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IRTF News
News Article
December 8, 2021
The United States accused El Salvador’s government of negotiating a secret pact with leaders of MS-13 and another gang under which the armed groups would cut back on bloody street killings and support the president’s party in midterm elections. The accusation, denied by El Salvador, was a new jolt to the rapidly deteriorating relationship between Washington and a longtime ally. The US Treasury Department announced that it was imposing sanctions on two Salvadoran officials for their roles in the alleged gang negotiations: Osiris Luna Meza, the vice minister of justice and director of the prison system, and Carlos Amilcar Marroquín, head of a major social welfare agency. José Miguel Cruz, a specialist in Salvadoran security issues, said the imposition of U.S. sanctions brought the allegations to a new level.
Content Page
December 7, 2021
WATCH RECORDING HERE
Watch this webinar to hear from Honduran activists an update on the state of affairs in the weeks after the highly contentious 2021 Presidential Elections. In particular, we learned more about the trial against the eight political prisoners of Guapinol, which started December 9, 2021. The webinar features Juana Zúniga: activist, community leader, and the spouse of one of the political prisoners of Guapinol, and analysis of the elections by Padre Ismael Moreno, of the Jesuit-sponsored media outlet Radio Progreso.
News Article
December 7, 2021
El juez Rafael Rivera, declaró sin lugar la nulidad argumentando en su resolución que «el cementerio de Azacualpa no constituye patrimonio cultural indígena» de la población Maya Chortí, que «si fuesen los peticionantes indígenas, esto no significa que puedan decidir sobre el cementerio» y que «es de interés público las exhumaciones en el cementerio», según lo compartido por el abogado Mejía con Criterio.hn. Frente a estos argumentos del Juez Rivera de Santa Rosa de Copán, el integrante del bufete Estudios Para la Dignidad expone que el cementerio de Azacualpa fue declarado patrimonio cultural indígena en Cabildo Abierto, que está dentro del territorio Maya Chortí, y que fue la misma Corte Suprema de Justicia la que en su sentencia de amparo dispuso que en caso de existir fallas geológicas, las autoridades municipales debían hacer lo necesario para garantizar la integridad del cementerio por ser un mandato popular a través de Cabildo Abierto.
News Article
December 7, 2021
México y Haití figuran entre los países que han tenido menos éxito en el proceso de solicitud de asilo en Estados Unidos en las últimas dos décadas, informó este martes el centro Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), de la Universidad de Syracuse, en Nueva York. De acuerdo con el informe de TRAC, las cinco nacionalidades con las tasas de obtención de asilo más bajas en las cortes de inmigración son México (15 %), Honduras y Haití (18 % cada uno), Guatemala (19 %) y El Salvador (20 %). Indica además que en conjunto, las personas de Honduras, Guatemala y El Salvador son el segmento más grande de solicitantes de asilo en los últimos años.
News Article
December 4, 2021
Thalía, Amelian y Lucía son mujeres de distintas realidades, pero se enfrentan a la discriminación y falta de oportunidades tanto laborales como integrales. Ellas luchan día a día por la subsistencia. Mientras tanto, el Estado de Honduras ignora las sentencias de la Corte Interamericana de los Derechos Humanos que mandan el reconocimiento de la ley de identidad de género para permitir a las personas trans adecuar sus datos de identidad, algo determinante para mejorar su calidad de vida. “¿Realmente quién es el protagonista de todos los daños que nos hacen a la comunidad de mujeres trans?”, pregunta Thalía. “Es el mismo Estado”, se contesta. “Quien dice que vela y protege es el que nos mata, el que nos lastima”....Las mujeres trans sufren violencia en muchos de los ámbitos donde se desempeñan. Según el estudio del Centro de Documentación y Situación Trans de América Latina y El Caribe (CeDosTALC), las víctimas trans de vulneraciones de derechos humanos en Honduras son en su mayoría trabajadoras sexuales, el 42% del total. El 34% son trabajadoras formales, el 5% son activistas y el 7% trabajadoras informales.
