Worth the read (return to article Honduras at Ten Years After the Coup: a Critical Assessment – by James Phillips), this timely release by Counterpunch comes from a well-known academic, a friend of Peace House, Ashland, and someone who has spent a lifetime following the trajectories of politics, human rights struggles and atrocities in Central and South America. As a long-time and disciplined investigator of these trends, who has also lived amongst the people affected by the political histories of the region, Jim Phillips knows whereof he speaks.
The recommended reading at the end of this article backs up the huge documentation done by Dr. Phillips and several authors who have carefully recorded the sad trajectory of the last ten years – or more accurately assessing the last one-hundred years – of US and private enterprise in Honduras in collaboration with Honduran military and civilian officials The record unfurls a history that revolves around the “vendepatria” or “sale of the land” of the Honduran people: read as “sale of any hope for democracy”. Through corruption within an extractive economy, drug and weapons trafficking and huge human rights violations, intended to suppress those who report on the violations of democratic process and human rights, Honduras bears both deep scars and open wounds.
One consequence is the annual exodus of approximately 100,000 of its citizens who are fleeing the horror of what their country has become. Sadly many of them are running toward the horror of what the United States has and is becoming, evidenced in part by the horrifying treatment of refugees along the US southern border, where US personnel are dumping out hundreds of gallons of water that is left by good samaritans for potential refugees being scorched in the desert and prosecuting the samaritans for their compassion.
We have also reached the point of watching our own US “vendepatria” or sale of the land to extractive corporations is at an unparalleled level. We hear, everyday, of ways in which those who are in power are abusing their office for self-gain or to placate a president that is fostering corruption and violence at the expense of our so-called democracy. With this president’s affection for dictators and impunity for their assassination of journalists, it is possible that our country could look like the Honduras dictatorship rather soon.
We are fortunate to have skilled and unusual people like Jim Phillips dedicated to the observance and reporting of what is happening in Central America, willing to speak the truth and challenge violations that are reaching the overt proportion of war crimes.
This article’s progression follows the stages: “The Frantic Pursuit of Neoliberal Extractive Development”; “From Fragile Democracy to Party Dictatorship”; to stages of “Corruption and Official Impunity”; through the consequential “Violence, Gangs, Drug Traffickers, and Those Who Must Leave”; to the “Evolution of Popular Resistance”. it ends with the inevitable question: “Has the U.S. Role Changed?”
Read this and learn!
Elizabeth V. Hallett
Director, Peace House
