IRTF News

Guatemala’s Supreme Court of Justice said on Tuesday it has suspended Judge Pablo Xitumul, who is known for his fight against corruption and handling high-profile cases against the military and former government officials. The decision comes a day after the prominent Judge Erika Aifan resigned from the post and fled into exile to the United States, alleging persecution over her work as a renowned anti-corruption figure in the institution. Xitumul and Aifan have both worked as judges in the country’s so-called “high risk” courts, which were created after the CICIG, a United Nations-backed anti-corruption commission; and they both pushed for reforms to investigate organized crime and corruption. So far this year, at least 10 justice figures have fled the country to the United States due to the cases opened against those who worked on CICIG cases.

 Although the Supreme Court of Justice annulled the trial against the Guapinol defenders, the Trujillo Court denied the definitive dismissal of the eight environmentalists who were illegally imprisoned for 914 days, now saying that the release was only provisionally granted. This decision by the Tocoa Court has provoked widespread concern that there is an attempt to reopen or manipulate the case. "We already know that they have been manipulating the process, that our comrades have spent 914 days deprived of liberty and that the company wants to continue to screw them," said Juana Zúniga, a partner of one of the eight defenders.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

This spring, Colombia could elect its first progressive president. In primary elections earlier this month—held for left-wing, centrist, and ruling right blocs—former Bogotá mayor and 2018 presidential candidate Gustavo Petro won an astounding nearly 4.5 million votes to emerge as nominee for the left-wing coalition known as the Historic Pact. Petro has pledged to ban new fossil fuel exploration from day one, proposing to "end oil exploration, but not exploitation. The old coffee-growing country has been left behind and sadly we moved into oil and coal. This is unsustainable and will bring about extinction. We need to move away from an extractivist economy and move towards a productive one.” Petro has been involved in politics ever since the M19 pivoted toward the constitutional process, and is no stranger to challenging the right. He called out right-wing government connections to far-right paramilitaries as a lawmaker, consequently receiving death threats, which is no surprise as Colombia is the world’s most dangerous country for human rights defenders and environmentalists.

The Livestream of our 2022 Liberation Lab: A Social Justice Teach-In on Abolition and Environmental Justice is now available! Watch it if you couldn't make it on Saturday or if you want to revisit the wonderful and interesting discussions we had on March 19!

As the head of Guatemala’s High-Risk Tribunal D, a court specialized in handling complex high-stakes criminal cases, Erika Aifán spent six years trying dozens of the most powerful business people, politicians, judges, and capos of Guatemala on charges of corruption, money laundering, and drug trafficking. For that work she has faced constant threats, espionage, and judicial persecution. In February, El Faro revealed that a witness in her court accused President Alejandro Giammattei of financing his electoral campaign with $2.6 million in bribes from construction firms. It was reason enough for Attorney General Consuelo Porras, converted into Giammattei’s enforcer, to file seven motions to repeal Aifán’s judicial immunity from prosecution and look to incarcerate the judge who may otherwise have put the president of Guatemala behind bars. In the evening on Wednesday, March 9, and without warning her team of bodyguards, Erika Aifán crossed the land border into El Salvador to fly via Costa Rica to the United States. This morning her attorneys formally tendered her resignation from the Guatemalan judiciary. Her departure makes fifteen justice system operators to have abandoned Guatemala in the last 11 months.

WOLA visited a large segment of the Texas-Mexico border, from Del Rio to Brownsville, during the week of March 7. Joy Olson, WOLA’s former executive director, and Adam Isacson, WOLA’s director for defense oversight, covered three of the nine sectors into which Border Patrol divides the U.S.-Mexico border, crossing into four Mexican border cities along the way. We were pursuing different research questions: Joy was looking at how the U.S. government could respond to ransom kidnappings, and Adam was looking at communities’ and migrants’ interactions with U.S. border law enforcement. Information about both topics is scarcer in this part of the border than it is from El Paso westward, and we wanted to know why. We saw many longtime colleagues, for the first time since before the pandemic, who are doing important work throughout the border zone. We introduced ourselves to many others whom we’d never met before. We talked to service providers, shelter personnel, attorneys, and some government officials and experts—and we put a lot of miles on our rental car. Here are a few things we saw.

The Title 42 expulsion policy — issued just days after COVID-19 began taking its grip on the U.S. — has driven a wedge between the Biden administration and immigrant communities, many of whom see its continued implementation as a broken campaign promise. As the Biden administration oversees the two-year anniversary of Title 42, it has given little sign it intends to lift the Trump-era policy that cites the pandemic as a reason to summarily expel asylum-seekers, even amid increasing pressure from members of its own party.