In famine-stricken Sudan, soup kitchens that feed hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in a war zone have shut down.

In Thailand, war refugees with life-threatening diseases have been turned away by hospitals and carted off on makeshift stretchers.

In Ukraine, residents on the frontline of the war with Russia may be going without firewood in the middle of winter.

Some of the world’s most vulnerable populations are already feeling President Trump’s sudden cutoff of billions of dollars in American aid that helps fend off starvation, treats diseases and provides shelter for the displaced.

In a matter of days, Mr. Trump’s order to freeze nearly all U.S. foreign aid has intensified humanitarian crises and raised profound questions about America’s reliability and global standing.

“Everyone is freaking out,” Atif Mukhtar of the Emergency Response Rooms, a local volunteer group in the besieged Sudanese capital, Khartoum, said of the aid freeze.

Soon after announcing the cutoff, the Trump administration abruptly switched gears. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that “life-saving humanitarian assistance” could continue, offering a respite for what he called “core” efforts to provide food, medicine, shelter and other emergency needs.

But he stressed that the reprieve was “temporary in nature,” with limited exceptions. Beyond that, hundreds of senior officials and workers who help distribute American aid had already been fired or put on leave, and many aid efforts remain paralyzed around the world.

Most of the soup kitchens in Khartoum, the battle-torn capital of Sudan, have shut down. Until last week, the United States was the largest source of money for the volunteer-run kitchens that fed 816,000 people there.

“For most people, it’s the only meal they get,” said Hajooj Kuka, a spokesman for the Emergency Response Rooms, describing Khartoum as a city “on the edge of starvation.”

After the American money was frozen last week, some of the aid groups that channel those funds to the food kitchens said they were unsure if they were allowed to continue. Others cut off the money completely. Now, 434 of the 634 volunteer kitchens in the capital have shut down, Mr. Kuka said.

“And more are going out of service every day,” he added.

Many of the aid workers, doctors and people in need who rely on American aid are now reckoning with their relationship with the United States and the message the Trump administration is sending: America is focusing on itself.

“It feels like one easy decision by the U.S. president is quietly killing so many lives,” said Saw Nah Pha, a tuberculosis patient who said he was told to leave a U.S.-funded hospital in the Mae La refugee camp, the largest refugee camp on the Thai-Myanmar border.

Mr. Nah Pha, who fled Myanmar in 2007 to escape the fighting there, said the staff gave him a week’s supply of medicine and told him that was all they could provide. “Once my medicine runs out, I have nowhere else to get it,” he added.

The public health implications of the aid freeze are broad, health workers say. In Cambodia, which had been on the cusp of eradicating malaria with the help of the United States, officials now worry that a halt in funding will set them back. In Nepal, a $72 million program to reduce malnutrition has been suspended. In South Africa and Haiti, officials and aid workers worry that hundreds of thousands of people could die if the Trump administration withdraws support for a signature American program to fight H.I.V. and AIDS.

Some programs that don’t fit the category of lifesaving aid remain frozen, while others are explicitly barred because they fall outside of the administration’s ideological bounds, including any help with abortions, gender or diversity issues.

The United Nations Population Fund, the U.N.’s sexual and reproductive health agency, said that because of the funding freeze, maternal and mental health services to millions of women in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gaza, Ukraine, and other places had been disrupted or eliminated. In Afghanistan, where the Taliban has banned women from working, 1,700 Afghan women who worked for the agency would no longer be employed.

At stake is not just the good will that the United States has built internationally, but also its work to promote America’s security interests. In Ivory Coast, an American-sponsored program collecting sensitive intelligence on Al Qaeda-related incidents has been interrupted.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, some of the funding to United Nations agencies supporting more than 4.5 million people displaced by a rapidly growing conflict in the country’s east has been frozen, according to a U.S. humanitarian official on the continent.

Even with Mr. Rubio’s announcements that lifesaving efforts could resume, much of the American aid system in Africa remained paralyzed by the confusion and disruptions, including in conflict-hit areas where every day counts.

“When they issue these broad orders, they don’t seem to understand what exactly they are turning off,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior U.S.A.I.D. official under the Biden administration who is now the president of Refugees International. “They’re pulling levers without knowing what’s on the other end.”

