Social cleansing

Although aware of the problem of street children, especially in Latin America, I was unaware of the general hostility felt and expressed towards them and to teams of street educators who try to protect them until one evening in 1995 when I accompanied one such team around the centre of Tegucigalpa. It was only then that I began to appreciate the constant danger experienced by both street children and the workers of organisations such as Casa Alianza and the Quincho Barrilete Association. The experience and the hatred that so many citizens feel towards street children are described more fully in an account of that evening given in ‘The Violence of Development’ website. It is this widespread hatred which excuses the unofficial programme of social cleansing carried out largely by police and death squads.

Later that year I had the displeasure of proof reading the English version of Casa Alianza’s submission to the UN Committee Against Torture, a report on ‘The Torture of Guatemalan Street Children 1990 – 1995’, a thoroughly unpleasant booklet documenting “a PARTIAL list of cases of torture against street children in Guatemala City” [emphasis in original.][1] If proof were needed that the major perpetrators of the torture and killings of street children were to be found amongst the ranks of the police and security forces, this booklet provides it.

Eighteen years later the number of street children in Central American cities has not decreased and governments have failed to implement solutions that prevent children feeling the need to seek refuge on the streets. Despite some successful and valuable programmes to tackle the problem, it is not possible to report much progress. A total of 373 children and youth under the age of 23 were murdered in Guatemala City during the first six months of 2003. 105 of these (28 per cent) were under 18 and some as young as 12 years. The statistics were collected by the Legal Aid Programme of Casa Alianza Guatemala.[2] In Honduras between 1998 and December 2003, Casa Alianza documented 2,089 extrajudicial murders of children and youth under the age of 23.[3] Figure 9.1 brings the statistics for Honduras up to the year of 2011 and shows a shocking recent increase, suggesting a deliberate strategy of social cleansing – as Duncan Campbell writes, some in Honduras would see it as getting rid of the vermin from the streets.[4]

Founded in Guatemala in 1981, Casa Alianza expanded into Honduras and Mexico in 1986 and Nicaragua in 1998 and serves 4,000 – 5,000 children each year. It describes the situation of most of them as:

abused or rejected by dysfunctional and poverty-stricken families, and further traumatised by the indifference of the societies in which they live. Ubiquitous and growing in numbers, many far too young to comprehend their fate, they beg, steal and sell themselves for a hot meal, a hot shower, a clean bed. Living on the edge of survival, they are often swept in an undertow of beatings, illegal detentions, torture, sexual abuse, rape and murder.[5]

The Quincho Barrilete Association is a NGO which works with abused children in Managua, Nicaragua. There is of course considerable overlap between abused children and street children and María Consuelo Sánchez, director of the organisation, outlines the extent of this overlap for those children helped by the Association, at the same time indicating the nature of the problems they suffer:

76 per cent experience intra-family violence; 31 per cent experience sexual violence; 58 per cent spend much of their time on the street; 18 per cent are at risk of commercial sexual exploitation; 21 per cent have already been victims of commercial sexual exploitation; and 31 per cent work on the streets, selling. Basically, the children who are not at school are on the streets.[6]

Jessica Shepherd reports that Viva, an umbrella organisation for charities that help street children, says that up to 1.5 million Guatemalan children are consistently out of school – that is a fifth of the country’s pupil population.[7] Casa Alianza has also reported several times on threats which have been issued to street educators by patrolling soldiers and policemen. In one extreme case in 2005, lawyer Harold Rafael Pérez Gallardo was murdered in Guatemala City. Harold was a legal programme advisor to Casa Alianza and at the time of his killing was advising the organisation on several pending cases regarding irregular adoptions, murders, sexual exploitations, the trafficking of children and other human rights violations against children.[8]

Like the Casa Alianza observation above, María Consuelo Sánchez also noted the close correlation between family poverty, unemployment and the abuse of children which her organisation attempts to prevent and/or overcome. Behind this link with poverty, at least in part, are the structural adjustment programmes and stabilisation programmes forced on Central American governments by the international financial institutions such as the IMF and supported by various international aid organisations such as the USAID. These ‘agreements’ implemented painful economic reforms which threw thousands of state employees and others out of work and forced the end of food subsidies and school meal programmes, as a result of which, as Dafna Araf noted, “more and more families needed their children to work in order to help the family to survive.”[9]

Such neoliberal economic policies led to more flexible working patterns, or put another way, to the chance for employers and companies to pay their workers less and demand more from them. In such a world, “children make good employees – the cheapest to hire, the easiest to fire and the least likely to protest.”[10] The link between such policies and the increase in the number of street children is indirect, but the link between street children and the violence meted out to them is direct. Many working class and middle class commuters of Tegucigalpa resented the existence and presence of these children and were prepared to turn a blind eye to their removal – by whatever means and with whatever violence necessary.


