Honduras: Lawyer for Aguán and “Model Cities” Struggles Is Murdered
Weekly News Update on the Americas | September 23, 2012
Activist Honduran attorney Antonio Trejo Cabrera was killed by unknown assailants the evening of Sept. 22 in Tegucigalpa’s América neighborhood near the Toncontín International Airport. Trejo, who was also a Protestant minister, received a call on his telephone while he was in a church attending a wedding; he stepped outside and was gunned down. He died an hour later in a teaching hospital. Trejo was active in two major political conflicts: a long-standing dispute over land in the Lower Aguán Valley in northern Honduras and a new struggle over the Special Development Regions (RED, also known as “Model Cities”), a neoliberal project for creating several privatized semi-autonomous zones near ports.
Trejo was the attorney for the Authentic Claimant Movement of Aguán Campesinos (MARCA), one of the main campesino collectives involved in the Aguán disputes; he was arrested along with 24 MARCA members at a demonstration outside the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ) building in Tegucigalpa on Aug. 21 [see Update #1142]. Annie Bird, co-director of the Toronto-based solidarity organization Rights Action, wrote after Trejo’s death that his “dedicated efforts had regained legal ownership of four farms owned by [wealthy landowners] Miguel Facussé, René Morales and Reinaldo Canales…. Now MARCA will have a hard time continuing to defend their land from the judicial hitmen.” In a statement on Sept. 23, another campesino collective, the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), charged that Facussé, Morales and Canales were responsible for Trejo’s murder. (El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa) 9/23/12; Rights Action email 9/23/12; Notimex 9/23/12 via Univision)
Trejo was also one of several attorneys who filed a complaint with the Public Ministry charging the legislative deputies who voted in favor of the “model cities” project with “the crime of treason to the nation and abuse of authority.” A number of legal challenges have been filed against the project on the grounds that it cedes national sovereignty to private and foreign groups; the main investors appear to be Canadian and US firms [see Update #1144], although some deputies suggested that one US investor, Michael Strong, might be fronting for some Honduran business interests. The Public Ministry itself has found the project unconstitutional, according to Danelia Ferrera, the director of prosecutors at the ministry, although she said any legal action would be on hold until the CSJ makes a ruling. (El Heraldo 9/15/12, 9/19/12)
Opposition to the “model cities” isn’t limited to court challenges. A number of organizations have joined together in a National Campaign Against the Model Cities, which has called for “the most aggressive actions by all the organized sectors and by the citizenry in general, going beyond mere public pronouncements.” The campaign called for a demonstration on Sept. 19 outside the CSJ. (Adital (Brazil) 9/17/12)
Public school teachers included the “model cities” among the issues they protested with a one-day strike on Sept. 21 that shut down classes for two million students; the teachers also protested a change in the schedule for their pay day, which had previously been on the 20th of each month, and the cost of fuel. In Tegucigalpa the teachers gathered at 8 am outside the Francisco Morazán National Pedagogic University (UPNFM) and then spread out to different parts of the capital. One group of strikers blocked traffic on the Centroamérica Boulevard near the National Institute of Teachers’ Social Security (Inprema), which handles teachers’ pensions. In northern Honduras a number of teachers and students blocked Puerto Cortés, the country’s most important port, bringing economic activity to a halt. (A conservative parents’ group responded to the strike by calling for teachers to be subject to drug testing.) (El Heraldo 9/22/12)
Members of the Garífuna ethnic group have combined opposition to the “model cities” project with their continuing struggle to regain land they claim along the northern coast. One of the supposedly “uninhabited” regions being considered for the first “model city” is the area near Puerto Castilla in Colón department, territory that the Garífuna say their ancestors began settling in the early 19th century, more than a decade before 1821, when Honduras became an independent country. On Aug. 26 some 200 Garífuna families occupied the Vallecito area on the coast, with support from a leading Garífuna organization, the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH); apparently this was intended as a preemptive move to establish the Garífuna claim to the area.
The coastal region is near the Aguán Valley, the site of the land dispute between landowners and campesinos, and the Garífuna settlers say they have been harassed by paramilitaries who may be linked either to drug traffickers or to Aguán landowner and cooking oil magnate Miguel Facussé. (Desinformemos 9/17/12 via Lista Informativa Nicaragua y Más; Upside Down World 9/18/12)
Related articles
- Lawyer Representing Peasant Land Rights Cases Murdered in Honduras (hispanicallyspeakingnews.com)
Vallecito Resists, Satuye Lives! The Garífuna Resistance to Honduras’ Charter Cities
By Tim Russo, with Research by Genevieve Roudane and COMPPA | Upside Down World | September 18, 2012
The Camp
It is August 28th in Vallecito, Colon on the Atlantic coast of Honduras. Unceasingly heavy winds and rain pound a small encampment of 200 Garífuna families throughout the night. The families came from more than a dozen of the 46 Garífuna communities that dot the Honduran coastline, in order to set up camp, staking claim to ancestral lands they mean to recover. Not tonight, nor any other since their arrival here on August 26th, do their worries stem from the violent rains or turbulent sea that Isaac has brought. No, Isaac is merely one of 20 or so hurricanes that could show its fury on the Garinagu[i] coast this year.
The Garífuna drums echo robustly and the people’s fervor rises with the tension in the camp as the tarps sound thunderously as they are jarred to and fro in the gale. It is impossible to distinguish the faint movement of people outside the main tent in the absence of the moon and her stars. Suddenly, out of the darkness that surrounds the encampment like an ocean fog that encroaches silently from afar, enveloping everything in its path, heavily armed men wielding sophisticated weaponry burst onto the scene unleashing a barrage of gunfire above the camp. They arrive mounted in pairs on motorcycles, an act in and of itself illegal in Honduras[ii]. They move rapidly from one edge of the camp to the other, relentlessly firing a hairs shot above anything they encounter in their trail. They are uniformed, but not with official police or military uniforms, but well uniformed nonetheless.
“Yes!” insists Alfredo López, Vice-President of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), founder of the first Garífuna radio station, Faluma Bimetu (Sweet Coconut) and coordinator of the Garífuna Radio Network; they are “paramilitaries linked to drug trafficking and Reynaldo Villalobos, the man who has invaded five of the six associative businesses[iii] with over 700 hectares [1730 acres] of land” here in Vallecito. Still a doubt remains as to whether the mercenaries are actually Miguel Facusse’s, the“Palmero de la Muerte” or Palm Owner of Death, as he is known, whose vast extensions of African Palm plantations completely surround Vallecito, with exception of the beach. Regardless, says Alfredo, “against their weapons, our drums are all that we have,” as the drums sound with greater vigor through the camp, exhorting Isaac to unleash a fury of rain to dampen the mercenaries notorious taste for blood. They have already harassed the camp for three enduring nights.
There were no massacres nor was anyone injured last night but the message of the regional plantation owners is dead clear says Alfredo, “They are treating us like trespassers in our own home and instead of receiving help from the authorities, it seems that they are in collusion too.” Despite the fact that no one has slept a wink in three nights, the people here knew what they were getting into by setting up this camp. They came to participate in a non-violent action to recover ancestral garífuna lands that legally and legitimately belong to the garífuna people. They mean to pressure the National Agrarian Institute (INA) into properly surveying the 700 hectares pertaining to the 6 garífuna “associative businesses” [Empresa Ruguma, Saway, Saway Sufritiñu, Walumugu, Satuye, Sinduru Free], and demand that the state guarantee the necessary security conditions for the Garífuna to live and work on this land. The Garífuna, reiterates Alfredo, are no strangers to persecution nor to resistance, “We have been fighting for many years, hundreds of years, and we are not going to give up now because of the sordid interests of a government as irresponsible as Honduras.”
The Land
OFRANEH´s, Report on the Territorial Defense of Vallecito in Colon, indicates that “Historically, Vallecito belongs to the Garífuna people who, in response to pressure from the Spanish after 1804, began to move from the Trujillo bay to the Sico River” in search of fertile land for farming with access to the ocean for fishing, activities that form the backbone of the Garífuna culture. As a result of this displacement and their search for better living conditions than to be exploited workers for the Spanish in Trujillo, at least 24 Garífuna communities began to emerge along the coastal region. Essentially, the Garífuna began to inhabit Vallecito 17 years prior to the Honduran independence from the Spanish Crown in 1821.
The current attempt by the Garífuna, organized by OFRANEH and the Iseri Lidamari Movement, is not their first effort to recover their ancestral lands from the economic interests of the Honduran oligarchy or of the foreign interests that forced their displacement. Shortly after the Garífuna arrived at Vallecito, the story is told, “around 1820, the Scottish pirate Gregor MacGregor ‘purchased’ the Serrania de Payas territory between Trujillo and the Sico River from Georges Frederick I, King of the Moskitia, allegedly in exchange for two bottles of Whiskey.”[iv] This was the first heist, a foreign attempt to appropriate, develop and sell without the people’s consent the Garífuna’s new lands.
