Anti-Militarism: News & Updates

President Bukele’s “state of exception” has led to the mass incarceration of 2% of the nation’s population. Poised to run for a second term in February 2023, Bukele is upping his draconian iron fist policies—with the support of the Congress and popular opinion.

The latest:

On July 26, Congress passed by 67 votes in favor (just 6 against) a new law to allow prosecutors to simultaneously try up to 900 people alleged to be part of the same criminal group at the same time! And the maximum penalty for being found guilty of being a gang leader was increased to 60 years in prison.

Ingrid Escobar, spokesperson for Humanitarian Legal Aid, a group providing assistance to Salvadoran detainees, said prisoners are at risk of being tried for crimes they did not commit. She warned they could be prosecuted simply “for living in a place stigmatized by gangs, despite not necessarily being gang members themselves.”

While the get-tough-on-crime policies are popular in El Salvador, human rights groups in the country are taking their criticisms to the international arena.  On July 14, at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (based in Washington, DC), human rights organizations denounced the deaths of 174 people in state custody and over 6,400 documented human rights abuses during the “state of exception,” which was initiated by President Bukele in March 2022. It has been renewed by legislators every month or two since.

Will the Guatemalan people be allowed to vote for a government that is actually democratic for the first time since 1954?

 Or will the US and Canada stand back and watch as long-time “democratic ally” – the repressive, aptly-named ‘Covenant of the Corrupt’ government – carries out sustained attacks on the electoral process and the Semilla Party?

On June 25, to the shock of most Guatemalans, international observers and indeed the “Covenant of the Corrupt” (an alliance of corrupt judges, prosecutors, politicians, and economic and military elites who run the country), the opposition-party named Movimiento Semilla (“seed movement”) finished 2nd place in first-round elections, forcing a run-off against the establishment UNE Party (candidate Sandra Torres, a former first lady).

The “Covenant of the Corrupt”has been carrying out brazen, January 6/Trump-like attacks on the democratic aspirations of the Guatemalan people, targeting the electoral process itself and the Semilla Party that is favored to win the August 20 run-off vote.

Over the past ten years, the North American media has reported on the plight of millions of forced migrants desperately trying to cross Mexico and get into the US. A disproportionately high number of these refugees and forced migrants are fleeing Guatemala. Many have fled from land, environment and human rights defense struggles that our organization (Rights Action) supports, having suffered evictions and violence at the hands of successive Covenant of the Corrupt governments in partnership with transnational companies in the sectors of mining, hydro-electric dams and the for-export production of African palm oil, sugar cane, bananas and coffee.

Yet, in the face of this, the US and Canadian governments (and companies) have consistently prioritized their political and economic and political interests over basic issues of democracy, human rights, the rule of law and the guaranteeing of a basic minimum standard of decent living conditions for a majority of Guatemalans.

The Guatemalan presidential candidate Bernardo Arévalo has denounced a police raid on his center-left Semilla party headquarters as a “corrupt” show of “political persecution” just a month before the high-stakes runoff election. In a post on Twitter, Arévalo derided the raid as a “flagrant demonstration of the political persecution we have denounced”. The presidential hopeful has blamed the police action on a “corrupt minority” but did not go into further detail. The raid follows an investigation into alleged irregularities in the registration of more than 5,000 Semilla members, which the party has denied and which has been widely criticized by rights groups as improper interference in Central America’s biggest democracy. Arevalo is scheduled to go up against former first lady Sandra Torres on August 20. 

Today, a group of 17 members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressing serious concern over the prolonged detainment of five prominent anti-mining activists in El Salvador. The arrests, which occurred on January 11, 2023 targeted leaders from the rural community of Santa Marta in northern El Salvador who were instrumental in passing a 2017 ban on metallic mining; El Salvador remains the only country in the world with such a ban.

For decades the United States has armed and supported military and paramilitary forces around Central America in its fight to oppress challenges to global capitalism. In this glorious struggle no means and violent actions were too extreme for "the nation of freedom and liberty," no matter who the victims were. Especially under the Reagan administration, violence by US-trained and armed forces ramped up, with one of the most devastating acts being the El Mozote massacre of December 1981 when the Salvadoran Army's Atlácatl Battallion killed more than 800 civilians, including children, in the small village in northern El Salvador. 

In this period of war crimes one of Reagan's most important supporters was Elliott Abrams, who served under President Reagan in the US State Department as both Assistant Secretary of Human Rights and Assistant Secretary of Inter-American Affairs. From the beginning on Abrams' was a strong supporter of the US's insurgency policies and a strong defender of dictators like Ríos Montt in Guatemala under who's regime mass murder, rape and torture were committed against the Ixil Mayan people, events later classified as a genocide by the United Nations. When asked about the US's record on El Salvador in 1994, Elliott Abrams called it a "fabulous achievement." 

Thirty years after the end of his initial service in the State Department under Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump brought Abrams back to the forefront of international politics as the United States Special Representative for Venezuela, were he represented the US's policy of starving the nation and support of the attempted coup in Venezuela. In 2020 Abrams additionally took over as Special Representation for Iran, pushing sanctions that harmed the Iranian civilian population. 

Now the Biden Administration is sending to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee the nomination of Elliott Abrams to join the State Department Bipartisan Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. It is clear that Elliot Abrams does not belong in another US administration. Please urge all Committee members to oppose his deployment. 

You can help in our (and other human rights groups') efforts.

TAKE ACTION

1) Click here to see if your US senator is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Urge them to oppose the nomination of Elliott Abrams.

2) Send a message to your US senator even if they are not a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Tell them that if this comes up for a vote in the full US Senate, you urge them to oppose the nomination of Elliott Abrams. You can find contact info for your US senators at https://www.senate.gov/

3) Send a message to your US congressperson.  Tell them that if this comes up for a vote in the full US House, you urge them to oppose the nomination of Elliott Abrams. Take action at https://afgj.salsalabs.org/oppose-elliott-abrams-nomination/index.html