"If we foolishly cancel these contracts, Russia and China would be the enormous beneficiaries," Trump said in November, at the height of global outrage over Khashoggi's assassination in Istanbul a month earlier.
Standing by Riyadh aimed "to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region", he said in a statement at the time.
But beyond his incendiary and widely criticised statement, Trump's handling of Khashoggi's murder highlighted the nature of his foreign policy toward countries in the Gulf, where economic gain appears to matter more than Washington's strategic long-term goals.
While 2018 also saw the Trump administration make other policy decisions in the Gulf - from repairing US relations with Qatar to ending mid-air refuelling of Saudi jets participating in the Yemen war - it was defined by Trump's insistence on defending Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman amid the Khashoggi crisis.
Here's a look at Trump's tumultuous year in relations with Gulf nations.
Standing with MBS
In a rare instance of bipartisanship, every US senator backed a resolution in December saying they believe the Saudi crown prince, known as MBS, "is responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi".
While the measure was symbolic, it nonetheless sent a scathing message not only to Riyadh, but also to the White House, which has stood by MBS despite the outrage that spread to some of Trump's staunchest defenders in Congress.
Khashoggi, a journalist who was often critical of the Saudi royal family, was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October.
The death of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and Virginia resident who had personal ties to top officials and analysts in the US capital, shook Saudi-US ties to their core.
Even hawkish conservatives who view Riyadh as essential to Washington's strategic goals in the wider Middle East region, including as a counterpoint to Iran and as protection for Israel, began to question the utility of the partnership with a kingdom led by bin Salman.
Congress's anger was fuelled by the CIA's conclusion that the crown prince ordered the assassination of Khashoggi.
Still, Trump would not budge, while Riyadh repeatedly denyied the crown prince's involvement, opting instead to put the blame on a group of Saudis that included some of MBS's top advisers.
Trump's statements in the aftermath of the killing only went as far as criticising how the murder was carried out. "They had a very bad original concept, it was carried out poorly and the cover-up was the worst in the history of cover-ups," he said in late October.
On 20 November, in his statement on Saudi Arabia after the assassination, Trump drew condemnations for attempting to smear Khashoggi.
Trump quoted Saudi officials as saying that Khashoggi was an 'enemy of the state' (Reuters)
He quoted Saudi officials as saying that the late journalist was an "'enemy of the state and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood", a claim that has been rebuked by members of the Khashoggi family.
"In a bizarre, inaccurate and rambling statement - one offering a good reminder why Twitter has character limits - President Trump whitewashed the Saudi government’s brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi," Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan wrote in a column the following day.
A few weeks after Trump's remarks, Khashoggi was among a group of journalists who were named Time Magazine's Person of the Year.
Although the international news cycle has largely moved on from the Khashoggi assassination, Trump remains alone in attempting to shield the crown prince from fallout at all costs.
With the US House of Representative set to be dominated by Democrats in the new year, US politicians have vowed to investigate the president's dealings with the kingdom.
Scrutiny over US role in Yemen
In his last Washington Post column published while he was still alive, Khashoggi urged MBS to end the war in Yemen.
Ironically, his death brought unprecedented scrutiny to Riyadh's war efforts in the impoverished country, as well as to Washington's role in the conflict.
Saudi Arabia launched a wide-scale military operation in Yemen in 2015 - during the tenure of then-US President Barack Obama - to root out the country's Houthi rebels, who had taken over the capital Sanaa and ousted Saudi-backed President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi.
Washington, which views the Houthis as a proxy force for Iran, was on board from the get-go.
But as casualties mounted to the tens of thousands by some estimates, and Yemen became the world's worst humanitarian crisis, backing the Saudis began losing its status as the default position for the power centres in Washington.
In a stunning rejection of Trump's relations with Riyadh, the US Senate voted in December to end US military assistance to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.
The senators invoked the War Powers Resolution of 1973 for the first time ever, which gives Congress the power to stop US involvement in military interventions authorised solely by the White House.
A similar measure stalled in the House of Representative, as lawmakers from Trump's Republican Party, who still controlled the chamber, managed to prevent it from being debated and presented for a full vote.
However, the growing awareness of the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen and the newly found scepticism towards Riyadh has raised troubling questions for the White House over its logistical and political support for the war.
In September, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were making an adequate effort to minimise civilian casualties, an assertion that was backed by then Pentagon chief James Mattis.
The announcement came about a month after a Saudi air strike on a school bus killed dozens in northern Yemen in an attack that Human Rights Watch said was an "apparent war crime".
Still, by October, even the Trump administration was calling for an end to the war.
"It is time to end this conflict, replace conflict with compromise, and allow the Yemeni people to heal through peace and reconstruction," Pompeo said in a statement late in October, as pro-coalition forces closed in on the port city of Hodeidah, threatening to choke the lifeline for humanitarian aid into Yemen.
The secretary of state's comments were followed by a decision from the White House to stopmid-air refueling for Saudi jets headed for missions in Yemen.
Those steps towards resolving the conflict, however, had little effect as lawmakers tried to force Trump's hand.
In December, Mattis and Pompeo asked members of the House of Representatives in a briefing "to continue the military advising, logistics support and intelligence that have for years been shared with Saudi Arabia", the New York Times reported.
