Canada should press Honduras on free speech
Canada should press Honduras on free speech
By John Ralston Saul, Ottawa Citizen April 9, 2014 3:02 PM
Imagine yourself in Washington, D.C., charged with the task of honouring 32 murdered journalists at a session of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. You have been allotted five minutes. What would you do?
Two weeks ago, speaking for a joint delegation from PEN International, PEN Canada and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law’s International Human Rights Program (IHRP), the Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue read the names of Honduras’ fallen journalists — and spoke of the ordinary lives behind their extraordinary courage. “Celín Orlando Acosta Zelaya held his five-year old daughter’s hand as they walked, just as I do when I take my children to school each day. But he was a journalist and lived in Honduras. He was murdered in front of her.”
One journalist was killed in an Internet café, checking email; another was gunned down while driving his car. And so it went, with tragic, unbearable monotony, until 32 names had been read aloud, with the word asesinado (“murdered”) slicing the air like a guillotine, hinting at the awful price Honduran journalists have paid these past five years for their stubborn insistence on freedom of expression. The discomfort of the Honduran government representatives can be clearly seen on the OAS website video
Enrigue ended with a line that could have been written about any of the hundreds of threatened writers that PEN International defends each year: “When you save the life of someone who writes in freedom, you save the world for a lot of people.”
Details of violence, intimidation and targeted killings which have overwhelmed Honduras since the ouster of President José Manuel Zelaya appear in Honduras: Journalism in the Shadow of Impunity, a joint PEN-IHRP report released in mid-January. The report highlights how the 2009 coup that resulted in Zelaya’s removal allowed a culture of impunity to flourish even though “the roots of the crisis lie further back in Honduras’ history, notably in (the state’s) failure during the demilitarization process that began in the 1980s to hold those who had committed serious human rights violations accountable for their actions.” For at least a generation, there has been little public confidence in the country’s security forces, and chronic corruption within the police force persists, despite decades of “purification.” Transnational drug cartels have used the recent power vacuum, to establish new territory and terrorize journalists with a familiar combination of threats and murderous violence.
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