July 2020 Honduras Coup Update (tags)
This July 2020 in Honduras we saw many killings and disappearances against activists and we saw many COVID-19 deaths including of a political prisoner, an organiser, health care workers and jorunalists. Living under a dictatorship regime where global and national capital, together with regime leaders, continue to profit through laundering and exploiting the people and the land – when you put a pandemic into that equation it’s a disaster, as we can see in Honduras. Government offers no protection for its poor majority, the money officially designated for healthcare doesn’t translate into actual healthcare, and there is no welfare to enable people to stay home, but the military is controlling the streets and spreading the illness. Communities and organisations continue to campaign for the ‘Where is the money?’ campaign, with voices reverberating from zoom conferences, to managing to stage large letters across highways, printing the question on roads for drivers to see, and on walls for passers-by – people must have found holes in the militarisation. They paint their pained words about losing increasing numbers of fellow Hondurans to death from COVID-19, lives lost due to government’s greed and lies. This July 2020 we saw many attacks against people and organisers, and we continue to see that on the other hand, big businesses that don’t even have environmental permits are free to move around, operate, and act in ways that are harmful to people and environment. And similar to discourse familiar to all of us worldwide about balancing the economy over staying home, this regime, like others, is broadcasting that the nation only has a chance of surviving the pandemic, if ‘development (mega) projects’ of mining, logging, energy etc go ahead and if people also put up with low wages (not to mention threats, killings, and arrests to impose opposed projects) so that large profits can be made from them. International development finance organisations also continue to ignore the violence meted out by capital and by the regime and fuel this fire, passing loans to the regime and ignoring cries from communities who dream of a different kind of ‘development’. https://sydneywithhonduras.wordpress.com/2020/08/30/july-2020-honduras-coup-and-pandemic-update/
May 2017 Honduras coup update (tags)
20 uni students occupied an uni admin building in solidarity with 3 other arrested students, they all got repressed and arrested as did a journalist who answered their call to accompany them and cover what was happening, who was also beaten and tortured by security guards and then by police. A journalist who covers local corruption and gives coverage to local protests against a hydroelectricity dam received a chain of threats, to add onto old threats and aggressions. And, as usual council officials, who illegally sold ancestral land of a Garífuna community gets away with it, while an community activist gets arrested and charged for usurping their own ancestral land. A cameraperson for a media outlet has 6 gunshots fired at his body on his way home from work and is gravely injured. This and other abuses, happened in May 2017 in Honduras, read here https://sydneywithhonduras.wordpress.com/