what is referred to as the “West Coast track” for trafficking, and it is estimated that each victim traveling along the track can make a trafficker around $200,000 a year, contributing to the $150 billion global human trafficking industry.

Portland has earned a reputation as a hub of human trafficking, in part due to its prime location along I-5. Some have called Portland the largest hub for juvenile trafficking in the country, but a lack of reporting makes it hard to determine the exact number of victims in Portland and other major trafficking cities across the country.

Portland’s notoriety has driven Dr. Christopher Carey of Portland State University to research the city’s trafficking problem. He seeks to quantify the epidemic despite the challenge of identifying victims. Anyone can be trafficked, but the majority of victims are female. In Carey’s study of Portland from 2009 to 2013, 96.4 percent of all victims were female, 2.8 percent were male, and 0.9 percent were transgender. Carey found that 40.5 percent of the victims in his research were Caucasian, 27.1 percent were African American, and 5.1 percent were Hispanic.

The youngest victim in Carey's study was eight years old.

Human trafficking is defined by the Department of Homeland Security as The Gate | 3

cities of all sizes, but largely goes unnoticed by the general population. Alisha Howard and Keri Wilborn, case managers with SARC’s Survivors Together Reaching Your Dreams (STRYD) program for youth ages twelve to eighteen, agree. They say that “it’s baffling to [SARC staff] when people say, ‘I didn’t know that happened here,’ and we’re like, ‘What do you mean?

They’re trafficking right next door to you, or at your kids’ school. It’s happening everywhere.’”

Trafficked and Traumatized “modern-day slavery [that] involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act.”

Any minor in the sex industry is viewed

by United States law as a victim of sex trafficking. Leah Bolstad, a federal prosecutor in the violent crimes unit of the US Attorney’s Office in Portland, stresses that trafficking is not the crime that many think it is. Often, people believe it only involves international victims brought into the United States. However, Bolstad says that none of the cases she has taken on over the course of her entire career have involved international victims. Instead, most victims come from “broken homes” in the Portland area. “People think that [sex trafficking involves] driving in these truckloads of Asian women,” she says. In fact, it is “really an easy crime” to commit.

Politicians on both the national and state levels are also concerned by the prevalence of trafficking in Oregon. Ron Wyden, a Democrat, has represented Oregon in the United States Senate since 1996 and previously served in the House of Representatives from 1981 to 1996. “The I-5 corridor is a real magnet for some of these really horrible sex traffickers,” he told the Gate.

“The anonymity of the corridor makes it easier for them to do their horrible deeds.”

Representative Alissa Keny-Guyer, a Democrat who represents Oregon’s Forty-Sixth District in the state legislature, adds that traffickers “keep moving [victims] around so they don’t make any local connections that might help them get out of the trade and to keep them so-called ‘fresh’ for consumers.” She too identifies I-5 as a crucial component of the trafficking network along the West Coast, particularly in Oregon.

However, the I-5 corridor is not the only factor in Oregon’s trafficking problem. Bolstad identifies two additional causes: state 4 | The Gate

laws and the state’s liberal culture. She says that Oregon “has very lax rules about sex offenders, [making it] a haven for people who commit sexual offenses, which stems from Oregon’s pretty liberal environment.

Penalties are not as high in this state for failure to register as a sex offender as they are elsewhere.” Bolstad argues that reduced budgets for law enforcement and staff shortages at the Portland Police Bureau also lead to weaker enforcement of laws targeting sex offenders.

Additionally, Oregon has a reputation for being very sex-positive, and Bolstad argues that the pervasiveness of this culture contributes to trafficking. For example, Portland has the most strip clubs per capita in the country. “Who do you think comes here?” she asks. “It’s people who are interested in watching women dance naked.”

Bolstad clarifies that Portland’s status as “a very lax town … a very liberal town is all fine and good, but it comes with a price …

It fosters an environment of a lot of sexually liberal things.”

Nonetheless, staff at the Sexual Assault Resource Center (SARC) question Portland’s notoriety as one of the largest hubs for trafficking in the country, suggesting that the problem is just as prevalent in other cities. Molly Botsford, a case manager with SARC’s Resilient Youth Survivors Empowerment (RYSE) program for young adults ages eighteen to twenty-five, argues that Portland has gained notoriety as a center for trafficking because of concentrated efforts by law enforcement, the government, and organizations like SARC to identify and help victims of trafficking.

If any other city along the I-5 put similar efforts into exposing human trafficking, she asserts, it would uncover its own population of victims.

Trafficking occurs across the nation, in

Entrapping new victims is all too easy.

Bolstad says that it is as simple as “some man approaching a young girl at Pioneer Square Mall [in downtown Portland], and telling her she’s pretty, offering to take her to get her nails done, and taking her out to dinner.” The girl then “falls in love, she’s like ‘Wow, this is the first time someone has paid attention to me!’ Next, the man can say, ‘Well, I’ve spent all this money on you, what are you going to do for our relationship? I know this guy, and you can go give him a blowjob for $100, and then we can get a hotel tonight.’ From there,” Bolstad continues, “it’s really an easy crime.”

Robin says many girls believe they are the “girlfriends” of their pimps, and that their boyfriends will “pick them up and take them to the strip club for lunch, or take them on a call at the lunch hour, and take them right back to school.” She adds that while many people think of trafficking as something hidden, she believes that people are just “afraid to know.” Robin says she could go to the Lloyd Center, a mall in Northeast Portland, and “point out five pimps … [and many] girls who are either high-risk or already in the life.”

Life changes immediately after a victim’s first interaction with a client.

Howard says that from her work as a case manager for underage survivors, she has come to understand that “if it’s something that a youth wasn’t already exposed to, the first time is extremely traumatic for them. [They think], ‘I never thought I would do that.’ The idea is that ‘it’s just a one-time thing that I had to do because I love him [the pimp or trafficker] …’ Then that money runs out, too. Then it becomes something that continues.”

Robin suffers from PTSD, including recollections of painful moments from her time being trafficked. She remembers “very vivid images of the sex buyers,” and

notes that she would recognize the faces of many former clients even today. She remembers the danger that she felt each day from the uncertainty of what she was doing: every interaction forced her to wonder whether she was “going to live through the next sex buyer.” Robin notes that it can be “better [for a woman] to have her own room, do in-calls where the men come to her, because she already knows there’s not a gun under the pillow. There’s nobody hiding in the closet. She knows her surroundings.” Even in this type of situation, however, Robin says there’s no “guarantee he won’t kill you.” She recalls the distress she felt not knowing “who’s in the house, who’s in the closet, or what’s under the front seat of the car.”

One particularly traumatic interaction stands out to Robin. In Panorama City, California, she and another girl were approached by two men who Robin believes were in their twenties. They negotiated a $150 price for a date. Normally, Robin would always sit in the front seat of the car, so she could exit easily, but because the men wanted both her and the other woman to join them, she was forced to make room by sitting in the back. The car was a Thunderbird from the 1980s, and Robin says that even to this day, she has an intense aversion to the model. The back seat had no door, but the other woman sat in the front seat and unrolled the passenger side window.

The two men were talking to each other in a foreign language and suddenly started speeding, frightening Robin and the other woman because they couldn’t tell what the men were planning. The other woman opened the car door, and asked them to stop. When they refused, she jumped out.

Robin was then left in the car, alone in the back seat. To stay calm, she pulled out a cigarette, but one of the men grabbed the pack and crumpled it. Robin was terrified.

She pleaded with the men not to hurt her, and told them she had a baby—the first of three children with her trafficker—who was back in a motel room with him. One of the men said “f--- your baby,” and Robin knew immediately that she needed to get out of the car. She pushed the seat in front of her down, stuck the front half of her body out of the car window, and stared down at the pavement.

Before she could jump out of the vehicle, her shoes came off. Robin recalls how each day she would collect money from her clients and hold onto it until her

trafficker picked her or the money up. To protect herself from being mugged, she would hide it in her bra, or in her stockings under her foot so that it was hidden by her shoes. When her shoes fell off, the men in the car saw the money she had made that day—around $500—in her stockings. They tried to pull Robin back into the car, and punched her between her legs. Robin kicked at them, thrusting herself out of the window of the speeding car, and slammed down onto the pavement.

Robin remembers dry-heaving on the side of the road. Her wig fell off. Her legs were bleeding. Her adrenaline was “overwhelming and overpowering,” as she gathered her possessions and started walking back to the motel where her trafficker and baby waited. During her walk back, several men stopped, and she wondered what kind of person would want to hire her in her clearly disturbed state. It was around 11:00 p.m. when Robin got to the room and told her pimp what had happened.

He responded by asking her if she wanted to go back out, since, he said, she would “probably make a lot more money” that night. Robin recalls that “all [she] wanted to do was hold [her] daughter,” who stayed with them on the road for nine months before being taken in by Robin’s parents.

She refused to go back out that night.

Lifeline to the Outside With the exception of other working women, her pimp, clients, and cops, Robin did not interact with many people during her six years with her trafficker. She argues that today, with the advent of websites like Backpage, life is scarier for people being trafficked because the crime is less visible to police officers, with whom she could talk to face to face on the streets during

her time “in the life.” In particular, she remembers the San Francisco Vice Unit, who “were very concerned and supportive, and wanted to help.” She says that unlike other “dehumanizing” police units she interacted with, “they didn’t want to throw us in jail; they wanted to offer us resources on how to get out of it.”

Robin laughs when recalling some of the tactics used by the Vice Unit, sharing that they had a decoy female detective they would use to attract buyers. Robin and the other girls working “were mad because she was so pretty,” and would have lines of people waiting for her. In her head, she would mock the buyers. “I was like, ‘You guys are the stupidest fools I’ve ever seen. Clearly something is up.’” Men caught by the decoy would get a ticket and be sent to “john school,” a workshop to discourage them from buying sex.

