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Honduras

Honduran LGBT activists fear ongoing threat upon Hernández inauguration

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NOTE: This post originally appeared at Huffington Post’s Latino Voices blog.
For more of Suffragio‘s coverage and reporting on Honduras, click here. 

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Erick Martínez remembers exactly where he was when Erick Martínez was killed.honduras flag icon

Erick Vidal Martínez, today one of Honduras’s most high-profile LGBT activists, was supposed to meet Erick Martínez Avila at one in the afternoon on an otherwise temperate spring day in May 2012. Martínez Avila had been selected to be the representative of the LGBT community in the congressional primaries for Honduras’s new leftist political party, the Party of Liberty and Refoundation (known by its acronym, LIBRE, which is Spanish for “free”). But the LGBT community had planned to meet on May 6, 2012 to hold a full assembly in order to ensure that all voices, including transsexual and transgender members of the community, could provide input on the campaign ahead.

“The meeting was scheduled at 2:00 p.m., but we had talked about getting together beforehand.,” Martínez said. “Then 3 o’clock came around, then 3:30, and he didn’t show up. People started to believe that he didn’t want to become the candidate. So people said, ‘well, we’ll just have to find somebody else.'”

The next day, May 7, was Erick Vidal Martínez’s birthday. When the other Erick didn’t send so much as a text message to mark the occasion, the community’s brief annoyance deflated quickly into concern. Later that day, they learned the news — Erick Martínez Avila had been kidnapped off the streets of Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras. His kidnappers ultimately strangled him to death and discarded his body in a ditch on the outskirts of town.

“My world completely changed that day, it was a 360-degree turn,” he said. “I didn’t have time to mourn him, I didn’t have time to cry.”

It was among the more high-profile of dozens of assassinations within Honduras’s struggling LGBT community — another top LGBT activist, Walter Tróchez, was shot while walking down the street in December 2009. Erick Vidal Martínez knew both of them well — as friends, as political allies, as part of his support network in a country where dissent of any stripe has become increasingly perilous. No one would have blamed him for packing his bags, filing an asylum application and catching the next flight to Ottawa. Or Brussels. Or London.

Instead, just days before Hondurans voted in a landmark general election, Erick met with me for coffee in downtown Tegucigalpa to explain why he’s picked up the fight where the other Erick, Walter and other murdered LGBT activists left off, and why he’s willing to risk his life to fight for greater rights for the diversity community in Honduras, a task that could become ever more treacherous in the years ahead, when Honduras’s new conservative president, Juan Orlando Hernández, will be inaugurated Monday, January 27.

“Everyone in Honduras has fear, but you can’t make decisions through fear and the past,” Martínez said. “I have to be smart. It would be foolish of me to expose myself. My advantage is my profile as a human rights activist. This is not a bulletproof vest, but it helps… After Erick’s murder, I gave up my social life; I gave up my private life.” Continue reading Honduran LGBT activists fear ongoing threat upon Hernández inauguration →

Honduras

Personal reflections on Roatán, the Bay Islands and the Garífuna

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TEGUCIGALPA — I spent part of my weekend here in Honduras on a day trip to Roatán, the largest and the most well-known on Honduras’s Islas de la Bahía (Bay Islands).honduras flag icon

The Bay Islands are so far afield from the Honduran mainland — culturally, topographically, politically, economically — that it’s perhaps  difficult to weave them seamlessly into a greater narrative about Honduran politics.   At minimum, it was a Saturday well spent at the beach reading about the history of labor, politics and business in La Ceiba, Trujillo and San Pedro Sula along Honduras’s North Coast, which developed a separate elite around bananas.  That’s separate from the history of southern Honduras, including the capital, Tegucigalpa, that developed a more conservative elite centered around mining silver.

As one of the 18 departments that comprise Honduras, the Bay Islands are a political discrete region.  But with about 50,000 residents, the Bay Islands are the least populous of the country’s 18 departments.  Francisco Morazán, the department that includes and surrounds Tegucigalpa, has nearly 1.5 million residents, and Cortés, the department that includes and surrounds San Pedro Sula, has nearly 1.6 million residents. (Together, they constitute about three-eights of Honduras’s population of eight million people.)

But the Bay Islands are different from either of those regions — they perhaps have more in common with the relatively untamed eastern part of Honduras, La Mosquitia.  That’s because of the extraordinary English (and then British) influence in both La Mosquitia and the Bay Islands.  When you think of the quintessential English pirates (yo ho ho), there’s no place more notorious than the Bay Islands, which was a haven for English pirates throughout the 17th century.   Although Christopher Columbus landed in what is today Trujillo on Honduras’s Caribbean coast in 1502 on his fourth and final voyage, and although Hernán Cortés founded the permanent settlement of Trujillo in 1525, the English didn’t give up their interest in Honduras easily.

