How Washington Created a Honduran Nightmare on Its Doorstep
Tuesday, January 17, 2017 By Antony Loewenstein, Truthout | Report
Members of Indigenous group COPINH protesting in the Honduran capital,
Tegucigalpa, July 2016. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)Armed men wearing ski
masks suddenly appeared in the distance. On a dirt road in northern
Honduras, between the city of Tocoa and the small village of Punta de
Piedra, a massive drug raid was underway. Dozens of men in bulletproof vests
with high-calibre weapons swarmed the area: members of the Honduran military
and police as well as US-trained Tigres and Cobra forces. They burst
forcefully into this area where drug trafficking was rampant.
I was travelling toward the Atlantic coast when I was stopped at a roadblock
and ordered out of the car. My translator, my driver, a local Indigenous
leader and I were all questioned by the masked police officer about our
destination, profession and intentions. What's happening here, my translator
asked? "Too many traffickers, even during the day," the policeman replied.
We discovered that the raid's purpose was to find a local drug kingpin and
anybody working for him.
However, the absurdity of the mission was soon apparent. After arriving at
the peaceful town of Iriona Puerta, no more than 15 minutes away from the
raid, I was shown the house of the chased drug trafficker. It was a large
wooden structure overlooking a calm river, with apparently nobody home,
adjacent to the government's municipal building and across the road from the
main police station. The drug boss had little to fear, I was told by locals,
because officials in the district protected him.
The house of a drug dealer in the northern Honduran town of Iriona Puerta,
July 2016. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)
It was one small insight into the futility of American and Honduran efforts
to tackle drug smuggling in the small Central American state. Honduras has
long been one of Washington's most "captive nations" in Central America,
never independent from US dominance. Bertha Oliva, head of the leading human
rights NGO Cofadeh (the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in
Honduras), confirmed this view. "We're like the ass of the US," she told me
in the capital, Tegucigalpa, meaning that her nation is always beholden to
Washington and treated badly because of it.
US military funding for Honduras during the Obama administration has caused
unprecedented levels of violence against civilians and environmental
activists, and has exacerbated gang activity and local government impunity.
Donald Trump's presidency will likely worsen these current trends.
President-elect Trump's appointment of Gen. John Kelly to head the
Department of Homeland Security is a worrying sign. Kelly was head of the US
Southern Command during the Obama years and oversaw violent,
counter-narcotic efforts across Latin America. He's a drug war zealot.
The Deadly History of US Involvement in Honduras
I recently travelled independently across Honduras and visited remote and
vulnerable areas to witness the reality for impoverished communities
struggling to survive amid drug traffickers, corrupt police and government
officials, US military personnel and extreme poverty. Collusion between
Honduran military forces, big business and US assets has led to Indigenous
communities being kicked off their lands and critics of the Honduran state
being murdered.
I spoke to human rights workers, Indigenous leaders and victims of state
aggression along with officials at the US embassy in Tegucigalpa to
understand how this state has become one of the most violent countries in
the world since a 2009 coup backed by then Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton. The human toll continues to be devastating, with a 2016 US State
Department report acknowledging that the majority of illicit drugs entering
the United States still arrive through Central America.
Many times throughout my visit I felt scared, afraid to walk the streets
during the day or night due to risks from gangs, police or the military. It
was a fear shared by many locals living in the big cities. After
Afghanistan, it was the most challenging reporting trip of my life. During
my time with a family in the Tegucigalpa suburb of Flor Del Campo, I was
told that many people barely left their homes because of regular police and
gang killings. Everybody running a business had to pay a "war tax" to at
least one gang; if they didn't, they would be murdered. One Honduran
politician, Maria Luisa Borjas, told me that members of parliament were
making money from extortion.
It's why so many Hondurans are fleeing toward the US (though receiving
minimal support from the Obama administration and his immigration
bureaucracy, which have deported more immigrants than any other period in
history). Trump has pledged to militarize US borders even more and
Hondurans, Guatemalans and El Salvadorians are rushing to the US border
before he takes office.