Kendra Harding works with Robin at Lifeworks Northwest and is the program coordinator of the New Options for Women and Multnomah County Domestic Violence Program. The New Options for Women program with Lifeworks Northwest is an outpatient program that provides mental health and chemical dependency services and case management to women who have experienced sexual exploitation while in the sex industry.

One of Kendra’s duties is running a john school, “an eight-hour class on the harms of the sex industry from the angle of how it affects women, and all the women who are involved in it,” which allows “johns,” or men who purchase sex acts, to avoid official charges. Harding reports that many of the men are in committed relationships or married with children, and that they fall everywhere along the socioeconomic spectrum. Robin echoes such descriptions and says she knows from experience that The Gate | 5

the majority of men who hired her were married with children. She emphasizes that a john can be anyone: “They’re pastors, they’re doctors, they’re lawyers, they’re teachers, they’re your neighbors, they’re your dads, they’re your cousins, your uncles, they’re anybody. You don’t know.”

From Victim to Survivor Robin divides the time she was trafficked into before and after she began using crack, which she turned to as a way to cope with her situation. At the time,

that had got [her] through was depleted.”

Robin prayed and contacted her mom, who was raising her children. Her mom called some of Robin’s old friends from a residential treatment program she had been a part of. They contacted Robin and offered to help her. Robin was reluctant, but eventually joined a clean and sober house where she lived for three years.

The day Robin left her pimp, she realized she was pregnant with their third child. Still, she was able to rejoin normal life and rekindle relationships with her two older children, even though her par-

“If any other city along the I-5 put similar efforts into exposing human trafficking, it would uncover its own population of victims.” she says, she was a “chronic addict” and reports that she used every day. Harding explains, “when you’re asked … to have sex with multiple men per day, a lot of times dissociation is needed to kind of zone out and be on another planet [when] you don’t want to be in that moment.” She states that in order to cope and achieve that dissociation, “a lot of times substances are used, or the trafficker gets the person addicted to substances, and then they have this addiction that they’re reliant on their trafficker to support.” It’s part of what she calls the “disease of prostitution”: “the older you get, the longer you’re in the game, the likelihood of you turning to a stronger substance is greater,” she says.

Despite the hazards of drug use, Robin believes that her addiction helped her cope with her transition out of the system. In her capacity today at Lifeworks Northwest, she meets daily with women who have been trafficked. For those without substance addictions, she has found that it can actually be harder to transition back into normal life because “without any addiction to focus on,” trafficking victims have to face “the really hard, ugly, raw stuff ” that happened to them.

Robin credits her faith with getting her through her experience of being trafficked and helping her transition out of it. After six long years and a particularly nasty fight with her pimp, she felt like her “heart was turning black with hate,” and that the “love 6 | The Gate

ents retained custody. Robin beams with pride when she talks about driving her daughter to school every day and is incredibly proud of her children’s success.

She is also proud of herself. In addition to the ways in which she can support her children, she has been able to serve as a mentor to women “who are where [she came] from,” which has brought her healing and joy.

CSEC mentor Valerie Salazar knows from her own experiences working with survivors how difficult the transition out of trafficking can be. She stresses that while people think they can just give a survivor “peace and a place to live and food” in order to heal, it is often a much more difficult process. Salazar argues that this type of new environment can be “almost so calming that it’s like a shock to their whole being” and that survivors may go stir crazy, create drama, or sabotage themselves because they struggle to function in such a place. Alisha Howard, the SARC case manager, emphasizes that the organization celebrates the little victories and sets goals tailored for each person they work with, such as going a week without using drugs, graduating from high school, or getting a job.

Victims of trafficking face many challenges if they choose to press charges against their traffickers. Bolstad cites the Federal Sex Trafficking Statute as a document that could do a better job of

making it easy to prosecute traffickers.

Trafficking anyone under the age of eighteen is a federal crime with a tenyear minimum sentence. “Whether or not the trafficker abused or coerced or compelled or used force, if you transport a minor from one state to another to have or engage in prostitution acts, it’s a federal crime, easy,” Bolstad says. The statute also applies to forced sex trafficking, in which victims can be either minors or adults. If the trafficker uses force to compel a victim to engage in sex acts for profit, the exploiter faces a fifteen-year minimum, regardless of the victim’s age. However, it can be difficult to convict someone for trafficking. In some cases, lawyers may need to prove the knowledge and intentions of the trafficker. In her experience, “it’s a very poorly written statute,” because of the challenges of proving intent. In some cases, she has to give up on full trafficking charges and charge traffickers with other, lesser offenses in hopes of keeping them away from victims for at least some time.

Robin’s trafficker is now in prison.

Robin is not sure when he will get out.

She does know, however, that he was supposed to be charged with two new counts of human trafficking, although one of his more recent victims backed out of testifying. Robin was planning on testifying against him in the other woman’s case because she wanted to “tell [her] truth and stop him from doing it anymore to anybody else.” Given her role as a mentor at Lifeworks, she felt that in order to empower other women to testify or take charge of their situations, she needed to show that she was willing to do so as well.

Twenty years ago, however, Robin did not press charges against her trafficker when she left him. She “just got away,” and as a crack addict and alcoholic, was focused on her own treatment. Pregnant with her third child, she “just wanted to move on.” Robin recalls that the support system for survivors in the 1990s was not the same as it is now and says that she is not sure if anything would have even happened had she tried to fight her trafficker in court or reported him to law enforcement. She is glad that survivors now have more legal recourse against their exploiters than they did when she found her way out of the system; she now encourages the survivors she works

with to press charges because, as Bolstad’s work demonstrates, the criminal justice system has improved to make survivors better able to prosecute their traffickers.

Ending Exploitation The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 is the most expansive piece of federal legislation against human trafficking to date. It defines trafficking as a federal crime and requires restitution for victims; it also established the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and the Interagency Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking. In 2003, 2005, 2008, and 2013, the act was further updated. The Polaris Project publishes annual ratings assessing states’ legislative efforts to fight trafficking, based on factors like training methods for law enforcement and victim services. Oregon passed the state’s first criminal statute against trafficking in 2007, and Polaris now designates it Tier 1, the project’s top rating.

Nonetheless, the ranking system does not measure the actual impact and efficacy of legislation, only whether or not it exists, and those who work with survivors of trafficking point to areas where improvements can be made.

Bolstad views court rules about the timeline from indictment to trial as a potential area for change that could counter the

challenges she faces in prosecuting traffickers. “It is really difficult to keep a victim out of harm’s way,” from the time of indictment until the time the case goes to trial, she says.

“It can span years, and during this time it is easy to lose track of where the victims are, [and some] traffickers [are] even capable of finding victims and exploiting them again.”

Because Bolstad cannot guarantee protection, some survivors feel as though the state does not care about their cases or their safety. Bolstad proposes creating a rule that anyone indicted for sex trafficking or related crimes involving a minor victim has to go to trial within a year.

Oregon’s national and state politicians share concerns about how trafficking is currently addressed. Keny-Guyer focuses on jointly tackling issues like education, healthcare, affordable housing, and racism to help stop trafficking. She believes that trafficking can be countered only by a combination of efforts on the state and federal levels. Wyden says that trafficking became an important issue to him after he heard about it at many of the open county town hall meetings he has hosted, and in particular after he went on a ride-along with police in Portland. On the ride-along, he saw girls carrying “enormously long knives … to survive a night on the streets,” which he describes as shocking to him both as a senator and as a parent. Wyden describes trafficking as “a travesty happening in our backyard to

our kids and neighbors.”

Wyden sees fighting trafficking as a bipartisan issue and acknowledges that Democrats and Republicans are both moving toward viewing minors who were trafficked as victims, understanding that “there’s no such thing as a child prostitute [because] … by definition a child prostitute is a victim.” Wyden’s colleagues in the Senate are “starting to ensure that these young girls get treated like victims rather than just sending them off to the criminal justice system.” He hopes that the issue “doesn’t get lost in a sea of screaming on cable TV,” so that “thoughtful bipartisan workaround principles that are common-sense” can lead to methods to combat the trafficking problem.

Robin advocates for more education about trafficking and for building up self-esteem in children. For example, she believes kids should be taught warning signs that people might hurt them. She also advocates to increase the number of trafficking prevention services. However, Robin maintains that only one thing that can stop the problem: “If men stopped buying sex, that’s it. Pimps wouldn’t be selling women or children. They’d be selling something else.”

“I’ve Done a Lot of Healing” In the twenty years since she left her trafficker, Robin still struggles to speak about her experience. Robin is “re-traumatized” each time she tells her story, underscoring the lasting effects that trafficking has on survivors. However, she is proud that her passion to end human trafficking has made her stronger since she began working at Lifeworks Northwest. After enduring six years on the West Coast track, she has built a network of fellow survivors and works every day at what she calls her “dream job.”

Robin commutes from her home in Vancouver to Lifeworks Northwest for work; on some mornings, the fastest route is via the I-5, which sometimes triggers memories from her past. Alone in her car on the highway where she was trafficked, Robin concentrates on the fact that being trafficked was something that happened to her, not something she chose for herself.

“I’m looking around at the trees in my car,” she says, “just knowing I’m safe.”

This article was originally published on January 9, 2017. The photos were taken by the author.

The Gate | 7

EXPLORING THE FUTURE OF MEMORY

by Atticus Ballesteros

P

ressed between a highway, Colombia’s National Cemetery, and one of Bogotá’s most impoverished neighborhoods sits a humble building with a great potential. Through the open window of a passing bus, the building appears to be no more than a short, boxy, sand-colored structure with reflective glass windows. But this view is deceiving. One only needs to approach the building and walk underneath it to realize that something unique and powerful is happening inside.

