Tag Archives: #HumanRights

Political trial of El Salvador’s water defenders continues

by Jim Hodgson

Sadly, it’s not unusual for peace activists and the defenders of ecology or Indigenous rights to find themselves facing trumped-up criminal charges. It’s a bit weird when it happens to members of a modest community development organization in rural El Salvador.

But that’s what has happened to five people whose organization, the Santa Marta Association for Economic and Social Development (ADES). They’re people that I have know for more than 20 years.

This past week, five ADES members have been on trial, accused of a murder that supposedly occurred long ago during El Salvador’s civil war. No one, except zealous defenders of the government of Nayib Bukele, believes they are guilty of that crime. Rather: they built an alliance that reached around the globe, preventing a gold mine from operating in their Cabañas department and eventually winning a ban on metals mining in the whole country. While it is true that the five defendants were FMLN combatants during the 1980-1992 civil war, they are protected by the internationally-recognized Peace Agreement and the National Reconciliation Law, both signed in 1992.

Defence lawyers will present final arguments on Monday (Oct. 14) and a verdict could be issued as soon as Tuesday (Oct. 15). The next few days are a CRITICAL time to raise the visibility as much as we can to try to avoid a grave injustice. 

Here below you will find a statement from observers of the trial and some suggestions about how you can show your solidarity.

Statement of the international observer delegation on the ongoing trail of the Santa Marta and ADES water defenders  

October 11, 2024

Following three days of observing the trial of the five Santa Marta and ADES environmentalists, the international delegation convened by International Allies Against Mining in El Salvador releases the following statement:

San Salvador, we are international observers from King’s College Western University in Canada, Dartmouth College and UCLA Law School in the United States, and the Autonomous University of Mexico City in Mexico. At the conclusion of the third day of the trial, we offer the following observations:

  1. We witnessed a trial that, formally, appears to have followed most international standards of due process, however, the proceedings transgressed those standards on numerous occasions. We agree with the defense that sufficient proof was not presented to convict the five defendants. Based on what was presented in the courtroom, we believe that the only just resolution is the acquittal of all five defendants. Failure to acquit signals the lack of presumption of innocence and, therefore, the lack of an independent judiciary in El Salvador. 
  2. For example, the Attorney General´s communications team violated the gag order imposed by the judges, exposing the identities of witnesses and observers, as well as depicting the defendants in ways that assumed their guilt across social media. We fear that this violation of the gag order without a court reprimand represents a lack of procedural impartiality. Additionally, while journalists were allowed to access court grounds on the final day of the trial, we believe this was a last minute measure to rectify the earlier breach of the gag order by the Attorney General. We lament that the measure was not announced widely to members of the wider press who were respecting the gag order. Throughout the proceedings, the independent press was not allowed to take photos or videos inside the courtroom.
  3. Additionally, we observed an overly aggressive strategy by the lawyers representing the Attorney General that included berating and a using of their bodies to put pressure on witnesses. For this behavior, they were repeatedly cautioned and corrected by the tribunal. Despite warnings and requests by the judges, the Attorney General´s lawyers ignored directions, interrupted procedures, and failed to respect courtroom decorum. 
  4. At least one defendant was mistreated by the police who deprived him of sleep and food. Rather than transferring him directly to his residence following the day’s proceedings, he was held at a police substation and verbally abused, only to arrive home hours later underfed and exhausted. The following morning, police arrived at his home unexpectedly early and denied him a proper breakfast. We witnessed the visible fatigue and inability to focus on the proceedings from all of the accused. Mistreatment remains a concern as the defendants are of advanced age with a variety of preexisting conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. The well-being of the accused must be prioritized to ensure a fair trial. 

Outside of the courtroom, we witnessed overwhelming support for the defendants from international human rights organizations, the Santa Marta community, Salvadoran civil society, and social movement organizations. Many have concluded that the case is an attempt by the Salvadoran government to intimidate the environmental movement that resulted in the landmark national ban on metallic mining in 2017. For us, the incessant pursuit of a conviction by the Attorney General’s lawyers despite a lack of evidence, cannot be unlinked from these broader politics and concerns against communities resisting the encroachment of extractive projects.

While we await the closing arguments and the tribunal’s decision, and based on our observations, we maintain that justice can only be served by a ruling that affirms the innocence of the accused. The community of Santa Marta too, aggrieved and impacted by this lengthy ordeal, must be presented with restitution and steps must be taken to ensure lasting transitional justice.

