TITLE: Inside Trump’s Disastrous ‘Secret’ Drug War Plans for Central America
SENTENCE 1: The blackmailing goes on in front of the barracks where the officers “eat, sleep, and live,” and not by accident, but because “the police are involved in organized crime.” Everyone in the area knows “they’re working with the gangs, extorting people for profit.”  Far from being independent entities, she says, the gangs are often tools of the authorities, who “use them for their own purposes.”  Most citizens know they can’t “call the Honduran police for help” when they’re targeted themselves since “they assume [officers] are involved” with the maras.
SENTENCE 2: to Honduras has made any changes for the majority of the population,” she says, and as evidence cites the fact that “60 percent of the country is still in poverty.”  The soft-power initiatives seem to have proven useful in some cases, but Spring also accuses them of “promoting very specific interests” that don’t “have an impact on security or why people live in fear.”  Johnston, of CEPR, also wonders if the soft programs are adequate.
SENTENCE 3: diplomacy in the region will likely be wearing a uniform instead of a suit.”  Cops, Soldiers, and Cartels on the Same Team  Over the last two decades of the Drug War, the Pentagon’s penchant for propping up repressive generalissimos in places like Mexico, Colombia, and Central America has caused widespread suffering among the populations of those nations, including a plague of extrajudicial killings.

Bias label: moderately
Annotator rationales:
If the police are described as being assumed to be involved with the maras,
then it attributes corruption and criminal complicity to law enforcement, reinforcing a perception of institutional failure.
If U.S. military involvement is described so bad,
then it frames U.S. intervention as a direct contributor to human rights abuses rather than a stabilizing force.