Latin America

Judi Lynn

(160,545 posts) Fri Apr 4, 2014, 05:27 AM Apr 2014

How Indigenous Communities in Honduras Are Resisting US-Backed Multinationals

How Indigenous Communities in Honduras Are Resisting US-Backed Multinationals
Beverly Bell and Foreign Policy In Focus on April 2, 2014 - 5:59 PM ET

“Screw the company trying to take our river, and the government. If I die, I’m going to die defending life.” So said María Santos Dominguez, a member of the Indigenous Council of the Lenca community of Rio Blanco, Honduras.

April 1 marks one year since the Rio Blanco community began a human barricade that has so far stopped a corporation from constructing a dam that would privatize and destroy the sacred Gualcarque River. Adults and children have successfully blocked the road to the river with their bodies, a stick-and-wire fence and a trench. Only one of many communities fighting dams across Honduras, the families of Rio Blanco stand out for their tenacity and for the violence unleashed upon them.

The Honduran-owned, internationally backed DESA Corporation has teamed up with US-funded Honduran soldiers and police, private guards and paid assassins to try to break the opposition. Throughout the past year, they have killed, shot, maimed, kidnapped and threatened the residents of Rio Blanco. The head of DESA, David Castillo, is a West Point graduate. He also served as former assistant to the director of military intelligence and maintains close ties with the Honduran Armed Forces.

María Santos Dominguez’s prediction that she would die defending life almost came true. On March 5, seven people attacked her as she was on her way home from cooking food at the local school. They assaulted her with machetes, rocks and sticks. When her husband, Roque Dominguez, heard that she was surrounded, he and their 12-year-old son, Paulo, ran to the scene. The men brutalized them as well. They brought a machete down on the child’s head, deeply slashing his face, cutting his ear in half and fracturing his skull. Roque Dominguez’s hand was severely injured, and he also suffered cuts to the face. (Friends of the Earth has organized a petition urging the Honduran government to investigate, which you can sign here.)

More:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/179167/how-indigenous-communities-honduras-are-resisting-us-backed-multinationals#

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How Indigenous Communities in Honduras Are Resisting US-Backed Multinationals (Original Post) Judi Lynn Apr 2014 OP

More from this article: Judi Lynn Apr 2014 #1

This is how the American right dictates foreign policy. Enthusiast Apr 2014 #2

Judi Lynn

(160,545 posts)

1. More from this article:

Reply to Judi Lynn (Original post)

Fri Apr 4, 2014, 05:32 AM

Apr 2014

This was the second machete attack Roque Dominguez suffered since the community began its blockade. The first, last June 29, by several members of a powerful family allied with the dam company, left his eye, face and hand mutilated. Days later, a soldier murdered María’s brother, Tomás Garcia, and shot his 17-year-old son, Allan, in the chest and back. The two bullets barely missed Allan’s heart.

Washington has admonished Honduran land rights defenders, even singling out the people of Rio Blanco. The US ambassador to Honduras, in her remarks on International Human Rights Day last December 10, accused the Lenca community of trying to block development, and cited them as an example of people incorrectly taking justice into their own hands. And last June 28, according to the newspaper La Prensa, the ambassador called on the Honduran government to prosecute those who encourage small farmers to occupy lands. Weeks later, a Honduran court leveled exactly that charge, and others, against three leaders of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), of which the Rio Blanco community is a member.

The US government has been a strong force behind the exploitation of natural riches on indigenous and small-farmer lands. In 2009, the United States contributed to a coup against President Manuel Zelaya, which was motivated in part by a desire to quash his support for agrarian reform and greater rights for indigenous and land-based peoples. President Obama backed the unconstitutional administration that followed as it gave corporations free rein for resource extraction, including granting forty-one illegal contracts for dams. Many of those contracts are moving forward in today’s pro-business environment, in violation of Honduran and international conventions requiring free, prior and informed consent by the indigenous peoples on whose territories the projects would be located.

During the period between the coup against Zelaya and today, the US government has given not only political support to the anti-indigenous, law-violating administrations, but also almost $40 million in military and police aid—aid used for repression of citizens and for the so-called drug war. The United States also maintains six military bases in the country.

Enthusiast

(50,983 posts)

2. This is how the American right dictates foreign policy.

Reply to Judi Lynn (Original post)

Fri Apr 4, 2014, 07:14 AM

Apr 2014

Sharing the value of resources among "the people" is considered too far left for the US government. Why are we always in the wrong?

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