Given the mistreatment described against one of the defendants above, we recommend that the rest of the proceedings, particularly the logistics of transportation, are monitored by the Office of the Ombudsperson for the Defense of Human Rights in El Salvador (PDDH) to ensure their personal and physical integrity.

  • Aideé Tassinari, Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México
  • Yvette Borja, Faculty of Law, University of California Los Angeles
  • Jorge Cuéllar, Dartmouth College
  • Bernie Hammond, King’s College, University of Western Ontario

What you can do: 

Check out these suggestions from the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES): 

Social media solidarity posts: Make the case visible on social media & make sure the community knows we have their back! As the trial approaches, one of the most important things we can do is show the Salvadoran government that all eyes are on them. You can show your solidarity with the Santa Marta 5 by participating in the international social media campaign!

Write a brief statement of solidarity like:

  • Drop the charges against the Santa Marta 5!
  • ¡Retiren los cargos contra los Santa Marta 5!
  • International solidarity is with the Santa Marta 5!
  • The diaspora is watching! Free the #SantaMarta5 of all charges!
  • Keep El Salvador metallic mining-free!

Take a picture OR make a short video with your sign

Post on social media with the following hashtags: #SantaMartaNoEstaSola  #ComunidadSantaMarta #ADESNoEstáSola

Tag the following orgs on Twitter: @stopesmining @acafremin @CSantaMarta1987 @ades_sm@no_mineria_sv @cispes_solidarity 
(On Facebook: @ComunidadSanta Marta, @Mesa Nacional frente a la Minería Metálica en El Salvador, @International Allies Against Mining, @acafremin, @ADES Santa Marta)

Check out these examples for inspiration from CISPES on X and Instagram

For more information, check out some of these resources:

El Salvador faces scrutiny for ‘political’ trial of five environmental activists, The Guardian, Oct. 9

La Justicia de Bukele vs los Defensores del Agua, Manuel Pérez Rocha, La Jornada, Oct.7

Solidarity with El Salvador’s Santa Marta 5 Grows Across Borders | NACLA
Minera Titán, la empresa que acecha para llevarse el oro de El Salvador – Voz Pública
Threat of Metal Mining Returns to El Salvador, Organizations Warn | CISPES
State of Deception: Fact Finding Report

Almost a decade later, truth still elusive in case of the 43 students in Guerrero, Mexico 

They’ve been gone for almost 10 years now, those 43 education students who were taken one night in Iguala, Guerrero. Hypotheses abound but despite promises and investigations, the crime is not solved. 

But there are new revelations about the cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of the Mexican state in weeks after the disappearance (see below).

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known popularly as AMLO) has done many good things as he nears completion of his six-year term. But his failure to press finally for the full truth of the Mexican army’s involvement in the disappearance of the students who attended the Ayotzinapa teachers training school stains his record. 

“A decade of failure,” says a headline in the Mexico City daily newspaper, La Jornada. Students, teachers and family members say their struggle will continue.

During a march in Mexico City on Monday, Aug. 27, Luz María Telumbre, mother of one of the disappeared students, told a reporter that she would be among the parents who would meet the president again the following day. This time, she said, it will be to say: “’thanks for nothing’ because we’re still walking, shouting in the streets for justice and truth.”

Another mother, Joaquína García, said “it isn’t fair that we should be in the streets for 10 years seeking justice and we still don’t know anything about the boys.” She added that she wants to tell the next president, Claudia Sheinbaum, “that we will not stop struggling until we find them and that as a woman and mother, we hope she will understand us.”

On the night of Sept. 26, 2014, students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School were attacked in Iguala, Guerrero, after they had commandeered buses to travel onward to Mexico City for a protest over the Oct. 2, 1968, massacre of student protesters at Tlatelolco plaza in Mexico City.

In Iguala, six people—including three students—were killed in the assault, 25 were injured and 43 students were abducted and presumably murdered later. Leading suspects are members of the Mexican army who worked alongside municipal officials and drug-traffickers who were trying to move opium gum (semi-processed heroin) on one of the buses that was taken.

What happened before?

One afternoon in the late 1990s, I accompanied a group of students from Canada and the United States to a meeting with rural teachers in the mountains near Tlapa in northeast Guerrero.

These teachers spoke for communities afflicted by poverty, military incursions and the drug war. They taught their students in Spanish as well as in Nahuatl or one of the other Indigenous languages spoken in the area. They dedicated their lives to strengthening rural communities through the education of children. They were convinced that people needed to be able to organize themselves and demand that their rights be respected so that things would begin to change.