[1] Casa Alianza / Covenant House (November 1995) ‘Report to the UN Committee Against Torture on the Torture of Guatemalan Street Children’, Guatemala City, p.4.
[2] Casa Alianza (July 2003) ‘Six months of bloodshed in Guatemala City – 373 young victims’, Guatemala.
[3] Casa Alianza (December 2003) ‘Increase of Child Murders in Honduras in November’, Tegucigalpa.
[4] Duncan Campbell (29 May 2003) ‘Murdered with impunity, the street children who live and die like vermin’, London: The Guardian.
[5] Casa Alianza (undated) ‘Giving Children Back Their Childhood’, Covenant House Latin America.
[6] María Consuelo Sánchez (6 July 2009) interviewed specifically for this book by Martin Mowforth, Alice Klein and Karis McLaughlin, Managua, Nicaragua.
[7] Jessica Shepherd (8 March 2011) ‘Street life’, London: Education Guardian, p.1.
[8] Casa Alianza (5 September 2005) ‘Legal Program Advisor from Casa Alianza Murdered’, Guatemala City: Casa Alianza.
[9] Dafna Araf (November 2003) ‘Children of the Street – Troubled Past and Uncertain Future’, San José: Mesoamerica, 22 (11), p.6.
[10] Ibid.

El Salvador’s State of Exception

10 February 2023

The El Salvador Solidarity Network (ESNET), a UK-based network, passed on to its members an article by El Faro investigative journalists regarding the country’s current state of exception. We are grateful to ESNET for distributing the article and to El Faro for producing it. ESNET’s introductory paragraph is followed by the El Faro article.

10 months into the ‘state of exception’ which the Government of Nayib Bukele/Nueva Ideas launched in the wake of a weekend of gang murders (in March 2022) the article below from investigative journalists El Faro gives a thoughtful analysis of the massive changes occurring, and the massive price the whole society is paying.

Scenes witnessed in recent weeks by El Faro reporters speak to a new, unknown life for thousands who can cross streets, talk to neighbours, and move on with their lives without gang members subduing them with a gun to their heads. This is, undoubtedly, an extraordinary change.

But it’s worth remembering that gangs weren’t born out of thin air. They were the crudest, most violent expression of a broken, corrupt society, one that gives limited opportunities to most of the population. It is a society marked by poverty, inequality, the impossibility of social mobility, lack of access to fundamental services like health, education, adequate housing, and jobs, and the non-conservation of precarious natural resources.

Those conditions haven’t changed. The current government has no plan for such structural changes capable of shedding the conditions under which these ghoulish expressions started. The fertile soil that allowed gangs to spawn and take root in the underprivileged barrios of most of El Salvador are still there. Repression is not a sustainable solution.

The Bukele regime went from negotiating with organised crime to repressing it only when the pact fell apart. The Army and the Police swept through communities under a state of exception that allowed them to act like prosecutors and judges and arrest without a warrant any citizen they considered a suspect.

Human rights violations have been massive. Thousands of innocents languish in overcrowded prisons. Scores have died in pre-trial detention. Meanwhile, the president boasts of a giant, newly built jail by a handpicked building company that was given a contract with no contest.

We Salvadorans gave up the rights of presumed innocence, legal counsel, fair trial, and to institutions that punish government abuses. We gave up the rule of law that comes with abiding by laws and the Constitution. We gave up freedom of expression, freedom to dissent, separation of powers, transparency in public finances, and mechanisms to fight corruption. We gave up alternation of power. We’re back to corrupt chieftainship.

The visible absence of gang structures, for the first time in a long while, is a fundamental change in the life of thousands of Salvadorans. But the price we’ve had to pay for it is sky-high. The cure could be as harmful as the disease.