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation in Bogotá is a space unlike any other. It is neither a museum, a memorial, nor a community center, although it shares characteristics with all three. Built into

8 | The Gate

the ground surrounding the building are offices, exhibit halls, classrooms, a library, and even an auditorium space. Together, the assemblage has a set of lofty goals: to memorialize and empower those who suffered in Colombia’s armed conflict; to educate the citizens of Bogotá about the conflict; and to promote a peaceful future in Colombia, one in which human rights are respected.

When the Center for Memory opened in 2012, it joined a slow but steady movement across the world for spaces that deal with conflict—or, more specifically, moving on after conflict—in innovative ways. Many of these institutions have cropped up in areas hard hit by war, usually decades after the war ends, and often as a

response to persisting violence or a collective ignorance of what happened during the war. The Space for Memory and the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights in Buenos Aires is just one example: what had been a clandestine torture facility from the 1970s Argentinian Dirty War became a museum and a space for human rights groups to organize in 2001.

Amid this growing set of global institutions, the Center for Memory remains unique. Founded in 2012, it is the only space of its kind that opened during the same armed conflict it seeks to memorialize. It is also one of the few spaces for collective memory run by a state entity, in this case by Bogota’s High Council for the Rights of Victims, Peace, and Reconciliation.

In part because the Center for Memory opened while Colombia’s armed conflict was ongoing, the center takes a special approach to projects of memorialization. This approach is shared among similar institutions, and it involves promoting “memory projects” not for history’s sake—not to build an objective archive of the conflict—but in order to help victims, citizens, perpetrators, and future generations imagine what a more positive future in Colombia could look like.

In practice, memorializing initiatives at the Center for Memory tend to be relatively unconcerned with recording the facts and details of conflict, leaving that work up to official archives and museums. Instead, the Center for Memory focuses on the healing process, investigating how sharing individual and collective stories can have a positive effect on those who share and those who listen.

A recent exhibit at the Center for Memory called Fragments and Marks exemplifies this approach. In the weeks leading up to the exhibit, members of a non-profit organization called Fundación Prolongar traveled out of Bogotá to a small town in central Colombia called Vista Hermosa. Vista Hermosa is one of the thousands of villages in Colombia that have been terrorized for decades by land mines left by the Colombian

military and guerrilla forces during the armed conflict. While in Vista Hermosa, Prolongar hosted a series of closed workshops with land mine survivors.

For the residents of Vista Hermosa, the workshops represented the first time that any land mine survivors had gathered together as a collective group. Throughout the workshops, members of Prolongar guided the survivors through a series of creative and performing arts techniques to explore their bodies, their lives, and their collectivity in new ways. They crafted pottery pieces together, only to break them, glue them back together, and paint them in such a way to ensure that the breaks were still visible—a material metaphor for the residents’ bodies, transformed but beautiful.

When the members of Prolongar returned to Bogotá, they arranged an exhibit at the Center for Memory to commemorate the workshops and the residents of Vista Hermosa. Unlike a traditional land mine exhibit that may display decommissioned mines or fragments from explosions, the Fragments and Marks exhibit centered on the pottery pieces donated by the residents of Vista Hermosa, alongside recordings of their stories and lives that they chose to share.

The value of an exhibit like Fragments and Marks varies depending on the audience. For many lay visitors

to the Center for Memory, Fragments and Marks served an educational purpose, combining facts of the conflict with local stories of its impact.

Many visitors to the exhibit were surprised to learn that Colombia trails only Afghanistan in the number of victims of improvised explosive devices. Facts like this, coupled with the oral and visual accounts from the residents of Vista Hermosa, had a dual effect on visitors. “This place not only gives you the history of what happened during the armed conflict and makes it concrete. It also gives so many of the personal stories of the victims and survivors that you feel the effect of the conflict on an individual level,” commented a student from Mexico who visited the Center for Memory in December 2016.

For reporter Juan Alberto Sánchez Marín, exhibits like Fragments and Marks are effective ways of emphasizing the importance of non-repetition, or a “never again” mentality, for ordinary Colombians.

“Many people associate the cyclical nature of the Colombian conflict with the ‘unmemory’ of Colombians—their willingness to forget what has happened in this country,” Marín wrote in HispanTV. “Confronting this ‘unmemory’ is exactly why the Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation was created.”

For the land mine survivors who

The Gate | 9

participated in the workshops in Vista Hermosa, the value of the exhibit extended far beyond any notion of

“Our wounds may become scars, but we can never forget them.” “unmemory.” As one of the participants from Vista Hermosa commented, “Our wounds may become scars, but we can never forget them.”

Instead, the workshops in Vista Hermosa were important to survivors for the creative processes they entailed—for the pottery and movement exercises, which, according to the exhibit, opened up “the possibility for residents … to find new ways of seeing … new appreciations for bodies that have been mended, restored, and transformed.”

Like all exhibits at the center, this one will only be temporary. As part of the center’s commitment to let memory be a process continuously shaped and remade, it runs no permanent exhibits. And just as the Fragments and Marks exhibit was curated by Fundación Prolongar alongside the residents of Vista Hermosa, all exhibits at the Center for Memory are curated in a bottom-up fashion. This means the Center for Memory receives proposals for exhibits, most often from NGOs like Prolongar or from organizations of victims seeking to tell their stories.

In most cases, staff at the Center for Memory will provide little more than limited oversight and resources to those constructing an exhibit in order to ensure that partner organizations can remain creative and autonomous in the curatorial process.

Across the hall from the temporary exhibition spaces, the Center for Memory offers three large classrooms, free and open for use by the public.

10 | The Gate

On any given day, one may walk by the classrooms to see them filled with a memory sewing group, or with people attending an academic debate on the current peace process. Most often, they are filled by members of social and political groups that use the classrooms for weekly meetings.

For many of these social and political groups, having a free space to meet is no trivial matter. The majority of organizations that use the classrooms at the Center for Memory are organizations of victims. These social organizations are largely composed of the individuals most marginalized by Colombian society, such as women, Afro-Colombians, and indigenous people, many of whom fled to Bogotá to escape the conflict. In the Center for Memory, they have found a space to meet and to organize events together.

Speaking about one of these groups, the Costurero de la Memoria sewing group, Juan José Toro of Pacifista noted that these meetings don’t always dwell on the violent events of the past. Instead they provide a space for productive conceptions of the present and future. “This is a space where, every Thursday, victims of different war crimes can congregate to sew cloth representations of their pasts, how they feel in the present, and their hopes [for the future],” he said.

For Virgelina Chará, one of the leaders of the sewing group, “What we do in the Costurero is a form of public aid. This involves, among other things, making formal denouncements of crimes committed against us, constructing memory of our pasts, and providing psychosocial support to each other.”

“For me, the Costurero has given me strength, a way of life, and a better path forward,” says Blanca Nubia Díaz, one of the Costurero participants.

For another participant, Lilia Yaya, having this space to meet “is a form of feeling reparated and reconciled by society. That’s why this space needs to continue existing in Bogotá.”

From its exhibits to its classrooms, the Center for Memory’s overarching emphasis on the process of memorialization rather than the outcome, tied with the practical resources the center

provides to marginalized groups, works to orient historical memory towards the future. In the center’s own words, “We construct the past in order for dreams of the future to return.”

In the end, however, the conditions of violence in Bogotá that led to a Center for Memory are not exclusive to that city. Colombia is not the only country where episodes of violence have rattled the social fabric of entire regions at a time. Many areas around the world, especially in the United States, could benefit from Centers for Memory. And yet the Center for Memory remains a singular institution with a global potential.

In Chicago, a Center for Memory could bring a great service. Whether it chooses to address gang-related violence, violence by police officers against black community members, or both phenomena, a Center for Memory could provide a link between policymakers and communities to intervene in the causes and results of violence, just as it works to empower the groups that are most impacted by violence.

Bringing together the qualities of a memorial, museum, and community center, the Center for Memory model is both dynamic and inexpensive. It provides an innovative space for citizens from all walks of life to meet, to learn, and to find the common ground necessary to begin building a better city together. If there’s anything that a site of collective memory has the potential to do, it’s bridging the current of a divided present.

As conflicts of all types continue to plague communities across the world, leaders and social organizers are encouraged to look to places like the Center for Memory in Bogotá for partial solutions. A Center for Memory cannot do everything, but it can ensure that as wounds become scars, they are never forgotten in search of a brighter future.

This article was originally published on January 29, 2017. The photos were taken by the author.

BIG SKY COUNTRY GETS A LITTLE BLUER

by Ridgley Knapp

T

o have any hope in the 2018 midterms, Democrats will have to try something new. They will have to take pages out of the Tea Party playbook, the tactics Republicans used to take the House of Representatives in 2010. They will have to get mad and stay mad. Most of all, they will have to look to Democratic candidates who managed to pull off upsets in this past election cycle.

One such candidate is Jacob Bachmeier, who lives in Havre, Montana, a small city just south of the Canadian border. Bachmeier won the Democratic primary in the race to represent the state’s Twenty-Eighth District in the Montana House of Representatives. He defeated retired Montana State University–Northern professor Will Rawn by a mere one hundred votes in the Democratic primary, 54 to 46 percent.

Bachmeier went on to defeat the Republican incumbent, Stephanie Hess, by just under three hundred votes, 53 to 47 percent. A Democrat beating a Republican incumbent in 2016 is a rare sight to behold, but that’s not all. Bachmeier was only eighteen years old.

The representative-elect spoke with Gate reporters at the end of December.

Bachmeier attributes his victory to a combination of a spirited grassroots campaign, a “strong advertising game,” and an eagerness to show his face “at as many community events as possible.” “Between my team, volunteers, and myself,” Bachmeier wrote over Facebook Messenger, “we knocked on over nineteen thousand doors in a district with only four thousand doors … we sent out seven mailers and advertised on the internet, radio, and

newspapers.”

Andrew Brekke, chair of the Hill County Republican Central Committee, credits Bachmeier’s “youthful exuberance” as a major factor in the electoral upset.