José Asunción Martínez, 37, a leader with the Indigenous group COPINH and
colleague of Berta Carceres, the Indigenous Lenca activist murdered last
year, told me at the organization's base in the city of La Esperanza that,
"our country is a narco-state with narco-mayors and narco-MPs. They get
funded by drug traffickers and when they get into power they have to pay
traffickers back." Martinez feared for his life after surviving multiple
attempts to kill him.
The house of murdered Honduran activist, Berta Caceres, in the town of La
Esperanza, July 2016. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)"President [Juan Orlando]
Hernandez wants more US money to fight a war on drugs, but we all know the
funds will be used to suppress Indigenous people," he said. "COPINH says
that we don't need the [Honduran] army in our communities. We want to
cleanse our community of drug traffickers."
An increasing number of voices in both the US and Honduras are calling for
the severance of all US military aid to Honduras after the killing of
Carceres in March 2016. Forces aligned with the Honduran army were
responsible, according to a deserter from the Honduran military who spoke to
the Guardian in June. The assassination resulted in a group of US Democratic
Congress members pushing for the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act
in July. They stated in an opinion piece that, "as long as the United States
funds Honduran security forces without demanding justice for those
threatened, tortured and killed, we have blood on our hands. It's time to
suspend all police and military aid to Honduras." WikiLeaks documents and
other information prove US and World Bank complicity in Honduran corruption.
This growing pressure is why the Honduran regime hired leading Washington PR
firms, Ketchum and Curley Company, for more than US $500,000 combined, in
2015 and 2016.
Although there is vast evidence that Honduran police routinely collude with
drug traffickers to kill people perceived as threats, the Obama
administration has poured tens of millions of dollars into the Honduran
military and police, with at least US $18 million in 2016 alone. The exact
amount of US backing for Honduran military forces is unclear. The Washington
Office on Latin America has submitted many FOIA requests over the last years
and concluded that US money is likely contributing to the counter-narcotics
and anti-gang known as the Xatruch task force and the National
Inter-Institutional Security Force, or FUSINA, accused of killing human
rights activists including Caceres. The US embassy in Honduras denied any
responsibility for the violence and -- during a rare, two-day tour in
Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula -- Ambassador James D. Nealon told me that
Washington was having a positive influence on the country.
The US Congress designated US $750 million in aid for Guatemala, El Salvador
and Honduras in December 2016 to reduce violence, poverty and the flow of
migrants surging toward the US border. However, there's currently little
indication how that money will be actually spent. Honduras is also building
a growing military alliance with Israel.
The US model for Honduras is clear. In 2012, the New York Times reported
that the US was aiming to transplant the violent counter-insurgency tactics
it used in Iraq and Afghanistan to Honduras to "confront emerging threats,"
including drug smuggling.
Washington's relationship with Honduras has a deadly past. From 1981 until
1985, under President Ronald Reagan, the US appointed John Negroponte as its
Ambassador. Honduras became a vital staging post for US-backed death squads
operating in Guatemala and El Salvador. The Nicaraguan Contras -- right
wing, brutal and funded by the US to sell weapons to Iran under an arms
embargo -- established a strong presence in Honduras.
Negroponte was a high-profile official in George W. Bush's administration,
serving as ambassador to Iraq from 2004-2005 and director of national
intelligence from 2005-2007. He endorsed Hillary Clinton for president last
August.
US-Caused Civilian Deaths in Honduras
One of the more recent notorious examples of US involvement in Honduras
occurred on May 11, 2012, when a botched Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) mission in the remote La Moskitia area caused the death of four
Honduran civilians, including one pregnant woman, and countless injuries. A
passenger boat was fired upon in the middle of the night; DEA and Honduran
forces alleged they were shot at first and responded to defend themselves
from armed drug traffickers.
I spoke to two surviving witnesses of the incident in Honduras, Clara Wood
and Adan Nelson Queen, and both strongly denied these allegations. They said
that the boat and its crew were working legitimately and they never saw any
drugs on the vessel. They have never received any financial or psychological
support from either the US or Honduras. They live with trauma every day.
"They want to wash their hands of all this," Wood told me on the northern,
Caribbean island of Roatan. Wood claimed that US officials pressured her to
change her testimony about what happened on that fateful night in 2012. They
falsely insisted that men on the boat had fired on the DEA agents first, she
said. Wood refused to comply despite being offered US $5,000.
