Honduras

On Friday, July 26, policemen burst into the office of the CNTC (National Center of Rural Workers) in El Progreso, Yoro, and arrested Magdalena Morales, the CNTC Regional Secretary for the Honduran department of Yoro. Magalena is charged with usurping land as part of the criminalization campaign against campesinos in the Sula Valley to the benefit of large sugar companies. She is just one of 52 campesinos with legal proceedings against them because the Agua Blanca Sur land struggle.

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Tomas Garcia was a father of seven who would have turned 50 this December. He was a husband, father, brother, and community leader, serving as an auxiliar and on his community’s Indigenous Council. On Monday, July 15, his life was brutally taken away by the Honduran military when a soldier shot and killed him at close range in broad daylight in front of 200-300 people.

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Armed thugs kidnap and threaten international human rights observers, in the midst of a community’s resistance and struggle against a mining project. “The terror we lived for two hours is the tragic everyday life in this town,” says kidnapped human rights observer.

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More than a year has passed since a DEA-assisted drug war operation in the Honduran Moskitia killed four indigenous Miskitu civilians, and relatives of the victims are still looking for answers. Operating outside of Honduran chains of command, it remains unclear how Honduran state structures – particularly when evidence is destroyed during the operations by the DEA itself – can conduct thorough and reliable investigations leading to arrests and, ultimately, justice.

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Honduran society remains shocked at the tragic fate of Aníbal Barrow, a journalist and university professor whose body was dismembered and scattered around a lake in Villanueva, in the northern province of Cortés. Stunned, in broken voices, the reporters who covered the recovery of Barrow’s remains told how his clothes and personal documents were found buried, and later on, parts of his body were discovered wrapped in bags while other parts were found in a different spot, charred from burning.

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There are some things Goldcorp would probably rather forget about its San Martin mine in Honduras. But Oneyda Velásquez can’t forget. She lives three kilometres from the mine site in the Siria Valley, Honduras.

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The global economy reaches its fingers into the small campesino communities, as it has for centuries. History repeats itself: the campesinos resist regressive land grabs by the country’s elites who control the electoral process, the military and the other institutions of power, the judicial system is notoriously ineffective, and the long arms of the U.S. government reach down into Central America to advance its own geopolitical and economic interests.

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National and international media gathered in the Committee of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH) office for the announcement of the exhumation of human remains found in the Paso Aguán plantation, in the jurisdiction of Trujillo, Colón. The initiative arose as a result of reports by the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguan (MUCA) on April 3, when the discovery of a body in what appears to be a clandestine cemetery in the Paso Aguán plantation, in the community of Panamá, was reported.

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During the first week of April, the Honduran daily newspaper La Prensa ran a series of articles that included photos, a video and a link to a montage of past articles entitled Terror en el Bajo Aguán. The major thrust of the series is that there are heavily armed clandestine groups of men training in the region. The photos and video show them, all wearing ski masks, with AK47s, M16s, and .223 assault rifles, all of which are military issue.

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“It’s certain that death squads are a product of the impunity that we’ve seen in Honduras. The death squads of the past were never really dismantled.  What we’re witnessing is a reactivation of these death squads.  And we’re seeing it quite clearly. We’ve seen videos of incidents in the street where masked men with military training and unmarked vehicles assassinate young people,” said Bertha Oliva, the General Coordinator of the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared and Detained in Honduras (COFADEH).

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