It’s now almost six years since a U.S.-backed coup unseated Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Zelaya was faulted by both Honduras’s richest families and the Obama administration for steering his country out of the U.S. orbit toward Cuba and Venezuela. While those two countries had the power to defy Washington, Honduras isn’t so lucky. It houses our largest base in Central America, and wasn’t the original banana republic for nothing.
Since the coup, the Honduran people have gone from bad to worse. It’s no accident that it was the largest sending country of unaccompanied children to the U.S. last year. Not only is Honduras the murder capital of the world, but it has also become a laboratory for new experiments in extreme neoliberal projects, offered up to the citizens with massive amounts of repression and government terror.
And this is precisely why my organization, The Cross Border Network, based in Kansas City, Missouri is organizing a trip the last week in May to Honduras. We are members of the Honduras Solidarity Network. Together we work to expose the massive human rights violations occurring under the government of Juan Orlando Hernandez and demand the U.S. Congress to get them and the President to stop pouring billions into the hands of thoroughly corrupt politicians, police and military via the war on drugs.
Earlier this year the International Monetary Fund loaned Honduras $188.6 million with the requirement that they sell off state-owned electrical energy and telecommunications companies to private investors. Mass layoffs of government workers have commenced. Meanwhile the government is privatizing the schools. Multi-national corporations are engaged in mass looting of resources as rivers and entire areas of the country are privatized and handed over to foreign investors in the so-called Model Cities program.
What all this means is that the good jobs with union protection are being wiped out with no plan to provide living wages to the millions of poor. Indeed, the export processing jobs in Honduras’s maquilas are low-wage, dangerous, and without even the protection of the country’s weak labor laws. The Office of Trade and Labor Affairs of the U.S. Department of Labor after great delay issued a report in February which found that the “Government of Honduras has failed to effectively enforce its labor laws as defined under (the Central America Free Trade Agreement]. . . with respect to: the right of association; the right to organize and bargain collectively; the minimum age for the employment of children and the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labor; and acceptable conditions of work with respect to minimum wages, hours of work, and occupational safety and health. The industries cited for these violations include the garment and auto parts sector, agriculture and ports.
From May 22 to 31st we will be investigating these issues in northern Honduras on a tour called Honduras: Laboratory for Ruthless Globalization. We will look into what happens when you take out all the stops of democracy and economic sovereignty and give free rein to militarists and global corporations.
Against the odds, Hondurans are resisting, and we will meet with the courageous people: students, indigenous people, union members who are standing up. There are still a few places available for this tour. It will be lead by Karen Spring of the Honduras Solidarity Network. The cost is $950 (does not include international travel). For more information, please contact CBN Coordinator, Melissa Stiehler at Melissa@CrossBorderNetwork.org.To support the resistance movement in Honduras, participate in grassroots international solidarity, or to learn more contact us, follow us on twitter @xbordernetwork, like us onFacebook, or visit our website at CrossBorderNetwork.org.
In Solidarity,
Judy Ancel
President