The official response to this incident was obfuscation. The Honduran
Security Minister General Julian Pacheco Tinoco told me that it was a "very
regrettable incident." The US Ambassador to Honduras, James D. Nealon,
declined to comment when I asked him about the raid.
The former DEA chief in Honduras, Jim Kenney, based in the country from 2009
until 2012, was more forthcoming. Over multiple phone interviews from his
home in Florida, Kenney explained the DEA's point of view about the 2012
incident and why he believed it was justified. He expressed no sympathy for
the victims of the 2012 incident and said they didn't deserve any
compensation.
"Bottom line, we were there to stop an interdiction of a major load of
cocaine coming into the country," he said. "We were doing our job." He told
me that, "If the [surviving] citizens there have an issue, they should be
going after the Honduran government. It shouldn't be a US response to pay
for any of the, if you want to call it, 'damages.'"
The Murder of Berta Caceres
La Esperanza, Berta Caceres' hometown, was pretty, four hours by car from
the capital, with far less violence than the major cities and bustling fruit
and vegetable markets. The name "Berta" was spray-painted everywhere,
commemorating the murdered environmental activist. Two massive, color murals
of Berta were painted on the outside walls of the prison. Next to one,
messages against police death squads were written in Spanish. Their English
translations are "Police dickface" and "Police hit man."
The mother of Berta Caceres, Austraberta Flores, at her home in the
Honduran town of La Esperanza, July 2016. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)Caceres
was killed on the outskirts of town in a house that stands empty today. It
was an active crime scene with police tape around its entire perimeter. A
solitary police car sat outside the house, and one policeman and soldier
walked up to me as I approached the property, which is situated in a
beautiful valley of trees, few houses and low hills. It was eerily quiet and
still difficult to imagine the murder on a quiet night last March. The grass
was overgrown around the green house, and all of Caceres's possessions from
inside had been removed. Her simple grave sat in a nearby graveyard, barely
noticeable amongst the hundreds of other simple memorials.
At the sprawling Caceres family home in the heart of La Esperanza lives her
mother, Austraberta Flores, and some of her children. Her mother showed me a
memorial for Berta in one of the rooms with her daughter's many global and
local awards. Berta's 24-year-old daughter Laura,who is usually in Buenos
Aires studying obstetrics, told me that in the months before her mother's
death, "there were more threats against her. I used to stay in the house
where she lived and was killed, and she wouldn't let me stay there
overnight," Laura said. "She told me about the threatening text messages she
was getting from the Desa company. There were 33 threats recorded since
2013."
Caceres was the highest-profile opponent of Desa's proposed Agua Zarca, a
hydro-electric project in the western La Paz department. Originally backed
by the World Bank, the hydro-electric facility was intended to be built on
Indigenous land. The company had signed a deal with a USAID partner in
December 2015. Both the World Bank and the engineering company hired to
build the damn, Sinohydro Group, eventually withdrew from the project.
Under President Trump, Honduras is set to continue its position as a key
transit point for cocaine into the US, because demand remains high and
Washington values a reliable autocracy in Central America. High levels of
violence will likely continue, forcing locals to flee. The result may well
be even deeper US involvement across the region, including new military
bases and further training of Honduran forces and police complicit in drug
running and murder.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN
Antony Loewenstein is a Jerusalem-based, independent journalist who has
written for the Guardian, The New York Times and many others. He is the
author of many books including his most recent, Disaster Capitalism: Making
a Killing Out of Catastrophe.
