You are here

Home » » » IRTF News

IRTF News

News Article
Colombia: Court rejects charging former army commander over extrajudicial killings
August 31, 2021
A court in Colombia has rejected a move by the attorney general’s office to bring charges against a former army commander for his alleged responsibility in 104 extrajudicial killings because it does not have jurisdiction, it said on Tuesday. At the start of August the attorney general’s office said it would bring charges against retired General Mario Montoya, 72, in connection to a number of so-called false positive killings that took place from November 2007 to November 2008. Despite orders from the defense ministry and military command to prioritize captures, Montoya did not pass them on and continued to incentivize combat deaths, the attorney general’s office said previously. Montoya, who remains free, was commander of Colombia’s army between 2006 and 2008. He submitted himself to Colombia’s transitional justice court (JEP, set up after the Peace Accords of 2016) in 2018. However according to the high court in capital Bogota, while the attorney general’s office can investigate such crimes, the JEP is the only organization that can charge Montoya, the attorney general’s office said.
Read more >
News Article
Colombia: monthly human rights report - AUG 2021
August 31, 2021
Colombia’s human rights crisis continued throughout August 2021, as social activists, trade unionists, students and FARC former combatants were targeted in violent attacks. The month saw several targeted killings and massacres, with authorities seemingly unable to contain deteriorating security and humanitarian conditions in various parts of the country.
Read more >
News Article
Honduras: Where Are They? The Disappeared: When Remembering is a Political Act of Resistance
August 30, 2021
In the early 1980s in Honduras, the military government, applying the national security doctrine—the idea that the security of the state was more important than the rights of people—began detaining many leaders and members of teachers and student groups, labor unions, and political parties. In many cases, people detained in police or military custody were never seen or heard from again. The number of such detained and disappeared people was said to be as many as two hundred, but that is widely believed to be a serious undercount because of the fear of families to report these events or the inability of poor families to know how to access help. The Honduran military operated what many called a “death squad” (Battalion 316). Detention in military or police custody was very likely to lead to disappearance, torture, and death. But relatives of the disappeared never knew for sure the fate of their loved ones.
Read more >
News Article
A lesson from Afghanistan for US policy in Latin America
August 30, 2021
"Perhaps the most relevant parallel from the past decade is Honduras. How does the US end up cooperating with a violent and corrupt drug trafficker like Juan Orlando Hernandez as it did under both the Obama and Trump administrations? Well, corruption is so ingrained in the system that it is difficult to do any infrastructure or security projects without working around someone close to corruption networks. Domestically, the immediate political alternatives to JOH are similarly corrupt and often openly opposed to US interests around the region. It’s easier to work with JOH than antagonize him in a region where the US already has too few allies. The US has to balance its desire to promote democratic leaders with other policy priorities including security, counter-narcotics and migration issues. "
Read more >
News Article
Migrant Justice: Organizations in Mexico and the United States demand an end to expulsions, Title 42
August 27, 2021
To the United States government, we demand: (1) Rescind the Title 42 order and all versions of its implementation, including lateral flights along the border and flights to southern Mexico. (2) Establish a process at the U.S.-Mexico border that is dignified and respectful of international law, in which unaccompanied families, adults and girls, boys and adolescents, can make their requests for protection immediately. This includes guaranteeing access to ports of entry. (3) Stand firm in the decision to terminate the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (Remain in Mexico, or MPP) and take all possible steps to put an end to this policy. (4) Continue the processing of people previously subjected to MPP, guaranteeing their stay in the interior of the United States to allow them to continue with their asylum process. (5) Cease pressuring governments of the region to take deterrence or enforcement actions, through the militarization and externalizing of their borders.
Read more >
News Article
Migrant Justice: Central American Youth Migrants Show Signs of PTSD and Stress
August 26, 2021

The trauma experienced by Central American minors before, during, and after their unaccompanied journeys to the United States puts them at high risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health problems, creating further obstacles to their success in school and broader integration into U.S. society. New research into results from the CLALS Pilot Project Household Contexts and School Integration of Resettled Migrant Youth, which included interviews and qualitative surveys (including a validated PHQ-9 Modified for Teens and the Child PTSD Symptom Scale, CPSS), revealed that about one-third of unaccompanied minors from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala show symptoms of moderate to severe PTSD — significantly higher than the general population....Many of the youths suffered deeply from separation from parents who preceded them in traveling to the United States, sometimes blaming them for problems and abuses they suffered back home, but they generally fared better than those whose parents had not emigrated.