In 1887, the first process to title Garífuna lands began near Puerto Cortez, now under the tutelage of the independent Honduran state. The relative peace for the Garífuna communities along the Honduran coast did not last long. The turn of the century proved to show the new face of colonization, manifested in the arrival of the Banana Republic, with its reinvigorated exploitation of natural resources and forced labor. Immense quantities of cultivable lands were turned over to three banana companies, the United Fruit Company (Chiquita), the Standard Fruit Company (Dole), and the Cuyamel Fruit Company. They received 1,235 acres of land for every kilometer of rail they lay for trains in Honduras. By 1929, the United Fruit Company controlled the principal ports and approximately 741,000 acres or nearly a thousand square miles of fertile lands for the banana boom, including the majority of maritime access on the Atlantic coastline.[v]
The Honduran transition from Spanish colony to Banana Republic defined a new era of forced displacements and territorial resistance by the Garífunas due to the pressures and expansionism of the banana companies who rabidly accumulated land and workers. This process provoked major state complicity in order to provide new land titles for the banana companies, ignoring the existing process that began to title land in favor of the Garífuna at the end of the 19th century. Nevertheless, the banana plantations proved, in many cases, too large to completely control.
“In 1997, the Iseri Lidamari movement, accompanied by OFRANEH, met with the National Agrarian Institute (INA) to obtain land titles in the [Vallecito] territory for six “associative businesses”; as a result, they obtained legal documents that recognize 2,700 hectares of land as Garífuna property,” states OFRANEH’s Report on Territorial Defense in Vallecito, Colon. However, the same report indicates:
“Since that date, intruders have attempted to take over that territory. Miguel Facussé planted 100 hectares of African Palm in Ruguma, one of the six “associative businesses” but the Supreme Court (CSJ) ruled in favor of the Garífunas, annulling Facussé’s claims to that land. Despite this [ruling], in recent years the area has turned into a corridor for organized crime and drug trafficking, causing the number of residents in the area to diminish.”
According to Teofilo Colon Jr., a Garífuna journalist and researcher in New York City, the creation of said corridor of organized crime and the usurpation of lands has provoked the following results, “In the last 18 years, 86% of Garífuna land has been seized by non-Garífunas.”[vi] The situation has become acute since the 1990’s, as the introduction of the war on drugs has intensified. OFRANEH highlights this in a communiqué:
“Since 2005, people associated with organized crime impose a reign of terror on the Limon- Punta Piedras corridor, forcing Garífunas living in Vallecito to reduce their presence and activities on land belonging to their “associative businesses”. Subsequently, foreigners arrive, taking over 900 of the 1,600 hectares of Garífuna land recognized by the National Agrarian Institute (INA).”[vii]
Despite the persistent threats, the coup d’etat in 2009 and the corridor of terror created in the Vallecito region, in 2010 OFRANEH was able to secure a signed agreement with delegates of the INA where they committed to surveying the “associative businesses.” But according to Miranda, “the intruders [Facussé and Villalobo] denied entry to members of the INA and the Attorney General,” preventing them from opening the gates and re-measuring the fenced-in “associative businesses”, a necessary step towards repopulating their land.
In 2008, Miriam Miranda was unanimously elected president of OFRANEH by the general assembly of Garífuna communities. OFRANEH was founded in 1978 with the express mission to “represent and defend the interests of the Afro-Caribbean Garífuna minority in Honduras with a mandate to protect the capacities of the Garífuna community and their self-determination through programs promoting political, social, economic, and cultural development.” Miranda took over the presidency of OFRANEH shortly after the previous president, Gregoria Flores was forced to seek asylum in the United States, fearing the constant death threats she was receiving.
Unfortunately, Miranda states in the Vallecito report, “The President [Porfirio Lobo Sosa] considers Vallecito to be uninhabited.” This territory, defined as “uninhabited” or vacant is fundamental in order to understand the most worrisome threat to the garífuna at present, the arrival of so-called “Special Development Zones” (RED) or “Charter Cities.” OFRANEH has emphasized there has not been a threat as severe as the one posed to the Garífuna by Latin America´s first Charter City since the arrival of the banana companies a hundred years ago. What Miranda considers the beginnings of the “deterritorialization garífuna,”[viii] which “intensified in the 1990s due to real estate speculation fueled by tourist mega projects” on the Caribbean Coast.[ix]
The Arrival of Charter Cities to Honduras
The so-called, “Special Development Regions” (RED) or “Charter Cities” are the brainchild of Paul Romer. Romer is the son of former Colorado Governor Roy Romer. He is a recognized economist educated at the University of Chicago and currently teaches economics at the NYU Stern School for Economics. He has devoted the last years to designing and promoting “Charter Cities” while searching for uninhabited territories in close proximity to exploitable natural resources in a carefully profiled country (a country with an on-going major disaster) where he can sell his first “Charter City” in order to produce a new era of development for the world.
Concluding a May 2012 New York Times Magazine article titled “Who Wants to Buy Honduras?” the author, Adam Davidson coincides with Romer’s perspective writing, “It’s easy to criticize experimenting with the livelihoods of the poor, but having spent time in the chaotic slums of Honduras, Haiti, Jordan and Indonesia, I’ve found that the poor are already conducting daily experiments in how to make life better outside the formal economy. By and large, it isn’t working. We have to try some new things.”[x]
In effect, says Miriam Miranda in an interview with journalist Giorgio Trucchi, “In the name of development, Honduras is up for sale; this fact alone reflects a failed state that has yet to recover its institutional legitimacy following the [2009] coup.” Indeed the goal of the May 5th and 6th 2011 conference in San Pedro Sula properly entitled, “Honduras, Open For Business” was to attract major foreign businesses to invest in Honduras, selling off crucial areas of interest. The mega expo, attracted the likes of corporate magnates such as Siemen Phillips, Mexican Carlos Slim (Fortune 500 World’s richest man), and 325 other corporate giants where they were pitched six primary areas for lucrative foreign investment by Honduras’ most powerful businessmen; Energy, Infrastructure, Maquiladora (sweatshops) and Transformation Services, Agro-Business, Forestry and Tourism, reassuring that “access to the most important markets in the world, with investment guarantees and clear rules, would be among the clear advantages that investors will have in Honduras.”[xi]
An article published in the conservative Honduran daily newspaper El Heraldo, offered a list of FAQ´s promoting “Charter Cities” in Honduras explaining that, “The REDs [Special Development Regions] will enjoy a high-degree of autonomy. The rules regarding health, education, justice, and security in the RED can be different from those in the rest of the country.” By definition, according to the Charter City’s official website in Honduras (www.red.hn), the RED will be practically an autonomous city-state inside of another state, with the express mission of producing economic profits in the name of development for the underdeveloped, as a means to combat poverty. Nevertheless, in order to launch and development a Charter City (RED) they first require an “A vacant piece of land, large enough for an entire city, voluntarily contributed by a host government.”[xii]
Contrary to the philosophy of the North American economist, the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano wrote years ago that, “Underdevelopment is not a stage of development. It is its consequence.” Paraphrasing, poverty is not eradicated with economic developmental experiments designed to tenfold the wealth of transnational corporations, theoretically trickling down in the wake of their riches. Rather, the ferocious development schemes based on the savage exploitation of natural resources, the forced relocation of traditional peoples and exploitation of forced labor contribute to and foment the exponential growth of disparities between the world’s wealthiest and poorest.
In order to launch the Charter City project in Honduras, Romer requires an “uninhabited” piece of land. For President Lobo and the Honduran Congress, this ambiguous concept already existed in Honduras when they began to “FastTrack” the necessary constitutional reforms in late 2010. Honduran prosecutors and lawyers have questioned said constitutional reforms. In October 2011, they submitted the first formal petition to the Honduran Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of the legislative decree that created the Special Development Regions. They argue that the decree openly relinquishes or indefinitely leases national territory to foreign interests in order to create a “state within a state,” in turn, violating Honduras’ sovereignty.
OFRANEH has also emphasized Romer’s erroneous understanding of Honduras, illustrating the potential consequences of his theories, which are on the verge of being implemented. “Paul Romer’s propaganda talks about building Charter Cities in uninhabited places. Unfortunately, in Honduras they are trying to dispossess the Garífuna people of half of our territory in order to create the RED (Special Development Region). The level of disinformation and violence that exists in this country reveals that multiple human rights violations will be caused by the establishment of a neocolonial project in the 21st century.”[xiii]
The Crisis
Yet, the economic crisis already exists. More importantly the general lack of security and un-governability of Honduras has become ever more acute since the consolidation of the coup d’état on November 29, 2009 with the election of Porfirio Lobo Sosa as Honduras’ President. Romer, who patented the phrase in 2004 “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,”[xiv] found in Honduras the perfect lab to perform a field test of his vision. To promote the reduction of poverty, enhanced security and a stable economy in a country where none of these elements exist is an immensely attractive proposal for legislators who will form the first line of potential investors and occupants of said “Charter City.”
