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Guatemalan Former Officials Must be Brought to Justice over Killings
WASHINGTON
Austria and Switzerland must ensure that former high-ranking Guatemalan officials face justice for serious allegations of involvement in extrajudicial executions, Amnesty International said today.
Both countries have ongoing proceedings against Guatemalan former officials over cases of prisoners who died in custody from 2004 to 2007, with Austria poised to decide shortly whether one will be extradited.
"This is an opportunity for Austria and Switzerland to prove their commitment to international human rights standards," said Sebastian Elgueta, Researcher on Central America at Amnesty International.
"Either by extraditing the accused to face trial in Guatemala or prosecuting in their own countries, European countries can help Guatemalan victims of human rights violations achieve justice."
Amnesty International called on Austrian authorities to either approve the extradition to Guatemala of Javier Figueroa Diaz, former chief of the criminal investigation division of Guatemala's police force, or prosecute him in Austria. He is currently under house arrest in Austria pending a judge's ruling on the extradition next week.
In Switzerland, an investigation is ongoing into the alleged involvement of Guatemala's former police chief Erwin Sperisen, who holds dual Swiss-Guatemalan citizenship, in several cases of extrajudicial executions of prisoners. The Swiss authorities recently contacted their Guatemalan counterparts to seek information relating to the investigation. The Swiss constitution gives Swiss citizens the right not to be extradited.
Spanish authorities on 31 May approved the extradition of Guatemala's former Interior Minister Carlos Vielman, who has been living in Spain, on related charges.
All three former officials and others are accused of involvement in extrajudicial executions while they served in Guatemala's government and police force.
Among the cases involved are the killings of four inmates who escaped from El Infiernito prison in October 2005, as well as the killings of seven prisoners in El Pavon prison in September 2006 and other alleged crimes.
At the time, Guatemala's Interior Ministry and police said that the inmates at El Pavon had been killed in clashes with prison authorities. However, a December 2006 report of the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman's Office concluded they had been shot, amounting to extrajudicial executions.
"Ensuring these former officials face fair, impartial trials - whether at home or abroad - sends a strong signal that steps are being taken to overcome Guatemala's rampant impunity in cases of extrajudicial executions and other human rights violations," said Sebastian Elgueta.
Amnesty International is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights for all. Our supporters are outraged by human rights abuses but inspired by hope for a better world - so we work to improve human rights through campaigning and international solidarity. We have more than 2.2 million members and subscribers in more than 150 countries and regions and we coordinate this support to act for justice on a wide range of issues.
LATEST NEWS
Pentagon Partners With Musk's AI Chatbot Despite Child Porn Scandal and Owner's Embrace of White Nationalism
"If an AI system cannot meet basic safety and integrity standards, expanding its reach to include classified data puts the American public and our nation’s safety at risk," said a tech expert at Public Citizen.
Jan 13, 2026
Elon Musk, the world's richest man and the owner of the social media app X, has faced a mountain of outrage in recent weeks as his platform's artificial intelligence chatbot "Grok" has been used to generate sexualized deepfake images of nonconsenting women and children, and Musk himself has embraced open white nationalism.
But none of this seems to be of particular concern to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Despite the swirl of scandal, he announced on Monday that Musk's chatbot would be given intimate access to reams of military data as part of what the department described as its new "AI acceleration strategy."
During a speech at the headquarters of SpaceX, another company owned by Musk, Hegseth stood alongside the billionaire and announced that later this month, the department plans to “make all appropriate data” from the military’s IT systems available for “AI exploitation,” including “combat-proven operational data from two decades of military and intelligence operations.”
As the Associated Press noted, it's a departure from the more cautious approach the Biden administration took toward integrating AI with the military, which included bans on certain uses "such as applications that would violate constitutionally protected civil rights or any system that would automate the deployment of nuclear weapons."
While it's unclear if those bans remain in place under President Donald Trump, Hegseth said during the speech he will seek to eschew the use of any AI models "that won't allow you to fight wars" and will seek to act "without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications," before adding that the Pentagon's AI will not be "woke” or “equitable.”
He added that the department “will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI. He added that ”we will become an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force across all domains.
Hegseth's embrace of Musk hardly comes as a surprise, given his role in the Trump administration's dismantling of the administrative state as head of its so-called "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) last year, and his record $290 million in support for the president's 2024 election campaign.
