Anti-Militarism: News & Updates

The student movement is diverse, accommodating a range of ideologies and tactics. This year it has intensified as wider movements against President Hernández’s attempts to privatize the health and education sectors have grown. Massive street protests have been led by La Plataforma para la Defensa de la Salud y Educación (Platform for the Defense of Health and Education), made up of various unions with more than seventy thousand combined members. Despite attacks by the staunchly pro-regime media, La Plataforma achieved a huge victory in June when Hernández backed down and repealed the law. It was a watershed moment of popular power against a regime that needed to deploy the military, when the police alone could not repress the movement.

An Italian appeals court sentenced 24 former officials from Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay to life in prison for their roles in Operation Condor — a brutal and extremely deadly US-backed operation in the 1970s and 1980s that targeted leftists, activists, social movement leaders, and others who spoke out. Operation Condor kidnapped, tortured, disappeared and/or murdered tens of thousands of people across South America.

This is urgent. Unless Congress legalizes the status of these immigrants (currently under a temporary protected status), they could be placed into deportation proceedings, tearing families apart.

Routine dehumanization of the very people they’re tasked with helping....Prosecutors have revealed that the Border Patrol agent set to go on trial next month for running down a border crosser referred to immigrants as “mindless, murdering savages.” Border Patrol agents routinely call migrants or detainees “tonks,” a moniker that agents joke stems from the sound a detainee’s head makes when hit with a flashlight, and such racist terms even surface in the agency’s academy...Even today, recruiting ads continue to make the Border Patrol look like an action movie, with stirring music and fancy toys, from helicopters to canines to ATVs, and lots and lots of weapons. On CBP’s website, “counterterrorism” is listed first under the agency’s mission—ahead of “customs” and “immigration,” and the first item on the agency’s own job description for officers states a “typical assignment” is “detecting and preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States.” In its first sentence of the agency’s “About” listing, CBP says it “is charged with keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the U.S.” Nowhere in its recruiting material does it list anything having to do with “providing humanitarian assistance,” “rescuing migrants,” or “aiding families and children fleeing drug violence,” the tasks that have over the past 10 years have consumed more and more of the Border Patrol’s time.

Ombudsman Carlos Negret said Wednesday that 983 social leaders have received personal threats and said it is “necessary to believe what the pamphlets say, they may not be ignored.” Ombudsman Carlos Negret said Wednesday that 983 social leaders have received personal threats and said it is “necessary to believe what the pamphlets say, they may not be ignored.” Since last year’s congressional elections in March, 481 human rights defenders were the victim of some kind of aggression, the vast majority through death threats. Twenty of them were assassinated and 13 survived assassination attempts.