“The rural teachers colleges are among the only means of social mobility within the reach of young people from campesino communities,” wrote Luis Hernández Navarro, opinion editor at La Jornada, back in 2011. “Through them, they have access to education, housing, food and later, with luck, a job they are qualified to do.” 

The first time I that I can recall hearing of the Ayotzinapa school was in January 2008, when Blanche Petrich, another La Jornada journalist, came to Toronto to support work by Canadian churches in defense of refugees from Mexico. She told us:

“To describe the panorama of repression in Guerrero, it’s enough to follow the route of the popular movement. ‘Wherever there is organization, protest, defense of human rights, mobilization of roadblocks, there is repression, irregular apprehensions and arrest warrants,’ we’re told by the [Tlachinollan] human rights organization in the La Montaña area, led by Abel Barrera. That is, the campesinos who oppose the taking of their lands for a dam in La Perota, close to Acapulco, the ecologists who resist cutting of trees in the Petatlán sierra, the laid-off workers of a government office in the state capital of Chipalcingo, the community leaders of Xochistlaguaca, the students at the normal school in Ayotzinapa: they all suffer persecution.”

And what’s new?

Through an access to information request, journalists obtained new information about the cover-up that was orchestrated after the abductions by high ranking authorities in the government during meetings presided over by then-President Enrique Peña Nieto and attended by then-Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam and other officials. Their “historic truth” version—since proven false—contended that local police turned the students over to a drug gang which murdered them, burned the bodies at a garbage dump, and put the remains into a river.

AP photo and story (left) about revelations by a former senior official; a tweet by the Fábrica de Periodismo about the cover-up led by high officials of the previous Mexican government.

Tomás Zerón, former head of investigations for Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office, is now a fugitive hiding in Israel, beyond the reach of the Mexican justice system. But in 2022, he answered questions posed in writing by Alejandro Encinas, then Mexico’s Interior Undersecretary for Human Rights.

Appointed by AMLO’s government, Encinas chaired the Commission for Truth and Access to Justice in the Ayotzinapa Case (COVAJ). The commission included family members and their advisors. Their report, published in August 2022, said federal, state and municipal politicians, along with the armed forces and local police, knew what had happened. 

But that report and a subsequent one in September 2023 have been undermined by the refusal of President López Obrador to accept its conclusions and his accusations against the human rights groups that accompany the families, including Tlachinollan and the Jesuit-backed Miguel Augustín Pro Human Rights Centre.

Left: La Jornada story Tuesday with headlines (adding my own details): federal prosecutors may call former president Ernesto Peña Nieto to testify about Ayotzinapa; AMLO: “I don’t protect anybody.” Below the photo, the text says that AMLO has also called on Zerón “to clarify his position because he is accused of coordinating the torturers.” Right: story today about the last of the parents’ meetings with AMLO.

After a meeting Tuesday (Aug. 27) with the president, the parents said it was the last one they would hold with him before he leaves office Oct. 1. 

“We ended badly,” said their lawyer, Vidulfo Rosales of Tlachinollan. He added that while in the first three years of this government, they saw clear good will to get to the truth, in 2022, the situation changed. “This is when we touched the sensitive fibres of the Mexican Army; we could advance no further. There was a break, a crisis, including in the relationship, the dialogue.”

“This government, unfortunately, could not give us truth and justice,” he added.

Human rights and land rights defenders are still under attack in Guatemala

by Jim Hodgson

Despite the inauguration earlier this year of a more progressive government in Guatemala, community land defenders still face criminal violence and judicial threats.

The government of President Bernardo Arévalo condemned the murder June 5 of a 47-year-old lawyer who worked to protect Indigenous and small-farmer land rights.

José Alberto Domingo Montejo worked with the Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC, Committee for Farmworkers Unity) and had been part of CUC’s legal team since 2019. 

Left: A poster from Prensa Comunitaria denouncing the murder of José Domingo. Right: a statement from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights upholding the right of small farmers’ organizations to work freely and safely, and calling for a fast and impartial investigation.

Domingo was shot during an ambush on a gravel road in Palin, Escuintla department, southwest of the Guatemalan capital. Two other CUC members, Gustavo Yoxon and Marcelo Yoxon, were wounded in the same attack.