News Article
December 3, 2021
After reaching a deal with Mexico, the US will by 6 December start returning asylum seekers from other Latin American countries to Mexico, where they will be obliged to wait while their case is assessed. Mexico said US officials met its concerns over funding for migrant shelters, protection for vulnerable groups and access to medical checkups and Covid-19 vaccines. It also promised to take “local safety conditions” into account before accepting asylum seekers – a pledge that provoked disquiet among migrant advocates. But advocates argue that the main shortcomings of the programme are unchanged. “The violence faced by migrants in Mexico is going to outweigh any sort of promise made by the Mexican government to try to make this better,” said Linda Rivas, executive director of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Texas. “There aren’t enough shelters. People are continuing to be kidnapped – sometimes in their own shelter … Mexico can try [to protect migrants] but the reality is Mexico doesn’t have the means of doing it.”
RRN Letter
December 2, 2021
The Armed Forces and National Police have militarized the 200-year-old Azacualpa community cemetery in La Unión, Copán Department, at the behest of a US/Canadian gold mining company. Exhumations of the mostly indigenous Maya-Chortí graves have occurred off and on for several years. Despite a Supreme Court order one year ago to stop the exhumations, in October of this year another judge issued an “urgent order” to exhume, transfer and rebury the skeletal remains. The removal of the cemetery (which is why the army and police have been deployed) is to make way for expansion of the San Andrés gold mine, which is owned by US- and Canada-based Aura Minerals and operated by its Honduran subsidiary MINOSA (Minerales de Occidente SA). Those who oppose mining operations are spied on and threatened. Many opponents (at least 35) have been criminalized.
RRN Letter
December 1, 2021
In the early hours of the morning of November 14, officers of the National Police in Comayagüela, Francisco Morazán Department, arbitrarily stopped a vehicle, arrested the occupants, and beat one of them to the point where she had to be stitched up at the hospital. The victims: Lucía Enamorado, a local leader of the National Network of Human Rights Defenders, her partner Junior Oyuela, and journalist Nancy Paola García, a columnist for the feminist publication Tinta Verde. With understandable worry after being stopped, Junior Oyuela expressed verbal concern that “the police in Honduras disappeared people.” The police arrested him. When Lucía Enamorado questioned why they were being detained, the police took her into the patrol car and beat her. She had to be taken to a hospital to receive stitches for her wounds. Despite her injuries, they held her in detention for several hours in the Fourth District Police Station in the Belén neighborhood of Comayagüela. They were released at 12:00pm after a social media campaign that pressured the National Police.
News Article
December 1, 2021
On November 28, the Honduran people cast their vote in overwhelming numbers for a future in which Hondurans aren’t forced to flee their own country, forcefully repudiating the corrupt administration of current President Juan Orlando Hernández, a man who wrought unimaginable destruction on his people for eight years. Now the big question is how the United States will respond to the policies of the new president. Xiomara Castro, a democratic socialist, unseated a right-wing machinery that has been backed by Washington since the 2009 coup that deposed her husband, Manuel Zelaya....Castro’s control over Honduras’s democratic institutions could be threatened by its terrifying military and police forces. They’re loyal to Hernández, tight with drug traffickers, long practiced at repressing dissent and capable of anything. Hondurans are rightly worried about a new coup or more complex disruption and violence involving provocateurs, paramilitaries, drug traffickers and gangs. Despite all of this, the United States has continued to fund, train and share intelligence with the Honduran military and police, in the face of powerful congressional opposition. What message is President Biden sending to the Honduran military and police now?
News Article
November 30, 2021
On December 21, 2021, the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador approved a Water Resources Law that had been widely criticized by environmental and popular movement organizations on the grounds that it includes various privatizing aspects and excludes community efforts to guarantee the right to water for the most vulnerable populations. The government introduced the bill on June 18, 2021, shelving the previously proposed General Water Law, which had been under discussion for three years in the Environmental Commission. and thus erasing more than a decade of debate and consensus among social and environmental organizations. After new the bill was introduced, the majority party, New Ideas, formed an ad-hoc commission ostensibly to study it; however, none of the proposals from environmental or social movement organizations were incorporated into the bill. These organizations have thus denounced the government's bill, arguing that it establishes mechanisms to monopolize water use and institutionalizes water injustice.