“He’s certainly taking his fight seriously,” Brekke told the Associated Press just after the Democratic primary. “He’s got a lot of signs up, and he’s knocking on doors.”

The representative-elect was also buoyed in part by a strong debate performance against the incumbent representative Hess: he targeted her support for tax credits for private schools as well as her vote against a resolution (HJ 19) that would have strengthened the state government’s opposition to efforts to claim, take over, or sell federal lands in Montana. Bachmeier, a high school debate champion, took hard stances on every question in his debate against Hess and advises other candidates for office to do the same. “Candidates will have to make stands on really uncomfortable issues,” Bachmeier said. “Candidates need to know where they stand on all the issues and then actually stand for them. If you feel uncomfortable and you are standing against the grain, you are doing your job as a leader. If things are going smooth and with the flow, then I would question if the candidate is actually being a leader.

People want to elect leaders.”

When asked about other outcomes of the November election, Bachmeier said he voted for neither President-elect Donald Trump nor Representative Ryan Zinke (R-MT). Nevertheless, he hopes to work together with representatives on both sides of the aisle. “I believe in respect

for the office [of the president] and the importance of maintaining constant communication with those of the other party.

We need to work together for a united country,” he explained. “We will disagree on issues, but what we can come together on only strengthens the country.”

Democrats running for state legislatures in the coming years should look to Bachmeier’s campaign. He ran as hard a race as he could and was willing to take risks, which ultimately resulted in his victory. As Brekke said of him in June, “He’s not the same old candidate who we see Democrats run in certain areas who don’t put up much of a fight.” Bachmeier did not equivocate on the tough issues, and he worked hard to reach out to every single voter in the district. Above all, he had a vision that the members of his community connected with.

Is this the last time voters will ever hear of Representative-elect Jacob Bachmeier of Havre, Montana? Maybe not.

The Montana legislature has an eightyear consecutive term limit, theoretically putting Bachmeier out of office at twenty-six, just older than the twenty-five-year minimum age to run for the United States House of Representatives. When asked if he would run for higher office, Bachmeier wrote, “If the people [of my district] continue to believe in my vision, I’d be humbled to continue to be their voice. If they wanted me to run for a higher office, I would be happy to.”

This article was originally published on January 17, 2017.

The Gate | 11

The Impact of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

by Ashton Hashemipour

O

ne of the driving forces behind Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was among the country’s most influential politicians before his death on January 8, 2017.

Rafsanjani led a life of contradictions. He wanted to loosen social restrictions in Iran, believing that they stood in the way of the nation’s modernization, yet he oversaw many political assassinations. His family benefited from the Shah’s economic policies, yet he was vocal in his support for economic change. He ensured the Islamic Revolution’s success, yet the institutions that the revolution created later barred him from running for president. Rafsanjani represented an unusual type of Iranian revolutionary, differing sharply from his contempo-

12 | The Gate

raries. He was a liberal, supporting relations with the Western world and economic privatization. And though opinions of him within Iran’s liberal community vary, one thing is certain: with his death, moderates in Iran have lost their biggest ally.

Rafsanjani’s Rise to Power Rafsanjani’s parents were pistachio farmers and had amassed significant wealth by the time their seven children were born. During his adolescence, Rafsanjani studied theology, notably the ideas of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. During this time, he became a vocal critic of the Shah’s White Revolution, a series of economic and cultural reforms that western-

ized Iran. This political dissent led to his arrest, imprisonment, and torture.

While Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian Revolution, was exiled in France, Rafsanjani became his representative in Iran and helped manage the beginning of the revolution. After Khomeini’s return and the revolution’s subsequent success, Rafsanjani was appointed to the Council of the Islamic Revolution, a group that created the institutions of the emerging political order. He then became the first speaker of the new Majlis (Parliament) in 1980, where he remained until he ran for president. Espousing a policy of privatization, he gained the support of Iran's middle and upper classes.

During his presidency from 1989 to 1997, he was tasked with reconstruct-

ing Iran after the destructive war with Iraq.

Though Rafsanjani’s reconstruction and liberalizing policy benefited Iran’s bourgeoisie, he failed to help the working and rural classes, attracting increased resentment. Because of his tremendous wealth, rumors circulated among these groups that he had millions of dollars stashed away in Swiss bank accounts and even that he owned Starbucks. All this gave the impression that Rafsanjani and his economic and political peers were benefiting from his liberalizing policies while leaving the lower classes behind.

Rafsanjani in Modern Iranian Politics Rafsanjani played an active role in Iranian politics even after leaving office. He was one of the most important voices in moderate Iran’s struggle to rekindle relations with the Western world. In stark contrast to his hardline colleagues, he wanted Iran to have a larger role in the global economy. Rafsanjani also worked to rebuild ties with other Arab countries, although this vision was never fully realized.

The former president became a vocal supporter of his fellow moderates.

He endorsed Mohammad Khatami in the 1997 elections in the hopes that Khatami would continue the globalizing foreign policy that Rafsanjani himself pursued during his two terms.

Though Ayatollah Khamenei was a vocal supporter of Khatami’s opponent, Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, he said that he “would treat anyone whose name emerges from the ballot box as [he] treated Rafsanjani.” This tolerance of Rafsanjani’s protégé demonstrates how the supreme leader continued to respect his fellow revolutionary.

After Khatami’s second term, Rafsanjani ran for a third term in 2005. He was handily defeated by the obscure mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who carried rural and working-class voters. However, Rafsanjani’s retained his influence on public opinion, and in 2009, he became one of the leading voices of the liberal Green Movement. In the midst of protests, Rafsanjani gave a speech at Friday prayers—attended by

about 1.5 million people—in which he criticized the government’s media censorship. This had consequences with conservatives, and in 2013, the

This personal history allowed Rafsanjani to “push boundaries,” engage the supreme leader in political discourse, and ensure that Khamenei’s hardline

“Their personal relationship still allowed Rafsanjani to influence Khamenei in a way few other Iranian politicians could.”

Guardian Council, tasked with vetting presidential candidates, disqualified him from running for president. Rafsanjani publicly supported Rouhani in the election, and the two became close allies. Rafsanjani was a staunch supporter of the nuclear deal, the crowning achievement of Rouhani’s presidency, because it helped integrate Iran into the world economy.

Why His Death Will Impact Iranian Politics Rafsanjani was able to exert influence over government policy up until his death through his relationship with Iran's supreme leader. And, though Rafsanjani was in many ways responsible for Khamenei’s rise to power, their relationship was not without serious tensions, as Alex Vatanka of the Middle East Institute explains.

The two began post-revolutionary life as “like-minded individuals” within the Islamic Republican Party and continued their close relationship under Khomeini’s leadership. However, during Rafsanjani’s presidency, Khamenei began to distance himself politically from his fellow revolutionary. While Rafsanjani focused on the economy, Khamenei was able to quietly influence security, the military, and other aspects of “hard power.” Vatanka speculates that the two men “had dirt on each other” and that when they started to differ in opinion, their initial love affair became a political “marriage of convenience.”

Though the two men drifted apart, their personal relationship still allowed Rafsanjani to influence Khamenei in a way few other Iranian politicians could. According to Vatanka, “Rafsanjani is the person who brought Khamenei into Khomeini’s inner circle.

Before [that], Khamenei was a nobody.

He owes everything to Rafsanjani.”

stances would not be the only ones in mainstream Iranian politics. His death leaves a gap in the informal circle around the supreme leader, who is now surrounded almost entirely by people who share his beliefs. With Rafsanjani gone, “an influential counterweight against [hardliners]” is lacking. Vatanka believes that although some of the “cooler heads” in the regime may be able to criticize Khamenei, nobody had the fifty-year close personal relationship with him that Rafsanjani had, and so no one can fully replace Rafsanjani.

Rafsanjani’s influence also extended to the presidency. He acted both as Rouhani’s mentor and as his closest political ally. Former Iranian official Seyed Hossein Mousavian argued that Rafsanjani’s support “had a major role in Rouhani’s win.” Rafsanjani gave Rouhani legitimacy among many staunch defenders of the Islamic Revolution, helping spur Rouhani to victory. Although, as Vatanka says, the impact of his death on Rouhani’s presidential campaign cannot be fully known, the grassroots support that Rafsanjani was able to consolidate will weaken. Moreover, without Rafsanjani’s unifying presence, moderates who are “not satisfied with Rouhani” may break away from his coalition and oppose him in the absence of Rafsanjani’s unifying presence.

As politically polarizing voices become louder around the globe, Rafsanjani’s death symbolizes Iran’s movement toward extremism. In the face of such challenges, his moderate successors should carry on the work of political and economic liberalization while carefully learning from his mistakes.

This article was originally published on February 14, 2017.

The Gate | 13

IT TAKES A WOMEN’S MARCH

by EMMA PRESTON 14 | The Gate

T

hough they are typically filled around the clock with car horns and bus tires, bike wheels and taxi drivers, the asphalt streets of downtown Chicago shook with the force of hundreds of thousands of marching feet on Saturday, January 21, 2017.

to Silence Us); and “Lucha Contra Fascismo” (Fight Against Fascism).

While most signs were held overhead, many were carried a few feet lower, resting in the small arms of young children. Though the stereotypical protest demographic of young

others, but all of them force parents to think critically about how to explain the Trump administration, and its rhetoric, to their children.

“She asked what fascism meant the other day,” another mother recalled at the march, pointing to her seven-

Wacker, Michigan, Jackson, and Wabash were flooded with upwards of 250 thousand people, all of whom gathered in the uncharacteristically warm 10:00 a.m. light with one common goal: to amplify the voices of women around the country through the Women’s March, a display of solidarity across more than five hundred cities in the US and many more worldwide.

