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Zulma Larin, coordinator of the El Salvador Network of Community Environmentalists (RACDES), members of Jubilee South /Americas, shares with us their perceptions on the implications of ten years since the coup in Honduras.
Secretary JS / A: Do you consider that this fact produced changes in the scenario of the Latin American region? What kind of changes?
Zulma: 10 years after the Coup d’état, there are substantial changes in the Mesoamerican region. These scenarios have changed somehow for the Honduran people and their fights have become harder in the sense that the criminalization of the human rights defenders has increased, the imposition of models as development experimentations has materialized in Honduras, such as charter cities. The implementation of Structural Adjustment Programmes are implemented so easily that transnational corporations are strengthened in their appropriation of subsistence means and their investments have no difficulty in developing.
Structural poverty continues to be a reality in the lives of Honduran people before, during and after 10 years of the coup and these people continue fighting every day for better living conditions, as well as all Mesoamerican people.
The issues with possession of land have worsened, which caused multiple complications and an undeclared war between the regime and peasants. The free trade agreement with the United States put a price on everything in agriculture and, with that, condemned millions of people to hunger. The insensitive description that they “live with less than two dollars a day” is exposed and in reality, it means misery for this country; four out of ten people live in extreme poverty.
In world geopolitics, it was an experiment of imperialism to boost other coups in Latin America, such as Venezuela and Nicaragua; These coups are called soft coups in the game of democracies disguised of good intentions and making people believe that American style democracies should be prescribed for all of us.
These ten years haven’t happened without great cost to Hondurans. With the coup consummated, the United States raised the destruction of States they consider outcasts and Honduras is one of them. With the coup government of Lobo Sosa came the advisor, Paul Roemer, as the prophet of Charter Cities, with the intention of dismembering the country into a conglomerate of autonomous regions under a private management. Meanwhile, an unprecedented campaign of privatization, destruction of unions, precariousness of work, plundering of natural resources and the proliferation of violence was launched.
In ten years, the Honduran people have fought many battles; had strong electoral victories that haven’t been able to materialize and today, their capacity and potential for mobilization, resistance and fighting is formidable. Without getting to the point, the “question of Honduras” is far from being solved in an election if the coup hasn’t been overcome.
Secretary JS/A: In your perspective, what is the relation between the model of coup impositions and the social, political and economic conditions in your country?
Zulma: I believe these are recipes that the imperialism subjects to peoples who touch the most fragile part which has to do with poverty and the migrations that the poor go through looking for the American dream and in that way the empire uses them to submit the government for what they want and decide to do an experiment in our cities. The recipe is the same all throughout Mesoamerica; each country however experiences it in a different way.
For the large European, Chinese and North-American economic powers, we are a geopolitical region that is important to the movement of their goods, as well as for the plundering of our natural, cultural and economic goods.
We are still laboratories in our regions for the imposition of programs, models and different forms of controlling our cultural, gender and economical roots in order to continue imposing their recipes and violating the national sovereignty of each people, stripping their spiritualities.
Secretary JS/A In your opinion, what is the role of social organizations in these scenarios?
Organizations in their different expressions are called to continue building organizational efforts to defend the strategic goods we still have such as patrimony, water, health, security and education, culture and spiritualities.
Recovering our cultural ancestral heritage as a people must be a strategic commitment in our region.
The class unit is an urgent necessity to strengthen fights in the region. The Mesoamerican people must unite again to strengthen the common bets in favor of life and people integration.
This publication has been produced with the financial support of the European Union. The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of Jubilee South Brazil Institute and Jubilee South / Americas and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of the European Union.