Read more >
News Article
NicaNotes: Managua’s Missing Murals
August 25, 2021
The capital city of Managua is a good lens through which to view Nicaraguan history. Its expansive views, shaded buildings, and streets with no name give us physical places to anchor our stories of colonization, inequality, insurrection, revolution and resilience. After the Sandinista government was pushed out of power by elections forced by the US in 1990, the new neoliberal government worked to erase the revolutionary history of Nicaragua, of the Sandinista movement in particular. After the elections in 1990, Nicaragua went into a kind of societal depression and the vast majority of families were crippled by extreme poverty, unable to plan beyond the next meal. While the country was incapacitated, the somocistas who had supported the former dictator oozed back into the country and violently stole back properties they had forfeited when they had fled Nicaragua a decade earlier. Violeta Chamorros’s government quietly erased the social gains of the Revolution, selling nearly all public enterprises at concessionary rates and effectively privatizing health care and education. She welcomed the World Bank and IMF and followed the letter of their structural readjustment programs, refusing to raise wages for teachers, police, or any public worker. She all but erased cooperatives by taking away their access to financing – when they could no longer work, they began to fold, and as those in the countryside lost their land they began to move into the cities looking for work. Gangs took hold in the cities, and crime rates – which had been all but nonexistent in the ‘80s – skyrocketed. The poor got poorer and the rich got richer until Nicaragua became one of the most unequal societies in the world. Desperate to find a way to earn a living, people began to leave in droves to Costa Rica and the U.S. until this small country had nearly 1 million citizens living outside its borders...And yet, not everyone forgot. In hidden neighborhoods around Managua, the people kept watch over their Revolutionary murals at night, saving them from Alemán’s gray brush. Concealed from the public eye, new murals were born inside walls where they could stay safe. We’ll find some of these murals on our next Managua tour.
Read more >
News Article
Colombia: Prosecutors pursue murder charges against former army chief in ‘False Positives’ killings of civilians
August 25, 2021
The charges, pursued by an attorney general closely aligned with President Iván Duque, could signal that the government is now willing to come to terms with one of the darkest aspects of its military’s history, said Adam Isacson, director of the Defense Oversight program for the Washington Office on Latin America. At least 6,402 Colombians were killed as false enemy combatants between 2002 and 2008, according to a postwar court created in 2016 as part of the peace deal with the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The court, known as the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, is charged with investigating the facts of the war and holding those who committed crimes accountable through restorative sentences and, in some cases, prison time. In July, the tribunal charged 11 top military leaders, including a general, in the deaths of at least 120 people in Catatumbo, Norte de Santander. The kidnappings and killings of innocent people, many of them unemployed, homeless or disabled, were carried out in response to pressure to meet body counts as measures of success, the court said. Military leaders incentivized soldiers to kill by offering medals, awards and even vacation time.
Read more >
News Article
Migrant Justice: Housing for CIS University Scholarship Student 2021
August 25, 2021
Many students cannot travel back and forth to their community to university each day because of distance, expense, and security. We do not have sufficient space for the demand for students who need housing closer to the university. As plans for opening the universities to classroom learning, many new students have requested to enter already overflowing small apartments. The overcrowding was lessened by the pandemic as some students were able to go home and study with CIS provided computers and internet. Still, some stayed in CIS dormitories due to extremely inadequate internet connections in their village. We want to prepare for the 2022 cycle to have space for students to live and study. For this reason, we are asking you for a one-time investment for the CIS to acquire an additional apartment for university scholarship students.
Read more >
News Article
Nicaragua: the right to live in peace
August 19, 2021

Sovereignty is not argued about It is defended Augusto Cesar Sandino It is an irrefutable fact that the United States orchestrated, financed and unleashed the violent coup attempt in 2018 against the democratically elected FSLN government. Spokespeople of the U.S. establishment, from former president Trump, extreme right wing senators and deputies, all the way down the food chain of its formidable ‘regime change’ machinery, including National Security Advisor John Bolton, the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and, of course, USAID, repeatedly stated their aim was to bring about ‘regime change’ in Nicaragua. In this connection, the significance of U.S. Nicaraguan proxies is ephemeral and purely utilitarian (does anybody remember Adolfo Calero, Miami-based Contra leader?). Such proxies are activated to sow chaos, violence and confusion to facilitate a U.S.-driven ‘regime change’ intervention, but for the huge U.S. democracy-crushing machine, when plans do not work, its proxies are disposable human assets. In the 2018 coup attempt, the operatives on the ground, disguised as civil society bodies committed to the rule of law, democracy, civil liberties, human rights and other fake descriptions, were in fact U.S.-funded proxies entrusted with the task to bring down the FSLN government by means of violence. The resistance of the Nicaraguan people defeated the coup and thus the nation will go to polls in November 2021, prompting the U.S. ‘regime change’ apparatus to launch, in despair, an international campaign aimed at demonizing the electoral process itself.

Read more >

Pages