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Judi Lynn

(160,217 posts)
Mon Jun 22, 2020, 07:40 PM Jun 2020

It's Not Just Covid That Has Hondurans Starving. It's Also U.S. Policy.

JUNE 22, 2020

On the roots of the Honduran hunger crisis.

BY MEGHAN KRAUSCH

The 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.”

More:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22615/honduras-covid-us-neocolonialism-hunger-crisis-national-party

Also posted in Editorials and other articles:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016259579

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