IRTF News

On March 10, President Joe Biden announced that the United States would designate Colombia as a Major Non-NATO Ally. This designation extends special military and economic privileges to Colombia, including participation in joint defense research and training, and the ability to purchase weapons, ammunition, vehicles, and other surplus war material from the United States. This came on the heels of a U.S. delegation traveling to Venezuela for the first time since the United States broke off diplomatic relations and closed its embassy there in 2019. Motivating the U.S. overture is the potential to resume purchasing Venezuelan oil to compensate for the oil no longer being imported from Russia and to drive a wedge between Russia and its most important Latin American ally. These events illustrate an administration scrambling to repair relations with a region that the United States has long neglected and whose support it has taken for granted.

Francia Márquez Mina is an environmental grassroots leader and lawyer whose rapid rise is expanding a new political Black feminist perspective in Colombia and Latin America. Come on Colombia! From resistance to power until dignity becomes customary!” were her closing words in her first public speech after hearing the results of the March 13 presidential primary elections. Although she is not the first Black woman to run for the Colombian presidency, that day, Márquez made history. With a campaign executed in record time, she obtained the third highest turnout—783,160 votes—outnumbering former governors, mayors, and senators with longer political trajectories in Colombia. And while there is no guarantee that Márquez will become Colombia’s first Black woman vice president in May, her work so far has already blazed a path for future Black feminist politicians and created new space for people who have been historically excluded from Colombia’s highest political institutions.

Men, women and children have been rounded up across the Central American country since the government declared a state of emergency on 27 March, suspending constitutional rights including the presumption of innocence. President Nayib Bukele has said that the detainees are all gang members and that they will not be released. While the police claim to have captured the MS-13 leaders who ordered the killings, there is mounting evidence that ordinary people who live or work in gang-dominated neighbourhoods have been arrested arbitrarily.

Fifty social leaders were assassinated in Colombia from January this year onwards, the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (Indepaz) confirmed. According to an early warning issued by the Ombudsman’s Office in 2018 for the municipalities of Mapiripan and Puerto Concordia, the presidents of Community Action Boards and governors of indigenous reservations are populations at risk.

This Monday, Honduras ratified its request to join the United Nations group for the protection of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex (LGBTI) people. "Honduras as a nation reiterates its strong interest in joining the United Nations Group for the Protection of the Rights of Persons belonging to the LGBTI community," the statement said. The Honduran government recalled that although the UN has called for the decriminalization of homosexuality, same-sex relationships between consenting adults are still classified as crimes in 70 countries, the statement said. See the full report here.

Last week, the aforementioned body approved a decision to set up a group of three experts to investigate possible human rights violations in the Central American country since April 2018. The Professor of Law at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN-Managua) emphasized that the aforementioned council has little legitimacy when dealing with the human rights agenda. Gonzalez described this agenda as colonial, adding that it was a strategy to discredit left-wing governments in the region.

Witness for Peace and other organizations were honored to lead a Congressional delegation that included Representatives Ilhan Omar (MN-05), Cori Bush (MO-01), Jesús “Chuy” Garcia (IL-04), and Jamaal Bowman (NY-16) – as well as representation from the office of Jan Schakowsky (IL-09). The delegation was coordinated alongside other U.S.-based solidarity organizations, including SOA Watch, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, and the Institute for Policy Studies - Global Economy Program.