|
which she embraces and represents, that many of us are complicit in through our positions of privilege, indifference, apathy etc. RIP.
>...but I have to post this. The right-wing Honduran coup
>government she provided political cover and backchannel
>support to, after they overthrew the moderate leftist Manuel
>Zelaya, continues its reign of terror. And that reign of
>terror includes targeting women, indigenous people, and
>environmentalists. Keep Berta Cáceres in mind if you're
>voting for Clinton in the primaries.
>
>http://www.thenation.com/article/the-clinton-backed-honduran-regime-is-picking-off-indigenous-leaders/
>
>Clinton-Backed Honduran Regime Is Picking Off Indigenous
>Leaders
>
>By Greg Grandin 3/3/16 12:53 PM
>
>Hillary Clinton will be good for women. Ask Berta Cáceres.
>But you can’t. She’s dead. Gunned down yesterday, March 2,
>at midnight, in her hometown of La Esperanza, Intibuca, in
>Honduras.
>
>Cáceres was a vocal and brave indigenous leader, an opponent
>of the 2009 Honduran coup that Hillary Clinton, as secretary
>of state, made possible. In The Nation, Dana Frank and I
>covered that coup as it unfolded. Later, as Clinton’s emails
>were released, others, such as Robert Naiman, Mark Weisbrot,
>and Alex Main, revealed the central role she played in
>undercutting Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president, and
>undercutting the opposition movement demanding his
>restoration. In so doing, Clinton allied with the worst
>sectors of Honduran society.
>
>Despite the fact that he was a rural patriarch, Zelaya as
>president was remarkably supportive of “intersectionality”
>(that is, a left politics not reducible to class or political
>economy): He tried to make the morning-after pill legal.
>(After Zelaya’s ouster, Honduras’s coup congress—the one
>legitimated by Hillary Clinton—passed an “absolute ban on
>emergency contraception,” criminalizing “the sale,
>distribution, and use of the ‘morning-after
>pill’—imposing punishment for offenders equal to that of
>obtaining or performing an abortion, which in Honduras is
>completely restricted.”) He supported gay and transgender
>rights. (Read this. Among the first to be murdered was Vicky
>Hernandez Castillo, a transgendered activist in San Pedro
>Sula. Hernandez left her home on the night of the coup,
>apparently unaware that the new government had decreed a
>curfew. She was found dead the next morning, shot in the eye
>and strangled; Sentidog, an LGBT monitoring group, writes that
>168 LGBT people were killed in Honduras between the coup and
>2014.)
>
>Zelaya apologized for a policy of “social
>cleansing”—that is, the murder and disappearance of street
>children and gang members—executed by his predecessors. And
>he backed rural peasant and indigenous movements, such as the
>one Cáceres led, in the fight against land dispossession,
>mining, and biofuels. Zelaya, as president, was by no means
>perfect. But he was slowly trying to use the power of the
>state on behalf of the best people in Honduras, including
>Berta Cáceres.
>
>Since Zelaya’s ouster, there’s been an all-out assault on
>these decent people—torture, murder, militarization of the
>countryside, repressive laws, such as the absolute ban on the
>morning-after pill, the rise of paramilitary security forces,
>and the wholesale deliverance of the country’s land and
>resources to transnational pillagers. That’s not to mention
>libertarian fantasies, promoted by billionaires such as
>PayPal’s Peter Thiel and Milton Friedman’s grandson
>(can’t make this shit up), of turning the country into some
>kind of Year-Zero stateless utopia.
>
>Such is the nature of the “unity government” Clinton
>helped institutionalize. In her book, Hard Choices, Clinton
>holds up her Honduran settlement as a proud example of her
>trademark clear-eyed, “pragmatic” foreign policy
>approach.
>
>Berta Cáceres gave her life to fight that government. She was
>the general coordinator of the COPINH (Consejo Cívico de
>Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras), a group
>that has had many of its leadership murdered in the last few
>years. Last year, Cáceres was awarded the Goldman
>Environmental Prize for her work opposing a major dam
>project.
>
>Since the 2009 coup, Honduras has witnessed an explosive
>growth in environmentally destructive megaprojects that would
>displace indigenous communities. Almost 30 percent of the
>country’s land was earmarked for mining concessions,
>creating a demand for cheap energy to power future mining
>operations. To meet this need, the government approved
>hundreds of dam projects around the country, privatizing
>rivers, land, and uprooting communities. Among them was the
>Agua Zarca Dam, a joint project of Honduran company
>Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA) and Chinese state-owned
>Sinohydro, the world’s largest dam developer. Agua Zarca,
>slated for construction on the sacred Gualcarque River, was
>pushed through without consulting the indigenous Lenca
>people—a violation of international treaties governing
>indigenous peoples’ rights. The dam would cut off the supply
>of water, food and medicine for hundreds of Lenca people and
>violate their right to sustainably manage and live off their
>land.
>
>Berta Cáceres, a Lenca woman, grew up during the violence
>that swept through Central America in the 1980s. Her mother, a
>midwife and social activist, took in and cared for refugees
>from El Salvador, teaching her young children the value of
>standing up for disenfranchised people. Cáceres grew up to
>become a student activist and in 1993, she co-founded the
>National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of
>Honduras (COPINH) to address the growing threats posed to
>Lenca communities by illegal logging, fight for their
>territorial rights and improve their livelihoods. In 2006,
>community members from Rio Blanco came to COPINH asking for
>help. They had witnessed an influx of machinery and
>construction equipment coming into their town. They had no
>idea what the construction was for or who was behind the
>project. What they knew was that an aggression against the
>river—a place of spiritual importance to the Lenca
>people—was an act against the community, its free will, and
>its autonomy.
>
>The names of Cáceres’s murderers are yet unknown. But we
>know who killed her.
>
>According to one email circulating about her death: “Berta
>Cáceres and COPINH have been accompanying various land
>struggles throughout western Honduras. In the last few weeks,
>violence and repression towards Berta, COPINH, and the
>communities they support had escalated. In Rio Blanco on
>February 20th, Berta, COPINH, and the community of Rio Blanco
>faced threats and repression as they carried out a peaceful
>action to protect the River Gualcarque against the
>construction of a hydroelectric dam by the internationally
>financed Honduran company DESA. As a result of COPINH’s work
>supporting the Rio Blanco struggle, Berta had received
>countless threats against her life and was granted
>precautionary measures by the Inter-American Commission for
>Human Rights. On February 25th, another Lenca community
>supported by COPINH in Guise, Intibuca, was violently evicted
>and destroyed.”
>
>(Here’s Telesur’s report on the killing.)
>
>I’m tempted to end this post with a call on Bernie bros and
>sisters to hold Hillary Clinton responsible and to ask, when
>possible in town halls and meet and greets, if she ever met
>Cáceres, or if she is still proud of the hell she helped
>routinize in Honduras. But, really, Cáceres’s assassination
>shouldn’t be reduced to the idiocy of American electoral
>politics.
>
>All people of goodwill should ask Hillary Clinton those
>questions.
|
Printer-friendly copy 
Email this topic to a friend
General Discussion
#/media/File:Firefly.png)
