IRTF News

For more than four decades, IRTF has welcomed dozens of interns who have helped carry forward our mission of promoting peace, human rights and systemic transformation across the Americas. Each year, our interns enter the living legacy of IRTF: never-ending advocacy, organizing, and accompaniment. Their experiences, like those of Lucia and Maddie, remind us of the importance of this work and of forming the next generation of justice seekers.

Maddie: As a small organization and a tight-knit community, IRTF’s support is direct. This summer, we accompanied migrants to their immigration hearings, speaking with them in a mix of broken English and Spanish, learning their stories and offering them support and companionship. We connected with other community groups to learn how we could best inform local migrant and refugee families through Know Your Rights training. We challenged our own comfort and security by attempting to take on the fear and uncertainty faced by the migrant community.

Lucia: IRTF has been an indispensable part of discerning the world I want to live in, the role I will have in that, and the way I hope to go about it. This haven of social justice, activism, and human-centered civic engagement has become the foundation on which I hope to build a lifetime of advocacy and purposeful action.

Please read more from the reflections of student interns Maddie and Lucia.

When Donald Trump returned to office on 20 January last year, he began rolling out a draconian migration policy that has effectively ended access to asylum at the US-Mexico border and shaken up migration dynamics throughout Latin America.

One of the first moves the Trump administration made was to shut down a pathway to seek asylum in the US for people in Mexico using a cellphone application called CBP One. In a matter of minutes, about 300,000 people in the app’s pipeline, including Mario Torres, found themselves stranded.

Mario left South America in September 2024. He traversed the Darién Gap – the lawless and dangerous stretch of jungle connecting Colombia and Panama. In Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, his money ran low and travelling wore him down. In Veracruz, Mexico, he was shot by men who wanted to rob or kidnap him. Mario eventually made it to the northern Mexican city of Monterrey in January 2025, but by then it was already too late.

The New Humanitarian has spent much of the past 15 months reporting throughout Latin America, trying to piece together an answer to one pressing question: what happened to the 300,000 people who saw their dreams of a better life suddenly rebuffed when Trump returned to office?

The picture that emerged is of a situation very much still in flux: some people have returned home, others have run out of resources and have ended up stranded in various countries, while many are still searching for a place where they can find stability.

Since September 2025, the U.S. armed forces have killed more than 175 people aboard small boats in operations that the Trump administration characterizes as attacks against “narco-terrorists.” The newly formed Shield of the Americas coalition brings together 17 states, including Argentina, Costa Rica, and Paraguay, in a U.S.-led effort to coordinate military pressure against the cartels — a move that critics fear will further institutionalize these extrajudicial killings.

A new international outcry—a  global coalition of 125 organizations issuing an urgent public appeal to all states to immediately cease all forms of support for US extrajudicial killings—underscores a shift from directly condemning U.S. actions to also holding third-party countries accountable for their role in these deadly attacks.

Along the Pacific coast of Guatemala on plantations subcontracted by Chiquita, agricultural workers with gaunt faces thread their way between banana trees, rubber boots sinking into black mud, machetes sharpened and strapped to their belts. They know the day will be long: 10 hours, sometimes 12, for a paltry wage – often below the legal minimum.

Although these plantations are certified by Rainforest Alliance (as “safe” for workers and the environment), researchers heard the same accounts from workers over and over: extreme fatigue, inadequate pay, unprotected exposure to chemicals, restrictions on the freedom of association.

The fungicide Mancozeb—banned in the European Union in 2020 after being classified as an endocrine disruptor that’s toxic to reproduction—is routinely sprayed on the banana fields. Without any warning to the workers,  the crop dusters fly very low, and the yellow acidic powder falls straight on them. The certification body Rainforest Alliance has granted an exceptional authorization for its use on Guatemalan plantations until December 31, 2028, citing the need for “rigorous disease management” of the Black Sigatoka leaf disease. Other fungicides, herbicides and insecticides are applied throughout the growing cycle, both from the air and workers applying them with backpack sprayers.

This report by Public Eye takes us deep inside the plantations where the global economy meets the silence – and often complicity – of local institutions. It’s a world where thousands of people labor in near-total invisibility. Here, Guatemala’s brutal history is still being written with a machete; it’s a story not of progress, but of sweat, pesticides and drug cocktails to alleviate workers’ aches and pains.

(You can learn about alternative trade organizations that partner with worker-owned banana farms at EqualExchange.coop )

You’ve heard of the “banana republic”? It started with the railroads. In the late 1800s, the Meiggs family (Boston entrepreneurs) began constructing a rail line in Costa Rica. They recruited workers from the US. But they were unprepared for the reality of manual labor in a  tropical environment—yellow fever, venomous wildlife, brutal manual work clearing dense jungle with machetes in the heat of monsoon season. When they died in great numbers, the family went to New Orleans and brought 700 inmates to Costa Rica. They promised pardons in exchange for labor. But only 25 survived!

So, bananas? As the railroad was built, along its tracks, something else had been growing. To feed his workforce, the project leader had planted banana trees along the railroad lines. Bananas grew fast, grew abundantly, and had only just been introduced to the American consumer at the Worlds’ Fair in 1876.

When Costa Rica defaulted on loan payments in 1882, the Boston entrprenuer made a deal. He would finish the final forty miles of track with this string attached: 800,000 acres of tax-free land along the railroad and a 99-year lease on the rail route itself. A single man now controlled the land, the transport, and the market.

By the time the railroad was completed in 1890, 5,000 men had died building it. The European market now had access to coffee from Costa Rica.  And the banana empire began.

(You can learn about alternative trade organizations that partner with worker-owned banana farms at EqualExchange.coop )

The Trump administration’s FY2027 budget combines a major defense buildup with sharp cuts to foreign aid, including a $12 billion reduction in diplomacy and assistance spending and a stronger focus on migration control and strategic leverage. In Latin America and the Caribbean, it shifts away from democracy and human-rights programming toward drug-war, anti-migration, and executive-controlled funding priorities.