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.
The disappearance of 43 rural students in a city surrounded by mass graves, in a region controlled by an unholy alliance of drug traffickers and corrupt public officials and police, in a country ruled by neoliberal multinational interests backed by an iron hand has awakened Mexican despair and rage.
The new movie, “Kill the Messenger,” recounts the brave Contra-cocaine reporting by Gary Webb and his subsequent destruction at the hands of the mainstream media. It forced devastating admissions from the CIA about drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contra rebels under the protection of the Reagan Administration in the 1980s, writes Robert Parry.
In the isolated region of La Mosquitia, Honduras, narco-traffickers act as shock troops in the assault on native Miskitu, Tawahka, and Pech homelands, ruthlessly dispossessing residents and rapaciously converting forest commons to private pasture primed for sale to multinational corporations.
Puerto Lempira lies on the shore of the sweetwater Laguna Caratasca, just west of the Caribbean in La Moskitia, Honduras. The largest Miskitu town in the region, with an ailing lobster industry in an atmosphere of post-coup insecurity and governmental corruption, many turn to drug trafficking for income.
On a recent trip to the Kruta River near Cape Gracias a Dios on the Honduran Caribbean and the Nicaraguan Border, life without roads and little electricity proceeds slowly, detached from the world at large. Yet, drug trafficking is changing the economy and the culture of the Miskitu People, and due to overfishing, local people can only turn to harvesting jellyfish for China as an honest source of revenue.
International environmental and human rights campaigners condemn the 4th Latin American Palm Oil Conference to be held by the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Honduras on 6th-8th August. The site of deadly conflicts over land rights with alarming impacts to ecosystems and communities, sustainably produced palm oil in this Central American country is impossible. The World Wildlife Fund among other sponsors, are charged with greenwashing and condoning human rights abuses.