To date, Honduras continues to be the country with the highest per capita rate of homicides in the world. According to the United Nations 2011 report, there are an average of 82.1 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants a year in Honduras. We can compare this to Mexico with an average of 20 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants despite a high intensity war on drugs that has claimed at least 50,000 lives in the last 6 years, or New York City where the homicide rate in 2010 was 6.4 per 100,000.[xv] According to the Tegucigalpa based Committee for the Freedom of Speech, C-Libre, Honduras also holds the world record for the highest per capita rate of journalists that are violently killed. There have been 33 journalists assassinated in the last 10 years in Honduras, and 28 of them since the June 29, 2009 coup d’état.[xvi]
The recent visit to Honduras by the International Mission on the Verification of Human Rights Violations in the Bajo Aguan summarized in a public hearing that Honduras has become characterized as a country where there is a systematic killing of campesinos. They cite in their report that, specifically in the Bajo Aguan, Colon, there have been at least 50 campesinos assassinated with total impunity in the last two years by mercenaries that protect the interests of wealthy landowner Miguel Facussé, who has boosted his African Palm production and biofuels exportations.[xvii]
Simply put, the favorable conditions necessary for the implementation of a Charter City culminated quickly in Honduras following the 2009 coup d’état. On January 19th 2011 the Honduran National Congress approved the Law for Special Development Regions (RED).[xviii]
Honduran journalist Sandra Marybel Sánchez, who also raises the concerns of Hondurans that feel that the country’s sovereignty is being compromised, highlights the most important concessions made by the Honduran Congress to investors in order to implement the Charter Cities in an article she wrote:
1. They will be autonomous, will be legally incorporated, will have their own administrative system, they will emit their own rules (Laws) and they will have their own legal jurisdiction… composed of national or international experts.
2. They will be authorized to enter into international agreements and treaties related to trade and cooperation in matters within their competence.
3. They will be able to enter into agreements with national or international intelligence services to combat organized crime.
4. They will be authorized to have and operate their own police force, which may be strengthened by entering into bilateral agreements with other countries and regions.
5. The REDs will have their own budget, to fix the taxes/rates they will charge and to collect and manage their own taxes.
6. They will be able to establish their own migration and immigration policies and rules, and control whatever transportation system that is admitted within its area of control/jurisdiction. Sea and air craft/vessels will have assured access to the RED.[xix]
Echoing the observations made by Sandra Marybel Sanchéz, Jari Dixon, a lawyer and ex- federal prosecutor now with the Association of Judges for a State with Rights, argues that the RED (Charter City) violates a series of Honduran laws. “In the RED, autonomous powers serve as the executive, legislative, and judicial powers, which is completely unconstitutional. Moreover, by indefinitely handing over part of the national territory to foreigners, the sovereignty of the country is being violated,” stated Dixon.[xx]
On September 5th, Dixon, Sánchez and members of several Honduran social organizations were illegally detained at the Honduran Supreme Court as they attempted to submit a formal petition to the court questioning the constitutionality of the congressional modifications made to the constitution, creating the RED. While being held arbitrarily for several hours before being able to submit the petition, Dixon manifested, “this is the first example of what to expect with the Charter Cities. Here, a wall separates them from the rest of Honduran society, revealing exactly what the State loses when it auctions off the country: nothing less than its sovereignty.”[xxi]
Back in the Vallecito camp on August 30th, OFRANEH, now accompanied by members of the Espacio Refundacional[xxii] and human rights organizations hold a gathering called the Meeting of Cultural Resistance Against Charter Cities. Miriam Miranda asserts: “On several occasions, the Executive and Legislative Powers indicated that the first RED in Honduras will be located between the Trujillo Bay and the Sico River, an area that includes 24 Garífuna communities, which are considered the cultural sanctuary of the Garífuna people. Moreover, some have mentioned creating RED’s in order to produce biofuels, presumably in the tropical forests of the Honduran Moskitia. There are major interests and tremendous potential in this area for the de facto powers in this country– the economically powerful, the oligarchy that has hijacked this country.”
Doug Henwood, special editor at The Nation, asserts in an interview with Al Jazeera that:
“It’s interesting how the charter cities concept unmasks the libertarian dream as deeply undemocratic. The compatibility of [Augusto] Pinochet and Milton Friedman offered plenty of hints, but this Honduran experiment looks like conclusive proof. First you need a coup. And then you need to set up a zone of freedom – but a special kind of freedom. Not the freedom of association, or of individual expression and development, but the freedom of maneuver for an economic elite to do as it pleases under a special kind of state protection. Milton’s grandson, Patri Friedman, one of the charter city pioneers, has declared that democracy is ‘unfortunately… ill-suited for a libertarian state.’”
The Honduran Charter Cities promise to create precisely this type of libertarian and laissez-faire state, attractive to investors that share a similar vision and dream about a city-state subject only to laws that guarantee, without restrictions, the absolute free flow of capital with zero interference.
The Deal
On September 4th in Tegucigalpa, The Commission for the Promotion of Public-Private Alliance, COALIANZA, a commission created by the Honduran congress, signed a fifteen million dollar contract with an investment consortium headed by Michael Strong to begin construction on Honduras’ first Model City. During the signing ceremony, Juan Orlando Hernández, president of the Honduran Congress proclaimed, “This is an extraordinary moment for our country, for this generation of Hondurans and for the generation of politicians, academics, and advisors who have decided to look to the future and not fear change.” Carlos Pineda, the president of COALIANZA, described the project as having “the potential to turn Honduras into an engine of wealth,” and a “mechanism for development typically belonging only to first world countries.”[xxiii]
Strong, founder and CEO of NGK, stated that “the future will remember this day as the day that Honduras began developing,” because “we believe this will be one of the most important transformations in the world, through which Honduras will end poverty by creating thousands of jobs.”[xxiv] Strong further emphasized that “this is a collaboration between a diverse group of investors, businesses and experts that aim to eliminate poverty through the creation of wealth in Honduras by means of Special Development Regions.”[xxv] Although the details of the deal are unclear, apparently Canada and South Korea will be the initial investors in the project, which is expected to break ground in Puerto Castilla, on the Trujillo Bay.[xxvi]
There are many sketchy details about the US based consortium NGK, who have estimated that they could create as many as 200,000 jobs for Hondurans over the next couple of years.[xxvii] Even the mainstream media are confused about the name of the consortium; the AP, ABC, The Guardian and The Independent have cited the company as either “NGK” or “MGK.” Even the highlighted article on the Honduran Congress’s website ran contradictory information about the consortium, citing “MGK” in the headline and title of the article while referring only to “NGK” in the body of the very same article. Extensive searches for information in regards to either name or any consortium run by Michael Strong return null, leading to a series of doubts as to whether Honduras has signed an 15 million dollar contract with a ghost company.
Furthermore, Paul Romer in his blog on www.chartercities.org wrote on September 7th, “Here at Charter Cities, we’ve received several requests for comment on recent press reports of an agreement with investors to develop the Honduran Special Development Regions (REDs). We learned of these agreements from the media and have no knowledge of their terms, so we’re unable to offer any comment about them.” Romer concludes by stating that members of the Transparency Commission (the supposed governing apparatus for the Charter City) have written to the Honduran President to clarify the situation.[xxviii] The Transparency Commission was named by the President Porfirio Lobo Sosa in December 2011 and includes Paul Romer, George Akerlof, a Nobel Laureate in Economy and Permanent Resident at the International Monetary Fund, Nancy Birdall, an ex Vice-President at the Inter American Development Bank, Boon-Hwee Ong, an ex-general in the Singapore Armed Forces, and Harry Strachan, the Director Emeritus at Bain & Company (founded by US Presidential candidate Mitt Romney and documented to have funneled El Salvadoran death squad funding during the 1980’s Central American civil wars).[xxix]
Nonetheless, Strong maintains that “We will work closely with the governor of the Charter City to assure that the region is equipped with the best police force, the best jurisprudence, legal system and transparency. The main goal of our project is to create the foundation of a safe and prosperous community for Hondurans.”[xxx] Furthermore, it turns out that Strong is not just the CEO of the controversial NGK or MGK consortium, but also the CEO and co-founder of FLOW (Freedom Lights Our World) and “flow-idealism” an organization built on libertarian and Friedmanite economic philosophies and theories.
Strong, who considers himself a leftist, is closely connected to and funded by Whole Foods CEO and FLOW’s other co-founder John Mackey. He goes so far as to relate the concept of “Free Cities” to an “anarcho-capitalist-paradise” that will be much more efficient in eradicating global poverty than the “euro-socialism” so feared by the “whackos” in the Tea Party.[xxxi] This is how Strong presented his philosophy and project to an elite group of global libertarians in April 2011 at an exclusive resort on Roatán, a Honduran Island in the Caribbean. Patri Friedman and Mexican Ricardo Valenzuela, CEO of Free Cities LLC were among the special guests. During his presentation in Roatán last year, titled “Marketing Free Cities as a Mainstream Solution to Global Poverty,” Strong repeated numerous times that one distinguishing factor between he and others that promote similar types of projects is that “We are on the side of the angels,” supposedly emphasizing his humanistic, transcendental and new-ageist traits that represent his particular line of thought among the diverse tangents in the libertarian movement.[xxxii]
The Relocation, Resistance and Dance
Roatán is the island where the Garífuna people first stepped on what is now Honduran soil, on April 12 1797. The Garífuna were banished to a tiny island, Baliceaux, following two ensuing wars that their leader Satuyé and his wife Barauda unleashed against the English in Saint Vincent, where they arrived from Africa shipwrecked but free of slavery in 1635. On Baliceaux, more than half of the 5,000 Garífuna banished there died, before the remaining 2,026 Garífuna were again relocated by the English and subsequently abandoned with minimal provisions for survival on Roatán in 1797.[xxxiii] Nevertheless, the Garífuna survived the relocations like so many times in their history, being torn from their native Africa in the chains of slavery, yet emerging from the coffers of the wrecked slave ships on the coasts of Saint Vincent as the only Africans to arrive to the Americas as free blacks. They were taken in and promptly mixed with the Arawak and Carib indigenous peoples to from the Garinagu or Garífuna people.
