Meddling in Honduras
Report from a Former Taosena
By Joanne Forman
Many Taosenos will remember Kathy Albrecht, who was a staff member of the Taos Public Library, and who now lives near Socorro. A few months ago she joined a delegation to Honduras, in Central America, and wrote this report, which is excerpted here.
Americans may have scarcely noticed a coup in Honduras, which ousted President Zelaya, “who was rousted from sleep, flown in his PJS to an American airbase, and finally deposited on a distant tarmac two countries away…seems that Zelaya and the Honduran Congress had been about to complete a major land redistribution…approximately 200 campesinos, journalists, teachers (whose pensions mysteriously disappeared and other reformists have been killed…these murders are frequently performed with U.S. arms and tear-gas canisters lavished by us upon the Honduran military and police.
Albrecht goes on to relate, “Our delegation was visiting peasant agricultural cooperatives…promised titles to their modest holdings in the 1970s (in exchange for having cleared the towering virgin forests for industrial agriculture), these campesinos are still waiting…two generations later…
“Over 300,000 families…have no land on which to grow food…375,000 peasants survive on 25 cents a day. I saw their stick and rag huts, wedged between palm oil plantations and the honking highway…
“Cooperatives have legal rights—though still no titles…and they have each other…the campesino cooperatives represent a tremendous threat to the four wealthy “landlords” …the 200 private “security guards” of the wealthiest man in Honduras, Miguel Facusse, are a roving death squad…the Honduran military, equipped and trained with your tax dollars, is also implicated…
“We came upon the National Police violently evicting a peasant cooperative which had worked the land for eleven years…houses had been bulldozede and burned, their food storage and seed stocks destroyed, their livestock slaughtered…after this showdown, two more peasant leaders were assassinated…seven days later, another…yet another…
“An assassin can be hired…for a mere $150—a small fortune to many Hondurans. Every co-op leader is currently receiving death threats.”
I forward this not because it is so unusual, but because it is so common. In a half century and a decade, the United States, complicit in so many of these situations, has gone from being the most admired and respected nation in the world to being perhaps the most hated and feared. Is this how we want our nation to be viewed? How did it happen? What can we do.
Joanne Forman is a composer and writer who has lived and worked for many years in Taos, New Mexico. You can contact her at: jofo@kitcarson.net