But with an anti-war bill that has cleared the Senate, in the new year a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives is expected to pass the measure to force Trump to end US assistance for Saudi Arabia's war, setting up another showdown over relations with Riyadh.
Trump can veto the legislation, which would then need a two-thirds majority in Congress to pass.
U-turn on Qatar
Early in the year, Trump appeared to make an aboutface on Qatar, praising the tiny Gulf nation for its "counter-terrorism" efforts, a stark contradiction to how the US president previously accused Doha of funding militant groups "at a very high level".
In June 2017 Trump appeared to take credit for the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar, fully backing his allies in Riyadh in their efforts to isolate Doha, against the advice of his top aides, who had called for end to the diplomatic impasse.
But in April of this year, Trump hosted Qatar's ruler Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani at the White House and lauded him as a "great gentleman" who is "very popular in his country".
Trump was clear that he views Gulf rulers, including the Qatari emir, as ideal customers for US goods, particularly weapons.
Trump hailed Al Thani as a 'great gentleman' (Reuters)
"We have a gentleman, on my right, who buys a lot of equipment from us. A lot of purchases in the United States, and a lot of military airplanes, missiles - lots of different things," Trump said during the White House meeting, after which Al Thani pledged to double Qatar's US purchases in the coming years.
The blockade would later resurface in the US Congress in a proposed Senate resolutionseeking to denounce Saudi Arabia's bin Salman for the murder of Khashoggi.
Monitoring oil prices
The US president also openly praised, threatened and even raged against Arab countries - particularly Saudi Arabia - over oil prices throughout 2018.
With casual reminders that the US military defends oil-producing countries in the Middle East, he called for an increased output to drive prices down.
"We protect Saudi Arabia — would you say they’re rich?" Trump asked supporters at a campaign rally in early October. "And I love the king, King Salman, but I said, 'King, we’re protecting you. You might not be there for two weeks without us. You have to pay for your military, you have to pay.'"
Just spoke to King Salman of Saudi Arabia and explained to him that, because of the turmoil & disfunction in Iran and Venezuela, I am asking that Saudi Arabia increase oil production, maybe up to 2,000,000 barrels, to make up the difference...Prices to high! He has agreed!
Yet even in the midst of the Khashoggi crisis, Trump expressed gratitude to Saudi Arabia for low oil prices.
"Oil prices getting lower," he wrote on Twitter. "Great! Like a big Tax Cut for America and the World. Enjoy! $54, was just $82. Thank you to Saudi Arabia, but let’s go lower!"
However, analysts have questioned the impact of Saudi Arabia's oil output on prices, and some have said the market is bracing for a drop in demand because of a forecast for slow growth caused partly by Trump's trade wars and erratic economic policies.
This is part two of two Middle East Eye reports on Donald Trump's 2018 Middle East policy decisions. To read part one, which zeroes in on Trump's policies towards Palestine, Syria, Iran and Turkey, click here.
Militants seize town of Baga, near Chad, in show of force before presidential election
A boy walks past the remains of a village burnt down by Boko Haram on the outskirts of Maiduguri. Photograph: Audu Marte/AFP/Getty
Boko Haram has launched a series of attacks in north-east Nigeria, hoisting its flags over several towns and overrunning a multinational military base.
Militants from Islamic State West Africa Province, a faction of Boko Haram that split off in 2016, have taken over the former commercial town of Baga near the border with Chad, and seized the nearby multinational joint taskforce base (MNJTF), in a show of force less than two months before Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, seeks reelection.
Hundreds of people fled Baga for Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, which has been the centre of the Boko Haram crisis during the past decade. Escapees said gunshots heralded the arrival of uniformed, turbaned men, who quickly took control of the town. Some said they led prayers in the town on Friday. The army chief of training and operations, however, said the fight was ongoing.
“We are having a ding-dong situation in Baga right now,” he said. “We are not in full control, but Boko Haram have not taken control either.”
Several communities surrounding Baga also fell to the insurgents, according to residents. “Boko Haram are now occupying the MNJTF and positioned their gun truck strategically in Shuwari town,” said Mala Musa, a youth volunteer living in Baga.
Hassan Mahmud, a resident of Kukawa, said they arrived just as he was starting dinner. “Boko Haram has taken over Cross Kauwa, Kukawa and Baga,” he said. “Presently Boko Haram (members) have hoisted their flag in Baga town and are in full control.
“I’d bet my life that Boko Haram are strongly and forcefully retaking the north of Borno state, because they easily sweep the area. No soldiers are in these areas as I speak, and most of our civilian populace have run out of the town.”
President Muhammadu Buhari, who is seeking reelection. Photograph: Sunday Alamba/AP
Mahmud managed to flee Kukawa, taking most of his family members with him. Arriving into Maiduguri at 9am on Friday morning, he sipped some tea as he recounted the ordeal that led to their 200km journey.
He said the militants headed straight for the military bases, trying to reassure civilians that they would be safe. “Boko Haram were even telling us: ‘Don’t worry, we are not here for you. Stay where you are and don’t panic.’ But can we trust them? Definitely not.”
Baga, previously a bustling town home to 300,000 people, was the site of what Buhari, then in opposition, called “an unspeakable massacre” in 2015. Up to 2,000 people are thought to have died then, but, as one resident said: “No one stayed back to count the bodies.”
