Coronavirus news, Honduras and Germany

This 7 May 2020 Spanish language United States TV video says about itself (translated):

Honduras is the Central American country with the highest mortality rate due to COVID-19 | Telemundo

The coronavirus has simultaneously attacked the entire region, although with different results in each country. Honduras is the hardest hit territory, while Panama, with greater capacity to carry out tests, seems to be one of the least affected.

Translated from Dutch NOS radio today:

[Right-wing] Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández is infected with the coronavirus. He said he has mild symptoms and has started treatment.

Two employees and his wife are also infected with the virus and are being treated.

When British Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson became infected, government propaganda also said that he had ‘mild symptoms’. However, Johnson landed on intensive care. Doctors say he had a 50% chance of dying then.

Usually, ‘mild’ coronavirus infection is not mild.

Germany is often called a country with ‘good’ anti-COVID-19 policies. Compared to Trump’s USA and Boris Johnson‘s Britain, that is true. But that is a very low standard. There were recent outbreaks in German slaughterhouses, a German church, a German restaurant, and a Berlin apartment complex.

Also from Dutch NOS radio today:

In Germany, 30 people have died from the effects of the coronavirus in the past 24 hours. That is more than in the previous days, when fewer than ten deaths were recorded. …

The German death toll from covid-19 is 8830, according to the Robert Koch Institut (RKI), Germany’s health authority.

Honduras regime, mass killing of women

This 17 January 2020 video from the USA says about itself:

4 Years Seeking Justice: Daughter of Slain Indigenous Environmental Leader Berta Cáceres Speaks Out

In Honduras, a new report by the Violence Observatory at the Honduran National Autonomous University says that at least 15 women have been murdered in the first 14 days of this year. Violence against women, LGBTQ people, indigenous leaders and environmental activists has skyrocketed in Honduras under the U.S.-backed government of President Juan Orlando Hernández.

The report comes nearly four years after the Honduran indigenous environmental activist Berta Cáceres was shot dead inside her home in La Esperanza, Honduras, by hired hitmen. Last month in the capital of Tegucigalpa, seven men were sentenced to up to 50 years in prison for her killing in March 2016. At the time of her assassination, Cáceres had been fighting the construction of a major hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque River on sacred Lenca land in southwestern Honduras.

In November 2018, a court ruled that Cáceres’s killing was ordered by executives of the Honduran company behind the Agua Zarca dam, known as DESA, who hired the convicted hitmen. Cáceres won the Goldman Environmental Prize for her work protecting indigenous communities and for her environmental justice campaign against the massive dam in 2015.

In December, we sat down with one of her daughters, Laura Zúñiga Cáceres, in Madrid, Spain, where she was receiving a human rights award. “This is a late conviction. It has been almost four years of seeking justice. It is the product of a rather difficult and painful process that has been putting us as victims in direct dispute with a murderous and aggressive state, and they produced the minimum consequences that the state could have given,” Zúñiga Cáceres says.

STRIKING nurses have accused the Honduran government of treating them like animals, vowing that they will keep going until demands for increased pay and an end to the threat of dismissal are met: here.

Honduran elected, coup deposed President Zelaya interviewed

This 2 January 2020 video from the USA says about itself:

Exclusive Interview: Ex-President Manuel Zelaya – The Crisis in Honduras

Former [democratically elected] Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted in a coup d’état in 2009, talks to Laura Carlsen about the origins and consequences of the crisis in his country.

United States ICE officer raped Honduran woman

This 22 July 2018 PBS TV video from the USA says about itself:

While in ICE custody, thousands of migrants reported sexual abuse

As migrant children wait in U.S. immigration detention centers to reunite with their families, public records reveal that in the past decade, thousands of people have reported sexual abuse while in a similar type of immigration custody. Emily Kassie, an investigative reporter and producer with the Marshall Project who obtained the data and spoke to survivors, joins Hari Sreenivasan for more.

‘ICE AGENT RAPED IMMIGRANT FOR YEARS’ An immigration agent threatened a Honduran woman living in Connecticut with deportation if she didn’t have sex with him, then raped her as often as four times a week for seven years, impregnating her three times, the woman says in a federal lawsuit. [AP]

Honduran scholar Lety Elvir Lazo, anti-dictatorship refugee

This Spanish language video says about itself (translated):

Interview with Vida Luz Meneses, Lety Elvir and Laura Zavaleta, participants in the Voces de mujer [Voices of women] cycle in Central American literature, which was held in Casa de América on November 15-17, 2011.

