Salvadoran political prisoner Atilio Montalvo is finally home with his family!

Montalvo, a signer of the 1992 Peace Accords on behalf of the FMLN and a leader of the National Alliance for a Peaceful El Salvador, had been unjustly imprisoned for 13 months without a trial. His fragile health was deteriorating rapidly but it took until a recent hospitalization, the courageous testimony of his family, and a renewed wave of public pressure for the courts to finally grant his release to house arrest.

Atilio – known to many as Chamba Guerra – is still in critical condition, but his family is hopeful that he will improve with access to the medical care he needs.

We are grateful to his family, to the Committee of Family Members of the Politically Imprisoned and Persecuted (COFAPPES) and to all the other popular movement organizations that tirelessly campaigned for his freedom.

We are also thankful to all of YOU who helped keep our international solidarity going strong. Every donation, every email, every social media share, and every vigil made a difference.

Now the struggle continues to free the other leaders from the National Alliance for a Peaceful El Salvador, all political prisoners and all those unjustly detained in Bukele’s prisons and to end U.S. support for repression.

¡La lucha sigue!

-all of us at CISPES

The recent arrests of two Maya leaders is emblematic of increasing repression and criminalization of Indigenous peoples by the Guatemalan state. With regards to Guatemala’s current state of affairs, many claim that the Public Ministry, Attorney General, and various judges criminalize human rights defenders and Indigenous peoples. It has been over two months since Pacheco and Chaclán were arrested, and the case is symbolic of the justice system in Guatemala, which works in favor of the Pact of Corrupt. “We are in a country that lives off corruption, that protects corruption, and that maintains impunity in many cases,” Herrera says. Yet, what is clear in talking to Herrera is that despite this criminalization and institutional challenges, they will continue to struggle undeterred and seek Pacheco’s and Chaclán’s freedom. 

In Guatemala, the site of some of Israel’s most abhorrent war crimes outside of Palestine, the reality of Israeli warmongering is well documented. Israel’s instrumentality in the decades-long civil war and state-sponsored genocide of the Indigenous Maya provides critical context for the genocide of Palestinians today.

Current relations between Israel and Guatemala are bound to this bloody history and fueled by the relationship between Zionism and an Evangelicalism informed by two biblical interpretations.

An estimated 200,000 Maya and, to a lesser extent, Ladino (also known as Mestizo) people of mixed Indigenous and European descent, were killed or disappeared during the 36-year Guatemalan civil war that was fought between 1960 and 1996.

However, it was between 1981 and 1983 – especially under the leadership of Efraín Ríos Montt, a Pentecostal Evangelical, and at the height of Israel’s military involvement – that “more than half the massacres and scorched earth operations occurred,” according to the UN-sponsored Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH).

Established in 1994 to investigate the history of human rights violations and acts of violence throughout the armed conflict, the CEH found that “agents of the state of Guatemala, within the framework of counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people which lived in the four regions analyzed.”

And Israel’s fingerprints were all over Ríos Montt’s atrocities.

In the wake of his coup d’état on 23 March 1982, Ríos Montt told an ABC reporter that it had succeeded “because many of our soldiers were trained by the Israelis.”

In 1983, his chief of staff General Héctor López Fuentes also confirmed that, “Israel is our principal supplier of arms and the number one friend of Guatemala in the world.”

In exchange for jailing more than 200 deportees, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has become a favorite of the Trump administration.

For the U.S. government, sending deportees accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador fits with President Trump’s promise to aggressively deport undocumented migrants and to crack down on crime.

For El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, the rewards appear to have included, among other things, a White House visit and stamp of approval, despite widespread concerns over Mr. Bukele’s crackdown on civil liberties.

By James Phillips

June 25 marked the 50th anniversary of the Los Horcones massacre, a gruesome and desperate event that still haunts Honduran society and is emblematic of major forces that have shaped much of modern global history. The massacre occurred in the Lepaguare Valley, in the municipal district of Juticalpa, in the Department of Olancho, on the hacienda “Los Horcones,” There, a group of military officers and landowners (or their paid agents) tortured and murdered 15 people, including 11 peasant farmers, two young women, and two Catholic priests—Ivan Betancur (a Colombian citizen) and Casimir Cypher (a U.S. citizen from Wisconsin).

In 2013, Honduran Jesuit priest and human rights leader Ismael Moreno (Padre Melo) wrote that the Los Horcones massacre was probably the starkest example of government repression against the Catholic Church in recent Honduran history, and that it caused Church leaders and many others to move away from their support of popular demands for social justice. But its significance goes beyond even that.

On June 27, 1954, a coup d’état deposed the democratically elected Soldado del Pueblo (Soldier of the People): President Jacobo Árbenz Guzman. He was the face of Guatemala’s democratic revolution, which began in 1944. The agrarian reform of 1952, redistributing unused land to landless Indigenous peasants, impacted the United Fruit Company (UFCO), the largest land owner in Guatemala, and U.S. foreign policy, as Cold War tensions grew. Collaborating with Guatemalan fascists, they plunged Guatemala into decades of U.S. backed dictatorships. On its 70th anniversary, we invite you to reflect with us on this counter-revolutionary event and what it might mean for Guatemala and the world today.

Giovanni Batz’s carefully researched text examines how the Ixil and K’iche’ Mayas have resisted attacks on their land, state violence, and extraction since Spanish colonization.

From February 1-6, 2025, Marco Rubio traveled to Central America for his first official visits as U.S. Secretary of State. With the exception of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Belize, every country hosted Rubio. His stated aim was “to advance President Trump’s America First foreign policy.” The four axes of this policy for the region are: migration, organized crime, China, and U.S. economic investment. These are part of his administration’s broad strategy to re-assert exclusive U.S. political and economic dominance in the region it has long considered its “back yard.”

The people of Guatemala continue to face the systematic and manufactured dispossession brought by capitalism and U.S. imperialism.

As Rubio’s visit demonstrates, the life of the people of Guatemala and the people of the United States is tightly interconnected—economically, (geo)politically, socially, ecologically. What happens here impacts there, and what happens there impacts here. For better or for worse. 

It’s time for a renewed internationalist solidarity movement with the people of Guatemala

ICE Set to Arrest a Record 35,000 Immigrants in June, Daily Quotas are Political - Not Practical (Part 2)

In Part 2 of my series on ICE arrest data made public by the Deportation Data Project, we examine daily and monthly arrest totals and project record arrests by the end of this month.

Austin Kocher

As Trump returns to power, our new analysis exposes how U.S.-Guatemala agreements threaten vulnerable communities through mass deportations and exploitation of resources. Through powerful testimonies from Indigenous leaders fighting for territorial rights and messages of solidarity with the Guatemalan diaspora, we illuminate the transnational resistance taking root. From ADH’s fight for community water rights to CODIDENA’s successful resistance against mining extraction, these stories reveal how communities are protecting vital resources despite increasing pressure. Join our movement for justice that transcends borders — dive deeper into Guatemala’s ongoing struggle for sovereignty and dignity.