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Afro-Descendant & Indigenous: News & Updates

RRN Letter
RRN Letter: Honduras 06/23/2021
June 23, 2021
We wrote to the Supreme Court of Justice of Honduras regarding the current trial of David Castillo, charged with the March 2, 2016 assassination of indigenous environmental defender Berta Cáceres. The extensive and detailed evidence submitted in this trial (and related prosecutions) demonstrates that David Castillo was part of a criminal structure that engaged in a range of crimes, including financial crimes and violence. Besides his trial for the murder of Berta Cáceres, David Castillo is also one of six people awaiting trial for corruption charges related to the construction of the Agua Zarca project. We urging that authorities in Honduras: (1) ensure that the judges overseeing the trial of David Castillo’s be able to make their decision without pressure from powerful actors interested in swaying the verdict and obscuring the truth about the intellectual authors of this crime; and (2) ensure that COPINH (Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras) be permitted to be included in any future legal proceedings involving David Castillo and DESA, as is their right under Honduran law
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RRN Letter
RRN Letter: Guatemala, 06/21/2021
June 21, 2021
National Civil Police used violent repression against a peaceful demonstration by residents of the community of Chicoyogüito, municipality of Cobán, Alta Verapaz Department. In 1968 the Q'eqchi families of Chicoyogüito were dispossessed and uprooted from their land by the Guatemalan state. In their place, the government built Military Base #21, a center where the army carried out forced disappearance, torture, execution, and burial of hundreds of indigenous men, women, and children. On June 9, community members demonstrated in Cobán, asking authorities for the return of their ancestral lands. The National Civil Police beat and injured several people. They arrested 21 men.
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News Article
MAY 2021: IRTF’s Rapid Response Network letters
May 28, 2021

Please see a summary of the six letters we sent to heads of state and other high-level officials in Colombia, El Salvador, and Honduras, urging their swift action in response to human rights abuses occurring in their countries. We join with civil society groups in Latin America to: -protect people living under threat -demand investigations into human rights crimes -bring human rights criminals to justice IRTF’s Rapid Response Network volunteers write letters in response to urgent human rights cases each month. We send copies of these letters to US ambassadors, embassy human rights officers, the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, regional representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and desk officers at the US State Department. To read the letters, see https://www.irtfcleveland.org/content/rrn, or ask us to mail you hard copies.

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RRN Letter
RRN Letter: Honduras, 05/16/2021
May 16, 2021
Five thousand members of the Indigenous Tolupán community of Agalteca in Yoro Department are being threatened with eviction. Tolupán lands contain precious resources, such as mahogany forests, silver, and iron oxide. To seize those resources, those with economic interests carry out attempts at forcible evictions (some successful). As a consequence of government concessions to mining companies over the past eight years, Tolupán communities have experienced an increase in evictions, as well as destruction of their land and waterways. Those who resist outside encroachment on their ancestral territories suffer attacks, murders, and judicial harassment. Over the past twenty years, forty Tolupán community members have been murdered.
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RRN Letter
RRN Letter: Honduras, 05/12/2021
May 12, 2021
National Police (and suspected military personnel as well) are waging armed violence against members of the Tolupán indigenous community of San Francisco de Locomapa in Yoro Department. On May 5, National Police fired on their encampment (Campamento Digno por la Defensa del Bosque y el Territorio Tolupán) that was set up to protect a pine forest against illegal logging. Norma Yackelin Ávila suffered a gunshot. We are unsure how many others might have been wounded.
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RRN Letter
RRN Letter: Honduras, 05/11/2021
May 11, 2021
A man was approached by unknown persons on the streets of the Garífuna community Nueva Armenia and threatened: “if you do not want to die, stop hanging around Mabel Robledo, because we have already been authorized them to kill her." A half-hour earlier, an unknown individual entered Mabel Robledo's place of business and threatened: “…we are going to kill you.” This occurred after Mabel Robledo denounced before local and national officials the appropriation of ancestral Garífuna territories by palm growers and the extraction of sand from the Papaloteca River by drug traffickers.
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News Article
Colombia: Human Rights Update - April 2021
May 7, 2021

On April 2, INDEPAZ (Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo de la Paz) documented the 24th massacre of 2021. The three victims in La Pata, Huila Department, belonged to the same family: 55-year-old Luis Eliber Quintero Trujillo and his sons, 32-year-old Ricardo and 29-year-old Luis. By April 26, the 32nd massacre was recorded. It occurred in the rural area of Sonsón, Antioquia Department, where paramilitary groups have recently intensified their activities, particularly around control of illegal mining operations. Three people were shot dead at 9:40pm on Sunday night, April 25. The victims were Yulieth Natalia Díaz Carmona (age 23), Julián Vanegas Marulanda (age 26), and Michel Daiana Sánchez (age 13).

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RRN Letter
RRN Letter: Guatemala, 04/29/2021
April 29, 2021
In Quiché Department, Indigenous journalist Anastasia Mejía Tiriquiz faces up to 12 years in prison on trumped up charges following an arrest in August 2020 while reporting on an Indigenous-led protest against a local mayor’s alleged corruption in distribution of COVID-19 assistance. Her trial has been delayed multiple times. We believe that the judicial delays and continued obstacles to Anastasia Mejía’s reporting are attempts to silence the voices of Indigenous peoples, to conceal information on corruption and human rights abuses, and to generate fear among communities. This is the third letter we have written regarding the journalist’s false criminalization since September 2020.
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RRN Letter
RRN Letter: Colombia, 04/28/21
April 28, 2021
To protect the autonomy and ancestral culture of the Nasa Indigenous Peoples, local governor Sandra Liliana Peña Chocué rejected pressures from illegal armed groups who promote the expansion of illicit crops, illegal mining, and drug trafficking. She reported to the authorities that she was receiving threats from illegal groups that exercise territorial control in Cauca Department. They didn't like that she was so outspoken against the increase in illicit crop cultivation in the La Laguna-Siberia Indigenous reserve. On April 20, four unidentified armed men violently abducted her from her home and shot her. She died on the way to the hospital.
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News Article
Movement for Black Lives: Derek Chauvin Found Guilty Of George Floyd's Murder
April 20, 2021
The jury has found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty on all the counts he faced over the death of George Floyd. The trial has been one of the most closely watched cases in recent memory, setting off a national reckoning on police violence and systemic racism even before the trial commenced.
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