Those fleeing from human rights violations, poverty, violence and climate breakdown in Honduras, Guatemala and other Latin American countries face numerous obstacles and infringements of internationally recognized human rights norms.

A militarized American border

In July 2017, the American Friends Service Committee highlighted, “Over the past four decades, policies under every presidential administration – regardless of political party – have systematically militarized southern border communities, criminalizing millions of immigrants and creating repressive conditions from California to Texas.”

That article further notes, “The impacts of border militarization are deep and lasting—individuals deprived of their human and civil rights, families torn apart, loved ones deported back to dangerous situations.”

A militarized Mexican border

This past June, CBC reported that Mexico has deployed almost 15,000 soldiers and members of its National Guard on its northern border to stem the flow of migration across its border into the United States according to the head of the Mexican army.

More migrants detained in Mexico

On July 1, The Washington Post reported, “In the weeks since Mexico signed a pact with the United States to stop migration [from Mexico into the United States], conditions in detention centers and shelters [in Mexico] have deteriorated dramatically, according to diplomats and human rights officials who have visited the facilities.”

That article highlights, “Mexico has detained 99,203 migrants this year and deported 71,110 of them, according to its immigration agency.”

U.S. ICE agents to be trained at Fort Benning

In September, Newsweek reported that the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agency is looking to build a training centre at Fort Benning in Georgia.

That’s the location of the School of Americas (SOA), now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).

The Jacobin comments, “The SOA has trained more than 83,000 Latin American security forces since its founding. Notorious graduates of the SOA — including nearly a dozen dictators and some of the worst human rights violators in the continent — are guilty of using torture, rape, assassination, forced disappearance, massacres, and forced displacement of communities to wage war against their own people.”

Safe Third Country Agreements

And in October, the Trump administration in the United States signed bilateral agreements with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

PRI explains, “The three deals would allow the U.S. to return asylum-seekers to countries they traversed en route to the U.S. They would shift the burden of stopping asylum-seekers from reaching the US onto the very region from which most of them are fleeing.”

That article adds, “The deals resemble ‘safe third-country’ agreements, or bilateral deals where one country may prevent individuals arriving at its ports of entry from applying for asylum on the basis that they could have applied for and received international protection in another country they traversed.”

It also notes, “Human rights advocates, meanwhile, have decried the agreements as dangerous violations of asylum-seekers’ rights and threats to their safety: People could be back to some of the world’s most dangerous countries, where they would face high levels of violence, crime, corruption and poverty.”

Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement

And if migrants were to make it past those obstacles, they would face the impediment of the Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement.

The Globe and Mail has previously explained, “The Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the United States, signed in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, means that with few exceptions, refugee claimants must make their claim in the first safe country they arrive in. That means virtually all asylum seekers attempting to enter Canada through a U.S. port of entry will be turned away.”

Significantly the article adds that “because Canada is a signatory of the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention, asylum seekers entering the country between border points are not automatically deported and may make asylum claims.”

In other words, the agreement, reached by then-Liberal prime minister Paul Martin and then-U.S. president George W. Bush, does not cover asylum-seekers who cross through unguarded sections of the Canada-U.S. border.

Expansion of Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement?

It would appear that the Canadian government is trying to close that option too.

In April, Reuters reported, “Canada wants the agreement rewritten to apply to the entire border. …’We’d like to be able to get [the United States] to agree that we can, if somebody comes across, we just send them back’, [a Canadian official] told Reuters, adding Canada had raised the issue ‘at least a dozen’ times since.”

More migrants detained in Canada

In July, the Canadian Press reported, “The CBSA [Canada Border Services Agency] says there were 6,609 people detained in holding centres in 2017-18, up from 4,248 a year earlier. There were 1,831 detainees held in jails last year, compared to 971 in 2016-17.”

This NeverHome.ca article indicates the numbers are even higher:

“The Canadian government jailed over 87,317 migrants without charge between 2006-2014 and spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars over five years to detain migrants.”

“Migrants are the only population within Canada who can be jailed simply on administrative grounds without being charged with a specific criminal offense.”

Canada rejects most refugee claims from Mexico

In February 2018, Global News reported, “Ottawa imposed a visa requirement on visitors from Mexico in July 2009, after the country became Canada’s top source of refugee claims, which totaled 9,000 that year, most of which were rejected.”