From Leiden University in the Netherlands, 23 September 2019:

Scholar at Risk Lety Elvir Lazo: ‘My university intimidated me too’

The proceeds of the Leiden University Science Run on 28 September will go to Scholars at Risk, a section of the UAF that assists refugee scholars. One such scholar is Leiden PhD candidate Lety Elvir Lazo from Honduras.

Lety Elvir Lazo spent 20 years working as a lecturer and author in Honduras. She now has a PhD scholarship from Scholars at Risk (SAR) and works at the Leiden University Centre for Arts in Society. She is conducting research into Central-American literature written by women in the period 1992-2002. That is one of the many post-war periods that Honduras has known; in Honduras, democracy and dictatorship have been following each other in succession for a long time already. Elvir also looks at how women are depicted in the context of failed revolutions and uprisings and increasing neoliberalism and globalisation in Central America.

Why did you flee Honduras?

‘There was a coup in June 2009, which resulted in a dictatorship. This dictatorship is involved in corruption, drug trafficking, election fraud and giving away natural resources to multinationals. I left Honduras because I was threatened, persecuted and monitored by groups and people who were part of the repressive state apparatus and/or paramilitaries.

‘In Honduras, there are death squads that abduct, torture and murder people if they are suspected of belonging to the opposition. The same is true for environmental and human rights activists. Even more painful was that I also fell victim to political persecution at the university where I had worked for 20 years. A few months before I left Honduras, my colleague Héctor Martínez Motiño, who like me was harassed and intimidated by the university administration, was killed with 12 bullets at the entrance to the university.’

How did you come into contact with SAR and how did you end up in the Netherlands and then Leiden?

‘I came to the Netherlands at the end of 2015, as writer in residence at the invitation of the city of Amsterdam and the Dutch Foundation for Literature. I write stories, poems and literary essays.

Then somebody told me about the UAF programme that helps threatened university lecturers and academics: SAR. SAR protects researchers whose life, freedom and wellbeing are under severe threat. It is a place of refuge for threatened academics, and an international network of higher education institutions that arrange for temporary research and teaching positions within this network as well as offering advice.

‘Later on, the UAF-SAR provided me with a scholarship, and Leiden University gave me the opportunity to do PhD research at the Faculty of Humanities. To be closer to the University, I moved to Leiden in 2019.

‘I have now experienced what the UAF-SAR can mean. You feel solidarity within the network of supporting universities – such as Leiden University, which opens its doors to people who need space to work, write, think and express ourselves in freedom. Space in which we can keep in touch with our subject and can continue to be of use by sharing our experience and above all living out our passion for free scholarship.’

Do you hold out any hope of returning to your own country?

‘At the moment it’s really dangerous. There’s no guarantee that you’ll survive under the present dictatorship, which, unfortunately, is supported by governments such as that of Trump. They prefer to see my country being governed by politicians who are involved in drug trafficking than by governments that are truly democratic. Of course I, like birds, turtles and most refugees, want to return to my homeland: I miss my family; I miss everything, except the violence. Luckily, I can develop in peace here, in freedom and without fear. That’s a real relief. I wish it were like that in my homeland.’

What is it like doing research in Leiden in comparison with in your homeland? And how do you find the Dutch?

‘The main difference is that can devote myself almost fulltime to my research in an environment in which there is no bullying. In Honduras, it was difficult to obtain a research budget if you didn’t say what the university administration wanted to hear. In practice, there is no freedom of education in Honduras, no freedom of expression and no freedom of research.

‘Having lived in the Netherlands for a number of years, I still can’t say with any certainty what the people are really like here. I have the general impression that they are open and very sociable, although they sometimes face the dilemma of whether they should be open to immigration. After all, we stand for the other, and that is often seen as something different, disruptive and even threatening.

‘However, there are two things that I know without a shadow of a doubt: first, you don’t leave your homeland if you are being treated decently and your human rights are being respected. Second, there is a complicit silence among governments and international organisations about the neocolonial genocide against the population of Honduras. And also about how Hondurans, who, under threat of violence, flee to survive only to come up against walls of stone, water and documents. They often have to take perilous routes that are controlled by criminals or they end up in the immense prisons and cemeteries that the countries in the funnel of Central to North America have become. If you invest money or have economic interests in the area, from an ethical, moral and humanitarian perspective you bear a big responsibility to contribute to a solution and to end the war, the foreign interventions plundering our assets and the suffering of our courageous peoples who continue to fight for their health and happiness.’

Why should people take part in the Leiden Science Run or donate to the Scholars at Risk programme?

