Anti-Militarism: News & Updates

Fearing for his life, a thin, curly-haired 25-year-old fled to the United States-Mexico border and requested asylum. After nine days in custody, he was put on a plane in McAllen, Texas, and sent to Guatemala. American authorities explained that he would wait there for an “initial screening,” the first step in the U.S. asylum process, and eventually return to stand before a U.S. judge, he said. But it wasn't true. The U.S. government sent him here to apply for Guatemalan asylum under a new Trump administration policy that puts migrants into this Central American country's bare bones asylum system with few resources and fewer options. From the program's start in November through last week, the U.S. government shipped 683 asylum-seekers to Guatemala. That is more than double the number of asylum-seekers processed by Guatemala in all of 2018. But only 14, or about 2% of the foreigners actually pursued asylum here.

Today is the 4-year anniversary of the indigenous land defender and feminist leader, Berta Cáceres brutal assassination. Berta was the co-founder of COPINH and was murdered for her brave fight in defense of the indigenous and sacred territories of the Lenca People in Honduras. Before her assassination Berta and COPINH fought against the construction of the Agua Zarca Project, a damaging dam of the Energetic Development Company (DESA). In early 2020, the Berta Cáceres Cause Observation Mission presented a new follow-up report on the year-and-a-half judicial process that culminated in December 2019 with the sentencing. This report emphasized that “[j]ustice in the Berta Cáceres case will not be fully realized until responsibility is established for the intellectual authorship of the facts of the case and for the various actions of delay and obstruction of the investigation and judgment.”

In 2010 Mesa, an on-duty U.S. Border Patrol agent who was at the border in El Paso, Texas, shot Hernández at least twice — once in the face. At the time, the boy, a Mexican national, was on the southern side of the border in Ciudad Juarez. What is in question, and at the core of a legal dispute the U.S. Supreme Court has been trying to resolve for nearly three years, is whether Hernández's parents, who are also Mexican nationals, have a legal standing to sue Mesa for damages in the killing that occurred outside of U.S. territory. On Tuesday the court delivered its decision: The Hernández family cannot sue.

Professor García Hernández spoke in Houston yesterday at Brazos bookstore, and in his presentation echoed the core demand of his book: End the incarceration of immigrants. García Hernández makes the case that the incarceration of immigrants is not justified by claims for security and protection. That, in fact, the evolution of immigrant prisons over the last 40 years have been driven by the strategic use of nationalist, race-baiting politics coupled with the profit generating subcontracting of enforcement operations. The two features – ideology and resources – intersect in a social structuring of incarceration. The practices that have evolved fly in the face of due process, and contradict existing legal protection. Another person has died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. David Hernandez Colula was from Mexico, and had been in the United States for at least 5 years. The apparent cause of death is self-inflicted strangulation. He died on Thursday, February 20. He was being held at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown.

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — A man from Mexico in government custody and awaiting deportation died by apparent suicide in an Ohio prison, U.S. immigration authorities said Friday. David Hernandez Colula, 34, was being held at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown during pending deportation proceedings, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. Colula died at a hospital early Thursday after prison staff found him unresponsive in his cell. Colula apparently died by suicide but the case is under investigation, authorities said. Colula was transferred to the Ohio prison following his arrest in Michigan in December for an outstanding warrant.

Good news... WE JUST PAID ELIAS'S BOND!

Friends, family, and fellow members of the movement,

We did it! Elias will be free from immigration detention after 6 months of incarceration. We are proud of our work but even more, we are proud of Elias and his perseverance in the face of vast injustice.

Honduras has been suffered since many year by the effects of corruption. So are getting $300 million robbed every year from the Honduran healthcare system. Also, Honduras is one of the world’s most dangerous places to be an environmental activist or human rights defender. Frontline Defenders rated Honduras third in the world in murders of human rights activists in 2019 and Global Witness named Honduras the deadliest country in the world for environmental activism in 2017. More than 100 small farmers have been killed since 2009 in land disputes in Bajo Aguán, where large-scale palm plantations encroach on land farmed by poor farmers and cooperatives. Activists protesting environmentally damaging projects, like Guapinol community members organizing against a mine polluting their water, are in jail. International financing backs many of the controversial projects. The November 2017 elections in which President Hernández was declared reelected were seen as fraudulent by much of the Honduran public, yet the OAS’s call for new elections was ignored. In the massive protests that followed, at least 23 people were killed, the vast majority allegedly by security forces. Over 60 people were wounded. Two years later, not a single security force member has been convicted for these crimes.

Fr. Donal Godfrey, SJ, associate director for faculty and staff spirituality at USF, explained that the Jesuits had spoken against the kidnapping, torture and murder of civilians, many of them poor, at the hands of El Salvador’s military regime during the country’s civil war. Because the Jesuits spoke up, they were targeted as enemies. “With this memorial, we honor the martyrs in El Salvador, and we reaffirm our Jesuit mission to struggle against injustice and seek the truth,” said Fr. Godfrey.