IRTF News

It seems there was only one topic this month, the general elections. In the weeks running up to November 28, fear grew ever stronger of a repeat of 2017. A record number of candidates and their family members had been murdered. The JOH regime started an unprecedented vote-buying campaign handing out 7000 Lempiras to over 100’000 families. Days before the election, the new ID needed to vote had still not been distributed to everyone. And it was unclear if the new electoral bodies were up to the task as the National Party tried to undermine them all along the way. On election day, reports of voting centers opening late, long lines, more vote-buying and intimidation of voters further compounded the fear of another electoral fraud. The National Party also seemed to believe in its own capacity to steal elections and announced their victory already by mid-day. But then everything changed as the first results were published. Hondurans went to the polls in higher numbers than feared (participation is estimated at around 69%) and the opposition candidate Xiomara Castro led with 53.55% over Nasry Asfura's 33.87% with 46.5% of votes counted. In the remaining days of November, her victory was recognized by all other parties and even JOH himself. While the fight about the new configuration of Congress will be fought in December, it seems not too optimistic to say: Welcome to a new month in Honduras. In solidarity, Daniel Langmeier Honduras Forum Switzerland.

The US apprehended over 50,000 Nicaraguans trying to cross the U.S. border illegally in 2021, up from 2,291 in 2020, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data. In immigration court, the number of Nicaraguan cases waiting to be heard has exploded from 4,145 in 2018, when mass protests engulfed the country, to over 34,000 last month, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse (TRACS), a research group at Syracuse University. Over 19,000 of those cases were added this year, a record. Most cases end in deportation. Over 60% of deportation proceedings for Nicaraguans led to removal from the United States in 2019, when over 14,000 deportation cases were filed. Only 1,253 Nicaraguans were allowed to stay in the United States, and many cases from 2019 remain unresolved, TRACS data show....Nicaraguans once made up a tiny fraction of migrants in U.S. immigration courts. For decades, annual deportation filings were below 5,000. But in the fiscal year 2021, it had the sixth-highest number, just behind Mexico, according to TRACS data.

A Colombian paramilitary commander best known as “Macaco,” was responsible for the massacre of hundreds of people between the late 1980s and 2005. In 2008, the U.S. requested the extradition of Macaco and several dozen paramilitary leaders. The US had in fact enabled the interdependence of the Colombian state and the paramilitaries with billions of dollars in security assistance. (Macaco himself had benefited from U.S. support even more directly, as a palm oil company he owned had received funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development.) Macaco was convicted on drug trafficking charges, sentenced, released after 11 years and deported back to Colombia in 2019. While he continues to face murder and conspiracy charges in Colombia, he has not yet been found criminally responsible for any of the hundreds of murders he oversaw. But things started to change in the fall of 2021 when a Florida US federal judge ruled against Macaco in a civil case filed on behalf of the family of one of his victims. Eduardo Estrada was a popular community leader and founder of an independent radio station whom paramilitary leaders ordered executed in the town of San Pablo in 2001. The court awarded $12 million in damages to Estrada’s family. Although it is unlikely that they will collect the money, the ruling is significant nonetheless. It marked the first time a court in any country held Macaco responsible for one of the hundreds of murders carried out under his command. It was also the first judgment for murder and torture against a Colombian paramilitary leader in a case of its kind in the United States. Perhaps most significantly, the ruling recognized a “symbiotic relationship” between the paramilitaries and the Colombian state. While such a relationship is hardly a secret in Colombia, it was the first time a U.S. court recognized it. “A U.S. court has found that these violent, murderous, paramilitary regimes were basically the same as the Colombian government,” Daniel McLaughlin, another attorney who litigated the case, told The Intercept. “Which is the Colombian government that the U.S. was supporting at the time.” The case could set a precedent for more civil litigation against paramilitaries and other nonstate actors to be filed in the United States. Roxanna Altholz is a human rights attorney who fought for years to have the testimonies of the families of victims included in U.S. criminal proceedings against paramilitary leaders. “What happened in Colombia is certainly the responsibility of Colombian leaders and society,” said Altholz. “But also of the United States. Anywhere you look, you’ll see the United States.”