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FOCUS: Let's Talk About the Real Teddy Roosevelt |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35798"><span class="small">Jon Schwarz, The Intercept</span></a>
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Wednesday, 24 June 2020 12:17 |
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Schwarz writes: "New York City's American Museum of Natural History announced Sunday that it will remove its famous statue of President Teddy Roosevelt from its sidewalk entrance."
The 26th US president Theodore Roosevelt. (photo: Getty)
Let's Talk About the Real Teddy Roosevelt
By Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
24 June 20
 ew York City’s American Museum of Natural History announced Sunday that it will remove its famous statue of President Teddy Roosevelt from its sidewalk entrance.
The museum’s president emphasized that the decision was made based on the statue’s “hierarchical composition” — Roosevelt is on horseback, flanked by an African man and a Native American man on foot — rather than the simple fact that it portrayed Roosevelt. The museum, co-founded by Roosevelt’s father, will keep Roosevelt’s name on its Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall, Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda, and Theodore Roosevelt Park.
This suggests that Americans still have not faced the extraordinarily dark side of Roosevelt’s history.
Roosevelt was born in 1858 to a wealthy New York City family. When his father died while Roosevelt was attending Harvard, he inherited the equivalent of about $3 million today. While in his twenties, Roosevelt invested a significant percentage of this money in the cattle business out west. This led him to spend large amounts of time in Montana and the Dakotas in the years just before they became states in 1889.
During this period, Roosevelt developed an attitude toward Native Americans that can fairly be described as genocidal. In an 1886 speech in New York, he declared:
I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian. Take three hundred low families of New York and New Jersey, support them, for fifty years, in vicious idleness, and you will have some idea of what the Indians are. Reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel.
That same year Roosevelt published a book in which he wrote that “the so-called Chivington or Sandy [sic] Creek Massacre, in spite of certain most objectionable details, was on the whole as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.”
The Sand Creek massacre had occurred 22 years previously in the Colorado Territory, wiping out a village of over 100 Cheyenne and Arapaho people. It was in every way comparable to the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. Nelson A. Miles, an officer who eventually became the Army’s top general, wrote in his memoirs that it was “perhaps the foulest and most unjustifiable crime in the annals of America.”
The assault was led by Col. John Chivington, who famously said, “I have come to kill Indians. … Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.” Soldiers later reported that after killing men, women, and children, they mutilated their bodies for trophies. One lieutenant stated in a congressional investigation that “I heard that the privates of White Antelope had been cut off to make a tobacco bag out of.”
In a subsequent book, “The Winning of the West,” Roosevelt explained that U.S. actions toward American Indians were part of the larger, noble endeavor of European colonialism:
All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes. … Most fortunately, the hard, energetic, practical men who do the rough pioneer work of civilization in barbarous lands, are not prone to false sentimentality. The people who are, these stay-at-homes are too selfish and indolent, too lacking in imagination, to understand the race-importance of the work which is done by their pioneer brethren in wild and distant lands. …
The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages. … American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori,—in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people.
It is no exaggeration to call this Hitlerian. And while it’s extremely unpopular to say so, Nazism was not just rhetorically similar to European colonialism, it was an outgrowth of it and its logical culmination.
In a 1928 speech, Adolf Hitler was already speaking approvingly of how Americans had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousands, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.” In 1941, Hitler told confidants of his plans to “Europeanize” Russia. It wasn’t just Germans who would do this, he said, but Scandinavians and Americans, “all those who have a feeling for Europe.” The most important thing was to “look upon the natives as Redskins.”
What this means for the innumerable celebrations of Roosevelt across the U.S. is up to us. But if we proceed honestly, we will face a reckoning with something even more monumental than the history of America.
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RSN: Whistleblowing, the Pandemic and a 'Law and Order' System of Injustice |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54811"><span class="small">Jeffrey Sterling, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 24 June 2020 08:29 |
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Sterling writes: "It is hard to find many positives as the death toll from the novel coronavirus continues to climb, but as we have seen before with situations of crisis, truth does find a way to make itself known."