RELATED STORIES
Honduras Breaks the Silence: Protests Persist Against Corruption
By Laura Valentina Natera, Brianne Berry, Council on Hemispheric Affairs |
News Analysis
Honduran Fishing Village Says "Adios" to Candles and Dirty Energy
By Thelma Mejia, Inter Press Service | Report
Honduran Authorities Arrest Four in Connection to Murder of Activist Berta
Cáceres
By Shannon Young, Free Speech Radio News | Audio Segment
________________________________________
Show Comments
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How Washington Created a Honduran Nightmare on Its Doorstep
Tuesday, January 17, 2017 By Antony Loewenstein, Truthout | Report
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Members of Indigenous group COPINH protesting in the Honduran
capital, Tegucigalpa, July 2016. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)Armed men
wearing ski masks suddenly appeared in the distance. On a dirt road in
northern Honduras, between the city of Tocoa and the small village of Punta
de Piedra, a massive drug raid was underway. Dozens of men in bulletproof
vests with high-calibre weapons swarmed the area: members of the Honduran
military and police as well as US-trained Tigres and Cobra forces. They
burst forcefully into this area where drug trafficking was rampant.
I was travelling toward the Atlantic coast when I was stopped at a
roadblock and ordered out of the car. My translator, my driver, a local
Indigenous leader and I were all questioned by the masked police officer
about our destination, profession and intentions. What's happening here, my
translator asked? "Too many traffickers, even during the day," the policeman
replied. We discovered that the raid's purpose was to find a local drug
kingpin and anybody working for him.
However, the absurdity of the mission was soon apparent. After arriving at
the peaceful town of Iriona Puerta, no more than 15 minutes away from the
raid, I was shown the house of the chased drug trafficker. It was a large
wooden structure overlooking a calm river, with apparently nobody home,
adjacent to the government's municipal building and across the road from the
main police station. The drug boss had little to fear, I was told by locals,
because officials in the district protected him.
The house of a drug dealer in the northern Honduran town of Iriona Puerta,
July 2016. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)
It was one small insight into the futility of American and Honduran efforts
to tackle drug smuggling in the small Central American state. Honduras has
long been one of Washington's most "captive nations" in Central America,
never independent from US dominance. Bertha Oliva, head of the leading human
rights NGO Cofadeh (the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in
Honduras), confirmed this view. "We're like the ass of the US," she told me
in the capital, Tegucigalpa, meaning that her nation is always beholden to
Washington and treated badly because of it.
US military funding for Honduras during the Obama administration has caused
unprecedented levels of violence against civilians and environmental
activists, and has exacerbated gang activity and local government impunity.
Donald Trump's presidency will likely worsen these current trends.
President-elect Trump's appointment of Gen. John Kelly to head the
Department of Homeland Security is a worrying sign. Kelly was head of the US
Southern Command during the Obama years and oversaw violent,
counter-narcotic efforts across Latin America. He's a drug war zealot.
The Deadly History of US Involvement in Honduras
I recently travelled independently across Honduras and visited remote and
vulnerable areas to witness the reality for impoverished communities
struggling to survive amid drug traffickers, corrupt police and government
officials, US military personnel and extreme poverty. Collusion between
Honduran military forces, big business and US assets has led to Indigenous
communities being kicked off their lands and critics of the Honduran state
being murdered.
I spoke to human rights workers, Indigenous leaders and victims of state
aggression along with officials at the US embassy in Tegucigalpa to
understand how this state has become one of the most violent countries in
the world since a 2009 coup backed by then Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton. The human toll continues to be devastating, with a 2016 US State
Department report acknowledging that the majority of illicit drugs entering
the United States still arrive through Central America.
Many times throughout my visit I felt scared, afraid to walk the streets
during the day or night due to risks from gangs, police or the military. It
was a fear shared by many locals living in the big cities. After
Afghanistan, it was the most challenging reporting trip of my life. During
my time with a family in the Tegucigalpa suburb of Flor Del Campo, I was
told that many people barely left their homes because of regular police and
gang killings. Everybody running a business had to pay a "war tax" to at
least one gang; if they didn't, they would be murdered. One Honduran
politician, Maria Luisa Borjas, told me that members of parliament were
making money from extortion.
It's why so many Hondurans are fleeing toward the US (though receiving
minimal support from the Obama administration and his immigration
bureaucracy, which have deported more immigrants than any other period in
history). Trump has pledged to militarize US borders even more and
Hondurans, Guatemalans and El Salvadorians are rushing to the US border
before he takes office.
