Honduras

Who is strangling the free spirit of the people?

Juan Almendárez

25/08/2010

Opinión

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"You men who have abused the most sacred rights of the people for your own sordid and petty ends...I am talking to you, enemies of independence and freedom!"

Francisco Morazán

The media campaign against Honduran teachers' organizations is local and international. The essence of propaganda is to privatize education and to impede the liberation of the peoples of Latin America.

The formal component is to present the teachers as the enemy of education. Justify the reduction of public expenditure and destroy the teachers' organizations.

Two international media celebrities have entered into this scene of the oligarchies' theatrical performance. Both based in Miami. One a singer and dancer and the other specializes in ridiculing the cultural values and heroes of Latin America.

Maria Conchita Alonzo's (Cuban Venezuelan) presence in Honduras in August was to celebrate the birthday of the "hero" representative of the bloody military coup, to campaign against Cuba and Venezuela and justify repression against education workers and the National Popular Resistance Front.

Conchita received the rejection of the people when she said: "The truth is within me." In other words "I am the truth." Since this statement is false, consequently all that Conchita said about Cuba, Venezuela, and Honduras was based on a falsehood.

Andres Oppenheimer of Miami (an Argentine), ideologue and proponent of financial capitalism. He arrogantly came to give recipes for education (stigmatizing the teaching profession). He ridiculed the ideas of Bolivar and Morazan and recommended that we should forget history and look forward (to the North) abandoning solidarity with the peoples of the South.

Why forget Morazan? Who are and have been stifling this central idea of his thinking: "Education is the free spirit of the people"?

The media campaign against Honduran teachers' organizations is local and international. The essence of the propaganda is to privatize education and to impede the liberation of the peoples of Latin America.

To control the education of a people is to attack freedom, to dominate and oppress it. To strip it of its cultural values. It distorts the critical and reflective awareness of educators. It alienates teachers so that they learn and teach the individualistic values of the violence of capitalism that impoverishes and sickens our people.

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund believe that education, health, information security and privacy are valuable commodities to be sold in methodological packages (a fraud) to exploited countries and that it is necessary to destroy the teachers' organizations to privatize education locally and internationally. Who are those responsible for Honduras spending more on weapons than on education? The oligarchy has more guns, bullets and private guards, than the quantity of bushels of corn, beans and liters of milk made available for school lunch.

The repressive apparatus has implemented the pedagogy of terror and torture it learned at the School of the Americas. Following the military coup, 15 teachers have been murders and hundreds more persecuted and traumatized by police and military brutality.

Total economic losses from the military coup have not yet been quantified. Just during the closure of the borders, there was 3 billion dollars in lost revenue. Forty million dollars were withdrawn from the external educational cooperation immediately after the military coup.

The following burdensome investments should be used instead in education: the mobilization of troops to repress the people, the costs of U.S. bases and military maneuvers, the privileges of the military caste and the numerous police and security guards assigned to look after the interests of senior officials, the invisible costs of media campaigns and network of informants.

The strategy of the oligarchy and of the military, mining and agro-industrial and energy complex is to privatize everything and own the rivers, coastlines, forests, water, air and the whole country and convert the poor into uneducated human waste. To carry out this horrendous plan, they aim to wipe out the teachers, so as to promote private education of future robots and slaves where the poor have no social space

The oligarchy distorts the facts, does not speak of multi-grade teachers, the abandonment of rural schools and poor neighborhoods nor the commodification of private education.

The media war against teachers has used all possible mechanisms of propaganda and instruments of violence.

The strategy has four pillars: first reduce the problem of education to the responsibility of the teacher. The second is that the main cost of education focuses on teachers.

The third is to discredit public education with the objective of privatizing it and make it work in the ideological service of the oligarchy and financial capital.

The fourth: to stigmatize the teachers, discredit them and justify the use of military force, the police, and media in order to destroy the teachers' movement.

We defend with courage and dignity the national struggle of the teachers articulated by the People's National Resistance Front. Its protest is just in fighting against the policies of privatization and against labor rights violations.

Educating for life and not educating to kill. Fewer weapons and more education!

https://www.alainet.org/en/active/40427?language=en