Now, August 30th, 2012, in the Vallecito encampment, Miriam Miranda has the word and turns it towards the government, citing its complicity in authorizing Honduras’ Charter Cities and the lack of human rights guarantees for pre-existing peoples such as the Garífuna. “Vallecito is the heart of the territory where they are promoting the creation and installation of Honduras’ Charter City. So, we are not only up against the interests of organized crime; we’re up against the interests of a government that—without consulting us—makes decisions about our territory.”
Miranda’s sentiment was echoed in early August 2012 when Frank LaRue, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, made an official visit to Honduras and submitting among others the following recommendation:
“I believe that establishing so-called development programs outside of the territorial authority of this country, such as the Charter Cities, which would displace populations and seek to create a legal system that is separate and autonomous of the State, are a violation of national sovereignty and the responsibility of the State to protect and promote the Human Rights of the population in its territory. I recommend that the Honduran Government extend an invitation to the Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers to organize a mission that could assist in combating impunity and contribute positively in processes to combat impunity.”[xxxiv]
For Miriam Miranda, Alfredo López and the 200 families that arrived to Vallectio reclaiming their land for the Garífuna people, the lack of response by the government has had a resonating impact. Miriam explains by cell phone, as the drums in the camp sound in the background:
“In this country, the government has no will to respond to the demands of our communities. The ‘preventative measures’ [already issued to Vallecito and other Garífuna communities by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights] don’t stop paramilitary attacks. It’s unbelievable! At this point we haven’t received any answer [from the government]; it’s a very clear message that we are in a state of ingovernability, that we’re in a failed state, and it’s a very clear example of how the state responds because they’ve reacted to requests to protect Miguel Faccusé’s African Palm plantations by mobilizing the entire Honduran army! Yet in our case, it hasn’t even been possible for them to send four police officers to protect the process of issuing our land titles, the process of surveying Garífuna communities. We are in the middle of an undeclared war zone where highly armed groups are protecting their own interests—they control this territory. We’re asking for something very easy, something simple: that the state come and says, ‘Yes, we issued that land title to you in 1997 and we are reiterating that this is your land.’ Now we are up against the silence and complicity of the state, the government, these groups with power, and their plans; for us, this is very serious.”
On September 12th, Miranda, Dixon, and Sanchéz accompanied by members from various social, indigenous and popular movement organizations mobilized once more to the Honduran Supreme Court as well as to the Attorney General’s office. This time they submitted a formal lawsuit accusing President Porfirio Lobo Sosa and the 162 congressmen that signed the changes to the constitution, of “committing treason against the country and abuse of authority.” The next day, the Garífuna people in Vallecito accompanied by OFRANEH and the National Agrarian Institute broke through the “door of shame” that had previously prevented them from surveying their land. They promptly re-surveyed and measured the five Garífuna “associative businesses” in Vallecito achieving their first goal towards returning to their land in this region.
In a surprise turn of events, late on Saturday September 15th as Honduras celebrated its Independence Day with marches, the Attorney General’s office announced that they had determined “Charter Cities” to be illegal, unconstitutional and that the reforms that permit them represent a crime. Nonetheless, Daniela Ferrera, the Director of Prosecutors at the Attorney General’s office stated, “the Honduran Supreme Court does not have to emit a resolution in order for us to determine what constitutes a felony or whether a felony has been committed. There are resources available to both institutions for use, but it is important that all channels be exhausted, so, as long as the Court does not define the constitutionality or not of the decree, the Prosecutor’s office will have to wait” to proceed in taking legal actions against the responsible parties.[xxxv]
Isaac’s rains have diminished; now the sun struggles to burst through the dense clouds and the heat permeates the camp. Alfredo comments through the unique and cynical smile of a man that spent seven years as a political prisoner, the Honduran State later receiving international condemnation for his unjust imprisonment. “It seems that the mercenaries have lost their appetite or maybe they just ran out of bullets and decided to go home,” said Alfredo. So here in Vallecito the drums sound the vigor of Garífuna rhythms without the interference of automatic gunfire overhead, and now the rhythm of the Yancunú: Guanaragua, Maladi Yancuru or Dance of Masks is resonating through the camp. Yancunú is the maximum expression of Garífuna rebellion and territorial defense. It is the dance that was used by Garífuna men during their 1773 rebellion in Saint Vincent.[xxxvi] They descended from their mountain hideouts disguised as women to a celebration the English soldiers were having, luring and seducing the soldiers with a spectacular dance before revealing their deadly machetes from beneath their skirts, to defeat the soldiers. The same machetes that defeated the English soldiers are the machetes that today continue to work the yucca, coconut, fishing and land in Vallecito. They pertain to the Garinagu people that once more defend their land against the new faces of material exploitation.
To Listen to Audio Reports Covering Garifuna Resistance to Charter Cities Click Here, Here, and Here
Comunicador@s Populares Por La Autonomía: www.comppa.org/wordpress
Notes:
[i] El pueblo Garinagu es el nombre original del pueblo garífuna después de haberse mezclado africanos naufragados en San Vincente del Caribe con los pueblos indígenas Arawak y Carib.
[ii] A principios del 2012, el congreso hondureño pasó una resolución la cual prohíbe que se monte más de una persona sobre una motocicleta debido al alto nivel de asesinatos atribuidos a gatilleros montado como pasajeros en motos, quienes rápidamente huyen de sus crímenes.
[iii] La empresa asociativa es la calificación legal de tierras otorgada por el Instituto Nacional Agraria. No se ha permitido una titulación comunal como cooperativa en los últimos años en Honduras, sobre todo en el Aguan y el departamento de Colón.
[iv] “Piratas en Honduras: De Gregor Macgregor y la República de Poyas, a la Ciudad modelo de Paul Romer” OFRANEH. Julio 18, 2012
[v] John Soluri, Banana Culture: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press: 2005)
[vi] “Garífuna People of Honduras Begin Land Recovery Campaign on MONDAY August 27th 2012,” by Tio Teo. Being Garífuna
[vii] “Pueblo Garífuna reocupa tierras usurpadas en Vallecito (Limón)” Comunicado de OFRANEH, 26 de Agosto del 2012. http://albatv.org/Pueblo-Garífuna-reocupa-tierras.html
[viii] “216 años de la muerte de Satuye y la nueva expulsión del pueblo garífuna del Banana Coast (Honduras),” OFRANEH, 14 marzo 2011.
[ix] “216 años de la muerte de Satuye y la nueva expulsión del pueblo garífuna del Banana Coast (Honduras)”, comunicado de OFRANEH del 14 de Marzo 2011
[x] “Who Wants to Buy Honduras?” por Adam Davidson, The New York Times. 8 mayo 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/who-wants-to-buy-honduras.html?pagewanted=all
[xi] http://www.cohep.com/l/content/%E2%80%9Chonduras-open-business-el-puente-ideal-para-los-negocios%E2%80%9D
[xii] http://chartercities.org/esp-concept[xiii] “Golpes de estado en Madagascar y Honduras” OFRANEH. http://ofraneh.org/ofraneh/ciudad_modelo_articulos_ingles.html
[xiv] “A Terrible Thing to Waste,” Jack Rosenthal, The New York Times Magazine. 31 julio 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02FOB-onlanguage-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22paul%20romer%22&st=cse
[xv] Nations Office on Drug and Crimes release of its first Global Study on Homicide October 2011
[xvi] Alertas C-Libre 0076-2012, 29-08-12
[xvii] “Fuerzas ocultas orquestan la criminalización de la protesta campesina en Honduras” Giorgio Trucchi, Desinformemonos, Septiembre 2012
[xviii] La pesadilla de las “Ciudades Modelo,” por Giorgio Trucchi, 29 agosto 2012. Voselsoberano.http://voselsoberano.com/v1/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14128%3Ala-pesadilla-de-las-ciudades-modelo&catid=1%3Anoticias-generales&Itemid=1
[xix] “Ni una revolución, mucho menos una elección revertirá las “Ciudades Modelo” ¡Es ahora o nunca!” http://voselsoberano.com/v1/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14076:ni-una-revolucion-mucho-menos-una-eleccion-revertira-las-ciudades-modelo-ies-ahora-o-nunca&catid=1:noticias-generales
[xx] La pesadilla de las “Ciudades Modelo,” por Giorgio Trucchi, 29 agosto 2012. Voselsoberano.http://voselsoberano.com/v1/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14128% Ala-pesadilla-de-las-ciudades-modelo&catid=1%3Anoticias-generales&Itemid=1
[xxi] Alertas C-Libre 0075-2012 05-09-12
[xxii] A coalition of popular movement organizations, true to the goal of reconstructing post-coup Honduras based on the vision of founding a new people’s constitution through broad participation – not through right or left party politics.
