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News Article
José Rubén Zamora is the founder and publisher of elPeriódico, a leading newspaper in Guatemala that aggressively investigated government corruption.
 
He was convicted last year of money laundering, sentenced to as many as six years in prison and fined about $40,000. He called the charges politically motivated and said they were retaliation for his newspaper’s focus on public corruption. The case became a sign of crumbling democracy in Guatemala and a symbol of threats against press freedom across Latin America.
 
After the election of Bernardo Arévalo, an anti corruption crusader, and 810 days in a cramped cell, he was released to house detention on Saturday night as he waits to find out whether he will be granted a new trial.
 
The IRTF wrote several letters about Zamora as part of the Rapid Resoponds Network, these are two of them:
News Article
Juan Antonio López was a prominent environmental defender, anti-corruption activist, and community and faith leader in Tocoa, Honduras. He was shot and murdered by an unidentified hitman in his car after attending a religious event at a local Catholic church.
 
This article remembers his firm activism and life. 
 
IRTF also wrote a letter about him as a part of our Rapid Response Network.
News Article

Since early 2023, IRTF has been involved in an international solidarity campaign to drop bogus criminal charges against five environmentalists in El Salvador. After 20 months of petition gathering, calls to the US State Departement and US Embassy, a sign-on letter from the US Congress and other advocacy efforts, we are happy to report that the Santa Marta 5 have been freed!

The five prominent community leaders (Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez, Antonio Pacheco, and Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega) were all instrumental in the successful campaign to save El Salvador’s rivers from the threat of gold mining. With a unanimous vote in El Salvador’s National Assembly in March 2017, El Salvador became the first nation on earth to ban all metallic mining.

Since they were arrested in January 2023 on politically-motivated charges, IRTF has participated in an international campaign spanning 31 countries demanding that the bogus charges be dropped and denouncing the political motivations behind their detention given the lack of evidence presented by the Salvadoran Attorney General’s office.

News Article
Five environmental activists who helped secure a historic mining ban in El Salvador are facing life imprisonment for an alleged civil war-era crime.
The only evidence is a witness who strongly changed his testimony during the pre-trial hearings. No body or weapon has been found.
 
Since sweeping to power in 2019, Bukele and his allies have taken steps to “effectively co-opt democratic institutions”, replacing independent judges, prosecutors and officials with political allies, according to Human Rights Watch.
 

In a letter to the government in March 2023, a group of UN special rapporteurs and the vice-president of the UN working group on arbitrary detention, said: “We fear that the case is an attempt to intimidate those who seek to defend the environment in the country, and especially those who defend human rights from the negative impacts of mining.”

News Article

Honduras is currently facing at least USD 14 billion in claims from foreign and domestic companies. This is equivalent to roughly 40 percent of the country's GDP in 2023 and almost four times its public investment budget in 2024. A new study on this avalanche of claims found that most investors are revolting against Honduran efforts to reverse or renegotiate corrupt deals made under Hernández, which were often damaging to the public interest and local communities.

Juan Orlando Hernández is the Honduras former drug trafficking and corrupt president who was illegally reelected through fraud and with the help of the US.

Now a private toll booth operator - backed by major US banks, including JP Morgan Chase Bank and two Goldman Sachs funds - is suing Honduras in international arbitration. They are demanding 180 million dollars, more than four times what the company has reportedly invested. If these investors are successful, the economic burden on the country will only deepen the displacement crisis that is driving Hondurans north.

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