Some of the roughly $70 billion in annual foreign aid approved by Congress has been directed at supporting civil society in countries with authoritarian regimes, especially in places where the United States sees democratic gains as furthering American security or diplomatic interests.

In Iran, where the work of documenting detentions, executions and women’s rights abuses is done by outside entities funded by the United States, activists say the U.S. pullback now means that there will be few entities holding the Iranian government accountable.

A Persian-language media outlet funded by the U.S. government said their employees were working on a voluntary basis to keep the website going for now, but they had fired all their freelancers. Without money, they said they could not keep going.

“While Trump campaigned on a promise of maximum pressure on the Iranian government, his decision to cut funding for dozens of U.S.-supported pro-democracy and human rights initiatives does the opposite — it applies maximum pressure on the regime’s opponents,” said Omid Memarian, an expert on Iran’s human rights issues at DAWN, a Washington-based group focused on American foreign policy.

In Cambodia, Pa Tongchen, 25, was relying on American funding for journalism in a country where nearly all independent media has been crushed. He was scheduled to start work on Feb. 3 as a staff reporter at a media outlet run by a nonprofit that was set up with U.S. support.

Mr. Pa said he had hoped to shine a light on corruption through his work. “I want to help people who are vulnerable in our society,” he said. “They are ignored if no journalists report about them.”

In Egypt, where the United States funds scholarships for more than 1,000 undergraduate students at private and public universities, students were left in limbo.

“I was in real shock, and I didn’t know what to do, especially since they told us to leave the dorm immediately,” said Ahmed Mahmoud, 18, a student who was about to start classes next semester at the American University but instead had to throw all his belongings into five boxes.

The fallout from the aid freeze is likely to reverberate geopolitically, giving American rivals, like China, a window of opportunity to present itself as a reliable partner.

“That will set China apart from the U.S. to win the hearts and minds of many of the global south countries,” said Jingdong Yuan, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s China and Asia Security program.

In Africa, America’s well-run aid machinery was one of the factors that differentiated the United States from China and Russia. While Moscow deploys mercenaries and Beijing mines for rare minerals, Washington has reached across the continent with aid programs worth billions of dollars that not only save lives, but also provide a powerful form of diplomatic soft power.

Now much of that is in doubt. In Africa’s war zones, some are already regretful of their dependence on American aid.

“It was our fault to rely so heavily on one donor,” said Mr. Atif, of the Emergency Response Rooms in Sudan. “But this has really shocked us. You can’t take food off people who are starving. That’s just insane.”

On the border of Thailand and Myanmar, the implications of Mr. Trump’s decision were stark. There, a four-year civil war and decades of fighting between Myanmar’s military junta and ethnic armies have pushed thousands of refugees into Thailand.

Saw Tha Ker, the camp leader for the Mae La camp, said he was told on Friday by the International Rescue Committee, a group that receives U.S. funding, that it would stop supporting medical care, water and waste management for all of the seven refugee hospitals managed by his camp.

“The first thought that came to my mind was that whoever made this decision has no compassion at all,” said Mr. Tha Ker.

Mr. Tha Ker said he and his staff had to tell 60 patients in one hospital that they had to go home. Videos posted on social media showed men carrying patients on makeshift stretchers through unpaved streets.

“We explained to them that the hospital itself is like a person struggling to breathe through someone else’s nose,” he added. “Now that the support has stopped, it feels like we are just waiting for the end.”

Reporting was contributed by Mujib Mashal in New Delhi, Pamodi Waravita in Colombo, Bhadra Sharma from Kathmandu, Elian Peltier in Dakar, Vivian Yee and Rania Khaled in Cairo, Daniel Politi in Buenos Aires, David C. Adams in Florida, Leily Nikounazar in Brussels and Sun Narin in Phnom Penh.

Hamas on Friday announced the names of three hostages — including an American citizen — whom it said it would release this weekend as part of its cease-fire with Israel to end the war in Gaza, an agreement that has now held for nearly two weeks.