Over 100 police officers who were being trained in counter-terrorism were sacked this week after they absconded to avoid having to fight Boko Haram, Nigerian media has reported.
Nigerian soldiers frequently complain of being poorly equipped to fight a group that has killed tens of thousands of people, raped and kidnapped many more, and displaced millions.
“The morale of our military personnel is going lower every day because our strength is daily weakened by the number of casualties.. due to lack of or obsolete equipment,” said an officer who asked for anonymity.
Buhari’s campaign for a second term rests partly on his security record – last week he claimed that “people in the north-east know that we have recorded remarkable improvement in the fight against Boko Haram”.
His administration has sent thousands of displaced people back to the areas they fled to try to further this perception, despite the fact that many of them remain unsafe. The spate of attacks over Christmas could undo this carefully crafted perception.
Family members and friends surround Laura Calderwood, center, at a news conference in Montezuma, Iowa, on Aug. 21, the day the body of her daughter, Mollie Tibbetts, was found in a cornfield. (Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press)
BROOKLYN, Iowa — The letters began immediately. Dozens at first, then hundreds, each day bringing more: from a Texas man telling her this was why we needed to build the wall. From a New York television producer asking for an interview. From an elderly woman despairing “this divided America in which we now live.” Nearly every day since her daughter’s body was found, she had opened the mailbox, then sat and read them, because that was her routine, that was how she tried to make sense of something so senseless. But now the mailbox was empty for the first time, and she had a new routine.
Laura Calderwood, whose daughter, Mollie Tibbetts, 20, was allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant and left to rot in a cornfield this past summer, closed the mailbox, walked up the steps to her house and turned on the stove. It was getting on toward 6, and she needed to get dinner going. The boys would be hungry.
There were two inside the house now. One was her son, Mollie’s younger brother, a high school senior named Scott. And the other was his friend, a courteous teenager named Ulises Felix. He was the child of Mexican immigrants. For years, his parents had lived and worked beside the man accused of killing her daughter at the same dairy farm on the other side of town, which they fled after his arrest, leaving behind not only Brooklyn, but also Ulises, their 17-year-old son. He’d wanted to finish high school in the only town he’d ever known, and soon, remarkably, he had a new home — the home of Mollie Tibbetts — where Laura had promised to look after him in his parents’ absence.
She flipped on the television.
The news that day was what the news was every day in a country where the central political clash no longer revolved around a choice between candidates, or a question of big government vs. small, but rather an elemental battle over who gets to be an American. Should any immigrant — regardless of race, religion, nationality or circumstance — have that chance? Or should it be reserved for the few who might more quickly assimilate into the American majority?
Today, on the news, President Trump was again making clear where he stood. Birthright citizenship was “ridiculous.” The caravan of Central American migrants marching through Mexico toward the United States was an “invasion.” In their numbers were “many gang members.”
And today, Laura was standing at a countertop cluttered with letters from strangers who had found her online, in a kitchen heaped with hundreds more, dropping shredded rotisserie chicken and noodles into a pot of boiling water, when the front door opened.
“Uli?” she called.
“Yeah?” he replied, coming into the kitchen, hair dyed blond and wearing white sneakers.
“Are you hungry now?” Laura asked. “I’ve got homemade chicken soup and some garlic bread.”
She brought him a bowl of soup, and he took it, and they stood there for a moment.
“There’s some more if you want,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said, eyes going from the dinner table to his nearby bedroom, then back to the dinner table. He turned to walk with the bowl to his room, where he would eat alone on his bed, but Laura stopped him. Scott was downstairs. She was about to eat alone, too.
“Eat out here, if you want, Uli,” she offered, so he came back. They both sat at the table, as opinions of the caravan and immigration seesawed on the television.
“. . . we simply cannot tolerate the continued invasion of this country . . . ” a voice on the news program said.
They discussed his excitement about playing basketball that season, and little else, two people from two different Americas — one immigrant, the other native — whose lives were upended by the same moment of violence and then plunged into the center of another divisive national debate about immigration.
“. . . sending close to 5,000 troops to the border . . .”
Two people who were, each in their own way, mourning the loss of family members, with little in common beyond raw need. Two people now trying to translate this unspoken need into something familial, an effort that was increasingly complicated by their separate connections to the alleged killer, Cristhian Bahena Rivera.
Ulises stood. He took his empty bowl to the sink. He washed it, put it away quietly, then returned to his room. He closed the door behind him. At the table, Laura finished her meal in silence.
Friends and family attended a memorial service for Mollie Tibbetts on Aug. 22 at St. Patrick Catholic Church. (Drea Cornejo , Richard Swearinger/The Washington Post)
The stories almost always begin the same way. A son or daughter is dead, and an undocumented immigrant is blamed. Aggrieved and adrift, the parents search for meaning in it all, some finding what they can in obsession and hatred. “In my life we’re going to find the trash who killed my kid,” said Scott Root of Council Bluffs, Iowa, whose daughter, Sarah Root, 21, was killed in 2016, allegedly by an undocumented drunk driver who was released after partially paying bail, then disappeared. Others find meaning in political transformation. “I became a Republican,” said Sabine Durden of Mineral Springs, Ark., whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant in a traffic collision. And still others in activism: “My story needed to get out,” said Laura Wilkerson of Pearland, Tex., whose son, Josh Wilkerson, 18, was beaten to death in 2010 by an undocumented immigrant.
