IRTF News

A woman in El Salvador has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for the death of her unborn child following an obstetric emergency, according to a rights group. The Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion said on Monday that the 28-year-old woman, identified by the court only as “Esme”, had suffered a health emergency while pregnant in 2019 and sought assistance at a local hospital. She was later convicted of homicide and handed the lengthy sentence after serving two years of pre-trial detention, according to the group. The case is the first of its kind in the past seven years in the country, the group said. Abortion is illegal in El Salvador, even in cases of rape and when the woman’s health is in danger.

As some U.S. states place more restrictions on abortion and Americans brace for the possibility that the Supreme Court will soon overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing the procedure, several Latin American countries have moved in the opposite direction. The latest nation to do so was Colombia. On Feb. 21, Colombia's Constitutional Court legalized abortion during the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. "Colombia now is the country with the most progressive abortion laws in Latin America and the Caribbean," says Mariana Ardila, managing attorney in Colombia for the rights group Women's Link Worldwide. In the Americas, she added, only Canada has more liberal abortion regulations than Colombia.

The origin of the dispute over land in Bajo Aguán dates back to the 1970s, when the Agrarian Reform Law handed over most of the rich land in that valley to collective organizations managed by peasants. It was a victory for poverty-stricken farmers, drawing waves of immigrants to the fertile Bajo Aguán region. Bajo Aguán has historically been characterized as one of the main regions of the country where agrarian capitalism has firmly established itself, until it completely dominates the economic model of the region. Within the framework of the ascension of the government of Xiomara Castro, and in response to one of the main demands of the peasant sector, the table for the resolution of the agrarian conflict in Bajo Aguán was installed in February, which seeks to manage and respond to the historic agrarian conflict. The table was installed in a context marked by critical economic and political interests, which is why it represents, geographically, the Bajo Aguán region for big capital and the regional political elite. The protagonists in the area maintain an open dispute, in a context of institutional openness and political will of the Government, to advance in the democratic management of the agrarian conflict in Bajo Aguán. In short, the dialogue of the Government in the conflict is an important element to consider to identify the dynamics of the blocks and the actors, in their struggle for access to and control of the territory.

A judge in Guatemala ruled Friday that nine former police and military officers will stand trial for a range of alleged crimes, including forced disappearances, torture and killings during that country’s civil war. In reading his decision, Judge Miguel Angel Gálvez recounted testimony about acts of torture, forced disappearance and killing. The case stems from a document from Guatemala’s civil war recovered in 1999 known as the “Military Diary.” Inside, military officials logged forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and the torture of 183 people. The men on trial were high-ranking military and police officers arrested last year and implicated in the cases described in the document by nature of the command positions they held when the crimes occurred between 1983 and 1986.
  

Environmental activists Fabian Urquijo and Jhordan Peinado, who hail from Colombia’s Santander region, received an eerie warning in February. They were named in a pamphlet shared by the Gulf Clan paramilitary group, warning that they would be killed if they did not give up their activism. More than 20 other local activists were also named in the pamphlet, which was distributed throughout their neighbourhood. Many Colombian activists are increasingly worried that they could be targeted for their work, as recent data from Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) and Corporacion Compromiso, a local NGO, reveal a sharp increase in threats and violence towards environmental defenders. The stakes for activists in Santander are especially high. Over the past 18 months, the JEP recorded more than four dozen threats against activists across the region.

The Government Accountability Office, in a little-noticed report released late last month, informed lawmakers that the Border Patrol “has not collected and recorded, or reported to Congress, complete data on migrant deaths.” The omission included data the Border Patrol was required to track and turn over under legislation passed last year. The law specifically obligates the agency to include data collected by entities other than the Border Patrol itself in its reports on migrant deaths. The failings mark the first public government assessment of the agency’s response to the new legal requirements. “It confirms something that we suspected for a long time,” Daniel Martínez, an associate professor at the University of Arizona and one of the world’s leading experts on migrant deaths in the Sonoran Desert, told The Intercept. “We’ve known this for a while — that the Border Patrol is not doing an effective job of counting the dead.”

On Friday, a delegation of five California Democrats from congress -- Reps. Juan Vargas, Sara Jacobs, Raul Ruiz, Mark Takano and Katie Porter -- visited the Jardín de las Mariposas shelter for LGBTQ migrants in Tijuana to learn about the kinds of challenges these migrants in particular face. The Congressmembers also heardfrom people working to provide LGBTQ migrants with legal, medical and mental health services. Several of the Congressmembers said they walked away with a clearer understanding that something must be done to make requesting protection in the United States a smoother and safer experience for LGBTQ people.

Mario Membreño, member of the national coordination of the Convergence Against Continuity (CCC), appeared on the program Voices against Oblivion, to analyze the issue of the first 100 days of the government of Xiomara Castro. An editorial of the Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras (COFADEH), entitled "The three months of the government in Alliance and Justice", refers to the inaccuracy by the media to promote the evaluation of the famous 100 days of government of Xiomara Castro, considering that after the departure of the narco-dictator, the nationalist Juan Orlando Hernández, the nation was left bankrupt, its territorial sovereignty exposed and with high rates of poverty and corruption. The editorial points out that "that is why we have insisted that these are not the first 100 normal days from one government to another, this is the transition from a 12-year corrupt and drug-trafficking dictatorship to a popular government."

Far from providing tools to protect citizens from violence, the state of emergency has represented a threat to everybody’s human rights. The government seems to be using it as an excuse to introduce unwarranted restrictions on human rights and civil liberties, to further its campaign to  silence political opponents, civil society organizations, and independent media, taking over the judiciary, and seeking other self-serving purposes. The introduction of legal reforms such as those made to the Penal Code on April 5 to criminalize media or journalists who “reproduce and transmit messages from or presumably from gangs that could generate uneasiness or panic in the population” are a clear illustration of the lengths Bukele is prepared to go to in order to ensure nobody criticizes him.