- Home
- About Us
- Issues
- Countries
- Rapid Response Network
- Young Adults
- Get Involved
- Calendar
- Donate
- Blog
You are here
Anti-Militarism: News & Updates
News Article
April 15, 2021
As armed groups continue their calculated attempts at recruiting children and teens, Colombia's teachers work to protect their students. This can often cause them to become targets themselves.
News Article
April 12, 2021
*Thanks to The Associated Press for the article*
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration has struck an agreement with Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala to temporarily surge security forces to their borders in an effort to reduce the tide of migration to the U.S. border.
The agreement comes as the U.S. saw a record number of unaccompanied children attempting to cross the border in March, and the largest number of Border Patrol encounters overall with migrants on the southern border — just under 170,000 — since March 2001.
Event
April 10, 2021
There are four bills in the Ohio legislature that can lead to imprisonment for protesting. If these bills are passed, Ohio residents who are exercising freedom of speech and freedom of assembly could be imprisoned for any of the following offenses and more: blocking streets or sidewalks during a protest, yelling at a police officer, providing support to groups that are organizing a protest, and more. Please wear your mask when you join us.
News Article
April 9, 2021
Justice for Colombia is starting a new series spotlighting women activists. This first spotlight is on Olga Quintero, a leader in the Catatumbo Peasant Farmers Association (ASCAMCAT). ASCAMCAT has about 5,000 affiliated members and works to defend its members rights over land and territory and works to advance peace and justice in the region.
Event
April 9, 2021
Desmond Franklin was murdered April 9, 2020, by Cleveland police officer Jose Garcia. This Friday we will celebrate the life of Desmond and stand in solidarity with his family as they unveil a loving banner created to honor the life of Desmond Franklin. Location: Riverside Cemetery, 3607 Pearl Rd, Cleveland, OH 44109
Event
April 7, 2021
Dr. Dana Frank, a history professor at UC Santa Cruz, is an expert on Honduras and Honduras/US relations. She explains the current situation: why people are fleeing, the role of the US in supporting the narco-dictatorship, and legislative proposals pending in the US House and US Senate that would cut support to Honduran police/military, as well as to President Juan Orlando Hernández. She is author of Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (2005) . She is currently researching the AFL-CIO’s Cold War in Honduras, 1954-1979.
Event
April 5, 2021
We invite you to join us for an intersectional NE Ohio event to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Time to Break the Silence” speech of April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City. This historic speech condemned US militarism, racism and extreme materialism/poverty, and represented a significant expansion of Dr. King’s thinking on the root causes of the challenges facing U.S. society. We will read excerpts from Dr. King’s speech, then discuss the implications for NE Ohio today.
News Article
March 16, 2021
Héctor Antonio Trigueros, community and environmental defender from Azacualpa (La Unión, Copán), suffered an attack in which his motorcycle was seriously damaged, while he was unharmed. Hector is one of the main community defenders in Azacualpa, a place where the US-based mining company Aura Minerals has been cyanide-leaching, open-pit mining for years, and where it intends to mine the El Cemeterio hill – local inhabitants are fully opposed to this. Threats, contaminations, explosions, lead poisoning have all resulted. This mining project is supported by President Juan Orlando Hernandez's regime
RRN Letter
March 13, 2021
We wrote to officials in Colombia because of our concern for the safety of church leaders who are speaking out against armed violence. We are especially concerned that Bishop Ruben Dario Jaramillo, the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Buenaventura, Valle del Cauca Department, is receiving death threats. The bishop told a radio journalist on March 3 that he received a death threat via WhatsApp and was warned he could become the victim of a bomb attack. We are concerned that paramilitary organizations are succeeding in seizing control over several districts of Buenaventura because the local security forces are complicit in allowing them to do so. The paramilitary groups are trying to impose their control in the city through fear, various extortionist tactics, and advertising what they call a “social cleansing” in the city. In the process, they are forcibly recruiting youth. The ongoing violence in Buenaventura is a clear example of how impunity for paramilitary actors threatens the true possibility of peace.
News Article
March 13, 2021
39th anniversary of Rio Negro massacres in Guatemala, carried out by the US-backed genocidal military regimes on behalf of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Banks’s Chixoy hydro-electric dam project. Some 450 people were killed outright. Villagers were killed by machete blows, gang-rapes and beatings, being strangled, small children beaten against rocks, and shot. Thereafter, massacre survivors perished in the surrounding mountains due to hunger and disease, after the final Rio Negro/Chixoy dam massacre in the village of Agua Fria, on September 14, 1982. This slaughter of Rio Negro villagers served as the Chixoy dam project’s “relocation” of the villagers to make way for the filling of the dam flood basin. In total, over 30 Mayan communities were forcibly evicted in whole or part, up and down river from the Chixoy dam wall. No community suffered more than Rio Negro. To this day, neither the World Bank or IDB have accepted any responsibility for Chixoy dam massacres and other deaths, the forced evictions and widespread loss of land, property and livelihood.