Environmental Human Rights: News & Updates

IRTF is grateful to the 200 supporters who gathered on October 27 at Pilgrim Church in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood for IRTF’s annual Commemoration of the Martyrs. In addition to marking the 44th anniversary of the martyrdom of Cleveland’s missioners in El Salvador (Jean Donovan and Sister Dorothy Kazel, alongside Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke), we commemorated 36 human rights defenders killed in Central America and Colombia this past year because they dared to speak truth to power.

Our keynote speaker, Lorena Araujo of the largest campesino organization in El Salvador (CRIPDES), held the crowd’s attention with horrific stories of mass arrests, detentions and deaths currently happening under their government’s State of Exception, now in its third year. With more 88,000 imprisoned (and more than 300 deaths in prison), El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world—surpassing the astronomical rate of incarceration in the United States. 

As the people of El Salvador face the greatest challenge to their democracy since the end of the civil war in 1992, they invite us to renew and deepen our solidarity.

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Since early 2023, IRTF has been involved in an international solidarity campaign to drop bogus criminal charges against five environmentalists in El Salvador. After 20 months of petition gathering, calls to the US State Departement and US Embassy, a sign-on letter from the US Congress and other advocacy efforts, we are happy to report that the Santa Marta 5 have been freed!

The five prominent community leaders (Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez, Antonio Pacheco, and Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega) were all instrumental in the successful campaign to save El Salvador’s rivers from the threat of gold mining. With a unanimous vote in El Salvador’s National Assembly in March 2017, El Salvador became the first nation on earth to ban all metallic mining.

Since they were arrested in January 2023 on politically-motivated charges, IRTF has participated in an international campaign spanning 31 countries demanding that the bogus charges be dropped and denouncing the political motivations behind their detention given the lack of evidence presented by the Salvadoran Attorney General’s office.

In a letter to the government in March 2023, a group of UN special rapporteurs and the vice-president of the UN working group on arbitrary detention, said: “We fear that the case is an attempt to intimidate those who seek to defend the environment in the country, and especially those who defend human rights from the negative impacts of mining.”

The anti-mining activist Juan Lopez said in an interview three years ago: "If you leave home, you always have in mind that you do not know what might happen, if you are going to return." The reason for that were threats from people whose interests clashed with Juan's activism.

Human rights organisations have been warning for a long time about the dangerous situation for environmental activists in Honduras. Now Juan Lopez was killed and people in charge like President Xiomara Castro now must take a stand.

A stunning report in Axios paints a damning picture of widespread farm labor abuse in the US agricultural industry outside the protections of the Fair Food Program (FFP). 

Yet while federal prosecutions of forced labor operations grow more common in agriculture, many massive food corporations like the grocery giant Kroger continue to turn a blind eye to the extreme abuses of some of the most vulnerable workers at the bottom of their opaque supply chains, according to a shocking report, months in the making, by Richard Collings of Axios.  Meanwhile, according to the report, the lack of adequate resources for state and federal authorities to protect farmworkers is only making matters worse, and is likely allowing even more widespread exploitation of the agricultural workers who put food on our tables to go undetected. 

Against this backdrop of pervasive abuse, Worker-driven Social Responsibility programs like the Fair Food Program and Milk with Dignity are singled out by Axios as “key to ending widespread forced labor.”

The bullet-pointed report is a must-read.   We have included it here below in full to best share its urgent message: Forced labor is an appalling reality in US agriculture today, but there is a proven solution — the unique monitoring and enforcement mechanisms of the Fair Food Program, driven by workers as the frontline monitor of their own rights and backed by the purchasing power of the program’s participating buyers.

Cañaverales, a town in Colombia’s northern province of La Guajira, has become the first beneficiary of a new government program protecting campesino communities from industrial development. On July 5, 2024, Colombia's Ministry of Agriculture declared Cañaverales a Protected Area for Food Production (APPA), safeguarding 80,000 hectares from coal mining and prioritizing agriculture. This victory follows decades of activism by Afro-Colombian, campesino, and Indigenous communities fighting against environmental degradation caused by large-scale mining.

Despite this progress, the future remains uncertain as corporate power, particularly from companies like the Turkish Best Coal Company, threatens to override these protections. The community's struggle reflects the broader challenges of balancing environmental protection with economic interests under the Petro-Márquez administration, which, despite its focus on rural development and food security, continues to face opposition from business interests and the extractive industry. The people of Cañaverales remain committed to resisting mining and protecting their land, but the threat of corporate influence and legal challenges looms large.

In this monthly newsletter, please read about : 1) ICE Air: Update on Removal Flight Trends, 2) US Government Policy: Some legislators and DHS trying to do more to offer humanitarian relief to migrants, 3) Migration Impacts on Women, 4) At the Border, 5) Beyond Borders: Health and Safety in the Age of Migration in Mexico, 6) Changing Demographics: Migrants to the US Come from Different Corners of the Globe, 7) Danger in the Darién Gap: Human rights abuses and the need for human pathways to safety, 8) Texas Gets Tough on Migrants, 9) Economic Benefits of Immigration – both documented and undocumented migrants, 10) Biden Can Claim Record Numbers of Removals.

TAKE ACTION NOW

Here is what you can do to take action this week and act in solidarity with migrants and their families. (See details at the bottom of this newsletter.)

A) Join a Solidarity Delegation to Southern Mexico:  November 11-16, 2024

B) Stop Criminalizing Migrants Traveling through the Darién Gap

C) Volunteer to Assistant Migrants and Refugees in Cleveland: Catholic Charities

D) Volunteer to Assistant Migrants and Refugees in Cleveland: NEO Friends of Immigrants

E) Get Paid to Assist Migrants and Refugees in Cleveland

F) Act Now for Welcoming, Dignified, and Just Immigration

Read the full IRTF Migrant Justice Newsletter each month at https://www.irtfcleveland.org/blog