That article then notes that the visa requirement was lifted on December 1, 2016 and that, “Three-quarters of the Mexican refugee claims that were heard by the Refugee Board in 2017 were either rejected, abandoned or withdrawn.”

Few spaces for those from the Americas

In July 2018, University of Toronto Professor Anne-Emanuelle Birn and York University Professor Liisa L. North commented in this analysis, “In 2017, Canada allocated a pitiful number of spots to Central Americans: out of 25,000 total spaces for resettled refugees, just 380 for all of the Americas.”

Human rights

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has noted, “Human rights violations against migrants can include a denial of civil and political rights such as arbitrary detention, torture, or a lack of due process, as well as economic, social and cultural rights such as the rights to health, housing or education.”

It adds, “The denial of migrants’ rights is often closely linked to discriminatory laws and to deep-seated attitudes of prejudice or xenophobia.”

In May 2017, Médecins Sans Frontières‎ (MSF) highlighted, “68.3 percent of the migrant and refugee populations entering Mexico reported being victims of violence during their transit toward the United States [and] nearly one-third of the women surveyed had been sexually abused during their journey.”

That report explained, “MSF patients reported that the perpetrators of violence included members of gangs and other criminal organizations, as well as members of the Mexican security forces responsible for their protection.”

Peace Brigades International is a global movement of activists that stands in solidarity with threatened human rights defenders around the world. We work to uphold the human rights of migrants and those who work to defend their human rights.

To read about the accompaniment of the Casa del Migrante Saltillo on the Texas-Mexico border by Peace Brigades International, please see PBI-Mexico expresses concern about continued harassment of the Saltillo Migrant Shelter.

On November 6, the Peace Brigades International-Guatemala Project posted on its Facebook page, “Yesterday we accompanied Jorge Coc and Marcelino Xol Cucul, members of the CCDA Verapaz, at the repair hearing. The complainant, the Chilté cooperative, has left it open for now, awaiting the possible appeal.”

PBI-Guatemala adds, “The two land defenders were sentenced a week ago to 35 years in jail.”

In response to that sentence, the Campesino Committee of the Highlands CCDA Verapaz posted, “Urgent! Sentence of 35 years in prison to land and territory defenders. The crime is to defend life, defend the rights of mother earth.”

UDEFEGUA (the Protection Unit for Human Rights Defenders) adds, “We express our solidarity with the human rights defenders Marcelino Xol and Jorge Coc who were sentenced to 35 years in prison for crimes of homicide and attempted murder…”

“Both defenders were criminalized by the Chilté Cooperative, in the village Choctun Basilá, a company that is depriving them of their territory and has been involved in the murder of community leaders in the area.”

UDEFEGUA comments, “The co-optation of the justice system and the criminal policy of the State to demobilize and repress the defense of human rights in the country, mainly defenders of the territory, is evidenced once again.”

PBI-Guatemala has previously explained, “Jorge has declared that on the day of the events he was at his home in Las Pacayas taking care of his sick father. Marcelino says that on July 13, 2017 he was teaching in a community in Chisec, several hours from the scene of the crime. Despite their testimonies of innocence, the inconsistencies in the testimonies from the witnesses to the crime and the failure of the accusers to individualize the crimes both men were formally charged and imprisoned.”

After the sentencing, PBI-Guatemala posted, “This sentence will be appealed. This case is an example of the criminalization and decriminalization of agricultural conflict in the Verapaces. We express our solidarity with the defenders and their families.”

PBI-Guatemala began accompanying the Campesino Committee of the Highlands (CCDA), a campesino organization that accompanies and advises mostly Indigenous communities on land rights issues, in July 2018.

A memorial service is taking place today (November 16) for Hazel Tulecke. She died on September 5 in Yellow Springs, Ohio at the age of 95.

Hazel was one of the first Peace Brigades International (PBI) volunteers.

PBI placed its first team in Guatemala on March 21, 1983. In Unarmed Bodyguards, Liam Mahony and Luis Enrique Eguren tell the story of how that first team shaped the mission of PBI that would define its work for years to come.

That first team, for a short while at least, consisted of Hazel. One of her teammates had changed his mind at the last moment and didn’t come, while the other, Alvaro Diaz, was denied a visa because he had explained in detail the purpose of his trip.

