Please join the Rochester Committee on Latin America for this 90-minute webinar featuring a recent official Veterans for Peace delegation to Nicaragua. They will share their experience and the knowledge they gained.
Register here: bit.ly/NicaJune22
“Ruth has dedicated her life to the defense of human rights and the fight against corruption,” Cristosal said in a statement last week. “Hers is not an isolated case: it is part of a pattern of criminalization against critical voices.”
As she entered the court for her initial hearing on June 4, Ruth said "'¡No me van a callar, un juicio público quiero!", ("they won't silence me; I want a public trial). She was remanded into pretrial custody for an additional six months. Read this update here: https://www.laprensagrafica.com/elsalvador/Ruth-Eleonora-Lopez-enfrenta-audiencia-inicial-por-enriquecimiento-ilicito-20250604-0022.html
More than one hundred national, international, and solidarity organizations, with a presence in Canada, Europe, the United States, Mexico, Central America, and South America, signed an open letter addressed to the Attorney General's Office of the Republic of El Salvador to demand the immediate release of environmental lawyer Alejandro Henríquez and community leader Ángel Pérez, president of the El Bosque Agricultural Cooperative, who were arbitrarily detained on May 12 and 13, 2025.
In the letter, the organizations condemn the use of security forces to repress the families of the El Bosque community, who were exercising their legitimate right to peaceful protest due to a planned eviction, when they were dispersed by riot police, resulting in the arrest of Ángel Pérez and, subsequently, of lawyer Alejandro Henríquez, who was providing legal advice to the affected families.
As immigration detention capacity in Ohio has jumped from 120 to 1,500 in recent weeks, IRTF (InterReligious Task Force on Central America) hopes to increase the visibility of faith leaders and communities showing our collective support for vulnerable migrant* families.
To that end, we hope you can take 3 minutes to read the attached letter and offer your endorsement by May 27, 2025 to brian@irtfcleveland.org .
Appendices to the letter include statements on the rights of migrants (and biblical mandate to “welcome the stranger”) from Jewish, Muslim and Christian religious bodies. There is also a statement from Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb and a national interfaith coalition.
What will we do with the sign-on letter?
-make it public at a prayer vigil/press conference in mid-June (date/location to be determined)
-use it as a basis to build interfaith solidarity in defense of migrants over the next several months or more)
Please contact brian@irtfcleveland.org if you as a faith leader endorse the letter. If you endorse, please list your name with your title, congregation/organization, and city. Info: 216 961 0003
Marco Rubio, Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump Jr. have made pilgrimage to El Salvador, and Republican commentator Tucker Carlson said Bukele “may have the blueprint for saving the world.”
The Garífuna, an Afro-Indigenous people with a profound historical and cultural presence in Honduras, continue to be targeted for defending their rights to territory, culture, and life. Despite legal victories, the Honduran government has failed to implement structural reforms or offer protection for these communities.
On April 10, the Garífuna community, which lives primarily along the Atlantic coast, led mobilization in the nation’s capial, Tegucigalpa. They demanded that the Honduran government comply with binding rulings issued by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (2015, 2023) in favor of three Garífuna communities in Colón (Punta Piedra) and Atlántida (Triunfo de la Cruz, San Juan).
Barely two days later, in the early morning hours of April 12, Max Gil Castillo Mejía, brother of the president of the community council of Punta Piedra was kidnapped from his home in San Pedro Sula (Cortés Department) by armed individuals who identified themselves as police officers. Just two days later, prominent Garífuna leader Miriam Miranda and other members of the Garífuna community of El Triunfo de la Cruz received threats.
Silencing Indigenous and Afro-descendant voices through fear and violence is a violation not only of human dignity but of binding international commitments. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has already warned that this violence will persist as long as the Honduran State refuses to uphold international legal mandates. IRTF calls on the government of Honduras to implement the rulings of the Inter-American Court to ensure that justice, reparations, and peace are no longer deferred for the Garífuna people.
Read IRTF’s recent letter demanding justice for Max Castillo here. To add your name to these urgent human rights letters, see https://www.irtfcleveland.org/content/RRN/join-RRN .
The National Commission of Human Rights in Honduras recently reported that more than 60 human rights defenders, including environmental defenders, were killed under violent circumstances during 2020-2025. The majority of those crimes remain in impunity.
We wrote to the National Commissioner to express our dismay over the lack of justice in the case of environmental defender Juan Antonio López, who was assassinated while walking home from church on September 14, 2024 (cf our letter of 21 SEP 2024). Local bishops, the bishops conference of Latin America, and even the late Pope Francis publicly decried his assassination and called for justice.
As a leading member of the Guapinol Environmental Defense Committee (in Tocoa, Colón Department), Juan López worked tirelessly to protect the Guapinol and San Pedro Rivers from the destructive impacts of the Los Pinares/Ecotek mining project in the Montaña de Botaderos “Carlos Escaleras” National Park. Despite a 2024 presidential decree (Decree 18/2024) designating the park as a protected zone, reports persist that the mining company continues to operate illegally in restricted areas, protected by armed groups and with impunity.
