The sea is encroaching fast in the coastal area of Balfate, along Honduras’ Caribbean Coast, where natural barriers are disappearing and the sea is advancing many metres inland. Credit: Courtesy of Hugo Galeano to IPS

By Thelma Mejía
BALFATE, Honduras, May 15 2017 (IPS)

In Balfate, a rural municipality that includes fishing villages and small farms along Honduras’ Caribbean coast, the effects of climate change are already felt on its famous scenery and beaches. The sea is relentlessly approaching the houses, while the ecosystem is deteriorating.

“What was it like before? There used to be a coconut palm plantation before the beach, and a forest with howler monkeys. Today there are no palm trees and the howler monkeys have left,” environmental activist Hugo Galeano, who has been working in the area for over three decades, told IPS.

“Where the beach is now, which used to be 200 metres inland, there used to be a thick palm tree plantation and a beautiful forest. Today the geography has changed, the sea has swallowed up much of the vegetation and is getting closer and closer to the houses. The effects of climate change are palpable,” he said.

Galeano coordinates the Global Environment Facility’s Small Grants Programme (SGP) in Honduras, and is one of the top experts on climate change in the country. He also promotes climate change mitigation and reforestation projects, as well as community integration with environmentally friendly practices, in low-income areas.

In the near future, this majestic tree will no longer be part of the scenery and a natural barrier protecting one of the beaches in Balfate, on Honduras’ Caribbean coast. Credit: Courtesy of Hugo Galeano to IPS

The municipality of Balfate, with an area of 332 square kilometres and a population of about 14,000, is one of the localities in the Caribbean department of Colón that makes up the coastal corridor where the impact of climate change has most altered the local residents’ way of life.

Other communities in vulnerable corridor are Río Coco, Lucinda, Río Esteban and Santa Fe. In these places, the sea, according to local residents, “is advancing and the trees are falling, because they can’t resist the force of the water, since the natural protective barriers have disappeared.”

This is how Julián Jiménez, a 58-year-old fisherman, described to IPS the situation in Río Coco. He said his community used to be 350 metres from the sea, but now “the houses are at the edge of the beach.”

Río Coco, a village in the municipality of Balfate is increasingly near the sea. Located in the central part of the Caribbean coast of this Central American country, it is a strategic hub for transportation by sea to islands and other remote areas.

To get to Balfate you have to travel along a partly unpaved road for nearly eight hours from Tegucigalpa, even though the distance is only around 300 km. To reach Río Coco takes another hour, through areas where the drug trafficking mafias have a lot of power.

Jiménez has no doubts that “what we are experiencing is due to climate change, global warming and the melting of glaciers, since it affects the sea, and that is what we tell the community. For the past decade we have been raising awareness, but there is still much to be done.”

The geography of Balfate, a land of famous landscapes in Honduras’ Caribbean region, has changed drastically from three decades ago, due to encroachment by the sea, according to local residents. Credit: Courtesy of Hugo Galeano to IPS

“We are also guilty, because instead of protecting we destroy. Today we have problems with water and even with the fish catches. With some kinds of fish, like the common snook, there are hardly any left, and we also are having trouble finding shrimp,” he said.

“It is hard for people to understand, but everything is connected. This is irreversible,” said Jiménez, who is the coordinator of the association of water administration boards in the coastal areas of Balfate and the neighbouring municipality of Santa Fe.

Not only Colón is facing problems along the coast, but also the four departments – of the country’s 18 – with coasts on the Caribbean, the country’s eastern border.

In the northern department of Cortés, the areas of Omoa, Barra del Motagua and Cuyamelito, which make up the basin of the Motagua River, near the border with Guatemala, are experiencing similar phenomena.

In these areas on the gulf of Honduras, fishers have also reported a substantial decline inT fish catches and yields, José Eduardo Peralta, from the Coastal Sea Project of the Ministry of Energy, Natural Resources, Environment and Mines, told IPS.

“The sea here has encroached more on the beach, and on productive land, than in other coastal areas. With regard to fishing, there are problems with the capture of lobster and jellyfish; the latter has not been caught for over a year and a half, save for one capture reported a month ago in the area of Mosquitia,“ in the Caribbean, he said in his office in Tegucigalpa.

This tree on one of the beaches in Balfate could fall in a matter of six months, due to the force of the waves which works against its roots, as part of the encroachment of the sea. Credit: Courtesy of Hugo Galeano to IPS

Peralta said the government is concerned about the effects of climate change, because they could reach dramatic levels in a few years.

The sea, he said, is rising and “swallowing up land, and we are also losing biodiversity due to the change in water temperatures and the acidification of the water.”

In line with Jiménez, Peralta said that “the sea currents are rapidly shifting, and the current should not shift overnight, the changes should take between 24 and 36 hours, but it’s not like that anymore. This is called climate change.”

Honduras is considered by international bodies as one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate impacts, as it is on the route of the hurricanes and due to the internal pressures that affect the wetlands, such as deforestation and large-scale African oil palm plantations, which have a direct effect on water scarcity.

Ecologist Galeano said official figures show that in wetland areas, there are approximately two hectares of African oil palms per one of mangroves. He said it was important to pay attention to this phenomenon, because the unchecked spread of the plantations will sooner or later have an impact on the local ecosystems.

On Mar. 9, Environment Minister José Antonio Galdames launched the Climate Agenda, which outlines a National Plan for Climate Change Adaptation for the country, whose implementation recently began to be mapped out.

Among the measures to be carried out under the plan, Galdames underscored in his conversation with IPS a project of integral management of the Motagua River basin, which will include reforestation, management of agroforestry systems and diversification of livelihoods at the productive systems level.

Hurricane Mitch, which caused incalculable economic losses and left over 5,000 people dead and 8,000 missing in 1998, tragically revealed Honduras’ vulnerability. Two decades later, the climate impact is felt particularly in the Caribbean coastal area, which was already hit particularly hard by the catastrophe.

According to the United Nations, 66.5 percent of households in this country of 8.4 million people are poor.

Employees of Grupo Ideal, a participatory company in the village of Paso Real, pull out tilapias ready to be sold, from the José Cecilio del Valle reservoir. An innovative credit system is helping family farmers in poor rural areas of Honduras, who have been excluded by the banking system. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
PASO REAL, Honduras, Feb 8 2017 (IPS)

In this village in southern Honduras, in one of the poorest parts of the country, access to credit is limited, the banking sector is not supportive of agriculture, and nature punishes with recurrent extreme droughts.

But over the past two years, the story has started to change in Paso Real, a village of about 60 families, with a total of just over 500 people, in the municipality of San Antonio de Flores, 72 kilometres from Tegucigalpa.

A group of family farmers here, just over 100 people, got tired of knocking on the doors of banks in search of a soft loan and opted for a new financing model, which the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) decided to test in this impoverished Central American country.

The initiative involves the creation of development financing centres (FCD), so far only in two depressed regions in Honduras: Lempira, to the west, and the Association of Municipalities of North Choluteca (Manorcho), to the south.

Both areas form part of the so-called dry corridor in Honduras, that runs through 12 of the country’s 18 departments, which are especially affected by the impacts of climate change.

Paso Real is part of Manorcho, composed of the municipality of San Antonio de Flores plus another three –Pespire, San Isidro and San José – which have a combined population of more than 53,000 people in the northern part of the department of Choluteca, where people depend on subsistence farming and small-scale livestock-raising.

Rafael Núñez is one of the leaders of Grupo Ideal, a company that is an association of family farmers who also breed and sell tilapia, a freshwater fish very popular in Central America. In addition, they raise cattle and grow vegetables.

Núñez is pleased with what they have achieved. Even though his family already owned some land, “it was of no use because nobody would grant us a loan.”

“The banks would come to assess our property, but offered loans that were a pittance with suffocating interest rates. They never gave us loans, even though we knocked on many doors,” Nuñez told IPS.

“But now we don’t have to resort to them, we have gained access to loans at the development financing centre in Menorcho, at low interest rates,” he said, smiling.

Nuñez said that because the banks would not lend them money, they had to use credit cards at annual interest rates of 84 per cent, which were strangling them. Now the loans that they obtain from the FCD are accessible, with an annual interest rate of 15 per cent.

Farmer Rafael Núñez told Central American visitors how the banking system mistreats small farmers in Honduras, and how the introduction in their municipality, San Antonio de Flores, of a financial centre for development which the FAO is testing in two depressed areas in the country, has improved their lives. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

“It has not been easy to get on our feet because the banking system here doesn’t believe in agriculture, let alone family farming. I collect the bank books that you see and someday I will frame them and I’ll go to those banks and tell them: thanks but we don’t need you anymore, we have forged ahead with more dignified options offered by people and institutions that believe in us,” said Nuñez with pride.

He shared his experience during a Central American meeting organised by FAO, for representatives of organisations involved in family farming and the government to get to know these innovative experiences that are being carried out in the Honduran dry corridor.

Nuñez showed the participants in the conference the tilapia breeding facilities that his association operates at the José Cecilio del Valle multiple-purpose dam, located in the village.

Grupo Ideal is a family organisation that divides the work among 11 siblings and offers direct jobs to at least 40 people in the area and generates indirect employment for just over 75 people. They are convinced that their efforts can be replicated by other small-scale producers.

Among the things that make him happy, Nuñez says they have started to improve the diet of people in the local area.

Marvin Moreno, the FAO expert technician behind this solidarity-based and inclusive innovative microcredit model, which so far has helped change the lives of 800 poor families. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

“We eat with the workers, we work with them, side by side, and at lunch they used to only bring rice, beans and pasta, but now they bring chicken, beef, tilapia and even shrimp,” he said.

One requirement for working in the company is that employees have to send their children to school. “This is an integral project and we want to grow together with the village because there are almost no sources of employment here,” he said.

Marvín Moreno, the FAO expert who has been the driving force behind the two experimental FCD finance centres, told IPS that the new model of financing has allowed families to organise to access opportunities to help them escape poverty.

Participating in the FCDs are local governments, development organisations that work in the area and groups of women, young people and farmers among others, which are given priority for loans.

The innovative initiative has two characteristics: solidarity and inclusiveness. Solidarity, because when someone gets a loan, everyone becomes a personal guarantor, and inclusive because it doesn’t discriminate.

“The priority are the poor families with a subsistence livelihood, but we also have families with more resources, who face limited access to loans as well,” Moreno said.

“It’s a question of giving people a chance, and we’re showing how access to credit is changing lives, and from that perspective it should be seen as a right that must be addressed by a country’s public policies,” he said.

Abel Lara, a Salvadoran small-scale farmer, highlighted the experience of the financial centres developed by FAO in Honduras, which he says show that concentrating on local solutions close to farmers is key for supporting family agriculture. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

This view is shared by Abel Lara, a small-scale farmer from El Salvador, who after learning about the experience, told IPS that this “basket of funds that makes available loans with joint efforts only comes to prove that it is possible to get family agriculture back on its feet, from the communities themselves..”

The two FCDs established by FAO in Honduras have managed to mobilise about 300,000 dollars through a public-private partnership between the community, organisations and local governments.

That has enabled more than 800 small farmers to access loans ranging from 150 to 3,000 dollars, payable in 12 to 36 months.

In the case of Manorcho, César Núñez, the mayor of San Antonio de Flores, said that “people are starting to believe that the financial centre offers a real opportunity for change and our aim here is to help these poor municipalities, which are hit hard by nature but have potential, to move forward.”

In a country of 8.4 million people, where 66.5 per cent of the population lives in poverty, access to loans as a boost to family agriculture can change the prospects for some 800,000 poor families living in the dry corridor.

These experiences, according to FAO representative in Honduras María Julia Cárdenas, will be part of the proposals for regional dialogue that the Central American Agricultural Council will seek to put the development of family agriculture on the regional agenda.

Reporters in Tegucigalpa staged a demonstration in April this year with coffins outside the office of the public prosecutor, to protest the murders of media workers in Honduras in the last decade. Credit: Courtesy of Proceso Digital for IPS

By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Nov 28 2016 (IPS)

It was in the wee hours of the morning on October 19 when journalist Ricardo Matute, from Corporación Televicentro’s morning newscast, was out on the beat in San Pedro Sula, one of the most violent cities in Honduras.

He heard about a vehicle that had rolled and was the first on the scene of the accident. When he saw four men in the car, he called the emergency number, for help. Little did he know that they were members of a powerful “mara” or gang.

Furious that he was making the phone call, they shot and wounded him, and forced him to get back into the TV station’s van, along with the cameraman and driver, and drove off with them.

But other journalists who also patrol the city streets each night saw the kidnapping and chased the van until the gang members crashed it and fled. If they hadn’t been “rescued” this way, the three men would very likely have been killed, because the criminals had already identified Matute and they generally do not leave loose ends, the journalists involved in the incident told IPS.“Now it turns out that reporters not only have to avoid commenting or giving news that affect the country’s groups of power, but also common criminals, and meanwhile the authorities don’t give us any real assurance of protection” -- Juan Carlos Sierra

Matute, who is part of TV5´s so-called Night Patrol, was wounded in the neck with an Ak-47. The reporters lamented that in spite of the fact that the accident occurred near military installations and that they asked for help, the military failed to respond.

“The state does not protect us, but rather attacks us,” one journalist told IPS on condition of anonymity.

Now Matute, a young reporter who was working for Televicentro, the biggest broadcasting corporation in Honduras, is safeguarded by a government protection programme, under a new law for the protection of human rights activists, journalists, social communicators and justice system employees.

Some 10 journalists, according to official figures, have benefited from the so-called Protection Law, in force for less than a year.

Matute sought protection under the programme after the authorities released, a day after the accident, a video showing the gang members who attacked him, captured by a local security camera. They were members of Mara 18 and carried AK-47 and AR-15 rifles.

Mara 18 and MS-13 are the largest gangs in Honduras. Mara 18 is the most violent of the two. Through turf wars they have basically divvied up large towns and cities for their contract killing operations, drug dealing, kidnappings, money laundering and extortions, among other criminal activity.

The authorities recommended that Matute take refuge under the protection programme and leave his job, since after the video was broadcast, the gang members felt exposed and could act against him in retaliation.

The young reporter Mai Ling Coto, who patrolled with Matute in search of night-time news scoops, told IPS that reporting in Honduras is no longer a “normal” job but is now a dangerous occupation.

This is especially true in a belt that includes at least eight of the country’s 18 departments or provinces, according to the Violence Observatory of the Public National Autonomous University of Honduras.

“Now the only thing that is left is to entrust ourselves to God. We used to report normally without a problem, but now things have changed, especially for those of us who work at night. We have to learn new codes to move around danger zones in the city and the outskirts,” she said.

“If we go to gang territory, we have to roll down our windows and flash our headlights; we move around in groups so they see that we are not alone,“ said Coto from San Pedro Sula, describing some of the security protocols they follow.

Reporters protested in seven cities in Honduras in May 2014 for the kidnapping and murder of Alfredo Villatoro, a reporter with Emisoras Unidas, the country’s main radio station. Credit: Courtesy of Proceso Digital for IPS

San Pedro Sula, 250 kilometres from the capital, is the city with the most developed economy in Honduras. It has a population of 742,000, and in 2015 had a homicide rate of 110 per 100,000 people.

This Central American nation of 8.8 million people is considered one of the most violent countries in the world.

The Commission for Free Expression (C-Libre), a coalition of journalists and humanitarian organisations, reported that between 2001 and 2015 63 journalists, rural communicators and social communicators were murdered.

In 2015 alone, C-libre identified 11 murders of people working in the media: the owner of a media outlet, a director of a news programme, four camerapersons, a control operator, three entertainment broadcasters, and one announcer of a religious programme. Most of them occurred outside of Tegucigalpa.

Ana Ortega, director of C-Libre, believes that journalism is not only a victim of violence, but also of laws and impunity.

She stated this in the group’s annual report on freedom of expression, observing that a secrecy law obstructs the right of information, while new reforms to the criminal code are planned with references to the press.

“Now it turns out that reporters not only have to avoid commenting or giving news that affects the country’s power groups, but also common criminals, and meanwhile the authorities don’t give us any real assurance of protection,” Juan Carlos Sierra, director of the news broadcast where Matute worked, told IPS in Tegucigalpa.

Another journalist from San Pedro Sula who asked to remain anonymous added: “We are helpless because we cannot trust the authorities, the police or the public prosecutors, since when they see us, they attack us and sometimes send us as cannon fodder to certain scenes, and they arrive afterwards.”

“We feel like neither the state nor the authorities respect us,” he said.

The state, Sierra added, “has not had any interest, now or before, in resolving murders of journalists, let alone violations of freedom of expression.”

For human rights defender and former judge Nery Velázquez, the vulnerability faced by reporters, “far from dissipating, is growing, and we have come to accept tacitly that the impunity surrounding these murders becomes the norm, while freedom of the press is restricted.”

Of the 63 documented murders, legal proceedings began in just four cases, and of these, only two made it to the last stage – an oral public trial – and ended with the conviction of the direct perpetrators, but not of the masterminds who ordered the murders.

“Investigation in Honduras is a failure, everything is left in prima facie evidence, and not only the press is trapped here by violence, but also human rights activists and lawyers,” Velázquez told IPS.

According to reports by human rights groups, corruption and organised crime are the main threats to freedom of speech in Honduras, where being a journalist has become a high-risk occupation over the last decade.

Students at the “República de Venezuela” School in the indigenous Lenca village of Coloaca in western Honduras, where they have a vegetable garden to grow produce and at the same time learn about the importance of a healthy and nutritious diet. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
COALACA, Honduras, Jul 15 2016 (IPS)

Barely 11 years old and in the sixth grade of primary school, this student dreams of becoming a farmer in order to produce food so that the children in his community never have to go hungry. Josué Orlando Torres of the indigenous Lenca people lives in a remote corner of the west of Honduras.

He is part of a success story in this village of Coalaca, population 750, in the municipality of Las Flores in the department (province) of Lempira.

Five years ago a Sustainable School Feeding Programme (PAES) was launched in this area. It has improved local children’s nutritional status and enjoys plenty of local, governmental and international participation.

Torres is proud of his school, named for the Republic of Venezuela, where 107 students are supported by their three teachers in their work in a “teaching vegetable garden”. They grow peas and beans, fruit and vegetables that are used daily in their school meals.

Torres told IPS that he did not used to like green vegetables, but now “I’ve started to like them, and I love the fresh salads and green juices.”

Josué Orlando Torres, an 11-year-old student, dreams of becoming a farmer to ensure that children like himself have access to free high-quality food at this school in the indigenous community of Coloaca, where a sustainable school programme is beginning to overcome chronic malnutrition. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

“Here they taught us what is good for us to eat, and also to plant produce so that there will always be food for us. We have a vegetable garden in which we all plant coriander, radishes, cucumbers, cassava (yucca), squash (pumpkin), mustard and cress, lettuce, carrots and other nutritious foods,” he said while indicating each plant in the school garden.

When he grows up, Torres does not want to be a doctor, engineer or fireman like other children of his age. He wants to be “a good farmer to grow food to help my community, help kids like me to be well-fed and not to fall asleep in class because they had not eaten and were ill,” as happened before, he said.

The 48 schools scattered throughout Las Flores municipality, together with other schools in Lempira province, especially those located within what is called the dry corridor of Honduras, characterised by poverty and the onslaughts of climate change, are part of a series of sustainable pilot projects being promoted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and PAES is one of these.

The purpose of these sustainable school projects is to improve the nutritional status of students and at the same time give direct support to small farmers, by means of a comprehensive approach and effective local-local, local-regional and central government-international aid  interactions.

As a result of this effort in indigenous Lenca communities and Ladino (mixed indigenous-white or mestizo) communities such as Coalaca, La Cañada, Belén and Lepaera (all of them in Lempira province), schoolchildren and teachers alike have said goodbye to fizzy drinks and sweets, and undertaken a radical change in their food habits.

Parents, teachers, students, each community and municipal government, three national Secretariats (Ministries) and FAO have joined forces so that these remote Honduran regions may see off the problems of famine and malnutrition that once were rife here.

A family production chain was developed to supply the schools with food for their students, who average over 100 at each educational centre, complementing the school vegetable gardens.

Every Monday, small farmers bring their produce to a central distribution centre, and municipal vehicles distribute it to the schools.

View of Belén, a town that is the head of a rural municipality of the same name amid the mountains of western Honduras, in the department (province) of Lempira, where a programme rooted in local schools is improving nutrition among remote indigenous communities. Credit: Courtesy of Thelma Mejía

Erlín Omar Perdomo, from the village of La Cañada in Belén municipality, told IPS: “When FAO first started to organise us we never thought things would go as far as they did, our initial concern was to stave off the hunger there was around here and help our children to be better nourished.”

“But as the project developed, they trained us to become food providers as well. Today this community is supplying 13 schools in Belén with fresh, high-quality produce,” the community leader said with satisfaction.

They organised themselves as savings micro-cooperatives to which members pay small subscriptions and which finance projects or businesses at lowinterest rates and without the need for collateral, as required by banks, or for payment of abusive interest rates, as charged by intermediaries known as “coyotes”.

“We never dreamed the project would reach the size it is today. FAO sent us to Brazil to see for ourselves how food was being supplied to schools by the families of students, but, here we are and this is our story,” said the 36-year-old Perdomo.

