This is the Second in four part Webinar series held every Tuesday from March 15 – April 5, 5 PM PST.
REGISTER FOR THE MARCH 22 EVENT HERE
From the late 1800’s, the United States has been destabilizing countries in Central America, including Honduras, through political, corporate, and military intervention. As recent as in 2009, the U.S. stood by while the Honduran military violently ousted President Manuel Zelaya. Systemic inequality and the ensuing violence – including the criminalization and assassinations of hundreds of Honduran activists– has led to a significant increase in Honduran migration toward the U.S. over the past decade.
With the victory of Xiomara Castro, the first woman head of state in Honduras, in the elections of November 28 2021, the country experienced a historic step forward for the popular resistance that coalesced after the 2009 coup. Still, there are many uphill battles in the struggle for justice and dignity for the people of Honduras. The previous administrations since the 2009 coup betrayed their own people by selling the country’s land, water, and minerals to foreign investors; brutalizing of activists by the police and military with US-supplied funding and training; and installing maximum-security prisons designed after those existing in the US.
In this four-part webinar series, we will be looking at how corruption, land dispossession, environmental degradation, and systemic human rights abuses are the consequences of neoliberal (global free-market capitalist) policies and the legacy of U.S. imperialism. We at Honduras Solidarity Network and the InterReligious Task Force on Central America and Colombia invite you to join this series to gain a deeper understanding around these issues, as well as what can be done by people living in the Global North to show solidarity.
March 22: Transnational “development” – How the Honduran government enables US extraction of resources and exploitation of their people
Throughout the 20th century and until present day, Honduran leadership, with the support of the United States, has sold out land and water concessions to transnational corporations. This has happened through countless avenues, including the Banana Wars one hundred years ago and the signing of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2006. This pattern has never ceased. Since the 2009 coup, the authoritarian government has granted hundreds of concessions to foreign companies to extract minerals, build dams, create luxury resorts, and log timber. One of the most obvious examples of this exploitation and extraction is the signing of the 2013 Zones for Economic Development and Employment (ZEDE) law, which allows the government to further sell off Honduran land, including collectively-held ancestral lands of Afro-descendant and Indigenous peoples. Foreign investors, mostly from the US and Canada, are moving in to develop autonomous charter cities where the government will have no jurisdiction. President Xiomara Castro had made it one of her main election campaign promises to overturn this law.
Join this webinar to examine the role the US government and corporations play in seizing land and waterways from communities in Honduras, the popular resistance movement against the ZEDEs, and the challenges faced by the new presidential administration and the people of Honduras in the current political landscape.