Then there is Laura Calderwood. Fifty-five, with curly blond hair and a halting gait, she is a lifelong liberal who didn’t abandon her politics. She feels anger like the others, but not toward an entire group of people. She’s not afraid of the demographic change remaking the country. But she does fear the deepening polarization. So she never goes to political rallies — never speaks publicly — because she believes that would just inflame things. Instead, she tries to live every day, including this one, just as she did before it all happened.
By late afternoon, Laura had finished up her shift at the grocery store, where she works in the catering department, and gotten into her white SUV. She drove through nearby Grinnell, pulling up to the public library, as always, seeking a sense of calm in its quiet. She went in and sat near the magazines, one of which she had been reading the afternoon of July 19, when her phone rang.
It was her son Scott. He was asking, “Did you know Mollie didn’t come into work today?” Laura quickly thought back to the night before. Mollie, who’d been dogsitting at her boyfriend’s house, was supposed to have come home for dinner but hadn’t. That wasn’t unlike Mollie, sometimes scattered, always losing something. But for her to miss work? Laura quickly reported her missing. The following weeks blurred: search missions, media reports, false ransom demands, death threats, misreported sightings, private fears. On and on it went, until Aug. 21, when police announced that a body was found, and those fears were confirmed, and Laura began a new life, this one saddled by public expectations.
“How are you?” one gray-haired woman now asked Laura as she came out of the library bathroom. “I hope you’re doing better.”
Laura smiled uncomfortably, trying to be kind, but privately hoping to end yet another conversation with someone well-meaning. What did they want from her? The truth? Did they want to know that she still sat on Mollie’s bed every day, looking at the books messily shelved, the walls covered with photos? Did they want to know that she still hadn’t removed Mollie’s death certificate from her car, because where would she even put such a thing?
Laura said, “I am,” thanked the woman and left the library.
The landscape on the drive home was a rolling splash of dull browns, marked by election signs, including one for Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds. She had taught Laura everything she needed to know about politics.
The day it was broadcast that Mollie was found, Reynolds called and wept with her on the phone. Laura had been moved by her tenderness — and still was — but then, on that same day, Reynolds issued a public statement. Gone was the empathetic woman from the phone call and instead was someone now using the words “predator” and “broken immigration system.” The next statement was even harsher, this one from Trump. He’d never called Laura, knew little about her daughter, but had no problem, Laura thought, using Mollie’s death to try to end immigration policies he now referred to as “pathetic.”
Laura puts things back on the bed in Mollie’s bedroom, where everything has been kept as it was. She still sits there, looking at the walls covered with photos. After Mollie died, Laura faced a decision of whether to take in an immigrant teenager whose parents fled the dairy farm where her alleged killer worked. Laura asked herself what Mollie would do. (Rachel Mummey/For The Washington Post)
Laura hated the sound of Mollie’s name coming from his mouth. His words were the opposite of who Mollie was, advancing a “cause she vehemently opposed,” as her father, Rob Tibbetts, who’s separated from Laura, wrote in a newspaper column soon after her funeral. She’d wanted to welcome all immigrants who needed help. So when Scott soon came to Laura with an unusual request — could they take Ulises in? — she asked what had happened. The nation, it seemed, was directing its anger about Mollie’s death toward Yarrabee Farms, where her alleged killer had worked, deluging it with vitriolic messages. The immigrant families who worked there were fleeing.
Laura thought of Mollie. She would argue that the farmworkers didn’t deserve this, that they were only trying to earn a living. What would she say about Ulises? Bring him in? Laura thought that his father may be undocumented and worried about attracting unwanted attention, but again, what would Mollie say?
Laura arrived home, weeks later now, that decision long since made, Ulises living in the spare bedroom. She had hoped to find a full house, but soon she was alone, on a night she had been dreading.
The doorbell rang.
“Oh my goodness, look at you guys,” she said, seeing young children in costumes on her doorstep. She handed out candy.
“Happy Halloween!” she then told the next group.
She closed the door, an emptiness swelling inside her. Everywhere in the house, there was Mollie — here holding a microphone in a hallway picture, there jogging in a newspaper clipping on the fridge — but in her mind, she couldn’t see her. What did Mollie wear for Halloween? Could she already be slipping away? Laura pulled down one photo album, and then another, and then she was crying, but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t remember.
The doorbell rang again.
“I thought it was over,” she sighed, going to the door. She opened it.
Three young children stood outside. All were dark-haired, speaking Spanish.
“Hi!” Laura said cheerfully, wanting to appear normal for them, handing out candy. “How are you?”
Authorities charged Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, with first-degree murder in the death of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts. (Allie Caren, Patrick Martin, Richard Swearinger/The Washington Post)
Three miles away, down a straight gravel road, where city gives way to fields, there is a line of four single-wide trailers outside a dairy farm, one of which had once been the only home Ulises had ever known. The beige carpeting where his young relatives played. The wood-paneled walls where his mother hung paintings of fruit. The small kitchen where, on Thanksgiving in 2015, the man who would take it all away once posed for a photograph, wearing a red button-down.