But it is quite noteworthy given the type of notoriety Grok has received of late after it introduced what it called “spicy mode” for the chatbot late last year, which “allows users to digitally remove clothing from images and has been deployed to produce what amounts to child pornography—along with other disturbing behavior, such as sexualizing the deputy prime minister of Sweden,” according to a report last month from MS NOW (formerly MSNBC).
It's perhaps the most international attention the bot has gotten, with the United Kingdom's media regulator launching a formal investigation on Monday to determine whether Grok violated the nation's Online Safety Act by failing to protect users from illegal content, including child sexual abuse material.
The investigation could result in fines, which, if not followed, could lead to the chatbot being banned, as it was over the weekend in Malaysia and Indonesia. Authorities in the European Union, France, Brazil, and elsewhere are also reviewing the app for its spread of nonconsensual sexual images, according to the New York Times.
One example of how Grok is being used to target women. Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch being sexualised, degraded, and humiliated step-by-step by Grok. All the images accurately reflect the prompts provided.
[image or embed]
— Eliot Higgins (@eliothiggins.bsky.social) January 5, 2026 at 12:37 PM
It's only the latest scandal involving the Grok, which Musk pitched as an "anti-woke" and "truth-seeking" alternative to applications like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.
At several points last year, the chatbot drew attention for its sudden tendency to launch into racist and antisemitic tirades—praising Adolf Hitler, accusing Jewish people of controlling Hollywood and the government, and promoting Holocaust denial.
Before that, users were baffled when the bot began directing unrelated queries about everything from cats to baseball back to discussions about Musk's factually dubious pet theory of "white genocide" in South Africa, which the chatbot later revealed it was "instructed" to talk about.
Hegseth’s announcement on Monday also comes as Musk has completed his descent into undisguised support for a white nationalist ideology over the past week.
The billionaire's steady lurch to the far-right has been a years-long process—capped off last year, with his enthusiastic support for the neofascist Alternative for Germany Party and apparent Nazi salute at Trump's second inauguration.
But his racist outlook was left impossible to deny last week when he expressed support for a pair of posts on X stating that white people must "reclaim our nations" or "be conquered, enslaved, raped, and genocided" and that "if white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered," necessitating "white solidarity."
While details about the expansiveness of Grok’s use by the military remain scarce, Musk's AI platform, xAI, announced in July that it had inked a deal with the Pentagon worth nearly $200 million (notably just a week after the bot infamously referred to itself as “MechaHitler”).
In September, reportedly following direct pressure from the White House to roll it out "ASAP," the General Services Administration announced a "OneGov" agreement, making Grok available to every federal agency for just $0.42 apiece.
That same month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter to Hegseth warning that Musk, who'd also used Grok extensively under DOGE to purge disloyal government employees, was "gaining improper advantages from unique access to DOD data and information." She added that Grok's propensity toward "inaccurate outputs and misinformation" could "harm DOD's strategic decisionmaking."
Following this week's announcement, JB Branch, the Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, said on Tuesday that, "allowing an AI system with Grok’s track record of repeatedly generating nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children to access classified military or sensitive government data raises profound national security, civil rights, and public safety concerns."
"Deploying Grok across other areas of the federal government is worrying enough, but choosing to use it at the Pentagon is a national security disgrace," he added. "If an AI system cannot meet basic safety and integrity standards, expanding its reach to include classified data puts the American public and our nation’s safety at risk.”
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Press Freedom Groups to Congress: Drop Subpoena of Journalist Over Reporting on Venezuela Attack
"This is a dangerous assault on press freedom, as well as the US people’s right to know."
Jan 13, 2026
A coalition of press freedom and civil liberties groups on Tuesday implored US lawmakers to immediately rescind their subpoena of investigative journalist Seth Harp, who named the commander of the elite Army Delta Force unit that carried out the illegal abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife earlier this month.
In a letter to House leaders, Defending Rights & Dissent, the ACLU, Freedom of the Press Foundation, PEN America, Reporters Without Borders, and more than a dozen other organizations warned that "by issuing this subpoena, Congress is undermining one of the most cherished American freedoms."
"The subpoena has few parallels or precedents in recent history and poses a grave danger to the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedom," the letter reads. "There is zero question that Harp’s actions were fully and squarely within the protections of the First Amendment, as well as outside the scope of any federal criminal statutes."