“We all participate, we generate income and bring development to our communities, to the extent that now the drop-out rate is practically nil, and our women have also joined the project. They organise themselves in groups to attend the school every week to cook our children’s food,” he said.

Rubenia Cortes, a mother and volunteer cook at the school in the remote village of La Cañada in the department (province) of Lempira, in western Honduras. They cook in a kitchen that was built by parents and teachers at the school. Credit: Courtesy of Thelma Mejía

A 2012 report by the World Food Programmme (WFP) indicated that in Central America, Honduras had the second worst child malnutrition levels, after Guatemala. According to the WFP, one in four children suffers from chronic malnutrition, with the worst problems seen in the south and west of the country.

But in Coalaca, La Cañada and other nearby villages and small towns, the situation has begun to be reverted in the past five years. The FAO project is based on the creation of a new nutritional culture; an expert advises and educates local families in eating a healthy and balanced diet.

“We don’t put salt and pepper on our food any more. We have replaced them with aromatic herbs. FAO trained us, teaching us what nutrients were to be found in each vegetable, fruit or pulse, and in what quantities,” said Rubenia Cortes.

“Look, our children now have beautiful skin, not dull like before,” she explained proudly to IPS. Cortes is a cook at the Claudio Barrera school in La Cañada, population 700, part of Belén municipality where there are 32 PAES centres.

Cortes and the other women are all heads of households who do voluntary work to prepare food at the school. “Before, we would sell our oranges and buy fizzy drinks or sweets, but now we do not; it is better to make orange juice for all of us to drink,” she said as an example.

From Monday to Friday, students at the PAES schools have a highly nutritious meal which they eat mid-morning.

The change is remarkable, according to Edwin Cortes, the head teacher of the La Cañada school. “The children no longer fall asleep in class. I used to ask them, ‘Did you understand the lesson?’ But what could they answer? They had come to school on an empty stomach. How could they learn anything?” he exclaimed.

In the view of María Julia Cárdenas, the FAO representative in Honduras, the most valuable thing about this project is that “we can leave the project, but it will not die, because everyone has appropriated it.”

“It is highly sustainable, and models like this one overcome frontiers and barriers, because everyone is united in a common purpose, that of feeding the children,” she told IPS after giving a delegation of experts and Central American Parliamentarians a guided tour of the untold stories that arise in this part of the dry corridor of Honduras.

There are 1.4 million children in primary and basic secondary schooling in Honduras, out of a total population of 8.7 million people. Seven ethnic groups live alongside each other in the country, of which the largest is the Lenca people, a group of just over 400,000 people.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/ Translated by Valerie Dee

Cinthia Padilla, the 16-year-old who has revolutionised the village of Plan Grande on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, where she teaches local residents to use basic computer programmes and is using an Internet platform to help prevent teen pregnancy. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
PLAN GRANDE, Honduras, Oct 14 2015 (IPS)

Four years ago, Cinthia Padilla, who is now 16, learned how to use a computer in order to teach children, adolescents and adults in this isolated fishing village in northern Honduras how to use technology to better their lives.

Now she is using her expertise in an online e-learning platform aimed at reducing teen pregnancies in her remote village and neighbouring communities.

Her father, Óscar Padilla, is the community leader who radically changed life in Plan Grande by bringing it round-the-clock hydroelectricity, as well as a project for the conservation and protection of the Matías River basin. His daughter learned a great deal accompanying him to village meetings from an early age.

“My dad would tell me: ‘Stay home little girl! What are you doing here?’” she told IPS. “But I would ignore him because I liked listening to the adults. That’s how I learned, with a computer project that came to the village, and today I teach kids and adults in my free time how to use programmes like Word, Excel and others that help them in their work and studies.“I’m in fourth grade and I like this idea because we’re going to learn by using games, and girls won’t get pregnant or fall in love so young,” Javier Alexander Ramos, eight years old

“I started out with a used computer that a businesswoman from the capital gave me four years ago. So far I have trained more than 60 kids and a number of adults. It hasn’t been easy, because who was going to believe in a girl?” said a smiling Cinthia, who is in the first year of secondary school.

Thanks to the skills of this young girl who dreams of becoming a systems engineer to help her community develop and use technology to protect the environment, the 500 inhabitants of Plan Grande discovered the advantages offered by the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs).

Thanks to what they have learned from Cinthia, local fisherpersons have improved their financial skills when selling their catch and purchasing products.

She also launched the e-learning platform to raise awareness among and educate adolescents to prevent teen pregnancy, with the support of the Sustainable Development Network, a civil society organisation that boosts technology use in communities in this impoverished Central American nation of 8.8 million people.

The success of the initiative drew the interest of Noel Ruíz, the mayor of the municipality of Santa Fe, where Plan Grande is located, and of the Global Environment Facility’s Small Grants Programme (GEF SGP), implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

With a 50,000 dollar grant from the SGP, the e-learning project will be expanded throughout the entire municipality of Santa Fe and the neighbouring Balfate, starting in 2016. The users will be students and teachers.

In Plan Grande, which is operating as a pilot programme for the platform, the schoolteachers are enthusiastic about the project because teen pregnancy is frequent in this region inhabited mainly by members of the Garifuna ethnic group – descendants of African slaves who intermarried with members of the indigenous Carib tribe.

The National Assembly of Afro-Honduran Organisations and Communities estimates that 10 percent of the country’s population is black.

“This will open kids’ minds and help them not make the mistake of getting pregnant due to a lack of sex education,” Julissa Esther Pacheco, the teacher in Punta Frijol, a hamlet next to Plan Grande, told IPS.

“They have taught us how to use it, even though we don’t have Internet, with interactive educational programmes created to help youngsters learn about their bodies,” she said.

In Punta Frijol, just over three km from the centre of Plan Grande, Pacheco teaches 22 children in grades one through six in the rural schoolhouse. She divides the children by grade and teaches some while the others do homework.

Students in the hamlet of Punta Frijol on the northern coast of Honduras welcome this IPS reporter visiting this remote area to learn about their e-learning programme aimed at bringing down the teen pregnancy rate. The teacher at the one-room rural schoolhouse, Julissa Esther Pacheco, is behind the group of children, to the right. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

Pacheco says the children have been very open to the programme “and are motivated because they know life isn’t all peaches and cream.”

Eight-year-old Javier Alexander Ramos told IPS: “I’m in fourth grade and I like this idea because we’re going to learn by using games, and girls won’t get pregnant or fall in love so young.”

His remarks drew laughter from his fellow students and the parents who had gathered at the school to tell IPS about their expectations for the project, in a demonstration of the importance that local residents put on telling their story, and of their support for the initiative.

Javier said he dreams of a country that is “better educated, in peace and safe, like Plan Grande. I would like to be a congressman when I grow up, to help in so many ways here, and that’s why I like to study. I enjoy learning how to use the computer because although we don’t have our own computers we learn with the ones in the school, which we all share.”

Because of Plan Grande’s location, some 400 km from the capital of Honduras on the Caribbean coast, and only reachable by boat, there are few educational opportunities and locals depend on fishing and subsistence agriculture for a living, while some move away or find seasonal work elsewhere.

Teen pregnancy is frequent in the municipality of Santa Fe, which includes three villages and nine hamlets.

According to Health Ministry and United Nations figures, Honduras has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in Latin America: one out of four adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19 have given birth.

The birth rate is 108 per 1,000 teenagers in that age group, according to official statistics.

To support the transformation that Cinthia has begun to bring about, Santa Fe Mayor Ruíz came to Plan Grande in September to lay the first stone in what will be a computer lab for the e-learning platform, set to open in January 2016.

“These are very neglected communities, but what they are doing in Plan Grande deserves support; the computer lab will have Internet and other appropriate technologies because we want adolescent girls to one day say: today I’m ready to be a mother,” he told IPS.

Cinthia broke in to say: “Young people here are losing their fear of expressing ourselves, and with this platform we’re going to teach them how to take care of themselves, and how to use the social networks.

“When the SGP proposed this idea, I was the first to say yes because they helped us before to bring electricity, they taught us the importance of nature, and now they’re going to help us educate people so our dreams as young people aren’t cut short at such a young age,” she said.

This remote village of poor fishing families on Honduras’ Caribbean coast has become a national reference point for community-run, clean self-sustainable energy.

And now they want to become an example to be followed in the prevention of teen pregnancy, led by a 16-year-old girl who has also launched a campaign for donations to her village of computers, whether new or used – because she has learned how to fix them as well.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

View from the Caribbean sea of the village of Plan Grande in the northern Honduran department of Colón. The isolated fishing community, which can only be reached after a 20-minute motorboat ride, is a 10-hour drive on difficult roads away from Tegucigalpa, and has become an example of sustainable energy management. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
PLAN GRANDE, Honduras, Oct 1 2015 (IPS)

A small fishing village on the Caribbean coast of Honduras has become an example to be followed in renewable energies, after replacing candles and dirty costly energy based on fossil fuels with hydropower from a mini-dam, while reforesting the river basin.

They now have round-the-clock electric power, compared to just three hours a week in the past.

The community, Plan Grande, is in the municipality of Santa Fe in the northern department of Colón, and can only be reached by sea, after a 10-hour, 400-km drive from Tegucigalpa on difficult roads to the village of Río Coco on the Caribbean coast.

From Río Coco you take a motorboat the next morning, which takes 20 minutes to reach Plan Grande.

It’s 6:00 AM and the sun has started to come up. The sea is calm and the conditions are good, say the motorboat operators, who add that manatees used to be found in these waters but have since disappeared, which they blame on the damage caused to the environment.

Plan Grande, a village of 500 people, is at the foot of steep slopes, along the Caribbean coast.

On the boat ride to the village, seagulls can be seen flying in the distance as the fishermen return in their cayucos (dugout canoes) and small boats after fishing all night at sea. Others take jobs on larger fishing boats, which keeps them away from home for eight months at a stretch.

Fishing and farming are the only sources of work in the village, which makes electricity all the more important: in the past, because they couldn’t refrigerate their catch, they had to sell it quickly, at low prices.

“There was very little room for negotiating prices, and we would lose out,” community leader Óscar Padilla, the driving force behind the changes in Plan Grande, told IPS.

The village finally got electricity for the first time in 2004, thanks to development aid from Spain. But it was thermal energy, and for just three hours a week of public lighting they paid between 13 and 17 dollars a month per dwelling.

Óscar Padilla, a community leader in Plan Grande who was the main driving force behind the initiative that finally brought round-the-clock energy to the village, in the 21st century. Sustainable management of renewable energy, based on a plan marked by solidarity, has transformed this fishing village in Honduras’ northern Caribbean region. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

“We couldn’t afford anything more than street lamps – no electricity for TV and no refrigerator, because the costs would skyrocket. We couldn’t keep things on ice for long, and our dairy products and meat would spoil,” said Padilla, 65.

But in 2011 the people of Plan Grande opted for hydropower after a visit by technicians from the Small Grants Programme (SGP), implemented by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), who suggested a small community-owned hydroelectric plant.

The entire community got involved and designed their own project for renewable energy and sustainability. With 30,000 dollars from the SGP and aid from Germany’s International Cooperation Agency (GIZ) and the Honduran Foundation for Agricultural Research (FHIA), a round-the-clock power supply became possible and Plan Grande left candles and dirty energy based on fossil fuels in the past.

“Our lives have changed – we now have electricity 24 hours a day and we can have a refrigerator, a freezer, a fan, and even a TV set – although we have to use the energy rationally and respect the limits and controls that we set for ourselves,” another local resident, Edgardo Padilla, told IPS.

“If we’re not careful, demand for power will soar, which would create problems for us again,” said the 33-year-old fisherman, who is responsible for running the energy supply from the micro-hydroelectric power station.

Edgardo Padilla, who administers the use of the small hydroelectric dam, explains how the process works and the rules the community has established to ensure rational use and distribution of electricity in Plan Grande, a fishing village on the Caribbean coast of Honduras. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

The rules and schedules set by the villagers to optimise and ration energy use include specific times for watching soap operas, turn on freezers, or use fans. For example, freezers are turned on from 10 PM to 6 AM, which is the time of lowest consumption, he said.

“For now, air conditioning is not allowed because it uses so much electricity, and light bulbs and freezers have to be the energy efficient kind,” said Edgardo Padilla, who added that they also focus on transparency and accountability in their energy policy.

The change in the source of energy has brought huge advantages. “We used to pay 360 lempiras (17 dollars) for three hours a week; now we pay 100 lempiras (four dollars) for a round-the-clock power supply,” he said.

The villagers also set a sliding pay scale. Families who have a refrigerator, fan, TV set, computer and freezer pay 11 dollars a month; those who have only a fan and a TV set pay six dollars; and families who just have light bulbs or lamps pay just four dollars.

The Plan Grande mini dam is 2.5 km from the centre of the village, along footpaths through a 300-hectare forest that runs along the Matías river, which provides them with electricity. The plant generates 16.5 kilowatt-hours (kWh).

The villagers also developed a conservation plan to preserve their water sources and installed cameras to monitor illegal logging and to identify the local fauna.

Belkys García is in charge of the Plan Grande nursery, where seedlings are grown to reforest the Matías river basin, which provides hydropower for the village, and to grow fruit and timber trees to generate incomes for this isolated fishing village in Honduras’ northern Caribbean region. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

Belkys García runs a nursery created a year ago to grow trees such as pine, which can be used for timber, in order to reforest and keep the area green. She organises maintenance and reforestation crews, which all villagers take part in.

“If someone doesn’t come on the day they were scheduled to do clean-up and maintenance of the nursery or the streets and paths that lead to the dam, they have to pay for that day of missed work,” García, 27, told IPS while watering seedlings.

“We organise ourselves, and using the nursery we also want to become entrepreneurs in other income-generating areas, such as growing rambutan (Nephelium lappaceum),” said García.

The local population is of mixed-race heritage. The municipality of Santa Fe is mainly Garifuna – descendants of African slaves who intermarried with members of the indigenous Carib tribe. The mayor of Santa Fe, Noel Ruíz of the Garifuna community, is proud of the village. “It is a model at the national level for the good use of clean energy,” he told IPS.

“It’s worth investing here; this is a committed community and its leaders know about accountability, believe in transparency and love nature, three things that you can’t find easily,” said the 44-year-old mayor, who was reelected to a second term.

“These people are happy because while the country has energy problems, they don’t; they have understood that there is a correlation between conservation of nature and well-being for the community,” added Ruíz, an agronomist.

Energy demand in this country of 8.8 million people is estimated at 1,375 MW. Sixty percent of that is generated by the national power utility, ENEE, and the rest comes from private companies or is imported by means of interconnection with other Central American nations.

Energy in Honduras comes from four sources: thermal, hydropower, wind and biomass. In 2010, 70 percent came from thermal power stations, and 30 percent from renewable sources. But since 2013, that has changed, and thermal energy now represents 51 percent of the total, while the rest comes from renewables.

The village of Plan Grande is now an example of the rational use and conservation of renewable energy.

Thanks to the new power supply this isolated community now has its own bakery.

“As a little girl I would imagine that one day I would trade my candle for a lamp. Things have really changed for us!” a 55-year-old local resident, Julia Baños, told IPS.

This reporting series was conceived in collaboration with Ecosocialist Horizons

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The rain has not stopped the ever-growing weekly torch marches organised by the Outraged Opposition citizen movement in the capital of Honduras and 50 other cities around the country. The peaceful protests are demanding the creation of an International Commission Against Impunity, to combat corruption and strengthen democracy. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Jul 21 2015 (IPS)

A Honduran spring is happening, led by young people mobilising over the social networks, who are flooding the streets with weekly torch marches against corruption and impunity.

Since late May, the peaceful movement of young people who declare themselves “indignados” or outraged has broken down the media’s resistance to cover what is happening, and has brought hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets in Tegucigalpa and 50 other cities around the country.

The torch marches are demanding the creation of an international commission to fight corruption and impunity, purge this Central American country’s institutions, and strengthen democracy.

The Oposición Indignada or Outraged Opposition citizen movement is largely made up of middle-class young people upset over the embezzlement of 200 to 300 million dollars in the country’s social security institute (IHSS).“But later, as if by some miracle, everything changed. And now every Friday thousands of us come out together with our torches, peacefully, to call for justice and an end to impunity.” -- Gabriela Blen

According to the investigations, some of the money was used to finance the right-wing National Party (PN), which has governed the country since 2010. The scandal also involved the purchase of equipment at marked-up prices, and of expired medications.

The IHSS scandal is the biggest case of corruption in Honduras in half a century and has caused widespread indignation due to the consequences it has had for the health of Hondurans, who already suffer from the scarcity of medicines in the country’s network of public hospitals.

The fraud and graft in the institution that provides social security and healthcare to both public and prívate-sector employees has severely shaken the government of Juan Orlando Hernández, whose four-year term began in January 2014.

The president ordered the investigations. But he never imagined that the straw that would break the camel’s back would be the use of healthcare funds to finance the campaign that led to his election.

So far, 10 checks totalling 147,000 dollars that went towards his party’s campaign have surfaced. But that figure could increase, if the investigation digs deeply enough, experts say.

Hernández says the party will give the money back, and denies any involvement.

The dozen or so people prosecuted in connection with the scandal include former deputy ministers of health, a former IHSS director and an influential businessman. But the investigators say the list will grow and that powerful governing party figures will soon be implicated.

“What made us come together was the embezzlement, and knowing cases of friends whose relatives died in the social security institute because of the shortage of medications,” Gabriela Blen, a young activist who is one of the founders of Oposición Indignada, told IPS.

“On the social networks we started commenting that young people can’t be so indifferent, and the idea of the torch marches emerged,” she said.

In the last 13 months, the organisation – the Latin American branch of the New York-based Covenant House – documented the murders of 1,076 people between the ages of 13 and 27.

Blen, 27, said that “in the beginning there were just a few of us, only 50 or 100 people who would come out to protest in front of the social security institute building. ‘There go those crazy kids’, they would say.

“But later, as if by some miracle, everything changed,” she said. “And now every Friday thousands of us come out together with our torches, peacefully, to call for justice and an end to impunity.”

Blen says Honduras has woken up.

Every Friday in Tegucigalpa, and on Saturday or Sunday in another 50 cities, hundreds of thousands of “indignados” or angry, outraged protesters pour onto the streets to demand the creation of an International Commission Against Impunity (CICIH), like the one operating in Guatemala since 2007.

The media, which initially kept silent about the movement, is now covering it, although still in a marginal fashion or to discredit it.

But society is sympathetic towards Oposición Indignada, which has also won recognition from the United Nations and the U.S. embassy.

Members of the movement have met with representatives of the U.N. and the U.S. embassy to ask for support for their demand for the installation of the CICIH.

Eugenio Sosa, an expert on social movements, told IPS that Oposición Indignada has the characteristics of a 21st century social movement.

“These are citizen movements without the classic rigid, hierarchical organisational structure, but with horizontal, fluid chains of command instead. That is why this has gone beyond the country’s political, trade union and social leaderships,” he said.

The sociologist said these movements “emerge around issues, and in this case it’s corruption, particularly in the social security institute. It’s a middle-class movement representing a new generation which is challenging the current political class.”

“Honduras is at an interesting historical juncture,” he said.

The government has ignored the protesters’ demands and has presented its own comprehensive proposal to fight impunity and corruption, without including the creation of the international commission the movement is calling for.

The demonstrators, meanwhile, reject the government’s plan.

Hernández called for a national dialogue but without including the political opposition or the “indignados” movement. Alghough the president said the dialogue would be “inclusive and without preconditions,” only traditional actors from some 30 sectors on good terms with the governing party have been invited so far.

The president also sought support from the U.N. and the Organisation of American States (OAS) to facilitate the dialogue.

The U.N. responded by sending a fact-finding mission which is to issue a report in a few weeks, and the OAS agreed to mediate talks but has not yet appointed facilitators.

During a visit to Honduras on Jul. 8, U.S. State Department special adviser Thomas Shannon called the torch marches a genuine expression of democracy and urged the government to “listen to the people.”

Shannon, who visited the country as part of a tour that also took him to El Salvador and Guatemala, said it would be smart for both the Honduran and the Salvadoran governments to consider setting up international commissions against impunity.

Former attorney general Edmundo Orellana told IPS that the situation is becoming complex because no Honduran president has faced such strong pressure from society.

But the movement – which has demanded that the president resign – says it will not engage in talks with the government until the CICIH is set up.

“And they’re right, because if people in the president’s inner circle are implicated in the social security corruption, what is needed is not talks but impeachment,” said Orellana, the country’s first attorney general, who enjoys great prestige.

Honduras, he said, has been caught up in a serious “crisis of legitimacy” since the 2009 coup that toppled then president Manuel Zelaya. And President Hernández “has lost credibility and popularity, and is really using the state for his own benefit.”

Orellana was referring to Hernández’s tight control over the three branches of the state and over the attorney general’s office itself.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The now clean, orderly village of Las Vegas de Tepemechin de Pueblo Nuevo, in the northern Honduran municipality of Victoria. The streets and houses of this Tolupan indigenous community used to be full of mud, manure and garbage, but there is not a single bag of rubbish to be seen now and the houses are painted shiny white. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
VICTORIA, Honduras , Dec 3 2014 (IPS)

The town’s dynamic mayor, Sandro Martínez, assumed the commitment of turning the Honduran municipality of Victoria into a model of food and nutritional security and environmental protection by means of municipal public policies based on broad social and community participation and international development aid.