Homemade signs cut from paper and cardstock jutted above the crowd, bouncing up and down in rhythm with the footsteps of those carrying them. Their inscriptions varied in message, mood, and language.

“The future is brown,” one marcher’s sign declared, with the text boldly printed in black sharpie on a cardboard rectangle. Another woman held a paper-covered coat hanger, and marched block after block waving the chilling symbol above her head. “Never Again,” she’d written, in a direct allusion to the era of illegal abortion— an era many fear will re-emerge under the Trump administration. Other signs differed in language: “Nyet my President” (Not my President); “Tú No Nos Vas a Callar” (You Are Not Going

adults and teenagers was present, entire families took to the streets as well.

Mothers and fathers shouldered young ones and pushed them in strollers while older children marched alongside their relatives. Rather than leave their children at home, many parents emphasized the value of experiencing the rally firsthand.

“I’m the mother of three biracial daughters, so I think it’s important that my whole family is here to be part of this process,” one parent told the Gate, pulling her three- and sixyear-olds in a red wagon behind her.

Wrapped in a blanket and carrying a handmade sign, one of them reached out to fellow marchers with heartshaped pieces of chocolate. “We need to understand what we’re up against while also engaging and experiencing this unity,” her mother said.

For many, though, understanding the impending challenges isn’t easy.

The hardest questions are often the ones asked with the most innocent intentions. These questions, about the circumstances of this march, about the presidential election, and about the inauguration, are often asked by kids. Some are harder to answer than

year-old daughter, “and I actually still haven’t responded. I need to do some more Googling, some more research, before I can say anything.”

In many family situations, children are comforted by the impression that their parents have all the answers— that their mothers or fathers, even if they are unable to shield them from all worldly evils, are at least able to offer explanation, guidance, or hope. But on the western outskirts of Millennium Park, one father told a different story.

“Do you remember when I told you that Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States of America?”

He stood facing his three sons, as they stood facing opposite the marchers on the street, each with a different word taped to the back of his shirt: “rise,” “resist,” “repeat.”

“We cried,” said the smallest boy.

“That’s right. We hugged on the kitchen floor and cried.”

One mother, holding her young son’s hand, tried to describe the context of the march in age-appropriate terms. In The Gate | 15

reference to Donald Trump’s bully-like behavior, said she has made it clear that her son that “even though he is the president, we cannot talk to people the way that he does.” At the same time, she addressed religious issues head on.

“We’re Jewish, so we have talked a lot about what a Muslim registry could look like,” she said.

Teachers, too, took to the streets after struggling to navigate the current political atmosphere within their classrooms. One Chicago Public Schools teacher felt that her responsibility to remain apolitical undermined her ability to make her students feel welcome.

“I am trying to let my students feel safe,” she said. “We do activities to celebrate diversity, and I emphasize positivity. But kids are coming to us with concerns. Last week, one of my students came to me crying. She said, ‘What if one day my mom doesn’t come pick me up?’”

Marching alongside this teacher was her eight-year-old daughter, Nayereh, who held a sign reading “CPS Girl Power!” In bright green, purple, and pink, the names of CPS graduates hugged the margins: “Michelle Obama,” “Jennifer Hudson,” and “Amelia Earhart,” were written in careful, practiced manuscript.

In the bottom right corner of her sign, “Nayereh?” was written a bit 16 | The Gate

smaller, indicating one of the broader themes of the march itself. The United States did not elect its first female president this year. If it had, perhaps Nayereh wouldn’t have assigned a question mark to her own projected future.

When asked how she planned to talk to her little brother about the the issues broadcasted in the Women’s March, Nayereh provided her own wisdom.

“I want him to think about who he is going to vote for, about who will really be the better choice for him and for me,” she explained.

Despite these displays of solidarity, many of the children in attendance likely lacked the perspective to truly understand the heavy circumstances at hand. One young girl, around the age of five, held a sign above her head with her neon gloves. In blocky cutout letters, it read, “NO MEANS NO & RAPE IS A CRIME.” Whether or not one agrees with the event’s politics, the presence of families at the Women’s March brought up important questions about the socialization and tokenization of young children. The image of a young girl holding a sign decrying sexual violence was powerful, if only because it reminded onlookers of the potential traumas that will stalk young girls and female-identifying people as they grow up.

But as swaddled toddlers at once sucked their pacifiers and clutched small, infant-sized but parent-made signs, the key irony seemed to manifest in the chants filling the air around them. “Fuck Trump,” the moving mass would occasionally chorus. Amidst the strollers, signs proclaimed, “This pussy bites back”; “You’ve got 99 problems and this bitch is one”; “Fuck you, Cheeto Voldemort.”

It would be callous and foolish to suggest that anger has no place at mass rallies and marches; on the contrary, many argue that the emotion is a necessary catalyst for social movements. But to some parents, a context already difficult to explain to younger marchers perhaps became even harder to navigate. Regardless, most remained confident of their children’s ability to parse out these important matters for themselves as they grew up. One mother in particular felt that her child would reflect on the morning of marching with a sense of pride.

“My daughter just turned seven, so I don’t know how much of this she will remember,” she said. “But looking back, I want her to know that she was on the right side of history.”

This article was originally published on January 31, 2017. The photos were taken by the author.

The Gate | 17

W

what’s behind gender violence in latin america by patricia van hissenhoven florez

18 | The Gate

hen I was sixteen, my grandmother talked to me about gender violence.

She did not seek to warn me against it, nor was her tone full of outrage. As she sipped her tea, she told me about the times that she and my grandfather had to break into her friends’ apartments to interrupt episodes of gender violence. My grandmother once received a call from a friend afraid to leave her own bathroom because her husband was “mad” and threatening to hit her. In order for my grandmother to help her friend safely escape, my grandfather had to hold down her husband. Both women were married and in their twenties.

Stories like this are not scarce, and my grandmother’s was not the worst. In Ciudad Juárez, México, there have been 1,500 femicides in the last twenty years. Frequently, the perpetrators are either partners or acquaintances of the murdered women. At the local level, there is little effort on the part of authorities to look into files or pursue leads in investigations. In Ecatepec, in the greater Mexico City area, people must bribe the justice system if they want an investigation to be opened into the death of a loved one. Few people trust the criminal justice system, and fewer still report crimes. In 2009, there were up to 19.7 deaths for every hundred thousand women in Ciudad Juárez. María Luisa Andrade, whose sister was a victim of femicide, describes the problem clearly: “It seems like we’ve become used to losing our girls.”

In May 2012, Rosa Elvira Cely was brutally murdered in Bogotá, Colombia. After an evening of drinks with friends, she left with an acquaintance on his motorcycle. He hit her on the head with his helmet, then beat, raped, and impaled her before leaving her in a park. Cely called for help and managed to give an account of what happened before going into cardiac arrest. She died four days later. Between 2009 and 2014, reports showed that there were up to four femicides a day in Colombia and that the rate of impunity for these cases was over 90 percent.

In October 2016, Lucía Pérez, a sixteenyear-old from Mar del Plata, Argentina, was drugged, raped, and brutally murdered by three men. Pérez was trying to buy a marijuana cigarette from the men, but when she met them they forced her to consume a large amount of cocaine. All three men then raped her in a case described by the district attorney (DA) as an “inhumane sexual assault.” In what the DA also deemed a “conjunction of abhorrent facts,” Pérez was bathed and clothed by the accused before being dropped off at a medical center where she died from cardiac arrest due to the trauma. In Argentina there is reportedly one femicide every thirty-five hours.

So, what drives violence against women in Latin America?

There is widespread tolerance of the denigration of women and of the belief that women are inferior to men despite laws meant to curb this system of belief.

In response to the victims mentioned previously, Mexico passed the General Law of Access of Women to a Life Free of Violence, which penalized crimes against women with forty to sixty years of prison in 2007. In Argentina, a 2012 law against femicide and domestic violence classifies these crimes as aggravated homicide, which carries up to a life sentence. In Colombia, legislation from 2008 classifies women as protected persons and femicide as an aggravated crime worthy of a proposed thirty to forty years in prison. In 2012, the Rosa Elvira Cely Law made sentencing more severe, punishing femicide with up to fifty years of prison and mandating that the government take action to sensitize Colombian society about crimes against women.

However, there is a large gap between law and action, and a principal cause for this gap is impunity. According to the Global Impunity Index (GII), an assessment conducted of fifty-nine countries by the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, Mexico in 2015, Mexico had the second-highest rate of impunity for femicide in the world and Colombia the third.

No effective sanctions exist in these countries to dissuade people from committing femicide. Penalties on paper are high, but they are worthless if no one is caught and punished. In the last decade, 34,571 criminal investigations have been opened for femicide in Colombia, but only 10 percent have ended with a conviction. However, the GII study suggests that impunity

#ni una menos

is high not only for femicide but for all crimes. Ineffective criminal justice systems are a key part of the problem, but do not sufficiently explain the recent increase in femicides (especially in the context of internal conflict) in Latin America.

In 2014, the Pan-American Health Organization published a 198-page report on violence against women in Latin America and the Caribbean, taking data from 2004 to 2008. Chapter Ten of this report discusses gender norms and violence, using results from a survey that asked women aged fifteen to forty-nine years old who had lived with a partner about whether there are “good reasons” for a man to beat his wife or partner. In Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, the rate at which women answered “yes” was below 5 percent.

However, in Ecuador, 38.2 percent of the women said men were “justified” if they hit their partner for certain reasons. 28.5 percent of the women in Haiti and 22.9 percent in Paraguay, agreed. The two most common “justifiable reasons” were “not having taken care of the home or children” and “failing to tell the husband they were leaving the house.” Refusing to have sexual relations and “burning the food” also made the list. The answers suggest a strong urban-rural divide in opinion, with women in rural areas being more tolerant of violent behavior from their partners than their urban counterparts. Furthermore, significant percentages of women (28.5 percent to 48 percent) said that they were against someone outside of the family intervening in a case of violence against a woman. Still, there is hope: these numbers are down from surveys done in the year 2000.

