Afro-Descendant & Indigenous: News & Updates

Mass incarceration in the United States is a crime against humanity. It disproportionately ruins the lives of Black, Brown and Indigenous people. It wastes human potential. It destabilizes neighborhoods and destroys communities. We all pay dearly for it, in human as well as economic terms. Both at its roots and in its practices and policies, mass incarceration as practiced by the United States is an egregious abuse of human rights. If you are Black, Brown or Indigenous in the U.S., jail and prison are traps targeted at you and waiting to spring shut. You have a high likelihood of being incarcerated. Race and class play a critical role in who is arrested, who is tried and convicted, who receives the harshest sentences – and who is able to successfully navigate the challenges of post-incarceration life. Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men, and Latinx people are 2.5 times as likely. For Black men in their thirties, about 1 in every 12 is in prison or jail on any given day. In 2019, the imprisonment rate for African American women (83 per 100,000) was over 1.7 times the rate of imprisonment for white women (48 per 100,000). Latinx women were imprisoned at 1.3 times the rate of white women (63 vs. 48 per 100,000).

The Honduran people will participate massively in these elections as an expression of social exasperation from the deepening of social inequality, the impoverishment that now impacts 73% of the population, the migration crisis, the systematic violation of human rights, the criminalization of social protest, the multiple expressions of violence in general and in particular against girls and women. Honduras will not change at the ballot box but voting against the dictatorship that governs us will be one step. The majority of the Honduran people will vote to reject these accumulated ills.

The United States is a contradiction. From the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution to the Statue of Liberty beckoning the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the U.S. trumpets to the world – and does not hesitate to export at gunpoint – the ideals of democracy, freedom, and unbridled capitalism; yet, it is a nation that is also based upon the murderous oppression of Black, Indigenous and other peoples of color. The United States was born of Indigenous genocide and settler colonialism, and African slavery, which included genocide and extractive colonialism, all driven by capitalism and the desire to exploit every natural and human resource for the fulfillment of greed and hegemony. These are not historical issues which have been overcome; they exist today in other no less deadly forms than their earlier iterations.