Anti-Militarism: News & Updates

The revolution in Mexico raged on and borderland oil companies like Texaco began building their own private border walls to protect their holdings. Then, in April 1917, the month the United States entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law a set of sweeping constraints on immigration generally, including literacy tests, entrance taxes, and quota restrictions. From that point on, the border sharpened— literally, as lengths of barbed wire were stretched ever further on either side of port-of-entry customs houses. What follows is a chronology of both the physical fortification of the U.S.-Mexico boundary and the psychic investment in such a fortification—the fantasy, chased by both Democrats and Republicans for more than half a century.

Week of fasting, public witness calls for closure of Guantanamo Bay Prison. Let them go home!

“Tell Mom not to worry – I’m applying for asylum,” Espinal, 28, told his sister Patricia, who recounted the December phone call with tears streaming down her sun-scarred cheeks. “We must pray to God that they give it to me. I told them I can’t go back to Honduras because if I go back, they’re going to kill me.” Within weeks of reaching the US, however, he was deported back to his gang-infested neighborhood in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa – and the death threats that had prompted him to flee. But just over a week after his return, Nelson was shot dead on the street outside his home on 18 December 2018.

In a press conference that was given shortly after the release of the report, Prosecutor General Nestor Humberto Martínez and Interior Minister Nancy Patricia Gutierrez stressed that the state is no longer involved in the killing of social activists, contradicting multiple think tanks and a 2018 Interior Ministry report indicating that state officials continue to be involved in the violent persecution of social leaders...In the first 10 days of 2019, at least eight social leaders were assassinated.

Border security—supported by Republicans and Democrats alike—is responsible for the death of Jakelin Caal, the exoneration of the Border Patrol agent who murdered a Mexican teen, and the separation and death of thousands of immigrant families.

the lifeless body of Jakelin Caal Maquín, 7, who died in the custody of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, was returned to her family home in Guatemala. Then on Christmas Day, the Border Patrol announced another Guatemalan child, 8-year-old Felipe Gómez Alonso, had died in the agency’s custody.

Roxsana Hernández Rodriguez had “deep bruises” on her body and died of dehydration, an independent autopsy found.

In December some of the IRTF staff traveled to El Paso, TX, to take part in “Christmas in Tornillo” at the detention camp where the US government is imprisoning upwards of 2,700 Central American teenagers in questionable conditions. Participants of the 10-day rally sang carols to the kids inside the barbed wire fence and chanted “No están solos” (“You are not alone”). The demonstrators’ nonviolent direct action culminated on New Year’s Eve when they held banners and blocked an entrance to the detention facility, also blocking the road to the US-Mexico border crossing.