The initiative began to be put into practice four months ago. It was inspired by what the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS) achieved in the Tolupan indigenous community of Pueblo Nuevo, a village located 15 km from the centre of Victoria.

In that tribe – as the Tolupan refer to each one of their communities – whose official name is Las Vegas de Tepemechín de Pueblo Nuevo, population 750, 29 children overcame malnutrition thanks to a comprehensive food security plan implemented over the last two years.“My aim with Promusan is to change people’s lives, make Victoria a green municipality; we are the least polluted part of the entire department. Food security is my priority, we want to have health and education; we want to be a model municipality in Honduras.” – Mayor Sandro Martínez

“I’m proud of this village, of what they have managed to do in such a short time,” the mayor told Tierramérica. “I grew up near the Tolupan and now that I’m mayor, they are a priority for me. I want to extend this experience throughout the entire municipality of Victoria.

“They have been empowered so much by their experience that one day I went there to cut sugarcane and I left the stalks in the street. I was so surprised when a boy came up and said ‘No Mr. Mayor, we don’t dump garbage here!’ That day I understood that everything they say about this village is true,” he added.

The tribe’s achievements are based on the use of good practices in agriculture and the development of a nutritious diet. They now grow their own food, and hunger has become a thing of the past.

Pueblo Nuevo is now a model of food security and nutrition in the eyes of local and international bodies, thanks to the local indigenous community’s efforts to improve their quality of life, and to their new level of organisation and discipline.

The swift transformations have included: clean houses, which families no longer share with their animals, the use of organic fertiliser, the abandonment of the slash-and-burn technique to clear fields for planting, purified drinking water, family gardens and reliable production of staple crops like maize and beans.

“We have shown that we indigenous people are not lazy,” a member of the local Tolupan community, Rosalío Murillo, told Tierramérica. “The people from FAO taught us how to manage the soil, without the need to slash and burn, and how to live orderly, clean lives, instead of living with our animals [in the huts]. We have improved all of that now.”

Similar remarks were made by other members of the community.

The Tolupan live in the mountains of the northern department or province of Yoro and in the central department of Francisco Morazán. They are one of the few indigenous communities in this country who have preserved their native language, Tol.

Mayor Sandro Martínez, meeting at the city government building in Victoria, in the Honduran department of Yoro, with part of the team in charge of Promusan, to share their experience with Tierramérica. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

The population of the country is 90 percent mestizo or mixed-race, eight percent indigenous and Garifuna, and two percent white, according to official statistics.

The people of Pueblo Nuevo are so proud of what they have achieved that they want to publish a book to tell their story.

“This is important,” another villager, Narciso ‘Chicho’ Garay, told Tierramérica. “They say next year we’ll have electricity, and I ask myself, and I tell my fellow villagers, that electricity can be good but it can also be bad. Bad because if we only sit around watching movies, it won’t help us at all, we’ll slide backwards, but if we know how to use it, it can lead us to development – not to become rich, maybe, but to live a decent life. The book should show all of this.”

The municipality of Victoria is home to 29,840 people, including 14,000 Tolupan Indians.

As a result of the Pueblo Nuevo success story, the mayor’s office did not hesitate to accept the FAO-SPFS proposal to implement the Municipal Food and Nutritional Security Programme (Promusan) as a public policy.

Promusan is a FAO-SPFS initiative being carried out in 73 of the 298 municipalities of this Central American country, where the U.N. agency identified serious food security problems.

The programme is financed by the municipal governments and the FAO, which has support from Canada. In Victoria, Promusan has already chalked up significant accomplishments by bringing together the community, health and educational institutions, the local government and international development cooperation agencies that are working in different villages.

That was explained by César Alfaro, a FAO technician who leads Promusan. The idea, he told Tierramérica, is to transfer the methodology used by SPFS and other agencies and institutions that work in the area to rural development, environmental and food and nutritional security projects.

One example of this is the Pedro P. Amaya public secondary school with an agricultural orientation which, due to the almost nonexistent support from the state, survives thanks to the hard work of the teachers and the people of Victoria themselves, who have seen the students applying theory in practice, teaching sustainable agricultural techniques to local farmers.

“I used to think agriculture was just about using the machete and hoe, but now I know that’s not true,” Josué Cruz, a student, told Tierramérica.

“I learned to help farmers improve the soil and their crops,” said the student, who is about to graduate from the school with a certificate as a forestry technician. “Here in our school we run our own farm and we even have a water harvester that FAO gave us to irrigate our crops.”

Victoria is a municipality rich in minerals like gold, lead, iron, silver and zinc, and wood that can be logged as well. In addition, it will soon have a nearby hydroelectric dam, “but one that respects the environment,” the mayor pointed out.

“My aim with Promusan is to change people’s lives, make Victoria a green municipality; we are the least polluted part of the entire department. Food security is my priority, we want to have health and education; we want to be a model municipality in Honduras,” Martínez said.

To that end, he is concluding an assessment to identify the most pressing needs, and he has brought together cooperation agencies to avoid duplication of efforts and to outline areas of action “to not just create projects and throw funding around any which way.”

For the first time, two Tolupan Indians are involved in the work in the city government. FAO’s Elvín Soler told Tierramérica, “they’re working with a strategic plan, they keep a log of their activities, and everyone wants to follow the Pueblo Nuevo model.”

Many things in Victoria have changed: more people now pay their taxes as they see the returns in roads, piped water and other improvements, while the mayor, who was reelected for a second four-year term that began this year, said he does not want to “rest on my laurels.”

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The brand-new kitchen that Estanisla Reyes and her husband built working 15 days from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM. The new ecological stoves cook the food with which the Tolupan indigenous community of Pueblo Nuevo, in northern Honduras, put an end to child malnutrition in just two years. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
PUEBLO NUEVO, Honduras , Nov 27 2014 (IPS)

In the heart of the Pijol mountains in the northern Honduran province of Yoro, the Tolupan indigenous community of Pueblo Nuevo has a lot to celebrate: famine is no longer a problem for them, and their youngest children were rescued from the grip of child malnutrition.

The Tolupan indigenous people in Pueblo Nuevo are no longer suffering from the drought that hit much of the country this year, severely affecting the production of staple crops like beans and maize, as a result of climate change and the global El Niño weather phenomenon.

For the last two years, the Tolupan of Pueblo Nuevo have had food reserves that they store in a community warehouse. The “black Junes” are a thing of the past, the villagers told this IPS reporter who spent a day with them.

“From June to August, things were always really hard, we didn’t have enough food, we had to eat roots. It was a time of subsistence, we always said: black June is on its way,” said the leader of the tribe, 27-year-old Tomás Cruz, a schoolteacher.“And how could we not be malnourished if we weren’t living well, if we didn’t work the land the way we should have? Our houses full of mud and garbage - that hurt our health, but now we understand. My little girl is healthy now, say the doctors, who used to scold us for not taking good care of them but who now congratulate us.” -- Estanisla Reyes

“But today we can smile and say: black June is gone. Now we have food for our children, who had serious malnutrition problems here because there wasn’t enough food,” he added.

The transformation was brought about with the help of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS), with funding from Canada. The programme employs proven technologies such as improved crop varieties and low-cost irrigation and drainage systems to bolster food security and nutrition in critical areas.

An assessment by the SPFS identified serious malnutrition problems in 73 of Honduras’ 298 municipalities.

Pueblo Nuevo and six other Tolupan communities in the municipality of Victoria in Yoro were among the villages with severe nutritional and food security problems.

In the seven tribes, as the Tolupan refer to their settlements, 217 cases of malnutrition were detected among children under five. The other six communities are El Comunal, San Juancito, Piedra Blanca, Guanchías, El Portillo and Buenos Aires.

But Pueblo Nuevo was the model community, because in two years it managed to eliminate malnutrition among its children. Pueblo Nuevo, home to 750 people, is a new settlement created after Hurricane Mitch devastated the country in 1998, claiming 20,000 lives and causing severe damage to infrastructure and the economy.

According to official figures, one out of four children under five in Honduras suffers from chronic malnutrition, equivalent to 240,000 of the over 800,000 children under five in this country of 8.4 million people.

The population of the country is 90 percent mestizo or mixed-race, two percent white, three percent Garifuna and six percent indigenous, according to official statistics.

Becoming a model community

César Alfaro, the SPFS-FAO expert working in the area, told IPS that Pueblo Nuevo’s experience was a success because the tribe understood that they had to change their way of life, implementing good practices in cropping, hygiene and food security.

The villagers, for their part, said Alfaro’s support was key to the community’s transformation.

“When we got here [to Pueblo Nuevo] nobody wanted to come,” Alfaro said. “The teachers said they couldn’t hold a celebration because there was manure everywhere. The indigenous villagers lived in chaos, they slept with the livestock in the middle of all the filth.”

But Pueblo Nuevo is now a clean village, the locals have improved their wattle- and-daub huts, the walls are shiny and white, they divided their living spaces with the animals on one side and the kitchen with ecological stoves on the other, and they even have separate bedrooms.

Located 200 km from the capital, Tegucigalpa, the village is an example of teamwork. Each indigenous hut now has a family garden, a chicken coop, and clean water, purified at a treatment plant run by the community.

The malnourished children were put on good diets, under close medical supervision, and their parents now have basic knowledge and awareness about food, nutrition and the environment, which they are proud to talk about.

One of the mothers, Estanisla Reyes, 37, told IPS that her five-year-old daughter Angeline Nicole, the youngest of her three children, had malnutrition problems in the past.

“And how could we not be malnourished if we weren’t living well, if we didn’t work the land the way we should have? Our houses full of mud and garbage – that hurt our health, but now we understand. My little girl is healthy now, say the doctors, who used to scold us for not taking good care of them but who now congratulate us,” she said, smiling.

She and her husband built the walls of their new kitchen, which forms part of the house, unlike their old kitchen, working 12 hours a day for 15 days. “My husband made the mix, and I brought the water, and polished the walls – many families worked like that,” she said proudly.

Another mother, Adela Maradiaga, said “our lives changed. I came in as a volunteer because I’m from another tribe. I was surprised when I found out that my daughter was also malnourished. Then the Pueblo Nuevo tribe accepted me, and with the food we grow in our garden, our children are nourished and we are too.” She added that her children no longer have stomach troubles or a cough.

In Pueblo Nuevo they are also proud that they don’t have to hire themselves out to work, or sell their livestock to ranchers or merchants in the area to eat. “We used to pawn our things, but now we sell them maize, beans, fruit and avocados,” said Narciso “Chicho” Garay.

The tribe no longer uses the slash-and-burn technique to clear the land, and they now use organic fertiliser and recycle their garbage. They have a community savings fund where they deposit part of their earnings, which has made it possible to have clean drinking water and provisions.

They managed to improve the yield per hectare of beans from 600 to 1,800 kg, and of maize from 900 to 3,000 kg, and now they know that a family of six needs 2,400 to 2,800 kg of maize a year, for example.

Sandro Martínez, the mayor of Victoria, is one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the changes in Pueblo Nuevo, because he was born and grew up near the Tolupan indigenous people and did not hesitate to ask FAO to bring its food security programme to the native villages.

“A famine in those villages in 2010 prompted me to look for help, and we found it. It wasn’t easy to start working with the Tolupan community; the success lies in respecting their way of government represented by the leader of the tribe, as well as their cosmovision. Now they say they’re rich because they no longer have to work for a boss,” he told IPS.

There are seven indigenous groups in Honduras: the Lenca, Pech, Tolupan, Chorti, Tawahka and Misquito, besides the Garífunas, who are the descendants of slaves intermixed with native populations. The Tolupan number 18,000 divided into 31 tribes, governed by a chief who leads a council that makes the decisions.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Rosa Nelly Santos arranges photos of missing Honduran migrants on a sort of shrine to ensure they are not forgotten, at the premises of the Committee for Disappeared Migrant Relatives in El Progreso. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
EL PROGRESO, Honduras, Sep 18 2014 (IPS)

United by grief and anxiety, the grandmothers, mothers and other relatives of people who disappeared on the migration route to the United States formed a committee in this city in northern Honduras to search for their missing loved ones.
Founded in 1999, the Comité de Familiares de Migrantes Desaparecidos de El Progreso (COFAMIPRO – El Progreso Committee for Disappeared Migrant Relatives) is now one of the most highly regarded migrants’ rights organisations in Honduras.

For the past 14 years, COFAMIPRO has aired a radio programme on Sunday afternoons called “Abriendo Fronteras” (Opening Borders) on Radio Progreso, a station run by the Society of Jesus (a Catholic religious order) in Honduras.

The programme was originally called “Sin Fronteras” (Without Borders), but Rosa Nelly Santos, a member of COFAMIPRO, told IPS that as the committee expanded its activities, “we decided to call it Abriendo Fronteras, because we have indeed opened them. We are listened to by a larger audience than ever before, and not only by migrants but also by governments.”“Every time I heard the rumble of The Beast [the Mexican freight train ridden by migrants] I would shudder because that’s where I discovered how dangerous the migrant route is. For them, the train tracks are their pillow. They sleep on the tracks and when they get on to the roof of the train they wait for it to get going, but some fall asleep from exhaustion and fall off when it moves.” -- Marcia Martínez

The hour-long radio programme fulfills a vital social function. It advises migrants about conditions on the routes, plays the music they request to lift their spirits, and provides a sevice by enabling them to send messages to their relatives in Honduras.

Emeteria Martínez, a founding member of COFIMAPRO, died in 2013 just months after locating one of her daughters , who had been missing for 21 years.

Finding their family members was the driving force that united them, Santos said. “The group was created out of nothing, by discovering that one woman’s grief was the same as another’s. We would meet in the home of one of the group and that’s how we built up courage to go out into the world and search for our relatives,” she said.

Twenty women started the group, and now the leadership group is composed of more than 40 members.

They are unassuming women but they are buoyed by hope, in spite of the pain of not knowing anything about their missing relatives and of facing dreadful tragedies like the Tamaulipas massacre in Mexico. Four years ago, 72 migrants, 21 of whom were Hondurans, were shot at point-blank range by Los Zetas, a Mexican criminal cartel. Their bodies were found on a ranch in the San Fernando district.

The Tamaulipas massacre brought home to Hondurans the suffering involved in migration, over and above the issue of the remittances sent back by those who make it to the United States.

“It was like a defeat for us. You hope that your son or daughter will travel safely on the migrant route and manage to cross the border, but you do not expect him or her to be massacred and shipped back to you in a box. That is really shocking,” said Santos, who together with other members of COFAMIPRO has helped and comforted victims’ relatives.

The women on the Committee are all volunteers who have overcome their fear of the unknown. For over a decade they have taken part in the mothers’ caravans , motorcades organised by the Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano (Mesoamerican Migrant Movement), which in September every year travel the migrant routes, looking for clues to the whereabouts of missing relatives.

The migratory route begins in Guatemala and ends at Mexico’s northern border.

“The first time I went on the caravan, three years ago, I understood the importance of my mother’s work. I learned from her grief and I decided to take a full part in the Committee,” Marcia Martínez, 44, another daughter of the Committee’s deceased founder, told IPS.

“I had no idea of the huge number of mothers and relatives who join the motorcade, nor of the epic nature of the journeys my mother undertook. They cover all the routes used by the migrants, asking about them with placards, looking for answers that sometimes never arrive, or arrive too late. When we find someone we were looking for, the joy is indescribable,” she said.

“Every time I heard the rumble of The Beast [the Mexican freight train ridden by migrants on their way north] I would shudder because that’s where I discovered how dangerous the migrant route is. For them, the train tracks are their pillow. They sleep on the tracks and when they get on to the roof of the train they wait for it to get going, but some fall asleep from exhaustion and fall off when it moves,” Martínez said.

COFAMIPRO’s premises are in a shopping centre in El Progreso, one of Honduras’s five largest cities, in the northern department (province) of Yoro, 242 kilometres from Tegucigalpa. Formerly they were housed in Jesuit property, but thanks to donations they were able to rent their own small locale where people can come for support to find their relatives.

In the years since it was founded it has documented more than 600 cases of disappeared persons, of whom over 150 have been found. They continue to seek the rest, although they believe that many must have died on the way or fallen in the hands of human trafficking networks.

Initially the government would not recognise the Committee, but the success of its work with the Mesoamerican caravans led to its voice being heard. It has presented cases of disappeared migrants to the foreign ministry. In June, the group finally acquired formal legal status.

Their struggle has not been easy. Honduran officials dismissed them as “crazy old women” when, years ago, they organised their own march to Tegucigalpa to demand action for their missing loved ones.

Their response was a song they chanted at the foreign office building. Santos sang it with pride: “People at the foreign office call us liars, but we are decent women and we prove it with deeds; what we are here to demand is completely within our rights.”

Their steady, silent work has yielded fruit. When IPS interviewed a group of these women, they had just saved the life of a Honduran man, a relative of a local official in El Progreso, through their Mexican contacts.

He had been kidnapped by a criminal organisation that extorted more than 3,000 dollars from his family before they approached the Committee, which secured his release through an operation by the Mexican prosecution service.

Five years ago, COFAMIPRO issued a warning about the present migration crisis, but no one listened. According to the group, migrants will continue to flee from unemployment and criminal violence.

In the baking hot city of El Progreso, cases have been known of mothers who left town when criminal gangs told them their children would be forcibly recruited into the criminal organisations when they were old enough, and that in the meantime the gangs would provide money to raise the children and pay for their education.

An estimated one million Hondurans have emigrated to the United States since the 1970s, but the exodus has intensified since 1998. As of April 2014, Washington has intensified its deportations of families with children as well as adults.

The Honduran authorities say that 56,000 people were deported back to the country in the first seven months of this year. Of these, 29,000 arrived from the United States by air and 27,000 from Mexico by land.

Honduras has a population of 8.4 million and a homicide rate of 79 per 100,000 population, according to official figures.

In 2013, migrants contributed 3.2 billion dollars to the Honduran economy in remittances, close to 15 percent of GDP, according to the Central Bank.

In COFAMIPRO’s view, the migratory crisis should spur governments to reform their public policies and refrain from stigmatising and criminalising migrants, because “they are not criminals, they are international workers,” Santos said.

She, at least, has the consolation of having found her missing nephew four years ago.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

Red Cross volunteers board a bus bringing back deported child and adult migrants at the Honduran border in Corinto, to check how they are and provide them with a bag of essentials. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
CORINTO, Honduras , Sep 3 2014 (IPS)

The clock marks 9 AM when a bus coming from the Mexican city of Tapachula reaches Corinto, on the border between Honduras and Guatemala. It is the first bus of the day, carrying children and their families sent back from a failed attempt at making it across the border into the United States.

The bus is carrying 19 children between the ages of five and 12, six women and seven men, all of them families. The trip took 10 hours. A team of volunteers from Red Cross Honduras, supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), meets them and climbs aboard to provide them with bags of essentials.

It is the first stop the bus will make in Honduras, in the northwestern department or province of Cortés.

Its destination is the nearby city of San Pedro Sula, where they will be censused in a government shelter and given a bag of food and a small amount of money to help them return to their homes. The authorities don’t allow journalists to interview, photograph or film the minors.“It’s awful to see people killed or just left lying there, people from your country. Things are really ugly there, I’m relieved to be back because I’m alive, others aren’t, they were killed by the criminals and some were thrown off the train. I saw all that and it feels really bad.” -- Daniela Díaz

But this IPS reporter is allowed to get on the bus, where I see the sad, exhausted faces of the children. Their parents or other relatives look down into their laps, to hide their pain, defeat and sense of impotence.

Today, four busloads of deported immigrants – two of which carry children as well as adults – totaling 152 people come through customs at Corinto. The flow is steady, although minors only arrive, alone or accompanied, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

“The buses bring an average of 30 to 38 people,” Yahely Milla, a volunteer with the Red Cross team, explains to IPS. She says “the mass deportation of minors started in April,” and in May and June, when the crisis of unaccompanied Central American child immigrants broke out in the United States, up to 15 buses a day were arriving.

“Children from the age of three months to 10 years, some of them alone and others accompanied by their parents, came one time; it had a big impact on us because we hadn’t seen so many deportations since we have been here at the border,” she said.

Corinto is 362 km from the capital, Tegucigalpa. It is one of the main areas along the border used by Hondurans heading north on the migration route to the United States. There are at least 80 “blind spots” used by migrants to cross the border into Guatemala before continuing on to Mexico and, if they’re lucky, to the United States.

The authorities have beefed up controls along the border, which has slightly curbed the exodus.

Institutions are practically nonexistent here and the only support for deported migrants comes from the Red Cross and the ICRC, which has been operating in this town for about two years.

The only time the government made an appearance, people here say, was in July, when the deportations spiked and Ana Hernández, the wife of president Juan Orlando Hernández, came to receive a group of children.

Over a month later, the promised camps have not yet been built, and there isn’t even a toilet at the bus stop for the deportees to use.

Between buses, Mauricio Paredes, the head of the Red Cross at the Corinto post, explained to IPS how the reception centre works. The magnitude of the humanitarian crisis has made it necessary to ration the aid.

