Anti-Militarism: News & Updates

In its annual human rights report released last week, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has placed Guatemala in chapter  IV.B, reserved for countries that violate aspects of the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Analyzing the human rights situation in 2021 in the Organization of American States’ thirty-five member states, the IACHR has grouped Guatemala with Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Explaining its decision to include Guatemala in this section, the IACHR cites “structural situations that seriously affect the use and enjoyment of fundamental rights recognized in the American Declaration, the American Convention or other applicable instruments,” including  “systematic noncompliance of the State with its obligation to combat impunity, attributable to a manifest lack of will.”

More than a dozen South American travel agencies have rented planes from low-budget Latin American airlines — some of them as large as 238-seat Airbuses — and then sold tickets at premium prices. Many of the customers are Haitians who had been living in Chile and Brazil before they made their way to the Texas border in September, only to be expelled by the Biden administration and prevented from seeking asylum. They are using the charter flights to flee Haiti again and return to South America. Rodolfo Noriega of the National Coordinator of Immigrants in Chile said Haitians are being exploited by businesses taking advantage of their desperation. They “are at the end of a chain of powerful businesses making money from this circuit of Haitian migration,” he said.

Three years have passed since the end of the former leftist administration in El Salvador, and popular social movement groups are decrying that the country is dangerously heading towards the consolidation of a dictatorship. This was expressed on June 1st by hundreds of people who gathered in various parts of El Salvador and in other cities abroad, such as Washington D.C., to denounce human rights setbacks under President Nayib Bukele on his third anniversary in office. As a representative of the Popular Resistance and Rebellion Bloc, Marisela Ramírez, summarized, the Bukele’s administration has meant “three years of the most serious and systematic violations of human rights since the Peace Accords were signed, with persecution of the press, political, religious and academic opponents, a dramatic rise in disappearances and the tripling of the number of migrants fleeing the country for fear of violence or hunger in search of a better life and also political asylum. [In sum] an inadmissible, intolerable, and condemnable setback.”

As the largest caravan of migrants so far this year journeys into central Mexico, the continued enforcement of a public health order barring their admission into the United States threatens to exacerbate already deteriorating humanitarian conditions on the southern border. The caravan, largely composed of asylum seekers from Venezuela, could add as many as 11,000 people to the population of migrants currently stuck in limbo near the U.S.-Mexico border—estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands. Many of them have been living in dangerous conditions for months or longer awaiting the final repeal of Title 42, the public health order that has effectively halted asylum admissions into the United States from Central and South America.

Since May, there has been an alarming trend of social movement leaders being arbitrarily arrested in the context of the nationwide State of Exception. Under the State of Exception, which was approved on March 27 for a 30-day period, but which has already been extended twice, raising concerns that the Bukele administration seeks to maintain its expanded power in perpetuity, constitutional rights such as the right to due process and the right to defense are suspended. A person can be arrested without a warrant and held for up to 15 days without charges being presented. As of June 5, the government reports that the total number of people arrested has since risen to over 37,000. As news outlet Gato Encerrado has reported, the number of people incarcerated in El Salvador has doubled within the span of less than three months.

The Honorable Alejandro Mayorkas

Secretary of Homeland Security

Washington, DC 20528

Dear Secretary Mayorkas:

We write to express our concern over the drastic increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) which relies on punitive surveillance, such as the use of ankle shackles, and facial recognition and geolocation tracking through a mobile application called SmartLINK as an ill-conceived “alternative” to detention.

By Kim LaCapria

The Supreme Court 100-Miles Border Ruling - Truth or Fiction?

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"The Supreme Court just ruled [in June 2022] that Border Patrol can enter any home without a warrant and assault you, within 100 miles of the border. And no, you have zero federal protections if they do so."

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