President Biden has taken steps to address some urgent needs in the immigration system, but deportations and expulsions continue. Previous and current administrations have failed in their legal duty to protect the human rights of all migrants, particularly Indigenous peoples. The Biden administration needs to recognize, consult, and directly engage with the leadership of Indigenous and Black migrants.
Thank you NISGUA for the petition and image.
Héctor Antonio Trigueros, community and environmental defender from Azacualpa (La Unión, Copán), suffered an attack in which his motorcycle was seriously damaged, while he was unharmed. Hector is one of the main community defenders in Azacualpa, a place where the US-based mining company Aura Minerals has been cyanide-leaching, open-pit mining for years, and where it intends to mine the El Cemeterio hill – local inhabitants are fully opposed to this. Threats, contaminations, explosions, lead poisoning have all resulted. This mining project is supported by President Juan Orlando Hernandez's regime
39th anniversary of Rio Negro massacres in Guatemala, carried out by the US-backed genocidal military regimes on behalf of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Banks’s Chixoy hydro-electric dam project. Some 450 people were killed outright. Villagers were killed by machete blows, gang-rapes and beatings, being strangled, small children beaten against rocks, and shot. Thereafter, massacre survivors perished in the surrounding mountains due to hunger and disease, after the final Rio Negro/Chixoy dam massacre in the village of Agua Fria, on September 14, 1982. This slaughter of Rio Negro villagers served as the Chixoy dam project’s “relocation” of the villagers to make way for the filling of the dam flood basin. In total, over 30 Mayan communities were forcibly evicted in whole or part, up and down river from the Chixoy dam wall. No community suffered more than Rio Negro. To this day, neither the World Bank or IDB have accepted any responsibility for Chixoy dam massacres and other deaths, the forced evictions and widespread loss of land, property and livelihood.
HR 1574: The Bertha Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act. Today Hondurans need your advocacy, as they fill the streets to fight the theft of public resources by a corrupt regime -- and continue 10 years of nonviolent resistance amidst lethal repression by the state.
Thank you Witness for Peace for the image and Urgent Action.
The humanitarian crisis in Honduras found international attention this month as the first and biggest migration caravan since the corona pandemic took off in mid-January. A combination of a pandemic, two hurricanes hitting Honduras in later 2020, an abysmal response by the JOH regime and a lack of perspective among the corruption and human rights violation left again thousands of Honduras without any other option that trying to leave. Congress also showed again how it rather worsens the situation of minorities and vulnerablized groups by changing the constitution to forever ban same-sex marriage and abortions instead of using its power to improve the situation of Honduras. There were also setbacks in the Berta Cáceres case and the Guapinol case. Further corruption cases were undermined, meanwhile Honduras dropped further in an international corruption index. Last but not least, JOH’s drug trafficking links prominently reappeared in the national and international headlines thanks to newly released court documents from New York. Welcome to another month in Honduras.
As Joe Biden begins his presidency, a majority of Honduran people continue to suffer the violence and oppression of the military-backed, drug-trafficking, ‘open-for-global-business’ Honduran regime brought to power in the US and Cdn-backed military coup of June 28, 2009 - during Biden’s first term as Vice-President during the Obama presidency. A courageous, community-led human rights and environmental defense struggle continues in Guapinol, where local people resist he illegal imposition of an iron oxide mine, suffering violence and criminalization by company-linked operators and the US and Cdn-backed Honduran regime.
On January 21, a coalition of Afro-Colombian, Indigenous, and Campesino communities represented by the Inter-Ecclesial Commission for Justice and Peace (Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz, CIJP) published a statement addressed to the Biden-Harris administration outlining recommendations for peacebuilding priorities in Colombia. The recommendations include: a full commitment to the agreed terms of the 2016 peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), resume peace dialogues with the National Liberation Army (ELN) and advance humanitarian minimums, dismantle illegal armed groups following community input, enforce agrarian reform, implement illicit crop substitution programs, and strengthen rural judicial institutions.
