It's Live on the HomePage Now: Robert Reich | Trump Has Captured the Republican Party - and That's Great News for Biden
The Grand Old Party, founded in 1854 in Ripon, Wisconsin, is now dead. What’s left is a dwindling number of elected officials who have stood up to Trump but are now being purged. Even Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s popularity has dropped 29 points among Kentucky Republicans since he broke with Trump. In its place is the Trump party, whose major goal is to advance Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Its agenda is to exact vengeance on Republicans who didn’t or won’t support the lie or who voted to impeach or convict Trump for inciting the violence that the lie generated, and to keep attention focused on the former president’s grievances. As the Trump party takes over the GOP, anti-Trump Republicans are abandoning the party in droves – thereby weakening it for general elections while simultaneously strengthening Trump’s hand inside it. It is great news for Democrats and Joe Biden. Democrats couldn’t hope for a more perfect foil – a defeated one-term president who never cracked 47% of the popular vote, left office with just 39% approval and is now hovering at an abysmal 34%, whom most Americans dislike or loathe, and a majority believe incited an insurrection against the United States. The gift will keep giving. Courtesy of the supreme court, Trump’s tax returns will soon be raked across America like barnyard manure. Expect more of his shady business dealings to be exposed – more payoffs, cheats and cons – as well as civil and criminal prosecutions. The Trump party isn’t interested in appealing to the nation as a whole, anyway. It’s interested only in appealing to Trump and the base that worships him. All this is making it nearly impossible for congressional Republicans to mount a strong opposition to Biden’s ambitious plans for Covid relief followed by major investments in infrastructure and jobs. Lacking unity, leadership, strategy, clarity or a coherent message on anything other than Trump’s grievances, the Trump party is irrelevant to the large choices facing the nation. Democrats in Washington have the public square all to themselves. Biden is in the enviable position of getting most of America behind his agenda – and he can do so without a single Republican vote if Senate Democrats end the filibuster. Democrats have proven themselves capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. But if they and Biden use this opportunity as they should, by this time next year Covid will be a tragic memory, and the nation will be in the midst of an economic recovery propelling it toward full employment and rising wages. With the GOP in disarray and rabid Trumpism turning off ever more voters, the 2022 midterm elections could swell Democratic majorities in Congress. But the emergence of the Trump party is deeply worrisome for America. It is a dangerous, deluded, authoritarian and potentially violent faction that has no responsible role in a democracy. Its big lie enables supporters of the former president to believe their efforts to overturn the 2020 election were necessary to protect American democracy, and that they must continue to fight a “deep state” conspiracy to thwart Trump. This is an open invitation to violence. The big lie also justifies Trump Party efforts to suppress votes considered “fraudulent.” In 33 states, Trump Republican lawmakers are already pushing more than 165 bills intended to stop mail-in voting, increase voter ID requirements, make it harder to register to vote and expand purges of voter rolls. Democrats in Congress are responding with their proposed For the People Act, to expand voting through automatic voter registration across the country, early voting and enlarged mail-in voting. The incipient civil war pits a national Democratic party representing America’s majority against a state-based Trump Party representing a defiant and overwhelmingly white, working-class minority. It’s a recipe for a harsh clash between democracy and authoritarianism. Plus, there’s the small possibility Trump could run again in 2024 and win. What’s good for Biden and the Democrats in the short run is potentially disastrous for America over the longer term. One of its two major parties is centered on a big lie that threatens to blow up the nation, figuratively if not literally.
