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This is the story of the murder of two aid workers in Mexico. The men fed Central American migrants traveling north through Mexico on a freight train that stopped near their home.

They were critical of both corrupt police, who abused and extorted the migrants, as well as the organized crime gangs that kidnapped and robbed them.

It wasn't hard to find the two men — they were never far from the train tracks — but there were no witnesses to their deaths, and police won't comment about the case. The double homicide didn't even get a mention in the local press.

I met the men on several occasions this summer while reporting on the surge of Central Americans, especially unaccompanied minors, who were making the long journey to the United States.

'We Are All Human Beings'

Last June, I walked the rock-filled tracks with Adrian Rodriguez Garcia. It was quite a hike from his house to where migrants would gather and wait for his meals.

Everyone called him "La Polla." He was the "mother hen" to thousands of migrants, mostly from Central America, who knew that when they got off the train near the central Mexican town of Huehuetoca, La Polla would be there with hot coffee and sweet bread in the morning, or a hot meal in the afternoon — rain or shine.

"I like helping people," he said.

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4 min 38 sec

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The Surge In Single Women With Children At The U.S.-Mexico Border

Garcia said he started feeding the migrants near the town, about 35 miles north of Mexico City, about 10 years ago.

"I see how they suffer, how destroyed their feet are from walking such long distances, how they are always targeted by corrupt cops of crime gangs," he said.

He just wanted to make this small leg of their journey a little lighter.

After all, Garcia said, "We are all human beings, the only thing different about us is that we come from different countries."

Garcia dyed his long hair a light red color and pulled it back with a bright head band. He liked to paint his nails and wear sparkling rings. He told me he was a transvestite, and maybe that's why he related so much to the cast-aside migrants; he, too, felt he was an outsider.

Two years ago, a Honduran named Wilson Castro jumped off the train at Huehuetoca and decided to stay.

"I'm also a migrant," said Castro. "I know how much they suffer along the trip north — some die falling off the train or lose limbs, I've seen it all."

Castro was the quieter side to Garcia's flamboyance, but equally committed.

Handouts And Hard Work

The two didn't have a lot to hand out. One day when I was out at the tracks with them, Garcia lined up a group of about 20 migrants and passed out hot tortillas, beans, a slice of cheese and a few jokes.

He had an easy, loud laugh, but clearly there was a serious side to the work.

For one story I was working on about abuse in Mexico's migrant detention facilities, Castro told me about being held for two months in an overcrowded cell, where gang members robbed and extorted the migrants.

Earlier this year, both men thwarted an attempt to kidnap migrants at the train tracks. Castro held one of the suspected kidnappers while Garcia called the police.

Both gave statements to the authorities, and both received death threats, but according to human rights workers Garcia and Castro had been promised police protection.

None was provided, says Jorge Andrade, a human rights worker.

Last Sunday, after they handed out the evening meal, Andrade says the pair drove back to their house. They still were sitting in the car outside, talking, when members of Garcia's family who were in the house heard the shots.

Garcia died instantly from a shot to the head and heart. Castro, shot in the heart and lungs, died a day later. Police are not commenting.

At a press conference Wednesday, aid worker Andrea Gonzalez said authorities long had been aware of the criminal gangs operating in the region and the threats to the men, yet did nothing.

"We can no longer permit this type of violence and impunity to permeate our society," she said.

Castro's body is being sent home to his family in Honduras. Garcia was buried Tuesday in the small cemetery in town not far from his house — not far from the train tracks.

This is the story of the murder of two aid workers in Mexico. The men fed Central American migrants traveling north through Mexico on a freight train that stopped near their home.

They were critical of both corrupt police, who abused and extorted the migrants, as well as the organized crime gangs that kidnapped and robbed them.

It wasn't hard to find the two men — they were never far from the train tracks — but there were no witnesses to their deaths, and police won't comment about the case. The double homicide didn't even get a mention in the local press.

I met the men on several occasions this summer while reporting on the surge of Central Americans, especially unaccompanied minors, who were making the long journey to the United States.

'We Are All Human Beings'

Last June, I walked the rock-filled tracks with Adrian Rodriguez Garcia. It was quite a hike from his house to where migrants would gather and wait for his meals.

Everyone called him "La Polla." He was the "mother hen" to thousands of migrants, mostly from Central America, who knew that when they got off the train near the central Mexican town of Huehuetoca, La Polla would be there with hot coffee and sweet bread in the morning, or a hot meal in the afternoon — rain or shine.

"I like helping people," he said.

Parallels

Riding 'The Beast' Across Mexico To The U.S. Border

Parallels

A Flood Of Kids, On Their Own, Hope To Hop A Train To A New Life

As Flow Of Migrants Into Mexico Grows, So Do Claims Of Abuse

4 min 38 sec

Add to Playlist

Download

Latin America

The Surge In Single Women With Children At The U.S.-Mexico Border

Garcia said he started feeding the migrants near the town, about 35 miles north of Mexico City, about 10 years ago.