Since 2012, Honduras has recorded at least 149 murders of environmental activists, with one of the highest per capita rates in the world. The similarities between the López case and that of murdered Indigenous Lenca environmental defender Berta Cáceres (March 2, 2016) are striking and deeply troubling: obstruction of justice, denial of state responsibility, and failure to dismantle the networks of corruption and violence that enable these crimes.
Read IRTF’s recent letter demanding justice for Juan López here. To add your name to these urgent human rights letters, see https://www.irtfcleveland.org/content/RRN/join-RRN .
“The gang pacts with Bukele are not a thing of the past; it’s a present-day aspect of how one man came to amass total power,” says Óscar Martínez, editor-in-chief of El Faro.
While thousands of innocent people remain incarcerated in inhumane conditions in the prisons of El Salvador, one of the most recognized gang leaders in the Central American country, Carlos Cartagena López, aka Charli de IVU, was secretly released by the government of President Nayib Bukele and has since given an interview to the digital media El Faro in which he shows his face and shares details about his deals with the Bukele administration.
Óscar Martínez, editor-in-chief of El Faro and co-author of the article, told EL PAÍS that “[this interview] describes how gangs turned Bukele into a relevant politician. It allows us to reach the stark conclusions that it is impossible to understand Bukele’s rise to total power without his association with gangs.”
Charli became one of the most famous gang members in El Salvador after starring in the BBC miniseries Eighteen with a Bullet. In the series, Charli, at just 16 years old, already emerges as the leader of one of the most important strongholds of Barrio 18, the IVU neighborhood in the capital. In the video, he confesses to having committed several murders and other crimes. His criminal record has only lengthened over the years, and he is currently a fugitive from justice.
Bukele maintains a merciless public rhetoric against the gangs and has marketed himself as a global example of crime-fighting. But back when he was mayor of San Salvador, he protected the gangs, demanding their support in return. Bukele’s people would give warning to the gangs about police operations targeting their neighborhoods. Gang members, in turn, would threaten political opposition activists in their neighborhoods and force their families and neighbors to vote for Bukele.
There is a wealth of evidence regarding the negotiations between the Salvadoran gangs Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha 13 with the various governments of Nayib Bukele: prison intelligence documents, prosecutorial investigations, photos, audio recordings, and even accusations from the U.S. State Department. Now, these testimonies from Charli and another gang leader are added, providing details of the pacts for the first time.
In the highlands of Izabal Department, the courts are siding with influential landowners who are contesting ancestral claims of Indigenous Maya Q’eqchi’ communities. (It is also worth noting, as we did in our letter to authorities on April 14, 2025, that many of these same communities that are involved in land disputes are also resisting the expansion of large-scale metallic mining.)
For three days in a row (March 5-7), the National Civilian Police (PNC) fired gunshots in the Maya Q'eqchi' community of Río Tebernal, Livingston municipality. They forcibly removed a few dozen families from their homes. The living conditions of the families post-eviction are dire. Between March 18 and April 7, observers from a Costa Rican human rights commission documented lack of food, drinking water, electricity, healthcare, and children’s education.
Authorities are also criminalizing land defenders. On March 15, Luis Xol Caal, a leader from the Q’eqchi’ community of Chaab’il Ch’och’ (also in Livingston municipality), was arrested by the National Civil Police (PNC) on false charges of aggravated usurpation, threats, and illegal detention. Luis Xol Caal, a member of the Campesino Committee of the Highlands (CCDA), was detained despite the fact that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) had previously granted precautionary measures to his community, which is situated near the Chocón Machacas nature reserve and with access to the Caribbean Sea. In 2018, community residents testified before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that the private individuals who are claiming land ownership had been using their land for drug trafficking.
We are urging that authorities end the practice of enforced eviction while land rights are still being disputed in the court system. We also urge that they end the criminalization of land defenders.
The government is falsely criminalizing those whose work is to expose and challenge abuses by the state. It’s a blatant attempt to silence them.
The Courts Against Organized Crime are, according to the government, reserved for gang members. Yet the charges of agrupaciones ilícitas (illicit groupings) brought forth against human rights attorneys Ivania Cruz and Rudy Joya by the Attorney General's Office (FGR) and the National Civilian Police (PNC) place them in this court, where they are scheduled to appear on May 5. Their criminal proceedings jeopardize the right to legal defense of the inhabitants of La Floresta. As we wrote in our RRN letter of 13 APR 2025, 24 community leaders from La Floresta have been falsely charged them with usurpation of property, irregular marketing of subdivision parcels, illegal restriction of movement, and aggravated threats connected with illegal criminal groups (i.e., gangs). Also arrested and imprisoned is Fidel Zavala, spokesperson for UNIDEHC (Human and Community Rights Defense Unit of El Salvador), which is supporting La Floresta.
We are urging that the government: 1) release Fidel Zavala from detention and drop all spurious charges against the residents of La Floresta and members of UNHIDEC, including attorneys Ivania Cruz and Rudy Joya; 2) uphold the right to due process and defense for all of those being criminally charged; 3) respect the right to free association as stated in Article 7 of the Salvadoran constitution; 4) stop the misuse of criminal law to persecute political, social and community leaders who engage in the legitimate defense of human rights