[xxiii]“Honduras-Coalianza y empresa NKG de Estados Unidos firman convenio para construir primera Ciudad Modelo” http://www.diariowebcentroamerica.com/region/honduras-coalianza-y-empresa-nkg-de-estados-unidos-firman-convenio-para-construir-primera-ciudad-modelo/
[xxiv]”Can private cities save a nation with world’s worst murder rate?” http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/can-private-cities-save-a-nation-with-worlds-worst-murder-rate-8113966.html
[xxv] “Coalianza y empresa estadounidense NKG firman acuerdo para construir primera ciudad modelo en Honduras” http://www.centinelaeconomico.com/2012/09/04/coalianza-y-empresa-estadounidense-nkg-firman-acuerdo-para-construir-primera-ciudad-modelo-en-honduras/
[xxvi] Can private cities save a nation with world’s worst murder rate? http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/can-private-cities-save-a-nation-with-worlds-worst-murder-rate-8113966.html
[xxvii] ” Honduras to build new city with its own laws and tax system to attract investors” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/06/honduras-new-city-laws-investors
[xxviii] http://chartercities.org/blog/231/honduras-update
[xxix] http://www.red.hn/
[xxx] Coalianza y empresa estadounidense NKG firman acuerdo para construir primera ciudad modelo en Honduras” http://www.centinelaeconomico.com/2012/09/04/coalianza-y-empresa-estadounidense-nkg-firman-acuerdo-para-construir-primera-ciudad-modelo-en-honduras/
[xxxi] http://newmedia.ufm.edu/gsm/index.php/Strongfreecities
[xxxii] ibid
[xxxiii] http://garífunaworld.blogspot.mx/, http://ofraneh.org/ofraneh/216_satuye.html
[xxxiv] Observaciones y recomendaciones de la visita oficial del relator de la ONU, Frank de La Rue http://conexihon.info/noticia/libertad-de-expresi%C3%B3n/honduras-%E2%80%9Cla-impunidad-es-el-mayor-obst%C3%A1culo-para-la-libertad-de
[xxxv] “MP: Decreto de “ciudades modelo” es illegal” http://elheraldo.hn/Secciones-Principales/Pais/MP-Decreto-de-ciudades-modelo-es-ilegal
[xxxvi] http://garífunaworld.blogspot.mx/2008/04/quienes-son-los-garfunas.html
Related articles
- Urgent Action Needed: Violent Repression Against Campesino Right-To-Land Movement in Honduras (aboriginalpress.wordpress.com)
Honduras: “Model Cities” Project Set to Begin?
Weekly News Update on the Americas | September 11, 2012
Honduran National Congress president Juan Orlando Hernández announced on Sept. 4 that the government’s Commission for the Promotion of Public-Private Alliances (COALIANZA) had signed an agreement for the first of three “model city” projects–semi-autonomous regions mandated under a 2010 constitutional amendment [see World War 4 Report 6/9/12]. COLIANZA claims the project, which still needs approval from the Congress, will create 5,000 direct and indirect jobs this year, 15,000 jobs in 2013, 30,000 in 2014, and 45,000 in 2015.
The project is likely to be located near Puerto Cortés or Puerto Castilla on the Atlantic coast, or in Choluteca department on the country’s narrow Pacific coast. “It should be noted that these model cities will be established in depopulated areas of Honduras,” Hernández told the media. “It does not imply the displacement of people or social groups.” The Honduras Culture and Politics blog noted: “None of these regions is completely vacant. Reading between the lines, what Hernández is saying is that there are no large cooperatives or powerful landowners in these regions, groups that might vocally protest the expropriation of the land on which they live and work.”
The main funding for the “model city” is coming from an unidentified Canadian company. Other funders include a US company identified as the “NKG Group” or “MKG Group,” and a start-up called Future Cities Development Corporation. Both companies seem to have rightwing libertarian orientations. A leading executive at NKG Group, Michael Strong, appears to be associated with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey; a Michael Strong is listed with Mackey as a co-founder of FLOW, an organization dedicated to “liberating the entrepreneurial spirit for good.” One of Future Cities Development Corporation’s founders is Patri Friedman, the grandson of University of Chicago economist and neoliberal theorist Milton Friedman. (Honduras Culture and Politics 9/5/12)
Some 14 groups or individuals–including campesino organizations and the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH)—filed a legal challenge to the “model cities” law on Sept. 7, citing a motion filed in October 2011 by Oscar Cruz, a former government attorney for constitutional issues. Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the presidential candidate of the leftist Freedom and Refoundation (LIBRE) party and the wife of former president José Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya Rosales (2006-2009), issued a statement denouncing the law as “incompatible with the concept of sovereignty, independence and equality of opportunity for national and foreign investment.” She warned people who start these projects that “they are exposing themselves to the loss of their investments.”
LIBRE was formed in June 2011 by the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), a coalition of unions and grassroots organizations that led the resistance to the June 2009 military coup that removed former president Zelaya from office.
The project has even received criticism from Paul Romer, the New York University professor whose “charter cities” concept is the basis for the Honduran “model cities” law. Romer reportedly may quit the Honduran transparency commission he was chairing because he feels he hasn’t been give sufficient information and authority to carry out his responsibilities. (Honduras Culture and Politics 9/7/12; Xiomara Castro de Zelaya statement 9/7/12 via Vos el Soberano)
Related articles
Democrats and U.S. Labor Delusional About Latin America
Diatribes and Curious Silences
By ALBERTO C. RUIZ | CounterPunch | September 4, 2012
The Democrats just put out their platform on Latin America, and it demonstrates only the loosest connection to reality. Thus, while praising the “vibrant democracies in countries from Mexico to Brazil and Costa Rica to Chile,” as well as “historic peaceful transfers of power in places like El Salvador and Uruguay,” the Democrats continue to point to Cuba and Venezuela as outliers in the region in which the Democrats plan “to press for more transparent and accountable governance” and for “greater freedom.” Of course, it is their Platform’s deafening silence on critical developments in the region which says the most about their position vis a vis the Region.
Not surprising, the Democrats say nothing about the recent coups in Honduras and Paraguay (both taking place during Obama’s first term) which unseated popular and progressive governments. They also say nothing about the fact that President Obama, against the tide of the other democratic countries in Latin America, quickly recognized the coup governments in both of these countries. Also omitted from the platform is any discussion of the horrendous human rights situation in post-coup Honduras where journalists, human rights advocates and labor leaders have been threatened, harassed and even killed at alarming rates.
As Reporters Without Borders (RWR) explained on August 16, 25 journalists have been murdered in Honduras since the 2009 coup, making Honduras the journalist murder capital of the world. In this same story, RWR mentions Honduras in the same breath as Mexico (a country the Democrats hold out as one of the “vibrant democracies” in the region) when speaking of the oppression of journalists and social activists, as well as the general climate of violence which plagues both countries. As RWR stated, “Like their Mexican colleagues, Honduran journalists – along with human rights workers, civil society representatives, lawyers and academics who provide information – will not break free of the spiral of violent crime and censorship until the way the police and judicial apparatus functions is completely overhauled.” And indeed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 38 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 1992, and it has been confirmed in 27 of these cases that the journalists were killed precisely because they were journalists. Meanwhile, in Mexico, over 40,000 individuals have been killed due to the U.S.-sponsored drug war – hardly a laudable figure.
Of course, in the case of Honduras, and Paraguay as well, things are going fine for U.S. interests post-coup, with Honduras maintaining the U.S. military base which President Manuel Zelaya, overthrown in the coup, had threatened to close. Similarly, in Paraguay, one of the first acts of the new coup government was agreeing to open a new U.S. military base – a base opposed by Porfirio Lobos, the President (and former liberation Bishop) overthrown in the coup. The other act of the new coup government in Paraguay was its agreement to allow Rio Tinto to open a new mine in that country, again in contravention of the deposed President’s position. The Democrats simply do not speak of either Honduras or Paraguay in their Platform.
Instead, the Democrats mostly focus on their alleged desire to bring freedom to Cuba, saying nothing about the strides already made by Cuba itself where, according to a January 27, 2012 story in the Financial Times, entitled, “Freedom comes slowly to Cuba,” “there are currently no prisoners of conscience.” This is to be contrasted with Colombia, the chief U.S. ally in the region, which houses around 10,000 political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. The Democrats, shy about such unpleasant facts, simply say nothing about Colombia – this despite the fact that Colombia just announced historic peace talks with the guerillas which have been engaged in a 50-year insurgency in that country. Apparently, this does not deserve a mention amongst the Democrats’ anti-Cuba diatribe.
