Afro-Descendant & Indigenous: News & Updates

IRTF is grateful to the 200 supporters who gathered on October 27 at Pilgrim Church in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood for IRTF’s annual Commemoration of the Martyrs. In addition to marking the 44th anniversary of the martyrdom of Cleveland’s missioners in El Salvador (Jean Donovan and Sister Dorothy Kazel, alongside Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke), we commemorated 36 human rights defenders killed in Central America and Colombia this past year because they dared to speak truth to power.

Our keynote speaker, Lorena Araujo of the largest campesino organization in El Salvador (CRIPDES), held the crowd’s attention with horrific stories of mass arrests, detentions and deaths currently happening under their government’s State of Exception, now in its third year. With more 88,000 imprisoned (and more than 300 deaths in prison), El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world—surpassing the astronomical rate of incarceration in the United States. 

As the people of El Salvador face the greatest challenge to their democracy since the end of the civil war in 1992, they invite us to renew and deepen our solidarity.

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The new Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo thanks indigenous people for ensuring a peaceful transfer of power. Arévalo said with their 106 day long presence in front of the prosecutor’s office in Guatemala City they were able to save democracy.

At the same time, they were deprived in advance of the opportunity to vote for the Movement for the Liberation of the Peoples (MLP) party. MLP also fights for plurinationalism which is an important  issue for indigenous people. Maya Waqib’ Kej National Convergence and the Campesino Development Committee (CODECA) argues that the Guatemalan nation-state was founded by a small criollo elite that legalized racism and sexism, marginalizing women and Indigenous and Black peoples for the last 200 years. It stresses the need for grassroots solutions to construct a new plurinational state, defined as “the expressed will of all the peoples and sectors that coexist in a country.”  For some, a plurinational state would reorganize social relationships and rectify long-standing structural and institutional inequalities by recognizing Indigenous territorial rights, political autonomy, and buen vivir (good living/living well) as an alternative to capitalism.

After the elections in Guatemala, the “Pact of the Corrupt” tried to prevent the transfer of power to the democratically elected Bernardo Arevalo, who surprisingly won. But indigenous people managed to organize quickly and prevent this from happening. It was not an obvious battle for them to defend the representative democracy of a system from which they are excluded. Women, who are even more discriminated against in this system, have played a central role in this.
Abigail Monroy, Maya Kaqchikel and ancestral authority of Chuarrancho, said that now “we have a president who understands the people and is willing to work with the people”, but it is also “just a turning point on a long road”.

A stunning report in Axios paints a damning picture of widespread farm labor abuse in the US agricultural industry outside the protections of the Fair Food Program (FFP). 

Yet while federal prosecutions of forced labor operations grow more common in agriculture, many massive food corporations like the grocery giant Kroger continue to turn a blind eye to the extreme abuses of some of the most vulnerable workers at the bottom of their opaque supply chains, according to a shocking report, months in the making, by Richard Collings of Axios.  Meanwhile, according to the report, the lack of adequate resources for state and federal authorities to protect farmworkers is only making matters worse, and is likely allowing even more widespread exploitation of the agricultural workers who put food on our tables to go undetected. 

Against this backdrop of pervasive abuse, Worker-driven Social Responsibility programs like the Fair Food Program and Milk with Dignity are singled out by Axios as “key to ending widespread forced labor.”

The bullet-pointed report is a must-read.   We have included it here below in full to best share its urgent message: Forced labor is an appalling reality in US agriculture today, but there is a proven solution — the unique monitoring and enforcement mechanisms of the Fair Food Program, driven by workers as the frontline monitor of their own rights and backed by the purchasing power of the program’s participating buyers.

The article by Efren Lemus in El Faro on August 19, 2024, highlights severe issues within El Salvador's Bureau of Prisons under the state of exception. It documents cases where court-ordered releases were ignored, leading to deaths and continued unjust detainment. Families like that of Luis Armando Rodríguez faced repeated bureaucratic obstacles after his release was ordered, ultimately resulting in his death in prison. The Bureau of Prisons, accused of crimes and secrecy, has failed to comply with court orders, perpetuating a pattern of human rights abuses and institutional impunity despite international scrutiny.

NISGUA’s press release on the latest updates in the historic Guatemalan case charging ex-general Manuel Benedicto Lucas Garcia with genocide against the Maya Ixil people. On August 12, the accused made a frivolous and malicious attempt to dismiss the case. Yet, the fight continues and elders from the three municipals of the Maya Ixil region who are unable to travel to the capital due to advanced age or health issues are preparing to give their testimonies in Nebaj, Guatemala next week. 

In this critical moment, a month before the expected end of the trial, we call upon international media to continue to shine a spotlight on the case and reflect upon the international community’s role in enabling the genocide. In particular, the United States provided training to the Guatemalan police and military, promoted the ‘internal enemy’ doctrine, and taught torture techniques, forced disappearance, and counterinsurgency tactics. Survivors of the genocide of the Maya Ixil people and their families and communities have been awaiting justice for over 40 years, and the fight will continue until justice prevails.