ALSO SEE: White House Withdraws Neera Tanden's RSN: RootsAction | Statement on Withdrawal of Tanden Nomination
RootsAction began its nationwide campaign to defeat the Tanden nomination on Jan. 3: http://act.rootsaction.org/o/6503/t/0/blastContent.jsp?email_blast_KEY=227742
ALSO SEE: Supreme Court Appears to Favor Restrictive Stacey Abrams on Why Securing Voting Rights Is as Necessary Now as in the Past
Abrams tells All Things Considered that the Democratic swing was "extraordinary," but "not wholly surprising," adding that the "numbers had been moving in our favor" in recent years. The 2020 election had historic turnout, but for Abrams, the fight to secure voting rights is just beginning. On Monday, the Georgia House of Representatives passed legislation that would restrict early and absentee voting. And 42 other states are also considering bills that would make it harder to vote. Last year, Abrams helped to make a documentary about voter suppression, in the past and present. Now, All In: The Fight for Democracy has been shortlisted for an Oscar. Here are excerpts from the interview. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, there are more than 250 bills in 43 states that seek to tighten voting rules, including the one that just passed in the Georgia House of Representatives. Supporters of the bill are saying that adding uniform Monday through Saturday voting times lessens confusion, while Democratic lawmakers say that that kind of bill discriminates against Black voters who mobilize on Sundays often. Do you agree with that assessment of these Democratic lawmakers that this kind of bill directly holds back Black voters? Georgia has 159 counties. The largest county has more than a million people, the smallest county has 2,500, and what has happened for the last 15 years is that we've allowed more to be done for places that are larger. And here's why this matters. In the 2020 general election, in 107 out of 159 counties, Black Georgians were more likely than white Georgians to vote on weekends instead of during the week. Under [the Georgia legislation], this limitation of access to voting is going to disproportionately harm Black voters because they tend to live in larger counties and they tend to live in higher population communities. This is not about uniformity. This is about constriction of access because in those larger counties, more people turned out in 2020 and it changed the outcome of elections in ways that Republicans loathe to acknowledge and see repeated. [On Tuesday] the Supreme Court has heard arguments in two Arizona cases that could further gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act. How worried are you that this current 6-3 conservative majority court will help erode much of the work that you and other activists have done? I'm deeply concerned and I am sadly steeled for that result. We know that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been the remaining pillar that has protected communities of color, because what it says is that states and local governments are not permitted to pass laws that are discriminatory against people of color in their ability to vote. The challenge that's raised by the erosion of Section 2 is that if you can pretend that the reason you are taking these actions is not connected to race, then you are permitted to eviscerate access. This matters because that's exactly what precipitated the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And if we eviscerate Section 2, we are returning to post-Reconstruction Jim Crow-era laws. And this is not hyperbole. It is a direct through line, which is one of the reasons All In: The Fight for Democracy is so important, because I need people to understand this isn't a new trick. This is the same trick that has been played time and again to deny access to the right to vote to voters who are considered undesirable by the party in power. |
ootsAction is proud to have led the progressive opposition to Neera Tanden’s nomination and heartened that she will not be OMB director. The opposition of Republican senators over nasty tweets was of course hypocritical and absurd, given their muted response to years of Trump’s tweeting. But it was inexcusable for Democratic senators to be silent about the legitimate reasons to oppose her nomination -- the potential conflicts of interest raised by her years of coziness with powerful corporate elites. That silence may be explained by the fact that Democrats in the Senate are beholden to some of the same corporate donors that lavishly bankroll Tanden’s think tank.Tanden was the wrong choice to head a federal agency that is vital in the regulatory process. It strains credulity to contend that she would have been a true advocate for the public interest after many years of dutifully serving corporate interests.
or the first time in nearly three decades, the state of Georgia voted to put a Democrat in the White House. Then it added two U.S. senators from the Democratic Party. And one person central to turning Georgia blue is the voting rights activist and former state legislator Stacey Abrams.
'Fight for 15.' (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Democrats Courted Fight for $15. The Movement Wants Them to Deliver.
Sarah Jones, New York Magazine
Jones writes: "Public opinion also favors a minimum wage."
hen LaTonya Jones Costa goes to work, her shift can start at a deathbed. It happened that way in December, when the home health aide arrived at the residence of a much-loved client. The woman’s lips were blue; there was vomit and feces on her. Still conscious, she worried about missing a doctor’s appointment, but Costa knew she needed a hospital and called for an ambulance. By the time the medics arrived, they couldn’t find the woman’s vitals. They took her away, and the same day, Costa received the call she’d been dreading: The woman had died. “What hurt me the most was that I wasn’t able to be there with her,” Costa said, choking up.
Costa makes $10 an hour. This is a fifty-cent improvement from when she first started working as a certified nursing assistant in Georgia in 2007. Paying her bills is a question of “creative budgeting,” she said. The lights have to stay on now, and her twelve-year-old daughter needs the internet for school. But “the water bill is due on the 11th, and I won’t receive a shut off notice until the 20th. So this can go a little bit longer,” she explained. After her client died in December, she started driving for Lyft to try to make up the income. She said she lost money instead.