Meanwhile, the Democrats also single out Venezuela as a country which it is hoping to free from its alleged chains. What the Democrats fail to note is that Venezuela already has a popular, democratically President in Hugo Chavez who is making life better for the vast majority of Venezuelans, and who appears poised to receive the majority of the votes of the Venezuelan people in the upcoming October elections as a consequence. Thus, according to Oxfam, “Venezuela certainly seems to be getting something right on inequality. According to the highly reputable UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, it now has the most equal distribution of income in the region, and has improved rapidly since 1990.” Again, contrast this with the U.S.’s chief ally Colombia and with Mexico, the two countries with the worst problems of inequality in the region. As the Council on Hemispheric Affairs noted earlier this year, “both Colombia and Mexico suffer from some of the world’s most unequal distributions of wealth. In 1995, Colombia was ranked the fifth most unequal country (of those with available statistics), with a Gini coefficient of 0.57, while Mexico was ranked the eighth worst with a Gini coefficient of 0.52. Between 2006 and 2010, Colombia’s inequality ranked 0.58, while Mexico’s coefficient was 0.52, qualifying them as two of the lowest ranked countries in the world.” The Democrats, uninterested in such trivialities as social equality, simply ignore such inconvenient data.
For its part, U.S. labor, as represented (albeit very poorly) by the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, continue to march in step with the U.S. government and the Democrats in their imperial delusions about the Region. Thus, while for some time simply hiding the fact that it has been working in Venezuela at all, the Solidarity Center, in response to pressure about this issue, has recently admitted on its website that it has been continuously working in Venezuela these past 13 years – i.e., to and through the coup in 2002 which the Solidarity Center aided and abetted by funneling monies from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to the anti-Chavez CTV union which was a major player in the coup.
Stinging from the just criticism over this, the Solidarity Center now claims — reminiscent of George W. Bush who fancied himself a “uniter” as opposed to a “divider” – claims that it is in Venezuela to unite the divided labor movement. Thus, the Solidarity Center states: “[g]iven the political fragmentation and divisions between unions in Venezuela, Solidarity Center activities work to help unions from all political tendencies overcome their divisions in order to jointly advocate for and defend policies for increased protection of fundamental rights at the workplace and industry levels. The Solidarity Center currently supports efforts to unite unions from diverse political orientations (including chavista and non-chavista, left and center) to promote fundamental labor rights in the face of anti-labor actions that threaten both pro-government unions and traditionally independent unions.” In its statement, the Solidarity Center says nothing about the progressive labor law which President Chavez just recently signed into law without any help from U.S. labor. This law, among other things, outlaws outsourcing and subcontracting, shortens the work week, increases minimum vacation time, increases maternity leave and requires employers to provide retirement benefits.
The Solidarity Center statement about Venezuela is laden with irony as well as hubris. The U.S. labor movement is itself greatly fragmented, with two competing houses of labor (the AFL-CIO and Change to Win) as well as divisions even within these two confederations. That the Solidarity Center would presume to be able to unite any union movement outside its borders is laughable. Indeed, only imagine the reception from the labor movement in this country if China’s labor confederation purported to intervene in the U.S. to help unite the labor movement here. Aside from wondering how exactly the Chinese unionists planned to do this, many would wonder about the ends to which such unity, once miraculously created, would be applied. And, one must wonder the very same about this in regard to the Solidarity Center’s role in Venezuela. First of all, the so-called “chavista” unions want nothing to do with the Solidarity Center, funded as it is by the NED and U.S.-AID, especially after the 2002 coup. Again, they would have to question what the Solidarity Center, which just received a massive grant of $3 million for its work in Venezuela and Colombia, would want to “unify” the Venezuelan union movement to do. The question appears to answer itself, and it is not a pretty one.
A modest proposal for the AFL-CIO and its Solidarity Center is to focus on uniting the labor movement at home in the U.S. to challenge the power that capital has on our political system; pressing for better U.S. labor law (on this score it could learn a lot from Venezuela and its labor movement); abandoning its labor paternalism (if not imperialism) and leaving it to the Venezuelans to unite their own labor movement. Similarly, the Democrats, instead of worrying about ostensibly bringing U.S.-style democracy (more like social inequality and militarism) to other countries in the Region, should spend more time trying to make this country less beholden to corporate and monied interests, and thereby more democratic in the process. But again, this is not what the Democrats are about. What the AFL-CIO is about, aside from blindly supporting the Democrats, is anyone’s guess.
Alberto C. Ruiz is a long-time labor and peace activist.
Related articles
The DEA and the Massacre in the Moskitia
By GREG McCLAIN | CounterPunch | June 15, 2012
The US is once again hell bent on establishing death squads in its militarization of Central America. This is a stark reminder of the 1980s when Ronald Reagan and Ollie North were funding the contras with drug money, but now it is reinforced with lessons learned in terrorizing the people of Iraq and Afghanistan through night raids and counterinsurgency tactics. Another tactic that the current US administration has reinvigorated comes from the “War on Drugs” playbook of past administrations: by using the DEA as a front for creating and sustaining havoc, it can attempt to justify the military buildup and control the policies of the host country while manipulating the flow of drugs, all the while appeasing the tax payers back home and the folks in the host country who see the build up as necessary. Not abating by any measure the flow of narcotics into the U.S., the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ has actually increased the narcotics industry in Central America and provided a bogus rationale for the increased militarization of yet another Latin American county; this time Honduras.
On May 11th on the Rio Patuca near Ahuas, a small municipality in the Moskitia, a helicopter titled to the US State Department sprayed bullets into a pipante, a long, narrow dugout canoe, which carried sixteen locals. Four people were killed: 28-year-old Juana Jackson (six months pregnant), 48-year-old Candelaria Pratt Nelson (five months pregnant), 14-year-old Hasked Brooks Wood, and 21-year-old Emerson Martínez Henríquez. At least four more were seriously injured. The DEA confirms that its Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team (FAST) participated in the operation supporting a Honduran National Police Tactical Response Team.
I first heard of the tragedy while in the process of preparing for a human rights delegation to Honduras coordinated by the Alliance for Global Justice and led by Karen Spring from Rights Action. The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press have all published stories glorifying the role of the DEA in seizing a huge quantity of drugs in the incident. They not only down played the killing and injuring of innocent people (some reports even questioned if there even were casualties), but also some of the news reports stated that those shot were actually involved in drug trafficking. In typical mainstream media fashion there was over-the-top anonymous quoting of US and Honduran officials and not much fact checking.
I arrived in Honduras on May 18th for the delegation. The original itinerary focused on the struggles of the campesinas and campesinos of the Aguan Valley and their fight to win back the land stolen from them by the oligarchs with the backing of the illegitimate post-coup government of Pepe Lobo. As important as the land rights struggle is to us, it did not take long for the delegation (made up of academics, human rights and labor activists, Canadian and U.S. citizens, several with extensive experience in Honduras) to agree that the massacre in the Moskitia was of a greater urgency especially in light of the contradictory reports coming from the US State Department and the DEA.
We spent our time in Ahuas talking to the survivors of the incident and families of those slaughtered by the US supplied M-60 bullets. We also spoke to several village leaders, the Mayor of Ahuas, and to many locals in order to piece together as best we could the incident and the aftermath. What we got was a startling look into how our government conducts its military adventurism and then obfuscates in order to cover up its crimes. We also witnessed the increased militarization of the region as platoons of masked Honduran soldiers, automatic weapons slung across their chests, patrolled up and down the muddied streets of Ahuas. An older commanding officer, whose Velcro name and rank patches were blank, stated that they would be there “for as long as necessary,” another chilling echo from the Iraq/Afghanistan quagmires.
Getting to Ahuas is no easy feat. We took a small plane from La Ceiba, closer to the Western end of the Caribbean coast of Honduras, to Puerto Lempira, which is on the Laguna Catrasco in the Moskitia on the Eastern side of the country near the Nicaraguan border. Once in Puerto Lempira we hired a small lancha, a motorboat with a capacity of about 15 people, to take us across the Lagunas. It was approximately an hour and a half in the scorching midday sun before we reached the port. Once there, we loaded into a giant pickup truck fastened with wooden planks for seating, which are placed across the truck bed, for the thirty-minute bumpy ride into Ahuas.
After our boat ride across the Laguna and through the rivers, which act as highways for the local people, it became clear to us what one of the survivors had been quoted as saying in the press, and that we were later to hear first hand. The reason that the pipante had been on the river at 2 AM was because they waited until the sun had set to take the boat home in order to avoid the mid-day heat. This is significant in light of the statement by the Honduran foreign minister, Arturo Corrales. He was quoted in the New York Times (05/18/12) as saying “it was totally dark, in a place that is not a fishing spot.” He added, “It’s in the jungle. It is very hard to believe that at 2 a.m., in the jungle, the people in a boat that is beside another boat with 400 kilograms of cocaine were fishing,” the implication being that they, the victims, were drug smugglers.
The ill-fated pipante had disembarked way downstream at the mouth of the river where it runs into the Caribbean, fighting against the current in order to get to Ahuas. Those that we interviewed said that they had been on the river for 8 hours. The owners of the boat had dropped off lobstermen at the opening of the Caribbean earlier in the day and waited for the sun to begin to set before heading back to Ahuas. This is a routine that they have been undertaking daily for 25 years. As they returned, heading into the current, they picked up other passengers along the way, some heading home and some heading toward jobs or to visit relatives. Many of them slept during the journey only to be awakened by the sounds of gunfire and the burning feeling of having M-60 rounds rip through their bodies.
