Ex-guerrilla Gustavo Petro, who leads in opinion polls ahead of Colombian elections next month, signed an oath Tuesday not to expropriate property if he becomes the country's first-ever leftist president. "My proposal of transformation for this country is not grounded in, and does not include, any kind of expropriation," the 61-year-old senator told reporters.
Over 65 U.S.-based human rights, faith, immigrant rights, diaspora and international solidarity organizations released a joint statement expressing “profound concern” about the Bukele administration’s mass arrests in El Salvador and reports of human rights violations at the hands of state security forces. Since early April, over 12,000 people have been arrested without warrants, predominantly in marginalized communities, in response to a tragic spike in homicides; many arrests have been denounced by witnesses and family members as arbitrary in nature. As the 15-day administrative period for which people can be held without charges under a 30-day State of Exception comes to close for many, the groups are calling on the Salvadoran government to reinstate due process, lest a door be opened to “profound and lasting injustice.”
Top United States officials are in Panama for a summit on migration in the Americas, where migrant rights groups say US policies exacerbate the dangers faced by migrants and asylum seekers heading north. The US secretaries of state and homeland security are joining their counterparts from 20 other countries in the western hemisphere for a ministerial conference on migration on Tuesday and Wednesday in Panama City. However, migrant rights advocates contend that security and deterrence policies pushed by the US and other destination countries aggravate the risks migrants and asylum seekers face in transit through the region.
Colombia’s opposition and anti-corruption advocates have sued President Ivan Duque for allegedly trying to influence the May 29 presidential election. Senator Ivan Cepeda said last week that he would sue the president and seven mayors for abusing their position for electoral purposes. The Anticorruption Institute, a non-government organization, said Monday that it sued before the Cundinamarca Administrative Tribunal for his allegedly illegal participation in electoral politics.
Border Patrol car chases have been the subject of increasing scrutiny in recent months, amid a spike in deadly crashes, an increase in vehicular use-of-force incidents, and newly released information about U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s controversial Critical Incident Teams. Immigrant advocates and federal lawmakers are raising alarms about how the agency defines what counts as a pursuit, how those pursuits are carried out and how they are investigated when things go badly. U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D- El Paso, recently joined other lawmakers in raising questions about Border Patrol pursuits. She signed a joint letter to CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus on April 4 calling for the agency to curtail the use of vehicle pursuits, update their vehicle pursuit policy and improve agency oversight.
On March 22, Julio Toc Mucu was apprehended by police near his home and taken to the Penitentiary Center in Puerto Barrios, where he was beaten in custody. We understand that arrest warrants have also been issued against 12 more environmental defenders and journalists who protested the mine in October 2021 when state security forces violently attacked community residents with beatings and tear gas.
We reiterate our condemnation of acts of state violence against, and criminalization of, Indigenous environmental rights defenders in El Estor. We strongly urge the government of Guatemala to: (1) drop all criminal charges against Julio Toc Mucu and the other environmental defenders, (2) suspend the company’s mining license and stop all further mining operations promptly, and (3) initiate a new, transparent and thorough and inclusive consultation process with impacted communities.
On Sunday, March 27, just hours after congress approved a state of emergency, heavily armed police and soldiers entered the packed, gang-controlled neighborhood of San Jose El Pino. Freed from having to explain an arrest or grant access to a lawyer, they went door to door, dragging out young men. President Nayib Bukele has responded to the surge in gang killings with mass arrests in poor neighborhoods like San Jose El Pino, each day posting the growing arrest total and photos of tattooed men. The highly publicized roundups are not the result of police investigations into the murders in late March, but propel a tough-on-crime narrative that critics are calling “punitive populism.”
Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who governed from 2014 to January this year, was arrested at his home in Tegucigalpa in February. He is accused of having been involved in a drug-trafficking ring which included his younger brother Tony Hernández, who last year was sentenced in the US to life in prison. Security Minister Ramón Sabillón said that "the extradition will happen next week (....) sometime between Wednesday and Friday".
We continue to be deeply concerned for leaders of the LGBTQ+ community. On March 17, Luis Carlos Bustamante Fernández, the current representative of the archipelago of San Andrés and Providencia to the Central Committee of Artists of the National Dance Council, was found dead at his workplace, his body showing signs of torture. He was an LGBTIQ+ activist on San Andrés Island, located 470 miles north of the Colombian mainland. Just three days prior, another musician, Fabián Pérez Hooker, was killed at his home, also on San Andrés Island. Many musicians and other artists are involved in defense of environmental, cultural and social rights, and do work against violence and drugs. The killing of two artists on the same island in a matter of days is greatly troubling. Luis Carlos Bustamante Fernández became the 42nd human rights defender assassinated in 2022. There have been 1,328 social leaders killed since the signing of the Peace Accords in November 2016.
We wrote to President Bukele of El Salvador to express our concerns over the weakening of democracy in El Salvador, especially in light of the recently imposed State of Exception. Measures implemented by the Bukele government over the past three years mark a move away from democracy and toward more authoritarianism: militarized repression, the state surveillance of journalists and dissidents, and political persecution. After a shocking total of 62 murders were recorded from different parts of the country on March 26, the population woke up the next day to learn that a State of Exception had been put into effect. Since then, police and army troops have been deployed in gang-controlled areas, resorting to unnecessary and excessive use of force. More than 5,747 people have been detained without a warrant, and there have been reports of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Security forces are combing through poor communities and neighborhoods, searching the pockets of students, and mass arresting real or suspected gang members. All the while, journalists are told they are prohibited from reporting. We join with human rights organizations within El Salvador and across the world in calling for an immediate end to the State of Exception, which is an instrument of repression and social control that dangerously limits constitutional rights.
