Three eights (II/III)

Juan Almendárez

15/03/2010

Opinión

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A horizontal eight reminds us of a frame for a pair of eyeglasses. Nobody in his right mind who needs eyeglasses wears them vertically. Looking through a narrow vertical slit or crack will only permit to observe with one eye or one lens (monocular vision), whereas looking through a horizontal crack permits to observe with both eyes (binocular vision).

Authoritarian, patriarchal education forces us to use our left brain hemisphere more than we use the right one. A practitioner of verticality strips intelligence from emotion, the heart’s brain. It allows only the use of the right hand, not the sinister (or left) one. A general who tortured (who has somebody to flatter him with the right hand) used to say that ecologists were communists because they sowed plants using their left hand.

In La Prensa daily’s March 4, 2010 edition, there appeared several articles against the Bajo Aguán peasant community (the estimate could be made that more than 100 thousand lempiras –almost five thousand dollars- were spent in that edition for that purpose).
Among these articles the Investigation Series (an interview with Melvin Sauceda, Police Sub-Chief for Tocoa Colón) stands out. Let us start by analyzing the headline: “We Police and FFAA [the Armed Forces] have been too passive.”

First we can ask ourselves, With whom the police and military forces have been complacent? How have they behaved regarding the crimes against and violations of human rights committed by mining, banana, oil palm (for biofuels), and the oligarchy who maintain hired guns and veritable paramilitary armies? What was the basis for the military policy of destroying the Isletas peasant company? What national interests have they protected and defended in Yoro, Atlántida and Colón? Why are they silent concerning the Soto Cano (Palmerola) military base in Comayagua, which violates our national sovereignty? Why were the Armed Forces involved in CREM (Regional Military Training Center), which trained Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Honduran troops, following Pentagon orders, which was the headquarters not only for assaulting our brethren, the peoples of Central America, but also to train torturers and the perpetrators of the crimes on our people’s grassroots and students leaders.

"Passive"? Yet, historically, police and military forces have been extremely active in violently evicting peasant organizations, local residents, indigenous peoples, Garifunas and now are doing just that in the Bajo Aguán. Suffice it to remember Tacamiche, Isletas, El Nuevo Amanecer, El Mochito, Las Vegas and the banana zones. The crimes against members and leaders of the National People’s Resistance Front are the best evidence of this.

The old National Security Doctrine story and the irregular warfare plans have a merely monocular vision of the Aguán peasant community but are blind to the terror exerted by the oligarchy and the repressive bodies.

The interviewer asks: "There is reporting that many foreigners from Nicaragua and Ecuador have entered the zone. ¿Have they entered the zone?" The Police Sub-Chief responds in the affirmative. The Police Sub-Chief’s statements, the military intelligence report coincide with the assertions of Mr. Miguel Facussé, one of the owners of African palm plantations, who claims: "the peasants have AK-47s, there are foreigners with Cuban, Nicaraguan, Ecuadorian accents, there an insurrection is simmering, I don’t think it is the people themselves, but they are being agitated from outside." (Hondudiario Digital.com, March 8, 2010.)

National Agrarian Institute (INA)’s Director Cesar Ham says: "There is a media campaign led by this man because he does not want to obey the law; the only thing that we are demanding from Mr. Miguel Facussé is that he presents the legal documents that prove that he holds title to the 4,000 hectares that are exceeding [Agrarian Reform] legal limits in the Aguán zone."

After that statement, a demonstration made up by security guards, well-nourished (landless) peasants, financed by the oligarchy holding the powerful bio-ogre fuels business (valued at $5,400 million dollars, almost the sum of the Honduran State’s health budget) arises in protest against the INA official. Nonetheless, in the interview with the police, drug trafficking is nowhere to be found. Why it is not mentioned? Let the reader come up with the pertinent reflections.

Horizontal vision, or better said, holistic vision, leads us to lay bare the facts: there is a collusion of the international financial capital’s policy with the oligarchy either to destroy the peasant class or to incorporate them as salaried workers into agribusiness and transgenic and biotechnology industries. The consequences are famine, the violation of food sovereignty, environmental injustice, deforestation, pollution, and depletion of water sources.

The Honduran Caribbean (Colón, Gracias a Dios, Cortés and Atlántida) and Yoro and Olancho proximities, are geopolitical areas for the neo-colonial interests and the building of military bases (CREM, El Aguacate y Flota del Atlántico). They are lands and water bodies so rich in resources they could feed all of Central America. However vertical vision is fixed on bio fuels, oil, strategic minerals on the seas floor, regardless of the lives of Hondurans.

It is false that Honduras harbors Nicaraguan, Ecuadorian, Venezuelan and Cuban armed groups. It is false too that there are plans to encourage drug traffic from Venezuela. Where are they, and why the confiscated planes’ pilots are never presented? This is a multimillion media campaign that has been in the works since the June 28, 2009 international military coup. What indeed has truly taken place is that the military and police recently entered into an agreement between Colombia and Honduras, and that the presence of Colombian hired assassins and military counsels (the “Colombianization of Honduras”) grew more conspicuous just after that country’s president’s visit to Honduras.

We reject violence and war. We denounce a military and police assault that is about to slam the peasants, which will result in a massacre and a crime against humanity. We urge the European Union’s member states, Amnesty International and world human rights organizations to put in their appearance in the Bajo Aguán to contribute to peace and to witness, with the holistic, human vision, the hideous stage of violence produced by bio-ogre fuels and the irregular warfare policy that threatens to be implemented.

The Honduran Atlantic is an experiment of torture, war and violation of peasants’, Garifunas’ and indigenous peoples’ human rights. It is a menace to peace in Latin America and to the historic dignity of all peoples. (Translation by María Soledad Cervantes Ramírez)

https://www.alainet.org/en/active/36783