Jeffrey and Holly Sterling honeymooning on the beach in Jamica, June 2007. (photo: Reporters Without Borders)
Whistleblowing, the Pandemic and a 'Law and Order' System of Injustice
By Jeffrey Sterling, Reader Supported News
24 June 20
 t is hard to find many positives as the death toll from the novel coronavirus continues to climb, but as we have seen before with situations of crisis, truth does find a way to make itself known. We saw this with the impeachment of the president, which demonstrated the worth of whistleblowers in bringing accountability to power (although of course, the end result had more to do with denial than truth). Now we see the importance of whistleblowing once again as so many have come forward to reveal the truth. Whistleblowers have testified before Congress about how woefully unprepared we have been and how the response from those charged with protecting us and this nation has been at best inadequate, and at worst negligent. Imagine where we would be in this pandemic without the courage of those who have dared to come forward and present the realities of our government’s response to this global crisis.
And, as in the impeachment episode, we have also seen the negative side of the response to whistleblowers. Far too often, people who are out there on the front lines battling COVID-19 and tending to our nation’s health have been fired for having the audacity to reveal the inadequacies of our government and hospitals in preparing for this crisis. Prior to this pandemic, why should any of us have thought that something as simple as masks and other personal protective equipment would be in short supply and that testing would be a “nice to have” vital commodity? Those sorts of issues happen in other countries, right? And revealing that uncomfortable truth has cost many fine Americans their jobs. The cost of telling the truth should not be hazardous – it should be embraced, especially in times of crisis. Please join me in continuing to commend those who choose to step forward.
COVID-19 has been a kick in the complacency of this nation and especially of our leaders. Thanks to the many brave souls on the front lines coming forward to reveal the truth, and through our own fortitude as individuals and as a nation, we will persevere.
Now, there is something else I want to discuss, another kick in the complacency of our nation. I have been agonizing, like so many others, over the death of George Floyd and wondering what I could possibly do or say about that horrible tragedy. Seeing a police officer with his knee on the neck of a subdued African American filled me with a sorrow that I have unfortunately felt before. Once again, I find familiarity in the words of my favorite scribe, “Oh, I have suffered with those that I saw suffer” (The Tempest Act I, Scene II).
Those eventually lifelong nine minutes that the officer had his knee on the neck of a pleading-for-his-life George Floyd brought me and my wife Holly to familiar tears. Before going to trial, I suffered along with Michael Brown, whose bullet-riddled body was allowed to remain in the street under a bloody sheet for four hours, an undeniable and foreboding message to every other African American. While in prison, Alton Sterling (the coincidence in name was not lost on me) was brutally shot by instigating police officers with no more regard for him as a human being than they would have for a target on the shooting range. And since I returned home from prison, Breonna Taylor was murdered in her own home by the racial-profiling guns of a “no-knock warrant,” and Ahmaud Albury was needlessly and callously killed by so-called upstanding citizens with the same veracity of a lynch mob. I suffer with them all, not only as an American citizen who should be outraged by the actions of power against its own citizens, but also and particularly as an African American who continues to wonder when the official carnage against us will stop.
While wrongfully imprisoned, I wrote about how I found myself pondering whether the racial divide and cruelty in prison were merely reflections of the racial divide and cruelty I was seeing through the television and radio windows I had of the outside world. What saddened me about where I was and what I was witnessing was the feeling that my eventual release would find me going from one prison to another. As an African American, it is an unmistakable and far too often repeated and professed truth that this country regards us as inmates, in or out of prison.
There is nothing rhetorical about my sentiments, I speak from experience. America, my country, deemed an African American fighting for his civil rights a threat to national security. Then, to fully remind me of my place, my country put me on trial and had to do nothing more than prove that I was black to wrongfully convict me of violating the Espionage Act. What my experiences and those of my fellow murdered citizens have in common is that those acts against us were perpetrated in the name of the law and not justice. And that is a history and reality this country refuses to acknowledge: African Americans have always been considered a threat not only to national security, but also to the well-being of the nation, and the law has always been the foundation of that disenfranchisement. We are branded the antithesis of the American Dream. And since time immemorial, the law has been used as a noose around — and lately epitomized by a knee on — the neck of African Americans. True, I still have my life, and I feel disgusted with the possibility of even having the thought that “at least I wasn’t killed.” Do I have to feel fortunate that I am still alive, yet trying to pick up the pieces of a shattered life? There is no solace in surviving in a system that continues to suffocate the life out of me, even after the law has had its say. But I am grateful to be alive. Comparisons about the destructive nature of official racism in this country on those killed and those who have survived are not generally made as impetus for change, but they should be. It is a sad statement on the sensibilities of this country that the only time there is an outcry over racism is when there is a dead body to mourn, of course along with accompanying video.