Everyone knew Cristhian Bahena Rivera. The 24-year-old immigrant lived in a nearby trailer and helped tend the farm’s 650 cows. Bahena Rivera came to the farm all but alone, his family 2,150 miles away in El Guayabillo, Mexico. Knowing what that meant, Ulises’s parents, who are from Durango, Mexico, watched after him as best they could. Ulises’s mother tried to be a maternal presence, preparing food for him and inviting him over. His father helped him become a good farmhand. Eventually, Bahena Rivera got into a relationship with Ulises’s cousin Iris Monarrez and they had a daughter together before separating.
So on Aug. 20, when dozens of investigators swept through the farm, interviewed workers and then took Bahena Rivera in for further questioning, few suspected him of anything. It couldn’t have been him. Not Bahena Rivera, who was always joking around and had trained Ulises when he worked on the farm. Not the guy who had called Ulises’s cousin “mi princesa hermosa” — my beautiful princess — on Facebook. Not the employee who’d acted perfectly ordinary during those dramatic weeks, as Brooklyn tore itself apart looking for Mollie, and Ulises put up missing-person posters, and authorities investigated about 4,000 leads.
The next day was the news conference. Mollie’s body had been found. Ulises and other seniors on the football team wanted to support Scott, their quarterback, so they drove to Montezuma, the county seat, where an investigator wasted no time getting to it:
“Cristhian Bahena Rivera . . . has been charged with murder.”
Ulises felt his body go numb.
“He is an illegal alien.”
His teammates were looking at him, asking what was wrong, why he was crying.
“Found in a cornfield, and there were cornstalks placed over the top of her.”
Ulises glanced over at Mollie’s family, huddled together nearby. Scott was looking down. His baseball cap was tipped low. Laura appeared uncertain on her feet, people propping her up on either side. Did they know? Did they have any idea that his family knew — and knew intimately — the man who allegedly killed Mollie? As he looked at them, a sense of shame rose in him, as though he was complicit somehow. If only he’d been more curious, asked more questions. Maybe he could have picked up on something, even stopped it all. Mollie would still be here. And he wouldn’t be going back to the farm, where his family waited in their trailer, and telling them news that none of them had expected.
“No,” his mother said, distraught. “It’s not true.”
He then summarized what police had said:
On the evening of July 18, surveillance footage near Boundary and Middle streets had shown Mollie jogging. Into the frame came a dark Chevy Malibu linked to Bahena Rivera. He got out and ran after her. Mollie, wearing headphones and clutching her phone, said she was going to call the cops, and he got angry. Bahena Rivera couldn’t remember what immediately followed. His memory was “blocked,” he told police, explaining that happened when he became very upset. The next thing he recalled, he said, was driving. He noticed an earpiece from headphones in his lap. That was when he remembered: Mollie was in his trunk. He drove deep into the country and pulled out her body. He dragged it 20 yards into a cornfield. He left it faceup and then drove away, returning one month later with investigators to show them where it was.
Not long after the news conference, the news trucks pulled up to the farm. Then came the racist telephone calls, some of which were routed to Ulises’s trailer, whose number was listed. Next the hate mail. And finally a robo-call went out from a white supremacist group using a Brooklyn number. “We don’t have to kill them all,” it said. “But we do have to deport them all.”
Ulises begged his family to stay. Everything would calm down. The hate was coming from out-there America, not Brooklyn. Then someone said something racist to his mother at a gas station, and a Latina high school student reported hearing bigoted comments by classmates, and his mother said they had to move. It wasn’t safe here anymore. They began packing, telling Ulises they understood if he chose to stay.
“I got home to a basically empty house except for my room. My parents are moving up to Illinois,” Ulises messaged to Scott one night soon after. “ . . . I don’t know what’s gonna happen.”
“Live here,” Scott quickly wrote back. “We got an extra room.”
And that’s what he did, moving all that he owned — his video games and some clothing — into the bedroom that Laura had cleared of the gifts, flowers and letters flooding the house. Every night, in that room, he called his parents, now living with relatives hours away. And outside it, he tried to get used to a new culture in a house where no one ate the food he did, meals weren’t usually shared together and details of his family’s close relationship with the man who allegedly killed Mollie started to trickle out.
Fields of corn dominate the landscape around Brooklyn. Mollie’s body was found hidden by cornstalks in a field outside Guernsey, Iowa. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
Laura had refused to attend the arraignment. She hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near that man, whom a federal investigator had described to her as the “most demonic person” he’d ever met. But then it was a little later, and the house was silent and she felt restless. She took out her computer. She had to know. She had to look at his face, if only just once. A recorded live stream of the arraignment came up. Ignoring the comments scrolling past — “Another American killed by an illegal”; “Illegal aliens must be stopped!” — she stared at the screen, confused. This hadn’t been what she expected. He looked so thin, so young.
The camera swiveled to a young child with black hair and earrings. Laura had heard Bahena Rivera had a daughter. This must have been her. She was held by a young woman who looked overwhelmed. Laura closed the laptop. She wondered who this woman was. Then Ulises came to live with them.
