Update on Honduras, 4/12/13

Adrienne Pine is on fire (metaphorically-speaking, of course), posting half a dozen links to substantive articles or her own analysis about Honduras in the last two days.

Jeremy Kryt (via Quotha):

Rights Action director Russell is not impressed by this largesse.

“It is controversial, to put it mildly, that the World Bank claims they sold land to the government that many campesino communities are claiming is their land to begin with. Furthermore, it is irrelevant with respect to the allegations that the Bank’s partner, Grupo Dinant [owned by Miguel Facusse], is linked directly and indirectly in the killings of some 90 campesinos in the region.”

Russell said he believes the World Bank has a responsibility to thoroughly investigate potentially shady clients, especially in a place like Honduras, which, with its per-capita murder rate of 91 per 100,000 is one of the most violent places on Earth.

“The World Bank should have a very clear understanding of how Honduras has become the ‘murder capital of the world’ and the ‘repression capital of the Americas’….
…
“The World Bank [remains] indirectly if not directly complicit with the extraordinarily high levels of repression and killings in the Aguan region,” Russell said.

Greg McCain expands on how Grupo Dinant hires paramilitary groups, amounting to death squads, to inflict terror on Aguan–and then the oligarch-owned national press tells Hondurans that the paramilitaries are being run by the Nicaraguans as a hostile act against Honduras. It’s purely amazing that all the casualties of these death squads are farmers who oppose Grupo Dinant (via Quotha)

Pine:

There are several US military installations in the Moskitia as part of the militarization of the region justified by the so-called “War on Drugs,” which has been more of a war on the local population in terms of the victims it claims. Miskito people … have organized boldly…. But their organization has not yet been sufficient to stop the Honduran Congress, with the support of the US military controlling the region, from giving away the Miskito peoples’ subsoil (and therefore topsoil) rights to the British BG Group [for oil drilling].

Pine:

[Left-wing political party] LIBRE can’t be blamed for disowning Chepe [Handal] now, just as they can’t really be blamed for not disowning him earlier. It’s not like he became a narco two days ago when the Treasury Department announced it. Honduran electoral politics (all the parties) is just so full of narcos, and they’re so powerful, that it would have been politically complicated for LIBRE to reject him as a supporter, or even candidate (supposing they wanted to). What were party leaders going to say? “You’re a narco, so we won’t let you in”? Slander. Risky. Not just losing money risky, but party leaders getting killed risky. You don’t turn down a socio of Chapo Guzmán in Central America. Come. On. But once the U.S. picks sides by attacking a LIBRE-identified narco (but not a Liberal or Nacional, of which there are boatloads), LIBRE does indeed have to take the moral high ground.

There’s more at Quotha, but that gives a flavor for the important news on Honduras being aggregated and produced at that site.