What she needs, she said, is a $15 minimum wage. And she needs it this year, not at some future date to be determined by lackadaisical legislators. So does Ieisha Franceis, who works for $9.20 an hour at Freddy’s Frozen Custard and Steakburgers in Durham, North Carolina. Like Costa, Franceis is an activist with the Fight for $15 and a Union and helped lead two walkouts at Freddy’s last year over what she said were dangerous lapses in pandemic safety. She had hopes for this Congress. Now, on the phone, she sounds like a woman out of patience.
“It’s ridiculous,” Franceis said. “You have this unelected ghost that just popped up out of nowhere. Who is this person, this Senate parliamentarian? Who are you to decide whether millions of African American workers make more money and come out of poverty? Whether millions of Latinos are able to come out of poverty?”
Franceis and Costa have both paid close attention to the ongoing battle to include a $15 minimum wage in the latest COVID-19 stimulus package. Progressive Democrats have the votes in the House but not the Senate, where moderates Krysten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia remain steadfastly opposed to increasing the nation’s poverty wage. Last Thursday, Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that the Byrd rule prohibited Democrats from including a minimum-wage hike in a relief bill passed through budget reconciliation to avoid a Republican filibuster — it is, to use the Byrd rule’s language, “extraneous.”
Progressive Democrats disagree. Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota has called for MacDonough to be fired; a group of House progressives, including Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Pramila Jayapal of Washington, have called for Vice-President Kamala Harris to overrule the parliamentarian. Even if that were to happen — the White House says it has no such plans — Manchin and Sinema would still deny Democrats the majority they need to give a living wage to workers like Franceis and Costa.
That disappoints Fight for $15 activists, who were courted by Democratic presidential candidates during the primary season. Harris, for example, joined striking members on a Las Vegas picket line and Joe Biden ran on a $15 minimum wage. Working with the Service Employees International Union, Fight for $15 organized a sophisticated get-out-the-vote campaign for Democratic candidates that built on previous successes with minimum-wage increases in a handful of states and municipalities. “I feel like we wore them down to make them listen,” Franceis said of the political class.
Public opinion also favors a $15 minimum wage. A February survey from Yahoo Finance and the Harris Poll found that 83 percent of Americans believe the federal $7.25 minimum wage, which hasn’t been raised since 2009, is too low. Fifty percent believe it should be either $13 to $15 or higher than $15. Twenty-nine percent support a wage of either $10 to $12. (Manchin supports an $11 minimum wage, placing him squarely within this minority.) Voters in Florida approved a $15 minimum wage by referendum last year. In fact, $15 an hour is something of a lowball estimate now: If the federal minimum wage first enacted in 1968 had kept up with inflation and worker-productivity growth, economist Dean Baker has said it would be more than $24 an hour today.
Nobody has suggested raising the wage quite that high, and most proposals for a $15 minimum wage would phase it in over the next several years, including the contested provision in the COVID-19 relief bill. But even an increase to $15 an hour would lift around 1 million people out of poverty, according to a recent analysis from the Congressional Budget Office. Though the CBO also found that a $15 minimum wage would lead to job losses — a conclusion disputed both by left-leaning think tanks like the Economic Policy Institute and by some literature on existing wage hikes — the losses would likely not be steep enough to offset the economic gains generated by giving workers a wage that keeps their lights on.
“If this is what you said you would do, and this is what’s in your heart to actually do, then let’s stop playing games. Stop trying to play nicey-nice in the sandbox,” she said. Costa, too, is waiting for the Democratic Party to deliver on its promises.
“I did my part. I got out and I voted, even during the pandemic. I didn’t vote by mail. I went down to the polling station because I felt like it was my duty,” said Costa, who lives in Atlanta. “I got my friends to come out and vote, and my family to come out and vote, because I believed that things would change if we changed the administration.”
Instead, she added, she’s still fighting. “Why do I have to fight for what these politicians take for granted?” she asked. “Why do I have to fight for the basic necessities?”
