On October 10, 2012, sixteen-year-old José Antonio Elena Rodriguez was in his hometown of Nogales, Mexico when Border Patrol agent Lonnie Swartz fired 10 shots across the border and killed him. Since then, José Antonio’s family has demanded justice, including organizing monthly vigils, protests, and other actions, including legal actions. His family is one of the founding families of the Border Patrol Victims Network. On October 8 & 9, 2022, join us in accompanying the Elena Rodriguez family and the Border Patrol Victims Network in Ambos Nogales (Arizona and Sonora) to uplift the memory of José Antonio and countless victims of border militarization. We are grateful to the family of José Antonio for the invitation to stand in solidarity with them.
You are here
Anti-Militarism: News & Updates
The Akron Beacon Journal is reporting that Ultimate Jet Charters, a local company, played an instrumental role in a depraved political stunt by Florida Gov. DeSantis. The charter airline flew dozens of people seeking asylum to Martha's Vineyard and left them there, stranded. In this video, lawyer Rachel Self talks about the ways people were tricked by Gov. DeSantis, DHS, and now an Ohio company. Ultimate Jet Charters facilitated a depraved political stunt for a Republican governor, which amounts to large-scale human trafficking. The passengers were people seeking asylum in the U.S. because they face extortion, gang violence, kidnapping, and murder in their native countries. They were tricked into getting on the plane, told lies, and had no idea what was happening.
After the transportation of asylum seekers to Martha's Vineyard, initiated by Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, the contracted aviation company Vertol System Inc. caught public attention.
The Oregon-based company has received more then $1 million from the state of Florida to transport immigrants to different locations in the United States.
Investigations now show, that the company has donated at least $12,000 to the Floridian political campaigns of DeSantis' allies, including 2,500 to a Super Pac supporting Matt Gaetz, a former law representative of Vertol System Inc.
Read more about DeSantis' transportation of Venezuelan asylum seekers in this month's IRTF Migrant Justice newsletter. https://www.irtfcleveland.org/blog
Since the Biden administration restarted the Central American Minors Refugee and Parole Program (CAM program), initionaly initiated by the Obama administration and later withdrawn by Trump, not much has happened.
Underfunding and personal shortage at the nine national resettlement agencies led to the inability to handle the mass of applications.
Due to this bottleneck only a few hundred cases filed before the Trump administration ended the program have been completed since March 2021.
For many children this slow processing of applications means waiting times of over a year and no information on how long it will take until they are reunited with their familes.
Organizations are now calling for the support of consuls to help the children with their application interviews and pass case information on to the waiting parents or guardians.
On behalf of IRTF’s Rapid Response Network (RRN) members, we wrote six letters this month to heads of state and other high-level officials in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico, urging their swift action in response to human rights abuses occurring in their countries. We join with civil society groups in Latin America to: (1) protect people living under threat, (2) demand investigations into human rights crimes, (3) bring human rights criminals to justice.
IRTF’s Rapid Response Network (RRN) volunteers write six letters in response to urgent human rights cases each month. We send copies of these letters to US ambassadors, embassy human rights officers, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, regional representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and desk officers at the US State Department. To read the letters, see https://www.irtfcleveland.org/content/rrn , or ask us to mail you hard copies.
The PNC (national police) and military have a long history of violating the rights of Indigenous communities with extreme violence. There have been several violent incidents reported around the Petén region and the Sierra del Lacandón National Park. Security forces are known to enforce the initiatives of private companies to install hydroelectric dams that pollute the local rivers and drinking water sources. They also enable the deforestation of biodiverse regions for industrial-scale agricultural plantations for the production of palm oil.
At around 2:00 am on August 17, 150 National Civil Police vehicles and 12 army trucks entered the communities of Nueva Jerusalem II and La Revancha, detonating explosives that left 12 large holes along the road, claiming to comply with a judicial order to destroy two alleged clandestine highways inside the Sierra del Lacandón National Park. It is curious that the roadways are described by authorities as “clandestine” since personnel of CONAP (National Council of Protected Areas) have themselves traveled by those roadways many times.