For children there are disposable diapers, water, baby bottles and IV saline solution, while the adults are given water, toilet paper, toothpaste and toothbrushes, sanitary pads for women and razors for men. They are also allowed a three-minute call to phone their families.

At the crowded government shelter in San Pedro Sula, deported families with children receive instructions for being censused and for the return to their home villages and towns. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

The sun is beating down five hours later when the next bus comes, from the Mexican town of Acayuca. It brings 38 immigrants, including adolescents and adults.

One of them, 19-year-old Daniela Díaz, calls her mother to tell her that she is back from her second attempt to reach the United States. She then tells IPS about her odyssey.

“I set out on this journey nine months ago and although it’s my second try, I was still shocked by what I saw,” she says.

“This time I managed to get up on The Beast [the Mexican cargo train used by migrants, who ride on top of the wagons], but horrible things happen there. I saw women raped, I saw how the coyotes [migrant smugglers] sell people to criminal bands,” she says, speaking with long pauses.

“It’s awful to see people killed or just left lying there, people from your country. Things are really ugly there, I’m relieved to be back because I’m alive, others aren’t, they were killed by the criminals and some were thrown off the train. I saw all that and it feels really bad,” she says with a broken voice.

“What you go through is so tough that I almost have no tears left. I went out of need, because there’s no work here, my family is very poor, sometimes we eat, sometimes we don’t, we are five brothers and sisters, I’m the youngest and the most rebellious, my mom says,” adds the young woman who is from Miramesí, a poor neighbourhood in the capital.

But despite her experiences, she says she’s going to try it again. “Going to the United States is my dream, and I’ll do it even if I die in the attempt,” she says, while getting ready to hitchhike – or walk – back to the capital, because she came back without a cent.

The deportees return like Díaz – without money and with a broken dream.

Poverty and violent crime are the main factors driving Hondurans to attempt the dangerous trek to the United States, experts say. Between October 2013 and May 2014, an estimated 13,000 unaccompanied Honduran minors reached the United States.

In the first six months of this year, some 30,000 Hondurans were deported by the United States and Mexico, according to the governmental Centro de Atención al Migrante Retornado (Reception Centre for Returned Migrants).

David López, 18, comes from Copán Ruinas in the western department of Copán, one of the “hot spots” in the country, where organised crime flourishes.

That is what he was fleeing. But he came back frightened, defeated and frustrated. He was assaulted twice by criminal bands that operate along the migration route. “I left because it’s not safe to live here anymore, you see things that it’s better not to talk about. I told myself, it’s time to leave the countryside, and I came back defeated, yes alive!…but defeated,” he tells IPS with a pained voice.

His aquiline features crumple as he remembers the assaults, the abuse, the drought and the hunger he survived.

“I thought the paths life took you on were different, but this is really tough,” he says. “I’m ashamed to go home because I failed this time. But I’ll try again, when things have calmed down along the border.”

In August alone some 19,000 deportees were brought back to the country through Corinto – as many as arrived in all of 2013, Paredes said.

This Central American nation of 8.4 million, where 65 percent of households are poor, is also one of the most violent countries in the world, with a homicide rate of 79.7 per 100,000 population, according to the Honduran Observatory on Violence.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

At the conclusion of the International Conference on Migration, Childhood and Family, civil society organisations called for migrants to be seen as human beings rather than just statistics in official files. Credit: Casa Presidencial de Honduras

By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Jul 18 2014 (IPS)

The migration crisis involving thousands of Central American children detained in the United States represents the loss of a generation of young people fleeing poverty, violence and insecurity in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, the countries of the Northern Triangle of Central America where violence is rife.

Some 200 experts and officials from several countries and bodies met in Tegucigalpa to promote solutions to the humanitarian emergency July 16-17 at an International Conference on Migration, Childhood and Family, convened by the Honduran government and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The conference ended with a call to establish ways and means for the countries involved to implement a plan of action with sufficient resources for effective border control and the elimination of “blind spots” used as migrant routes.

They also called for the rapid establishment of a regional initiative to address this humanitarian crisis jointly and definitively, in recognition of the shared responsibility to bring peace, security, welfare and justice to the peoples of Central America.“It is like someone has torn open an artery in Honduras and other Central American countries. Fear, grinding poverty and no future mean we are losing our lifeblood – our young people. If this continues to happen, the hearts of our nations will stop beating” – Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras

But the declaration “Hoja de Ruta: Una Invitación a la Acción” (Roadmap: An Invitation to Action) does not go beyond generalisations and lacks specific commitments to address a crisis of unprecedented dimensions.

The U.S. government says that border patrols have caught 47,000 unaccompanied minors crossing into the United States this year. They are confined in overcrowded shelters awaiting deportation.

José Miguel Insulza, Secretary General of the Organisation of American States (OAS), told the conference that in 2011 there were 4,059 unaccompanied minors who attempted to enter the United States. But this figure rose to 21,537 in 2013 and 47,017 so far in 2014.

“These huge numbers of children are from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. According to the data, 29 percent of the minors detained are Hondurans, 24 percent are Guatemalans, 23 percent are Salvadorans, and 22 percent are Mexicans,” said Insulza, who called for the migrants not to be criminalised.

Images of hundreds of children, on their own or accompanied by relatives or strangers, climbing on to the Mexican freight train known as “The Beast” on their way to the U.S. border, finally aroused the concern of regional governments.

The U.S. administration’s announcement that it would begin mass deportations of children apprehended in the past few months was also a factor. Honduran minors began to be deported on July 14.

The Tegucigalpa conference brought together officials and experts from countries receiving and sending migrants. According to analyses by participants, in Guatemala migration is motivated by poverty, while in El Salvador and Honduras people are fleeing citizen insecurity and criminal violence.

Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández said these migrants were “displaced by war” and that an emergency “has now erupted among us.”

Out of every nine unaccompanied minors who cross the border into the United States, seven are Hondurans from what are known as the “hot territories” of insecurity and violence, the president said.

Ricardo Puerta, an expert on migration, told IPS that the Central American region is losing its next generation. “This is hitting hard, especially in countries like Honduras where people are fleeing violence and migrants are aged between 12 and 30.

“We are losing many new and good hands and brains, and in general they will not return. If they do come back it will be as tourists, but not permanently,” he said.

Laura García is a cleaner. She earns an average of 12 dollars for each house or office she cleans, but she can barely get by. She wants to emigrate, and does not care about the risks or what she hears about the hardening of U.S. migration policies, whose officials endlessly repeat that Central American migrants are “not welcome”.

“I hear all that, but there is no work here. Some days I clean two houses, some days only one and sometimes none. And as I am over 35, no one wants to give me a job because of my age. I struggle and struggle, but I want to try up in the North, they say they pay well for looking after people,” she told IPS in a faltering voice.

She lives in the poor and conflict-ridden shanty town of San Cristóbal, in the north of Tegucigalpa, which is controlled by gangs. After 18.00, they impose their own law: no one goes in or out without permission from the crime lords.

“They say that a lot can happen on the way (migrant route), attacks, kidnappings, rapes, they say a lot of things, but with the situation as it is here, it’s the same thing to die on the way than right here at the hands of the ‘maras’ (gangs), where you can be shot dead at any time,” Garcia said.

At the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington on July 7, Honduran cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga spoke about the despair experienced in Honduras and the rest of Central America.

“It is like someone has torn open an artery in Honduras and other Central American countries. Fear, grinding poverty and no future mean we are losing our lifeblood – our young people. If this continues to happen, the hearts of our nations will stop beating,” said the cardinal in a speech that has not yet been disseminated in Honduras.

Rodríguez Maradiaga criticised the mass deportations of Honduran children who have started to arrive from Mexico and the United States. “Can you imagine starting your adult life being treated as a criminal? Where would you go from there?” he asked.

The Catholic Church in Honduras has insisted that fear and extreme poverty, together with unemployment and violence, lead parents to take the desperate measure of sending their children off on the dangerous journey of migration in order to save their lives. The Church is demanding inclusive public policies to prevent the flight of a generation.

Violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador is considered to have grown as a result of the displacement of drug trafficking cartels from Mexico and Colombia, due to the war on drugs waged by the governments of those countries.

In 2013, the homicide rate in El Salvador was 69.2 per 100,000 people, in Guatemala 30 per 100,000 and in Honduras 79.7 per 100,000, according to official figures.

At present over one million Hondurans are estimated to reside in the United States, out of a total population of 8.4 million. In 2013 remittances to Honduras from this migrant population amounted to 3.1 billion dollars, according to the Honduran Association of Banking Institutions.

The social role of journalists in Honduras is restricted under the official secrets law because they will not be able to report information that the state regards as “classified,” under the controversial new regulations. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Jul 9 2014 (IPS)

The new official secrets law in Honduras clamps down on freedom of expression, strengthens corruption and enables public information on defence and security affairs to be kept secret for up to 25 years, according to a confidential report seen by IPS.

The Law on Classification of Public Documents related to Security and National Defence, better known as the official secrets law, was approved on the eve of the conclusion of the last parliamentary term, on Jan. 24.

“It [information about corruption] would be classified for 25 years, by which time the statute of limitations for prosecuting public servants for corruption would have expired, and no one would be held accountable,” says the IAIP
In a marathon two-day session, Congress approved a hundred decrees and laws to smooth the path of the new government of President Juan Orlando Hernández, who took office Jan. 27 and belongs to the right-wing National Party, like his predecessor Porfirio Lobo.

“This law lets the government behave like a cat that covers its own dirt,” shopkeeper Eduardo Tinoco told IPS wryly. He pays 20 dollars a week extortion money to one of the gangs that control El Sitio, a neighbourhood in the northeast of the capital.

“I pay taxes here for everything, even to be allowed to live, and that secrecy law will only be used to cover up the diversion of funds used for security and other government business. There are no two ways about it,” said Tinoco, who owns a small grocery store.

The law was blocked in October 2013 because of opposition from the Honduran Community Media Association (AMCH) and international groups, which regard it as a violation of the right to information and freedom of expression.

But it was reconsidered in January. How this occurred is not really known, because there are no audio records in the parliament archives that indicate when the bill was reintroduced, legislature officials told IPS on condition of anonymity.

A report by a team of experts for the Institute for Access to Public Information (IAIP) says that the official secrets law lacks a clear definition of “national security” and this ambiguity opens the way to discretionality, so that anything considered sensitive may be classified as secret.

The IAIP is the autonomous state body responsible for ensuring transparency in Honduras, according to the Law on Transparency and Access to Public Information. IPS obtained the report, which is due to be made public in a few weeks.

Article 3 of the official secrets law indicates that the following can be classified as confidential, in the interests of “national security”: “matters, actions, contracts, documents, information, data and objects whose knowledge by unauthorised persons may harm or endanger national security and/or defence and the fulfilment of its goals in these areas.”

The law sets four classification levels: private, confidential, secret and ultra secret, with periods of secrecy of five, 10, 15 and 25 years respectively, which may be extended as determined by the National Security and Defence Council which is responsible for classifying and declassifying material.

This Council is made up of the three branches of state, the Attorney General’s Office, the ministers of Defence and Security, the national Information and Intelligence Office and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces.

Information classified as “private” is lower level information, documentation or strategic internal material within state bodies that could cause “undesired institutional effects” if they came to light.

“Confidential” is the term attributed to intermediate level information, which could cause “imminent risk” or a direct threat to security, national defence or public order if it were made public, the law says.

Materials classified as “secret” are high level information at the national level, in the strategic internal and external spheres of the state, revelation of which poses an imminent danger to “constitutional order, security, national defence, international relations and the fulfilment of national goals.”

Finally, “ultra secret” is the highest level classification and is described as material which, if in the realm of public knowledge, would provoke “exceptionally serious” internal and external harm, threatening security, defence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the achievement of national goals.

Omar Rivera, of the Civil Society Group (GSC), an association of political advocacy and human rights organisations, told IPS that the “broad discretionality provided by the law is very worrying, because it provides a cloak of secrecy that can cover everything.”

His main concern is related to the security tax that has been levied on businesses and individuals for the past two years, as a contribution to the fight against insecurity and violence. This law “will make it impossible to get factual information on how the millions of dollars the state collects are spent,” he said.

The IAIP report highlights the same discretionalities, pointing out that any information about a public official being implicated in corruption can be classified as “ultra secret”.

In this case it would be classified for 25 years, by which time the statute of limitations for prosecuting public servants for corruption would have expired, and no one would be held accountable, the report analysing the law says.

Meanwhile, human rights expert Roberto Velásquez told IPS that the law directly targets journalism and freedom of expression, by putting a stranglehold on investigating or disseminating information.

He was referring to Article 10 of the law, which establishes that “when it can be foreseen that classified material may come to the knowledge of the media, these shall be notified of the nature of the material, and shall respect its classified nature.”

Also, any person having knowledge of classified information is obliged to “keep it secret” and report it to the nearest civil, police or military authority.

The new law directly contradicts the Transparency Law, in force for the past five years, by removing the IAIP’s powers to classify information regarded as secret, and overriding guarantees for freedom of expression and investigative journalism.

Doris Madrid, the head of IAIP, told IPS that it is hoping that the official secrets law will be reformed, on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and violates international treaties, but a proposal to revise or repeal it was turned down in Congress in March.

IPS learned that Transparency International made the signing of an agreement with the government on Open Budgets conditional on a revision of the law.

Honduras is regarded as one of the Latin American countries with the highest perception of corruption and insecurity. In April, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) indicated that this country of 8.4 million people has the highest murder rate in the world.

The Observatory on Violence at the National Autonomous University of Honduras reported this rate as 79.7 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. But now the authorities have refused to give any more figures on violent deaths to the Observatory, its members have complained.

One of the walkways built by the community of Santa Rosa de Aguán to connect the local houses with the beach to preserve the sand dunes. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
SANTA ROSA DE AGUÁN, Honduras , Mar 26 2014 (IPS)

At the mouth of the Aguán river on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, a Garífuna community living in a natural paradise that was devastated 15 years ago by Hurricane Mitch has set an example of adaptation to climate change.

“We don’t want to make the sea angry again, we don’t want a repeat of what happened with Mitch, which destroyed so many houses in the town – nearly all of the ones along the seashore,” community leader Claudina Gamboa, 35, told IPS.

Around the coastal town of Santa Rosa de Aguán, the stunning landscape is almost as pristine as when the first Garífunas came to Honduras in the 18th century.

To reach Santa Rosa de Aguán, founded in 1886 and home to just over 3,000 people, IPS drove by car for 12 hours from Tegucigalpa through five of this Central American country’s 18 departments or provinces, until reaching the village of Dos Bocas, 567 km northeast of the capital.

From this village on the mainland, a small boat runs to Santa Rosa de Aguán, located on the sand in the delta of the Aguán river, whose name in the Garífuna language means “abundant waters.”

Half of the trip is on roads in terrible conditions, which become unnerving when it gets dark. But after crossing the river late at night, under a starry sky with a sea breeze caressing the skin, the journey finally comes to a peaceful end.

A three-year project to help the sand dunes recover, which was completed in 2013, was carried out by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) through the Global Environment Facility’s (GEF) Small Grants Programme, with additional support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).

The project sought to generate conditions that would enable the local community to adapt to the risks of climate change and protect the natural ecosystem of the dunes.

The initiative enlisted 40 local volunteers, almost all of them women, who went door to door to raise awareness on the importance of protecting the environment and to educate people about the risks posed by climate change.

“They called them crazy, and thought the people working on that were stupid, but I asked them ‘don’t stop, just keep doing it.’ Now there is greater awareness and people have seen the winds aren’t hitting so hard,” Atanasia Ruíz, a former deputy mayor of the town (2008-2014) and a survivor of Hurricane Mitch, told IPS.

She and Gamboa said the women played an essential role in raising awareness on climate change, and added that thanks to their efforts, the project left an imprint on the white sand and the local inhabitants.

People in the community now understand the importance of protecting the coastal system and preserving the dunes, and have learned to organise behind that goal, Gamboa said. “It’s really touching to see the old women from our town picking up garbage for recycling,” she said.

The sand dunes act as natural protective barriers that keep the wind or waves from smashing into the town during storms.

“When the sea got mad, it made us pay. When Mitch hit, everything here was flattened, it was just horrible,” Gamboa said.

Some people left town, she said, “because we were told that we couldn’t live here, that it was too vulnerable and that the sea would always flood us because there was no way to keep it out.

“But many of us stayed, and with the knowledge they gave us, we know how to protect ourselves and our town,” she said, proudly pointing out how the vegetation has begun to grow in the dunes.

In late October 1998, Hurricane Mitch left 11,000 dead and 8,000 missing in Honduras, while causing enormous economic losses and damage to infrastructure.

Santa Rosa de Aguán was hit especially hard, with storm surges up to five metres high. The bodies of more than 40 people from the town were found, while others went missing.

The effort to recover the sand dunes along the coast included the construction of wide wooden walkways to protect the sand.

In addition, the remains of cinder block houses destroyed by Mitch were finally removed, to prevent them from inhibiting the natural formation of dunes.

The project also introduced recycling, to clear garbage from the beach and the sandy unpaved streets of this town, where visitors are greeted with “buiti achuluruni”, which means “welcome” in the Garífuna language.

Lícida Nicolasa Gómez is an 18-year-old member of the Garífuna community who prefers to be called “Alondra”, her nickname since childhood.

“I loved it when they invited me to the dunes and recycling project, because we were deforesting the dunes, hurting them, destroying the vegetation, but we’re not doing that anymore,” she said.

“We even made a mural on one of the walls of the community centre, to remember what kind of town we wanted,” she added, with a broad smile.

The mural of scraps of plastic and other recyclable materials made on the community centre wall by the people of Santa Rosa de Aguán to celebrate their way of life and the beauty of Garífuna women, and remind the town of the need to mitigate climate change. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

The mural includes scraps of plastic, metal, tiles and bottle tops. It reflects the beauty of the Garífunas, showing people fishing, crops of mandioc and plantain, and the sea and bright sun, while reflecting the desire to live in harmony with the environment.

The sand dunes are up to five metres high in this small town at the mouth of a river that runs through the country’s tropical rainforest.

Hugo Galeano, from GEF’s Small Grants Programme, told IPS that Santa Rosa de Aguán became even more vulnerable after Hurricane Mitch, which affected the local livelihoods based on fishing, farming and livestock.

For this community built between the river and the sea, flooding is one of the main threats to survival, said the representative of the GEF programme.

Ricardo Norales, 80, told IPS that, although the sand dunes and vegetation are growing, “the location of our community means we are still exposed to inclement weather.

“With the project, we saw how the wind and the sea don’t penetrate our homes as much anymore. But we need this kind of aid to be more sustainable,” he said.

The history of Santa Rosa de Aguán is marked by the impact of tropical storms and hurricanes, which have hit the town directly or indirectly many times since it was founded.

But the sand dunes are once again taking shape along the shoreline, where the community has built walkways to the sea.

Local inhabitants want their town to be seen as an example of adaptation to climate change and the construction of alternatives making survival possible. Several of them said they did not want an “ayó” – good-bye in Garífuna – for their community.

Police raid on a greenhouse where marijuana and opium poppies were grown in La Cumbre, in the Honduran municipality of La Iguala. Credit: Courtesy of Policía Nacional.

By Thelma Mejía
LA IGUALA, Honduras, Mar 15 2014 (IPS)

Discovery and destruction of an elaborate greenhouse for growing opium poppy and marijuana on a western hill, La Cumbre, has alerted the Honduran authorities to the fact that this is no longer just a transit country for illicit drugs, but also a producer and processor.

This is the first time that opium poppies have been found in this country. Previously, the only place in Central America where they had been recorded was in the Guatemalan region of El Petén. Opium paste is the raw material for making heroin, which is highly addictive and is re-emerging as a drug of choice.

On Jan. 31, the authorities announced the discovery of the high-tech greenhouse on the steep mountain, 1,600 metres above sea level and 400 kilometres from Tegucigalpa, in the hamlet of La Cumbre in the municipality of La Iguala. IPS visited the place, which is reached by tracks that are barely passable by rural vehicle and on horseback.

On the way up the trail went through five hamlets, and wound between wild flowers and coffee plantations, typical for the department (province) of Lempira. The roads were creviced and narrow, wet and muddy; they become impassable in the rainy season that begins in May.

At the end of the trail, the remains of the greenhouse came into view. It was 100 metres long and 40 metres wide, and 1,800 opium poppy plants and 800 of the Dutch variety of marijuana (cannabis) were found there.

The enclosed area was air-conditioned, with a large generator, a modern irrigation system and high-efficiency equipment.

Carlos Mejía, deputy superintendent of the National Police in Lempira, who headed the seizure raid, told IPS “we suspect there are many more plantations in these enormous western mountains, so we are combing the entire region.”

Two people were captured during the operation, Rubén Darío Pinilla, a Colombian, and Orlando Jacinto Miranda, a Honduran. Miranda worked for Pinilla, and grew vegetables on his farm as a “front” for his illegal activities at the greenhouse, Mejía said.

Another police officer present during the raid told IPS that the registered owner of the land, a local person, is being investigated, and that he himself might be fronting for someone else. It is assumed that crops of opium and marijuana have already been harvested here.

A teacher in the community of El Matazano, at the foot of the large hill, told IPS in confidence that “it was high time they caught those people.”

