IRTF News

Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who governed from 2014 to January this year, was arrested at his home in Tegucigalpa in February. He is accused of having been involved in a drug-trafficking ring which included his younger brother Tony Hernández, who last year was sentenced in the US to life in prison. Security Minister Ramón Sabillón said that "the extradition will happen next week (....) sometime between Wednesday and Friday".

Some National Civilian Police commanders in El Salvador have been pressuring their officers to meet daily arrest quotas as part of the government’s crackdown on street gangs that have yielded more than 10,000 arrests, a police union said Tuesday. On March 26, authorities reported 62 killings across El Salvador that they attributed to the country’s powerful street gangs. President Nayib Bukele requested and received from congress a state of emergency that allows police to make arrests without explaining the reason, not provide access to a lawyer and hold suspects for 15 days without charge. The congress has since passed additional measures, including increasing prison sentences.

Almost 1.5 million votes that were cast in Colombia’s congressional elections were omitted from the announced results, according to election observers. Vega has blamed the discrepancy on a design flaw in the senate vote form and irregularities committed by jurors. Alejandro Barrios, the director of the Electoral Observation Mission (MOE), disputed Vega’s explanations. "That does not explain why we are talking about a difference of around 6% or 7% between what was announced and actually counted, because in other electoral processes we talk about a 0.5% difference".

A three-day weekend of extreme gang violence in El Salvador, March 25 to March 27, ended with 87 people dead. The government of President Nayib Bukele responded by declaring a state of emergency on March 27, suspending various civil liberties for 30 days and expanding the armed forces’ enforcement powers. Civil liberties suspended by the emergency declaration include freedom of association, the right to legal counsel in case of detention and the right to remain silent if arrested. The emergency declaration allows the government to arrest citizens for 15 days without charging them, listen to private communications without a warrant and detain anyone suspected of belonging to a gang. The government also announced new restrictions in prisons that included limiting meals to two per day, locking inmates in their cells 24/7 and removing sleeping mats as a type of collective punishment.

The United Nations’s human rights body has urged Colombia to prosecute those responsible for a military raid that resulted in the deaths of 11 people, including four civilians that community members say were passed off as fighters. The Colombian military said last month that it had carried out an operation against Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) dissidents involved in drug trafficking. But human rights groups have reported that there were four civilians among the dead. The UN urged authorities to protect witnesses and journalists that have been threatened in recent days over their reports.

Countries in Latin America came under particularly harsh criticism in the U.S. State Department’s annual report on human rights, with allies such as Mexico and adversaries including Nicaragua facing similar opprobrium. The report zeroed in on many of the widely denounced human rights abuses, including the killing of journalists, discrimination against LGBTQ people, targeted murders of women, and widespread violence fueled by drug traffickers, but largely ignored by the government of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The annual reports examine actions from the previous year.

As more and more Haitians seek refuge in the United States, refugee advocate Marleine Bastien says they're not being given a fair shake. The number of Haitian refugees arriving in the United States is on the rise as people try to flee an increasingly desperate situation in their home country, which has survived several major hurricanes and epidemics in recent years, only be thrown into political chaos after the assassination of its president last year. Unfortunately, once officials find them, most of them are deported in complete denial of their basic rights of due process. For the past few months, especially since September 2021, the Biden administration has used a health policy, Title 42, to deport Black Haitian refugees without due process. At the same time that they're deporting Haitians, the Biden administration has promised to bring in up to 100,000 refugees from Ukraine.