PBI activist Dan Clark has written that he called Alain Richard, a French Franciscan worker-priest in Panama, and Pablo Stanfield, a non-violence activist in Seattle, and before long a three-person PBI team was set up in the home of an exiled Guatemalan professor.

By the end of their first month in Guatemala, the team – Hazel, Alain and Pablo – had worked out a plan that included “serving continually as an international presence”, “direct action with regard to disappearances” and “creative nonviolent action in a crisis period”.

Mahony and Eguren write, “During their first year, PBI team members traveled throughout the highlands, visiting rural farmers, clandestine contacts, and government and military officials, introducing themselves and feeling things out.”

“When necessary, they helped people flee the country. In one case, PBI learned of a man who was about to be sentenced to death by Rios Montt’s Special Tribunals. PBI and other groups outside the country put together an overnight campaign, using confidential diplomatic channels of pressure, and they got a stay of sentencing and execution.”

“PBI later helped hustle the man out of the country.”

“By the end of the first year, the team had made many contacts and tested several program ideas, but none of them had developed into a clear mission.”

Then on March 11, 1984, Nineth Montenegro de Garcia wrote them: “I am pleading for your aid in my anguish. My husband, Edgar Fernando Garcia, was kidnapped, or more accurately, illegally captured on Saturday February 18 this year.” She further explained that it was the Police Special Operations Brigade who had taken him.

Nineth was a young schoolteacher, Fernando was a 25-year-old worker at a glass factory who had become involved in a union.

At this point, Edith Cole, a 57-year old psychologist from California, had joined the PBI team of Hazel, Alain and Pablo.

The PBI team asked Nineth if she knew of other people in the same situation and before long the Mutual Support Group (GAM) was formed.

Given the number of people whose loved ones had been disappeared, GAM grew quickly. It met weekly (at the PBI house in Guatemala City), organized memorial masses, published advertisements in the newspapers, listed disappearances and asked for support and investigations, met with the Guatemalan president, organized a silent march for peace, held a sit-in at the congress building, and announced their intention to charge elements of the security forces with the disappearances.

They even called on the international community to cut off aid to Guatemala. It was that last action that led to a siege on GAM.

Nineth writes, “In December [1984] we began to receive the first threats.”

Mahony and Eguren write, “On Saturday, March 30, 1985, Hector Gomez left a GAM meeting at the PBI house. He was found dead the next day with his hands tied behind his back, no tongue, and signs of beating and burns.”

And Clark has written, “On April 3, PBI’s Alain Richard warned founder and secretary of GAM Maria Rosario Godoy de Cuevas not to leave her home for any reason because she was also in danger of being killed. The next day she was found dead in her car in a ravine with her brother and her two-year-old son, who had been ill. The cause of their deaths was strangulation, and the child’s fingernails had been pulled out.”

Mahony and Eguren comment, “According to Alain, the idea of personal accompaniment did not arise until after her death.”

Alain notes, “The night before I had to leave [the country to renew my visa], a close diplomatic contact visited me, along with Jean-Marie Simon of Americas Watch, and they told me, ‘Listen, you’ve started to be with these women. That has to continue. How can you make sure you have enough people to do that?’”

Mahony and Eguren highlight, “This was the beginning of PBI ‘escorting’: providing the surviving GAM leadership with around the clock unarmed bodyguards.”

“The pressure on the Guatemalan state after the two killings was immediate. Peace Brigades International made sure that high-level authorities knew about the escorting and the political costs that further attacks would carry.”

Though the situation remained intense and difficult for the group and some fled the country, “no other GAM leaders were killed.”

To read more about Hazel, please see this YS News article.

It notes, “She wrote letters, demonstrated, taught and sang her convictions. She travelled to where there was need for voices to be heard in favor of justice and peace, whether in this country or elsewhere — in Haiti, Guatemala and Nicaragua. And she was willing to be jailed for her stances on environmental and foreign policy issues, several times engaging in civil disobedience that brought sentences of weeks or months, which she served with an adventuresome spirit.”

That article adds, “In Yellow Springs, Hazel is known for her works to establish the sister village project between El Jicaro, Nicaragua, and Yellow Springs, as well as the Saturday Peace vigil that has been held continuously for 18 years.”

Peace Brigades International-Canada honours the memory of Hazel Tulecke and her profound contribution to the work of PBI today.