José Asunción Martínez, 37, a leader with the Indigenous group COPINH and
colleague of Berta Carceres, the Indigenous Lenca activist murdered last
year, told me at the organization's base in the city of La Esperanza that,
"our country is a narco-state with narco-mayors and narco-MPs. They get
funded by drug traffickers and when they get into power they have to pay
traffickers back." Martinez feared for his life after surviving multiple
attempts to kill him.
The house of murdered Honduran activist, Berta Caceres, in the town of La
Esperanza, July 2016. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)"President [Juan Orlando]
Hernandez wants more US money to fight a war on drugs, but we all know the
funds will be used to suppress Indigenous people," he said. "COPINH says
that we don't need the [Honduran] army in our communities. We want to
cleanse our community of drug traffickers."
An increasing number of voices in both the US and Honduras are calling for
the severance of all US military aid to Honduras after the killing of
Carceres in March 2016. Forces aligned with the Honduran army were
responsible, according to a deserter from the Honduran military who spoke to
the Guardian in June. The assassination resulted in a group of US Democratic
Congress members pushing for the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act
in July. They stated in an opinion piece that, "as long as the United States
funds Honduran security forces without demanding justice for those
threatened, tortured and killed, we have blood on our hands. It's time to
suspend all police and military aid to Honduras." WikiLeaks documents and
other information prove US and World Bank complicity in Honduran corruption.
This growing pressure is why the Honduran regime hired leading Washington PR
firms, Ketchum and Curley Company, for more than US $500,000 combined, in
2015 and 2016.
Although there is vast evidence that Honduran police routinely collude with
drug traffickers to kill people perceived as threats, the Obama
administration has poured tens of millions of dollars into the Honduran
military and police, with at least US $18 million in 2016 alone. The exact
amount of US backing for Honduran military forces is unclear. The Washington
Office on Latin America has submitted many FOIA requests over the last years
and concluded that US money is likely contributing to the counter-narcotics
and anti-gang known as the Xatruch task force and the National
Inter-Institutional Security Force, or FUSINA, accused of killing human
rights activists including Caceres. The US embassy in Honduras denied any
responsibility for the violence and -- during a rare, two-day tour in
Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula -- Ambassador James D. Nealon told me that
Washington was having a positive influence on the country.
The US Congress designated US $750 million in aid for Guatemala, El Salvador
and Honduras in December 2016 to reduce violence, poverty and the flow of
migrants surging toward the US border. However, there's currently little
indication how that money will be actually spent. Honduras is also building
a growing military alliance with Israel.
The US model for Honduras is clear. In 2012, the New York Times reported
that the US was aiming to transplant the violent counter-insurgency tactics
it used in Iraq and Afghanistan to Honduras to "confront emerging threats,"
including drug smuggling.
Washington's relationship with Honduras has a deadly past. From 1981 until
1985, under President Ronald Reagan, the US appointed John Negroponte as its
Ambassador. Honduras became a vital staging post for US-backed death squads
operating in Guatemala and El Salvador. The Nicaraguan Contras -- right
wing, brutal and funded by the US to sell weapons to Iran under an arms
embargo -- established a strong presence in Honduras.
Negroponte was a high-profile official in George W. Bush's administration,
serving as ambassador to Iraq from 2004-2005 and director of national
intelligence from 2005-2007. He endorsed Hillary Clinton for president last
August.
US-Caused Civilian Deaths in Honduras
One of the more recent notorious examples of US involvement in Honduras
occurred on May 11, 2012, when a botched Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) mission in the remote La Moskitia area caused the death of four
Honduran civilians, including one pregnant woman, and countless injuries. A
passenger boat was fired upon in the middle of the night; DEA and Honduran
forces alleged they were shot at first and responded to defend themselves
from armed drug traffickers.
I spoke to two surviving witnesses of the incident in Honduras, Clara Wood
and Adan Nelson Queen, and both strongly denied these allegations. They said
that the boat and its crew were working legitimately and they never saw any
drugs on the vessel. They have never received any financial or psychological
support from either the US or Honduras. They live with trauma every day.
"They want to wash their hands of all this," Wood told me on the northern,
Caribbean island of Roatan. Wood claimed that US officials pressured her to
change her testimony about what happened on that fateful night in 2012. They
falsely insisted that men on the boat had fired on the DEA agents first, she
said. Wood refused to comply despite being offered US $5,000.