Abu Obeida, the spokesman for the group’s armed wing, named the three as Yarden Bibas, 35, Ofer Kalderon, 54, and Keith Siegel, 65, an American-Israeli. Israel is slated to release about 90 Palestinian prisoners this weekend in exchange for the three men, according to a Hamas-linked prisoners’ information center.

The three were abducted during the Oct. 7, 2023, surprise attack on Israel when Hamas and its allies killed roughly 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 hostage, according to the Israeli authorities, setting off the war in Gaza. Israel’s subsequent military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has lasted for over a year and killed more than 45,000 people, according to local health officials.

In a multiphase cease-fire deal that Israel and Hamas agreed to this month, Hamas pledged to free at least 33 of the 97 remaining hostages over the first six weeks in exchange for over 1,500 Palestinians jailed by Israel.

About 10 Israeli captives have been freed so far, in additional to five Thai workers who were taken hostage in the October 2023 attack while working in Israeli villages near the Gaza border. Israel has released more than 300 Palestinian prisoners, including many who were serving life sentences for involvement in deadly attacks against Israelis.

For many Israelis, the abduction of Mr. Bibas’s family has become emblematic of the cruelty of the Hamas-led attack. Militants also abducted his wife, Shiri Bibas, and their two children, Ariel, who was 4, and Kfir, who was 9 months old.

Hamas later said that Ms. Bibas and the two children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Israeli officials have not publicly confirmed that assertion, but have said that they are gravely concerned for the fate of the three captives.

Mr. Siegel was taken hostage from his home in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz close to the Gaza border. His wife, Aviva Siegel, was held captive with him until late November 2023, when she was one of about 105 hostages released as part of a weeklong cease-fire deal.

Shir Siegel, his daughter, shared a video on Instagram showing her embracing her mother after receiving the news on Friday. “Dad’s coming back, Dad’s on the list,” Aviva Siegel says, choking up.

Mr. Kalderon, a French-Israeli dual citizen, was taken captive when Palestinian militants raided his hometown, Nir Oz. His two children, Erez and Sahar, were freed in the November 2023 truce.

Shortly after her release, Sahar described being afraid of her Hamas captors — and also of being killed in Israel’s relentless aerial bombardment of Gaza. She was 16 at the time.

“What about my father, who has been left behind?” she told The New York Times. “I ask of everyone who sees this: Please, stop this war; get all the hostages out.”

Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.

He blocked Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

He signed a censorship law that led TikTok to disable its functions.

President Vladimir V. Putin has clamped down on free expression in Russia to a degree unseen since the Soviet era. Now he is taking aim at the last Western tech platform barely standing in wartime Russia: YouTube.

Mr. Putin has not formally banned the U.S. video platform that has more than 2.5 billion users worldwide. But the site has angered Russian authorities, who view the platform as an uncontrollable gateway to antiwar content. They have also decried YouTube for removing Russian propaganda channels as well as videos by Russian musicians subject to western sanctions.

So last summer Russian users experienced a significant slowing of YouTube, primarily on desktop internet connections. Internet experts have said the sudden and simultaneous drop-offs in traffic could be explained only by deliberate throttling of the service on the part of Russian authorities.

The purposeful slowing of the service spread to a wider swath of the internet, including mobile networks, in December. Millions of Russians trying to access videos have found them too slow to load or too pixelated to watch.

“This sudden massive drop is 100 percent artificial,” Philipp Dietrich, an analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations, said. “There is no doubt about the fact that this is human-made.”

The results of the broadside against YouTube have so far been mixed, demonstrating the complications Moscow faces in snuffing out an American-made cornerstone of the Russian internet that for years was seen as practically too big to ban.

YouTube for years has been a staple of daily life for many Russians, streaming everything from old Soviet movies to anti-Kremlin political shows. Some 96 million Russians over the age of 12, or about 79 percent of the over-12 population, visited the site monthly as of July, before the slowdown in service began, according to the research group MediaScope.

But the relationship between the Kremlin and Google, which owns YouTube, has been tense for years. Searing viral YouTube broadcasts transformed the late Russian opposition figure Aleksei A. Navalny into a significant threat to the Kremlin. His corruption investigation into a palace on the Black Sea built for Mr. Putin, released on YouTube in early 2021, has drawn 133 million views over the past four years, underscoring the power of the platform.

