Nearly five years after the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) first called on the Honduran government to protect Carlos Mej\u00eda Orellana, the Radio Progreso marketing manager was found stabbed to death in his home on April 11. \u201cThe IACHR and its Office of the Special Rapporteur consider this a particularly serious crime given the precautionary measures granted,\u201d the Commission stated, assuming Mej\u00eda really was being guarded. But since the 2009 coup, asking the Honduran state to defend journalists is as effective as entreating a spider to spare a web-ensnared fly.<\/p>\n
The coup, which four School of the Americas (SOA) graduates oversaw, toppled elected president Manuel Zelaya, and was \u201ca crime,\u201d as even the military lawyer\u2014another SOA alum\u2014charged with giving the overthrow a veneer of legitimacy couldn\u2019t deny. A pair of marred general elections followed. Journalist Michael Corcoran recognized widespread \u201cstate violence against dissidents\u201d and \u201cballot irregularities\u201d as hallmarks of the first, in November 2009, which Obama later hailed as the return of Honduran democracy. And there was little dispute that the subsequent contest, held last November, was equally flawed. The State Department, for example, admitted \u201cinconsistencies\u201d plagued the vote, the same charge Zelaya himself leveled and an echo of the SOA Watch delegation\u2019s findings, which identified \u201cnumerous irregularities and problems during the elections and vote counting process[.]\u201d But while grassroots and governmental observers described the election in similar terms, they drew dramatically different conclusions about its validity. Canadian activist Raul Burbano, for example, acknowledged that \u201ccorruption, fraud, violence, murder, and human rights violations\u201d dominated the situation. For Secretary of State Kerry, \u201cthe election process was generally transparent, peaceful, and reflected the will of the Honduran people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kerry, to be sure, was referring to the class of \u201cworthy\u201d Hondurans, whose will was indeed reflected in the contest. One might be \u201ca policeman, a lumber magnate, an agro-industrialist, a congressman, a mayor, an owner of a national media outlet, a cattle rancher, a businessman, or a drug trafficker\u201d\u2014all belong to this sector, Radio Progreso director Rev. Ismael Moreno Coto, S.J., known as Padre Melo, points out, adding that these \u201cworthy\u201d Hondurans use the state as a tool to maintain, if not enhance, their power. The results for the rest of the population are what you\u2019d expect. The government no longer pays many of its employees, for example; Peter J. Meyer\u2019s Congressional Research Service report on \u201cHonduran-U.S. Relations,\u201d released last July, cites \u201cmisused government funds\u201d and \u201cweak tax collection\u201d as two factors contributing to the current situation, a kind of wage slavery sans wages. Doctors, nurses and educators toil for free throughout the country, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research reported last fall that over 43% of Honduran workers labored full-time in 2012 without receiving the minimum wage. That same year, nearly half of the population was living in extreme poverty\u2014the rate had dropped to 36% under Zelaya\u2014and 13,000 inmates now crowd a prison system designed for 8,000. In San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city after Tegucigalpa, some 5,000 children try not to starve to death while living on the streets; this figure includes 3,000 girls, aged 12-17, who roam the roads as prostitutes.<\/p>\n
Confronting this reality\u2014asking fundamental questions, like whose interests dominant Honduran institutions serve\u2014\u201cmeans living with anxiety, insecurity, suspicion, distrust, demands, warnings, and threats. It also means having to come to grips with the idea of death,\u201d Padre Melo emphasizes, explaining that a reporter in Honduras \u201conly has to publish or disseminate some news that negatively affects the interests [of] a powerful person with money and influence\u2026for the life of that news reporter to be endangered.\u201d Melo was making these points in July 2012, well before Mej\u00eda\u2019s recent murder, but when it was already obvious that open season had been declared on Honduran correspondents. It\u2019s likely that \u201cfew observers could have foreseen the deluge of threats, attacks, and targeted killings that has swept through Honduras during the last five years,\u201d PEN International noted in January, highlighting \u201cthe surge in violence directed against journalists following the ouster of President Jos\u00e9 Manuel Zelaya in June 2009.\u201d A great deal \u201cof the violence is produced by the state itself, perhaps most significantly by a corrupt police force,\u201d and now over 32 Honduran journalists\u2014the equivalent U.S. figure, as a percentage of the total population, would be well over 1,200\u2014are dead.<\/p>\n
These killings are part of a broader Honduran trend, namely what Reporters Without Borders calls \u201ca murder rate comparable to that of a country at war\u201480 per 100,000 in a population of 7 million.\u201d One crucial battlefield is the Bajo Agu\u00e1n Valley, where at least 102 peasant farmers were killed between January 2010 and May 2013. The conflict there can be traced back to the \u201990s, when a \u201cparadigm promoted by the World Bank\u201d spurred \u201ca massive re-concentration of land in the Agu\u00e1n into the hands of a few influential elites,\u201d Tanya Kerssen writes in Grabbing Power, her excellent book. These land barons, particularly Dinant Corporation\u2019s Miguel Facuss\u00e9, thrived as \u201cthe Agu\u00e1n cooperative sector was decimated,\u201d some three-quarters of its land seized, Kerssen concludes. Campesinos, suddenly dispossessed, first sought legal recourse, which failed. They subsequently \u201cprotested and occupied disputed land,\u201d Rights Action\u2019s Annie Bird observes in an invaluable study (\u201cHuman Rights Violations Attributed to Military Forces in the Bajo Agu\u00e1n Valley in Honduras,\u201d February 2013), prompting government authorities to review the legitimacy of World Bank-promoted territorial transfer. But the June 2009 coup ended this appraisal, and since then Honduras\u2019 15th Battalion, Washington-aided \u201csince at least 2008,\u201d has \u201cconsistently been identified as initiating acts of violence against campesino movements,\u201d with police forces and Dinant\u2019s security guards getting in on the kills, Bird explains<\/p>\n
After Brazil, Honduras is the most dangerous place on the planet for land-rights defenders, according to \u201cDeadly Environment,\u201d a new Global Witness investigation, which notes that \u201cmore and more ordinary people are finding themselves on the frontline of the battle to defend their environment from corporate or state abuse, and from unsustainable exploitation.\u201d At least 908 worldwide died in this conflict from 2002-2013, and Washington\u2019s \u201ccounterdrug\u201d policies in the region have helped raise the stakes, Dr. Kendra McSweeney\u2019s research suggests. \u201cIn Honduras, the level of large-scale deforestation per year more than quadrupled between 2007 and 2011, at the same time as cocaine movements in the country also showed a significant rise,\u201d BBC correspondent Matt McGrath summarizes her findings. \u201cOnce you start fighting\u201d the traffickers, McSweeney elaborates, \u201cyou scatter them into more remote locales and greater areas become impacted,\u201d as smugglers clear forests to build airstrips and roads, and \u201cworthy\u201d Hondurans in, say, the palm oil and ranching sectors capitalize on booming drug profits.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday it\u2019s the same\u201d as it was in the 1980s, Honduran activist Bertha Oliva remarked a year ago, referring to the decade when \u201cthe presence of the U.S. in the country was extremely significant,\u201d and \u201cit was clear that political opponents were being eliminated.\u201d Obama\u2019s Honduras policy is Reagan\u2019s redux, in other words. The thousands of child prostitutes and street children, the prisons teeming with inmates, the scores of slaughtered peasants and dozens of murdered journalists\u2014all indicate the type of nation Washington helps build in a region where it\u2019s free to operate unimpeded, revealing which \u201cAmerican values\u201d really drive U.S. foreign policy.<\/p>\n
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