“For some time now, we have seen four-wheel-drive vehicles on these bridle paths at night, loaded with plastic barrels, and people have been saying that marijuana was being grown on that hill, but this opium poppy business is news to us,” the teacher said.

The mayor of La Iguala, Marcio Orlando Miranda, told IPS that Pinilla had been arrested in July 2013 for illegal logging in the forest close to the greenhouse, but strangely, he was freed. “There was collusion with the authorities,” he insisted.

Pinilla is in prison awaiting trial for drug trafficking, while those responsible for freeing him last year are under investigation, and a prosecutor has already been suspended.

Mayor Miranda said that for some time,“strangers have been appearing around here, and it is said that many local farms are being used to grow marijuana and this opium poppy that I never heard of before.”

La Iguala is a municipality of 27,000 people, where maize, beans and particularly coffee are grown. There is only one police post, with five poorly-equipped officers, to serve its 26 villages and 86 hamlets.

The operation that dismantled the greenhouse was organised from Tegucigalpa by the National Police anti-drug squad and was headed by the Lempira branch, which is also very short of manpower, equipment and vehicles in the fight against powerful drug traffickers.

The authorities suspect that in adjacent provinces like Ocotepeque and Copán, which border on Guatemala and El Salvador, there may be more opium poppy plantations. Lempira also shares its southern border with El Salvador.

In February the police found what appeared to be a clandestine laboratory in the Nueva Arcadia region of Copán, that was suspected of being used for cocaine processing, together with underground tunnels, heavy machinery and a helipad.

Nueva Arcadia and La Iguala are both economically depressed zones located among tree-covered mountains.

But they are not the only indications that the drug trade is changing its spots in Honduras, which has been a transit zone since the 1970s and is now a country where drugs are grown, processed and even, to a lesser extent, sold.

Eugenio Sosa, a sociologist and university professor, told IPS that Honduras “has for a long time ceased to be a transit country. There are indications that drug trade penetration is much deeper than that, and growing opium poppies only reflects one of the forms of organised crime.

“The authorities seek to present these discoveries as a success, but one has to ask: are more drugs seized because more are being trafficked, because they are being produced and processed, or because the authorities are more efficient?” he said.

“I have my doubts about the last of these possible answers,” he said.

Mirna Flores, an expert on security issues, attributes the expansion of drug-related crimes to displacement of the trafficking routes due to the war against drugs in Mexico, which has prompted the cartels to dispute territories in Central America.

“Honduras’s geographical location appeals to the cartels and they have become more sophisticated in their expansion strategies, based on corruption and impunity,” she told IPS.

In her view, “that is why these plantations and processing laboratories have arisen.”

The Atlantic cartel, on the northern Caribbean coast, and the Valle cartel in the west are the main drug organisations operating in this country of 8.5 million people.

Analysts say the opium discovery will compel the government to crack down more effectively on the smaller cartels operating in the country, and on their political and economic bosses.

Official reports say that 80 percent of illegal drugs en route towards the lucrative United States market through Central America pass through Honduras, and connect this with the country’s having one of the world’s highest levels of violence, with an average of 19 violent deaths a day.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), in 2012 Honduras had the highest homicide rate in Latin America, at 81.9 per 100,000 population.

Most of those who meet violent deaths are young people, and although criminal investigation is fragile, the nature of most of these murders leads criminal experts to believe that they are the result of cartel turf wars and score settling.

After three decades of waiting, the people of the La Villanueva shantytown in Tegucigalpa have new staircases, making it easier to get up and down the hill and providing an evacuation route in the case of climate-related calamities. Credit: Luis Elvir/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Jan 18 2014 (IPS)

For some 250,000 shantytown-dwellers in the Honduran capital, fear of dying or losing their home due to a landslide or other weather-related event has been reduced, thanks to a global warming mitigation plan that has carried out small infrastructure works in 180 ecologically and socially vulnerable neighbourhoods.

The 100×100 Plan – one hundred works in the same number of days – is part of a climate change risk mitigation project financed by the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) with a 26-million-dollar credit granted on concessionary terms.

“Before the bridge was built, this area would be cut off when it rained,” Xiomara Castellanos, who lives in the poor neighbourhood of Mololoa, told IPS, proudly pointing to one of the new infrastructure works. “We used to come down the hill barefoot to cross the river, which rises a lot in winter, and has even swept away several houses.”

The more than 100 small projects are scattered all over the city of Tegucigalpa, which is home to 1.8 million of Honduras’s 8.5 million people.

Tegucigalpa and the adjacent city of Comayagüela – also known as the Central District – make up the capital of this impoverished Central American country. The city’s vulnerability increased when Hurricane Mitch left at least 11,000 dead and 8,000 missing in 1998, besides causing enormous damage to infrastructure.

The capital, located in a chain of mountains that reach 1,300 metres in height, was among the most affected parts of the country. And 15 years after the catastrophe, there are still areas where time has stood still, and the ruins of houses are still standing.

The 180 neighbourhoods selected for the project are home to the poorest of the poor, who live on hillsides where mudslides and landslides can occur after just one hour of heavy rain.

Julio Quiñónez, assistant director of Honduras’ Municipal Emergency Committee, told IPS that environmental vulnerability is high in many parts of Tegucigalpa, but “mitigation works, large and small, have now reduced the levels of risk.”

One of the projects involved construction of a small bridge and the strengthening of the banks of the river in the Mololoa shantytown, on the northeast side of the city, where local residents are now able to get in and out of their neighbourhood and to evacuate in case of a storm.

Mololoa, home to some 5,000 people, is an area at risk not only because of the vulnerability to landslides on the steep slopes, but also due to the high levels of insecurity and violent crime. Maras or youth gangs control the area, where there is a vacuum of formal authority.

“We would even get fungus on our feet from walking down the hill in the water, because the vehicles that sell products didn’t come up, and when our kids got sick, we would carry them down the hill, sloshing through the water,” said Castellanos, 35, who is the head of her household.

But now “even the vehicles that sell water come up without any problem, and the public transport does too, and we even have an evacuation route in case of disaster,” she happily explained, after describing the isolation the people of Mololoa used to live in.

Johan Meza, in charge of mitigation projects in the 100×100 Plan, told IPS that the small infrastructure works include the construction of ditches, gutters, stairways, evacuation routes, pedestrian bridges, and storm water drains.

The projects, he said, were determined by an assessment of the vulnerability of the city carried out by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and other bodies.

A few metres from one of the city’s main roads, in the east, is La Villanueva, full of crumbly, narrow steep paths that are an odyssey to climb.

The mitigation projects here range from buffer strips and embankments to prevent landslides to storm water channels and ditches, the paving of streets, and staircases with handrails in areas where it used to be impossible to walk during the rainy season.

La Villanueva is one of the most populous slums in Tegucigalpa, with 120,000 residents living in the area’s eight sectors. It is highly prone to landslides and the collapse of the homes that line the hillside.

Pointing to the new stairways for which residents waited three decades, community leader María Elena Benítez told IPS: “We used to climb down the hill on all fours, to reach the bus; when it rained this was all mud, you can’t imagine how hard it was for us.

“It was common to see people who had broken a limb, especially children or the elderly. But the authorities tell us that what they have done here is just a start, that La Villanueva will stop being a high-risk area and that now a training plan is coming so we’ll know how to take care of the mitigation works,” she said.

“We know that this, even though it might not look like much, benefits everyone,” said Yovany Tróchez, president of the La Villanueva patronato – a local government institution that represents the members of the community – who accompanied IPS on the tour of the area.

“The landslides won’t happen like they did before, and with these works we’re preventing the water from running and leaking into other sectors and we’re keeping the hillside from sliding down with nothing to prevent it.”

Tegucigalpa Mayor Ricardo Álvarez told IPS that “a simple downpour can mean the difference between life and death in the face of natural disasters that reveal the vulnerability of our city.”

Álvarez and his team did not conceal their satisfaction with the mitigation works that they have organised, when they show the statistics indicating that the number of deaths from rainfall and landslides went down from 12 in 2010 to just one in 2013.

The aim is for no one to die in weather-related incidents, Álvarez said.

But until that is achieved, he said, the capital is already less vulnerable than it was 15 years ago, thanks too to the fact that local residents have learned to deal better with the risks.

Álvarez stressed that Tegucigalpa is the Honduran city that has done the most to prepare itself for the risks posed by climate change.

The next phase of the 100×100 Plan involves climate change adaptation, which includes an intense programme of training and provision of equipment in the areas that received assistance, so people are prepared and know how to use the evacuation routes in case of disaster.

The fear of losing one’s home – or one’s life – has now diminished in shantytowns in Tegucigalpa like El Pastel, La Concordia, Campo Cielo, Flor del Campo, Brisas del Norte, Nueva Suyapa, Venezuela, Los Pinos and San Juan del Norte.

Xiomara Castro making the victory sign and surrounded by supporters during the Sunday Dec. 1 march in Tegucigalpa against alleged electoral fraud. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Dec 3 2013 (IPS)

The recent elections which were expected to strengthen the fabric of governance in Honduras failed to do so. Now the country has a president-elect with just 38.7 percent support who is facing accusations of electoral fraud, along with a fragmented parliament where the governing party will be in the minority.

“It won’t be easy for Juan Orlando [Hernández], his task is going to be complicated, he’ll have to negotiate,” university student Juan Sánchez told IPS, referring to the candidate of the governing right-wing National Party (PN), who was declared winner of the Nov. 24 elections.

Sánchez was watching from the sidelines as thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets of Tegucigalpa, the capital, on Sunday Dec. 1, to protest the alleged fraud.

They were called out by the left-wing Libre party, whose candidate, Xiomara Castro, 58, took 28.7 percent of the vote, according to the electoral tribunal.

“I don’t know if there was fraud, I’m not sure about that. But I do know that the PN government will be tough on the people, and that it’s good it won’t have a majority in Congress; I hope the different political forces balance each other out,” Sánchez commented.

He said he has been looking for work for a year and in the meantime is scraping by on the commissions he earns from selling cosmetics.

As a warm-up for Jan. 27, when Hernández will take office, the supporters of Castro and her husband – the head of the Libre party former president Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted by a coup in 2009 – marched through the capital.

They were demanding a vote-by-vote recount due to supposed irregularities such as altered tally sheets, the inclusion of dead people on the voter rolls, and inadequate monitoring of polling stations.

Castro, Zelaya and their followers marched to the electoral tribunal warehouse where the votes are counted. The candidate and her husband rode in a pickup truck carrying the coffin and body of José Antonio Ardón, the leader of the fleet of motorcyclists who have headed Libre’s marches since the coup. Ardón was kidnapped and murdered the day before the demonstration.

Although the leaders of Libre say his death was politically motivated, they have no evidence.

The authorities are investigating his murder, which happened in one of the most dangerous neighbourhoods of Tegucigalpa, the capital of this country that has one of the highest murder rates in the world, according to United Nations figures.

“They mounted a fraud against us, they dealt us a technical, democratic blow, but this struggle isn’t over,” Castro said in a passionate speech. “I am the president-elect of Honduras, and today’s demonstration is a clear message for those who took part in the fraud.”

Zelaya talked about filing a legal challenge. But he also said that “it is on the streets where peaceful revolutionary processes emerge; soon we will bring them down and win political power.”

The electoral tribunal said it would look at the tallies from thousands of polling booths, but it stopped short of agreeing to a full recount.

Another university student, Waleska Zavala, who took part in Sunday’s protest, said she did believe “bad things happened in the elections; they stole the elections from us, but they did it with kid gloves, so it’s difficult to prove.”

In her view, “Libre should now prepare itself to be in the opposition, because one thing I can tell you: the people have changed, and with them we young people,” she told IPS while tying her party’s trademark scarf around her forehead.?

That change, according to Aquiles Uclés, a driver for a private company, should involve social inclusion and coverage.

“If the new government wants to change things, it will have to live up to its promises, which are jobs and security; it will have to govern for everyone, and not just for the rich,” he told IPS.

Political analyst Miguel Cálix said Hernández won’t find it so difficult to govern because “they already knew what was coming and they began to forge alliances from the presidency of Congress, where Hernández reached important decisions with the consensus of the different blocs of legislators, even though they had a parliamentary majority.”

Hernández, 45, was president of the single-chamber Congress until June, when he threw himself into his campaign. “He is an astute, skilled politician, and as far as I know he’s already negotiating to be able to count on a majority in Congress,” Cálix told IPS. “In the executive his performance will be sound, and there will be reforms and a high level of social concern,” he predicted.

One of the novel aspects of the elections was that the brand-new Libre party became the main opposition force, pushing aside the moderate right-wing Liberal Party (PL), which has traditionally alternated in power with the PN.

But expert in electoral issues Adán Palacios said the effort to forge alliances should be ongoing.

“We are facing the need for electoral reforms that would usher in a second round of voting, which should not be delayed, now that Honduras has moved from a two-party system to a multi-coloured political map,” he told IPS.

Palacios said that power is increasingly shifting from the executive branch to the legislature, “and with this atypical Congress made up of many political forces, where the PN will not be in the majority, other scenarios guaranteeing better governance, such as a second round of elections, should be tried out.”

But sociologist Mirna Flores told IPS that a run-off would be costly for a poor country like Honduras. “In theory it’s feasible, but governance problems here should be solved with more sustainable policies and real responses to structural problems like poverty, health, education, inequality, unemployment and insecurity.”

In the new 128-member Congress, the PN will hold 48 seats, Libre 39, the PL 25, the centre-right Anticorruption Party 13, and three small parties will hold one seat each.

This panorama is very different from the one faced by outgoing President Porfirio Lobo, who had 71 legislators – a big enough majority to reform the constitution and introduce the possibility of holding referendums and plebiscites, and to impeach political office-holders.

The reforms were aimed at responding to some of the demands voiced by the people after the coup that toppled Zelaya and sparked a major institutional crisis, as well as to requirements set by the international community in order to recognise the Lobo administration after he was elected four years ago, within a difficult process of stabilisation that was to be crowned by the Nov. 24 elections.

Hernández, as president of Congress, played a key role in drumming up support for the reforms, which required the votes of 81 legislators. He also managed to build broad backing for the removal of Constitutional Court and Supreme Court judges and for the replacement of the heads of the prosecution service and other government departments, which the PN now controls.

In poorer Tegucigalpa neighbourhoods like Flor de Campo, the gangs mark the limits of their territories by hanging dolls from power cables. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Nov 22 2013 (IPS)

The capital of Honduras, one of the world’s most violent countries, has turned into a huge cage, where people lock themselves into their homes behind barred windows and iron doors along the steep winding, narrow streets of the city.

And in the poor areas of Tegucigalpa, a city of 1.6 million, people have to make protection payments to the maras or gangs, which set curfews for entering and leaving the areas under their control.

In some of the poor neighbourhoods, the maras mark the limits of their territory by hanging dolls from the power lines, IPS saw.

In the Sunday Nov. 24 elections, 24, this society held hostage by soaring levels of violence crime will choose between hard-line zero tolerance and more integral approaches that take into account prevention and socioeconomic aspects, to combat the problem.

On average, 20 homicides a day are committed in this impoverished Central American country of 8.5 million people. In 2012 alone, 7,172 murders were committed, according to the Autonomous National University of Honduras’ Violence Observatory.

That makes Honduras the country with the highest homicide rate in the world, according to the latest ranking by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), with 96.1 murders per 100,000 population, compared to a global average of 8.8, a Latin American average of 29, and a Central American average of 41.

In Peña por Bajo, a poor neighbourhood on the south side of Tegucigalpa, the police announced with great fanfare three months ago that they had seized control of a dozen houses from the gangs. But a month ago, after the police had stopped patrolling the area, the maras destroyed the houses and the people who were living in them had to flee.

The people of Tegucigalpa are also fed up with extortion rackets – which not even the politicians escape. Candidates have told the media that they have had to pay “taxes” to criminals to be allowed to enter certain areas to campaign.

In the last four years, 2,607 people have also been displaced from their homes because of the violence, according to the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR.

Karim Vargas is tired of living in danger, and says she doesn’t know to what extent Sunday’s elections will change her life.

She lives in Peña por Bajo and works as a receptionist in a hotel. And although she wants security, she is not convinced that militarisation is the answer.

That is the proposal of the candidate of the governing right-wing National Party (PN),
Juan Orlando Hernández, who promises to be tough on crime.

Hernández, the president of Congress, which his party controls, is the architect of the recently created Military Police of Public Order (PMOP), which will carry out intelligence work to fight organised crime.

In October, the new force’s first 1,000 agents began to patrol the streets of Tegucigalpa and the second-largest city, San Pedro Sula, in the midst of the election campaign, without receiving training for their new policing and intelligence tasks.

“You feel a little bit safer when you see them in the streets,” said Vargas, 28, the mother of a two-year-old daughter. “But we know this won’t last, because when they leave, the mareros [gang-members] will come back and spread fear and everything will be the same again.

“It’s all politics, and that won’t save my life,” she told IPS.

Bringing down the rates of violence and crime is the most pressing issue in the campaign for the election of President Porfirio Lobo’s successor, who will take office Jan. 27.

Political analyst Ernesto Paz told IPS that Hernández, who promises the most aggressive approach to crime, is trying to convert “the vote to punish the government for its policies into a vote of fear; we’ll see if he manages to pull it off.”

The PN candidate told foreign correspondents: “I am going to bring back peace and tranquillity by the hands of the military police.”

Hernández is competing with seven other candidates from nine political parties, in elections that will mark the end of a two-party system and the emergence of a multi-colour array of political forces after decades of control by the PN and the Liberal Party (PL), a more moderate right-wing party.

Besides the PN and PL, the parties disputing the elections include the social democratic Innovation and Unity Party, the Christian Democrat Party, and the left-wing Democratic Unification party – all of which are smaller traditional parties.

But the political, social and institutional upheaval caused by the June 2009 coup that toppled then president Manuel Zelaya, leader of the PL at the time, led to the emergence of four new parties, which people who want change have pinned their hopes on.

The parties are the left-wing Freedom and Refoundation (Libre) party, created by Zelaya when he returned to the country from exile in 2011, the leftist Broad Front of Political and Electoral Resistance (FAPER), the centre-right Anticorruption Party, and the far-right Patriotic Alliance.

These elections will also mark an end to the institutional effects of the coup, because the elections that Lobo won four years ago were organised by a government that had taken power in a coup, and it took months for the new president to be recognised by the rest of Latin America and by the international community.

Libre, Zelaya’s party, stands a real chance of turning the PN and the PL into opposition parties. The party’s candidate is Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro, who is neck and neck with Hernández according to the latest polls, carried out in October.

Castro has 29 percent poll ratings, compared to Hernández’s 27 percent, while the third in line, Mauricio Villeda of the PL, has recently seen his popularity spike, which has created a new sense of uncertainty about the outcome.

Castro, like Villeda, advocates an integral approach to fighting crime, which would combine police measures with prevention and rehabilitation. She proposes community policing, with agents who establish a closer relationship with the people in the neighbourhoods they patrol.

Ombudsman Ramón Custodio complained to IPS about the “politicisation of insecurity,” saying that tackling the problem is a priority for the state “and should not be a platform for generating votes.”

Custodio does not believe the problem will be solved by any of the candidates, no matter who is elected. He recommended that Honduras enter a new era of broad pacts and reforms, to avoid opening a “Pandora´s box” that would generate greater problems of governance.

Besides electing a new president Sunday, voters will choose three vice presidents, 128 legislators and their alternates, and the mayors of the country’s 298 municipalities.

Human rights defenders and members of the opposition in Honduras see a new elite military unit created to engage in policing as a drastic setback for the demilitarisation efforts that began two decades ago.

The Military Police of Public Order will be launched in October, initially with 900 officers, to be built up to 5,000 by early 2014.

It was created to carry out law enforcement duties in shantytowns and other poor neighbourhoods where the civil police force has pulled out, overwhelmed by the greater organisation and firepower of common criminals and organised crime.

It will also have powers to call up military reservists and engage in domestic intelligence activities.

The new unit’s intelligence efforts will be in addition to the work carried out by the National Intelligence Directorate, created six months ago, the Anti-Drug Trafficking Directorate and the anti-drug prosecution service.

Ramón Custodio, the national human rights commissioner or ombudsman, said he was staunchly opposed to the new body on the grounds that it violated the constitution and virtually ensured the demise of the national civilian police, re-established 15 years ago when the military began to yield power to civilians.

To use reservists, a special law would be needed declaring a state of emergency or of war, “but this is not included in the law approved Aug. 21,” Custodio told IPS, calling the decision “an enormous setback.”

In contrast, congressman Celin Discua of the governing right-wing National Party said the foundation of the elite corps was a historic event that restored to “the military the power that had been taken from them … Now we will be safer.”
Discua said the decision was justified by the crisis in the national civilian police, which has been undergoing a reform and purge for the last two years, since its connections with crime and corruption came to light.

Twenty people a day are murdered in this impoverished Central American nation of eight million, which is considered one of the most violent countries in the world.

According to experts, the police purge is moving forward too slowly, and only an estimated 30 percent of the police force’s 12,000 officers can be trusted, Discua said.