The boy, who was nothing but respectful and sweet, always asking permission to go anywhere, told her he was related to the woman. The mother of Bahena Rivera’s child was his cousin.
Another revelation:
“He was a pretty funny dude . . . always messing around,” Ulises casually said of Bahena Rivera one night, and Laura just listened, looking down as she cooked.
And another:
“My mom took care of him for a while, and she fed him every day,” he said one evening. “He was so busy sending money back to his parents, trying to help them build a house.”
“Oh, wow, I didn’t know that,” Laura said quietly. “Did he come here by himself, Uli?”
“The only family I know that he had here was his uncle and aunt.”
Ulises Felix is pictured in an undated family photo. After Mollie was killed and his parents moved to Illinois, he went to live with her family. (Family photo)
“I mean, that’s . . . ,” she began, searching for the right thing to say. “I’m glad he had someone as a mother figure to look after him,” she ultimately got out, referencing Ulises’s mother, struggling to show compassion. “If he didn’t have any family here to speak of.”
She then left the room, saying, “I’m going outside.”
The night was cold and quiet. She lit a cigarette, breathed in. Was what Ulises said true? But how could it be? She never wanted to think — or anyone else to think — that Bahena Rivera was somehow decent. She wanted to picture him only as that federal agent did: without conscience.
Deport him? Execute him? Too easy. He needed to spend the rest of his life in prison, deprived of seeing his daughter, just as she’d been deprived of seeing hers. Justice to her would be waking up every day knowing that he was in pain. And now to hear something redeeming about him? It made her feel uncomfortable and unmoored.
She called Sophia Bucheli, her friend from Oakland, Calif., where Laura once lived, before leaving the father of her three children. The women had spoken almost every day since Mollie was found, when Sophia, whose parents are Ecuadoran immigrants, told her, “Something horrific has just happened to you, and I do not blame you if your ideals completely change.” But when Laura responded that they hadn’t and that, in fact, she was going to invite Ulises from the dairy farm to live with her, Sophia kept it a secret. She worried that Laura would get hurt. Or used. Or become a target for the anti-immigration hard-liners, who she feared were prevalent in Iowa, a state she saw for the first time the next day on a trip to visit Laura.
They drove to Iowa City, where Mollie had attended the University of Iowa, and tried to ignore it all for the day — drinking coffee, talking about nothing, walking among the campus buildings — until they were heading back to Brooklyn, speaking in low voices. Sophia had so many questions, questions she’d never dared ask, but now, in the quiet of the car, she thought she might.
“In all of our conversations, I’ve never asked you what happened,” said Sophia, whose graying hair looked black in the low light.
“What do you mean what happened?” Laura said.
“How did she die?”
“You don’t know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Multiple stab wounds.”
“Oh my God.”
“In the chest. And I also know there was one in the skull,” Laura said. “. . . Mollie’s death was horrific.”
Sophia wanted to believe she could be like Laura. She hoped she would have it within her to suppress the hatred and anger she feared would consume her, would consume anyone, but here Laura was. She somehow hadn’t let that happen. She’d instead brought this child of immigrants into her house — a child whose ties to Bahena Rivera seemed endless — and how had she managed to handle it? How did she reconcile the differences between what the evidence said of Bahena Rivera and what Ulises said? What did she gain from caring for Ulises, except for a constant reminder that Mollie’s alleged killer wasn’t, perhaps, all bad? How could she stomach the incongruity?
“Take this exit,” Laura said. “It gets us off the interstate.”
They turned onto a barren county road, streaking past the last gas station for miles.
“Highway 21,” Laura said. “They found her body around here.”
Sophia didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything at all.
“In a cornfield,” Laura said, repeating it for what seemed like the millionth time, still trying to believe it herself.
They passed the spot and continued on to Laura’s house, where Uli was waiting, with nothing but blackness outside the windows.
Laura prepares dinner in her kitchen, where a childhood photo of Mollie hangs on the refrigerator.
Everywhere in the house are reminders of Mollie, but Laura feels her memories of her daughter slipping away. (Rachel Mummey/For The Washington Post)
“Are you working today?” Ulises texted Laura one morning.
Odd, she thought. He rarely texted her this early.
“Yes, what’s up?” she replied. Did he need her?
“That’s fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about it then.”
Hours went by before she heard the news. Ulises had been injured at basketball practice that morning and had gone to the hospital. His ankle might be broken. He might miss most, if not all, of the basketball season. Laura picked up the phone again, something maternal kicking in, worrying now not only about his ankle, but also about his disappointment. Basketball — a sport he talked about constantly and loved above all others — had been part of the reason he’d stayed in Brooklyn, and now his chance of playing was coming apart. She typed out a message. What did he need? Why hadn’t he told her when it happened?
“I was going to, but I didn’t wanna worry you with you being at work,” he wrote.
“You must want something for dinner.”
“Could I have some Mexican? A burrito. Steak.”
Ulises — and how he was doing — was just about all she thought about for the rest of the day, until it was finally time to leave work. She went to a nearby Mexican restaurant, bought him the dinner he had requested and headed home, feeling good, feeling useful, filled with purpose. She wanted to be the one to care for him. She needed to be the one to care for him. She’d had three children for a reason, and here was a chance now, in a small way, perhaps, to try to partly fill the void.