I therefore find myself echoing Martin Luther King Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in which he lamented: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
The impact of those words on me was profound as I revisited them from prison, but now they are painfully prophetic as a warning that has been ignored. That “shallow understanding” and waiting for a “more convenient season” were championed by the Obama administration’s tactful avoidance of the racial ills of the country. Immersing himself in appeasing terms such as “institutional racism” and “post-racial America” was nothing more than the advancement of the “white moderate” agenda Dr. King warned us about. It was the law and order under the Obama administration that sent me to prison, and that same law felled Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and many others.
But whereas Obama empowered it by skirting racial issues, Trump is codifying and encouraging the “white moderate” agenda. Unlike others, Trump is not subtle about the use of law and order. Trump’s callous nature toward African Americans and our fight for freedom and respect has emboldened the white moderate to be comfortable and louder, and far too often deadly in his/her disdain for the non-American-Dream American. His response to the killing of George Floyd and the continued victimizing of African Americans in this country is to avoid the issues by figuratively and literally hiding behind the law. There is no “more convenient” season for Trump on racial issues, the matter to him is not up for debate. His threats to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy active-duty U.S. troops to quell protests in cities across the nation are not motivated by controlling the so-called opportunists, but to restore the “negative peace.” To Mr. Trump, the threats to national security are not only the African Americans protesting their treatment at the hands of the law, but also anyone who stands with them. And he has full justification in the law as his excuse.
But where does justice stand in the viewpoint of our law and order nation? We have lived under and ignored for too long the insidious peace offered and enforced by the law of “white moderates.” There is no legitimacy for laws and their enforcement if their purpose and use is the disenfranchisement of an entire, meaningful segment of society. If law and order in this country are equated with justice, then Langston Hughes was right when he penned:
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise.
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes
Indeed, George Floyd, Michael Brown, and the countless others, including myself, have fallen victim to a system of justice that has been blinded not by the quest for equality, but by the sightlessness of a law and order system and attitude that refuses to see and acknowledge its own injustice.
So I wonder, what is next? That is the same question I had when emerging from prison, and it remains the case. With what I’ve been through, and under the suffering I have felt for those who have been ultimately victimized, I do not find it hard to believe Dr. King that the great stumbling block for African Americans has been and remains the law and order “white moderate.” Half-hearted moves of appeasement like banal criminal justice, police, and prison reform have shown their worth to heal momentary lapses with eye-gouging canned promises of change, but it has never been enough for real, substantive change. There must be meaningful change in the law and its application such that all citizens feel protected and not subject to victimization by it. We must stop empowering and encouraging law enforcement to unilaterally take on the role of judge, jury, and executioner. I can certainly see the potential good that can come from dismantling or defunding the police, but whatever system will step in the blighted steps of the police will be no better, if its foundation remains the same laws and system that have plagued racial equality in this country. Judges and politicians need to open their eyes to the inequities of a biased system instead of rubber-stamping injustice by hiding behind a broken rule of law. What is necessary is nothing less than a complete dismantling of an irreparable system of justice. Calls for accountability from our judges, politicians, prosecutors, and the police are not enough when that accountability is founded upon a system that is designed to ignore it. If revolution has ever been called for, now is the time. Unlike the white moderate sensibility that sees all protests as violent and detracting from the overall issues (thereby embodying the problem), I know that a bloodless revolution is possible. The peaceful protests demonstrate that the time for change is now.
The American psyche must come out from behind the flag and confront the realities of its quixotic view of the American dream and American justice. Fundamental change such as this cannot be piecemeal, it must be far-reaching and complete. All vestiges of the current system of white-moderate law and order must be obliterated. Only then will America live up to its own promise of freedom.
I may be idealistic in what I feel needs to and can happen, but what other choice do I have? What other choice do we have? I want not only mine but all the suffering I have witnessed to end.
