IRTF News

We wrote to President Bukele of El Salvador to express our concerns over the weakening of democracy in El Salvador, especially in light of the recently imposed State of Exception (a government-declared crackdown on gang activity).  Measures implemented by the Bukele government over the past three years mark a move away from democracy and toward more authoritarianism: militarized repression, the state surveillance of journalists and dissidents, and political persecution....More than 34,000 suspected gang members have been arrested since the State of Exception in late March. Maximum time-limits on pre-trial detention have been lifted. Journalists are under surveillance of spyware and criminalized for reporting on gang activity or the government’s response to it. Recent legislative reforms limit freedom of speech, association, and movement.  Civil society organizations in El Salvador have documented more than 300 human rights complaints since March 27. Today, the government announced that the State of Exception crackdown will continue for at least another month....We join with human rights organizations within El Salvador and across the world in calling for an immediate end to the State of Exception, which is an instrument of repression and social control that dangerously limits constitutional rights.

The government of Honduras is a signatory to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Who Work and Live in Rural Areas, Agricultural Workers and Indigenous Peoples, approved by the United Nations General Assembly on December 17, 2018. The document calls for protection of several basic rights, including food, land and water, and respect for the cultural identity and traditional knowledge of Indigenous populations.

Clearly, the government is not upholding its obligations to Indigenous and other campesino communities. Here is a recent example. The Lenca Council of Palestine in Marcala, La Paz Department, is embattled in an ongoing land dispute with a private landowner. The Indigenous families of the campesino cooperative have 229 hectares of ancestral lands that were titled to them by the Honduran government in 1999. Nevertheless, the private landowner succeeded in getting a judge to issue an eviction order to force some families from some of the land. On May 18, about 200 employees of the private landowner arrived with 40-50 state security personnel (police and military) to carry out the eviction.  When Ramon Domínguez and Juan García, two members of the Lenca campesino cooperative, showed resistance, they were arbitrarily detained for seven hours even though they were not charged with any crime.

For many years, Garífuna communities along the Atlantic coast have suffered violence, killings, disappearances, and forced displacement due to powerful economic interests. This includes Honduran elites, international tourism, charter cities (aka ZEDEs), drug traffickers, industrial scale agriculture (e.g., African palm oil plantations), and more. The government of Honduras has enabled the stealing of Garifuna land because of its failure to ensure Garifuna communities the right to their ancestral territories, even when ordered to do so by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

On May 1, unknown persons shot community leader Alonso Salgado Caballero to death while he was sitting in a hammock outside the home of his cousin in Río Tinto, a Garífuna community in Tela municipality, Atlántida Department. The assailants then entered the home and attacked two of his relatives.   They seriously injured the wife of his cousin, Zury Quintanilla, a  school teacher and the current secretary of the board of trustees of the community. His sister-in-law, Sury Mariela Quintana, was also hospitalized with two gunshots to the head. Alonso Salgado Caballero, age 51, was the former treasurer of the board of trustees.

We are urging that the government of Honduras create and implement legal instruments to eradicate all types of violence against those who lawfully work to protect the land, natural resources and territorial rights of Garífuna communities.