IRTF News

For our last installation of this year’s Black History Month series, we at the Quixote Center are highlighting the life and work of Honduran Garifuna activist Miriam Miranda. Miriam Miranda is a Honduran Garifuna human rights activist and land defender. As the head of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH)—which defends the rights of Garifuna communities—Miranda has worked to stop land theft by the tourism industry, to reclaim ancestral Garifuna land, promote sustainability, and support community leadership development for youth and women. In 2015, Miriam received the Óscar Romero Human Rights Award, alongside fellow Honduran activist Berta Cáceres, who was assassinated less than a year later. In 2016, Miriam received the Carlos Escaleras environmental prize for her 30 years of activism defending Garifuna communities.

A bombardment carried out by Colombia's armed forces killed 23 FARC dissidents on Thursday as part of a military offensive to seize control of an area in the northeast of the country which sits on the border with Venezuela, the government said. Dissident members of the demobilised Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) reject a 2016 peace deal with the government. The dissidents have become a security threat, according to the government, which accuses them of murdering community leaders and civilians.

Augusto Cesar Sandino was one of the most important and successful guerilla fighters of the 20th century, successfully driving the US Marines out of Nicaragua against nearly impossible odds. His image continues to be the most ubiquitous symbol in Nicaragua – a country led by the Sandinista Front, named in his honor. Sandino was not a revolutionary by training or study; he was drawn into the armed struggle in response to the US Marine invasion and occupation of his country which began in 1911 with the goal of ousting Liberal Party President Jose Zelaya. As the US State Department itself explains, American opposition to Zelaya stemmed from his intention to work with the Japanese government to develop a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast of Nicaragua which would rival the US-controlled Panama Canal. This flew in the face of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which holds that the US has sole dominion over the Western Hemisphere and the right to intervene in any country therein to prevent the influence of other nations. Sandino and his forces, though not great in number and certainly not as well-armed as the United States Marine Corps, proved to be a formidable force which could neither be caught nor vanquished.

The Six Guapinol water defenders have finally been freed!! 

 

A few hours ago, they walked out of the Olanchito prison where they have been held for over 900 days. Outside the prison, their families and community members gathered to greet them. Several Honduran media were there covering their release and all travelled in a large caravan to Guapinol where the six defenders were greeted by the community. 

The Supreme Court of Justice of Honduras declared the Law for the Protection of Plant Varieties, also known as the Monsanto Law and approved by the Congress of the Central American country in 2012, for unconstitutional. As of this legislation, it was prohibited to save seeds, give them away and exchange them. This initiative took place within the framework of the advance of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), an organization that works exclusively and explicitly for the privatization of seeds throughout the world, through the imposition of intellectual property rights on plant varieties. The Honduran State is one of those that signed the UPOV Convention. The National Association for the Promotion of Ecological Agriculture (ANAFAE), a group that has defended organic agriculture and food sovereignty in Honduras for more than 25 years, has been denouncing this law since it was approved and in 2016 had filed a legal appeal to declare it unconstitutional, which was rejected. Two years later, groups of peasants and independent producers presented a new appeal, which led to the declaration of unconstitutionality of the law last November and publicly communicated at the end of January of this year. 

COFADEH documented the case of José Antonio Torres Meza, 40 years old, originally from Catacamas, Olancho. He lived 11 years in exile, until last February 11, when he entered through the customs of El Amatillo to attend his mother's funeral, but was captured. He was being prosecuted since August 2009, for the alleged crimes of terrorism and aggravated arson to the detriment of the State of Honduras, the group Industrias Turísticas (INTUR) and Ladislao Augusto Servellón Aguilar. The Public Prosecutor's Office, who accused Torres 12 years ago, had no choice but to follow COFADEH's demand for release and Judge 2 of the Criminal Court of Tegucigalpa ruled the immediate release of the victim, which will be effective tomorrow.

The January inauguration of Xiomara Castro Sarmiento Zelaya from the Liberty and Refoundation Party was a political landmark in Honduras. Castro became the Central American country’s first female president, winning 51.12 percent of the vote. She has promised to convene a National Constituent Assembly to rewrite the constitution. “For us to have the first female president in Honduras means 67 years of struggle (since it was in 1952) that us women fought for the right to be citizens — for the right to vote and the right to be voted for,” Wendy Cruz, member of the international peasant movement La Vía Campesina, told Truthout. Castro campaigned on an agenda that will strongly empower lower-income Honduran women, who have been one of the hardest-hit sectors in a country ruled through aggressive neoliberal policies for the last 12 years. Castro’s task of governing will be particularly hard given the high levels of corruption and ties to the drug trade that have been linked to Honduras’s former president, Juan Orlando Hernández.

Mayan indigenous communities in eastern Guatemala are waging an ongoing struggle for the defense of their lands and resources, in the face of encroachment by mining, power and oil corporations. These struggles have resulted in protests on behalf of the affected communities and against the Guatemalan government's repression of activists and indigenous inhabitants, and have now reached the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Colombia’s constitutional court voted Monday to decriminalize abortion in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy, a transformative shift for the majority-Catholic country and the latest sign of a turning tide in Latin America. The ruling makes Colombia the third large country in the region to decriminalize the procedure in slightly more than a year, after Mexico and Argentina, a development that appeared unlikely just a few years ago. Abortion rights activists said it could fuel further gains for abortion rights in the region. Since 2006, the procedure has been permitted in Colombia in cases of rape, nonviable pregnancy and when the life or health of the mother was in danger. At the time, those rules positioned the country as a regional leader in abortion rights. But between 2006 and 2020, the court heard, nearly 3,000 people were prosecuted for having an abortion. More than 90 groups filed a lawsuit in September 2020, arguing that the criminalization of abortion exacerbates the stigma around the procedure and creates barriers to access, even for patients who qualify under the exemptions.