Jeffrey Sterling is a former CIA case officer who was at the Agency, including the Iran Task Force, for nearly a decade. He filed an employment discrimination suit against the CIA, but the case was dismissed as a threat to national security. He served two and a half years in prison after being convicted of violating the Espionage Act. No incriminating evidence was produced at trial, and Sterling continues to profess his innocence. His memoir, Unwanted Spy: The Persecution of an American Whistleblower, was published in late 2019. Sterling is the coordinator of The Project for Accountability, sponsored by the RootsAction Education Fund. This article is being distributed by ExposeFacts.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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We're Dying From Coronavirus. Corporations Are Getting Rich Off It. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53593"><span class="small">Nicole Aschoff, Jacobin</span></a>
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Wednesday, 24 June 2020 08:29 |
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Excerpt: "The 2008 bailout was a giant giveaway to corporate America. 2020 is more of the same."
Traders, some in medical masks on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
We're Dying From Coronavirus. Corporations Are Getting Rich Off It.
By Nicole Aschoff, Jacobin
24 June 20
The 2008 bailout was a giant giveaway to corporate America. 2020 is more of the same.
 he 2008 financial crisis was disastrous for working people in America. Millions lost their homes, jobs, and retirement savings. Half the wealth of African American households evaporated. Suicides surged, particularly for older men unable to find a new job.
When people finally found new jobs, they were often inferior positions with lower pay and less benefits. Moreover, youth unemployment persisted long after the “recovery,” and many college graduates found their career trajectories irreparably disrupted.
For corporate America and Wall Street, however, the federal bailout and the decade of quantitative easing that followed was a bonanza. Bankers got bonuses, corporations got handouts, and all the big players enjoyed access to incredibly low interest rates.
The skewed nature of the recovery, and the anger it precipitated among ordinary Americans, destroyed the legitimacy of neoliberal capitalism and laid the groundwork for the election of Donald Trump. So, when it became clear in March that a federal bailout was needed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, elected officials made a lot of noise about not repeating the mistakes of 2008.
They have not backed up their words with actions, however. Once again it is the billionaires and giant corporations, not working families, who are getting bailed out.
No Strings Attached.
On June 16, the Federal Reserve Board began directly purchasing existing corporate bonds through the newly created Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF) in a bid to “support market liquidity and the availability of credit for large employers.” The SMCCF will use Treasury money (given a green light through the CARES Act) to buy (through a “special purpose vehicle”) a portfolio of corporate bonds.
The SMCCF is part of a broader scheme that includes the Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility (PMCCF) and the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility — which is designed to provide liquidity for corporations who don’t qualify for other federal bailout programs.
The Treasury is authorized to invest up to $750 billion in the SMCCF and PMCCF, adding to the mountain of no-strings-attached money available to America’s largest corporations. Corporate executives can use the cash they raise selling bonds to the Fed to buy back their company’s own shares, issue dividends, and give themselves bonuses.
Just Deduct It.
The CARES Act also initiated a gargantuan tax giveaway for billionaires and corporations. The legislation lifted the $500,000 cap on tax deductions for individuals, allowing wealthy investors — like sports team owners, real estate developers, and hedge fund investors — to “deduct 100 percent of their business losses to reduce taxes paid on profits made between 2018 and 2020.” 82 percent of the individuals who stand to gain from this tax giveaway make more than $1million a year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Corporations will also get theirs. The Financial Times reports that, moving forward, corporations will be able to deduct any business losses accrued between 2018 and 2020. They will also be able to deduct 50 percent (up from 30 percent) of their interest payments and, to the delight of the retail and hospitality industries, “immediately offset investments made to improve property.”
These breaks come on top of Trump’s 2017 tax bill, which lowered the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. With corporations and elites off the hook for paying their fair share, the cost of rebuilding the country will fall on everyone else.
Gimme Some of That 401(k).
The Department of Labor (DOL) has opened up American workers’ $9 trillion in 401(k) investments to private equity firms. Employer-run pension funds have long invested in private equity investment vehicles, but until now 401(k)s have been protected from vulture investors.
Why? Because as Edward Siedle at Forbes argues: “Private equity funds are the highest cost, highest risk, least transparent and most illiquid. Their assets are the hardest-to-value and the easiest-to-inflate.” In the past, officials worried that private equity firms’ risky ventures and exorbitant fees would adversely impact small-time investors trying to build their retirement nest egg.
Yet, for no reason whatsoever, the coronavirus has changed their minds. The DOL claims that the changes to Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) are necessary to “level the playing field for ordinary investors” and promises that the deregulatory decision is “another step by the Department to ensure that ordinary people investing for retirement have the opportunities they need for a secure retirement.”