The official response to this incident was obfuscation. The Honduran
Security Minister General Julian Pacheco Tinoco told me that it was a "very
regrettable incident." The US Ambassador to Honduras, James D. Nealon,
declined to comment when I asked him about the raid.
The former DEA chief in Honduras, Jim Kenney, based in the country from 2009
until 2012, was more forthcoming. Over multiple phone interviews from his
home in Florida, Kenney explained the DEA's point of view about the 2012
incident and why he believed it was justified. He expressed no sympathy for
the victims of the 2012 incident and said they didn't deserve any
compensation.
"Bottom line, we were there to stop an interdiction of a major load of
cocaine coming into the country," he said. "We were doing our job." He told
me that, "If the [surviving] citizens there have an issue, they should be
going after the Honduran government. It shouldn't be a US response to pay
for any of the, if you want to call it, 'damages.'"
The Murder of Berta Caceres
La Esperanza, Berta Caceres' hometown, was pretty, four hours by car from
the capital, with far less violence than the major cities and bustling fruit
and vegetable markets. The name "Berta" was spray-painted everywhere,
commemorating the murdered environmental activist. Two massive, color murals
of Berta were painted on the outside walls of the prison. Next to one,
messages against police death squads were written in Spanish. Their English
translations are "Police dickface" and "Police hit man."
The mother of Berta Caceres, Austraberta Flores, at her home in the
Honduran town of La Esperanza, July 2016. (Photo: Antony Loewenstein)Caceres
was killed on the outskirts of town in a house that stands empty today. It
was an active crime scene with police tape around its entire perimeter. A
solitary police car sat outside the house, and one policeman and soldier
walked up to me as I approached the property, which is situated in a
beautiful valley of trees, few houses and low hills. It was eerily quiet and
still difficult to imagine the murder on a quiet night last March. The grass
was overgrown around the green house, and all of Caceres's possessions from
inside had been removed. Her simple grave sat in a nearby graveyard, barely
noticeable amongst the hundreds of other simple memorials.
At the sprawling Caceres family home in the heart of La Esperanza lives her
mother, Austraberta Flores, and some of her children. Her mother showed me a
memorial for Berta in one of the rooms with her daughter's many global and
local awards. Berta's 24-year-old daughter Laura,who is usually in Buenos
Aires studying obstetrics, told me that in the months before her mother's
death, "there were more threats against her. I used to stay in the house
where she lived and was killed, and she wouldn't let me stay there
overnight," Laura said. "She told me about the threatening text messages she
was getting from the Desa company. There were 33 threats recorded since
2013."
Caceres was the highest-profile opponent of Desa's proposed Agua Zarca, a
hydro-electric project in the western La Paz department. Originally backed
by the World Bank, the hydro-electric facility was intended to be built on
Indigenous land. The company had signed a deal with a USAID partner in
December 2015. Both the World Bank and the engineering company hired to
build the damn, Sinohydro Group, eventually withdrew from the project.
Under President Trump, Honduras is set to continue its position as a key
transit point for cocaine into the US, because demand remains high and
Washington values a reliable autocracy in Central America. High levels of
violence will likely continue, forcing locals to flee. The result may well
be even deeper US involvement across the region, including new military
bases and further training of Honduran forces and police complicit in drug
running and murder.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Antony Loewenstein
Antony Loewenstein is a Jerusalem-based, independent journalist who has
written for the Guardian, The New York Times and many others. He is the
author of many books including his most recent, Disaster Capitalism: Making
a Killing Out of Catastrophe.
Related Stories
Honduras Breaks the Silence: Protests Persist Against Corruption
By Laura Valentina Natera, Brianne Berry, Council on Hemispheric Affairs |
News AnalysisHonduran Fishing Village Says "Adios" to Candles and Dirty
Energy
By Thelma Mejia, Inter Press Service | ReportHonduran Authorities Arrest
Four in Connection to Murder of Activist Berta Cáceres
By Shannon Young, Free Speech Radio News | Audio Segment
Show Comments
