Honduras Journal
by Lucy J. Edwards
Ashland resident Lucy Edwards has been doing human rights accompaniment in Honduras since 2010. A coup d’état in the country in 2009 created a human rights crisis that continues today. She is a volunteer with the Honduras Accompaniment Project, known by its Spanish acronym PROAH. Her husband, Dr. Jim Phillips, anthropologist at Southern Oregon University, is author of Honduras in Dangerous Times, published in 2015 by Lexington Press.
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| Padre Melo faces police at a new toll booth outside El Progreso |
There is always a process of unfolding on coming home from Honduras. I have not yet been home a full week, and so am still in the midst of understanding of what I experienced on this most recent three week trip accompanying Honduran Jesuit Ismael Moreno, SJ, known as Padre Melo.
Padre Melo is the director of Radio Progreso, a radio station based in the northern Honduran city of El Progreso. He also directs a Jesuit investigative team that works on human rights. That team goes by the acronym ERIC, equipo de reflexión, investigación y comunicación. Padre Melo is known internationally for his human rights advocacy in the face of intimidation and death threats. In 2015 he was awarded the prestigious Rafto Prize in Bergen, Norway. Many Ashlanders met Padre Melo when he visited Oregon in 2013.
In Honduras, I spend a lot of time with Padre Melo’s team. They include some 35 journalists, broadcasters, lawyers and investigators. Many are quite young; all are courageous. All have lost friends or loved ones in the human rights disaster that is Honduras. In 2014, colleague Carlos Mejia Orellana, the station’s marketing director was murdered in his home. His murder is still unsolved and in October, 2014, the public prosecutor in his case was also murdered. (Note: After my return, in the second week of November, a single individual was found guilty in court in El Progreso for Carlos’ murder. Lawyers close to the case say there were numerous irregularities, and a flawed investigation and trial. To his family and colleagues, the case is still unsolved.)
US POLICY: CARSI and the Alliance for Prosperity
Murder and Impunity
Most recently some US funds were halted when indigenous leader Berta Cáceres was murdered March 2, 2016, by a death squad that included active and retired military and a private security employee of the international corporation building a huge hydroelectric project on a river in indigenous territory. Cáceres was winner of the 2015 Goldman Prize for her courage and leadership in defense of protecting that river, the Gualcarque, sacred to the Lenca. She was a prominent human rights and environmental defender, and her murder has mobilized an international community in solidarity with Hondurans challenging the violence and corruption of extractive industries and their deadly practices.
A Death List
In May, two months after Cáceres’s murder, Honduran journalist and a particularly coherent critic of the Honduran regime, Félix Molina, survived an assassination attempt in the capital of Tegucigalpa. He survived with gunshot wounds to both legs. In June, the Guardian published an article based on testimony from defecting Honduran military members who say they fled rather than participate in Berta Cáceres’s murder. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/21/berta-caceres-name-honduran-military-hitlist-former-soldier)
They revealed the existence of a death list that had included Cáceres and other Honduran social leaders. The defectors were from a Honduran special forces unit that had received recent training from US Marines and the FBI.
The organization Berta Cáceres led, COPINH, continues to be a target of repression and assassination. Four months after Cáceres’s killing, in the first week of July, COPINH community leader Lesbia Janeth Urquía, 49, was murdered in Marcala, La Paz. Her body was found in the municipal dump. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/07/honduras-murder-lesbia-janeth-urquia-berta-caceres)
US Certifies Honduras Human Rights
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| Padre Melo speaks against the privatization of the public highways |
The Extraction Model of Development
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The toll booth in Siguatepeque on the main north-south highway |
The murders have not stopped in Honduras. Two campesino movement leaders were murdered the day I arrived, October 18. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/19/honduras-land-rights-activists-killed-unified-peasant-movement) José Ángel Flores, 64, was president of MUCA, movimiento unificado campesino del Aguán. Silmer Dionisio George was a MUCA community leader. They were gunned down leaving a MUCA meeting in Tocoa, Colon. Flores had survived an assassination attempt in April of 2015. Both men had protective measures granted by the InterAmerican Commission for Human Rights (IACHR) because of threats. Almost everyone I know in Honduras has IACHR protective measures, or had loved ones who had these measures before they were murdered. It is an international legal designation telling the government of Honduras that it has an obligation to investigate threats and attacks against human rights defenders, and if possible to mitigate those threats. Padre Melo and several members of his team have IACHR protective measures. Félix Molina had them since before the attempt on his life. Berta Cáceres and Carlos Mejia Orellana had IACHR measures in place before their murders.
New Trend-Deporting International Witnesses
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| Padre Melo blesses the coffin of Fernando Alemán Banegas, 28,] murdered October 30. His mother Esly sits in the pew beside the coffin. |
A Funeral
On October 30, we received the devastating news of the murder of Fernando Alemán Banegas, 28, oldest child of human rights defender and social leader Esly Banegas. http://defensoresenlinea.com/asesinan-hijo-de-la-defensora-de-derechos-humanos-y-actual-coordinadora-general-de-copa/ The next day a group of us left El Progreso early so that Melo could celebrate Fernando’s funeral mass in Tocoa. Melo is very close to the family and I had met Esly on various occasions. There is a terrifying practice in Honduras to kill the young adult children of social leaders to incapacitate their work. His murder happened on the day of a primary election in Tocoa, where his mother Esly was a Libre Party pre-candidate for Mayor.
At his funeral Padre Melo lamented the number of young people murdered in Honduras, the number of mothers and fathers in anguish as they bury their children. A funeral should be a celebration of life, he said, with sorrow but with great joy for a life well lived, filled with love and experience. No mother and no father should have to bury their murdered child. But that is the experience for too many parents in Honduras.
A few days later, on the Day of All Souls, on his morning radio program Padre Melo named the many friends and colleagues who have died in the violence since the 2009 coup. Many were people I had met in the six and a half years I have done international accompaniment. I return to Ashland holding their memories and filled with fresh grief for Fernando’s family, a witness to the suffering that is too much a product of US policy in Honduras.
