Anti-Militarism: News & Updates

Yesenia Portillo, a Salvadoran American activist raised in Los Angeles, said there is a perception that Salvadorans in the U.S. are overwhelmingly supportive of Bukele. But Portillo said there are many in the U.S. who don't support him, and are “becoming more vocal about their concerns, especially as more political exiles arrive in the U.S." Portillo said that in El Salvador, there is more opposition to Bukele than polls reflect. “Feminists, LGBTI+, labor, and environmental organizations in El Salvador have been taking to the streets by the tens of thousands to criticize his policies and that often doesn’t get highlighted,” she said.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s national drug strategy, which includes a focus on harm reduction to respond to an overdose crisis at home, is at odds with the country’s ongoing “Drug War” in Latin America, which has perennially failed to curb drug supplies, at a huge cost in human lives. A new report by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) argues that the global drug prohibition regime and the 50-year-long U.S.-led “war on drugs” has not only had disastrous results across the world but are increasingly exacerbating other serious problems. These include violence, corruption, organized crime, forced displacement and migration as well as forest loss and climate change.

On July 26, relatives of Salvadorans unfairly arrested during the current State of exception marched in front of the Human Rights Office and later went to the Legislative Assembly with a letter for the congresspeople. No representative spoke to them. This is not the first time that these people march for their families. They did it on July 19 and, as reported by Gato Encerrado, Josselyn Palacios, one of the most visible attendees found herself receiving the attack from social media managed by allies of the Salvadoran government.

A special peace tribunal investigating atrocities committed during Colombia’s decades-long conflict has charged 19 soldiers with war crimes and crimes against humanity for murdering 303 people, mostly civilians, between 2005 and 2008. The murders form part of what is known in Colombia as “false positives”, where the military killed civilians and then presented them as fighters to try to inflate the effectiveness of their fight against rebels. In return, the soldiers received special benefits such as help to gain promotion.

The Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is traveling to Honduras this week to meet with the president over increasing migration from the Central American country, the agency announced. The visit comes as a growing number of Hondurans cross the border from Mexico and try to claim asylum in the United States, according to new data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. And it comes at a time when thousands of migrants are arriving on the Southwest border, most from the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, which form what is called the Northern Triangle.

A boat capsized in Bahamian waters in Sunday’s first hours, killing 17 “suspected irregular Haitian migrants,” Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis said at a Sunday afternoon news conference. “It is believed their final destination was Miami, Florida,” Davis said. Though officials said they had reached out to the Haiti embassy in Nassau, it wasn’t clear whether all of those aboard the boat were Haitian. Davis said the investigation will determine that. The U.S. Coast Guard is assisting with the search for those unaccounted for on the boat, who number eight to 15 by Bahamian officials’ estimation. The seas migrants try to cross to reach the U.S. aren’t safe. Neither are the boats “At daylight, we were able to recover the boat,” Fernander said. “The hull of the boat was the same color blue of the sea, so it was difficult at nighttime to identify the vessel in the water. It was submerged in the water.

Guatemala was once listed among the most violent countries on earth. Today, after years of declining crime rates, violence is once again on the rise in 2022. Of the more than 2,000 people killed since January, the majority were the result of gun violence. The United States’ obsession with guns and its unwillingness to implement reasonable restrictions to accessing them has directly contributed to increased violence and crime in Central America, especially in Guatemala. Easy access to weapons allows criminal groups to illegally export U.S. weapons across the U.S.-Mexico border and bring them into other countries. 

A former high-ranking government official in Guatemala has pleaded guilty in Miami federal court to conspiring to commit money laundering while paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to Guatemalan politicians through the U.S. banking system. Acisclo Valladares Urruela, the former economics minister in Guatemala, admitted that he transferred $350,000 in bribery payments to the unidentified Guatemalan politicians through two companies with bank accounts in Miami, according to a factual statement filed with his plea agreement. Valladares also acknowledged that he received $140,000 for moving the dirty money into those accounts, the statement says. Valladares paid the illegal bribes on behalf of a telecommunications company known as Tigo, for which he worked as a corporate officer. As a result of the payoffs, Guatemalan politicians passed a law that paved the way for the telecommunications company to obtain a series of lucrative government contracts in Guatemala, according to court records. The corrupt dealings allowed Valladares to benefit personally and politically, U.S. authorities said.

Ice’s database lists about 25,000 detainees nationwide, but does not maintain reliable inmate demographics. Non-profits such as Freedom for Immigrants (FFI) and Black Alliance for Just Immigration estimate that roughly 20% of Black immigrants are waiting for deportation. Advocacy organizations like FFI also say that this demographic experiences higher rates of deportation; sexual, physical, medical, and psychological abuses in detention; and solitary confinement. In the last month alone, FFI has received more than 2,100 complaints nationwide. The most common abuse-related ones are anti-Black discriminatory actions, ranging from forced strip-searches and unprovoked pepper-spraying to prolonged solitary confinement and critical medical treatment negligence.