CENTRAL AMERICA

International Sign-On Statement in solidarity with the Garifuna People and OFRANEH and demanding the safe return of 5 forcibly disappeared Garifuna leaders.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is warning us today that if we fail to build alternatives to the current system governed by voracious, ruthless and extractive capitalism, it will rob our descendants of the future.

They say coronavirus doesn’t discriminate, that it puts us all at risk, that it dictates an equally threatening future for all humankind, but pre-existing inequality for women–the largest group of people discriminated against–ensures that the virus does discriminate.

With the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in Latin America, indigenous peoples and communities face the challenges that this disease brings. Faced with government neglect, the absence of social investment in their regions and the lack of access to regional or national hospitals, indigenous people have a serious disadvantage, but our own ancestral knowledge provides forms of protection.

On August 31, 2018, Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales, a comedian by profession, accompanied by his cabinet and the high command of the army, convened a press conference where he unilaterally announced that he would not renew the mandate of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). The CICIG no longer functions, but it has left a powerful legacy.

Honduras is collapsing. The thousands of migrants who flee every day are direct testimony to a political, economic and social crisis that the world ignores and the U. S. government seems bent on perpetuating.

A democratic crisis is deepening in Guatemala, with human rights and rule of law increasingly under assault. Forty-four Nobel laureates, alarmed by the growing and dangerous disregard for justice, issued an open statement urging Guatemalan authorities to safeguard peace and democracy in Guatemala.