Congressman German Leitzelar, of the social democratic Innovation and Unity Party (PINU), claimed the law in question is “unconstitutional and confuses the spheres of defence and security, which are two different things that in the long run may clash and result in human rights violations.”

As part of a strategy for strengthening ties with the armed forces, the government of right-wing President Porfirio Lobo issued a decree on Aug. 13 granting the military the right to carry out commercial forestry projects on land under military control.

The income from timber sales will go towards the military pensions institute (IPM – Instituto de Previsión Militar), which was in charge of managing business enterprises for the armed forces until two decades ago.

The IPM sold off its businesses when Honduras embarked on a demilitarisation process that stopped it from competing with the private sector for state funds.

But now the process seems to have gone into reverse. “The military are allowed into nearly every area of the country’s development, and they are creating the future conditions to return to the business sphere. Civilians may not like it, but they will not be able to get them out,” sociologist Eugenio Sosa told IPS.

Soaring levels of violence and the spread of organised crime have created a climate that favours the growing involvement and presence of the armed forces, in the midst of the campaign for the November elections.

The National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) Observatory on Violence reported that the number of homicides rose from 7,104 in 2011 to 7,172 in 2012, equivalent to 85.5 per 100,000 population – one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Although most of the killings were the result of gunshot wounds, a bill to regulate firearms possession has languished in Congress for three years.

For the last nine years, the most dangerous areas of the country have been the central province of Francisco Morazán, which includes Tegucigalpa, and the northern provinces of Atlántida and Cortés, although more ecently, organised crime has spread along the entire Caribbean coast.

Among the high-profile murders blamed on the police are those of two university students in 2011, one of whom was the son of Julieta Castellanos, president of UNAH and an expert on security and governance issues, who fostered strong social pressure for the reform of state security.

A month ago four of the eight police officers implicated in the murders were convicted, but the masterminds have not been identified.

The case led to the final lifting of the veil hiding police corruption, which includes kidnapping, connections with drug trafficking mafias and other serious crimes.

Political analyst Miguel Cálix told IPS that legal reforms were necessary before powers were granted to the armed forces to carry out logging and sales of timber. He also said the revenue obtained from these activities should go into the state coffers, rather than directly to the military.

What is being given in return for all this? Cálix asked. In Honduran society, “a militaristic viewpoint prevails in spite of the 2009 crisis,” he said.

On Jun. 28, 2009, then-president Manuel Zelaya was taken from his home at gunpoint and put on a plane to Costa Rica, still in his pyjamas. The coup was backed by Congress, which appointed Roberto Micheletti as acting head of state. Lobo was elected in December 2009.

Nevertheless, according to opinion polls, out of Honduras’ fragile institutions, public confidence in the military still puts it in third place, after the churches and the media.

In the face of the insecurity, people have been in favour of the soldiers being put on the streets, originally alongside the civilian police, but now with autonomy enjoyed by their own special unit.

Honduran society remains shocked at the tragic fate of Aníbal Barrow, a journalist and university professor whose body was dismembered and scattered around a lake in Villanueva, in the northern province of Cortés.

Barrow, 65, was kidnapped on Jun. 24 in the city of San Pedro Sula, the provincial capital, 450 km north of Tegucigalpa, as he was riding in his car with family members and a driver, who were released unharmed by the unidentified gunmen

The car was found several hours later, with a bullet hole in one of the doors, and traces of blood inside. Barrow’s remains were discovered 15 days later in a swamp next to a lagoon near the community of Siboney, in Villanueva.

Social analysts say the murder indicates that Honduras has entered a phase of “high-profile violence,” and that reporters are the favourite victims in order to spread terror. In the past three and a half years, 29 media workers have been killed on the job.

“We are experiencing a kind of violence that was not seen 15 years ago. The way criminals are operating has changed. This action is more like a message from organised crime in the 21st century – a long way from the banditry seen in Honduras in the 19th century,” historian and social analyst Rolando Sierra told IPS.

“This is high-profile violence. The victims are not ordinary citizens, but well-known journalists, evangelical preachers, lawyers or human rights activists; in other words, the violence is spreading towards sectors that have a greater impact on society,” he said.

Stunned, in broken voices, the reporters who covered the recovery of Barrow’s remains told how his clothes and personal documents were found buried, and later on, parts of his body were discovered wrapped in bags while other parts were found in a different spot, charred from burning.

“It was a cruel and abominable deed,” said Human Rights Commissioner Ramón Custodio.

Journalist Jorge Oseguera, a friend of Barrow’s and a correspondent for the HRN radio station in Tegucigalpa, said he found the “macabre act” unbelievable.

Choking on his words, Oseguera said, “we who work in the media have become used to violence, but when it affects someone close to us, a colleague and friend, all we can say is that these killing machines have no mercy for anyone.”

The murdered journalist was host of a popular morning talk show on the Globo TV channel in San Pedro Sula, where he also taught mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Honduras.

Four suspects have been arrested, but 10 people have been implicated by a protected witness who was one of the hired killers, said the head prosecutor at the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Roberto Ramírez. The motive for the murder has not been revealed.

Honduras has an average of 20 murders a day and its annual homicide rate in 2012 was 85.5 per 100,000 population, nearly 10 times the global median rate of 8.8 per 100,000. It is considered one of the most violent countries in the world.

The security ministry has announced it aims to reduce the homicide rate to 80 per 100,000 population this year. However, the authorities have not spoken to the press for two months, limiting their information to official communiqués that do not give murder figures.

The National Human Rights Commission has recorded 36 journalists murdered since 2002. But 29 of the killings have taken place since rightwing President Porfirio Lobo took office in January 2010.

Impunity is the common factor in these cases, only one of which has led to a firm sentence. Prosecutor Ramírez, however, is hopeful that Barrow’s grisly murder will be solved soon, due to the abundance of evidence.

Honduras is regarded as an especially high-risk country for journalists. Killings of reporters are concentrated in 10 of the 18 provinces, most of them known for drug trafficking problems.

In the view of journalist and university professor Miguel Martínez, “the viciousness of Barrow’s murder takes us back to the 1990s in Colombia, or to Mexico today. And it indicates the need for a debate on organised crime and extradition.”

“There is plenty to discuss. It would seem that this (murder) was a message sent by organised crime, because of its characteristics, but the time has come for the press to know how to behave in the face of the coming avalanche, and what safety protocols should be used,” Martínez said.

Bertha Oliva, a prominent Honduran human rights activist, told IPS the murder showed “disrespect for life, for freedom of expression, and for those who are the link between society and the state. We have to get to the bottom of this and find out why he was killed.”

The unhealed wounds left by the 2009 coup in Honduras will continue to mark the campaign for the Nov. 24 elections, in which nine parties are participating, four of them new political groups, spanning a wide ideological range.

The elections will focus on two main issues, according to analysts who spoke to IPS: insecurity in the most violent country in the world, with an official homicide rate of 85.5 per 100,000 population in 2012; and the political polarisation that has resulted from the coup d’état four years ago.

Ousted president “Mel” Zelaya’s party LIBRE, with his wife Xiomara Castro as presidential candidate, is leading the polls for the November elections. Credit: Yamil Gonzales/CC BY-SA 2.0

On Jun. 28, 2009, then president Manuel Zelaya was ousted and sent out of the country on a plane, still in his pyjamas.

He is participating in the election campaign that just began, as the leader of a new party backing the presidential candidacy of his wife, Xiomara Castro, and as a congressional candidate.

The general elections, announced May 23 – according to legal regulations, six months in advance – are a novelty in that four new political parties are participating, one of them a political-military grouping and one regarded as an “outsider.”

The new arrivals are joining three traditional parties in a bid to break with the dominant two-party system that has ruled for 30 years of unstable governments, in the transition to democracy of this Central American country of more than eight million people.

David Matamoros, the president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, said in a speech to the nation that in the interests of greater political participation, “this high court has authorised the registration of four new political parties, thereby extending the options for the Honduran electorate and advancing in the democratisation of our political system.”

The electoral spectrum is now made up of the governing rightwing National Party (PN), which has alternated in power with the conservative Liberal Party (PL) for over 100 years.

The social democratic Innovation and Unity Party, the Christian Democracy Party and the leftwing Democratic Unification Party are referred to as “bonsai” by political analysts because they have not grown in over two decades of existence.

The new arrivals on the scene are the leftwing Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE – Freedom and Refoundation Party) of former president Zelaya; the Frente Amplio Político Electoral en Resistencia (FAPER – Broad Political Electoral Front in Resistance), also of the left; the centre-right Anti-Corruption Party (PAC); and the Patriotic Alliance, a political-military project headed by Romeo Vásquez, the former armed forces commander who led the coup in 2009.

The electoral race includes major political figures who were directly involved in the 2009 political crisis, Eugenio Sosa, a sociologist and university professor, told IPS.

Among these actors, he said, were “Zelaya and his wife Castro, who are now seeking to return to government with LIBRE, and General Vásquez.”

In addition, “Juan Orlando Hernández, who was a member of Congress for PN and the spokesman for his congressional sector at the time of the coup, is now their presidential candidate; and Mauricio Villeda, the PL candidate, supported the de facto government of Roberto Micheletti,” the president of parliament at the time of the coup.

“In this campaign we will again be hearing the epithets of ‘coupmongers’ and ‘non-coupmongers,’ ‘far-right’ and ‘far-left,’ ‘pro-constituent assembly’ and ‘anti-constituent aseembly,’ among others,” Sosa predicted.

Then there is sports commentator Salvador Nasralla, presidential candidate for PAC, “whose discourse is anti-political and against the leadership, typical of a political ‘outsider’,” he said.

Sosa forecast a campaign in which ideological polarisation will characterise the debate, and insults and put-downs may be more common than constructive proposals.

Analyst Wilfredo García had a different point of view. He did not think the coup would have such a marked effect on the campaign, although he agreed the run-up to the elections would be virulent and highly ideological, since “the very existence as the hegemonic power group” of the traditional two-party system is at stake.

“Security and corruption will be the keynote campaign issues, because under the administration of President Porfirio Lobo, violence overflowed in Honduras to the point where it has become the most violent country in the world, and it is also under his government that we occupy the shameful first place for corruption in Central America,” he said.

In García’s view, the traditional parties do not have any answers and represent a culture of corruption and political patronage.

“The military’s political project should be examined closely, because they felt betrayed by the political class after the 2009 crisis and have opted to develop a movement to represent their own interests. If violence continues to increase, they may have possibilities in the future,” he said.

The first opinion polls put LIBRE in the lead for voter intentions, followed by PAC, while PN and PL alternate in third place.

But the traditionally dominant liberals and nationalists have formidable party structures, and the analysts believe they will fight tooth and nail to remain in power.

The United States embassy in Tegucigalpa issued a communiqué after the announcement of the elections, calling for the vote to be held in a climate “free of violence and intimidation.”

Latinobarómetro, a polling firm, reported that disenchantment with democracy in Honduras resulted in a 10-point drop in popular support for this form of government between 2010 and 2011. This disaffection will be put to the test in November when rupture or maintenance of the status quo in political power will be decided, the analysts said.

Concrete channels with steep banks were built to increase slope stability during heavy rains in El Reparto and El Berrinche. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Apr 1 2013 (IPS)

In slums lining several hillsides in the Honduran capital, mitigation works are under way to protect the neighbourhoods from flooding and landslides, which completely obliterated several areas when Hurricane Mitch hit the country fifteen years ago.

Tegucigalpa, which covers nearly 1,400 square km and is home to over 1.3 million people, is one of the areas of Honduras most exposed to natural disasters. Geological faults have also been identified in some hillsides surrounding the capital, threatening the neighbourhoods on or below the hills.

In 1974, 135 neighbourhoods were highly vulnerable to the effects of extreme natural events, but today 300 neighbourhoods – a large proportion of the capital – are at risk, according to a study carried out two years ago by the United Nations and the architectural association of Honduras.

The report warns that urban sprawl will continue, requiring a map indicating the places where it is safe to build in the capital city of this impoverished Central American country of 8.3 million people.

In March, the Tegucigalpa city government presented a plan for 100 public works projects to mitigate the effects of natural disasters, to benefit more than 154,000 families in 70 neighbourhoods. But it has not yet managed to implement the urban planning programme due to lack of funds.

However, three major natural disaster mitigation projects are already moving ahead, with foreign aid.

After Hurricane Mitch wreaked havoc in Honduras and neighbouring countries in 1998, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) conducted an environmental study in Tegucigalpa which found that top priority should be put on the high-risk areas of El Reparto, El Bambú and El Berrinche, poor neighbourhoods in hilly areas of the capital.

Stabilisation works aimed at preventing landslides along a fault line in El Bambú were completed in 2012. The project benefited 50,000 people, and similar efforts are under way in the other two high-priority districts.

Work on the stabilisation of El Reparto, a high-crime neighbourhood of 8,500 people on a hill to the east of the city, continues under a scorching sun whose effects are aggravated by the burning of forests in the area.

The project was launched two years ago by the city government with support from JICA, which donated 13 million dollars for the works in the neighbourhoods highly susceptible to landslides.

“We feel safer with these works – the earth doesn’t move as much as before, and when the heavy rains come, we don’t have the mudslides we used to have,” said Magdalena Flores, taking a break from selling fruit at her roadside stand to talk to IPS.

Japanese technicians are building channels to carry underground and runoff water to specially constructed wells, in order to prevent the saturation of the ground and subsequent landslides.

JICA director in Honduras, Akihiko Yamada, told IPS that the technology used to drill through the ground has never been employed before in Latin America. Using that methodology, water is taken from underground sources in high-risk areas, “which implies broad participation by the community and the local government so they can save lives together.”

As part of the landslide prevention efforts, which should be completed by the middle of the year, local residents tend the early warning systems that include inclinometers, pluviometers and other soil motion sensors connected to red warning lights.

When the work began, “you would drill four metres down and find water, which showed us that the water table level was very high,” the assistant manager of the Municipal Development Committee of the capital, Julio Quiñónez, told IPS during a tour of the area.

But now, “with the mitigation works, we don’t find water until 12 metres down, which reduces the risk,” he said.

Projections indicated that if the works didn’t start in El Reparto immediately, the makeshift homes lining the hillsides would be swept away by a landslide, collapsing onto neighbourhoods located downhill, and even onto theatre and diplomatic districts.

El Berrinche, on the northeast side of the capital, was facing a similar situation.

Mitch completely swept away La Soto, a poor neighbourhood on a slope that has been declared uninhabitable by the local government.

Some 750,000 cubic metres of sediment were removed from La Soto and eight drywells were built to soak away the underground water, stabilise the soil, and avoid new mudslides and rockslides that could have dammed up the Choluteca river, which runs across the city from north to south.

Once the works have been finalised in El Berrinche, an embankment will be built as protection against landslides. The embankment will also be used as a soccer field by the neighbourhood.

Tegucigalpa Mayor Ricardo Álvarez told IPS that the next few winters “won’t be a nightmare any more for the local residents, because these works will reduce their vulnerability.”

“This implies an effort similar to building four or five bridge underpasses,” he said. “And although people won’t see these works from the city boulevards, lives will be saved here…we have to learn to live with the risk.”

Artisanal miner panning for gold in Choluteca, Honduras. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Mar 19 2013 (IPS)

The Honduran government’s announcement of its plans to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) has raised expectations as well as doubts, particularly due to the speed with which it aims to complete a process that has taken several years in other countries of the region.

The EITI is a coalition of governments, companies, civil society groups, investors and international organisations that promotes better governance in countries rich in natural resources, through the publication and verification of tax payments made by the companies and of government revenues from oil, gas and minerals.

Honduras is not yet an official EITI candidate country, as Guatemala and Trinidad and Tobago have been since 2011, much less a fully fledged EITI compliant country, a status attained by Peru in 2012 after a process that began in 2004.

These are the only nations in Latin America and the Caribbean that currently form part of this initiative which now encompasses 35 countries, half of them in Africa.

Honduras does not even appear on the EITI website among the countries that intend to implement the initiative. Nonetheless, its government has announced that it plans to complete the initial stage of adhesion to the EITI in a year and a half.

“Nobody could be opposed to transparency, but we have been rather taken aback by how these plans for adhesion have come about, without any consultation with the sectors involved, such as the communities where mining activities are carried out,” activist Pedro Landa of the National Coalition of Environmental Networks of Honduras commented to Tierramérica.

Landa said that his organisation will announce a public position in the coming weeks, “because transparency and accountability are essential, and we feel that up until now, the EITI process has not been sufficiently transparent.”

When the Honduran Congress passed a new mining law in January, a generic article referring to the EITI was included at the last minute. “This came as a surprise, because no one knew the country was even trying to join the initiative,” said Landa.

The Coalition, which includes more than 40 community-based environmental groups, played a prominent role in the debate over the new law, whose draft text was submitted for consultations with different stakeholder sectors for over a year.

When it enters into force, the new law will bring an end to a six-year moratorium on the issuing of mining permits, in place since the Supreme Court of Justice declared 11 articles of the previous law to be unconstitutional.

According to congressional deputy Donaldo Reyes Avelar of the ruling National Party, the novelty of the newly passed legislation lies in the fact that communities will directly participate in deciding whether or not mining projects will be given the green light. It also raises the royalties paid by mining companies from one to two percent, he told Tierramérica.

But the Coalition withdrew from the final stage of consultations because the draft text “is not clear on community participation in decisions regarding the authorisation of mining activities, and the mechanisms for transparency and accountability are not defined,” stressed Landa.

In fact, some 400 protestors took part in a 10-day march this month from the northern community of La Barca to the Congress building in Tegucigalpa to demonstrate their opposition to the new legislation.

Francisca Valle, from the western department of Santa Bárbara, was one of the participants in the “Dignity and Sovereignty Step by Step” march. She called for “greater transparency in terms of the scope of the law, where we were not taken into account.”

Her fellow marchers included representatives of indigenous, women’s and religious organisations.

“During these days of walking, staying overnight in community centres, we have received incredible support from the people. The government consulted on the law with its own ‘activists’ in the municipalities it controls, but the grassroots communities, the people, are angry, because they were not taken into account,” Jesuit priest Ismael Moreno told Tierramérica.

The protestors called for a 90-day period for changes to be incorporated into the draft legislation, based on wide social participation, and for President Porfirio Lobo to veto the bill approved by Congress. But when the marchers reached Tegucigalpa, “they told us we were too late,” said Moreno.

Lobo is expected to pass the law in the coming weeks.

“The problem is that neither the government nor the members of congress are properly reading the country, and when a mining company comes in to set up operations, for example in Santa Bárbara, where people are angry, instead of being a solution, this law will be a source of conflict and violence,” warned Moreno.

When they arrived in Tegucigalpa, the marchers also learned about the government’s plans to join EITI.

But Omar Rivera, executive director of the Civil Society Group, made up by a number of non-governmental organisations, has been closely monitoring the EITI process.

The main challenge, he said, is to strengthen the institutions in charge of controlling mining activity, in terms of taxation as well as the environmental impacts and potential violation of the rights of communities where mining operations take place.

“At present, the state and municipal government institutions responsible for enforcing the legislation related to the mining industry are insignificant, with poor technical capacities and no political power,” said Rivera.

The government has other expectations with regard to the EITI.

Roberto Herrera Cáceres, the high representative and national coordinator for the EITI in Honduras, told Tierramérica that one of the goals is to make the rules for exploration and exploitation in the extractive industries more transparent, with the assistance of the World Bank.

Vice President María Antonieta Guillén reported that the government has complied with all of the requirements to join the initiative, including the creation of a consultative board with participation by the academic, business and civil society sectors.

The objective is for everyone to know how much is paid in taxes and what these resources are invested in. “We want to lay the foundations for genuine transparency in this sector,” the vice president stated at a local press conference.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

The doctrine of national security imposed by the United States on Latin America, which fostered the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, is making a comeback in Honduras where a new law is combining military defence of the country with police strategies for maintaining domestic order.

The law created the National Directorate of Investigation and Intelligence (DNII), a key agency in the security structure that does not appear to be accountable to any other body, and does not appear to be under democratic civilian control.

“This bill unites or fuses military defence and internal security, which is dangerous, because one of the aims after the Cold War was to separate these fields, due to the negative effects (their union had) on systematic violation of human rights” in the region, sociologist Mirna Flores, an expert on the issue, told IPS.

“We are back again with old national security concepts dating from the Cold War era in Central America, and the danger is that the former anti-communist rhetoric may be used against the ‘new threats’, such as allegedly criminal youth, dissidents against the regime, social protests or for the imposition of absolute powers,” she said.

The approval of the law on Jan. 14 took human rights organisations, civil society groups and academic bodies by surprise, because of the rushed nature of the legislation, the lack of consensus-building and the skipping of two of the three debates necessary for passing laws in parliament.

Sergio Castellanos, a legislator for the leftwing Democratic Unification Party, was the first to react when the bill was introduced. He asked for time for a fuller debate, but was overruled by the large rightwing majority comprising representatives of the governing National Party and one wing of the Liberal Party.

The law was passed amid a whirlwind of parliamentary activity, along with constitutional reforms and other laws that have engendered controversy in the country, such as mining regulations and suspension of all tax exemptions, pending review.

The Intelligence Law has some loopholes consisting of a lack of conceptual definitions, included in modern legislation in order not to allow room for discretionary interpretations or decisions.

