Blood of Martyrs:
Seeds of Liberty
By Alexy J. Lanza
As millions of dollars in badly-needed international aid were sent to countries hit by the tsunami, in January The New York Times noted that the focus on tsunami devastation had ripple effects in other countries that have suffered natural disasters of their own over the past decade. The story featured Honduras, noting that the few remaining international aid efforts to rebuild the country from Hurricane Mitch dried up as focus shifted to the tsunami.
The fact is, Hurricane Mitch was a Tsunami for Honduras, causing just as much devastation proportionally to the impoverished population there. And very little has been done to rebuild the country or help people displaced by the disaster.
The effects of Mitch caused an increase in rural poverty from 69 percent to 74 percent. The standard of living is falling at an accelerating rate. Besides this, the present administration of President Ricardo Maduro has taken steps to dismantle the National Agrarian Institute (INA), the agency charged with carrying forward agrarian reform and redistributing land to the poor.
These were some of the issues discussed at the 10th Regular Congress of the National Center of Rural Workers (CNTC-Centro Nacional de Trabajadores del Campo), held in Yoro, Honduras from January 17-21, 2005. (The Pilsen / Little Village-based group La Voz de los de Abajo works closely in solidarity efforts with the CNTC.)
The Congress, where a new board of directors was elected for the next two years, was dedicated to the memory of CNTC members who died in the struggle for land and human rights during 2003-2004: José Santos Carrillo, Fabián Gonzáles, Isidro Velásquez, Pablo Garay, Teofilo Gutiérrez, and Felipa Teonila Flores. The Congress demanded punishment for their murderers, but the government has refused to listen to the demands of the campesinos.
The CNTC is the largest campesino organization in Honduras, fighting to defend the campesinos’ land in a country in which the majority of the population is predominantly rural and suffer the worst injustices engendered by a system that defends the interests of the big land owners and international corporations without insuring (as is required by the Honduran constitution) “the enjoyment of justice, liberty, culture and economic and social well-being” for the people.
80 percent of Hondura’s 6 million inhabitants live in poverty and of that number, 50 percent, subsist on less than a dollar a day.
Much of the international aid that did arrive for Hurricane Mitch was siphoned off by the corrupt leadership; Honduras has been named the third most corrupt country in Latin America by the group Claritas. These leaders have thrown the country into hock, with an unpayable national debt that eats up half the budget, never resting even for a moment from thinking about how to continue to steal from the people. But there are those who dare, as a poet once said, “to see and to love the world with eyes that have not yet been born,” like those who attended this congress to organize and propose that another Honduras is possible.
–Reprinted from ¿Hasta Cuando? (Translation by V. Cervantes)