The role of the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights has not ended with the exit of the GIEI. However, it now falls to Mexican society to assume the responsibility for continuing its work. The work isn’t so much technical, as political and social—it’s the work of mobilization, building solidarity and exerting constant pressure.
Our day of speaking truth to UNGASS began in Foley Square, New York City, just steps away from the federal prison. VOCAL NY, Latino Justice, Make the Road Brooklyn, LEAP, Moms United, Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), Stop the Harm, Drug Policy Alliance and others.
On December 28, 2015 in the early morning, the Honduran Navy shot and killed two Afro-Indigenous Garifuna men, Jostin Lino Palacios, age 24 and Elvis Garcia, age 19 in Barra de Iriona in the department of Colon, on the northeast coast of Honduras.
By the end of the pope’s visit, activists wondered whether their organizing efforts and messages to the pope were enough to inspire long-lasting justice on the border.
What is extraordinary is not the crime. The crime of disappearance is part of the structural violence that has become daily life in Mexico. What is extraordinary is the families’ fight for their missing loved ones. These men and women are an example of courage and good citizenship for the whole country.
Most U.S. aid to Mexico supports governance, justice and “rule of law” reforms aimed at curbing corruption and remolding the notoriously dysfunctional Mexican justice system. But corruption pervades the U.S. justice system and the state of New Mexico is a good example.
We, the undersigned organizations working in the fields of human rights, Latin American solidarity, immigrant rights, women’s rights and fair foreign policy, call for humanitarian protection for Central American migrants through administratively-granted relief and for an immediate halt to the raids.
The fact that Salvadorans form part of the mercenary armies operating in Yemen is an open secret. A military intelligence source from the Salvadoran Ministry of Defense, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed to the Americas Program that there are 100 Salvadorans carrying out operations of that type in Yemen.
The defensoras, or women human rights defenders, embody courage every moment as systematic violence has broadened its target toward them as a way to disempower women activists, weaken movements for social change, and maintain the patriarchal, militarized Mexican State. Women human rights defenders risk their lives every day to create a Mexico where being a woman doesn’t inherently mean a doomed fate.
Mexico just joined the growing list of countries that have moved towards legalization of marijuana. In a ruling last Thursday, the Supreme Court of Mexico granted injunctive relief to a group of four plaintiffs who had filed a complaint in 2013 requesting to be able to grow, transport and consume marijuana.
