In January, a US military operation captured Venezuela’s president and killed 32 Cuban military personnel in the process, a number Cuba’s own government, Venezuela’s own defense minister, and Trump himself have all confirmed. Within weeks, Cuba’s most important oil supply was gone.
In 2002, the world built a court to prosecute the crimes no one else would: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity. Twenty-four years later, it has convicted exactly three people for those crimes. Twelve more, including a sitting Sudanese president wanted for genocide, remain free, protected less by law than by the diplomatic weight of the governments that shelter them.
ICE called it a suicide attempt gone wrong. A county medical examiner, outside ICE’s own chain of command, ruled it homicide by asphyxia. That’s one name inside a system where the death rate in federal immigration detention has nearly quadrupled since last year, by independent count after independent count, none of which agree on the exact number, all of which agree on the direction. Part Three closes our series by moving from individual cases to the machinery behind them.
Fifty miles from where Emmett Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, a college student was found hanging from a tree. Ruled a suicide within days. His family is still fighting that finding, and he is not alone. Five cases, five states, the same sequence every time: a fast official conclusion, a family forced to hire a lawyer just to get it questioned, and a wait for answers that may never come. Part Two of our series asks who gets believed when the official story doesn’t hold up.
A federal agent shot and killed a 23-year-old American citizen on the side of a road in Texas. It took eleven months for the public to learn his name. Weeks later, in Minneapolis, two more people were killed under nearly identical circumstances, and the country knew within hours. Same kind of case. Same kind of contested account. Wildly different reaction. Part One of a three-part series traces five names most Americans have never heard, and two everyone has.
Content warning: this piece documents the killing of children. Details are graphic. What follows is sourced to UN bodies, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and independent investigators, not allegation.
THE CHILDREN
A six-year-old girl spent three and a half hours on the phone with a dispatcher, surrounded by her dead family in the back seat of a car, waiting for an ambulance that was hit by a tank shell before it reached her. That was January 2024. In April, during an active ceasefire, a nine-year-old was shot at her desk in front of forty-four classmates. In the three months since, at least 72 more children have been killed by the UN’s own count, during a ceasefire that was supposed to have stopped this. Thirty years of documented pattern, four UN and human rights findings of genocide, and not one conviction. Updated this week with what’s happened since April.
In any other advanced democracy, a 927-page disclosure showing $1.4 billion in earnings from industries the president regulates would have triggered an investigation. In America, it triggered a press release.
Before there was a Jesus or a Mohammed on the African continent, there were gods. The Hijra of India collected taxes in Mughal courts. The Mexica god Xochipilli presided over sexuality alongside flowers and music. The British came and wrote the laws. The laws stayed when the colonizers left.
Ghana’s Parliament just passed a bill criminalizing same-sex identity. Uganda’s carries the death penalty. Senegal doubled its prison sentence. Burkina Faso. Mali. A wave is moving across Africa.
The laws being defended as African tradition were written by British colonial administrators. The theology underwriting them was brought by missionaries. And the Americans now helping defend them — Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, Family Watch International, MassResistance, World Congress of Families — built their movement on a religion that was itself imposed on Africa by force.
A Massachusetts Christian nationalist organization coordinated strategy with a Senegalese Islamic network to pass legislation in a Muslim-majority country. They are now running anti-LGBTQ youth clubs in Ghanaian secondary schools using American-produced materials.
“The transnational pro-family movement has reached new heights in terms of their level of influence now that Trump is in office.” — Haley McEwen, author of “The US Christian Right and Pro-Family Politics in 21st Century Africa,” Reuters, March 2026.
This is not a story about Africa. It is a story about what America exports when it loses at home.
