IRTF News

This month marks 15 years since President Daniel Ortega declared public education to be free once again, just 24 hours after he was inaugurated. That was his second declaration, which has led to significant improvements – among many important improvements – in the lives of Nicaraguan families in the past decade and a half. The neoliberal educational model from 1990 to 2007 considered the public school system as useful only in creating future clients, viewing the poor as a source of cheap labor and not worthy of investment in their education. To that end, budgets were cut and the “school autonomy” policy was introduced, which passed the cost of education on to families. By 2003, the average Nicaraguan had just three and a half years of schooling and only 30% of those starting 1st grade were expected to finish 6th grade. By 2006, more than 45% of all teachers working in schools had not been formally trained.

On Thursday, Honduras will inaugurate Hernández’s successor: the country’s first female president, Xiomara Castro. Her resounding victory in November’s general election was propelled by a wave of anti-Hernández sentiment that reached even into his home town of Gracias. Hernández is widely expected to be indicted by US prosecutors on drug trafficking conspiracy charges upon leaving office. It would mark a spectacular fall from grace for a president who was once considered one of Washington’s top allies in the region.

A new study shows the impact the warmer climate will have on cultivating coffee, avocados and cashews, and on the farmers doing so. Of the three crops, coffee will be hit hardest by warming: The study model foresees an overall decline by 2050 in the number of regions where it could grow. For cashews and avocados, results were more complicated. Certain growing regions would experience declines in those crops while others, such as the southern United States, would likely find more land better suited to tropical food crops like cashews and avocados. By predicting decades in advance how agriculture will change, scientists can help farmers know what to expect, and can advise policy makers on how to encourage farmers to use more efficient growing methods like cover crops to prevent erosion or planting new crops when needed.

Guatemala's highest court has sentenced five former paramilitaries to 30 years in prison for raping dozens of indigenous Mayan women during the country's civil war in the 1980s. The men were members of so-called Civil Self-Defense Patrols, armed groups formed and supported by the military. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Guatemala said the sentence was a "landmark advance in the access to the rights to truth, justice and reparation for female victims of sexual violence during" the war.

In scouring the globe for cheap labor, US clothing brands are not merely opportunistic, they are also sometimes actively parasitic. Honduras is a case study: one in which US corporations and the US state department have worked together for decades to bring cheap garments to American consumers, framing job creation as a blessing for the Honduran economy while simultaneously engaging in political interventions that keep Honduran citizens poor. Among the manifold complexities of the global supply chain, a simple principle holds: corporations will always go where their costs – and their responsibilities – can be kept to an absolute minimum.

President-elect Xiomara Castro has not been sworn in yet, but her administration already faces its first major crisis. Just days before Xiomara Castro’s Jan. 27 inauguration as president of Honduras, her party Libre split over the congressional vote, as some members of National Congress aligned with her political opponents of the National Party and Liberal Party to support Jorge Cálix, a dissenting member of the Libre party, as president of the National Congress. It is a preview of the tumult that may await the transition out of 12 years of post-coup rule under the National Party, unlikely to willingly loosen its grip on power given that many prominent members face potential corruption or drug trafficking charge. As of Monday afternoon, Honduras still had two parallel Congressional leaderships, both under suspicion of illegality, a sign that does not bode well for the stability for the first days of Castro’s presidency.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas yesterday betrayed the Biden administration’s commitments to disentangle local policing from the federal detention and deportation system and called on local law enforcement agencies to assist DHS in the enforcement of federal civil immigration law. When local police, who lack expertise on immigration laws, act as ICE officers, the racial biases and discriminaton of the criminal legal system are layered on top of the already racist enforcement of U.S. immigration law. Sec. Mayorkas is urged to reverse course and follow-through on President Biden’s critical promises to affirmatively terminate “287(g)” agreements” with local law enforcement agencies around the country.