On one level, the throttling looks to have worked. Russian internet traffic to YouTube is less than a third of what it was this time last year, according to public data released by Google, the streaming service’s parent company. VK, the state-controlled social media network, is pitching a domestic alternative to YouTube, known as VK Video, and it has trumpeted surges in traffic.

But the reality is more complex.

Droves of tech-savvy Russians are continuing to access YouTube using virtual private networks, or VPNs. Those tools route their internet traffic through another country, meaning it does not show up in Google’s data as Russian usage. They also encrypt users’ traffic and protect their identities.

The impeding of YouTube has also proved spotty across Russia’s hundreds of internet providers, leaving some Russians able to access YouTube videos directly, even without VPNs.

Political shows critical of the Kremlin filmed outside Russia have seen relatively minimal traffic declines from the slowing service, according to the Russian journalist Dmitry Kolezev, who tracks the shows through a product called YouScore. That is likely because their viewers in Russia who are particularly motivated to view anti-Kremlin content have swiftly acquired VPNs.

Entertainment content, ranging from children’s cartoons to cooking shows, has seen a significant drop-off in many cases, according to YouTube traffic measurement sites. Viewers of such content are less likely to purchase VPNs and may be able to find what they are looking for on Russian streaming platforms.

The exact number of Russians using VPNs is unclear. Mikhail Klimarev, executive director of the Internet Protection Society, a digital rights group now based in Europe, estimated that more than half of Russian internet users, or about 60 million people, at least know what a VPN is and say they are able to use one.

“People will learn to use VPNs because of YouTube and will discover that there is much more to the internet than what they get on the regular Russian internet,” Mr. Klimarev predicted. “It is simply of higher quality, there are simply more opportunities, more access to content.”

Still, the slowdown in service is driving many Russians to state-controlled domestic platforms, such as VK and RuTube, to consume at least some of the content they used to watch on YouTube. That is a bifurcation of the internet that the Kremlin desires.

“We are calling this phenomenon a splinternet,” said Anastasiya Zhyrmont, policy manager for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at the digital rights group Access Now. They are trying “to splinter the internet and build their own ecosystem,” she said.

Ilya Shepelin, a Russian journalist in exile who makes popular YouTube videos skewering state propaganda, worries that only politically oriented Russians willing to go through the process of setting up and paying for quality VPNs will end up staying on YouTube, with the rest migrating toward a state-controlled domestic internet for leisure, where they will not chance upon political videos critical of the state.

The result, he said, would be “a kind of information bubble” where video creators will not “reach the average Russian.”

Already, some bifurcation is visible.

Artur Dneprovsky, the creator behind some 20 YouTube channels showing Russian-language children’s cartoons, including the popular “Blue Tractor,” said in an email that his studio’s bigger channels have seen drops in YouTube traffic from 20 percent to 30 percent, while the smaller projects have dropped up to 50 percent, amid the slowdown.

At the same time, he said, he has seen noticeable and rapid increase in views and subscribers on Russia’s domestic video platforms, especially RuTube, where more than 400,000 people have signed up for “Blue Tractor” since the start of the throttling — suggesting that some people having trouble with YouTube are migrating to RuTube or VK as alternatives.

Maxim Katz, a Russian opposition figure who broadcasts a popular political YouTube show from Israel, watched as the number of users tuning into his show from Russia in the data for his channel dropped 45 percent from a year ago. But his overall viewership numbers stayed the same, suggesting that some viewers in Russia had adopted VPNs and were showing up in the data as coming from other countries.

“People simply switched to using VPNs en masse and are continuing to watch YouTube,” said Mr. Katz, who is on Russia’s federal wanted list and does not publish videos on the state-controlled platforms.

Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 significantly escalated the Kremlin’s clash with Google. The company globally blocked more than 1,000 Russian state-sponsored propaganda channels, including more than 5.5 million videos, according to YouTube. It suspended ads shown on YouTube to users in Russia, as well as the serving of ads by Russia-based advertisers to users globally.

Google regularly denied demands by the Russian authorities to remove content. For example, after Mr. Putin announced a mobilization in September 2022 to shore up his reeling forces in Ukraine, Russia’s communications regulator asked Google to remove 63 videos from YouTube related to the unpopular mobilization. Google said it agreed to remove only one, because the clip advised the use of poison to avoid the draft.