"I see how they suffer, how destroyed their feet are from walking such long distances, how they are always targeted by corrupt cops of crime gangs," he said.

He just wanted to make this small leg of their journey a little lighter.

After all, Garcia said, "We are all human beings, the only thing different about us is that we come from different countries."

Garcia dyed his long hair a light red color and pulled it back with a bright head band. He liked to paint his nails and wear sparkling rings. He told me he was a transvestite, and maybe that's why he related so much to the cast-aside migrants; he, too, felt he was an outsider.

Two years ago, a Honduran named Wilson Castro jumped off the train at Huehuetoca and decided to stay.

"I'm also a migrant," said Castro. "I know how much they suffer along the trip north — some die falling off the train or lose limbs, I've seen it all."

Castro was the quieter side to Garcia's flamboyance, but equally committed.

Handouts And Hard Work

The two didn't have a lot to hand out. One day when I was out at the tracks with them, Garcia lined up a group of about 20 migrants and passed out hot tortillas, beans, a slice of cheese and a few jokes.

He had an easy, loud laugh, but clearly there was a serious side to the work.

For one story I was working on about abuse in Mexico's migrant detention facilities, Castro told me about being held for two months in an overcrowded cell, where gang members robbed and extorted the migrants.

Earlier this year, both men thwarted an attempt to kidnap migrants at the train tracks. Castro held one of the suspected kidnappers while Garcia called the police.

Both gave statements to the authorities, and both received death threats, but according to human rights workers Garcia and Castro had been promised police protection.

None was provided, says Jorge Andrade, a human rights worker.

Last Sunday, after they handed out the evening meal, Andrade says the pair drove back to their house. They still were sitting in the car outside, talking, when members of Garcia's family who were in the house heard the shots.

Garcia died instantly from a shot to the head and heart. Castro, shot in the heart and lungs, died a day later. Police are not commenting.

At a press conference Wednesday, aid worker Andrea Gonzalez said authorities long had been aware of the criminal gangs operating in the region and the threats to the men, yet did nothing.

"We can no longer permit this type of violence and impunity to permeate our society," she said.

Castro's body is being sent home to his family in Honduras. Garcia was buried Tuesday in the small cemetery in town not far from his house — not far from the train tracks.

In 2011, drought hit Somalia hard, triggering a famine that ultimately killed some 260,000 people. Now, after a poor rainy season, the Food and Agriculture Organization is warning that the country could be on the brink of another famine.

To find out more about the current situation in East Africa, we spoke with Degan Ali, the Somali-American executive director of Adeso (African Development Solutions), a Nairobi-based humanitarian and development organization focusing on aid, education — particularly among nomadic populations — and community-based economic growth. Formerly known as Horn Relief, the organization was founded in the early 1990s by Ali's mother, Fatima Jibrell, in response to their homeland's devastating civil war.

Adeso does work in Kenya, Somalia and South Sudan. Ali spoke with Goats and Soda earlier this month.

Let's talk about your homeland, Somalia. It's been three years since the devastating famine that struck in 2011. How are things now?

Somalia is just getting out of its second famine in recent years, the first one being in the early '90s. We still have a situation where there are millions of people in south Somalia and parts of the north who are food-insecure. There are still more than a million internally displaced people. So the message to the international community would be that yes, things did improve and we left famine conditions in 2013, but we still have an unacceptable number of people who are hungry and food-insecure. We need to start addressing some of the root causes of these problems.

i i

Children from southern Somalia lined up for cooked food at a distribution center in Mogadishu in 2011. Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP

Children from southern Somalia lined up for cooked food at a distribution center in Mogadishu in 2011.

Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP

What are some of those root causes?

In the north, it's cycles of drought and hunger that are linked to environmental degradation. Poor rangeland management and poor natural resource planning — because there was no government for 20 years — as well as larger issues like climate change are expanding the deserts in Africa and all over the world.

It was [my mother's] idea to start putting in these very low-tech physical structures — basically, strategically placed rocks — to harvest rainwater and move it in a way that it spreads out and regenerates the grasslands. We've had so much success with these rock dams since 2001 that the European Commission came to us a few years ago and said they wanted to work with us to scale it up. So now we're implementing a 14 million-euro program on that kind of physical rehabilitation of the rangeland.

What lessons do you think the international community could learn from Somalia's 2011 famine?

In Somalia, 260,000 people died in the famine, over a billion dollars was spent trying to save them, and now we still have more than 300,000 people living in refugee camps in Dadaab that we are spending money on every single day. If we had only spent half of that money on predictable cash transfers, a safety net program could have supported the same households, in their homes and villages, in the breadbasket of Somalia. That kind of social protection — predictable cash transfers — is very simple, but it requires a new way of thinking.

You think aid organizations should simply give people cash?

Yes, we believe that if the bottom 5 to 10 percent of society in Somalia had more predictable resources, they could make longer-term decisions that would rebuild their asset base and make them more resilient.