Private equity companies have been trying to get their hooks into 401(k)s for years. Apparently all it took was a pandemic.
I Won’t Tell If You Won’t.
The Paycheck Protection Program, designed to help small- and medium-sized businesses pay their bills and maintain their payrolls, was denounced early on for handing out millions to big, publicly listed firms who should have been ineligible, such as Shake Shack and the Los Angeles Lakers.
After a public backlash some of these companies gave the money back. But many did not. Dozens of publicly-traded firms — who have much easier access to capital markets — took money from the program. Who are these companies? Steve Mnuchin says we’ll never know.
Last week, the Treasury secretary announced that the names of the 4.5 million companies who received over $500 billion in federal bailout money will never be revealed. Mnuchin’s allergy to oversight comes straight from the top. President Trump has fired numerous inspector generals, including Glenn Fine, the lead auditor hired to oversee the $2 trillion coronavirus relief package.
While the Trump administration bails out the rich and powerful, ordinary Americans are about to be cut off from the meager relief they received from the CARES Act. Despite record unemployment and a grim economic outlook, federal unemployment benefits will end in July and Congress looks unlikely to pass another round of stimulus payments for individuals.
It appears that the real lesson from 2008 is that we didn’t learn any lesson at all.
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It's Not Just Covid That Has Hondurans Starving. It's Also US Policy. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54809"><span class="small">Meghan Krausch, In These Times</span></a>
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Wednesday, 24 June 2020 08:29 |
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Krausch writes: "From early 20th century military intervention on behalf of banana companies to recent support for a right-wing coup, the U.S. neocolonial relationship with Honduras has a direct hand in driving hunger and poverty."
A soldier of the Honduran presidential guard disinfects shopping carts outside a supermarket during a break of the curfew imposed by the government against the spread of the new coronavirus, in Tegucigalpa, on March 19, 2020. (photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images)
It's Not Just Covid That Has Hondurans Starving. It's Also US Policy.
By Meghan Krausch, In These Times
24 June 20
On the roots of the Honduran hunger crisis.
he spread of Covid-19 is terrifying in Honduras, where the healthcare system has been decimated by corruption and defunding. But when I talked to contacts in Honduras, the first concern on their mind was hunger. Honduran human rights lawyer Prisila Alvarado Euceda tells me “at this point,” people in Honduras are “suffering a famine.” Alvarado says that during the three months that Honduras has restricted movement at gunpoint based on identity card number—including trips to grocery stores, pharmacies and work—many people “have not received any food from the state.” Melisa Martinez is an organizer with the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), in another part of the country: Punta Gorda, Roatán, Melisa Martinez. She tells me, “The hunger, in my view, is fatal.”
Honduras has been under strict lockdown since March. This has meant almost total restriction of poor people’s ability to go out and seek work, while the wealthy and people connected to the current government seem able to flout the order at will. As in the United States, shelter-in-place orders have not been accompanied by robust social programs to ensure that people are able to eat and pay rent while staying at home. In a country where 48.3% of people live in poverty, including 16.5% who live in what is considered “extreme poverty,” and more than 70% rely on work in the informal sector, the effects of the lockdown for ordinary Hondurans have been devastating. “If we don’t die of Covid, we will die of hunger,” Albertina López Melgar, one of the general coordinators of the Broad Movement for Dignity and Justice (MADJ) tells me.
Yet hunger is no more a product of natural forces than the palm plantations that have replaced the bananas along the northern coast. From early 20th century military intervention on behalf of banana companies to recent support for a right-wing coup, the U.S. neocolonial relationship with Honduras has a direct hand in driving hunger and poverty. Despite the context of risk, organizers are stepping in to fill the gaps, modeling powerful forms of food security and sovereignty in the midst of tremendous hardship. López points to the fact that President Juan Orlando Hernández had millions of Honduran lempiras allocated for aid to citizens during the lockdown at his disposal, yet the people have received neither food nor medicine. She put it this way: “The people have received nothing, and when they go out to protest for food what they receive is repression.” In a separate interview, Alvarado, a lawyer and member of a group of women defenders of environmental and human rights in El Progreso, Yoro, highlighted that the United States has consistently been implicated in bankrolling and manufacturing the weapons used to repress Hondurans who take to the streets demanding their rights, including in recent demonstrations for food.
