Moskitia on their minds

In Honduras, TLC doesn't stand for "tender loving care." It stands for "tratado de libre comercio," which is Spanish for "free-trade agreement." The Honduran Congress ratified its participation in the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA in English) on Thursday, despite bitter opposition from special interests (special interests are, by definition, everyone who's not part of the big-business "community"). So far there have been a few protests at the capitol, but the organized opposition has been decidedly weak. In part, the dearth of protesters at the capitol building owes to the fact that Congress snuck the vote past even some of its own members, who had been promised that next week would be used to debate the issue. My understanding is that, upon passing the TLC, Congress adjourned to give itself and civil society a few days to reflect on the solemn enormity of the accomplishment.

The apparently weak opposition also reflects spiritual fatigue and economic distress in the face of a continuous onslaught of neoliberal reforms that are overwhelming popular organizations' capacity to inform and mobilize folks. At the same time, groups that are speaking out and sticking up for themselves remain largely invisible to the national and international media because the process of implementing the substantive changes that constitute and complement the TLC and other investment-friendly international agreements is geographically diffuse. It's not just the TLC: it's the municipalization (and piecemeal privatization) of the country's water distribution system; it's the concession of subsurface mineral rights to an estimated 1/3 of the national territory in the past few years; it's the coordinated efforts of government and NGOs to make it easier for campesinos across the country to sell their land and become sweatshop workers; it's a legislative and marketing assault on indigenous and Garifuna territory to benefit the tourism industry; it's an extra-legal timber-industry cartel that's hauling off millions of board feet of unprocessed and minimally processed timber products from angry communities all over Honduras.

There's another part of the story of the TLC's passage. A narrative of inevitability about this and other unpopular reforms is unfolding. This is nothing new in itself; over the years, "TINA" (There Is No Alternative) has often been invoked by poor countries' goverments as a proxy for a more cogent defense of the implementation of the devastating structural-adjustment recipes cooked up by the IMF. But the reformers' audacity these days is off the charts. The Guatemalan president, Oscar Berger, was quoted last week saying that the TLC is going ahead, "Like it or not." Much the same rhetoric is going around in Honduras, too. The old line was, "There's nothing we can do about it." The new line is, "There's nothing you can do about it." And they're willing to back that up with the summary arrests of protest leaders and the expatriation of international solidarity workers. Know why? 9/11 has a whole lot to do with it.

The PATRIOT ACT didn't just gut US civil liberties; it emboldened a lot of other countries' governments to do the same. Honduras is one of many fledgling McDemocracies where the US assault on previously-accepted definitions of democracy is having a deleterious effect on citizens' rights. The leading presidential contender here, Pepe Lobo, is staking his claim to the throne on his open appeals to return to the halcyon days of the brutal fascist dictatorship of Tiburcio Carías, who ruled Honduras with an iron fist in the 1930s and 1940s. Pepe Lobo's campaign logo? An iron fist. As president of Congress, Lobo has lobbied for the implementation of the death penalty and overseen legislative tinkering to produce putatively anti-gang legislation that in fact allows the government to harry and jail just about any kind of group it doesn't like. Like land-reform activists on the north coast. Like defenders of communities' timber resources in Olancho. Like anyone. And in case "just jail" might not be enough anymore (though suspicious prison fires have burned to death a couple hundred suspected and convicted gang members in the past few years), Lobo is pushing for the creation of an ultra-tough penitentiary in the heart of the Honduran Moskitia (read: tropical Siberia).

Increasingly wild confabulations linking Honduran gangs, the Venezuelan and Cuban governments, and other subversive elements (next we may be hearing about the California nurses' union) to terrorist attacks on US soil make their rounds on US-government-approved "news organizations" (e.g. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42398) and give governments like Honduras's the paper-thin cover story they need to abridge the rights of anyone who criticizes their moves. (To briefly illustrate: a US friend of South-Asian descent was here last summer to work with COPINH, the Lenca-Indian thorn in the Honduran government's side. One day he was pulled off a Honduran bus by plain-clothes cops and detained for a few hours of questioning about his beard.) Pro-corporate economic policy is being underwritten by the international war on terror.

It's tough for me to try to write cogently on this subject in this itty-bitty blog format, especially as I'm doing so from an internet cafe and working without benefit of notes and documents to give more substantiation and credence to this outburst. So I'll end for now. But I just want to appeal to you: the next time you read a mainstream article about Central Americans' hopeful embrace of free trade (you know, the kind of thing Thomas Friedmann loves to write), remember that the sweatshop worker you read about, the one who speaks with such pathos about her cautious optimism, might just have the Moskitia on her mind.