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RRN Letter
Guatemala, 11/21/2021
November 21, 2021
In our letter to the attorney general of Guatemalan, we joined the voices of our RRN members with organizations from around the world to denounce the state of siege declared by the government of Guatemala and repression carried out against the local indigenous Maya Q’eqchi’ community in El Estor, Izabal Department. Since October 4, residents have been organizing a highway blockade to prevent the passage of machinery on its way to the El Fénix nickel mine, which has been operating illegally since 2005. Police have implemented tactics of intimidation and repression over the past several weeks. Local residents—along with journalists reporting on the protests—have been tear-gassed, beaten and threatened by the excessive number of agents of the National Police and military deployed to the area. Police are enforcing a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Roads in and out of El Estor are controlled by military road-blocks. Lake Izabal is patrolled by naval boats. Drones are flown to monitor neighborhoods and movement of local residents. Tear gas is fired not only at demonstrators but into people’s homes. Some indigenous leaders and journalists have been arrested. Security agents have also been confiscating cellular phones of the residents and journalists to prevent documentation of the events.Both the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights have denounced the state of siege, but the violence continues.
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News Article
2021 IRTF Commemoration program book, recordings, highlights
November 17, 2021
Thank you to the more than 120 people who attended the IRTF annual Commemoration of the Martyrs online on Sunday, November 7. You helped to create a beautiful and moving tribute to human rights defenders throughout southern Mexico, Central America, and Colombia. Here you will find links to (1) Commemoration program book 2021, (2) Zoom recording of the event, (3) Facebook livestream recording, (4) playlist from the social hour, (5) an additional play list, (6) how you can add your name to urgent human rights letters, (7) donations for the Honduras support fund, (8) IRTF Legacy Circle planned giving fund, and (9) highlights from the speakers' presentations. Thank you!
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News Article
Colombia: U.S. Media Provides Biased Coverage of Cuban and Colombian Protests
November 15, 2021
An analysis of how two major U.S. newspapers presented the civil unrest in Latin America this year demonstrates how corporate media favors political allies and blames enemies. Although people in both countries protested for many of the same reasons—inequality, poverty, and unemployment exacerbated by COVID; rising cost of living; police violence; and systemic racism—the Colombian protests lasted far longer and were met with a harsher crackdown than in Cuba. According to respected human rights and civil society groups, the death toll ranged from 21 to 44 deaths in Colombia in a population of 51 million and one to five deaths in Cuba in a population of 11 million. In addition to disproportionately killing more people, Colombian police also injured protesters more severely than their Cuban counterparts, such as deliberately shooting at dozens of protesters’ eyes.
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News Article
Guatemala: Indigenous mine opponents targeted in raids during state of siege in El Estor
November 15, 2021
In the midst of a long conflict and recent protest over a nickel mine in El Estor, in eastern Guatemala, police have carried out more than 40 raids and 60 arrests, and the government has declared a 30-day state of emergency. Indigenous Mayan opponents to the mine say they were never properly consulted about the mine and its impacts on their lands, livelihoods and lake, and protested on the town’s main road, refusing passage to mining vehicles. Four police were shot during the police crackdown on protests by what the government blames as armed protestors, although mine opponents say the assailants were not involved in the protest. There are concerns mining operations will pose environmental damages to Guatemala’s largest lake, home to diverse fish, bird, reptile and mammal species, including the endangered Guatemalan black howler monkey (Alouatta pigra).
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News Article
Honduras: Election Rules Uncertain, Corruption and Human Rights Abuses Unchecked
November 12, 2021
Honduras will hold presidential, legislative, and local elections November 28th under a cloud of concerns. An array of presidential and legislative candidates are competing who habe allegations against them of corruption and connections to money laundering and drug trafficking. Violence stalks the process. Thirty candidates and close family members have been killed.
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News Article
Honduras: Why Arbitrary Ruling to Move Guapinol Trial Location Is Repudiable
November 11, 2021