American Patriots Three Percent was described by one person on the membership list as an attempt to 'build out a national network of Three Percent groups'. (photo: Maranie R Staab/AFP/Getty Images)
US Militia Group Draws Members From Military and Police, Website Leak Shows
Jason Wilson, Guardian UK
Wilson writes:
Analysis: Membership list of American Patriots Three Percent also shows widespread network of people from variety of occupations
Guardian investigation of a website leak from the American Patriots Three Percent shows the anti-government militia group have recruited a network across the United States that includes current and former military members, police and border patrol agents.
But the leak also demonstrates how the radical group has recruited from a broad swath of Americans, not just military and law enforcement. Members include both men and women, of ages ranging from their 20s to their 70s, doing jobs from medical physics to dental hygiene and living in all parts of the country.
Experts say the revelations of the broad scope of the movement’s membership shows the mainstreaming of the radical politics of militia and so-called “Patriot Movement” groups during the Trump era and beyond.
There has been a particular focus on the militia movement after the 6 January attack on the Capitol in Washington DC, in which a rampaging pro-Trump mob included militia members and others from far-right organizations.
According to members who spoke to the Guardian, the website from which the list was leaked was set up by national leaders of Patriot Movement group, which is affiliated with the broader Three Percenter movement.
Names, phone numbers and even photographs of members were obtained by activists who then posted the data to an internet archiving site, and the Guardian cross-referenced these with public records and other published materials.
One of the activists who discovered the leak, whose name has been withheld due to safety concerns, said that the Wordpress site’s poorly configured membership plugin left those details exposed to public view. Additional materials seen by the Guardian confirm that claim, and show that the materials were obtained by a simple search technique.
Many of the members revealed by the leak have extensive armed forces experience, including some who are still serving in branches of the US military.
Master Sergeant Andrew Holloway Selph performs quality assurance on fighter jets for the US air force in Hill air force Base, near Ogden, Utah, and is a 20-year service veteran. On 16 February, the Daily Dot reported that Selph had been nominated as a Utah contact for the Oath Keepers, another far-right Patriot Movement group which has been implicated in the organization of the Capitol riot.
The group also has retired soldiers, including Scott Seddon, who founded the group in 2009 as one of a number of Three Percent groups that arose in the wake of the election of President Barack Obama. In 2018, he told journalist, Chris Hedges that he had done so “out of fear”.
It also features the group’s similarly-named, self-styled “sergeant major”
and website administrator, Scott Sneddon, a former air force sergeant and now a realtor in Layton, Utah. He joined the breached AP3% website with thesales email address of the group’s merchandise website.
Several other members of the group are current or serving police or military officers, including a reserve deputy police constable in Texas with a long police and US air force career behind him.
Meanwhile, Phillip Whitehead, 61, of Prescott Valley, Arizona, is the commander of that city’s American Legion post. In his bio on that site he boasts of six years’ military service in the 1980s, and then 34 years in law enforcement including stints in the Tucson police department, Yavapai county sheriff’s office, and the US border patrol.
In a telephone conversation, Whitehead blamed national leaders of AP3% for breaching members’ privacy. Describing his role as “sergeant at arms and zone commander” in the Arizona AP3%, he said he was “appalled that information attached to individuals” had been leaked from the site.
He explained that he had not specifically entered his own details on the site, and his understanding was that the information had been collected from state-level organizations to be stored in a “member-only database” which would serve as “a way to contact the organization and perhaps as a recruitment tool”.
Whitehead’s claims that he did not specifically provide information to the website matched the response of a serving US army non-commissioned officer who, when contacted by the Guardian, said that he had only attended one “meet and greet” several years before, and could not explain how his contact details came to be added to the website.
“A lot of us are former military, former law enforcement,” Whitehead said of the leak. “Some of us have had high level security clearance. This has put myself and my family at risk.”
Whitehead insisted that the group was “not a militia” and the goal as he understood it was to act as “community protectors at the request of local authorities”. Beyond the “distress” caused by the website, Whitehead criticized Seddon, the national leader, for his “outbursts in a public forum, Facebook”, adding that “I don’t like his public behavior because I don’t think that’s what the organization should stand for.”
Devin Burghart is vice-president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), which tracks far-right militants including the militia movement.
In a telephone conversation, Burghart said that AP3% were “one of the early attempts to build out a national network of Three Percent groups”, and that “they were successful early on in using Facebook for recruitment”.
