IRTF News

As criminal groups battle for control over Mexican territory, the displaced are becoming increasingly visible, in towns such as Coahuayana and at the U.S. border. An estimated 20,000 people have fled violence in the past year in Michoacán state, roughly the size of West Virginia. Thousands more have abandoned their homes in other states like Zacatecas and Guerrero. Forced displacement is generally associated with armed conflict — it’s been a feature of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yet it’s become such a problem in ostensibly peaceful Mexico that the country’s Senate is considering legislation to offer humanitarian aid to victims. Security officials describe the conflict as a battle between Jalisco and a rival cartel network to control the region, a hub of marijuana and methamphetamine production. But the accounts of the displaced underscore how unconventional this war actually is. At stake are not just drug routes, but timber, minerals and fruit plantations. In many cases, the armed groups have ties to local governments, business groups and the police.

The mining conflict in Azacualpa has shown the implications of mining activity in the territories of Honduras, under a state policy that promotes extractivism in an excessive manner and that, apart from environmental damage, has resulted in the exile of entire communities. This mining company generated the displacement of three villages in the municipality: San Andrés Minas, San Miguel and Azacualpa. In the case of San Andres, the mining company negotiated with the municipal and central government the total relocation of the community. While, in the case of San Miguel and Azacualpa, the displacement was partial. The current conflict in Azacualpa is a socio-political and environmental conflict motivated by the actions of the MINOSA mining company that, in its eagerness to extract and exploit the commons, has destroyed the biodiversity and ecosystems of the area and (if that were not enough) has dispossessed families of the cemeteries where their relatives have been buried for more than two hundred years.

For the second time in three years, El Salvador is back under martial law. The state of exception was approved so swiftly that lawmakers failed to remove references to public health and economic reopening in the text, clearly copied and pasted from the decrees that governed the country’s notoriously militarized 2020 pandemic lockdown. This latest suspension of constitutional guarantees, however, was enacted as part of right-wing populist president Nayib Bukele’s newly declared “war on gangs.” Still reeling from the pandemic, working-class Salvadorans now find themselves caught between predatory street gangs and an unaccountable authoritarian state.

The deportation of Hondurans, mainly from the United States and Mexico, increased by 84.2% in the first quarter of 2022, compared to the same period of 2021, the Consular and Migration Observatory of Honduras reported Friday.  A total of 24,207 Hondurans were deported between January and March of this year compared to 13,140 in the same period of 2021, according to a report by the Consular Observatory. Of the total number of Honduran returnees in that period, US immigration authorities deported 11,368, including 2,617 minors. The Honduran returnees are attended in the Returning Migrant Attention Centers (CAMR) located in San Pedro Sula and Omoa, in the north and Caribbean of the country.

In a letter to U.S. State Department Secretary Antony Blinken, the two Senators Tim Kaine and Patrick Leahy recognized the steps new Honduran President Xiomara Castro has taken in the fight against corruption and impunity in Honduras, but expressed the urgency of strengthening the legislative framework through an "independent judiciary free of political influence". The letter was published by the Secretary of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Honduras, Enrique Reina, who celebrated that both senators recognized, according to him, the leadership of President Xiomara Castro in the fight against corruption and her support in the installation of an International Commission Against Impunity in Honduras (CICIH).

Title 42 appears to be on its way out. After two years and 1.8 million expulsions, impacting well over 1 million people, Biden announced, and the CDC confirmed, that Title 42 would end on May 23, 2022. Now, the Attorney Generals of Arizona, Louisiana and Mississippi filed a lawsuit to block the administration from ending Title 42. The Arizona Attorney General, Mark Brnovich, who is also running for governor as a Republican, said, “If Title 42 ends, it will result in an even greater crisis at the border that will have a devastating impact, not just on border states, but across the country.” How ending Title 42 will lead to “devastation” across the country is not very clear. But while we think that the end of Title 42 is something to be celebrated, a return to “normal” is not such a great prize.

You’ve probably seen the terrifying headlines about the suspension of constitutional rights in El Salvador, the mass roundups of over 6,000 people now being held without charges and with no right to defense, President Bukele’s threats to deny prisoners food and other basic rights, and his accusations that any critic is a gang sympathizer. We at CISPES wanted to share a new round-up we put together of analysis from social movement organizations, human rights leaders, and journalists in El Salvador who are courageously speaking out against state repression and threats to democracy.

This book explores the pernicious nature of US engagement with Nicaragua from the mid-19th century to the present in pursuit of control and domination rather than in defense of democracy as Washington has incessantly claimed. In turn, Nicaraguans have valiantly defended their homeland, preventing the US from ever maintaining its control for long. Led by Daniel Ortega, the Sandinistas established democracy in Nicaragua with the country’s first free and fair elections in 1984. Once again, the US attempted to subvert democracy by organizing Somoza’s former National Guardsmen into a terrorist group known as “the Contras.”  Directed and funded by the CIA, the Contras would terrorize Nicaragua for nearly 10 years. Paradoxically, the US government and media now castigate Ortega as somehow “a new Somoza,” a claim that is swallowed by some in the US left. This book debunks this claim by putting Nicaragua’s past into historical perspective and documenting the reality of today’s Nicaragua.

A premium coffee, "Fruits of Hope" is grown, harvested and roasted by more than 1,000 guerrilla fighters who laid down their arms following the signing of a peace agreement between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) and the government in 2016. The combatants-turned-coffee growers are among almost 13,000 former Farc guerrillas who have joined the Colombian government's process of reincorporation into civilian society. Rather than hiding their past, many make a virtue of their unusual entry into the labour market by alluding to it in the names they give their products.