 

What the ‘state of exception’ means in El Salvador

February 2023

The state of exception under which El Salvador’s population now lives was instigated in March 2022 by the country’s President Nayib Bukele. Although the state of exception is a legal mechanism designed to address an emergency situation and is therefore intended to be temporary and extraordinary, Bukele’s continued renewal of the state lends it a permanent and indefinite character under which constitutional rights are restricted. The state of exception was declared as a response to gang violence, but the security forces have committed widespread abuses of human and constitutional rights since the policy’s introduction. These abuses include the detention of many people under the suspicion of gang membership.

The Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad (Exchange and Solidarity Centre), or CIS, is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) which runs a variety of community development programmes throughout the country relating to housing, water provision, sanitation, education and farming. It also runs election monitoring delegations. The organisation’s end of year review includes a description of what the state of exception means to some of the people involved in their development programmes. We include extracts from their report below. We are grateful to Leslie Schuld, director of the CIS in San Salvador, for permission to reproduce their article here.

 

CIS Review of 2022, December 2022

The current situation:  Constitutional rights have been suspended since 27 March 2022 – we are going into our ninth month of the government’s ‘war on gangs’. While people applaud the arrest of gang members, many innocents have been caught in these dragnet operations. Dragnet was a popular TV show in the 1960s about apprehending criminals, but a dragnet is also used for fishing to drag and pick up fish, also snagging anything in its way. Government officials have referred to casting this dragnet knowing many innocents are caught up in it; they say they will let them go if they have no criminal background. Nonetheless, only 800 of over 54,000 arrested to date have been set free, when government sources state that at least 20 per cent have no criminal ties.

The persons set free include those with health conditions, so the government wouldn’t be held responsible for their deaths. A few prisoners have been freed in the middle of the night with no known process or criteria for being let out. And news reports say gang leaders with ties to government officials have also been released.

The CIS continues to focus its efforts to free 22 fishermen from the Holy Spirit Island who have been unjustly arrested, an island with no gangs and no delinquency, and where the CIS has worked since Hurricane Mitch in 1988. This is not a story from the bible, even though of the 22 fishermen, five are named Joseph, two are named Jesus, one is Christian, another is Saviour, among other biblical names.

The CIS was conceded a special hearing on 10th October for the first five fishermen who were arrested from the island. The judge in San Miguel stated that she had no proof of criminal activity, but we had not proven their innocence or ties to the island. We had stacks of sworn statements from community leaders, clients and family members – for the men who had lived on the island for 40 years or were born there. On top of that, over 30 family members travelled from the island to the hearing on 10th October, the very day that Hurricane Julia hit El Salvador. They braved the dangerously rough ocean in small motorboats. They took back roads to the judicial centre as the river had washed out the main route. CIS members and lawyer drove hours from San Salvador and had to wait 30 minutes on two occasions as boulders were cleared out of the road. Everything was suspended that day except the judicial system. Only the lawyer was allowed to be present in the hearing with his stacks of written testimonies, while we waited outside. Four of the five fishermen were present only via a virtual screen. The judge need only to look out of the window at humble family members to know that the men had family ties. Their children were left at home because of the danger that day. The judge focussed on one of the many false accusations – we had not proven that they were not providing food to a gang encampment in the mangroves around the island. CIS has asked: if this encampment exists in the mangroves, why has nobody been arrested there? How big is this encampment, that 22 men must provide food? Since the men work all day fishing, as boat taxis or other labour, who is preparing the food?

The CIS is also offering counselling, food baskets and organisational and legal support to others. Unjust arrests are not the only human rights violations, although they are the gravest since those arrested are automatically given a six month provisional sentence and an added six months after that. Those arrested have not had a visit from a lawyer or family member since the time of their arrest.

We share with you just two examples of other human rights violations faced by the CIS community.

Authorities visited and ransacked one scholarship student’s home four times. CIS provided refuge for fear of her arrest. Afterward, in a fifth visit to her home, the police handcuffed her mother and put her on her knees. She was given three days to turn in a gang member or face her own arrest and the arrest of her daughter (the CIS scholarship student), which they threatened would ruin her career.

Another CIS scholarship home was visited by police at 3 am. The father who suffers from cancer was beaten up. The police took pictures of the family members and their identity documents. A few days later the gangs came to the same home and threatened to kill the daughter (the CIS scholarship student) if the family did not find a house and a title for gang members. CIS counselling and support helped to protect these families.

