Exactly one week before our July 1 visit, police entered Rigores and at gunpoint burned the homes of 135 families, killed their animals, bulldozed their orchards, the school, and two churches. Six months later all but four families remain on their land. They have rebuilt their houses, although now from branches and mud wattle where before stood larger block or poured cement homes.
Now that Honduras has returned to the Organization of American States (OAS), you don’t hear much talk of the country in international spheres and organizations, under the assumption that it would be in an ongoing process of normalization—when in reality, human rights violations are even more serious now than during the coup. ALAI held an exchange between Bertha Cáceres, leader of the Civic Committee of Honduran Popular and Indigenous Organizations, (COPINH) and Joaquín Mejía, lawyer and investigator from the Team of Reflection, Investigation, and Communication on Progress Radio.
Reports of a purported police network in Honduras engaged in murders, extortion, kidnapping, car theft and drug trafficking prompted the government to sack several high-level police officials and ask Congress for help in purging the police at all levels.
Just when the situation was supposed to improve based on the Cartagena Accords and when the presidents of Honduras and Colombia had declared that the promise to respect human rights is being kept, the bloody acts of recent days have revealed a regression, in particular because the campesino movement has been criminalized through allegations of ties with guerrilla forces trained and financed by foreign governments.
Since the June 28, 2009 coup in Honduras, campesino organizations attribute at least 45 killings in the Aguan region alone to private security forces working for the wealthy producers of African palm oil, who often act jointly with state police and military forces. The most recent surge in rural violence occurred days after Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada, signed a “free” trade agreement with Honduras.
Homes, churches, schools, and crops all destroyed as the post-coup government continues to side with wealthy plantation owners over the country’s organized farmers. […]
The manner in which people commute is another indicator of the structural violence lived every day by the working class in Honduras and throughout Latin America.
The Final Declaration of Copán Galel of the Self-Organized Constituent Assembly of Indigenous and Afro-Honduran women denounced the “violence, repression and domination of women operating through capitalism, patriarchy and racism,” said Berta Caceres, coordinator the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), in an interview with Escribana.
“The historical, political and cultural significance of the Constitutional Assembly of Indigenous and Afro Honduran women recently held in Copan Ruinas includes its critical role in confronting the roots of the crisis that has besieged the country since the military coup in June, 2009,” said Miriam Miranda, a Garifuna leader and coordinator of the Fraternal Organization of Black Hondurans (OFRANEH).
Proposals to radically re-formulate the constitution of Honduras need to incorporate the experiences and perspectives of indigenous and Afro-Honduran women, declared Berta Cáceres, a longtime feminist indigenous activist and an organizer of the Constitutional Assembly Self-Organized by Indigenous and Afro-Honduran Women.
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