She came back to a house full of people — her sister and both her sons were there — but did little in the way of greeting them. Instead, she hustled to the counter and opened the oven. She put Ulises’s dinner inside to warm it up, waving off Sophia’s offer to help. Minutes later, she took out the meal, put it on a plate and carried it to Ulises’s room. The door was closed. “Can I come in?” she asked.
He was lying on his bed, a video-game controller in his hands, a big bag of ice on his left ankle. Nearby were crutches and pain relievers and a boot.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
She came over, knelt and gently patted his leg, touching the bag of ice. “Okay, good,” she said to herself, placing the food beside him.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, looking up at a woman whom he once hadn’t known all that well, but whom he’d come to trust so much that she’d been one of the first people he texted when he got hurt, even before his mother.
Laura quietly closed the door as she left, and it was still closed the next morning, when she woke early. She made breakfast for everyone and then checked in with Ulises’s doctors — the X-rays showed that it was only an avulsion fracture, offering hope that he’d be back on the court that season — and made a follow-up appointment for him. She put down the phone and looked around the kitchen. It was still covered with all of those letters, telling the familiar story of a fracturing country. There had been enough of that, she had come to think, beginning to gather them up.
There were two boys inside the house now. She had to think of both. They didn’t need to see all of this every day.
She put the letters into a box, took them into her study and closed the door behind her.
PUERTO ASÍS, Colombia—Just one year ago a drive through the rugged roads of Puerto Asís, a municipality in Colombia’s Putumayo department, would have passed by countless fields covered in emerald green coca crops. Coca is the substance used to make cocaine, and Putumayo, located on the border with Ecuador, has long been one of the country’s top cocaine-producing regions. But today more than half of Puerto Asís’s coca is gone.
The coca crops of Puerto Asís began to disappear one year after the Colombian government signed a peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerilla group in 2016 and the subsequent National Comprehensive Program for the Substitution of Illicit Crops. Under the program, which passed in 2017, coca farmers of this region voluntarily uprooted their crops in exchange for a series of government-provided benefits and programs to swap illegal crops for legal ones.
Marcos Rojas was one such coca farmer. Now 42, he had grown coca since age 17. That was when the FARC guerrilla group killed his mother, a single parent, and displaced him from his land in Meta, a department northeast of Putumayo. For 25 years coca was his only source of income. But he is now tired of it. “We never prospered with coca,” he says. “It only attracted armed groups and violence.”
At first glance, all of this sounds like a success story for the Colombian government. And it would seem Puerto Asís is on track to rid the region of coca for good. But, according to Rojas, by this time next year, coca is likely to take over once again. That is because the government hasn’t fulfilled its end of the agreement.
Under the substitution program, in exchange for uprooting their own coca plants, coca farmers were to receive a monthly subsidy of 1 million pesos, more than $300, for one year, and technical assistance to begin other projects—such as personal, self-sustaining vegetable gardens—beyond that. Rojas and his neighbors say they have fulfilled their part of the bargain; each eradicated their own coca crops in 2017. Yet thus far they have only received half the subsidies and no technical assistance. Meanwhile, with their coca gone, they’ve lost their livelihoods. To put food on his able, Rojas himself took some plantain and yucca plants from faraway plantations and tried to plant them in his land. But now his farm looks like it was ravaged by a hurricane; the plantains and yucca grow among fallen trees and burned coca leaves.
While the government drags its feet, other armed groups are taking advantage of the void created by the FARC’s demobilization. They now control the drug trade the FARC once created and are trying to stop crop substitution by killing those who take part in it. Farmers feel unsafe and poorer for the choice to rid their land of coca plants. All of that could lead to violence, backsliding, and a resurgence of the cocaine trade, if things don’t change quickly. That would mean one of Colombia’s greatest success stories could quickly turn into failure.
The project’s aim was to give coca farmers alternative options though which they could make a living. When the FARC was in power, prior to the peace deal, the militant group was the law of the land for these farmers in Putumayo. It was a symbiotic relationship: The FARC financed itself through the cocaine business, which meant they needed the farmers to grow it. The farmers benefited, because the FARC bought their coca. The promised stipend and assistance to build a vegetable garden under the substitution program was meant to help farmers survive while they transitioned into a legal way of making a living. In the long term, more technical assistance was meant to help farmers transform their arable land for crops they could eventually sell at markets, such as cacao and sacha inchi, a type of nut. The farmers first signed collective agreements expressing their communities’ interest in the program, and then individual ones with a commitment to voluntarily eradicate. The United Nations was put in charge of verifying that each farmer declares the right amount of coca. It also verifies that farmers fulfill their promises to uproot their own crops.
The program was considered revolutionary by drug policy experts in the country, because it was the government’s first large-scale attempt to deal with the country’s vast coca plantations as a problem of development, not of criminality. But even at the outset, its implementation was chaotic.
Its creation coincided with a dramatic upsurge in the number of hectares planted with coca across Colombia (171,000 in 2017). Under pressure to produce results in the war against cocaine, the government rushed into signing contracts with thousands of coca farmer families without working out the finer details of the program.
