Rights Action
March 18, 2020
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The best solution to COVID-19 is people, communities and governments working and collaborating together, based on solidarity and cooperation, mutual well-being and fundamental equality inside and between nations
Dear friends,
I trust this message finds you-all healthy, sanitized and (somewhat) isolated socially. I hope you are living in communities taking appropriate measures to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus, and support people who have contracted it.
Rights Action is expecting and asking for more caution and protective/sanitary measures, not fewer. It is better to be too worried, and take extra protective/sanitary measures, than not enough.
For the immediate future, Rights Action cancelled a number of trips south (leading delegations; taking journalists; visiting partner groups) and two educational-activism trips north for community defender partners of ours.
Rights Action continues with our work, monitoring how COVID-19 plays itself out in the U.S., Canada and ‘south of the border’, particularly in Honduras and Guatemala. Unjustly, but quite predictably, a disproportionate percentage of COVID-19 victims will be amidst the poorer, exploited sectors of our overlapping human communities, from the local to global levels.
We are particularly concerned about the conditions of hundreds of thousands of Hondurans and Guatemalans who were forced to flee their countries by violence and poverty, corruption and desperation kept in place by repressive U.S. and Canadian-supported regimes, people who are now ‘criminalized’, many of whom are illegally held in unsanitary detention centers, jails and crowded forced migrant camps in Mexico and the U.S.
To the best of our financial ability, Rights Action will increase small general support grants to long-term community defender partner groups in Guatemala and Honduras so that they may take steps in their homes and communities to socially isolate, to provide a minimal of soap and water that can be boiled, and to support any person who contracts the virus.
We encourage folks, who are in a position to do so, to continue funding our work with on-line donations or bank-to-bank transfers. We encourage folks not to send checks, unless this is your only option. Our part-time colleagues in Toronto and Washington DC will visit our PO boxes on a regular basis, as long as no postal service restrictions are put in place, and respecting recommendations for social distancing that may limit this as well.
The best solution to COVID-19, as with so many injustices, violence and inequalities plaguing the lives of so many humans, is people, communities and governments working and collaborating together, based on solidarity and cooperation, mutual well-being and fundamental equality inside and between nations.
This is always the case. This is what Rights Action, and our partner groups in Guatemala and Honduras, have long been working for.
Thank-you. Best wishes to all, near and far.
Grahame Russell, director Rights Action
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Tax-Deductible Donations (Canada & U.S.)
To support land, human rights and environmental defender groups in Honduras and Guatemala, make check to "Rights Action" and mail to:
- U.S.: Box 50887, Washington DC, 20091-0887
- Canada: (Box 552) 351 Queen St. E, Toronto ON, M5A-1T8