So, while there is an illusion of safety, projected by millions of dollars spent on publicity saying how safe El Salvador is now, many Salvadorans with scarce economic resources are living in fear. While homicide rates are down, the security, income and well-being of thousands of poor families – who are not involved in criminal activity – are being compromised.

The CIS website:  www.cis-elsalvador.org

 

 

Dr Juan Almendares: Letter to Mother Earth and Humanity of the Planet

The reader is also referred to the interview with Dr Juan Almendares in the Honduras section of the Interviews page.

13-300x276Let us defend the right to land of the peasants of Aguán and the National Front of Popular Resistance in Honduras. My grandmother used to say that the umbilical cord is always buried in some place and that my mother buried my umbilical cord in the roots of Ceiba, because this tree represents the unity of Mother Earth with the heavens. I learned the first lessons inside my mother when she was pregnant through the pedagogy of dreams, based in three principles: an intimate love for Mother Earth and for humanity, telling the truth and respecting dignity and life.

In every little piece of land, or close to the spring or the river – my grandmother would say – “you have to plant a tree or a little nutritious or medicinal plant. Clean earth and the water maintain the health of the body, the mind and the animal and human community.”

I grew up watching my mother pedal day and night on a sewing machine to make shirts for a factory that exploited her without minimal labour rights. We were “those from below” the railway, where poverty, brothels, alcoholism and violence proliferated. On the weekends the “campeños” – agricultural workers from the banana companies – would come to get drunk and attack each other with their machetes. It was a form of self destruction and of taking out their impotence against the power of the US banana companies.

When I was eight years old, at three in the morning I went with my mother to see the almost decapitated body of my father, who was killed by a hired assassin to take away a piece of land. There were seven of us brothers and sisters, we learned from that not to have hate or vengeance, nor violence or consumption of drugs and alcohol. A tropical storm came and we lost everything including our own house.

In my years as a secondary student I met the peasant Chepe Campos, of Salvadoran origin, who had migrated to the city because of poverty. He was a bricklayer; we worked together on the dream of organizing a bricklayers’ union. The project didn’t get finished because of the repressive anti-union forces and because of the flooding that destroyed the brick yards.23

The other teacher was Cristóbal, a shoemaker from the neighbourhood with whom we would talk about social injustice. When I was studying in secondary school at the José Trinidad Reyes Institute I met a Guatemalan peasant who was an agricultural worker for the banana companies. He explained to us with extreme wisdom the painful experiences of being exploited by those companies.

We suffered hunger, humiliations and poverty to be able to study medicine. I worked with one main idea: to serve the poor, the peasants, workers, original peoples, Garífunas and students.

I carried out post-grad studies in medicine in the United States. The peace movement of the US youth against the war in Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Gandhi were inspiration for my position against militarism, torture and structural violence.

Nonetheless I came to the understanding that the essence of capitalism is anti-human and racist, that in its bosom is engendered the process of qualitative transformation of humanity itself and that we can’t be indifferent nor neutral but have to take a position against injustice, war and the violation of human rights.

I never wanted to stay in the north, even when I was condemned in Honduras by the death squads and the Argentinean Anti-Communist Alliance (Triple A). I have been a victim of the policy of the “three t’s”: trauma, torture and terror. This has not made it possible for me to hate any of my adversaries nor detractors. I start from the principle that the life of every being on the planet should be preserved and that this principle should be defended everywhere. That is why I have the firm conviction of not being racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, a participant in patriarchy nor authoritarianism; but I can’t keep silent before the crimes and lies of the military geopolitics of international financial capitalism, articulated with the oligarchic power and the ideology of neoliberalism.

In essence, I am anti-imperialist. I have the firm conviction that without local, regional and global solidarity and vice versa the substantial transformations in the bosom of humanity will never be made.

With this preamble of my life I want to respectfully invite the nice readers, friends of life and of Mother Earth to move your consciousness to protest against the injustice happening in Honduras and Meso-America and the plans of war against the peoples of the ALBA [Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas] and Our America.

