The Berta Caceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, which would cut off military and police aid to Honduras until impunity for their human rights violations ceases, is due to be reintroduced in a couple of weeks. Rep. Hank Johnson has contacted the 70 Representatives who co-sponsored the bill with him during the last session of Congress to ask them to sign on again to show strength of support when the bill is reintroduced. Those from Illinois who signed on in the 2017-2018 session of Congress are Reps. Rush, Lipinski, Quigley, Danny Davis, Schakowsky, and Foster.

The bill never got out of the Foreign Affairs Committee during the last two sessions of Congress with the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. There is a chance that with a Democratic majority and new progressives in office, it will advance to the floor of the House for a vote. In Illinois, we must contact new Representatives Jesus “Chuy” Garcia (IL-4) and Sean Casten (IL-6) for their support on this bill.

CRLN staff and board members will be in DC April 4-8 and will take letters to all Illinois members of Congress at that time. The letters will include a request to support this bill if it has been reintroduced by then, or to cut off military and police aid by other means if the bill has not been reintroduced yet. Email shunter-smith@crln.org with name and address if you give us permission to add your name to your members of Congress’ letters.

Berta Caceres was an inspired feminist, indigenous rights and environmental activist and leader who was murdered on March 2, 2016. While her case went to court and some of those involved in her assassination were convicted, the intellectual authors of her death have yet to be held accountable, according to her family and an international panel of experts who investigated the case. Berta’s family’s and her organization COPINH’s persistence, along with International solidarity efforts with the family and COPINH, was key to getting her case tried in court at all.

Honduras now has an illegal President, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who “won” an election for a second term that was prohibited by the Honduran constitution, and who shut down the vote counting computers repeatedly to tamper with the election results. He is one of the golpistas, one who was behind the 2009 coup, and he is already planning his re-election campaign for 2021. He has consolidated power through appointments of friends in all branches of government and is a dictator in everything but name. There is a direct connection between his misuse of power and the tens of thousands of people leaving Honduras in a mass exodus on the “caravans.” His brother, a former Honduran Congressman, was recently arrested in Miami and charged with being a major mover of cocaine into the U.S., and his personally appointed national police chief has a history of accepting bribes from drug cartels. He has sought the arrest and conviction of journalists and opposition political figures who try to bring such crimes to light. The corruption of his administration is another reason we should not be sending aid to Honduras.

Articles:

Unavision:  “Judge denies bail  to brother of Honduran president arrested on drug charges”

AP:  “Honduran lawmaker faces defamation trial after naming names”

See previous posts on Honduras on the CRLN website for background on the 2017 Honduran presidential election and the international investigation into Berta’s murder, 

University of California at Santa Cruz Professor of History Emerita, Dana Frank, was in Chicago on February 27 and was interviewed by WBEZ’s Jerome McDonnell on the program “Worldview.” Here is the link:

https://www.wbez.org/shows/worldview-podcast/historian-dana-frank-on-honduran-politics-us-intervention-food-mondays-can-romanstyle-pizza-make-it-in-chicago/662032dc-bc70-4e42-b647-a7709d8f429a

Professor Frank has just published another book, The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror and the U.S. in the Aftermath of the Coup.  CRLN has 3 copies for sale. Please contact Sharon at shunter-smith@crln.org or call the CRLN office at 773-293-2964 if you would like to buy a copy.

By Sidney Hollander, Secretary, CRLN Board of Directors

Guatemala is in the grip of a constitutional crisis that threatens to reinstate a regime of dictatorship and death squads supported by the U.S. government.

This is the message that was delivered to me and my fellow members of a CRLN delegation to Guatemala by a variety of human rights activists in January of this year.  Appalled by the looming threat to the modest progress toward righting the historic wrongs that continue to cast a shadow over public life in Guatemala, these activists deplored the recent U.S. retreat from its previous 12 years of support for the effort to bring justice to Guatemala and pleaded with us to help rekindle that support in the U.S. congress.

Because of the urgency and importance of this moment, explained below, CRLN is forming a Guatemala Working Group. Call the CRLN office at 773-293-2964 or email shunter-smith@crln.org if you are interested in joining a CRLN Working Group on Guatemala.

