IRTF News

This past weekend, neighbours and family members gathered in Tzucubal to remember two of the Guatemalan victims who were found dead late last month in an abandoned trailer in Texas: cousins Pascual Melvin Guachiac, 13, and Juan Wilmer Tulul, 14. Pascual’s childhood home buzzed with activity as his grandmother, Manuela Coj, worked alongside other family and friends to prepare food for people visiting to express their condolences. The continuing flow of migration has highlighted a growing desperation in Guatemala, driving children to set off for the US in search of opportunities. 

This past weekend, neighbours and family members gathered in Tzucubal to remember two of the Guatemalan victims who were found dead late last month in an abandoned trailer in Texas: cousins Pascual Melvin Guachiac, 13, and Juan Wilmer Tulul, 14. Pascual’s childhood home buzzed with activity as his grandmother, Manuela Coj, worked alongside other family and friends to prepare food for people visiting to express their condolences. The continuing flow of migration has highlighted a growing desperation in Guatemala, driving children to set off for the US in search of opportunities. 

Perched on an incline where the road splits the countryside as much as the community, Webster’s home on the island of Roatán is at the center of a battle over land rights and sovereignty that has galvanized Honduras. It’s also symptomatic of a broader phenomenon throughout the region, where foreigners – often cryptocurrency enthusiasts, libertarians or both – have flocked in recent years, supporting controversial projects – such as the proposed “Bitcoin City” in El Salvador – threatening to displace local residents and drawing comparisons to colonialists. When the new Honduran government repealed a pair of laws in late April that had allowed for the creation of semi-autonomous zones called a Zede, it sent a similar message. But investors in the Zede on Roatán, known as Honduras Próspera, have challenged the move.

An international coalition of activists delivered a petition to Pan American Silver leadership at the company’s annual meeting yesterday calling on the company to respect communities’ self-determination in Guatemala and Argentina. The petition, organized by corporate watchdog SumOfUs, garnered more than 85,000 signatures in just two weeks. But Pan American Silver took advantage of the lack of transparency afforded by the virtual platform at this year's Annual General Meeting in Vancouver, Canada to silence community voices and dodge questions about opposition to its projects. "Why is Pan American Silver refusing to engage with shareholders who are concerned about Indigenous rights?” asked Ellen Moore, International Mining Campaign Manager with Earthworks. “It is not clear if the company will respect Indigenous people’s right to say no to mining in their territory. That makes it a dangerous investment and shareholders should know that.”

Bukele’s “state of exception” – declared at the end of March and recently extended until late July – has outraged human rights activists who say massive human rights violations are being committed. “They have detained tens of thousands of people, many of them because of their physical appearance or because they have tattoos … We have found case after case in which the people [being arrested] have no links to gangs,” said Tamara Taraciuk, Human Rights Watch’s acting director in the Americas. “The reality is, this could happen to [anyone].” Exhausted with years of rampant gang violence, however, many Salvadorans see little extreme about Bukele’s crusade, which the president compares to chemotherapy and insists will continue until “the metastatic cancer” of crime is eradicated.

Honduras commemorated the 13th anniversary of the coup d’état this month, for many the first time since the coup this took place under a legitimate government. While some important steps have been made to improve the situation, for example strengthening UFERCO which started an investigation into the ZEDEs, the legacy of the last 12 years still loom heavily over Honduras. Two more members of the LGBTQ+ community were murdered in June. The militarization of Honduras continues as the Xiomara administration failed to to disband the Military Police. They even started talks with Southcom to strengthen the Honduran Armed Forces. On a more positive note, David Castillo was finally sentenced for his role in the murder of Berta Cáceres and the Guapinol defenders had the charges officially dropped against them. Welcome to another month in Honduras.

Forced migrants and refugees from Central America are again in the news. Most of the victims of the gruesome tractor-trailer death in Texas are from Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala. There is no focus on, no blame put on the global nation state system and the global capitalist, neoliberal economic system that create and re-create the very conditions that force people to flee home and country in the first place. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of impoverished Central Americans and Mexicans are attempting, right now, to cross northern Mexico into the US.

 The development promised by Minerales de Occidente S.A. (Minosa) in La Unión, Copán, has cost the inhabitants of Azacualpa the destruction of the historic Maya-Chortí cemetery of San Andrés, despite the fact that two high courts of Honduras have ruled to protect it. Minosa, a subsidiary in Honduras of the transnational Aura Minerals, imposed its project against the will of the Maya-Chortí people of Azacualpa, while at the same time promoting campaigns on social networks about the supposed economic development that mining produces for the communities. However, for the member of the Asociación de Organismos No Gubernamentales (Asonog), José Ramón Ávila, this development promoted by mining is not reflected in the municipality of La Unión. In fact, he believes that a socioeconomic study would find the same or greater poverty than in any other municipality.

"The government of Honduras should adopt reforms that provide greater protection for fundamental rights and the rule of law after years of setbacks since the 2009 coup", Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to President Xiomara Castro. The letter is accompanied by a 14-page report outlining the main human rights challenges in Honduras, as well as a series of key recommendations to address them. The main issues Human Rights Watch addresses in the report are the independence of the judiciary and the Public Ministry, the fight against corruption, the rights of women and girls, the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, the independent work of civil society and journalists, the land rights of communities, and migration and internal displacement.

On behalf of IRTF's Rapid Response Network (RRN) members, we wrote six letters this month to heads of state and other high-level officials in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, urging their swift action in response to human rights abuses occurring in their countries.  We join with civil society groups in Latin America to: (1) protect people living under threat, (2) demand investigations into human rights crimes, (3) bring human rights criminals to justice.

IRTF’s Rapid Response Network (RRN) volunteers write six 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 on 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.