Anti-Militarism: News & Updates

The Observatory for Justice for the Guapinol River Defenders urged the State of Honduras to compensate the damages caused, investigate and punish those responsible for the events and offer immediate physical and psychological protection measures to the defenders and their environment. In February 2021, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention made public its resolution that the "preventive" detention of the eight defenders was illegal and called for their immediate release; as well as an exhaustive and independent investigation of the judges and prosecutors who promoted the trial. However, the State of Honduras did not take any measures to put an end to and redress their unjust deprivation of liberty. It was not until February 24 2022 that all eight environmental defenders had been released.

The United Nations’ Security Council will not allow social leaders to contradict President Ivan Duque on Colombia’s peace process. The Security Council will meet in New York on Tuesday for its quarterly session on the implementation of a 2016 peace deal with now-defunct guerrilla group FARC. These sessions have always been attended by Colombia’s foreign minister to represent the State and a social leader to represent civil society. This time, only Duque will address the UN ambassadors.

The number of people in Colombia who identify themselves as right-wing has decreased dramatically since 2019, according to Colombia’s statistics agency DANE. They released the results of their poll weeks after congressional elections in which the far-right Democratic Center party of President Ivan Duque received a major blow. The elections made the progressive “Historic Pact” party of opposition leader Gustavo Petro the biggest party in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

As criminal groups battle for control over Mexican territory, the displaced are becoming increasingly visible, in towns such as Coahuayana and at the U.S. border. An estimated 20,000 people have fled violence in the past year in Michoacán state, roughly the size of West Virginia. Thousands more have abandoned their homes in other states like Zacatecas and Guerrero. Forced displacement is generally associated with armed conflict — it’s been a feature of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yet it’s become such a problem in ostensibly peaceful Mexico that the country’s Senate is considering legislation to offer humanitarian aid to victims. Security officials describe the conflict as a battle between Jalisco and a rival cartel network to control the region, a hub of marijuana and methamphetamine production. But the accounts of the displaced underscore how unconventional this war actually is. At stake are not just drug routes, but timber, minerals and fruit plantations. In many cases, the armed groups have ties to local governments, business groups and the police.

The mining conflict in Azacualpa has shown the implications of mining activity in the territories of Honduras, under a state policy that promotes extractivism in an excessive manner and that, apart from environmental damage, has resulted in the exile of entire communities. This mining company generated the displacement of three villages in the municipality: San Andrés Minas, San Miguel and Azacualpa. In the case of San Andres, the mining company negotiated with the municipal and central government the total relocation of the community. While, in the case of San Miguel and Azacualpa, the displacement was partial. The current conflict in Azacualpa is a socio-political and environmental conflict motivated by the actions of the MINOSA mining company that, in its eagerness to extract and exploit the commons, has destroyed the biodiversity and ecosystems of the area and (if that were not enough) has dispossessed families of the cemeteries where their relatives have been buried for more than two hundred years.

For the second time in three years, El Salvador is back under martial law. The state of exception was approved so swiftly that lawmakers failed to remove references to public health and economic reopening in the text, clearly copied and pasted from the decrees that governed the country’s notoriously militarized 2020 pandemic lockdown. This latest suspension of constitutional guarantees, however, was enacted as part of right-wing populist president Nayib Bukele’s newly declared “war on gangs.” Still reeling from the pandemic, working-class Salvadorans now find themselves caught between predatory street gangs and an unaccountable authoritarian state.

The deportation of Hondurans, mainly from the United States and Mexico, increased by 84.2% in the first quarter of 2022, compared to the same period of 2021, the Consular and Migration Observatory of Honduras reported Friday.  A total of 24,207 Hondurans were deported between January and March of this year compared to 13,140 in the same period of 2021, according to a report by the Consular Observatory. Of the total number of Honduran returnees in that period, US immigration authorities deported 11,368, including 2,617 minors. The Honduran returnees are attended in the Returning Migrant Attention Centers (CAMR) located in San Pedro Sula and Omoa, in the north and Caribbean of the country.

In a letter to U.S. State Department Secretary Antony Blinken, the two Senators Tim Kaine and Patrick Leahy recognized the steps new Honduran President Xiomara Castro has taken in the fight against corruption and impunity in Honduras, but expressed the urgency of strengthening the legislative framework through an "independent judiciary free of political influence". The letter was published by the Secretary of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Honduras, Enrique Reina, who celebrated that both senators recognized, according to him, the leadership of President Xiomara Castro in the fight against corruption and her support in the installation of an International Commission Against Impunity in Honduras (CICIH).

Title 42 appears to be on its way out. After two years and 1.8 million expulsions, impacting well over 1 million people, Biden announced, and the CDC confirmed, that Title 42 would end on May 23, 2022. Now, the Attorney Generals of Arizona, Louisiana and Mississippi filed a lawsuit to block the administration from ending Title 42. The Arizona Attorney General, Mark Brnovich, who is also running for governor as a Republican, said, “If Title 42 ends, it will result in an even greater crisis at the border that will have a devastating impact, not just on border states, but across the country.” How ending Title 42 will lead to “devastation” across the country is not very clear. But while we think that the end of Title 42 is something to be celebrated, a return to “normal” is not such a great prize.