He said that while AP3% “definitely have a far-right paramilitary structure and ideology”, they were “far more focused on action than they are on ideology”, and have in the past done extensive live fire drills and acted as vigilante security guards during protests, including recent Black Lives Matter protests around the country.
Burghart said that “military veterans involved in far-right paramilitary groups are not just betraying their oaths, they are threatening American democracy and national security”, adding that “there is a staggeringly long list of far-rightist veterans trained in the use of lethal force overseas who turned those techniques on Americans back home in pursuit of political aims.”
Not all of the members have experience in the armed forces or law enforcement, and many do workaday jobs. Members investigated by the Guardian include dental hygienists, Apple Geniuses and beekeepers.
Others work in advanced or specialized fields. John P Balog, of Rome, New York, has a PhD in medical physics and advertises a consultancy advising on radiation therapy for cancer patients.
Dr Balog was another AP3% member who responded to requests for comment on the website leak.
After emailing and calling on a protected number, Balog described the group as a “secret society”, and said that the website had been in existence for several years.
Asked why secrecy was necessary, Balog said that “honestly because most of the country doesn’t share our values”, which he characterized as “hardcore conservatism”.
Other members of the site have a documented history of joining online forums for similar groups. Data provided to the Guardian by IREHR indicates that many were members of a wide range of militia-related groups on Facebook before that company began reining in such organizing on its website.
Seth Weiner, 34, of Canton, New York, who is also the administrator of a Facebook group for collectors of German Iron Cross military medals, was a member of seven militia-related Facebook groups including “Q Patriots”, “Pissed Off Patriots of America”, and “Red Pilled Patriots”.
Brian Plescher, of Ottawa, Ohio, was a member of nine such groups on Facebook, including one attached to Ohio Militiamen, the Continental Militia Network and “APIII American Patriot the III%, Old School”, the Facebook group that once served as AP3%’s online hub. Jennifer Delane Hinson, a dental assistant in Pontotoc, Mississippi, was also a member of the AP3% Facebook group, along with groups like the “Mississippi Minute Man Militia” and “III% Militia national Contingency”, all under the alias, Jenny Plunk.
Members of the group are not concentrated in any region of the United States, but there are unusual levels of membership in some states and counties, including some outside the Patriot Movement’s heartlands in the midwest, south and west of the country.
New York state, for example, is home to 53 of the signed-up Three Percenters – more than 11% of the total members on the site – and 17 members are resident in and around Saint Lawrence county, in the state’s far north on the Canadian border.
While the leak disclosed the details of about 500 members, Burghart said the total national membership was probably “somewhere in the low thousands”.
The site is no longer online, and visiting the URL returns a page which says “this account has been suspended”. Internet records indicate that they abruptly lost hosting around 2 February, just after the leak was discovered. Their former hosts, wix.com, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
AP3% made news in January when pictures emerged of Colorado members posing with the controversial Colorado congresswoman Lauren Bobert on the steps of that state’s capitol.
Denis Giles, editor of Indian newspaper Andaman Chronicle, works inside his office in Port Blair, the capital of Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, India, March 1, 2021. Picture taken March 1, 2021. (photo: Stringer/Reuters)
SOS Call to Indian Newspaper Saves 81 Rohingya at Sea, but No Country Says Welcome
Rupam Jain, Reuters
Jain writes:
enis Giles, the editor of a small Indian newspaper, received a phone call as he sat typing in his one-room office in Port Blair overlooking the languid waters of the Andaman Sea.
The caller, Mohammed Siddiqui, was frantic and largely incoherent. Giles said he was about to hang up until he heard, in broken Hindi: “Please help me... Many people may die.”
Siddiqui pleaded with Giles to spread the word of dozens of Rohingya Muslims fleeing Bangladesh for Malaysia aboard a crippled fishing boat in the Andaman Sea. Eight of the passengers had already died.
“You can help me save lives,” Siddiqui told Giles, who publishes the English-language Andaman Chronicle, which has been covering news in India’s coral reef-fringed Andaman and Nicobar archipelago for more than 15 years.
Siddiqui’s brother and the other Rohingya passengers had paid human traffickers to smuggle them to Malaysia from cramped refugee camps in southern Bangladesh that are home to more than a million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar.
