Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
In the nightmare of corruption, murder and impunity that is post coup d’état Honduras, many political and economic sectors of the “international community,” foremost the U.S. and Canada, maintain beneficial relations with drug trafficking and related enterprises. Rights Action ?shares Karen Spring’s dissection of a recent U.S. money laundering bust in Miami of the Rosenthals, one of Honduras’ elite families.
What kind of President would Hillary Clinton be? According to her record, she has consistently favored big business, multinational billionaires and the national security state, at the expense of the “everyday Americans” she claims to “champion.” Not in the least progressive.
Dana Frank writes on why the U.S. must stop funneling money to Honduras for repressive militarization and “free trade” projects that sacrifice labor and environmental standards in favor of multinational corporate hegemony. He must start treating its president like the corrupt ruler he really is.
In search for legendary “City of the Monkey God,” explorers ignore indigenous residents and archaeologists who have worked in the region for years, and shamefully claim to find the “untouched ruins” of a “vanished” culture found in the remote Moskitia region eastern Honduras.
The tiny forgotten Pacific port town of Amapala, among volcanic island sands and stifling heat, is proposed as the site of a radical libertarian experiment: an autonomous free trade city, a haven for multi-national corporations. And the locals are not celebrating.
In 2013, the Honduran government granted BG Group oil and gas exploration rights in a 35,000 square kilometer block off the Caribbean Coast of the Moskitia. Miskitu and Garifuna community leaders, in the absence of organized support from environmental NGOs and scientists, are speaking out to defend their territories from oil and gas activity.
Honduras’ Garífuna people, with their rich culture and homeland spread across the Caribbean Coast of Central America recently asked an international court in Costa Rica to help them recover ancestral land, which they say has been lost to development. We present the dark and the light of this vibrant way, threatened by neoliberal development schemes, palm oil plantations, mega-tourism, and drug trafficking.