The government’s first mistake was trying to roll out the program with an aggressive forced eradication initiative. Members of the armed forces forcefully uprooted more than 60,000 hectares of coca a year for the past two years. Coca growers often protested, leading to violent clashes with police. Forced eradication proceeds much more quickly than voluntary eradication and reached many coca farmers before they were able to sign on to the plan willingly. But forced eradication is more likely to lead to backsliding and replanting, as it doesn’t create alternatives or options to make a living without coca.
The second mistake was one of infrastructure. Across Colombia, underdevelopment threatens the substitution program’s success. Selling coca requires little infrastructure. A buyer typically shows up to a coca farm and takes it away. But to sell their, new, alternative crops, farmers will have to bring their own produce to market. That means they need roads—and these, largely, do not yet exist in coca regions. If the government doesn’t build them fast enough, the agricultural products meant to replace coca will rot before the farmers have a chance to sell them.
Verification, too, has hit stumbling blocks. The U.N.’s efforts to verify and confirm the thousands of hectares that are now part of the program are taking longer than anticipated They were supposed to take between 30 and 60 days to verify uprooting. Further, in some areas where the government has signed agreements, the presence of armed groups has made it too dangerous for the U.N. to do its job. But without the U.N.’s seal of approval, coca farmers cannot start receiving benefits. Some farmers I spoke to say they have been waiting for the U.N.’s arrival for about a year.
There are organizational problems too. Emilio Archila, the lawyer appointed as the high counselor for post-conflict by Colombian President Iván Duque after he took office in August—Archila’s office is in charge of articulating the government’s vision of post-conflict Colombia and implementing the peace deal—says delays with the program’s technical assistance are the previous government’s making. When he took over the job, there were only 17 contractors hired to provide technical assistance. They each had a capacity to help a maximum of 100 families. But just over 99,000 families signed up with the program. Archila is in the process of hiring providers that can tackle the magnitude of the job, but that, too, will take time.
There’s more. In Puerto Asís, the database for the Forest Ranger Families Program, a small-scale substitution program that pre-existed the National Comprehensive Program for the Substitution of Illicit Crops (it launched in 2005) lists as beneficiaries hundreds of farmers. But most of those farmers never actually received assistance from that program. That’s a problem: Though those farmers are still waiting for the Forest Ranger Families Program, they are rejected if they try to sign up for the new substitution plan because farmers cannot be part of two similar programs.
The Fundación Ideas Para la Paz, a nongovernmental organization and think tank that supports peace building in Colombia, says delays in the substitution program’s arrival, its perceived broken promises, and forced eradication generate mistrust in the government. Coca farmers are therefore susceptible to the influence of illegal armed groups and could continue to grow coca at their behest.
Those armed groups have been gaining ground. Colombia’s coca plantations usually exist in remote areas, far from urban centers in places where the state has been historically absent. The FARC used to control most of those areas. After their demobilization, the government failed to fill in the void they left behind. Instead, other armed groups, such as the National Liberation Army and FARC dissidents, or those who refused to adhere to the peace deal, arrived first. They now control the drug trade the FARC once created and are trying to stop crop substitution by killing leaders who advocate for it. Last year, 226 social leaders, most of them substitution advocates, were killed in Colombia.
If the government wants crop substitution to succeed, it will have to guarantee coca farmers’ safety.
To do that, it cannot solely rely on the armed forces, said Hernando Zuleta, the director of the Center for Studies on Security and Drugs at the University of the Andes in Bogotá. It will have to largely expand its presence to areas where it has failed to do so in the past. Infrastructure spending will need a radical boost to build roads, schools, and hospitals. Education will have to be prioritized, as well as the presence of government institutions such as courts, notaries, and state banks.
And yet, for all its flaws, the program is still proving to be more effective than forced eradication. The police say growers replant around 40 percent of forcefully uprooted coca. On top of that, Zuleta said, forced eradication produces the so-called globe effect, in which coca forcefully uprooted in one area reappears in another where it wasn’t previously present. The program eradicates coca at a much slower pace. Since its creation, farmers have voluntarily eradicated 32,929 hectares. But in regions where the plan has been implemented, replanting rates are near zero. Putumayo is proof of the potential that a program like the National Comprehensive Program for the Substitution of Illicit Crops has in fighting the spread of coca. It has the largest number of voluntarily uprooted coca hectares in the country. Not a single productive project resulting from the program is found in the region. Yet farmers who signed contracts with the program have not gone back to coca, yet, and are hoping for the program’s success.
Archila has stated that the new government will fulfill every single such contract already signed. It is commendable that the new government did not end the program. But Duque’s anti-drugs policy is very similar to that of his predecessor, with a heavy focus on forced eradication and a return to aerial spraying of crop-killing chemicals. It’s true that the fear of forced eradication pushes farmers to consider signing up for a voluntary substitution program—after all, if farmers don’t voluntarily uproot, the armed forces will do it for them. The better option is voluntary eradication, because they get the benefits of the program. But Duque should not allow his policy to become too much stick and not enough carrot. Otherwise, he will lose the most viable option to finally strike a blow to the country’s decades-long cocaine production problem.
Reporting for this article was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
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Trump hailed Al Thani as a 'great gentleman' (Reuters)
President Muhammadu Buhari, who is seeking reelection. Photograph: Sunday Alamba/AP