They formed an alliance with the Moskito kingdom in northern and eastern Honduras (the word ‘Moskito’ refers not to the ubiquitous and disease-ridden insect pest, but to the muskets that the English supplied the locals), and in 1643, the English-Moskito alliance sacked Trujillo, and the British declared Honduras a British protectorate in the 1740s.  The tide turned only in the 1780s, when the Spanish regained Trujillo, and only in 1786 did the Anglo-Spanish Convention recognize Spanish sovereignty over the Caribbean coast.

It took even longer for the British to cede the Bay Islands, their long-coveted Honduran stronghold.  By the time the British ceded the islands in 1860, Spain no longer controlled Honduras, and Honduras had gone through periods as a part of the Mexican empire and as the most enthusiastic member of the short-lived federation between 1823 and 1838 of the United Provinces of Central America.

Fast-forward to the present day, and it’s still clear that the Bay Islands are quite different from the rest of Honduras.   Continue reading Personal reflections on Roatán, the Bay Islands and the Garífuna →

Honduras, United States

So what’s the big deal about Honduras’s election?

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TEGUCIGALPA — It’s not a controversial argument that the November 24 general election is the most important Central American election of the year, if not the most important since 2009, for the region.  But it’s certainly of vital importance for US foreign policy — and much more than the three additional upcoming elections next spring in Central America (Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panamá).USflaghonduras flag icon

The coup that overthrew former president Manuel Zelaya in June 2009 was in many ways the first important foreign policy crisis for the administration of US president Barack Obama.  Views differ incredibly as to whether Obama and US secretary of state Hillary Clinton succeeded in handling the crisis.  Though the US government joined virtually the entire international community in condemning the coup and voicing support for Zelaya’s return to office, the United States ultimately backed down on threats to refuse to recognize the November 2009 election, despite threatening not to recognize those elections in talks with Honduras’s interim president between June 2009 and January 2010, Roberto Micheletti.

It was clear that top US policymakers weren’t happy with Zelaya’s increasing turn toward stridently anti-American leftist regimes, including Venezuela, which was then under the leadership of Hugo Chávez, and Zelaya’s decision to join the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA, Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas) was a turn away from the United States and toward Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba and others in the region.  While Zelaya would be a fool to turn away the favorable terms of Chávez’s Petrocaribe scheme that subsidizes fuel (50% down, 50% to be paid far off in the future), and even his conservative successor continued to accept Petrocaribe fuel, he pulled Honduras far closer to the hardcore left than it had ever been in its history.

As the subsequent post-Zelaya elections approached, however, it was clear that the United States was more comfortable with the impending victory of Porfirio Lobo Sosa, the candidate of the Partido Nacional (PN, National Party).  When Lobo Sosa (pictured above with Obama) won that election, US-Honduran relations went back to business as usual — and then some.

Honduras is, in many ways, the key to US policy in Central America.  Its Soto Cano air force base is a key military transport point between the United States and the rest of Latin America — the air base itself came into modern existence in 1981, when the US government used Honduras as a staging point for Contra incursions against the Soviet-backed Sandinista forces in Nicaragua.  Don’t let its relatively small size fool you, either.  If you think a country with a population of just eight million people can’t be relevant to US foreign policy, just look at Israel — it’s a country with just six million.

Four years after the mixed US response to the coup, Hondurans are preparing to elect a new president and all 128 members of the Congreso Nacional (National Congress), and the consequences couldn’t be greater for US-Honduran relations.

Current polls show that it’s a three person-race, with the National Party’s Juan Orlando Hernández, the president of the National Congress, essentially tied with Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the wife of the former president.  Castro de Zelaya is running as the candidate of a broad leftist movement, the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP, National Popular Resistance Front), which is now organized as a full political party, the Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Liberty and Refoundation Party).  Lagging behind is attorney Mauricio Villeda, the candidate of Zelaya’s former party, the Partido Liberal (PL, Liberal Party) and the son of a former social democratic Liberal president in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Though Castro de Zelaya isn’t going out of her way to disparage the United States, and the United States hasn’t endorsed Hernández directly, US-Honduran relations will be much trickier if Castro de Zelaya wins the election.

But that doesn’t mean relations will necessarily be worse for the Honduran people.   Continue reading So what’s the big deal about Honduras’s election? →