News for your weekend

We know it’s difficult to find reliable news. USESSC has a collection for you if you want to catch up with what’s happening in El Salvador and with U.S. foreign policy:

 

‘It’s a war on the people’: El Salvador’s mass arrests send thousands into despair (The Guardian)
Tom Phillips, on the State of Exception

 

People marched on World Environment Day to demand policies to protect the environment (Diario Co-latino, in Spanish): “We are asking him (Bukele) to bring back the proposed constitutional reform of the human right to water and the human right to food”

 

Gang Extraditions Will Unify Washington against Bukele (Op Ed in El Faro – audio available)
Ricardo Bukele, on the conversations in Washington towards the Bukele administration and their refusal to extradite gang leaders. One of them (according to leaked audios) was taken to Guatemala by official Carlos Marroquin.
Bukele said in the past: “…We received support from the US government to fight crime, but it was under the Trump administration. You are now supporting the gangs and their civil liberties”. (France 24)

 

NGOs reject new registration process that has not been properly explained (ElSalvador.com, in Spanish):
“The new regulation, for us, is invasive, it restricts freedom of association, because it imposes, among other things, a new registration of all civil society organizations. What result will we have? We do not know, keep in mind that we are going to register in the unit that is under the direction of the Attorney General’s Office, we are already registered in the Registry of Non-Profit Associations and Foundations”, said Henri Fino, executive director of FESPAD, during a press conference prior to the event.

Alejandro Valverth, a consultant for the Association for Legislative Development and Democracy of Guatemala (Legis), stated that 1,214 NGOs would be in the process of being canceled in his country due to ignorance of the reforms to the Law on Non-Governmental Organizations that forced them to update their data within a period of six months.

 

Vice President Harris Announces More Than $1.9 Billion in New Private Sector Commitments as Part of Call to Action for Northern Central America (X)

Private Sector and Civil Society Commitments
Today, the Vice President and the Partnership for Central America launched In Her Hands as a private sector initiative to empower, train, and protect women in northern Central America and across the Western Hemisphere. Founding members are a coalition of companies and organizations who responded to Vice President Harris’s Call to Action, including CARE, Cargill, Mastercard, Microsoft, Millicom, Nespresso, PepsiCo, PriceSmart, and Pro Mujer.

 

Neo-liberal policies announced by the Biden administration as “a strategy to address the root causes of migration” are hardly new. They have never worked. They are often weaponized to control people and they never address inequality and the impact of capitalism in the region.

 

USESSC keeps supporting CRIPDES’ women’s program. Read more here.

 

Our spring board meeting will also be held virtually this weekend. We hope to share more information soon.

 

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