The United States, with a few notable exceptions, has been playing a relentlessly destructive role in Guatemala since at least 1954 when the CIA-engineered a coup that overthrew a democratically elected reformist regime because it was encroaching on U.S. business interests there.  In the ensuing maelstrom of repression and rebellion the U.S. allied itself with the Spanish-descended economic elite and its military, supplying arms and training in support of a barbarous genocidal counterinsurgency that destroyed 440 Mayan villages and killed over 200,000 people, nearly all of them civilians.

The heavy hand of the U.S. did not stop there.  When survivors of these massacres and related repressions sought refuge in the United States, the Reagan administration barred them, thereby inadvertently giving rise to the Sanctuary Movement of churches and synagogues that sheltered these “illegal” refugees in defiance of the U.S. government.

CRLN is a direct outgrowth of that sanctuary work in the 1980s.  Over the years it has continued to stand with Guatemalans in their postwar pursuit of justice and to call out the U.S. government when it impedes that work.

That is the background of the crisis that CRLN found during its January delegation.  The current constitutional crisis has its roots in the crimes of the counterinsurgency.  The long-delayed effort to bring the perpetrators to justice got a big boost about 12 years ago in a fleeting, breakthrough moment when the Guatemalan government, desperate for some measure of international and domestic legitimacy, agreed to cosponsor a United Nations Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG, in the Spanish acronym).  Its mandate was to assist the Guatemalan Attorney General in the development of prosecutions relating to crimes from the past as well as from the present.  The U.S. supplied a portion of the necessary funding.

The CICIG has become a victim of its own success.  In its support of dozens of successful prosecutions of perpetrators of the genocide and of sitting politicians, including a sitting president and vice president, the CICIG has come to be seen as a threat to the allied business and military elites that have long dominated Guatemalan politics and government.  It was the 1970s and 1980s threat to this same elite that caused it to launch the brutal counterinsurgency, so it is no surprise that it has launched a counterattack on the CICIG.

The current crisis was precipitated by the present president of Guatemala who, along with his son and brother, has come under investigation and fears that they will be indicted for corruption.  He and his allies for some time have been attacking the CICIG as an agent of foreign powers that are compromising Guatemalan sovereignty.  They have even used high priced lobbyists to win the support of conservative politicians in the U.S.  These attacks came to a head late last year when the president declared that he was ending the mandate of the CICIG.

The resulting political crisis rapidly became a constitutional crisis when the Constitutional Court ruled that the president lacked the authority to terminate the CICIG unilaterally, the president defied the Court and withdrew police protection from the CICIG workers.  He then sought to indict and remove the Court majority on charges that they had acted against the law by ruling against him.   That is where things stand as of this moment in mid-February.

It is painful to report that the United States has jettisoned its 12-year support for the CICIG.  The State Department and the embassy have issued statements in defense of Guatemalan sovereignty and blandly said they favor the rule of law.  They have remained pointedly silent on the CICG, in contrast with the robust support they have voiced in the past.

Guatemalan human rights activists see the CICIG crisis as part of a larger drift toward dictatorship characterized by the reappearance of death squads, the criminalization of protest and opposition generally, and the subordination of independent branches of government to the control of the president acting on behalf of the old elite.  Emblematic of this drift is proposed legislation that would void the convictions that the CICIG has helped to obtain and forbid further prosecutions of crimes committed during the counterinsurgency, thus reinstating the impunity on which elite rule has rested.  In addition, a companion bill would subject nongovernmental organizations to onerous registration and reporting requirements and would outlaw many of their activities.  If this bill is enacted many of the groups with which CRLN works would find it difficult or impossible to operate, and individual activists would find themselves in even greater jeopardy than they are at present.

The awful developments in Guatemala create a particular moment for CRLN.  As members of CRLN we are not powerless to resist Guatemala’s slide toward dictatorship.  We must remain in contact with our partners there.  We must contact U.S. officials and other leaders.  We must spread the word so that our friends and associates in the U.S. can do the same.

Because of the urgency and importance of this moment, CRLN is forming a Guatemala working group.  All members are invited to join.  I definitely will be participating.  I hope many of us will.  We have a lot of work to do.

Call the CRLN office at 773-293-2964 or email shunter-smith@crln.org if you are interested in joining a CRLN Working Group on Guatemala.