IRTF News

June 19 is the second and final round of Colombia’s presidential elections. The race has come down to two anti-establishment candidates: populist businessman Rodolfo Hernández, who has little political experience, and leftist Gustavo Petro, whose election would end decades of rightwing leadership. As the polls predicted, Petro won the most votes in both the primaries and first round, but Hernández as the runner-up came as a surprise. Perhaps the most surprising outcome of this year’s election cycle, however, has been Márquez’s meteoric rise. Although she failed to garner enough signatures to run as an independent presidential candidate, her star performance in the Pacto Histórico coalition's primaries secured her spot as Petro's running mate. This Sunday, she could become Colombia’s first Black vice president. An Afro-Colombian environmental activist and lawyer, Márquez is new to politics. Since announcing her candidacy, Márquez has become a rallying point for Colombian activists and youth dissatisfied with the status quo. She is only the second Black woman to run for president in Colombia and campaigned on a platform that challenges the traditional powers in a highly militarized, conservative country. Unlike other presidential candidates, Márquez is from a small majority-Black town in southwest Colombia and doesn’t have a political machine behind her. So she did something that other candidates did not: she appealed to the Colombian diaspora.

The White House put out a statement last week in which Vice President Harris announced "more than $1.9 billion in new private sector commitments to create economic opportunity in northern Central America" as part of the so-called U.S. Strategy to Address the Root Causes of Migration. As we have shared before, this strategy promotes corporate interests at the expense of the majorities and replicates the same type of policies that have contributed to migration in the first place. A quick look at just a few of the corporate "commitments" announced by VP Harris this week illustrates this.

On April 27, a group of progressive Members of Congress called for withholding all military and security aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala in light of “human rights violations” resulting from “state violence.” In parallel letters to the House Appropriations subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations and to the subcommittee on Defense, which will soon propose 2023 spending bills for each department, the members expressed concern regarding “the use of U.S.-trained and equipped security forces for civilian repression” and sought support from committee leadership to “restrict police and military financing” to all three countries.

A controversial moment captured last fall on the U.S. southern border of an officer on horseback chasing Haitian migrants with his reins raised like a lash in Del Rio, Texas, has been memorialized on “a challenge coin” that has led to an investigation by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Images of the incident led to a public outcry and national scandal, with President Joe Biden demanding accountability for the officers and the Department of Homeland Security launching an independent investigation into the treatment of migrants there. Nearly a year later, the results of the investigation still have not been made public. The unofficial coin, a token of memorabilia, embraces some of the most controversial elements of the scandal, where video footage appeared to show white border agents using their reins as whips against Black migrants.

We, the undersigned Certified B Corps have joined together—with the support of certification watchdog, Fair World Project —because we believe the very mission of B Lab and the integrity and relevance of B Corp Certification is at risk. As brands, we are Certified as B Corps because progressive social impact and environmental stewardship are core to our approach to business. We believe that B Lab and the broader community of B Corp Certified brands are an important force in transitioning our economy away from extractive practices and towards economic models that truly benefit people and the planet. Because we value this community and deeply believe in what it means to be a Certified B Corp, it is imperative that we speak up now to protect the B Corp Certification and the movement it represents.

Rights Action has been very involved in funding and supporting Indigenous land and environmental defenders, and their human rights and justice struggles in the Q’eqchi’ territories of eastern Guatemala since 2004. With the immediacy of this recent trip in mind, Rights Action sends this special appeal for their work and struggles. For a number of complex and very unfortunate reasons, the human rights/ repression/ corruption/ impunity situation is even harder in this region, and has been going on longer, than in other regions of Guatemala – Honduras, as well - where people and communities that Rights Action supports are involved in their own community defense struggles.

Three years have passed since the end of the former leftist administration in El Salvador, and popular social movement groups are decrying that the country is dangerously heading towards the consolidation of a dictatorship. This was expressed on June 1st by hundreds of people who gathered in various parts of El Salvador and in other cities abroad, such as Washington D.C., to denounce human rights setbacks under President Nayib Bukele on his third anniversary in office. As a representative of the Popular Resistance and Rebellion Bloc, Marisela Ramírez, summarized, the Bukele’s administration has meant “three years of the most serious and systematic violations of human rights since the Peace Accords were signed, with persecution of the press, political, religious and academic opponents, a dramatic rise in disappearances and the tripling of the number of migrants fleeing the country for fear of violence or hunger in search of a better life and also political asylum. [In sum] an inadmissible, intolerable, and condemnable setback.”

The Supreme Court said Wednesday that a Border Patrol agent in Washington state cannot be personally sued in federal court for damages after a private citizen brought claims of illegal retaliation and excessive force. The decision continues a recent trend of the high court cutting back on the ability of individuals to sue law enforcement officers who violate their constitutional rights when there is no specific law authorizing such a claim to go forward. The ruling expands federal officers’ immunity from private lawsuits and reverses a lower court opinion that allowed the lawsuit to go forward. Lawyers for the Border Patrol agent argued that the threat of liability would interfere with his job duties.