I have served as a doctor with profound love for the poor and the condemned of the earth who live in the world of injustice. I express my testimony of solidarity against the unjust conditions lived in by the Lenca people, where the oligarchy took ownership of the rivers and wants to build in San Francisco de Opalaca a dam to change the course of the waters and generate electricity for their multinational projects. Nonetheless the Lenca people are enlightened; they reject the shady light of corruption that make vulnerable the life of the rivers and of the forest; and they join in with the National Front of Popular Resistance to participate in the Re-foundation of Honduras and install the National Constitutional Assembly which takes a step towards a Constitution for everybody.

When I examine the original and peasant peoples I observe the infamous process of social injustice that forces beings into autophagy (eating oneself). The boys and girls have sad, anaemic, dry eyes, with their bellies bulging and full of parasites, bare-foot, emaciated and swollen because of pain. This horrendous reality doesn’t just move me and make me cry, but my consciousness acquires a greater commitment with the people in resistance.

Some years ago I presented my testimony of solidarity against the killing of the Tolupanes in Yoro, caused by the occupation of their lands by cattle. The authors of this sinister plot paid $500 for each human head. This practice is an indicator of the extreme racism in Honduras and that the hired killers have always been a normal tool in the hands of the powerful.

I remember Tacamiche, to cite one of so many violent evictions in Honduras. In July of 1995 close to 500 people who had been living since the middle of the century on lands abandoned by a branch of the North American business Chiquita Banana were evicted by the Honduran military. The symbolic cost of these lands for the banana company was one dollar. To evict the peasants they launched hundreds of teargas bombs. We attended boys and girls who were burned and several women aborted because of exposure to the toxic gases. They destroyed the health centre, the Church School, and the corn and bean fields. The five hundred evicted people were relocated in a building with just one bath and one bathroom.

If we ask ourselves who are those who have been dispossessed of their lands and of the waters by the mining, banana, shrimp and wood companies and the plantations of African Palm for agro fuel, it is the original peoples, the Garífunas, the Misquitos and the peasants. They are the ones who make the land produce, who live in pauper conditions, and those who have the worst conditions of health, education, potable water and housing.

21
Based on these historical antecedents, we appeal to unity, organization and mobilization of the local national and world conscious with the objective of stopping the machinery of geopolitical, ideological and anti-human war against the peoples of Latin America. In Bajo Aguán, in Honduras, plans for a peasant massacre are being developed. The demand for delegations, economic solidarity and every type of humanitarian support for the families of the Unified Peasant Movement of Aguán (MUCA) is an urgent message.

The violence screams in every sweaty pore of the peasant and the system buys the consciousnesses to hide the truth. To defend at all costs the life of humans and of the planet should be our mission. In this small country, with an oligarchic system and an army of international capitalism the multimillionaire plans for proliferation of military bases, media campaigns and growing multimillionaire religious and media fundamentalism against Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua and the suffering people of Colombia are reflected.

They are rehearsing and experimenting with a war in Honduras that begins against the peasantry and the original and Garífuna peoples. It is the power of the arms business and the buying of consciousnesses against the process of liberation and historic dignity of the peoples of Latin America.

We celebrate the strength of the spiritual and cultural unity of the resistance of the peoples of the world against pain and suffering. Our ethical and libratory commitment should be to such a degree that with the slightest showing of injustice, the subtle flight of the hummingbird moves us and invites us to defend dignity and life.

FNL members assassinated, 2009 – 2011

This table also appears, slightly amended, in the book as Box 9.4 (page 184).

24 October 2009 – Victor Galvez shot 32 times as he left his office in Malacatan, San Marcos.

13 January 2010 – Evelinda Ramírez shot and killed in the municipality of Ocos – see Chapter 4.

29 January 2010 – FNL member Pedro Garcia shot and killed while driving home.

17 February 2010 – FNL leader in San Marcos Octavio Roberlo shot 16 times from a passing car while closing his store in the bus terminal.

21 March 2010 – Three community leaders who had denounced Unión Fenosa, Carlos Noel Maldonado Barrios, Leandro Maldonado and Ana María Lorenzo Escobar, killed by gunshots and machete wounds in the municipality of Ocos.

22 March 2011 – Head of the local committee for the nationalisation of energy, Santiago Gamboa, shot and killed by Guatemalan soldiers during protests in the town of Las Brisas.

