Anti-Militarism: News & Updates

The fiercest voices of dissent against President Nayib Bukele have long feared a widespread crackdown. They weathered police raids on their homes, watched their friends being thrown into jail and jumped between safe houses so they can stay in El Salvador.

Then they received a warning: Leave immediately. It’s exile or prison.

A combination of high-profile detentions, a new “foreign agents” law, violent repression of peaceful protesters and the risk of imminent government detention has driven more than 100 political exiles to flee in recent months.

The biggest exodus of journalists, lawyers, academics, environmentalists and human rights activists in years is a dark reminder of the nation’s brutal civil war decades ago, when tens of thousands of people are believed to have escaped. Exiles who spoke to The Associated Press say they are scattered across Central America and Mexico with little more than backpacks and a lingering question of where they will end up.

“We’re living through a moment where history is repeating itself,” said Ingrid Escobar, leader of the human rights legal group Socorro Juridico, who fled El Salvador with her two children.

When Julio González Jr., who had agreed to be deported to Venezuela (but was instead sent to El Salvador), refused to get off the plane in San Salvador, he, along with two other shackled men, were yanked by their feet, beaten and shoved off board as the plane’s crew began to cry. Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.

Julio González and the two others were able to return to their family’s homes in Venezuela this week, among the 252 Venezuelans released from CECOT in exchange for the release of 10 American citizens and permanent U.S. residents imprisoned in Venezuela.

Many of the former detainees, after 125 days denied contact with the outside world, began to share details of their treatment.

“I practically felt like an animal,” González said by telephone from his parents’ home. “The officials treated us like we were the most dangerous criminals on Earth. … They shaved our heads, they would insult us, they would take us around like dogs.”

The three men denied any gang affiliations. Neither the U.S. nor El Salvador has provided evidence that they are gang members.

@austinkocher

Austin Kocher shares this two-part interview with Antero Garcia at La Cuenta. 

“When Antero first contacted me, I assumed we would focus on immigration data. But Antero, a Stanford professor and skilled interviewer, led the conversation through the thicket of my academic background and personal experiences to tell the story not only of what I do but why I do it. We discuss how my training as a geographer continues to shape my thinking, how my military service influenced my research on immigration enforcement, and why I believe—perhaps deeper than I believe anything—that working class Americans and immigrants need to see each other as allies, not adversaries, in the struggle for economic justice.

I am grateful to Antero and La Cuenta for generously publishing both parts of the thorough interview this week. I invite you to read both parts at the links below, then to explore La Cuenta’s many other moving stories. La Cuenta’s goal is to offer individual stories and perspectives about the costs of undocumented living in the U.S., primarily from the perspective of current and formerly undocumented individuals as well as members of mixed-status families.”

On June 24, IRTF convened more than 100 people from Islamic, Christian and Jewish faith traditions for an interfaith prayer in support and defense and migrants, hosted by Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.

After the morning prayer service, another organization, Network (a Catholic social justice advocacy organization based in Washington, DC, which has some Clevelanders on staff), organized a prayer vigil walk. Many of us from the IRTF prayer vigil joined the walk. At the Carl B Stokes Federal Courthouse (where the only immigration court in the state of Ohio is housed), we encountered a young woman crying. A few moments before ICE apprehended her husband as they exited a courtroom up on the 13th floor. The ICE agents told her “he’ll call you in about an hour.”  IRTF staff spent 20 minutes with her, consoling her, giving her resources and our mobile phone numbers.

Colombia hosted the first ever “Emergency Conference” on Gaza, bringing together more than 30 countries that pledged to move beyond condemnation toward coordinated legal action to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Over the course of two days, diplomats, activists, Palestinian organizations, and human rights lawyers participated in rallies, public symposiums, and closed door meetings to debate next steps forward. While the agreements reached were limited in scope, they marked an unprecedented show of international resolve.

The conference ended with several countries, including Colombia, signing a 6-point join action plan that includes blocks of weapons transfers to Israel and other diplomatic, legal, and economic measures aimed at stopping Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people and defending international law.

