IRTF News

A special peace tribunal investigating atrocities committed during Colombia’s decades-long conflict has charged 19 soldiers with war crimes and crimes against humanity for murdering 303 people, mostly civilians, between 2005 and 2008. The murders form part of what is known in Colombia as “false positives”, where the military killed civilians and then presented them as fighters to try to inflate the effectiveness of their fight against rebels. In return, the soldiers received special benefits such as help to gain promotion.

President-elect Gustavo Petro and Vice President-elect Francia Marquez won an historic race with the promise to bring about deep social, economic and political change in Colombia. Only about half of the population has formal work. Just a quarter of eligible adults have access to the pension system. The pandemic made matters worse. After years of stagnation, poverty is rising again. Will Petro, the first left-wing president in the history of the country, be able to keep his promises?

The Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is traveling to Honduras this week to meet with the president over increasing migration from the Central American country, the agency announced. The visit comes as a growing number of Hondurans cross the border from Mexico and try to claim asylum in the United States, according to new data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. And it comes at a time when thousands of migrants are arriving on the Southwest border, most from the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, which form what is called the Northern Triangle.

A boat capsized in Bahamian waters in Sunday’s first hours, killing 17 “suspected irregular Haitian migrants,” Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis said at a Sunday afternoon news conference. “It is believed their final destination was Miami, Florida,” Davis said. Though officials said they had reached out to the Haiti embassy in Nassau, it wasn’t clear whether all of those aboard the boat were Haitian. Davis said the investigation will determine that. The U.S. Coast Guard is assisting with the search for those unaccounted for on the boat, who number eight to 15 by Bahamian officials’ estimation. The seas migrants try to cross to reach the U.S. aren’t safe. Neither are the boats “At daylight, we were able to recover the boat,” Fernander said. “The hull of the boat was the same color blue of the sea, so it was difficult at nighttime to identify the vessel in the water. It was submerged in the water.

Mexico's Supreme Court decriminalized abortion last year, loosening decades of restrictive laws in the predominately Catholic nation, leading to more permissive laws in several of its states. Now — because the abortion accessibility landscape that lawmakers had faced in Mexico until recently more closely resembles the terrain in parts of the U.S. — U.S. state legislators have begun to learn how Mexico's policymakers and women’s health advocates managed to provide safe abortion care to women — and how they won back certain abortion rights. “Being able to go to Mexico, and visit activists who have been doing the work on the ground for many, many years, who changed the culture, changed what is possible, who really forced lawmakers and health care providers to think differently about abortion as health care, and then to see the ways in which the policies and the legal landscape and the medical landscape have shifted as a result was incredibly powerful,” said Julie Gonzales, a Democratic Colorado state senator who traveled throughout Mexico with five other state legislators earlier this summer.

Guatemala was once listed among the most violent countries on earth. Today, after years of declining crime rates, violence is once again on the rise in 2022. Of the more than 2,000 people killed since January, the majority were the result of gun violence. The United States’ obsession with guns and its unwillingness to implement reasonable restrictions to accessing them has directly contributed to increased violence and crime in Central America, especially in Guatemala. Easy access to weapons allows criminal groups to illegally export U.S. weapons across the U.S.-Mexico border and bring them into other countries. 

Ice’s database lists about 25,000 detainees nationwide, but does not maintain reliable inmate demographics. Non-profits such as Freedom for Immigrants (FFI) and Black Alliance for Just Immigration estimate that roughly 20% of Black immigrants are waiting for deportation. Advocacy organizations like FFI also say that this demographic experiences higher rates of deportation; sexual, physical, medical, and psychological abuses in detention; and solitary confinement. In the last month alone, FFI has received more than 2,100 complaints nationwide. The most common abuse-related ones are anti-Black discriminatory actions, ranging from forced strip-searches and unprovoked pepper-spraying to prolonged solitary confinement and critical medical treatment negligence.