Another murder in the murder capital of the world

carlos-mejia-orellana-2Carlos Mejía Orellana killed

Information from Rights Action (info@rightsaction.org), 13 April 2014

Radio Progreso has reported that Carlos Mejía, a member of its staff, was murdered last night in El Progreso, Honduras. In 2009, Carlos had received precautionary measures from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights due to threats that he had received. Radio Progreso issued this statement:

“Carlos was a beneficiary of precautionary measures by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and therefore we demand that the State of Honduras through the relevant institutions investigate the facts and that this crime does not go unpunished.”


Links
www.tiempo.hn/portada/noticias/Honduras-matan-a-gerente-de-mercadeo-de-radio-progreso
http://radioprogresohn.net/index.php/comunicaciones/noticias/item/850-hoja-de-prensa
www.proceso.hn/2014/04/12/Caliente/Matan.a.gerente/84947.html

El Salvador builds Latin America’s largest prison

Key words: El Salvador; state of exception; gangs; prison conditions.

On 3 February 2023, the Salvadoran government opened the largest prison in Latin America. The compound has a capacity for up to 40,000 inmates, is called the Centre for Terrorism Confinement and is located in a rural area 47 miles from San Salvador.

It covers 165 hectares of land and the structure itself covers 23 hectares. The compound has eight electric sub-stations, two water wells, a sewage treatment plant, three miles of access roads and 19 watchtowers with many thermal surveillance cameras. As the cells have toilets and large water basins for washing, inmates will be allowed out only for hearings and to go to the prison infirmary. “No yards have been built, nor recreation area for the inmates, nor conjugal spaces,” Public Works Minister Romero Rodriguez said.

Everyone who enters the facility – including the guards and other staff – must pass through a body scanner to verify that he or she is not carrying a weapon or other contraband. “Normally, telephones, televisions and even prostitutes entered the prisons,” Rodriguez said. “We have tried to guarantee that orders to murder Salvadorans are no longer given from inside the prisons.”

President Nayib Bukele declared a state of excepetion in March 2022 because of the high levels of violence perpetrated by the Salvadoran gangs and since then, his allies in congress have voted every month to renew the state of exception. The state of emergency entails the suspension of constitutional guarantees and allows police to detain people without warrants and in the absence of grounds that would stand up to judicial scrutiny.

Nearly 63,000 people with gang connections have been arrested, according to the government, but families of many detainees say that their loved ones were law-abiding citizens. Many organisations and human rights advocates have described the arrests as a massive human rights violation.


Sources:

  • Latin America News Dispatch, 6 February 2023, El Salvador.
  • Sara Acosta, 3 February 2023, ‘El Salvador builds largest prison in the Americas’, EFE Online News Editor.

See also other entries into the TVOD website for this month [February 2023]:

  • Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad CIS), ‘What the ‘state of exception’ means in El Salvador’.
  • El Salvador Solidarity Network (ESNET), ‘El Salvador’s State of Exception’

 

Narco-cattle ranchers in the Petén

The following is a brief summary of an article published in September 2008 in NotiCen which offers news and analysis of international political matters as they manifest themselves in Central America and the Caribbean.

A tourism project of astounding proportions is rising up out of the ashes of the grandiose but defunct Plan Puebla Panama (PPP), replaced by Plan Mesoamerica – see Chapter 7. The tourism project was proposed for the Petén, Guatemala’s largest and most remote department. President Alvaro Colóm proposed an archeological park extending some 22,500 sq km across this, Central America’s largest, forested wilderness. The park would include both El Mirador, a giant ruins considered the cradle of the Mayan civilisation, and Tikal, the gem of the Mayan classic period.

Some of this vast area has been raped, turned into cattle ranches, denuded of the forests that could not be seen for the trees whose value as illegally felled timber has spelled their doom. It also necessitates the eviction of subsistence campesino families and would include a large area of the Petén which is lawless and in which forest is clear-felled with impunity for cattle grazing. Additionally, the area is used as a major trans-shipment route by drug smugglers. The Guatemalan NGO Trópico Verde refers to those responsible for the illegal felling as ‘narco-cattle ranchers’.

