Nicaraguan opposition leader Cristiana Chamorro has been given an eight-year sentence after being found guilty of money-laundering. Shortly after Cristiana Chamorro announced she would run for president, prosecutors accused her of "abusive management [and] ideological falsehood" during her time at the helm of a media foundation she had led until early 2021.
This spring, Colombia could elect its first progressive president. In primary elections earlier this month—held for left-wing, centrist, and ruling right blocs—former Bogotá mayor and 2018 presidential candidate Gustavo Petro won an astounding nearly 4.5 million votes to emerge as nominee for the left-wing coalition known as the Historic Pact. Petro has pledged to ban new fossil fuel exploration from day one, proposing to "end oil exploration, but not exploitation. The old coffee-growing country has been left behind and sadly we moved into oil and coal. This is unsustainable and will bring about extinction. We need to move away from an extractivist economy and move towards a productive one.” Petro has been involved in politics ever since the M19 pivoted toward the constitutional process, and is no stranger to challenging the right. He called out right-wing government connections to far-right paramilitaries as a lawmaker, consequently receiving death threats, which is no surprise as Colombia is the world’s most dangerous country for human rights defenders and environmentalists.
This year’s “Water & War” festival from March 15-22, 2022 explores the intersection of militarism & water, survival & resistance, in the lead-up to World Water Day on March 22. A unique mix of films explores this theme, from PFAS pollution on a military base in Michigan and the infamous Red Hill fuel leak in Hawai’i poisoning groundwater, to Syrian war refugees fleeing violent conflict by boat to Europe and the story of the assassination of Honduran Indigenous water activist Berta Cáceres.
WOLA visited a large segment of the Texas-Mexico border, from Del Rio to Brownsville, during the week of March 7. Joy Olson, WOLA’s former executive director, and Adam Isacson, WOLA’s director for defense oversight, covered three of the nine sectors into which Border Patrol divides the U.S.-Mexico border, crossing into four Mexican border cities along the way. We were pursuing different research questions: Joy was looking at how the U.S. government could respond to ransom kidnappings, and Adam was looking at communities’ and migrants’ interactions with U.S. border law enforcement. Information about both topics is scarcer in this part of the border than it is from El Paso westward, and we wanted to know why. We saw many longtime colleagues, for the first time since before the pandemic, who are doing important work throughout the border zone. We introduced ourselves to many others whom we’d never met before. We talked to service providers, shelter personnel, attorneys, and some government officials and experts—and we put a lot of miles on our rental car. Here are a few things we saw.
This Monday, March 21, will mark the second anniversary of the start of Title 42, the CDC health order that has been used to rapidly expel hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border without due process for their asylum claims. The Biden administration has an opportunity to end this disastrous policy and restore the asylum system.
Catholic priest José Enrique Vásquez left his mother’s house after a visit at 10am on March 2, returning to his parish in San Pedro Sula, Cortés Department, for Ash Wednesday religious services. He never showed up. At 10pm that night, his lifeless body was entered at the morgue as an unknown person. There were six bullet wounds in his body, including two in the head and two in the chest.
As the head of Guatemala’s High-Risk Tribunal D, a court specialized in handling complex high-stakes criminal cases, Erika Aifán spent six years trying dozens of the most powerful business people, politicians, judges, and capos of Guatemala on charges of corruption, money laundering, and drug trafficking. For that work she has faced constant threats, espionage, and judicial persecution. In February, El Faro revealed that a witness in her court accused President Alejandro Giammattei of financing his electoral campaign with $2.6 million in bribes from construction firms. It was reason enough for Attorney General Consuelo Porras, converted into Giammattei’s enforcer, to file seven motions to repeal Aifán’s judicial immunity from prosecution and look to incarcerate the judge who may otherwise have put the president of Guatemala behind bars. In the evening on Wednesday, March 9, and without warning her team of bodyguards, Erika Aifán crossed the land border into El Salvador to fly via Costa Rica to the United States. This morning her attorneys formally tendered her resignation from the Guatemalan judiciary. Her departure makes fifteen justice system operators to have abandoned Guatemala in the last 11 months.
The Title 42 expulsion policy — issued just days after COVID-19 began taking its grip on the U.S. — has driven a wedge between the Biden administration and immigrant communities, many of whom see its continued implementation as a broken campaign promise. As the Biden administration oversees the two-year anniversary of Title 42, it has given little sign it intends to lift the Trump-era policy that cites the pandemic as a reason to summarily expel asylum-seekers, even amid increasing pressure from members of its own party.
The 22nd Annual Social Justice Teach-In is a great opportunity for high school and college students--as well as people of all ages-- to learn about critical human rights issues. The theme for the 2022 Teach-In is Liberation Lab: A Social Justice Teach-In on Abolition and Environmental Justice. Attendees will be invited to attend different sequential panels that focus on grief, empathy, apathy, and, of course, liberation–and much more. Between the main sessions of panel presenters, participants will go into small breakout rooms so that they can share and reflect on what they’ve just heard. We are training volunteers to facilitate these break-out sessions.
This symposium will explore some of the ways in which racial hierarchies and subordination are present in American policing. Since the early 1970s, some law enforcement scholars, politicians and reformists have presupposed that increasing the number of Black officers on the force could be an important tool to improving relations between police departments and communities of color. The national conversation around the myriad of continued problems in policing during the Racial Reckoning of 2020 revealed continued instances of racial discrimination endured by Black police officers inside and outside of their departments. While affinity law enforcement associations began in an effort to support and empower officers from underrepresented racial groups, those groups often lack collective bargaining rights or mechanisms by which to support the interests of their members.
Symposium presenters will explore the historical role of racism in American policing, Indian policing, disparate officer discipline outcomes, the intersection of use of force and race, the impact of arbitration on police reform, how gender impacts the rate of reported crimes, potential solutions for a transformational path forward, and other related topics.