After the recent bond hearing concluded, the Guapinol water defenders were told that the court would rule on whether or not to release them within 24 hours, which is what the Criminal Procedural Code establishes. The family members of the defenders didn't wait for the ruling outside the court. They traveled by busloads more than an hour away to the jail in Olanchito to be near their loved ones, awaiting the decision. Late that night, after no news and after the Court clearly passed the established time to deliver its ruling, the families returned home. The following day, with still no news, they made another hour-long trip to the court in Trujillo. Outside, entire families and their communities congregated peacefully, under police watch. They shared food, chanted, and used the time to denounce the environmental destruction being caused by illegal mining in the Carlos Escaleras National Park by the Grupo Emco open-pit iron oxide mining project. They held posters and banners of their loved ones, hoping they would be finally freed after 26 months of detention deemed arbitrary by the UN.

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News Article
Colombia: Deforestation and Conflict
November 11, 2021
In the five years following its historic 2016 peace accord, Colombia has seen a surge of forest razing and land clearance amid continuing unrest in the countryside. The rate of tree loss, which greatly lowers the country’s chances of meeting its zero-deforestation goal by 2030, is tied to conflict and violence. These ties are complex. Deforestation began to rise soon after the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which had operated mostly from rural areas, declared a ceasefire in December 2014. It then gathered steam after the 2016 accord was signed. The rebels’ departure from their strongholds provided an opportunity for other insurgencies and organised crime to assert control. With state authority in the countryside still feeble, those groups pushed back the forest to expand enterprises like coca growing, cattle ranching, illegal gold mining and logging, sometimes working with legal businesses. To arrest the damage, Bogotá should fix its approach to prosecuting environmental crime, implement peace accord commitments relating to the environment and urgently bolster its natural resource management systems. (Bram Ebus, Crisis Group consultant for the Andes, investigates how deforestation in Colombia is often linked to conflict.)
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News Article
Honduras: Violent Infiltration
November 6, 2021
Daniel García received the text message, which showed the muzzle of an AK-47 above a blurry road, at 7:30 p.m. “You’re alive because God is great and powerful,” the sender wrote, “but I don’t think you’ll have the same luck this week. I’ll see you soon, love.” García knew the message was serious. Rumor had it he’d been placed on a kill list of five land rights activists in Honduras. The first of the five, his friend Juan Manuel Moncada, had been assassinated just four days earlier. The paramilitaries’ strategy begins with infiltrating social movements, killing off key members, and then installing armed groups inside communities to terrorize their residents into exile or silence, according to eyewitness testimony, interviews with more than a dozen local residents, and affidavits made on behalf of asylum-seekers in the U.S. If successful, the armed groups will extinguish land rights movements and seize back control of the palm oil lands the Dinant corporation claims it owns. Both Dinant and the paramilitaries have ties to Xatruch Special Forces base in Tocoa, being trained by members of the U.S. Army from Joint Task Force-Bravo.
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News Article
Colombia human rights update October 2021
November 5, 2021
As Colombia’s President Iván Duque, while attending COP 26 in Glasgow, received praise and a warm welcome from world leaders such as Boris Johnson, Prince Charles, Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau, there was no attention paid to the horrific human rights crisis which has engulfed Colombia throughout Duque’s governance.
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News Article
Anti-Racism: Black America And White Supremacy - Race As A Factor In Human Rights Abuses
October 31, 2021

The United States is a contradiction. From the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution to the Statue of Liberty beckoning the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the U.S. trumpets to the world – and does not hesitate to export at gunpoint – the ideals of democracy, freedom, and unbridled capitalism; yet, it is a nation that is also based upon the murderous oppression of Black, Indigenous and other peoples of color. The United States was born of Indigenous genocide and settler colonialism, and African slavery, which included genocide and extractive colonialism, all driven by capitalism and the desire to exploit every natural and human resource for the fulfillment of greed and hegemony. These are not historical issues which have been overcome; they exist today in other no less deadly forms than their earlier iterations.  

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