Carlos Albacete, Co-Director of Trópico Verde, said that the organisation first denounced the situation in 2006 and has documentation showing that, in at least five cases, lands within the Laguna del Tigre park were illegally deeded to persons linked to narco-trafficking. In the Mirador area of the central zone of the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, the group has documentary evidence of state lands taken over by drug traffickers that were subsequently robbed of their timber and turned to grazing. After Trópico Verde made its charges, authorities nullified the titles, but they did not act against the drug traffickers. “They don’t mention that, to get the deeds issued, they had to bribe lawyers and officials, or that in Laguna del Tigre so far 40 small planes used to transport cocaine from Colombia to Guatemala have been found,” added Albacete.


The full article on which this summary is based is accessible on the ENCA website

Costa Rica: land of natural wonders and threats to those who defend them

This is an extended version of Box 9.3 which appears in the book (page 182).

A small selection of the threats suffered by Costa Rican environmentalists follows:

1989 – the death in suspicious circumstances of the indigenous Antonio Zúñiga, who opposed illegal hunting in the Ujarrás Indigenous Reserve.

1992 – the death from shooting of Oscar Quirós, a leader in the fight against deforestation in Sarapiquí.

1994 – the death in a fire, whose cause was never satisfactorily explained, of Oscar Fallas, Jaime Bustamente and María del Mar Cordero, leaders of the Costa Rican Ecologists Association (AECO) who had run a strong campaign against the Stone Forestal company, then a subsidiary of Stone Container, a US company.

1995 – the death of David Maradiaga, a poet, ecologist and leader of AECO, after a mysterious disappearance for three weeks.

1995 – simultaneous house fires of the homes of Wilfredo Rojas (a geologist) and Elizabeth González, both professional members of the Campaign Against the Landfill Dump in Cordel de Mora.

1990s – constant threats received by members of the country’s ecological movement after denouncing environmental damage; cases include Ana Cristina Rossi (writer), Patricia Sánchez (journalist) and León González (forestry engineer).

1999 – repression and arrest of ecologists on a peaceful march to demand a moratorium on deforestation in the Osa Peninsula.

2005 – Didier Leitón Valverde – see Box 2.1 (page 35) in the book.

2007 – the lawsuit intervening against a programme on the University of Costa Rica Channel 15 made by ecologists Marielena Fournier and Fredy Pacheco.

2000s – intimidation against Alcides Parajeles, a campesino who opposes illegal hunting and felling in the Osa Peninsula; threats include the destruction of his stock fencing and firearms pointed at his family.

2008 – threats to the residents of the Perla de Guácimo as a result of their complaints against the contamination of their water by pineapple cultivation.

2009 – Aquiles Rivera – see Box 2.1 (page 35) in the book.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, other Costa Ricans who have been the subject of threats and intimidation as a result of their defence of the environment and rights include: Carlos Arguedas, Abel Sánchez, Marco Tulio Araya, Orlando Barrantes, Marta Blanco, Era Verde, Cristino Lázaro, Yamileth Astorga, Marielena Fournier, Fredy Pacheco, Ronald Vargas and Santos Coronado – amongst others.

‘Anyone Can Murder A Woman In Honduras And Nothing Will Happen’ Women and girls in the barrios live in constant fear of sexual attack and a violent death

We are grateful to Rights Action for permission to reproduce this article by Sorcha Pollak.

By Sorcha Pollak, May 11, 2015

The windowless room in downtown San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second city, bustles with activity as more than a dozen women take their seats at a long oak table. Water bottles are distributed and the electric fan switched to full blast to alleviate the oppressive summer heat creeping through the half-open door.

As the chatter dies out, Dicsa Bulnes clears her throat, introduces herself and begins to speak. “As a woman I feel trapped. I am a prisoner in my own home, there’s nowhere for me to go. I have no freedom.”

Bulnes, who is from the marginalised Afro-Caribbean Garífuna community, pauses for a moment to take a sip of water before she continues. “My partner nearly killed me. He still sends me threatening messages on my mobile attacking me. I’ve tried reporting him but the authorities won’t do anything. It feels like they are forcing women to buy their own coffins, to return to the attacker and suffer through the violence.”

Bulnes is a member of the Foro de Mujeres por la Vida (Women’s Forum for Life), an organisation which campaigns for women’s rights in a country that increasingly turns a blind eye to the violence and persecution that plagues the lives of countless women.

The forum has called a meeting in its small San Pedro Sula office so a female journalist from a safe western country can hear about the daily battles endured by the women of this small central American nation.