Arguing that the basic structure of the Honduran economy remains the same since the days of the powerful banana companies, Corie Welch, coordinator of the Solidarity Collective Honduras Program, says, “This creation and perpetuation of poverty in Honduras has led to massive amounts of hunger in Honduras and this is intentional—it’s not something that happened by chance.”
The original banana republic
Forty-nine years ago, Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano wrote, “The Koran mentions the banana among the trees of paradise, but the ‘bananization’ of Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Ecuador suggests that it is a tree of hell.” In the early 20th century, United Fruit (now Chiquita) received military assistance from the United States to steal public land and install a more U.S.-friendly government in Honduras. O. Henry, author of “The Gift of the Magi,” coined a term for supposedly unstable countries governed by proxy by the United States: the “banana republic.”
Pointing to one continuation of this legacy, Welch says, “You see that with the 2009 coup, the National Party has expanded concessions on mining and mega projects.” Welch is referring to the 2009 coup in Honduras, during which the currently ruling National Party took power in moves condemned internationally yet supported by the United States. This coup was followed by two other ‘soft coups,’ including an electoral fraud in 2017, through which the National Party has maintained power. Throughout this period, current president Juan Orlando Hernández has figured prominently, including in several drug trafficking and corruption scandals. One of the first acts of the coup government in 2009 was to approve a flood of land concessions. Welch notes that after the coup, “you see a big economic change, and that’s in favor of U.S. corporations. And the same happens in 2017 with the electoral fraud.”
Welch underscores that there is a “long historical legacy of prioritizing economic wealth over human rights in Honduras,” and adds that Hondurans who “push for food sovereignty or just their own autonomy, whether it be in how they make their own food or how they survive day to day with alternative economies, are being repressed by the government itself which is using money from the United States to do that.”
Welch is echoed by Alvarado, who holds the United States responsible for “maintain[ing] these types of governments like the narco-dictatorship of Juan Orlando Hernández, who in addition to being despotic, is a murderous government … and the United States knows this. … And we also know that the United States sends a good amount of money to maintain the repressive bodies in Honduras, like the Honduran army, this army that goes out to the streets to kill the Honduran people.” Apparently, sovereignty is still bad for business.
The fight for sovereignty
“I’ll be back and we will be millions” were the last words of the anti-colonial hero Túpac Amaru II at his execution by the Spanish in 1781. In Honduras, these words often accompany the image of Indigenous leader Berta Cáceres, who has become a national hero since her murder in 2016 for defending a sacred river from the imposition of a hydroelectric dam. Aurelia Arzu, another OFRANEH community leader in Santa Rosa de Aguán, Colón, reflects on the dangerous circumstances for activists, especially the Afro-Indigenous Garífuna people in post-coup Honduras, who struggle for sovereignty and autonomy. Recalling the many Garífuna community members assassinated last year, Arzu told me that she did not want to be “just one more statistic in this country… killed for defending what’s rightfully ours.” Despite hostile circumstances and significant personal danger, each of the women I spoke with are engaged in healing and life-saving community work to rectify the failure of what they all refer to as the failed narco-state.
Albertina López tells me that MADJ is working on a food sovereignty project. “This is a project we already had going as an organization, a proposal to create sovereignty for ourselves with dignity,” she says. Across MADJ’s three anti-extraction encampments in Pajuiles, Jilamito and San Francisco de Locomapa, members have planted corn, beans, yuca and plantains, with the intention to swap once the crops are harvested. One crop of yuca has already been shared.
In El Progreso, Prisila Alvarado and her compañeras have formed two community kitchens for kids. Located in sectors of the city that are “totally marginalized by the municipal authorities,” they feed the children “so that the parents can at least have a little bit of calm, and the kids can at least have one or two meals a day.” Alvarado and her group of women defenders work with other organizations and friends to raise the resources and buy the basics, feeding 90 children a day in one of the kitchens.
The many Afro-Indigenous Garífuna communities organized with OFRANEH have built on their existing base to insulate each other from the hunger. Arzu says they too are growing their own food, and that community members young and old are “reconnecting to everything our ancestors did.” Tania Iden, in Corozal, Atlántida, tells me that they are doing home visits (especially to older people), making and distributing masks, making hand sanitizer, making an immunity-boosting tea, handing out food rations, and running clinics for vulnerable community members. These responses are echoed by women from many OFRANEH communities, who sound remarkably empowered during such a dire time.
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