Roberto Cajina, a civilian consultant on security, defence and democratic governance, told IPS that lack of definitions and limits in the text of the new law could give rise to “temptations” for abuse.

“It must be clearly understood what is meant by investigation, intelligence, strategic action, privacy protection, national security, special units, covert operations, special agents, special protection measures, secret funds and special risks, to cite just the most important definitions that are lacking in the law,” Cajina said.

Article 28 out of the 33 articles in the law says the DNII may recruit active members of the armed forces and the national police, Cajina said. This is “a very delicate matter and should be studied with care,” he said.

“As it stands, it is a dangerous precedent. One could warn of possible ‘piracy’ of the DNII toward the armed forces and police. What kinds of intelligence do each of them carry out?” he asked.

“If this is not clarified, problems and serious contradictions will arise, and the scenario will change radically. It is necessary to demarcate the boundaries of the fields of action of each of them,” Cajina emphasised.

Flores, the sociologist, and Cajina concur that another vacuum in the law is the lack of a chain of command subjecting the DNII to the control of any civilian institution or authority. It is not clear to what body it is affiliated.

The law compels private bodies to “cooperate by providing information required of them in order to support intelligence efforts”.

The experts said there should be a clearer description of the kind of information that private companies are required to give, because the current text leaves too much room for discretion. “The DNII director could, with very little justification, pick any organisation as a subject of interest which must provide the information (the DNII) demands,” they said.

“We are alarmed at this law that was tabled without ceremony, but also without debate, and furthermore, relying on old Cold War concepts,” activist Bertha Oliva, of the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), told IPS.

Oliva said she was concerned by some aspects of the law, especially the power it gives the DNII to create “special investigation and intelligence units” and to cooperate with “other state intelligence bodies”.

“Does that mean there are more? Which ones? Why do we know nothing about them? I think there are many loopholes that could lead to abuses,” she said.

In the 1980s, members of the Honduran intelligence corps created the so-called Batallón de la Muerte (death squad), which was responsible for the forced disappearance of 187 people for political and ideological reasons, according to an official report.

This history raises fears that a similar body could be recreated, since the executive branch is giving the armed forces and police wide powers to run an intelligence corps which by law was supposed to come under the rule of the Commission on Public Security Reform, a civilian body working on structural reform of the police, prosecutors and the justice system.

But according to Matías Funes, chair of the Commission on Public Security Reform, its proposals do not have the ear of the legislative and executive branches. “It’s as if there were a parallel agenda,” and the institutional environment and democratisation of the country are not making progress, he said.

Police officers in Honduras are protesting regulatory measures and aptitude tests implemented as part of reforms aimed at purging the police force of corruption and growing links to organised crime.

The rebellious police officers say they do not oppose the clean-up of the force, and insist that they are loyal. But they are complaining about the four new exams: drug tests; lie detector tests; studies to verify their personal and family assets; and psychometric tests to determine their aptitude as police officers and their ability to control their emotions.

The protests broke out after a number of officers failed the tests, which began seven months ago. The authorities are considering dismissing them from the force.

Other officers are to be relieved of their posts because of seniority or other labour-related reasons.

The situation has led to a bitter dispute within the police force, especially against the new police chief, Juan Carlos “El Tigre” (The Tiger) Bonilla, whom many of the purged officers do not recognise as their superior because he is less senior than they are. They also accuse him of being linked with human rights abuses in the past.

Eduardo Villanueva, head of the office of investigation and evaluation of the police (DIECP), told IPS that the tests “are one of several instruments to purge the institution. At present we are investigating the family assets of 150 officers, and no doubt this is causing resentment,” he said.

By law, DIECP is responsible for enforcing controls and testing in the police force and taking action based on the results. It is an autonomous body that does not depend on the security ministry, and its work has drawn on Mexican, Colombian, Chilean and U.S. experts.

Villanueva said the agency he heads is “getting to the bottom of the barrel in the police force, and the reactions against the process merely indicate that we are on the right track.”

One of the leaders of the police rebellion is Aldo Oliva, former head of the National Penitentiary, who publicly challenged the authority of President Porfirio Lobo, calling on him to “be more careful” in reviewing the purging process.

In late October, Oliva and another 150 officers went to court to challenge the constitutionality of the tests, claiming they violated human rights.

When Lobo refused to meet with him, Oliva hinted that in the coming months there would be “a revelation of irregularities of such magnitude that he will have to listen.” But he did not provide details.

Lobo confirmed the tests would continue, as would the purge. “If (the police) feel hard done by, they can go to the courts, but the clean-up process we have started is irreversible,” he said.

Along with Oliva, two other former police chiefs, José Luis Muñoz who was suspended from his post in October 2011, and José Ramírez del Cid, suspended in May 2012, have also expressed discontent.

Muñoz and Ramírez del Cid have been identified as part of a group of officers who are trying to destabilise the administration of Bonilla, a hard-line police officer who enjoys the full confidence of the government of the right-wing Lobo, in spite of doubts expressed about him by human rights defenders and the families of victims of violence.

“At least Bonilla gets things done; he seems to be diligent and willing to clean up the police force, although we still give him a margin of doubt,” Julieta Castellanos, the president of the National Autonomous University of Honduras, whose son was murdered by police officers a year ago and who is now one of the leaders of the movement to reform the police force, told IPS.

“We are living in a time of a police counter-reform. This will not be an easy process, because organised crime mafias have been operating within the force, and they are feeling the effects,” political analyst Víctor Meza, coordinator of the Public Security Reform Commission (CRSP), which includes the attorney general’s office and the judicial branch, told IPS.

In late October Meza presented a package of six bills to the legislature, including a new comprehensive law on the police. All of this, analysts say, is causing jitters among corrupt police structures.

Edmundo Orellana, a former attorney-general, told IPS, “difficult times are coming; they are fighting among themselves, and seeking external allies to put the brakes on the reform.”

The Honduran police force has faced an unprecedented crisis in the past year, with revelations of its links to organised crime, extortion rackets, kidnapping and assault gangs compelling President Lobo to sack a number of police chiefs.

Traditional Garifuna dance forms part of the projects aimed at preserving the culture, boosting food security and conserving the environment in the area. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
TRUJILLO, Honduras , Oct 10 2012 (IPS)

Hurricane Mitch, which devastated Honduras 14 years ago, prompted a group of Garifuna women to start organising, to help the people in greatest need of assistance.

Since then they have expanded their work, and have become an example of the commitment to preserving the environment, farming in a sustainable manner, and preserving their culture.

The experience gave rise to the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras, led mainly by women from the Caribbean province of Trujillo, one of the most beautiful parts of the country, and the first human settlement created by the Spanish colonialists.

According to historical accounts, the Garifunas are descendants of African slaves who survived the sinking of Spanish galleons off the coast of the Caribbean island of St. Vincent in the 17th century, where they intermarried with members of the indigenous Carib tribe.

Their language combines words and grammar of West African languages with the Caribbean’s Arauak dialect, and some French, English and Spanish. The Garifuna are estimated to number around 600,000 in Central America, the Caribbean, Mexico and the United States today.

“When Mitch hit our community and the help didn’t arrive, we organised to go out in search of food, medicine and shelter, because we could not allow our people to sink,” the executive director of the committee, Nilda Hazel Gotay, told IPS.

From Oct. 22 to Nov. 5, 1998, Hurricane Mitch wrought havoc throughout the Caribbean region, Central America, southern Mexico and the United States.

It hit Honduras particularly hard, leaving 6,500 dead, 9,000 missing and 1.5 million homeless, and causing some four billion dollars in economic losses, according to official figures.

The Garifuna Emergency Committee is made up of nine women and three men, and has been working for 13 years in three main areas: the environment, culture preservation and sustainable agriculture.

Sixteen communities have benefited from the work of the Committee, which since its creation has managed to raise awareness in the communities about the importance of preserving the local environment through projects of reforestation of stream and river basins and mitigation of climate change, and of growing crops without pesticides.

They have received a variety of international aid, because the projects involve extremely poor Garifuna communities that “have to be strong to face the challenges of the future,” said Gotay, a leader of the ethnic group.

“We teach our people how to grow crops that are traditional to our culture, like manioc, taro, plantain, coconuts and sweet potatoes, besides educating our children about Garifuna traditions in dance and music,” she said.

These traditional practices, said Gotay, have helped the communities prepare for natural disasters and for the more frequent and lengthy drought caused by climate change. They have managed to recover river basins in Guadalupe and Trujillo, reforest waterfronts, and recuperate fruit trees like coconut palms.

Hugo Galeano, an expert on environmental issues, told IPS that the work carried out by the Garifuna Emergency Committee is the best example of empowerment and organisation of a community defending its natural resources, “as they are the protagonists of their stories of change and cultural preservation.”

“Garifuna women have demonstrated their leadership and management capacity, without the need of intermediaries, which has brought down costs and gives these grassroots civil society groups a stronger level of community organisation,” he said.

Along with implementing projects in favour of the environment and sustainable agriculture, the communities that have benefited from the Committee’s projects have also managed to keep Garifuna culture from dying out among the younger generations.

They now have a Garifuna market where they sell products related to their cultural and gastronomic roots. And every April, they organise the Educational Garifuna Carnival, where the “baile del maipol” (maypole dance) is held by costumed women dancing with colourful ribbons attached to a tree.

They also explain to children the importance of the traditional Garifuna drum made of hollowed-out hardwoods like mahogany, which links the past and the future, and they teach them to write music in their native language.

Agricultural engineer Noel Ruíz, the mayor of Santa Fe, one of the communities where the Committee is active, said he supports the projects “because I know their work since I was a technical adviser to environmental organisations, and they have managed to respond to the needs of the local population.”

In a conversation with IPS, Ruíz stressed the importance of the strategic alliances with the Garifuna Committee for the preservation of the culture and traditional foods, the creation of market gardens, humanitarian aid and sustainable agriculture.

“They go to poor areas that have been abandoned to their fate, and today they are a great example of association that local governments should follow. I hope this example will be taken into account in national policies on citizen participation, which haven’t been seen yet,” he added.

The work with local governments has been essential to the members of the Garifuna Emergency Committee. They underline the importance of lose relations with the municipal authorities, to coordinate training workshops on the environment, cultural festivals, productive projects and other activities.

“As Garifunas, we love supporting our people, designing projects so they can pull ahead, and thus also teaching our children that there is a culture and a language that must be preserved, and teaching them to learn to love and value nature,” Gotay said.

The Committee has earned international prizes from Ecuador, Canada and the United Nations. It is currently operating with funds from Canada, but it has also received support from organisations in Europe and the United States.

The Honduran government’s plan to create a new rapid response police force, as part of a strategy to militarise the fight against crime, is dangerously vague, experts say.

The creation of the elite “Intelligence and Special Security Response Groups Unit” (whose acronym is Tigres, which means “tigers”) would undermine the process of demilitarisation of society that got underway in this impoverished, crime-ridden Central American nation 15 years ago.

The new force would be a step forward by the right-wing government of President Porfirio Lobo in the plan it launched a year ago to merge the work of the ministries of security and defence, with the stated aim of making the fight against violent crime and organised crime more effective.

Honduras is one of the most violent countries on earth. According to a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report, there were 82 homicides for every 100,000 citizens in 2010, the highest homicide rate in the world. (In comparison, the United States had five homicides per 100,000.)

But experts consulted by IPS warned that the government plan was ambiguous, because the new force would fall under the ministry of security, but its training and centres of operations would be in the armed forces battalions, which answer to the ministry of defence.

The Tigres, according to a draft law sent to Congress on Jul. 26, marked for approval within 15 days, would answer to the ministry of security “in normal times”, but “in times of war” would be under the aegis of the ministry of defence. It would reportedly have the technological tools to double its reaction capacity and effectiveness, and would also play an intelligence role.

But who will decide what are ‘normal times’ and what aren’t? was the question raised by experts who spoke to IPS. They stressed that the ambiguous nature of the plan could be dangerous, when the government attempts to resolve political or social conflicts with repression.

“It’s a hybrid force that implies the militarisation of the police forces, a trend that has been growing stronger in our country in response to the huge flaws in the police,” sociologist Mirna Flores told IPS.

Flores, a university professor who specialises in security issues, said the greatest shortcoming in the proposal was that it “explicitly states that the police forces are incapable” of doing their job, and grants the military “a prominent role in matters that are not of their concern, blurring the boundaries between the functions of security and defence.”

While the police are in charge of law enforcement and crime-fighting, which are internal matters, the military are trained to attack and to protect national sovereignty, Flores said.

The president of Congress, Juan Orlando Hernández, said the Tigres would be “a highly trained elite force that will have hi-tech equipment for fighting common and organised crime.”

“This is not at all a force parallel to the police or the army. What we want is a rapid response team to tackle the insecurity in our country. Regardless of whether they like it, it will strengthen the response capacity to crime, because the Tigres will attack everything,” he said.

The Tigres will be made up of 200 men who will be deployed in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, the second biggest city in the country, located in the north.

The members of the force will receive training in human rights, “to prevent them from committing serious violations, and they will receive assistance from Chile’s Carabineros police and from the Honduran armed forces,” said Augusto Cruz, a Christian Democrat legislator.

The Tigres are to be ready to begin operating by the end of the year. The unit’s initial budget will be 65 million dollars, provided by a loan from the Inter-American Development Bank, the authorities reported.

But Yuri Sabas, a lawmaker with the opposition Liberal Party, told IPS that the creation of the Tigres should be studied in depth. “A few years ago, we created another elite force in the police named Cobra, which has now been implicated in criminal activities,” he said.

“We have to think this over; we mustn’t reach hasty decisions and make the same mistakes,” Sabas added.

Mistakes that in the view of analyst Eugenio Sosa could unleash an uncontrolled elite armed force, “which at any time could get out of hand.”

“This is a country with so much impunity and such weak institutions that it is a risk to distort the objectives of these forces,” he said.

Sosa told IPS that Honduras is a society with an authoritative culture, where the military have once again moved to the fore, gaining key public posts in sectors like telecommunications, migration and housing.

In fact, he said, “if you analyse in detail the decree creating the Tigres, it is clear that we’re talking about a greater militarisation of society.

“Tigres is a first step towards the merging of security and defence issues,” he added.

Both Sosa and Flores, the sociologist, pointed out that similar forces created in the 1980s ended up committing serious human rights abuses.

The most recent of these was the so-called “red car gang”, a paramilitary force that carried out “social cleansing” operations against youth gang members between 2003 and 2005, as a death squad working from within the police, according to human rights groups.

While attempting to bring down the levels of violent crime in Honduras, Lobo is also fighting to purge the police, since collusion between members of the police and organised crime and drug trafficking groups came to light.

The heads that have rolled in the last six months included those of three police chiefs. Today the police are headed by Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla, a veteran police officer with a military background who was accused of being involved in human rights violations in the 1980s and 1990s, but was absolved by the courts.

In his effort to improve security, President Lobo has granted increasing power to the military once again, which not only patrol the streets with the police now, but also control the recently created Civil Intelligence Directorate, and have taken the lead in the fight against drugs.

Honduras, in the heart of Central America, normally makes headlines for its political upheavals and violence. But sometimes there is good news, too. It is one of only a few countries with a shark sanctuary off its coasts, and it has just created a protected area around a reef of a coral species formerly on the brink of extinction.

This month Honduras is celebrating the first anniversary of the declaration of the Bi-Oceanic Shark Sanctuary that encompasses its entire exclusive economic zone, some 240,000 sq km spanning both the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.

A photographer dives near a great hammerhead shark. Credit: Jim Abernethy - Courtesy of the Pew Environment Group

Its coastal waters are home to numerous shark species, including hammerhead sharks, bull sharks, nurse sharks, tiger sharks and even six-gill sharks, which can reach lengths of almost five metres and are found in the Caribbean waters off Roatán, one of Honduras’ Bay Islands.

“In the Gulf of Fonseca (on the Pacific) there are hammerhead sharks, one of the most endangered shark species due to the fact that their fins are highly sought after in Asia for making soup. There are many young hammerhead sharks in the gulf, where they are protected,” biologist Stephen Box, who has studied the threats to these creatures in the Honduran sanctuary, told Tierramérica.

Shark fin soup, considered a delicacy in China, can cost up to 750 dollars. Although the fins have no nutritional value, the soup is a culinary tradition that dates back to the Ming dynasty and became popular beginning in the 18th century among Chinese monarchs, who coveted it because of its rareness, experts told Tierramérica.

Sharks are highly vulnerable animals. Although they have long life spans, they do not begin to reproduce until they are 18 years old and they have very few offspring, explained Box, who has lived in Honduras for almost a decade and works for the Centre for Marine Ecology, a Honduran NGO.

A third of shark species are threatened or endangered around the world, said Maximiliano Bello of the Pew Environment Group, a conservation organisation based in Washington.

These large predators act as controllers that maintain the balance of ecosystems, added Bello, the coordinator in Latin America of Pew’s Global Shark Conservation Campaign. “They are like the lions of the sea. If the sharks are not there, the system could collapse,” Bello told Tierramérica.

Between May 31 and Jun. 2, Bello participated in a series of activities organised to celebrate the first anniversary of the shark sanctuary and the declaration of a protected area encompassing a bank of coral reefs off the Bay Islands.

Together with Honduran President Porfirio Lobo, Bello witnessed the burning of 184 shark fins seized by the authorities from fishermen. In the waters of the sanctuary, the capture, sale and export of sharks are strictly prohibited.

Natural Resources and Environment Minister Rigoberto Cuéllar told Tierramérica that the fact that sharks do not form part of the national diet has made it easier to protect them in Honduras. They are now working to educate fishing communities about the importance of sharks for maintaining the balance of ecosystems, he added.

Honduras is sending a message to the world about the need to protect marine species, said the minister, who announced that neighboring Costa Rica is preparing to join Honduras in the shark sanctuary initiative. “We would like to see it extend to all of Central America, because sharks are barometres of the health of oceans and coastal ecosystems.”

Alongside the Bahamas, the Maldives, the Marshall Islands, Palau and Tokelau, Honduras is one of the few countries in the world that have established sanctuaries to protect sharks.

Now, the Honduran authorities have declared the Cordelia Coral Bank off the island of Roatán to be a protected area for wildlife preservation.

The 17 sq km of reefs encompassed by the Cordelia Bank are home to the Caribbean’s most extensive living colonies of staghorn coral, a critically endangered species, marine biologist Calina Zepeda of The Nature Conservancy told Tierramérica.

Aside from these recently discovered reefs in Honduras, staghorn coral has become almost extinct in the Caribbean, with its populations decimated by a rare disease between 1983 and 2000.

In addition, the Cordelia Bank is an important spawning ground for various fish species, including the Nassau grouper (Epinephelus striatus), an endangered species. It is also home to a significant population of Caribbean reef sharks (Carcharhinus perezi), which draw tourists to the area for the practice of shark diving.

In July 2011, another seven reefs were discovered in Tela Bay, on the country’s Atlantic coast.

Six of them form the barrier reef of Capiro Bank, located 8 km out to sea from the city of Tela. The seventh, similar to Cordelia, is off the coast of nearby Punta Sal. The national and local authorities have decided to create a protected area to encompass all of them.

For Zepeda, Honduras could serve as a sort of coral gene bank for the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, an initiative jointly undertaken by eight countries – Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama – for the conservation and protection of the region’s immense biodiversity.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

A few short hours after Honduran President Porfirio Lobo said he had seen evidence that Alfredo Villatoro, a radio reporter kidnapped May 9, was alive, the journalist’s body was found in a residential neighbourhood on the south side of the capital.

The prominent reporter’s kidnapping and death have shocked Honduras, one of the most violent countries in the world, where journalists are frequently among the victims of attacks.

The body of Villatoro, who was news manager at HRN, the country’s most influential radio station, was found by the roadside with two gunshot wounds to the head.

He was dressed in the uniform of the Cobras, an elite police force, and was blindfolded with a red scarf. The initial forensic reports indicate that he was killed shortly before the president announced at noon on Tuesday that Villatoro “is alive; we have seen videos that the kidnappers sent the family.”

“We hope they will release him soon,” the president added. A few hours later, Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla confirmed to the TN5 television news programme that Villatoro was dead.

Speaking with TN5 by telephone, the president lamented the reporter’s death and said he had announced the news that he was alive “to give hope. We had that information (the videos) since Saturday, but sadly the outcome was fatal. My condolences for the family and for all journalists.

“I cannot say whether this is a message for my government or for the press; I would never reveal anything that could hurt someone. I don’t think that what I said had anything to do with how this ended. I can only tell you that we must not allow ourselves to be intimidated. I hope the investigation will come up with answers very soon,” he added.

In a brief message on Wednesday, the president offered a 150,000 dollar reward for information that leads to Villatoro’s killers, and once again repeated his promise that he would make Honduras a safe country.

Honduras has one of the highest homicide rates in the world: 82 per 100,000 population, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), compared to a global average of 6.9 per 100,000.

Villatoro’s death brings to 20 the number of journalists killed in the last two years, and to 27 those murdered in the last decade, according to figures from the National Human Rights Commission.

On Tuesday night, shocked reporters, civil society and political leaders, and human rights activists crowded the city morgue, in a vigil that lasted into the wee hours of the morning.