For example, say you're a Somali woman, a farmer, experiencing the drought of 2011. And you know that you can get $30 a month for two years for staying in your home. Or you could trek hundreds of miles, risking your children's lives, to try to reach a refugee camp that you think might exist somewhere out there. What would you do? Of course you would hunker down and try to get through the drought, surviving on your predictable $30-a-month transfer.

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But right now, aid interventions are very unpredictable, so people are not making good decisions. So what we're saying is, let's move from the unpredictable transfers and make them more regular, to build resilience in vulnerable populations.

What's wrong with just sending food to hungry people?

In many cases, it's not an issue of food availability. It's an issue of purchasing power and keeping the local economy going. And it's an issue of empowerment. That word gets used a lot by people who still want to maintain control and tell aid recipients what they need. But what it should ultimately mean is that the person who receives the aid is given as much dignity and control as possible.

But many of us face this dilemma when we see a needy person on the street. If we give them money, how do we know they'll really use it for food?

If you were in the same situation, wouldn't you want people to feel that you are a responsible person? And all the evidence suggests that most of the recipients of these cash transfers make very responsible decisions. All the monitoring and evaluation data indicates that people use the money to purchase not only needed goods and services, but also to pay off debts — which is really interesting. That means they value their social capital and are thinking about the long term, not just their immediate needs. The debt is for meeting immediate needs, which is the normal cycle for pastoralists: They purchase goods during the dry season for food and water on credit, but then they need to pay it back during the rainy season.

I noticed on your Twitter profile that you describe yourself as a "social justice activist, Muslima." How are those connected?

I think my religion heavily informs both my values and the work that I do. In Islam, there is a core principle of mandatory charitable giving called zakat. I think in English you call it tithing. Every single Muslim has to give 2.5 percent of his or her wealth — if they're not using it — to support orphans, hungry and needy people.

Wow, 2.5 percent. If all of us did that ...

Exactly. There would be no hunger.

development

Africa

The Ebola outbreak started in rural areas, but by June it had reached Liberia's capital, Monrovia.

By August, the number of people contracting the Ebola virus in the country was doubling every week. The Liberian government and aid workers begged for help.

Enter the U.S. military, who along with other U.S. agencies had a clear plan in mid-September to build more Ebola treatment units, or ETUs. At least one would be built in the major town of each of Liberia's 15 counties. That way, sick patients in those counties wouldn't bring more Ebola to the capital.

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But it's taken a long time to build these ETUs; most won't be done until the end of the year. And now the spread of Ebola changing — clusters are popping up in remote rural areas. So building a huge treatment center in each county's main town may no longer make sense.

Two hours outside the capital, the Army's 36th Engineer Brigade just finished erecting an ETU last week. Lt. Abraham Richardson shows me around, first giving me a tour of the triage building where all patients will arrive. Then he leads me to four giant white tents inside what health workers call the "hot zone."

"That's where all the confirmed cases will be," Richardson says. Each tent will house about 25 patients.

This is what the military is good at: landing in a place they've never been and building stuff. But some say the size of the ETUs is a problem.

Because it's taken so long to build the centers, their relatively large size is no longer useful, says Dr. Darin Portnoy, who's with Doctors Without Borders. He's just finished caring for two sick children at one of the organization's original ETUs back in Monrovia.

"ETUs are not needed right now at the same level," he says. "Right now the construction should be scaled down — fewer beds."

"Take the amazing capacity that has been brought to bear and direct [it] elsewhere," he adds.

By elsewhere, Portnoy means remote rural areas, where, sometimes, the only way to reach people is by walking for hours or taking a canoe. He says big international donors should support so-called rapid response teams that go out, find those hard-to-reach people and set up small treatment centers where they actually live.

"Just because you have a plan ... doesn't mean you have to continue on that plan," he says.

The U.S. has started to scale down its plan, building only 15 ETUs instead of the 17 originally planned. Some ETUs will now have 50 beds instead of 100. And instead of sending 4,000 troops to West Africa to build facilities and train health workers, the military says that number will now be closer to 3,000.

i i

Maj. Gen. Gary Volesky, who commands U.S. forces in Liberia, wants to be sure the military has an exit plan. Kelly McEvers/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Kelly McEvers/NPR

Maj. Gen. Gary Volesky, who commands U.S. forces in Liberia, wants to be sure the military has an exit plan.

Kelly McEvers/NPR

The military is also helping to locate Ebola cases in remote areas. Just last week, says Maj. Gen. Gary Volesky, who commands the U.S. forces in Liberia, the military gave a team of epidemiologists a ride in a helicopter to a remote village north of the capital to find Ebola victims.

But Volesky says he wants to know the military has an exit plan, and that someone else will take over the jobs that the U.S. troops have been doing.

A few hours north of the capital, at one of the busiest ETUs in Liberia, custodian John Jameson shows us the burial ground full of fresh mounds of dirt. "Three, four, five burials a day," he says.

The ones buried here were those who could make it to the ETU. Health officials say many more people are getting sick and dying in remote rural areas, which means Ebola will keep spreading.

ebola

U.S. military

Liberia