The effort to subpoena Harp was led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), who accused the journalist of the "doxxing a US Delta Force operator" by posting to X a then-publicly available bio of Col. Chris Countouriotis. Harp identified Countouriotis as "the current commander of Delta Force, whose men just invaded a sovereign country, killed a bunch of innocent people, and kidnapped the rightful president."
The House Oversight Committee approved the subpoena—with the support of Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the panel's top Democrat—in a voice vote last week.
X, a platform owned by self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" Elon Musk, locked Harp's account and required him to delete the post on Countouriotis before he could regain access. Luna also referred Harp to the US Justice Department, urging it to "pursue criminal charges" against him.
Harp, an Iraq War veteran who authored a book exposing crimes committed by US Special Forces units, dismissed Luna's "doxxing" accusations and said the identities of military officers who "participated in this illegal and provocative act of war" against Venezuela are "the legitimate subject of journalistic scrutiny."
"I'm not the only one they're going after with these bogus 'doxxing' allegations," Harp wrote on X, "but they would have to radically restructure the fundamental architecture of US law to criminalize reporting the names of government officials involved in breaking news stories."
In their letter to House leaders on Tuesday, the press freedom coalition stressed that while "journalists have a right under the First Amendment to publish even classified information... none of the information published by Harp was classified."
Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, said in a statement that Luna attack on Harp "is clearly designed to chill and intimidate a journalist doing some of the most significant investigative reporting on US Special Forces."
"Her own statement makes clear that far from having a valid legislative purpose, she seeks to hold a journalist ‘accountable’ for what is essentially reporting she dislikes," said Gibbons. "This is a dangerous assault on press freedom, as well as the US people’s right to know. It is shameful it passed the committee."
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Trump Vows 'Reckoning and Retribution is Coming' to Minnesota as ICE Brutality Mounts
The president's declaration came as new reports documented brutality and other abuses carried out by federal immigration agents.
Jan 13, 2026
President Donald Trump vowed on Tuesday that "reckoning and retribution is coming" to the state of Minnesota as new reports documented the brutal actions of federal immigration agents throughout the US.
In a Truth Social post that was amplified by the official White House rapid response account on X, Trump addressed Minnesota residents and asked them if they "really want to live in a community in which their (sic) are thousands of already convicted murderers, drug dealers and addicts, rapists, violent released and escaped prisoners, dangerous people from foreign asylums and mental institutions and insane asylums, and other deadly criminals too dangerous to even mention."
In reality, the operations being done in Minneapolis and across the US by federal immigration agents have little to do with taking violent criminals off the streets.
Recently released data flagged by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, shows that a plurality of people detained by ICE in recent months have no prior criminal convictions.
Trump ended his message with an all-caps declaration to "FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!"
Trump's vow of retribution came just hours after ProPublica published a lengthy investigation documenting 40 instances in which federal immigration agents across the country used "chokeholds and other moves that can block breathing," including nearly 20 instances where agents "appeared to use chokeholds and other neck restraints that the Department of Homeland Security prohibits 'unless deadly force is authorized.'"
The publication also identified several videos in which federal immigration agents were kneeling on the backs of people's necks, similar to the way that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd as he suffocated to death in 2020.
Eric Balliet, a former law enforcement official who worked at both Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, told ProPublica that he has never seen immigration agents use such tactics before, even if they were arrested people suspected of serious crimes.
"I arrested dozens upon dozens of drug traffickers, human smugglers, child molesters—some of them will resist," he said. "I don’t remember putting anybody in a chokehold. Period."
Arnoldo Bazan, a 16-year-old US citizen who was put into a chokehold by federal immigration agents last year, told ProPublica that he "felt like I was going to pass out and die" because of it.
MPR News reported on Tuesday that immigration agents in Minneapolis have apparently been using license plate readers to identify local activists who have been observing and documenting operations in their neighborhoods.
John Boehler, a policy counsel with the ACLU of Minnesota, told MPR News that the agents' actions appear to violate Minnesota state law, which says accessing people's personal data in this manner can only be done if they are suspects in an active criminal investigation.
There is no reason, Boehler emphasized, that observers should be under any kind of criminal probe.
“Following or observing or reporting on federal agencies or federal activities is not a criminal activity—it's protected First Amendment activity,” Boehler explained. "To be using those cameras, to use those license plate readers, to surveil protesters has a chilling effect on First Amendment rights, and that's what we think the goal is."
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