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RRN Letter
Colombia, 09/11/2021
September 11, 2021
Student leader Esteban Mosquera was killed in Popayán, Cauca Department, when he left the house to walk his dog at 6pm on a Monday. In Popayán, Esetban had played an organizing role in recent protests over inequality and state violence. The 26-year-old was shot dead just several yards from the Humanitarian Refuge for Life meeting, which had been organized by social activists and former combatants with the aim of strengthening human rights and peace. In 2018, Esteban lost an eye when, during student mobilizations demanding a larger budget for public universities, he was attacked by the ESMAD anti-riot squad police, an event which sparked a wave of indignation towards the police and solidarity with the young man. In the three months of the national strike this spring, Institute for Peace and Development Studies (INDEPAZ) reports that 83 protesters suffered eye damage, along with at least 44 citizens murdered, and 1,832 people arbitrarily detained by police. We demand a thorough investigation that leads to the intellectual authors of this heinous crime.
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News Article
El Salvador: Is the President Trying to Shut Down a Hearing on the Infamous El Mozote Massacre?
September 10, 2021
Nayib Bukele, the forty-year-old President of El Salvador, has been in office since 2019 and has a reputation for what is referred to as “millennial authoritarianism.” He often wears a baseball cap backward on his head, he once pronounced himself the “coolest President in the world,” and he recently made Bitcoin a legal national currency. He tends to find ways to get what he wants. In February of last year, he coerced support for a security-budget loan by surrounding the Salvadoran legislature with snipers and invading it with armed soldiers. This May, with several of his executive orders being challenged as unconstitutional, and a number of his ministries under financial investigation, he replaced the attorney general and all five judges of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, the nation’s highest, with political allies. The newly appointed judges then voided El Salvador’s ban on Presidential second terms. But, on August 31st, Bukele made an announcement that many consider to be of a different order. Late that evening, the legislature, which his party dominates, passed a law forcing all judges over the age of sixty, or those with more than thirty years of service, to retire immediately—effectively allowing Bukele to replace a third of the country’s judges. Carlos Dada, the founding editor of El Faro, a prestigious Salvadoran online investigative-journalism outlet, told me that Bukele has “grabbed all power,” adding that “he has the military and the police in his pocket. The President takes care of them—they take care of the President. He now controls the courts. arena and the F.M.L.N.”—the two main opposition parties—“have been destroyed, and he has an absolute majority in congress. He no longer has any opposition except the N.G.O.s and journalists.”
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News Article
Nicaragua: September 2021 newsletter of the CDCA
September 7, 2021
From the September 2021 newsletter of Jubilee House/Center for Development in Nicaragua: The first Sunday in November Nicaragua will have its general elections. If you keep up with international news you may be reading a great deal of misleading information. After the attempted coup in 2018, everyone who had been arrested - whether it was for vandalism, looting, demonstrating without a permit, blocking roads, torture, or even murder - was granted provisional amnesty. The provision was that if they broke the law again, they would be arrested and stand trial. That seems logical…and generous…and yet many of these people who committed crimes before and were released are now breaking the law again and as a result are being arrested, while the international press continues to scream “repression.” Of course we do not know all the people arrested. We do not know all the crimes they are charged with, but we do know that the United States State Department had a paper leaked in 2020 that outlines how the State Department plans to disrupt the elections here and if the Sandinistas are elected again how the U.S. plans to create violence and havoc attempting to accomplish another coup since the one in 2018 failed.
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News Article
El Salvador: Ruling by loyalist court upends Constitution to allow Bukele to run for reelection
September 5, 2021
Social movement organizations in El Salvador are on high alert following a Supreme Court ruling on Sept 3 that would enable President Bukele to seek a consecutive term in office, despite multiple and explicit prohibitions in the Constitution against consecutive presidential reelection, including Article 88 which requires “alternance” in the exercise of the presidency. Though the ruling does not come as a shock, as the president’s intentions to remain in office were already clear, it affirms fears that El Salvador’s postwar democracy has entered free fall and that Bukele is successfully clearing the road of any legal challenges to his consolidation of power.
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News Article
Honduras: Ciudad Jaragua destruye El Merendón y se ensaña contra sampedranos
September 4, 2021

Ciudad Jaraguá is a luxury residential complex, developed by the Inversiones MPG and Inversiones en Activo group, located in San Pedro Sula, on the forested slopes of El Merendón. Local residents have been protesting this development for the past several months because the exclusive housing complex is destroying the El Merendón forest reserve, considered the lungs of the country's industrial capital. Hundreds of families are being impacted. Water sources are harmed. There is structural damage to the homes of local families caused by the use of dynamite. Without any consideration for the flora or fauna, developers are causing significant deforestation. On September 3, while covering the protests, journalist Deyni Menjivar was obstructed by security guards, who harassed and threatened her. The TV news reporter, accompanied by her cameraman, was intercepted by a guard, who aggressively ordered her to stop recording and immediately leave the premises, because if she did not do so, "she was going to get into trouble."

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News Article
Colombia: Facing Political Persecution, Protestors Need International Support
September 2, 2021

Emma Banks details the findings of #MisionSOSColombia, an international verification mission investigating human rights violations since the protests began on April 28. #MisionSOSColombia built on the findings of three similar preceding missions, covering a wider geographic area and collecting hundreds of personal testimonies that demonstrate the systematic political and violent repression of protests in Colombia. It found clear evidence of disproportionate use of force by police, violence from paramilitaries and armed civilians, and arbitrary detentions of protestors. #MisionSOSColombia calls on the Colombian government to immediately halt their efforts to end the protests through violence against protestors and the persecution of social movement leaders. The international community must demand that the Colombian government comply with the recommendations of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. International allies of the Colombian government should cut aid packages if human rights abuses continue.

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News Article
Migrant Justice: For U.S. and Mexico, awkward first steps to restart Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’
August 31, 2021
In recent weeks Mexico has allowed the United States for the first time to begin sending Central American migrants deep into southern Mexico on Title 42 “expulsion flights.” From there, Mexican security forces load Central American adults and children onto buses and deport them. One Mexican official involved in talks with the United States described the flights as a more effective border management tool than the “Remain in Mexico” program because they relocates migrants away from Mexican border cities where they are vulnerable to attack and incentivized to attempt repeat crossings because of their proximity to the United States.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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