The roads were built by the local communities themselves—and maintained without government support—along paths that have existed for decades and used initially for transportation of agricultural products. These transportation routes are vital to ensure mobility during health emergencies.
A new president moved into the Palacio de Nariño in Bogotá on August 7, but the political violence continues. We wrote to President Petro demanding accountability for the assassinations of five social leaders in the departments of Cauca, Valle del Cauca, Tolima, and Putumayo over the past month.
KILLED
July 16, in Cauca: 25-year-old member of the Awá Indigenous guard Kiwe Thegna Jorge Eliécer Mejía.
July 18, in Cauca: Larry Reinoso Sánchez, co-founder and legal representative of the Association of Peasant Workers of the Cordillera (Asocordillera), was kidnapped; his dead body was discovered on July 21.
August 5, in Putumayo: Kedinyon Jeider García, member of the Human Rights Committee of the Community Action Board of the Brisas del Yurilla village, Puerto Guzmán
August 6, in Valle del Cauca: Javier Usechi, a renowned 42-year-old environmental and animal rights leader and founding member of the Tatayamba Social and Cultural Collective
August 12, in Tolima: Diomedes Bermúdez Aguirre, a signatory to the Peace Agreement and ex-FARC combatant enrolled in the official reincorporation process. He became the 32nd signatory to the Peace Agreement assassinated this year.
Mexico ranks as the second most dangerous country in the world for journalists.
Fredid Román Román ran an online program called The Reality of Guerrero, which focused heavily on state-level politics. On August 22, he posted a story online about the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the nearby city of Iguala. His story was released just days after a government truth commission declared the incident, and its coverup, a “crime of the state” that involved the participation and negligence of all layers of government. In a lengthy Facebook post, Fredid Román Román mentioned an alleged meeting between four officials at the time of the students’ disappearance, including former attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam, who was arrested after the publication of the truth commission report last week.
At around 4:40pm on August 22, Fredid Román Román was in his car, just having a left a journalism workshop that he teaches. Two people who were traveling on a blue motorcycle intercepted the journalist on Valerio Trujano street in Chilpancingo, the capital city of Guerrero State, and shot him to death.
The killing of Fredid Román Román causes us to be ever more disturbed by the general climate of impunity and inadequate security conditions for journalists in the state of Guerrero, and in the Republic of Mexico in general. Fredid Román Román became the 15th journalist killed in Mexico this year.
Gustavo Petro is off to a fast start. In his first two weeks in office, the new Colombian president has already reestablished relations with Venezuela, replaced several top security officials, and moved to restart negotiations with one of the country’s most notorious rebel groups. And, with ambitious tax reforms and climate policies on the docket, he shows no signs of slowing down. Petro’s reform agenda is a chance to steer the country away from poverty, corruption, and a decades-long war on drugs that has led to nearly half a million deaths without putting a dent in coca production. But experts say the impact of these policy shifts could go well beyond Colombia’s borders, offering new approaches for major issues from the international drug trade to the crisis in Venezuela.
We wrote to the attorney general and human rights ombudsman of El Salvador to express our concerns over the weakening of democracy in El Salvador, especially in light of the State of Exception, which was recently extended for the fourth time. More than 46,000 suspected gang members have been arrested since the State of Exception, a government-declared crackdown on gang activity, was initiated on March 27. 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. Civil society organizations in El Salvador have documented more than 3,000 cases of abuse and torture, including the cases of 50 people who died while they were imprisoned in state detention centers. The University Observatory of Human Rights (OUDH) has documented 63 cases of cruel and degrading treatment, including cases of arbitrary arrests, deaths of detainees in custody, torture, and prison overcrowding. One of the most emblematic cases of torture corresponds to a 14-year-old who was detained and tortured by agents of the National Civil Police (PNC). To force the teenager into confessing that he belonged to a gang, police submerged his head in water and clamped his fingers with pliers. Although the teenager was not a gang member, he was later taken to a gang cell, where the inmates also beat him. For twelve days, the police continued to beat him. His mother found him vomiting blood when he was finally released after a hearing.
