Surreal Honduras: Putting the Narrative Together in the Local Press

[Judi Lynn]

Surreal Honduras: Putting the Narrative Together in the Local Press
Written by Clifton Ross
Friday, 24 July 2009

Gabriel Garcia Màrquez could easily have written "A Hundred Years of Solitude" in any country of Central America. It's a region replete with characters and magical landscapes and myths with power to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck when you merely hear them. There's the one about the gringo who visited the mining region of Cabañas and soon thereafter the water turned bad and the fish in the river died and the people all began to die simply because a mysterious gringo passed through.

That's the story as Miguel Rivera tells it. His brother, Marcelo Rivera was the latest victim of the newly organized death squads, formed from what appears to be a triad of power: Pacific Rim (a Canadian multinational), the ARENA party (the political party organized by the death squad killer of Monsignor Romero, Roberto D'Aubuisson) and the "maras" or gang members.

Of course Miguel, who has a deep and even scientific knowledge of his locale, is aware that the myth is just that: a small story that reveals a larger, hidden truth, in this case that a "Gringo" multinational indeed entered the area, but the reason for the deaths was the heavy metal waste from the mining that was poured into the community's water.

In cultures and states where telling the exact truth can lead to one's death, it's always more convenient to wrap the story in myth. Those who unpackage the myths, like Marcelo Rivera, often disappear into thin air -- that is, until they're found, as he was, naked, castrated and murdered after being horribly tortured: his fingernails had all been pulled out; his face had been disfigured so much that his brother could only identify him by his nose; the beatings had broken his skull. Finally, after he had been strangled to death, his body was thrown in a sixty-foot well, covered with chicken manure, dirt, and pieces of meat.

The right wing press did, of course, repeat the official story that Marcelo had fallen in with "mara" gangsters and drank with them, but editors had the integrity to also print a counterpoint that everyone who knew Marcelo had quite clear: that the victim of the unholy triad of moneyed power in El Salvador never drank nor hung out with the maras. His hero was Monsignor Romero and Miguel says the last time he saw his brother he was wearing a t-shirt with the image of that martyr on it.

There's a significant difference between El Salvador under the FMLN where power in the media is actively being contested, and Honduras where there is a blackout of the opposition perspective. Another difference is that the ARENA party has lost control of the military and has to rely on "maras" to do its dirty work while in Honduras the government hasn't yet had to consider recruiting "civilian contractors" from the 100,000 or so "maras" operating in Central America. Thus far the military has been quite happy to do the job of eliminating or terrorizing opponents under the "golpista" Honduran government (coup government) of Micheletti. On July 5, for example, the military fired with machine guns on a crowd numbering in the thousands. This is the unofficial story, of course. The papers, including El Heraldo, claimed that the military had fired on the crowd with rubber bullets. Officially, also, only one person died. Protestors say that there were eight or nine victims who died on the way to the hospital, and whose bodies were disappeared. Given the machine gun fire, it's only surprising that more didn't die.

The Honduran government of the 1980s found it had no need to replicate the widespread massacres being carried out in El Salvador and Guatemala. It was able to selectively eliminate a couple hundred leaders of the opposition and take care of its problem with the "subversives." But in order to maintain control over the rest of the population and assure its docility and compliance, like anywhere else, it required a press willing and able to cloak a damning reality in a less threatening myth.

Once again Honduran reporters are being called in to do overtime in psyops. Granted, the press in Honduras under the "golpista" government isn't any worse than Fox News. That being said, everything having to do with the news around the recent "golpe" (coup) has a quality that ranges from surreal interpretation to black propaganda. It would seem that the journalists of the major papers of Honduras really were frustrated writers of dystopian science fiction.

One Honduran tells me she saw a murder in her neighborhood that was multiplied in the journalistic alchemy of the Honduran press by six the following day. I keep that in mind as I sit here in my hotel room in Tegucigalpa, leafing through what my wife back home would call "the daily pack of lies."

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/2010/1 /

[Judi Lynn]

1. Obama and Hillary Nix Change in Honduras

Obama and Hillary Nix Change in Honduras
July 27, 2009 By Roger Burbach

The situation in Honduras and Central America is growing increasingly tumultuous with each passing day as deposed President Manuel Zelaya confronts the de facto regime of Roberto Micheletti with thousands of partisans mobilizing in the border areas. While Honduran army officers in Washington and the capital of Tegucigalpa issue statements indicating they may accept Zelaya's return-if the civilian coup leaders concur--military and police units continue to fire on and even murder demonstrators. It is impossible to predict the outcome of this confrontation. But one thing is increasing clear--the growing conflict represents a failure of the Obama administration to reshape US policy towards Latin America in spite of its early rhetoric directed at the leaders of the region.

On June 29, the day after the coup, Barack Obama declared it "not legal" and said "we don't want to go back to a dark past." This was in keeping with his remarks at the Summit of the Americas in April when, in alluding to the US history of backing military regimes, he stated, "The United States will be willing to acknowledge past errors where those errors have been made."

But US policy towards Honduras since the coup indicates that the Obama administration does not represent "change you can believe in." Rather it is bent on imposing its will and propping up the status quo in Latin America, just as previous US administrations did.

Over the past decade a popular upsurge has swept Latin America comprised of indigenous movements, impoverished urban dwellers, peasants, environmentalists, feminists, and human rights advocates. They are demanding a more equitable distribution of the wealth of their countries and an end to political systems dominated by oligarchs, corrupt politicians and business interests allied with the United States. A string of New Left governments has emerged beginning with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1999 followed by Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva in Brazil in 2003. They have been joined by the election of left of center presidents in Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Paraguay and El Salvador.

This block of progressive forces spearheaded the international opposition to the coup in Honduras. Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, reflecting the common sentiment around the continent, noted that the coup was a throwback to "the worst years in Latin America's history." The Organization of American States, which has historically been dominated by the United States, voted 34 to 0 to call for the restoration of Manuel Zelaya as president.

More:
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22136