In July, Google prompted ire from the Kremlin when it complied with European Union sanctions on pro-Kremlin musicians and removed their channels and videos. The impeding of service began soon afterward.

Russian authorities have also slapped Google with increasing fines.

Mr. Putin, speaking at his annual call-in show last month, accused YouTube and Google of doing the U.S. government’s bidding by serving up politically oriented videos to Russians searching for culture and music content.

“If they want to work here,” Mr. Putin said, “let them act in accordance with the laws of the Russian Federation.”

Mr. Putin also blamed the disruptions to YouTube last year on Google, saying that the company had not serviced its infrastructure in Russia since retreating from the market. Google denies that technical issues were responsible for the slowdown

Russian authorities have been stepping up a long-running campaign against VPN services, which, if effective, could further reduce Russian access to YouTube and other Western tech platforms.

Apple, for instance, removed scores of VPNs from its app store in Russia last year under apparent pressure from Moscow, a move that outraged international human rights groups. (Google Play, the App Store equivalent for Android devices, which are more popular than iPhones in Russia, has not done so).

Few Russian content creators, including those who support Mr. Putin, are satisfied with being confined to state-controlled domestic YouTube alternatives, which lack the same international reach, recommendation algorithm, monetization possibilities and broad user base.

Mr. Putin’s comments on YouTube in December came in response to a question from a popular Russian-language YouTube blogger, Vlad Bumaga.

Mr. Bumaga, originally from Belarus, praised the Russian alternatives, including VK, which has a deal to air his videos. But he nonetheless asked if YouTube access could remain accessible.

Even after signing with VK, Mr. Bumaga is still uploading his videos on YouTube, where they continue to earn millions of views and thousands of Russian-language comments. His account claims he is based in the United States.

Alina Lobzina and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.

When President Gustavo Petro of Colombia announced on social media on Sunday that he had turned back U.S. military planes carrying deportees, President Trump came down hard.

He threatened tariffs and penalties so extreme Mr. Petro was forced to back down. “They pushed until he had to bend,” Jorge Enrique Robledo, a former longtime Colombian senator, said in an interview.

Later that day, the White House and Mr. Petro’s government announced that Colombia would welcome all Colombian deportees, including those on military jets, and Mr. Trump declared victory.

The crisis riveted attention to the Trump administration’s deportation efforts; it also raised questions about the military planes deporting migrants, and why they angered Mr. Petro and other Latin American leaders.

Have military planes always been used for deportations?

No. Rarely, in recent times, if ever, defense officials say.

As part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal migration, Mr. Trump signed an executive order last week authorizing the U.S. military to assist in securing the border.

The acting secretary of defense at the time, Robert Salesses, said in a statement last Wednesday that the Department of Defense would “provide military airlift” to support the Department of Homeland Security in the deportation of more than 5,000 “illegal aliens.”

Mr. Salesses said these were people being held by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the southern border. He noted that the flights would take place after the State Department obtained “the requisite diplomatic clearances” and notified each country.

Symbolically, however, the military planes are emerging as crucial to the administration’s messaging around its efforts to crack down on migration.

On Friday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, posted images of migrants filing onto a hulking, slate-gray C-17 Air Force plane, while shackled together. The caption read, “President Trump is sending a strong and clear message to the entire world: if you illegally enter the United States of America, you will face severe consequences.”

Is the Trump administration deporting people only on military planes?

No, military planes have not replaced nonmilitary planes and so far represent a small fraction of the flights carrying out deportations under the administration: Only about six such flights have delivered deportees to other countries as of the end of Mr. Trump’s second week in office, according to a U.S. military spokesman.

During the same period, dozens of nonmilitary deportation flights left for countries around the hemisphere. The practice, schedule and the number of deportees on board has not changed under Mr. Trump, according to officials in Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia and Honduras.

But the commercial charters that resemble the planes used in everyday travel, which are operated by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, or I.C.E., have received less attention than the military planes.