HRN reporter Lucía Alvarado said that “we have been living in anguish for the past week; we thought he would come back. He was my boss for 20 years, and every day, when I passed his chair in the sound booth, I imagined myself saying to him ‘how’s it going boss!’…but they killed him,” she added between sobs.

Police spokesman Héctor Iván Mejía said “everything humanly possible was done to rescue him safe and sound, but we couldn’t find them (the kidnappers).”

It was reported that elite police commando units were put on the case, and that experts from Colombia provided assistance.

Mirna Flores, an analyst of security issues, told IPS that Honduras was facing “unstoppable violence. This death was a bad message, but above all it dealt a blow to the country’s institutions, because it highlighted their incapacity to resolve things.

“The way the murder was carried out indicates that this is a message – a terrible message – from organised crime.”

Minister Bonilla said “the mafias may have” carried out the kidnapping and murder, in response to the crackdown on organised crime and to the passage of a law allowing the extradition of Honduran citizens wanted abroad for involvement in drug-related crimes, terrorism or organised crime.

The government held an emergency meeting of the National Security Council Wednesday.

The president of the Honduran journalists union, Juan Ramón Mairena, said “they want to silence us. They went after an influential journalist from a major media outlet, but we must not be intimidated.

“We hope impunity will not prevail in this case, as it has in others,” he added. “We urge President Lobo not to allow this murder to merely swell the statistics of the many other crimes that adorn this government,” Mairena told IPS.

Over the last seven years, this impoverished Central American country of eight million people has suffered an average of 18 murders a day, according to official figures.

Corruption and the penetration of organised crime in the police force led to a purge of nearly 200 officers, including police chiefs, in late 2011. The public image of the police force has hit a new low.

The police, implicated in murders, kidnapping, theft, extortion, arms trafficking and other crimes, will be the focus of a broad reform process, for which assistance has been requested from Chile and Canada.

Governmental and non-governmental human rights institutions say the government must purge the top brass in the police, widely considered promoters of organised crime cartels that operate from within the structure of the police itself.

But the authorities have not taken the necessary decisions, despite the abundant evidence available, sources from human rights groups told IPS.

With respect to journalists, the vulnerability and limitations of freedom of expression that they face have been widely denounced by international organisations that defend and promote freedom of the press.

A press release issued by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in response to Villatoro’s death says “The government’s stance on media killings has worsened the situation. Authorities have minimised crimes against journalists and been slow and negligent in pursuing the culprits.”

On Tuesday, European Union representatives in Honduras expressed concern over the situation of human rights in this country and the threats and intimidation against human rights defenders, reporters and the gay and lesbian community.

Villatoro’s body was found just nine days after the murder of another journalist, Erick Martínez Ávila, spokesman for Kukulcán, an organisation that defends the rights of sexual minorities.

The activist, who was strangled, was also an outspoken opponent of the June 2009 coup and a member of the recently created Libertad y Refundación party, which is led by ousted President Manuel Zelaya (2006-2009).

The authorities report that they have no leads in the case.

Murders of journalists in this country tend to go unsolved and unpunished. (END)

The government of Honduras hopes to reach friendly settlements with the families of inmates killed in the Comayagua prison fire, to avoid international lawsuits.

Meanwhile, a team of U.S. investigators concluded that the blaze, the world’s deadliest prison fire in a century, was accidental but could have been avoided if certain problems had been addressed earlier.

Honduras’s minister of justice and human rights, Ana Pineda, told IPS that “we are preparing for a visit” by an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights mission “to address these aspects, because we are aware that the Honduran state is exposed to legal action and we want to reach friendly settlements.”

The authorities reported that 360 of the 852 inmates in the prison in the central region of Comayagua died in the Feb. 15 fire.

The team of investigators from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) said the fire was not premeditated, but could have been avoided if safety issues had been addressed in time, such as overcrowding, the presence of flammable materials, shortage of prison staff and lack of an evacuation plan,

The ATF team, who began to investigate two days after the fire at the request of the government of right-wing President Porfirio Lobo, said the cause was believed to be an open flame, such as a cigarette or lit match, but clarified that “the actual ignition source was not recovered.”

“The fire is believed to have begun in the area of the top two bunk beds in the fourth column along the western side of the prison’s module six, which ignited nearby flammable materials,” said a statement released Tuesday Feb. 21 by the U.S. Embassy in Honduras.

The team, which used cutting-edge equipment and trained dogs, “was able to rule out other possible causes of the fire, such as a lightning strike, electrical causes, or the use of a flammable or combustible liquid.”

Honduras’s attorney general, Luis Rubí, said the ATF report would be followed by an investigation into the presumed negligence of the country’s prison authority, for which “our staff has interviewed more than 80 survivors and other people to investigate this aspect and determine responsibilities.”

But the ATF report met with some scepticism among families of the victims, who have expressed despair over the delay in handing over the bodies of their loved ones.

To explain the delay, prosecutors say many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition, no fingerprints are available, and only a few have been identified by DNA testing.

Media reports that the bodies would be buried in a common grave prompted a group of victims’ relatives to storm the city morgue on Monday Feb. 20 and open several body bags, in a scene that shook the public.

“The (ATF) report is a first step forward,” said Gloria Redondo, the widow of one of the inmates who died in the fire. “But other things are lacking, so I can’t say I believe it is 100 percent accurate. We have set up a victims committee and until we find out the whole truth, we are not going to give our support to anything.

“We want a thorough report, because it wasn’t clothes or shoes that were lost in this fire, but human beings like our husbands, brothers and friends. This can’t go unpunished,” the 35-year-old woman told IPS, unable to contain her tears.

Redondo’s husband Marcio Arturo Sánchez, a former youth gang member, was still in prison even though he completed his sentence in September 2011, due to the slow-moving prison bureaucracy.

He was 32 years old and had written several essays describing life in the youth gangs or “maras” like the Salvatrucha gang, which he had joined when he was just 10 years old.

On Tuesday, President Lobo visited the shelter where relatives of the inmates are temporarily staying while they wait for the government to hand over the remains of the victims.

At the shelter, where there is a wall full of messages of grief and pain written by the relatives, the president said he hoped to reach a friendly agreement to avoid “the longer and more tortuous path” of international legal action.

The Honduran state does not deny its responsibility, which is why “I offer you reparations through the route of a friendly settlement; I am making the necessary consultations,” Lobo told the families.

Honduras’s 24 prisons are designed to hold 8,250 prisoners, but the human rights commissioner reported last year that they housed nearly 13,000 inmates.

Given the overcrowding and other severe problems noted by the ATF experts, it is hardly surprising that a series of tragic episodes have occurred in this country’s prisons.

One of these was the 2003 massacre in the El Porvenir prison in the northern port city of La Ceiba, where 69 people were killed. Although nine people were convicted in 2008 in connection with the massacre, no in-depth investigation of who was ultimately responsible was conducted.

Another tragedy in which no one has been found responsible was the 2004 fire in the prison in the northern city of San Pedro Sula, where 107 inmates died.

Next week, a hearing on the San Pedro Sula prison fire will be held before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica.

According to a press release, the Inter-American Commission concluded that the deaths were “the direct result of a series of structural deficiencies, which were known by the competent authorities, but were neither attended nor corrected in a timely manner.”

“We are going to seek viable settlements, without evading responsibilities, and in the case of Comayagua we will be transparent, nothing will be hidden,” foreign minister Arturo Corrales responded to a question from IPS.

Last Friday marked two years since the inauguration of Porfirio Lobo as president of Honduras, amidst accusations of corruption, an unprecedented crime wave, and his lowest approval rating yet.

Porfirio Lobo speaking in Congress at the inauguration of the new legislative session. Credit: Honduran Presidency

A poll conducted by two Jesuit research centres revealed that halfway through Lobo’s term, Hondurans give his right-wing government a rating of 4.6 points out of 10, down from the 5.11 rating of a year ago.

“This is the lowest rating for the president’s administration, with respondents indicating as his sole achievement the 10,000-lempira subsidies (some 526 dollars) granted every three months to the poor,” Father Ismael Moreno, Jesuit provincial superior for Honduras, told IPS.

“In everything else, Porfirio Lobo scores an overwhelming failing grade,” he said, commenting on the results of the survey conducted jointly by Honduras’ Reflection, Research and Communication Team (Eric) and the El Salvador-based “José Simeón Cañas” Central American University (UCA).

Such widespread disapproval “would appear to be connected with the belief that Lobo has done nothing to respond to popular demands and has achieved little in his administration,” he said, noting that the 1,540 respondents agreed that Lobo’s greatest failure is his inability to curb rising violence and insecurity.

Official data also points to growing criminal violence, with an average of 17 murders a day in a country of 8.4 million inhabitants.

Results from the survey were only just released but are based on polls conducted over the second half of November in 16 of 18 departments (or provinces) Honduras is divided into.

Increasing criminality is just one of the many problems affecting the country. High unemployment and widespread corruption are also major concerns.

On Jan. 24, Lobo admitted that he would not be able to make good on his election promise of creating 100,000 new jobs. “At most we’ll be able to generate some 10,000 jobs,” the president said.

Lobo’s admission came during the presentation of his second annual report before Congress, at the formal inauguration of the 2012 legislative session.

In his address, Lobo highlighted Honduras’s return to the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the reopening of credit lines by multilateral financial institutions as leading achievements of his administration.

He also credited his administration for the establishment of a unity government, giving participation to every political group in the country, and a drop in the social unrest that followed the civilian- military coup d’état that deposed democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya, in June 2009.

After the coup, Honduras was isolated by the international community and, in particular, by most countries of the Americas.

The country was immediately cast out of the OAS and only readmitted two years later following an agreement brokered by Colombia and Venezuela, which included Zelaya’s return from exile and the recognition of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) – the broad popular movement that emerged to protest the coup, among other conditions.

President Lobo admitted that he has failed to meet a promise that was instrumental in his securing 56.6 percent of the votes and winning the November 2009 election. In his electoral campaign he had vowed to make Honduras a safe country.

But two years on, not only has criminal activity not fallen, it has soared to all-time highs, and the police entrusted with combating it is mired in corruption scandals, fuelling the already reigning impunity.

Of the respondents polled by Eric and UCA, 67 percent say the police have ties to organised crime, and 72 percent say they do not feel safe with the current police force.

The military troops that have been called in patrol the streets are somewhat better perceived, with 46 percent of respondents saying they trust them.

Historian and analyst Marvin Barahona said to IPS that the Lobo administration inherited a multifaceted crisis, and in some aspects “such as security, he’s made no effort to improve the situation”.

Another aspect of this crisis is corruption, Barahona said. He recalled how government officials have been implicated in rigged electric power and basic grain import contracts, procurement contracts awarded without tender, and other irregularities.

As a result, Honduras is one of the countries of Latin America with the highest level of perceived corruption, according to international transparency indexes.

“Underlying it all is impunity, and a rift between the government and its citizens caused by the lack of solutions to (the country’s) problems,” Barahona said.

The survey also reveals increasing disillusionment with political leaders and government institutions, as Lobo “has failed to inspire even a minimum of trust,” he added.

Lobo has arrived at the halfway mark of his term “with hardly any room for manoeuvring and his administration’s image will be even more tarnished in May when primary campaigns for the candidates of next year’s general election begin,” the historian and analyst said.

In Honduras, presidents traditionally have two years to actually govern. During the third year, pre-election campaigns wear down the administration, as most contenders are executive branch officers and acting legislators who hope to continue in the government in the following term.

Hondurans will go to the polls this November to elect the presidential candidates who will vie for the presidency a year later, when both president and national legislators and local government authorities will be elected.

For over a century, power in Honduras has been shared by the Liberal Party, now in the opposition, and the National Party, currently in power. Both parties are considered right-wing.

Although Zelaya was elected president of Honduras in 2005 running as the Liberal Party candidate, after coming back to Honduras in May 2011 he chose to leave the party and build a new political left-wing party, called Libertad y Refundación or Libre (Freedom and Refoundation – Free), which is currently applying to register with electoral authorities.

The Eric-UCA survey reveals a 2.8 percent voter preference for the new Libre party, with the majority of electors saying they intend to vote for one of the traditional parties, although voter support for both parties combined is under 60 percent.

Honduras has five political parties, which will be joined by three new ones in the next elections. Two of these new parties are left-wing and the third party is a right-wing group formed by retired military officers.

For sociologist Eugenio Sosa, this pre-election atmosphere “will speed up Lobo’s steady descent, as he will only be able to improve his image slightly if he takes firm actions to root out police corruption and address insecurity.”

“Otherwise, he will be the most unpopular president in recent years,” he said.

Following a surprise meeting between President Porfirio Lobo and U.S. government officials, Honduran lawmakers voted to amend the constitution to allow extradition of its nationals.

With no prior announcement, on Wednesday Lobo met with White House representatives in Miami, and only 24 hours later the Honduran national congress had passed an amendment that authorises the signing of treaties with foreign governments to extradite Honduran citizens charged with drug trafficking, terrorism and organised crime.

The decision was adopted in a closed session and under tight security measures. Of the 128 members of congress, only the representatives of the left-wing Unificación Democrática (Democratic Unification) party expressed any misgivings about authorising terrorism-related extraditions, but they still voted in favour.

To secure approval of the measure, government officials engaged in intense negotiations with the country’s political parties and powerful economic groups throughout Thursday.

The amendment modifies article 102 of the constitution, which prohibited the extradition of Honduran nationals to a foreign country. Starting Feb. 1, the Central American country will be able to sign extradition treaties with other countries.

In a very brief press release, issued Thursday night, legislators said the decision was made for reasons of national security.

Several sectors attribute the government’s quick move to pass the amendment to Washington’s concern over Honduras’ sluggishness in addressing security issues, a concern that was apparently voiced at the Miami meeting with Lobo.

One of these issues is a recent scandal implicating police officers in murders, kidnappings, weapon thefts, extortions and other crimes.

The U.S. is also concerned over other unresolved cases such as the murder two years ago of the head of the country’s anti-drug operations, Arístides González, and more recently the death of former security adviser and anti-drug expert Alfredo Landaverde over a month ago. Both González and Landaverde had close ties to the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa.

Former Attorney General Edmundo Orellana told IPS that “it’s obvious that there was pressure from the United States. How else can you explain that within a day of the Miami meeting congress was able to pass a constitutional amendment that was more than a decade-long demand?”

“I commend the legislators for this brave decision and understand the need to not make the session public or reveal the names of those who voted in favour, as many have received threats from the drug cartels,” Orellana said.

At the Miami meeting, right-wing President Lobo was accompanied by Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla, Congress Chair Juan Orlando Hernández and two other high government officials.

According to Honduran diplomatic sources, the Washington delegation was headed by Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson and U.S. Ambassador in Tegucigalpa Lisa Kubiske, and included narcotics officers and U.S. Security Council officials.

At the meeting, U.S. officials are believed to have pressed for purges in the Honduran police to address the high level of corruption and influence from organised crime, after announcing that the U.S. would be sending two special security advisers to Honduras, who will work directly with President Lobo and Minister Bonilla as of February.

Lobo refused to give any details of the Miami meeting and merely repeated in general terms the press release issued by Washington announcing the two countries’ decision to cooperate in security matters, highlighting the legal action taken by Honduras to combat crime, and suggesting that greater “efforts” to purge police forces are needed.

Hernández was more forthcoming in his statements after the meeting in Miami. “We set out general strategic lines to address security issues and we can’t go back on our actions. We are going to move forward to implement the security reforms that are still needed,” he said.

He also said that forming a new police force is a possibility that cannot be ruled out and that there will be many legislative discussions that for reasons of national security “will not be open to the press, so we ask for the media’s understanding.”

Hernández’ comment regarding a new police force came as a complete shock to Coralia Rivera, security vice minister and former police commissioner, who at a public appearance said “we were not expecting this, especially not in the manner (Hernández) announced it, so out of the blue.”

Rivera is mentioned in confidential reports from the attorney general’s office, where she is accused of being involved in police and government corruption and in particular in drug-related crimes. But she denies the charges and claims she is working to “clean up” the police’s image.

The chancellor of the National Autonomous University of Honduras, Julieta Castellanos, told IPS that the decision to authorise the extradition of Honduran citizens “is a positive sign that (the government) is willing to take action, it’ll have a deterrent effect that will enhance the possibilities of effectively cracking down on organised crime networks.”

She also said that this amendment sends out an indirect message to “corrupt police officers”, in reference to the police involvement in recent criminal actions, such as the murder of her own son and his friend on Oct. 22, 2011. Five police officers have been imprisoned for that crime, but another three suspects are still on the run.

Rigoberto Espinal, a legal expert and adviser to the state attorney, told IPS that this measure “is a significant step in the battle against impunity. It was what we were hoping for because it gives us more legal elements to combat these crimes.”

Pressure from Washington to pass this amendment intensified two months ago when it pushed for Colombia’s criminal prosecutor, Germán Zamudio, to be invited to a forum in Honduras, despite strong resistance from important circles.

Several congresspersons and executive and judicial officers called for a low-profile visit and refused to let the government host his stay, which in the end was paid for by a private company.

With the amendment, Honduras joins its neighbours El Salvador and Guatemala in authorising extraditions. The three countries form Central America’s “northern triangle”, considered one of the most violent regions in the world due to the presence of drug cartels that have been displaced from Colombia and Mexico by the war on drugs.

By - - and Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Dec 30 2011 (IPS)

As the new year rolls in, Honduras is feeling more than ever the challenges posed by soaring rates of violent crime, police corruption, the penetration of the police by organised crime, and a wave of selective killings of journalists and experts in the fight against drugs.

The growing insecurity prompted the U.S. Peace Corps to announce that it would withdraw all of its volunteers from this Central American country. It will also stop sending new recruits to neighbouring Guatemala and El Salvador.

Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, which make up the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America, have some of the highest homicide rates in the world: 82, 66, and 49 per 100,000 population, respectively, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), compared to a global average of 6.9 per 100,000.

Although Peace Corps members have not specifically been the targets of violence, the 158 volunteers in Honduras will be withdrawn in January, because of safety concerns.

The decision, announced Dec. 22, “deals a major blow to the government and a political class that have not grasped the gravity of the security problem and the need for reforms of the police,” political analyst Juan Ramón Martínez told IPS.

Martínez said the Peace Corps measure is even more serious for Honduras’ image than the cut-off of Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) assistance for failing to live up to its requirements in the fight against corruption and impunity for human rights violations.

The MCC is a bilateral U.S. government foreign aid agency set up in 2004 to fund poverty reduction programmes in areas such as agriculture and irrigation, transportation, water supply and sanitation, and access to education.

But this month, the MCC board selected Honduras as eligible for a Threshold Programme in recognition of recent steps by the government “to address corruption through improved fiscal transparency.”

Through the Threshold Programme, the country will once again be eligible for between two and 20 million dollars in grant funding. And if Honduras meets the MCC’s requirements, it will become eligible again for some 240 million dollars in assistance.

The withdrawal of Peace Corps volunteers “obviously affects us and should serve as a call for reflection. But the world must understand that we are shoring up our institutions, because we gain nothing by trying to downplay the impact,” said Foreign Minister Arturo Corrales.

Corrales told IPS that “there is no time for crying, and it is time to bring about the necessary changes in the area of security, whether we like it or not. Our job is to guarantee people’s safety.”

Pressure from the U.S. was stepped up after several recent high-profile murders: of two university students, a radio show host, and a former security minister.

One of the students was the son of the chancellor of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH). The two young men were chased by two police cars as they drove home from a birthday party the night of Oct. 22. The police shot at them and wounded one of the young men, who were forced to pull over. The police then killed them and dumped their bodies in a ravine on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa.

The Dec. 6 murder of radio journalist Luz Marina Paz by gunmen, meanwhile, brought the number of reporters killed in the last two years in Honduras to 17, making this the second-most dangerous country for media workers in Latin America, after Mexico.

And former security minister Afredo Landaverde, an outspoken critic of police corruption, was killed on Dec. 7, when he was preparing to testify as a protected witness in the case of the December 2009 murder of former anti-drug czar General Julian Arístides González.

Sources at the prosecutor’s office told IPS that González was apparently killed by the police to keep him from revealing the names of high-level security forces officers involved in the drug trade.

Before he was killed by gunmen, Landaverde, who had close ties to the U.S. embassy, made explosive comments to the press about police corruption and the extent to which organised crime is embedded in the police. He even publicly called on President Porfirio Lobo to create a new police force.

In the last two months, there have also been incidents involving military police operations in the northeastern province of Olancho aimed at capturing two drug barons, who were tipped off by the police themselves and managed to escape.

But two of the drug lords’ deputies were captured. However, they were later found hanged in the country’s main prison.

This came on top of the murder of a police firearms expert who was apparently a witness in the case of 300 FAL assault rifles and more than 300,000 munitions that went missing from a military warehouse in the capital in August or September.

Sociologist Eugenio Sosa said the country is facing a dangerous expansion of the power of organised crime, with the latest deaths “targeting not only journalists, but also witnesses who dare to speak out about police corruption and its ties with transnational crime.

“There are attempts to impose a society of fear, and without a doubt 2012 will be a decisive year in terms of security,” Sosa told IPS.

The violence is partly connected to the presence of Mexican drug cartels like Los Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel, which according to recently published accounts operate throughout Central America, but especially in the Northern Triangle.

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