The details of what exactly prompted the occupants of the helicopters to fire on the pipante are murky at best. The reports from the State Dept. and the DEA have not been consistent and leave out many details, which calls into question their depiction of the events of that night. While witness and victim testimonies have been consistent, the U.S. government versions are shrouded in a haze of information that cannot be divulged, parsed statements that are obviously leading, and “facts” that do not shed light on the operation and the role of U.S. government agents in it. COFADEH (Committee of Families of the Detained and Disappeared), a Honduran human rights group, put it most succinctly in a press release days after the incident, “To keep an act of terror covered up in the midst of media confusion was always a strategy of psychological warfare, a special chapter of state terrorism. We should not accept this.” Audio recordings of communications from the helicopters that evening or surveillance video, if it exists, could potentially clarify many of these issues. The release of such recordings is something that the delegation would like to see Congress demand in any congressional investigation that it conducts. Until such data surfaces, we will never know the true motivation of those in the helicopters who pulled the trigger nor what they were truly doing on the Rio Patuca.
The events of the immediate aftermath became clearer once our delegation took the time to interview numerous witnesses to the shooting and those who rushed to the river upon hearing that loved ones had been shot at. We spoke to Hilda Rosa Lezama Kenreth, 53, laid up in the Ahuas hospital, an underfunded facility run by an evangelical church. She stated that as the shots were being fired from the helicopter she felt a pain across both of her thighs. A bullet had ripped through her left leg and cut across her right leaving huge gaping wounds. She instinctively jumped from the pipante and swam as best she could for cover in the reeds that hugged the bank of the river. She stayed there clinging to the reeds for at least two hours while going in and out of consciousness waiting for help.
Hilda’s son and daughter, Hilder and Elmina, who had been in town when they heard of the shooting, and were awaiting family members to arrive, rushed to the landing, a small sandy area where pipantes and other riverboats were moored. When they got there a helicopter was landing on an open area near were the boats were moored. Before Hilder could begin to search for his mother and brother-in-law he was approached by what he described as three large white men in uniforms who spoke to each other in English. The soldiers ordered him, in broken Spanish, to sit down while pointing guns at his and his sister’s head and chest. They asked him where gasoline was stored. He told them that there was a building nearby that had gas for the boats. They ordered him at gunpoint to take them there often hitting him in the back of the head causing him to fall. When they arrived, the tall white soldiers kicked in the door of the building and stole two 18-gallon barrels of gas. They returned to the landing and ordered Hilder to fill a boat motor with the gas. He did so and then was ordered to get in the boat. They went down river to where the massacre had occurred and Hilder saw a boat with two more tall white soldiers sitting in it. Once they got along side this boat he was further ordered to move bags from it to the boat they had arrived in. He stated that the soldiers told him in broken Spanish to “move the drugs.” Once he was finished he and the five soldiers returned to the landing with the drugs. The soldiers then moved the bags from the boat to the helicopter, not allowing Hilder to look for his mother and brother-in-law. Instead, they hit him again and handcuffed him with plastic zip ties and forced him sit until they left. Once they were gone, another villager cut the ties from his hand. He found the body of his brother-in-law and loaded it onto a boat. He then searched for his mother and was able to find Hilda in the water semi-conscious, but alive several hours after he had gotten there and was detained by the soldiers.
Another survivor, Clara Wood Rivas watched as bullets shattered her fourteen-year-old son Hasked’s skull. As she described the tragedy, she lifted her arm in the air to show the downward trajectory of the bullets, motioning her hand toward the top of her own head and passing it downward mimicking the bullets exiting Hasked’s chin. She stated that he had been shot so many times that she couldn’t recognize his face. Her son slumped over and fell into the water. Ms Wood jumped in to avoid the rain of bullets. Unable to find her son, she swam to shore. When she made it to the landing, “tall gringos” who did not speak Spanish pointed guns at her. She saw her nephew, who had come to the landing to meet her, handcuffed with zip ties and also being held at gunpoint. Through tears she told us, “I thought they were going to kill me. I passed through a war there. I’m blessed to be alive. I’ll never see my son again!”
Traveling with Clara and Hasked was Walter Wilmer, also aged 14. We were unable to meet with him in the hospital in La Ceiba. According to the preliminary report put out by COFADEH, at the time when the bullets began riddling the pipante Wilmer was asleep. He awoke to sounds of screams and blasts of gunfire. He managed to escape the boat unharmed, but the helicopter gunners aimed at him in the water, destroying his left hand. Wilmer managed to swim using only his right until he reached the bank of the river. He could still see the helicopters hovering over the river so he ran through the darkness making it to the hospital in Ahuas. He was later transferred, at great expense to his family, to the hospital in La Ceiba, but it was too late to save his hand.
Members of our delegation were able to meet with Lucio Adnan Nelson, 22, in the hospital at La Ceiba. He had been shot in the back and in his right elbow where he still has bullet fragments. Under sedation he was able to speak to us, but only briefly. Lucio jumped from the boat when it was fired upon. He felt a burning pain in his back as he clung onto a tree branch sticking out of the river. He managed to swim to shore using one hand and ran through the woods until someone found him and helped him to the hospital. Lucio’s father stated that they had to sell some of their livestock in order to pay for the transportation to La Ceiba hospital. He also stated that if his son doesn’t recover fully, which he most likely won’t, he fears that Lucio’s only option in life is to become a beggar in the street.
The AP and the New York Times have revised their reports many times since the incident. The AP in particular has given a clearer picture of the events, but the overarching bent is still on the justification of the DEA and Honduran military’s presence in the Moskitia. They continue to imply that it was simply a tragic mistake in identity, an example of collateral damage in the War on Drugs. I spoke with a Honduran lawyer who represents the interests of the people of the Moskitia. He stated that there have been several reports of US and Honduran military drug interdiction in that region. The common link to these reports is that in all of them the narcotraffickers have gotten away, but the military have seized the drugs. This raises serious questions, not just to the efficacy of the military in drug interdiction, but indeed, what truly is the US and Honduran militaries’ role in the trafficking. In the wake of the DEA’s implication in drug trafficking as related to Plan Colombia and Plan Mexico, as well as the nefarious scheme of the ATF in supplying arms to drug lords in Mexico, plus the rampant corruption of the Honduran military and police and their interrelationship to narcotraffickers, the questions linger as to the true motivations of the US military/DEA presence in Honduras.
The US’s military motivations come under sharper scrutiny when the issue of recently discovered oil reserves in the Moskitia region are brought to light. Texas based Honduras Tejas Oil and Gas Company, which is pursuing an oil and gas concession in La Moskitia, estimate that there are six to eight billion barrels of oil reserves there. Honduras Tejas has lobbying ties to Tea Party nut job Rep. Louis Ghomert (R. TX), who introduced legislation on their behalf, HR 532 (110th): Recognizing the energy and economic partnership between the United States and Honduras. Its ties to the Honduran government as well as the US State Department need to be further investigated.
Many people we spoke with, including representatives of indigenous organizations, are deeply concerned that militarization and violence generated by the “drug war” are negatively impacting their communities and are focused where there are significant natural resources, rivers with hydroelectric potential, petroleum, gold, and forests with many of these natural resources being privatized.
In light of what our delegation observed on our visit and the concerns raised, we demand:
- That the U.S Congress investigate and hold hearings about the U.S. role in the events of May 11, 2012 in La Moskitia.
- That serious and independent investigations take place exploring the role and responsibility of agents of the U.S. government in the May 11 massacre in Ahuas, be they DEA agents, private security contractors under the direction or contracted by agencies of the U.S. government or other security forces. This investigation should include identifying criminal responsibility of specific individuals.
- That the rights and decisions of indigenous communities and popular movements be respected rather than treated as drug traffickers and insurgents with complete disregard to fundamental human rights.
- That the U.S. government speak out publicly against the presence of individuals widely known to have involvement in drug trafficking and death squads within the Honduran justice system today.
- That in light of the abuses we documented, the U.S. government must withdraw all U.S. security forces including DEA and private contractors from Honduras, cease military assistance and training, and stop promoting re-militarization in Central America.
On June 6th the State Dept. was asked to provide an update on the DEA agent investigation in Honduras and on what is being done to assist the victims?
Their answer:
“DEA’s internal investigation is ongoing and should be completed in the next few weeks and we refer you to the Department of Justice for further information. A Honduran special task force conducted an initial investigation and we understand their preliminary conclusion is that the Honduran security forces were justified in firing in self-defense. The Honduran Government referred the investigation to their Attorney General’s office. The U.S. government is working closely with the Government of Honduras and offered transportation for investigators and additional assistance.
All Honduran citizens are eligible to receive care through the Honduran public health system.”
After four weeks of inadequate care in Honduran hospitals where horror stories are common, such as the lack of sutures for routine stitching procedures let alone for major surgery, The International Red Cross and UNICEF have agreed to intervene and pay for the surgeries of Walter Wilmer and Lucio Nelson at La Ceiba Hospital. Meanwhile, the other survivors are left in the care of an inefficient underfunded healthcare system, while the family members of the deceased have not even received so much as an official apology from U.S. or Honduran government officials.
With the ever escalating US military presence in Honduras, we can expect the events described above to become commonplace, just as the horror stories that have come out of Iraq and Afghanistan are never ending. Can drone attacks be far behind?