Both the usual I.C.E. flights and the new military flights are overseen by the Department of Homeland Security. During both Mr. Biden’s term and Mr. Trump’s first term, the United States deported more than a million people, according to the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

Where have military planes taken deported migrants?

Only Guatemala and Ecuador were confirmed to have received U.S. military flights carrying deported migrants as of Thursday. Honduras and Peru are expected to receive military planes on Friday, a Defense Department official said.

While Colombia has agreed to receive such flights, no new military planes have been sent out since Mr. Petro turned back the two planes over the weekend, according to the U.S. military.

Mexico has said it has received only nonmilitary flights and has not said it will accept military planes.

Pete Hegseth, the new defense secretary under Mr. Trump, has promised to continue to use military planes. On his first official day on the job, Mr. Hegseth said, “This Pentagon snapped to last week.” Along with adding barriers and troops at the U.S. southern border, he said the military had also moved to “ensure mass deportations.”

He added: “That is something the Defense Department absolutely will continue to do.”

Who are the migrants on the military planes?

So far, the people returned since Mr. Trump took office, including those on the military planes, are primarily people apprehended under the Biden administration.

Those in the photographs posted by Mr. Trump’s press secretary were Guatemalan migrants apprehended after illegally crossing the border who had been held in detention since early January, according to Guatemalan migration officials.

Why did Colombia’s president get upset over U.S. military planes?

Mr. Petro turned back two U.S. military planes bound for his country for a few reasons, according to his social media posts on Sunday morning and members of his government.

First, he was upset about how deportees on a nonmilitary flight had been treated while they were being transported to Brazil. (They were handcuffed and flown in a plane without air-conditioning that was forced to land in Manaus, in the Amazonian rainforest, after malfunctioning.)

Second, while Colombia’s government had authorized military flights — according to U.S. officials — Mr. Petro was caught off guard when he learned only a few hours beforehand that the military flights were scheduled to land in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital. (Officials in Guatemala have also said they are notified only shortly before military planes are scheduled to arrive.)

Mr. Petro also generally objected to putting deportees in handcuffs; officials said his government had an agreement with the Biden administration that permitted deportees to mostly travel without restraints.

Experts say handcuffs are sometimes used while a plane is in flight to prevent deportees from taking over the aircraft; in other cases, they are used when deportees are escorted on and off the aircraft.

Colombia never blocked nonmilitary deportation flights. In a post on Sunday, Mr. Petro said “on civilian planes, where they’re not treated like delinquents, we will welcome our compatriots.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Petro said online that his government was in dialogue with the Trump administration to establish a “protocol for dignified treatment” that would include allowing deportees to travel without handcuffs.

What are other countries saying about military planes?

The U.S. military has a particular resonance in Latin America, experts say, especially for leftist leaders like Mr. Petro and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. They remember a time when the United States carried out covert American military operations in the region as part of an effort to subdue revolutionary movements in the name of defeating Communism.

The presence of the U.S. military can also threaten the notion of national sovereignty in countries like Mexico. President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has said: “They can act within their borders. When it comes to Mexico, we defend our sovereignty and seek out dialogue so as to coordinate.”

However, regional officials are most concerned about how migrants are being treated on deportation flights, and have expressed particular concern over the use of handcuffs and chains.

Leaders in Latin America have also objected to the images that are being released of migrants in handcuffs and chains and to the way that Mr. Trump has described migrants, particularly deportees, whom on Monday he referred to as murderers, gang members and drug kingpins.

“We do not agree with calling a migrant ‘a delinquent,’” Ms. Sheinbaum said. “We defend our compatriots wherever they may be, but in particular in this moment in the United States.”

Since Mr. Trump took office, Brazil, Guatemala and Mexico have submitted complaints to the United States related to the treatment of migrants on deportation flights, according to officials in those countries. It was not immediately clear if in Guatemala the complaint was related to a deportee or deportees on military flights.

On Thursday, Colombian deportees said they had been handcuffed, shackled and chained around the waist for the duration of a flight to Bogotá on a nonmilitary plane; it was not immediately clear if the government there made an official complaint.

Reporting was contributed by Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and James Wagner from Mexico City; Jody García from Guatemala City; Federico Rios from Bogotá, Colombia; and Eric Schmitt from Washington.