They were doing what CUC and another organization with which I am more familiar, the Comité Campesino del Altiplano (CCDA, Highlands Committee of Small Farmers) do all the time: working to advance the interests of small farmers and Indigenous peoples by helping to legalize a community land title. The CCDA condemned the attack and expressed its solidarity with families of the victims.

“This attack is added to the wave of violent judicial and extrajudicial evictions, captures and arrest warrants,” said CCDA in a statement on social media. 

The Pact of the Corrupt

Guatemala may have that more progressive government but Arévalo and his cabinet do not control all the levers of power. 

A key obstacle is Consuelo Porras, the attorney general appointed in 2018; her term was renewed in 2022 and extends to 2026; she can only be removed if convicted of a crime. 

Left: A CCDA news conference [text in English] on June 3 warned the “Pact of the Corrupt” tries to provoke confrontations between government and small farmers and Indigenous communities.

The U.S. Department of State added Porras to a list of “undemocratic and corrupt” officials in 2021. And last year, the Organization of American States (OAS) called her efforts to annul Arévalo’s election “an attempted coup d’état.”

“Porras has served as the spearhead of the Pact of the Corrupt,” wrote former Guatemalan foreign minister Edgar Gutiérrez in December while she was still trying to quash the election result. He described the Pact of the Corrupt as “a loose coalition of politicians, bureaucratic and business elites, plus powerful drug trafficking groups, which has pushed back civil and political liberties, unleashing fierce persecution against dissent, particularly against independent justice operators, who now number half a hundred in exile.”

For people in a community that is struggling to establish a land claim, even with good legal advisors from CCDA or CUT, it is often a challenge to identify opponents. One example is the Xinca Indigenous community of Nueva Jerusalén, located further south in the same Escuintla department where José Domingo was killed. By March 2023, the community had exhausted legal avenues within Guatemala (despite having shown the land in question belongs to the government and having proven irregularities in the claim of a supposed owner. After I had joined a meeting with community leaders and CCDA advisors, I wrote about the community’s appeal to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR).

But a few months later, on August 9, police and private security forces burned the community to the ground and forced the 53 resident families to flee. 

In these scenarios—and there are scores of them—it can be difficult to distinguish between a legal, court-ordered eviction (even if fraudulently obtained) and a private army: in effect, a paramilitary death squad. 

And so you find a paragraph like this one in an Amnesty International report that (correctly, in my view) blends the crimes of state and non-state actors. From the victims’ point of view, it’s hard to see the difference.

“The Unit for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders in Guatemala (UDEFEGUA) reported 5,965 attacks against human rights defenders between January and November 2023, including threats, killings, harassment and arbitrary detentions. Criminalization increased, particularly against those involved in the fight against impunity and corruption.”

And this paragraph from a Maritimes-Guatemala Breaking The Silence (BTS) Network report on the Nueva Jerusalén eviction:

“[T]he state abets and perpetrates violence against the community. The police—the armed wing of the state—have…ransacked homes, destroyed possessions and sought to provoke community members to protect themselves. With this sleight of hand, they bring charges against community members, used to defame and criminalize the residents of Nueva Jerusalen.”

“Bringing charges.” “Criminalization.” 

Mélisande Séguin of BTS notes that land defenders continue to meet with government officials to stop future arrests. “Nonetheless, with Consuelo Porras at the helm of the Public Prosecutor’s office, criminalization remains a major threat for Indigenous and campesino movements.”

On Feb. 8, the new government signed an agreement with CCDA, CUT and other organizations of small farmers and Indigenous peoples. 

“For our administration, dialogue is not just a tool but a key pillar that promotes citizen participation in defining the agendas that effectively solve different needs,” said Arévalo during the signing ceremony. He said the agreement was the product of a dialogue process that began in the last quarter of 2023.

“All Guatemalans are equal in dignity and rights. The new government embraces the idea that everyone has something valuable to contribute and deserves to be heard,” he said.

Speaking at the ceremony, CCDA national coordinator Neydi Yasmín Juracán stated: “For us, it is a historic day because we have been meeting politically and technically for these agreements.” She said CCDA has worked for more than 28 years to prevent and end land evictions, but:

  • 12 community leaders were assassinated between 2018 and 2022.
  • Seven leaders are currently imprisoned.
  • 1,788 arrest warrants, 35 per cent targeting women.
  • Seven active temporary shelters to attend to agrarian conflicts.
  • 1,320 cases were accompanied by the CCDA.