Greg McClain was a member of the Human Rights Delegation to Ahuas, La Moskitia, Honduras.
Related articles
- Uniformed US soldiers involved in killing of six Honduran civilians (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- DEA Agents Helped Kill Two Pregnant Women in Honduras Last Week (reason.com)
Thousands hold demonstrations against journalist killings in Honduras
People protest violence against members of the media with signs that read in Spanish “United for peace and freedom,” left, and “Stop corruption” in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Friday, May 25, 2012.
Press TV – May 26, 2012
Thousands of people have taken to the streets of many cities across Honduras to protest the killings of journalists in the Central American republic.
The demonstrators, who were chanting “Killing journalists does not kill the truth,” marched past the offices of the president and the human rights commission in the capital Tegucigalpa on Friday, AFP reported.
According to organizers, some 5,000 people attended the demonstration in Tegucigalpa, but protests were also staged in San Pedro Sula, La Ceiba, Comayagua and Choluteca.
“No more impunity,” said one sign held by an activist. Another sign read, “United for peace and freedom.”
Since President Manuel Zelaya was toppled on June 28, 2009 in a military coup twenty journalists have been killed in Honduras.
Last week, the body of 47-year-old HRN Radio journalist Alfredo Villatoro Rivera was found blindfolded and with gunshot wounds to his head, a police spokesman said.
A week before Rivera had been kidnapped.
Honduras has been plagued by political turmoil following the 2009 military coup. Military rule, corruption, an enormous wealth gap, crime and natural disasters have turned Honduras into one of the poorest and least secure countries in Central America.
NYT and Honduras Killings, Take Two
By Peter Hart – FAIR – 05/21/2012
On Friday (5/18/12) we noted that the New York Times and Washington Post had long pieces about a drug war shooting in Honduras that reportedly killed four innocent bystanders, including two pregnant women. The story got increased attention here in the U.S. because of the apparent involvement of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.
Honduran officials and sources claimed the dead were civilians. The Times and Post, though, granted anonymity to U.S. officials to claim that the dead were maybe not civilians at all; in fact, according to some of these unnamed officials, the whole town where the shooting occurred was involved in the illegal drug trade, and it was downright suspicious that a boat would be out on the water at that time of night.
On Saturday (5/19/12), Times reporter Damien Cave, the author of one of the pieces we criticized, offered another take, which included a hospital interview with one of the shooting victims. He also reported that, contrary to the story peddled by anonymous U.S. officials, it would not have been all that unusual for boats to be out in the early morning hours.
It’s a strong piece that sheds considerable light on a story that is obviously still unfolding. The headline is unfortunate–”From a Honduras Hospital, Conflicting Tales of a Riverside Shootout”–in the sense that it suggests equal weight be given to the version of events as presented by U.S. officials.
Cave, it should be noted, appeared in the comments section of the FAIR Blog to argue this: “Instead of judging me and one story, try to keep paying attention to the story as it unfolds.” Fair enough. But the problem with the first story still stands. Why grant U.S. officials anonymity to spin their side of the story? Times readers who are following this story might have a hard time figuring out who to believe: Officials from their own government or the eyewitnesses and survivors. The main reason for that confusion is the fact that news outlets gave those officials space to tell their story without any accountability.
Another Times reporter, Michael Powell, also weighed in on the original blog post to say that Cave “wrote a riveting piece, first-hand, that directly challenges the U.S. government’s account.” That is true, but the first piece did almost exactly the opposite–which was, of course, the point of FAIR’s critique.
Powell dismissed the importance of the piece’s reliance on anonymous U.S. sources:
I am all for being as explicit as possible about sourcing, but would you have slept better if it had said because of government policy on talking to reporters or whatever?
A report that is heavily based on spin coming from anonymous U.S. officials is not a detour on the road to getting at the truth. That is why outlets like the Times, at least in principle, say they try to avoid using anonymous sources–out of concern over being used to transmit official deceptions. If these papers would follow their own rules on anonymity, their readers would be lied to less often.
There’s that thing everyone says about journalism being the first draft of history. But the first draft of journalism is just as important. The Times deserves credit for publishing a more thorough report that challenges the official story coming from the U.S. government. But that doesn’t undermine the critique of the first story; it bolsters it.
Related articles
- Embedded NYT Reporter Boosts US War in Honduras (and Why We Shouldn’t Listen) (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- When the Respectable Become Extremists The Extremists Become Respectable: Colombia and the Mainstream Media (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Uniformed US soldiers involved in killing of six Honduran civilians (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Honduras and the Obama Administration (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Uniformed US soldiers involved in killing of six Honduran civilians
Defensores en Linea | May 15, 2012
TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS–Although we have not read the official reaction of the U.S. Embassy about the tragic military actions of the Drug Enforcement Agency in detriment of the civilian population of the municipality of Ahuas in La Mosquitia, we can draw three preliminary conclusions.
The first one is that the operation launched at night against suspected drug dealers early Friday, was led by U.S. military uniformed agents of the DEA.
Mayor Baquedano from Ahuas confirmed it, and Commissioner Ramirez del Cid, a former liaison between the US Embassy and Casamata, admitted it.
The second conclusion is, then, that a foreign army protected under the new hegemonic concept of the “war on drugs”, legalized with reforms to the 1953 Military Treaty, violates our territorial sovereignty and kills civilians as if it was in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya.
Two pregnant women, two children and two adult males were killed by shots fired from helicopter gunships piloted by U.S. soldiers on a boat on River Patuca returning to their community. They were workers in the local lobster and shellfish diving industry.
The third conclusion drawn from the above is that the “failed state” of Honduras gave way to the foreign military occupation under the script of the “war against the drugs cartels”, similar to what has happened in the past eight years in Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala.
And this reality, from the perspective of a human rights organization, is unacceptable and reprehensible.
In a country under military occupation, as it occurred between 1979 and 1990, as part of the strategy of low intensity warfare against armed insurgencies in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras, the main victims were civilians.
The so called Honduran authorities have the ethical and political duty to demand from the US Department of State an explanation and a public apology, and to punish those responsible for the Ahuas massacre.
To keep an act of terror covered up in the midst of media confusion was always a strategy of psychological warfare, a special chapter of state terrorism.
We should not accept this. We demand an official statement immediately!
Related articles
- Chile: Human Rights Activists Protest New US Base (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Embedded NYT Reporter Boosts US War in Honduras (and Why We Shouldn’t Listen) (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Abducted Honduras reporter killed (bbc.co.uk)
Featured Video
DID THE ROAD TO WARP SPEED START YEARS EARLIER?
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
9/11 Was an Israeli Job
How America was neoconned into World War IV
By Laurent Guyénot • Unz Review • September 10, 2018
… 9/11 was made possible by an alliance between secret worshippers of Israel and corrupted American elements. The question is: who, of the two, were the masterminds of this incredibly daring and complex operation, and for what “higher purpose”? … Read full article
Blog Roll
Aletho News- DID THE ROAD TO WARP SPEED START YEARS EARLIER?
- Anthropic reveals five biological weapon risk cases
- Anthropic bans Israeli account over Iran, Gulf social media citizen profiling
- Why Benjamin Netanyahu Said 9/11 Was ‘Very Good’ For Israel
- Leaked chemical dossier reveals Israel’s role in Sudan’s civil war: Report
- Is the Noose Tightening on Iran?
- Persian Gulf states to meet in Oman to discuss regional security, Hormuz navigation: Iran
- Araghchi: US acknowledgment of Bahrain damage exposes cost of Israel’s wars
- YAF secure Bab al-Mandab, advance toward Dhubab
- Ansar Allah’s Victory Is A U.S. Defeat
- If Americans Knew
- Digital Strategists: Washington’s Network of “Manipulation and Influence Projects” for Israeli Propaganda
- Israeli Documentary ‘NAZA’ Exposes ‘System of Killing’ in Gaza From Eyes of Secret Intelligence Unit
- Confessions of an Israeli Army Drone Operator
- Maximum Territory, Minimum Population
- Is the Israel Lobby Doomed?
- Israel kills 9, including family of 4, in Gaza – Daily Update
- Secret systems used by Israel in mass killings of Gaza civilians revealed in new film
- Israel Bombs South Lebanon as Report Documents 23 White Phosphorus Attacks
- Nakba and Gaza: Zionism’s Century-Long History of Genocide
- ISRAELI MEDIA: ‘Baby, an Update: He’s Just Died’: Israeli Prison Guards’ Texts Expose a Routine of Abuse
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
- Fear Of Debate: Alarmist German Climate Scientist Calls On Mainstream Media To Discredit Skeptic Voices
- End-Of-August Arctic Sea Ice Extent Hasn’t Fallen In 20 Years, Official Data Show!
- News-Making Nepal Region Has Had As-Warm Or Warmer Periods Than The 2000s In The 1600s, 1700s, 1800s
- 2025 Study: ‘There Exists No Unequivocal Experimental Evidence For The CO2 Greenhouse Effect’
- 2026 Atlantic Cyclone Energy Index Running At 85% Below Normal!
- New Research Shows Soil Respiration And Temperature Drive CO2 Change, Not Humans
Aletho News 