Victim blaming is accepted in much of Latin America. In May 2016, the secretary of government of Bogotá issued a document claiming that Rosa Elvira Cely’s murder was “exclusively the victim’s fault.”

According to the document, her murderer and his accomplice had a reputation for “acting weird and acting with ill-intended manners.” The document closes by saying that Cely “risked her integrity and life to the point that [the perpetrator] killed her; if Rosa Elvira Cely had not gone out to have drinks with her classmates that night, we would not be lamenting her death.”

Condemned by human rights and women’s rights organizations, this is an official document issued from a public office that blames the victim for her own brutal rape and murder. Nevertheless, many members

of the Colombian government rejected the secretary of government’s position, and the government passed the Rosa Elvira Cely Law. Independently of direct government intervention, local social organizations and NGOs regularly condemn and fight to end violence against women. The most vocal campaign is Ni Una Menos (Not a Woman Less), which has spread to over eighty countries and most of Latin America. The Argentine organization recently received media coverage because of its activities after the murder of Lucía Pérez.

The murder, committed in October 2016, led to great outrage in both Argentina and around the globe. Ni Una Menos in Argentina summoned Argentine women to strike and a march on October 18, a day that they called “Black Wednesday.”

This initiative was echoed in fifty-eight cities around the world. Ni Una Menos published a list of nine demands on their website, intended to make the government guarantee female victims of violence the rights to justice, aid, and protection. Two of the demands are related to education, including both education in schools and training for public officials about gender issues. More importantly, the document suggests that femicide is the result of tolerance of “machismo” culture.

Ni Una Menos in Argentina calls upon the citizenry to commit to the advocacy of women’s rights under the motto “women’s rights are human rights.” The organization also criticizes mass media for victim-blaming, for replicating images and words that perpetuate stereotypes of female inferiority, and for the use of “they must’ve done something to deserve it” language when reporting on these cases, which greatly affects how society views and processes violence against women.

Some women in Mexico offer a similar perspective. As Anita Cuellar Figueroa, whose sixteen-year-old daughter disappeared four years ago, puts it, “Here, women lack value. Being a woman and being pretty in Ciudad Juárez is a sin.

From the moment you live here, you feel the machismo strongly, and men are responsible, in whatever position they have; even in my home there might be a man harassing me.”

This article was originally published on November 23, 2016.

The Gate | 19

“The cancer makes the hard harder.”

– A lymphoma patient Grace Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria

THE FUTURE OF SUB-SAHARAN PSYCHO-ONCOLOGY TREATMENT BY 20 | The Gate

EVAN ESCHLIMAN

D

espite innumerable innovations and advancements in patient care, cancer continues to be a complex and difficult-to-treat disease. Cancer presents great expense to both society and patient—a burden that will only increase in the years to come, with the global annual incidence rate of cancer projected to reach 22 million cases per year within two decades.

Although cancer certainly has disastrous effects on a patient’s body, its diagnosis and treatment also takes a toll on his or her mental well-being. A cancer patient’s physiological complications can be accompanied by a wide array of psychological difficulties.

The management and treatment of cancer’s effect on a patient’s mental health has been termed “psycho-oncology” and can take many forms, from individual psychotherapy sessions to group art therapy to psychoeducational cancer information sessions. Thanks to pioneers in the field such as Dr. Jimmie Holland of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, both the number and scope of psycho-oncology services offered in US hospitals have increased rapidly since the 1970s. Many developed nations have followed the United States’ lead in ensuring widespread patient access to these services, but many patients worldwide still lack the access to psychosocial treatment that they need to achieve the best possible treatment outcomes or quality of life.

A lack of access to psycho-oncology care is especially common in low and middle-income countries. Although psycho-oncology is beginning to become established in places outside Western Europe and the United States, many medical facilities in low-resource settings cannot offer psycho-oncology services for a variety of reasons, including a lack of financial resources, patient and provider awareness, and institutional organization. A patient’s psychological struggles often negatively affect cancer treatment and recovery, so, by international standard, oncology care includes treatment for cancer’s adverse psychosocial effects. But along with increasing recognition of the importance of the treatment of the psychosocial effects of cancer comes awareness of the harsh reality that many medical facili-

ties across the globe are not equipped to provide complete physical oncology care, much less comprehensive psycho-oncology care.

Psycho-oncology might be even more important in low-resource settings, where patients often do not seek help until their cancer has already progressed past most treatment options. In these situations, the best approach might simply be psychological and palliative care. The World Health Organization (WHO) endorses a focus on palliative care, estimating that it would be possible to give 90 percent of advanced cancer patients relief from physical, psychosocial, and spiritual problems through palliative care alone. Fortunately, despite structural roadblocks, there are a few psycho-oncology programs pushing forward in different parts of the developing world that provide hope for a future of psychosocial cancer treatment in low-resource settings.

I spent ten weeks researching one of these programs at the University College Hospital (UCH) in Ibadan, Nigeria. UCH is the site of Nigeria’s premier medical school and is Nigeria’s best-funded public hospital. Dr. Chioma Asuzu, who mentored my project, has worked tirelessly to increase the degree of psychosocial cancer care available to patients at UCH. One program Asuzu developed was the psycho-oncology clinic, which is designed for cancer patients, their family members, and their caretakers. Crosses between group therapy and cancer-education sessions, the clinics are structured to first discuss cancer, its causes, and its treatments.

The floor is then opened to patients’ questions, which range from concerns about diet or treatment procedures to freely offered testimonies of personal experiences with cancer. Each clinic concludes with a stress-relief exercise, and patients who appear to be especially distressed are often asked to remain for brief one-on-one counseling sessions.

Although Asuzu has been able to get an academic appointment at UCH to develop these programs, which are now well-attended, her path to this point was not smooth. “At first,” she told me, “I had to bring my own chairs,” as the department did not

want cancer patients to sit in the regular chairs. Despite the success of these clinics, often attended by patients frustrated by the broken radiation machine (as one husband of a breast cancer patient told me, “it is always two months—when I was here two months ago, the radiation machine would be fixed in two months”), there are many obstacles that make it difficult to expand the reach and implementation of this type of essential programming in Nigeria. Like so many pressing issues in low-resource settings, psycho-oncology continues to be underrecognized and underfunded.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of hope for the future of psycho-oncology in low-resource settings. In addition to advancing the cause of psycho-oncology at UCH, Asuzu devotes a large portion of her time to furthering the cause globally. She serves as a board member of the International Psycho-Oncology Society (IPOS) and is the president of the newly-formed Association for Psycho-Oncology in Africa (APOA). I spent one week of my time in Nigeria at the inaugural APOA conference, where I got to meet passionate doctors, nurses, psychologists, and social workers from across sub-Saharan Africa. All of them are committed to expanding psycho-oncology services at their hospitals and in their countries.

Cancer care, both psychologically and physically, will only become more important in the coming decades.

Nigeria and Africa’s populations are rapidly expanding and their life expectancies are rising, which means that cancer incidence will increase. As Asuzu wrote in a 2015 volume called Global Perspectives on Cancer: Incidence, Care, and Experience, it will remain “important to address the structural roadblocks [in Africa] that prevent the incorporation of psycho-oncological services in the continuum of care.” It is only with increased political will, smart policy-making, and devoted implementation that all cancer patients will gain access to the psychosocial care that they need.

This article was originally published under a different name on January 15, 2017.

The Gate | 21

GETTING USED TO THE FAILURE

by Jacob T. Gosselin

J

ennifer Nava, Stephanie Carrasco, Maria Martinez, and Francisco Flores have been enrolled in public schools on the South Side of Chicago their entire lives. Attending Nathan Davis Elementary School, Curie Metropolitan High School, Hancock High School, and Kelly High School respectively, all four students are members of the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council (BPNC), a grassroots organization in the predominantly Latinx Brighton Park district. The teens have spent much of their young lives organizing, protesting, and speaking, with BPNC’s help, on behalf of the neighborhood schools they attend. And as a new presidential administration proposes radical changes to the public school landscape, all four are keenly aware of what is at stake for their schools in the coming years.

While the Trump administration has yet to release a concrete plan for public school reform, the president’s newly appointed secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, has been far from silent on the issue. A long time philanthropist and activist, DeVos has spent much of the past decade embodying the phrase ‘put your money where your mouth is.’ Just last year she donated over ten million

22 | The Gate

dollars of her personal fortune through her philanthropic group, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation. Much of that money went to Christian-related education groups, such as the the Grand Rapids Christian School Association ($350,000), the Ada Christian School Society ($50,000), and the Rehoboth Christian School Association ($10,000).

However, DeVos’s influence in public education is defined less by her charitable donations than by her political ones. The American Federation for Children, a political action committee formed by donations from the DeVos family and chaired by Betsy DeVos herself until this past November, has been at the forefront of the battle for school choice since it was founded in January 2010. The group envisions, in its own words, “an education system where parents are empowered to choose the best educational environment for their child … whether it be in a traditional public school, public charter school, virtual learning, private school, home school or blended learning.” Among its central tenets are private school choice (i.e., the removal of neighborhood boundaries for public schools in conjunction with the

implementation of voucher programs to fund private school tuition) and charter school expansion. In practice, it has doled out millions of dollars in states like Wisconsin and Michigan to state legislators who support its mission, making it among the most influential education lobbying groups in the country.