Siddiqui, who lives in Australia, told Reuters that he learned of the fate of the vessel after his brother made an SOS call from a satellite phone on board the boat on Feb. 18, roughly a week after it embarked on the voyage from Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh.
“No one knew of the boat until the engine developed a snag and it drifted near Indian waters,” Siddiqui said. “That was when I got to know that my brother was stuck on a boat with 80 survivors and that eight were dead due to extreme dehydration or hunger.”
Siddiqui said he tried to reach the Bangladesh Coast Guard and other agencies.
“There was just no response. Finally I decided to call some journalists and based on the GPS coordinates I realised the only person who could help was someone based in the Andaman Islands,” Siddiqui said.
FAVOURED DESTINATION
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were forced to flee their homeland after a crackdown by Myanmar’s military in 2017. Myanmar denies accusations of genocide and says the army was fighting a legitimate counter-insurgency campaign.
The Rohingya are a minority group, most of whom are denied citizenship by Buddhist-majority Myanmar, which considers them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
Muslim-majority Malaysia has been a favoured destination for fleeing Rohingya. Many risk the perilous sea journey in rickety boats despite Malaysia saying last year it would no longer accept them.
Siddiqui, who was given the coordinates by the fishing boat captain, passed them to Giles, who was the first person to call the Indian Coast Guard to alert them. That was Feb. 19.
“I told them people are dying they must send ships to help them but Indian officials instead suggested I send them details via email,” said Giles.
He fired off an email with the coordinates of the boat that was adrift roughly 235 km (150 miles) northeast of Port Blair, said Giles in an effort to explain the urgency.
Giles, who published a story about the refugees on Feb. 21, said he only received a call from the coast guard on Feb. 23 to inform him that a rescue was under way.
The Indian Coast Guard and Navy did not respond to requests for comment on the rescue operation.
“THE SEA IS NOT THEIR HOME”
But while the boat has been located, the fate of the passengers remains far from certain.
India’s foreign ministry confirmed the boat had been found and that two Coast Guard ships were helping those on board and repairing the vessel so that it could return safely to Bangladesh.
But Bangladesh Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen last week told Reuters his government expects either India, the closest country, or Myanmar to take it in.
Aid agencies are demanding that governments stop passing the buck and act.
“The law of the sea equally binds all states to come to the rescue of persons in distress at sea and deliver them to a place of safety,” said Catherine Stubberfield, an Asia-Pacific spokeswoman for the UNHCR.
“This applies regardless of nationality, legal status, or circumstances in which people in distress are found.”
New Delhi has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, which spells out refugee rights and state responsibilities to protect them, nor does it have a law protecting refugees.
Giles said he feels relieved the refugees are at least getting help for now, along with food, water and medicine.
“I hope the Rohingya receive a warm welcome from a country at the earliest,” said Giles. “The sea is not their home.”
Berta Cáceres, Honduran environmental activist and indigenous leader, was murdered on March 2, 2016. (photo: Jacobin)
Honduras Looks Back on the Murder of Environmental Activist Berta Caceres
teleSUR
She was murdered in 2016 for opposing a hydroelectric project on the Gualcarque River that endangered Lenca Indigenous communities.
he Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) on Tuesday remembers the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Lenca Indigenous leader Berta Caceres.
International organizations such as Ecologist in Action, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Global Witness signed a letter calling for justice in this case.
Caceres fiercely opposed a hydroelectric project granted to the company "Desarrollos Energeticos" S.A. (DESA) on the Gualcarque River, for it endangered the livelihoods of Lenca Indigenous communities.
In 2019, seven people were convicted and sentenced for her murder. DESA ex-President David Castillo was accused of being the "intellectual author" even though reports connected other high-ranking officials in the events.
COPINH warned that Castillo's lawyers had taken measures on repeated occasions to cause delays in the judicial process to date.
On March 3, 2016, four hired killers entered Caceres' home in La Esperanza village and murdered her. Later Investigations revealed that DESA officials planned the crime executed by the Military.
Between 2017 and 2020, Indigenous peoples filed nearly 35 complaints with the Prosecutor's Office about murders and menaces against human rights defenders. No legal actions have been taken against the alleged aggressors.
"This tragic event was a hard blow not only for human rights defenders in the Americas but for the whole world...Caceres has become a symbol of hope and courage for all people fighting for justice and dignity," COPINH stressed.