Aside from having one of the highest murder rates in the world – a national homicide rate of 79 per 100,000 – Honduras is rapidly becoming one of the most dangerous places on Earth for women.

Over the past decade, this nation of just over eight million people has witnessed a sharp increase in domestic and sexual violence and gender-based murder, a phenomenon known as femicide.
According to the University Institute for Democracy, Peace and Security in Honduras, 531 women were murdered in 2014, the majority of these aged between 15 and 24. Although this number was slightly lower than that of the previous year – there were 636 recorded murders of women in 2013 – the lack of accountability for this violation of a woman’s most basic human right has normalised the concept of femicide.

Between 2005 and 2013 the number of violent deaths of women increased by 263.4 per cent.
Carolina Sierra, spokeswoman for Foro de Mujeres por la Vida, says any attempts made to improve women’s rights before the 2009 military coup, which ousted reformist president Manuel Zelaya, were erased by the current administration.

“The increased militarisation of the country means all measures now focus on weapons and the military, while any measures that were taken to protect women’s rights have been completely abandoned,” says Sierra. “It’s almost like there’s a carte blanche for the assassination of women. Anyone can murder a woman in Honduras and nothing will happen.

“With this lack of accountability, women’s bodies are being used to send a message of fear and hate to the rest of the population.”

In 2014, the United Nations reported that 95 per cent of cases of sexual violence and femicide in Honduras were never investigated, while only 2.5 per cent of cases of domestic violence were settled.

Living in fear
Maria Teresa Meza, who lives in a small shack in the Bordo Gavión riverside slum of San Pedro Sula with her children, says sexual violence is the daily lot for most young women in the community. “Rape is a real danger for young women living in the bordos. If you let your daughter step outside her home she will either be raped or forced into selling drugs.”

Teenage girls living near the bustling food markets in the capital, Tegucigalpa, face the same level of violent abuse. Sarai (19) says many of her friends became pregnant when they were only 12 or 13 after meeting gang members in the marketplace. She says gangs “own the barrios” of Tegucigalpa, controlling how women walk, talk and dress. “They walk around the area monitoring everyone who comes in and out. They know exactly what’s going on and every single detail of our lives.”

Wendy (14) says women and girls are the first to suffer under this brutal culture of drugs, extortion and violence. Freedom of speech doesn’t exist in a world where themaras youth gangs rule the streets. “All I can see around me is violence; there never seems to be any light. Women don’t have the freedom to walk down the street without worrying about being attacked. The men rule and the women must follow.

“Some young women are raped by their own families,” she adds quietly. “They’re raped by their uncles and fathers.”

Supaya Martínez, co-director of the Centre for Women’s Studies Honduras, says gangs govern every aspect of a woman’s life, down to the colour she uses to dye her hair. “If a woman dyes her hair the wrong colour, the local gang will kill her.”

Martínez says people have learned to justify femicide by arguing that female victims are involved in gangs or connected with drug traffickers.

Murder of beauty queen
Last November the bodies of the Miss Honduras beauty queen, María José Alvarado, and her sister were found in the region of Santa Barbara in western Honduras. The sister’s boyfriend was found guilty of murdering the women in a jealous rage. However, Martínez says the government claims the young women were connected to drug-traffickers.

“It’s as if it was their fault. They place the blame on the victim and basically say she was responsible for her own death.

“There hasn’t been a strong enough response from the government to end this. Women die every day but no one is punished and so the crimes just continue.”

Last year UN special rapporteur on violence against women Rashida Manjoo called for the Honduran government to address the “climate of widespread and systematic crime, corruption and impunity”.

Supports cut
However, as part of its process of restructuring in 2014, the government actually downgraded the status of the National Institute for Women, cut funding to women’s rights groups and abolished the police emergency telephone line for female victims of violence.

“We’re living in a country where women don’t feel safe enough to report acts of violence to the authorities,” says Sierra, adding that many women who speak up about injustice must pay for it with their lives.

“Men are killing women with rage, fury and cruelty. We’re scared to speak out but this is the daily lot we’re living.

“We’re forced to live in a culture of violent machismo which has become a natural, accepted part of Honduran society.”


http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/anyone-can-murder-a-woman-in-honduras-and-nothing-will-happen-1.2207043

Rights action: www.rightsaction.org