For Nava, Carrasco, Martinez, and Flores, the implications of having an education secretary who supports these radical reforms are massive and multifold. Private school choice has faced serious criticism since its conception, both for its effectiveness and for its impact on public schools in low income areas. The latter sort of criticism is especially relevant for these South Side students: all of them attend schools with student bodies that are over 90 percent low-income, and that therefore receive a significant amount of federal funds through Title I, a Department of Education program that donates federal money to public schools with “disadvantaged” student bodies. As Trump and DeVos have vaguely alluded to “reprioritizing” $20 billion dollars of this money toward voucher programs in the coming months, these students’ schools could

see a substantial reductions in federal funding in the near future. These reductions could be devastating, especially given the budget constraints they already face. Flores’s elementary school, Nathan Davis, lost $200,000 in state funding last year, while Nava, Martinez, and Carrasco all attend high schools that have been brutally hit by recent cuts to the budget of Chicago Public Schools (CPS). These cuts are in response to Governor Rauner’s recent mid-year budget veto. As a result, the schools have lost $103,000 (Kelly High School), $167,000 (Curie High School), and $240,000 (Hancock High School) respectively.

In practice, this could mean worse conditions for schools that are already suffering. Carrasco, when asked about the impact of budget reductions on Curie, described how “we find mold in the food, our milk is expired” and how the bathrooms lack working sinks and trash cans, meaning “girls will stick their used lady hygiene products in toilet paper dispensers.” Flores similarly spoke of how his teachers “struggle to print copy” due to the lack of funds, while Martinez recounted how the number of counselors at Hancock, a school with three thousand students, has been reduced to six. She went on to say that “firing counselors is the worst thing that can happen to a school.”

DeVos’s embrace of charter schools could have a similar impact. Although charter schools, unlike private school choice, have been shown to improve student performance by several major studies, including a 2013 analysis by Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), they have also faced criticism for their middling success and their impact on low-income neighborhoods. BPNC are outspoken critics of charter expansion in Chicago: just last summer they led a campaign against a new Noble Network charter school in Brighton Park (despite their efforts, the school was approved by the board of education later that year). They argue that charter expansion weakens neighborhood public schools, like those attended by Flores, Carrasca, Martinez, and Nava, by pulling away students and, in the process, resources. While the issue is complex, there is data to back them up: especially in states like Illinois with budget problems, public and

charter schools often find themselves competing for funds.

When asked about charter schools, Nava responded that she “would be fine with them if they weren’t taking our resources.” She also expressed frustration at what she perceived to be a cycle of taking away funds from public schools and then criticizing them.

Carrasco echoed that sentiment, telling

“I’m really hoping that we finally get a win. I don’t want my little nephew to have to fight like I do.”

Gate reporters, “They’re giving us a bad rep because we don’t have the funding, but we don’t have the funding because it’s all going to charter schools.” All four students pointed out that their neighborhood schools accept all students, regardless of income level or ability, echoing the common critique that charter schools are typically far more selective in their admission, sometimes excluding students with learning disabilities, language disabilities, or disciplinary issues.

Curie, Davis, Hancock and Kelly all have learning disability rates of 9 percent or higher, along with limited English rates ranging from 9 percent at Curie to 52 percent at Davis.

Overall though, many of the students’ concerns revolved less around specific plans and more around a general sense that the system is, in Carrasco’s words, “going down the wrong path.” Flores, expressing discomfort at the notion of DeVos as secretary of education, said he wished she “would come try our food, and come to our bathrooms,” to “see firsthand what a public school in CPS

and nationwide looks like. She needs to push to help these schools.” Martinez, for her part, just “doesn’t want things to get worse.”

Nava’s concerns, however, went deeper than that. Having protested, lobbied, and rallied with BPNC since elementary school, she says her biggest fear is “getting used to the failure.” Going on to describe how she isn’t disappointed by CPS budget cuts anymore “because it’s something that happens constantly,” she concluded that “I’m really hoping that we finally get something done, that we finally get a win. I don’t want my little nephew to have to fight like I do.”

In the process of reporting on this story, Gate reporters reached out to the Education Department, Chicago Public Schools, and the American Federation for Children. Both the Education Department and CPS declined to comment, while the AFC’s Director of Communications, Tommy Schultz, gave the following statement: “For families in Illinois, a well-designed federal tax credit scholarship program could be a great way to have access to a high quality education for their kids. There are hundreds of thousands of families across the country who are currently benefiting or have benefitted from state tax credit scholarships— like Denisha Merriweather in Florida who went from failing 3rd grade twice to then going on to being the first in her family to graduate high school and the first in her family to graduate college due to Florida’s tax credit scholarship program. Families who find that their kids’ schools aren’t satisfactory should have the opportunity to access a school that better fits their needs. The research is clear that the kids with school choice options have better outcomes, and their public school peers have better outcomes as well. There are more than 3.5 million children enrolled in either public charter schools, or in one of the 50 private school choice programs in 25 states, and millions of additional parents in Illinois and across the country are also wanting the option to choose the best school for their children.”

This interview was originally published on March 20, 2017. All school statistics are from the CPS Data Library.

The Gate | 23

DJIBOUTI

A NEW FACTOR IN THE US-CHINA POWER STRUGGLE

C

hina has long practiced a foreign policy of isolation, maintaining a military for the sole purpose of homeland security. In recent decades, however, the nation has undergone an immense shift in economic aspirations, rising to become the world’s second-largest economy and a linchpin in the global economy. Consequently, the Chinese government has realized that in order to safeguard its economic position and situate itself for continued growth it must become stronger in the international security arena. President Xi Jinping has undertaken a massive Chinese military expansion. China has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in military modernization over the last decade, including a 30 percent total defense spending increase since 2011.

China’s official military budget is expected to exceed $200 billion by 2020 (and will be much larger counting China’s immense black budget defense spending).

While China’s aggressive territorial actions in the South and East China Seas have dominated the discourse among the American military and foreign policy establishments, a new development in the US-China dynamic has gone largely unnoticed. The construction of the nation’s first overseas military outpost in Djibouti is the most important single action to consider in analyzing China’s future goals. This new base signals that China is ending its legacy of focusing exclusively on East Asia and that it will exert its power globally in the future.

The Strategic Value of Djibouti As America’s only permanent African mil-

24 | The Gate

BY WILL COHEN itary facility, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti is a critical strategic asset. In addition to anti-piracy operations and general aviation missions, the United States runs numerous critical military operations from Lemonnier. The base is the primary location from which the US military directs drones and special operations forces in Africa and Yemen that are crucial to the War on Terror.

In July 2012, over 1,500 flights originated from the base in Djibouti. These included missions undertaken by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)-controlled units, which often carry out counter-terrorism operations in conjunction with the intelligence community. With two of America’s most highly classified programs—the drone program and JSOC operations—operating out of the base, Djibouti is of massive strategic value to the US military.

Recognizing the value of Camp Lemonnier to America, China selected Djibouti as the location for its first overseas base.

Whereas Camp Lemonnier is primarily serviced from the air, China’s new facility is situated on the coast with the stated intention of serving as a resupply base for the nation’s burgeoning blue-water fleet.

In addition to expanding its global reach, China now hopes to take advantage of the country’s proximity to the strategically and economically vital shipping lanes in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

However, in addition to economic interests, China likely chose Djibouti for its strategic location near the Middle East, al-

lowing it to project military power into the volatile region. For any country seeking to take on a greater international role, the Middle East, a powder keg in which all of the world’s powers have an interest, is vital.

Middle Eastern involvement gives China the ability to insert itself into consequential international deliberations. Furthermore, although China does not currently focus much on counterterrorism, it has indicated a desire to significantly increase its involvement. For example, China has continuously vetoed UN sanctions against Syria. Moreover, China clearly intends for the base to facilitate its anti-piracy operations and power projection into the nearby Middle East. This is evidenced by China’s enlarging its naval forces by 400 percent since the only reason to have a such forces is for overseas operations.

It is likely that the Chinese also have ulterior motives in choosing Djibouti for their foreign base location. Chinese leaders know that their new base is less than three miles from Camp Lemonnier, home to some of America’s most highly classified operations and programs. What better way for China to learn and incorporate tested logistics strategies, special operations tactics, and maritime security procedures than to observe the world leader practice such tactics in real time? If China’s sole aim was to support its growing navy and global ambitions, it could have chosen many other locations for the base. China likely selected Djibouti because it provides an invaluable location from which to gath-

er intelligence (radar, SIGINT, MASINT) on secretive US military activities.

Future Scenarios and Responses The United States government will be watching future Chinese actions closely to determine whether China’s overseas military expansion is primarily motivated by an economic or military desire. On one hand, China has indicated a significant desire to have a global military reach. In 2015, China boldly deployed five naval vessels immediately off the coast of Alaska during Barack Obama’s visit to the state, and in 2016, China positioned several navy ships at a Pakistani port.

With this military growth, Djibouti will not be the last overseas base China builds. When considering the implications of future bases, China’s strategic rationale must be analyzed.

Consider why the Chinese government chose this specific location: it is indicative of Beijing’s purpose and priorities. The site in Djibouti was primarily chosen due to its proximity to major trading routes in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, as well as existing Chinese economic investments in the region.

If China continues to position bases near major trading routes, there is likely little malicious intent behind China’s construction of new bases. Indeed, such bases could foretell increased cooperation between the US and China in counter-piracy operations.

However, the development of Chinese bases in nations closer to North America, such as on Pacific islands or near the Atlantic Ocean, should it occur, would likely foretell

future conflict. As China faces no threats to its economic interests in these regions, these facilities would likely be for the sole purpose of projecting power toward the United States.

This could result in Chinese-American competition among potential host countries, reminiscent of the Cold War, as China would offer the carrots of investment and financial payments, while America would offer the sticks of sanctions, cut-offs of foreign aid, and diplomatic isolation. In the event that these peaceful American mechanisms did not resolve the situation, tensions would surely escalate as the United States would be required to maintain a constant naval presence in the area that would allow for a quick response to any possible aggressive actions.

