Death In Honduras: The Coup, Hillary Clinton And The Killing Of Berta Cáceres
Death In Honduras: The Coup, Hillary Clinton And The Killing Of Berta Cáceres
Media Lens Latin America and the Caribbean March 18, 2016
On February 28, Hillary Clinton told an audience from the pulpit of a Memphis church: ‘we need more love and kindness in America’. This was something she felt ‘from the bottom of my heart’.
These benevolent sentiments recalled the national ‘purpose’ identified by President George H.W. Bush in 1989, shortly before he flattened Iraq. It was, he said, ‘to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world’.
Clinton, of course, meant North America, specifically the United States. But other places in America are short on love and kindness, too. Consider Honduras, for example.
On June 28, 2009, the Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped at gunpoint by masked soldiers and forced into exile. Since the ousting, the country ‘has been descending deeper into a human rights and security abyss’ as the military coup ‘threw open the doors to a huge increase in drug trafficking and violence, and… unleashed a continuing wave of state-sponsored repression’. In 2012, Honduras had a murder rate of 90.4 per 100,000 population, then the highest rate in the world. In 2006, three years before the coup, the murder rate had stood at 46.2 per 100,000.
The years since 2009 have seen ‘an explosive growth in environmentally destructive megaprojects that would displace indigenous communities. Almost 30 percent of the country’s land was earmarked for mining concessions, creating a demand for cheap energy to power future mining operations. To meet this need, the government approved hundreds of dam projects around the country, privatizing rivers, land, and uprooting communities.’ In 2015, Global Witness reported that Honduras was ‘the most dangerous country to be an environmental defender’.COPINH
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Honduras: Why Was Berta Cáceres Assassinated?
Written by Beverly Bell Published: 18 March 2016
A few numbers begin to reveal why Honduran indigenous leader and global movement luminary, Berta Cáceres, was assassinated on March 3, 2016.
According to the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), more than 300 hydroelectric dams are planned for Honduras, of which 49 are on COPINH lands. Eight hundred seventy-two contracts have been handed out to corporations for mining alone, with many others created for mega-tourism, wind energy, and logging projects. The majority of these are planned for indigenous lands. Of those, all are in violation of International Labor Organization Convention 169, to which Honduras is a signatory, allowing free, prior, and informed consent by indigenous peoples before development may take place in their territories.
The many planned extraction projects – in a country slightly larger than the state of Virginia - add up to the need of the Honduran and US governments to subjugate the population. Quiescence and compliance are essential for the national elite and multinational corporations to make their profits. So here are a few more relevant numbers. Honduras has 12,000 soldiers – one for every 717 people, for a county not expected to go to war. Its 2013 “defense” budget was $230 million. Since 2009, the US has invested as much as $45 million in construction funds for just one of those bases, Soto Cano, commonly known as Palmerola. Last year, US taxpayers footed $5.25 million in direct military aid, and much more in training for 164 soldiers at the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Operation. Three hundred seventy-two US military personnel are in the country.
Given that state control is often attained through violence, a few more figures become relevant. One hundred one environmental activists were killed in Honduras between 2010 and 2014, making it the most dangerous country anywhere in which to try to defend the Earth.
Nine land defenders were attacked just yesterday, March 15, between the time we began writing this article and when we completed it. COPINH member Nelson Garcia, who had been helping recover lands on Rio Lindo, was assassinated in his home on March 15 while the Rio Lindo community was forcibly evicted. This brings to 14 the number of COPINH members who have been murdered since the group was founded in 1993. A member of COPINH’s coordinating committee, Sotero Echeverria, was threatened with capture by police. Echeverria is one of the 3 members of the group who have been framed by the government for Berta’s murder.
Also yesterday, early in the morning, police agents arrested 7 members of United Campesino Movement of the Aguan (MUCA by its Spanish acronym), including the president, Jose Angel Flores. Flores and six other MUCA activists, including his family members, were arrested and taken to the police station. Flores has protective measures from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights because of the danger he, like all those organizing in the Bajo Aguan region, face. Berta did, too. Protective measures have the weight of toilet paper with the Honduran government.
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