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WEBINAR: Crisis in Honduras: A post-election update from on-the-ground activists
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.
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News Article
LGBTQ+: En Honduras, discriminación, prejuicios y exclusión: los obstáculos para el acceso al trabajo de las mujeres trans en Honduras
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.
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News Article
Migrant Justice: migrants face deadly peril as Biden restores Trump Remain in Mexico policy
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.”
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RRN Letter
Honduras, 12/2/2021
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.
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RRN Letter
Honduras, 12/01/2021
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.
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News Article
Honduras: After backing coups and corruption, the U.S. now has a chance to do the right thing in Honduras
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?
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News Article
Colombia: US Revokes Terrorist Designation for FARC
November 30, 2021
The 2016 peace accord, negotiated in Cuba with support from the U.S. under former President Barack Obama, resulted in President Santos’ winning the Nobel Peace Prize. After the deal was signed, FARC members began to demobilize, and 13,000 laid down their weapons. On the fifth anniversary of that peace deal, the Biden Administration will remove the FARC from the terrorist list. But it is adding two new groups that have splintered off from the FARC: La Segunda Marquetalia and the FARC-EP. (The United States also designated the leaders of those organizations - Luciano Marin Arango, Hernan Dario Velasquez Saldarriaga, Henry Castellanos Garzon, Nestor Gregorio Vera Fernandez, Miguel Santanilla Botache, and Euclides Espana Caicedo - as specially designated global terrorists.) Juan S. Gonzalez, the senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council, said removing the FARC from the terrorism list would allow the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to work in areas where demobilized FARC soldiers are. It would also allow former rebels to travel to the U.S.
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News Article
El Salvador: Water Forum Warns of Dangers in Government's Water Resources Law
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.

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News Article
Honduras: Monthly Human Rights Report - NOV 2021
November 30, 2021
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.
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News Article
Anti-Racism: Black, Brown, Busted & Broke
November 30, 2021

Mass incarceration in the United States is a crime against humanity. It disproportionately ruins the lives of Black, Brown and Indigenous people. It wastes human potential. It destabilizes neighborhoods and destroys communities. We all pay dearly for it, in human as well as economic terms. Both at its roots and in its practices and policies, mass incarceration as practiced by the United States is an egregious abuse of human rights. If you are Black, Brown or Indigenous in the U.S., jail and prison are traps targeted at you and waiting to spring shut. You have a high likelihood of being incarcerated. Race and class play a critical role in who is arrested, who is tried and convicted, who receives the harshest sentences – and who is able to successfully navigate the challenges of post-incarceration life. Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men, and Latinx people are 2.5 times as likely. For Black men in their thirties, about 1 in every 12 is in prison or jail on any given day. In 2019, the imprisonment rate for African American women (83 per 100,000) was over 1.7 times the rate of imprisonment for white women (48 per 100,000). Latinx women were imprisoned at 1.3 times the rate of white women (63 vs. 48 per 100,000).

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