The weapons systems and technologies placed within bases are also critical to understanding Chinese intentions. China possesses a large fleet of frigates, of which the newest version is the Type 054A, a class of ship that has historically been used for the protection of trade routes and protection of vehicles in dangerous regions. The deployment of frigates, coastal patrol vessels, and support ships would be confirmation that China simply seeks to protect vital trade routes. Even the deployment of an amphibious assault ship should not set off alarm bells, as these vessels are frequently used to evacuate citizens from dangerous regions, as China did in Libya and Yemen. However, if nuclear-powered submarines, multiple destroyers, or one of China’s aircraft carriers are deployed to an overseas military facility,

there is reason to doubt Beijing’s stated intention of protecting trade routes from pirates, and more reason to suspect power projection.

A similar distinction can be made if China deploys aircraft overseas. Maritime surveillance, cargo, and tanker aircraft, in addition to a variety of helicopters, are commonly used in maritime security operations. Deployments of fighter aircraft and strategic bombers, HQ-9, S-300, or S-400 SAM systems, land-based anti-ship missiles, or any of the nation’s newly developed ballistic missiles, however, would signal a military motive, likely prompting the US military to raise alert levels. Such deployments would prompt diplomatic crises (à la the Cuban Missile Crisis) as the US pushes China to remove them.

US and Chinese forces in Djibouti are very unlikely to ever come into conflict.

However, Chinese actions in Djibouti signal the much more important point that the age of China’s confinement to East Asia is over.

China has entered the global stage, not just as an economic power, but now as a major military and foreign policy force. President Xi Jinping is ready to make China’s weight felt across the globe. The era of unipolarity is over.

This article was originally published on April 1, 2017.

The Gate | 25

Moldova at a

CROSSROADS DECODING THE 2016 ELECTION

by Alexandra C. Price

T

he Republic of Moldova, a small country sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine, doesn’t often make headlines in the West. This past November, however, was an exception.

On November 13, 2016, pro-Russian Socialist candidate Igor Dodon was elected president of Moldova over the pro-Western Maia Sandu, a move that shifted Moldova decisively east toward Moscow and raised concerns in the West about the possibility of a new geopolitical standoff with Russia.

Moldova is a parliamentary republic with both a president, who serves as head of state, and a prime minister, who serves as head of government. As the Moldovan constitution was originally written, the president was chosen by the people in a popular vote, while the prime minister was appointed by the president and then confirmed, along with his cabinet, by the unicameral legislature. In 2000, a constitu-

26 | The Gate

tional amendment took the vote away from the people, giving Parliament the ability to elect the president. This amendment was overturned by the Constitutional Court of Moldova in March 2016, making this election the first direct presidential election in almost two decades.

The election of a socialist is hardly surprising given the pessimism and dissatisfaction that has pervaded public discourse under the pro-European government of the last seven years.

In a 2015 scandal that became known among Russian-speaking Moldovans as the “кража века” or “Theft of the Century,” $1 billion disappeared from the Moldovan banking system—a stunning 15 percent of Moldova’s GDP. Many Moldovans believe the theft was carried out by corrupt government officials in the pro-European coalition. In September 2015, hundreds of thousands of people staged

anti-corruption protests in the capital, Chisinau, calling for a more in-depth investigation into the stolen funds and for the resignation of the sitting government. Two different camps—the socialists and the pro-European “Truth and Dignity” party—set up tent cities in Chisinau, where they remained for several months. In the midst of the political turmoil that has engulfed the country in the past few years, it is no surprise that many Moldovans saw this election as an opportunity to change the political leadership and to elect a president who would eradicate long-standing corruption.

The 2016 election also revolved around the choice between East and West, a question that has troubled Moldova—and other post-Soviet nations—since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s.

Pro-Western parties have led the country since 2009, promising to

take steps toward European inte-

gration and economic development.

In 2014, they signed an EU Association Agreement, a seemingly decisive step toward EU membership. However, because of the corruption within Moldova’s pro-EU coalition, the country’s relations with the West have remained stagnant, and the various socialist parties—which are generally more pro-Russian—have become more popular in recent years. Many view a possible realignment with Russia as beneficial for Moldova because Russia provides a larger market for the country’s goods. Furthermore, a show of goodwill towards Moscow would likely persuade Russia to lift the trade ban it enacted after Moldova signed the Association Agreement with the EU. Predictably, the positions of the two leading presidential candidates— Dodon of the Socialist Party of Moldova and Sandu of a pro-European opposition party—reflected these divisions and tensions in Moldovan society. To signal their anti-corruption bona fides, both candidates took official stances against the regime in power. Sandu made corruption the central issue of her campaign, stating in a political advertisement: “As president, I will be your voice and your weapon. Together, we will get rid of corruption and thieves.” However, since she was the minister of education when the $1 billion was stolen, many Moldovans saw her as a part of the corrupt system rather than an antidote. In this sense, Dodon’s position as a member of an opposing party worked to his benefit.

In the official program of the Socialist Party, Dodon’s coalition criticized the pro-Western government, claiming that the “loud and pompous promises for democratic reform made by the ‘European integrators,’ in actuality … [led to the] seizure of the country by political oligarchs.” Dodon soon came to represent the opposition movement in Moldova, which appealed to the thousands of Moldovans disillusioned by the current government.

Dodon also appealed to the pro-Russian tendencies and Soviet nostalgia that have been on the rise in much of Eastern Europe over the past decade.

Throughout the campaign, Dodon, who once described himself as “the only politician who is trusted in Russia,”

supported strengthening ties with Vladimir Putin’s government. He even stated that he would void the Association Agreement signed with the EU in 2014, although he later reversed this stance. This attracted many Moldovans, particularly Russian-speaking voters, who are sentimental for Soviet times and feel marginalized in today’s majority Romanian-speaking population.

According to polls conducted by Baltic Surveys/The Gallup Organization, Moldovans are beginning to turn away from Europe, with 43 percent supporting a partnership with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union over one with the European Union, and 42 percent opposing membership in NATO. Dodon does not, however, represent all Moldovans—there remains a large segment of the population that favors the West and that supported Sandu in her call for further European integration. She hoped to bring Moldovan products up to European standards by forming joint economic and cultural projects with Romania, an EU member state. Furthermore, Sandu aimed to develop a “strategic partnership with the US.” In contrast to the older generation of Moldovans, who mostly voted in favor of Dodon and Russia, the youth overwhelmingly supported Sandu, although that demographic has low voter turnout.

So far, Dodon has kept his campaign promises. He distanced himself from the United States and Romania, telling both countries’ ambassadors in February to “stay out of his business.” On the other hand, he has strengthened ties with Russia, meeting with Putin multiple times in his few months in office and recently signing a memorandum on cooperation between Moldova and the Eurasian Economic Union, despite Parliament’s opposition. Domestically, Dodon called for the reintroduction of Russian as a required language in school and organized a September 24 referendum to increase the powers of the president. If it passes, this referendum would give the president the power to dismiss parliament and call for early elections, which Dodon has claimed will be necessary if the current government refuses to support his policies. This recent development evokes a statement made by Dodon during the election that Moldova needs “a leader

like Putin”—a strong, independent head of state who will get things done and fight for the people, regardless of possible opposition.

This election, apart from signaling a change for Moldova, reflects an overall shift from the West to Russia that has been taking place in Eastern Europe over the past several years. In Bulgaria, pro-Russian Rumen Radev was elected president in November, a surprising outcome in an overwhelmingly pro-Western country. Even further West, Czech, Hungarian and Slovakian leaders have begun to criticize the European Union’s sanctions against Russia. In 2015, Czech president Miloš Zeman even barred the American ambassador from the Prague Castle for criticizing Zeman's decision to attend WWII commemorations in Russia.

Why does Eastern Europe seem to be shifting away from the West? Many Eastern Europeans, like Moldovans, seem to be simply tired of the ongoing corruption and the lack of positive change over the past few decades of pro-European rule. To make matters worse, US government representatives have continuously voiced support for corrupt regimes for the mere fact that they are pro-European—for example, in January 2016, US State Department official Victoria Nuland stated that “the most important thing is that in Moldova there is a strong pro-European government,” a statement which disappointed many Moldovans hoping for support from the West. Ironically, it is the US preoccupation with geopolitics that will likely push Moldova—and the rest of Eastern Europe—further and further away. In the meantime, while the US and the European Union try to come up with new ways to work with the East and show that the wellbeing of the region is important to them, Russia will be allowed to prove that it deserves a second chance. Only time will tell whether Moldova and its neighbors will be better off cooperating with Russia, and whether or not Western states will be able to maintain the influence they have become accustomed to in the post-Soviet era.

The author published an article of the same name before the election on November 10, 2017.

The Gate | 27

SCENES FROM THE INAUGURATION Photographs by Luke Sironski-White Text by Emma Herman

28 | The Gate

T

he rain began at noon, just as he took the oath of office. Some—his detractors, mostly—said this was an omen; others didn’t seem to notice. The morning had been gray and chilly (but not cold) and threatening clouds hung over the Washington Mall. Families dressed up in their Sunday best: little girls in silken, frilly dresses and baby heels; boys scrubbed and coaxed into suits. Old ladies wore ankle-length fur coats, young men wore camo, and people of all ages wore street clothes of all types, but the red ballcap was ubiquitous.

Streams of people ebbed and flowed: through the warren of streets on the southwest side of the Capitol—a maze of bleak and dirty office buildings—into the Metro and along the Mall.

Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office to Donald John Trump on Friday, January 20, 2017, inaugurating Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. Inaugurating: from the Latin inaugurationem, a word rooted in the verb augurare. To augur is to foreshadow, to portend, to predict or signify. For half the voters of this country, give or take about three million, Trump’s inauguration heralded a rebirth in American politics. The words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—“that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom”—encapsulate the fervor and faith that marked the slow progression towards this much-anticipated day. Lincoln’s next lines resonate as well: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The peaceful transfer of power ensured that the republic’s institutions will live on, but the spirit of the people for whom they exist seems lost.

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