On Saturday, May 3, I flew to southern Arizona where I stayed for two and a half weeks for a border witness delegation. While hiking in the desert doing water drops, we always found clothing, shoes, and jackets left behind by migrants who had passed before us. There were also many black water bottles—used because they’re harder for Border Patrol to spot in the dark. Holding a black bottle and thinking about which hands had held it before was very powerful for me.

The whole trip to the borderlands was deeply meaningful to me. It gave me a much deeper understanding of the situation at the US-Mexico border and a deeper emotional sense of what migration means, not only at this border but at all borders. Seeing the vastness and dangers of the desert, walking on the same paths as people trying to migrate—this was very different from reading articles or looking at photos.

What I experienced brought me closer to IRTF—our  work and our mission.

Please consider donating to IRTF to make meaningful experiences like this possible for future volunteer staff associates.

Today’s essay could be characterized as a meditation on irritation. ICE is irritated with me for publishing facts, the public is increasingly irritated with ICE for not doing what they said they’d do, and I’m irritated with news outlets for getting basic facts wrong.

I have been publishing a steady stream of data-driven research over the past six months that (1) predicted a rise in ICE targeting immigrants without criminal histories, (2) documented this steady rise over the past several months, and, just this week, (3) showed that non-criminal immigrant arrests now make up an objective majority.

These findings have circulated widely in news articles at leading outlets, including CNN, The Economist, Washington Post, USA Today, NPR, the Guardian, Mother Jones, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, and many more.

The findings are significant because they help us understand immigration enforcement trends, and because the data shows that the Trump administration’s rhetoric about going after dangerous criminals is not entirely accurate.

Pressed by the press about these numbers, ICE is becoming increasingly irritated and defensive. Border czar Thomas Homan1 and Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs for ICE, Tricia McLaughlin, have both reacted strongly to these well-documented data points published by the news media.

The current (as of June 30) percentage of ICE arrests for immigrants with no criminal histories is 45 percent.  Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin did not seem to know this. She says that the mainstream media is pushing a false narrative, even though they are getting all their data on arrests, detentions, and deportations from her agency!

By James Phillips

June 25 marked the 50th anniversary of the Los Horcones massacre, a gruesome and desperate event that still haunts Honduran society and is emblematic of major forces that have shaped much of modern global history. The massacre occurred in the Lepaguare Valley, in the municipal district of Juticalpa, in the Department of Olancho, on the hacienda “Los Horcones,” There, a group of military officers and landowners (or their paid agents) tortured and murdered 15 people, including 11 peasant farmers, two young women, and two Catholic priests—Ivan Betancur (a Colombian citizen) and Casimir Cypher (a U.S. citizen from Wisconsin).

In 2013, Honduran Jesuit priest and human rights leader Ismael Moreno (Padre Melo) wrote that the Los Horcones massacre was probably the starkest example of government repression against the Catholic Church in recent Honduran history, and that it caused Church leaders and many others to move away from their support of popular demands for social justice. But its significance goes beyond even that.

On June 27, 1954, a coup d’état deposed the democratically elected Soldado del Pueblo (Soldier of the People): President Jacobo Árbenz Guzman. He was the face of Guatemala’s democratic revolution, which began in 1944. The agrarian reform of 1952, redistributing unused land to landless Indigenous peasants, impacted the United Fruit Company (UFCO), the largest land owner in Guatemala, and U.S. foreign policy, as Cold War tensions grew. Collaborating with Guatemalan fascists, they plunged Guatemala into decades of U.S. backed dictatorships. On its 70th anniversary, we invite you to reflect with us on this counter-revolutionary event and what it might mean for Guatemala and the world today.

SUMMARY

IRTF has been a member of the Honduras Solidarity Network since the coup 16 years ago that ousted their democratically-elected president, Mel Zelaya. Although the current government is considered post-coup, the administrations since 2009 implemented a lot of changes that benefit the oligarchy at the expense of Indigenous, Afro-descendant and campesino communities. Although state-led repression is less now, the network of coup proponents, corrupt actors and organized crime continue to have influence and to act, even violently, against the peoples’ movements.

Read our full statement on the anniversary of the coup here.