‘Because people who are critical thinkers and democratically minded are entitled to express their thoughts everywhere, not just on campus, without being intimidated, persecuted, vilified, imprisoned or murdered. If the academic world says nothing, if universities are not a place for free speech, research and solutions to national and international problems, universities don’t serve a single purpose. Then they are neglecting their duty. And if we allow voices of protest to be stifled or punished, we allow hope to fade and democracy to die. Then the world, of which we only have one, becomes a hell instead of our home. And happiness is possible for no one. That is why we need to rise up for the freedom of expression and freedom of thought of everyone.’

Hondurans flee bloody drug-dealing dictatorship

This 14 August 2019 video from the USA says about itself:

“A Narco State Supported by the United States”: How Crime & Corruption in Honduras Fuel Migration

We speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Sonia Nazario, who has closely detailed why migrants from Central America are fleeing their homes in an attempt to seek asylum in the United States. Earlier this year, Nazario spent a month in Honduras documenting how corruption and gang violence are forcing many people to flee. Her piece, “Pay or Die”, ran in The New York Times, where she is a contributing opinion writer.

This 14 August 2019 video from the USA says about itself:

“Cut to bits“: Honduran women flee extreme patriarchal violence

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Sonia Nazario describes the extreme culture of violence against Honduran women that causes so many to flee and seek asylum in the U.S. “What I saw in Honduras was that four of 10 women, when they are killed, they are killed with brutality that far exceeds what is needed to kill them. It’s a message,” says Nazario. “I was having horrible nightmares. I’m in therapy now after returning from Honduras.” Nazario is the author of “Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother.”

This 14 August 2019 video from the USA says about itself:

As Honduran gangs terrorize the streets, many flee north

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sonia Nazario gives a harrowing account of a bus driver’s cash drop she witnessed during a ride-along while reporting for her recent New York Times cover story, “Pay or Die: MS-13 and 18th street gangsters want to run Honduras.” For nearly a decade, gangs have been extorting cash from transportation workers in Honduras on the threat of death. According to Nazario, the Honduran transportation industry pays an estimated $23 million to the gangs every year. This unofficial “tax” system is part of a larger culture of corruption in Honduras that reaches the highest echelons of the government. “This is what is driving a lot of the despair in a place like Honduras,” says Nazario. “Because the police are paid off by the gangs, because the politicians are paid off by the gangs, because 30 to 40% of all the revenues of the government are estimated to be siphoned off in corruption by all of these players. The whole system is rotten.”

This 14 August 2019 video from the USA says about itself:

“Give Us Your Rich”: Immigration Reporter Says Trump Administration Changing “Wholesale” Who Gets into U.S.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Those are the words of Emma Lazarus inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. But this week, acting Director of Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli attempted to rewrite the poem to make a case for limiting immigration to the United States. He told NPR’s Rachel Martin on Tuesday that the Statue of Liberty’s message is “Give me your tired and your poor, who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”

Facing outrage, Cuccinelli then doubled down on his comments, telling CNN that the words on the Statue of Liberty are about “people coming from Europe.” We speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sonia Nazario about the comments and recent moves by the Trump administration to thwart immigration and target immigrants already in the U.S. Nazario says, “It’s a wholesale attempt to change who’s allowed into this country: Give us your rich; don’t give us your poor. And, of course, this is contrary to the entire tradition of immigration to the United States.”

Hondurans protest against far-right president

This 14 August 2019 video says about itself:

Protests In Honduras Intensify as President Is Implicated in Drug Trafficking

Adrienne Pine and Jesse Freeston discuss Hondurans‘ demand that President Juan Orlando Hernandez resign and the repressive, violent police response to protesters stop.

Governmental, corporate murders of environmentalists

This 11 March 2016 video from the USA says about itself:

Before Her Assassination, Berta Cáceres Singled Out Hillary Clinton for Backing Honduran Coup

Former [United States] Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is facing a new round of questions about her handling of the 2009 coup in Honduras that ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. Since the coup, Honduras has become one of the most violent places in the world.

Last week, indigenous environmental activist Berta Cáceres was assassinated in her home. In an interview two years ago, Cáceres singled out Clinton for her role supporting the coup. “We’re coming out of a coup that we can’t put behind us. We can’t reverse it,” Cáceres said. “It just kept going. And after, there was the issue of the elections. The same Hillary Clinton, in her book, ‘Hard Choices’, practically said what was going to happen in Honduras. This demonstrates the meddling of North Americans in our country. The return of the president, Mel Zelaya, became a secondary issue. There were going to be elections in Honduras. And here she [Clinton] recognized that they didn’t permit Mel Zelaya’s return to the presidency.” We play this rarely seen clip of Cáceres and speak to historian Greg Grandin.

From the University of Queensland in Australia:

The front line of environmental violence

August 6, 2019

Environmental defenders on the front line of natural resource conflict are being killed at an alarming rate, according to a University of Queensland study.

According to UQ School of Biological Sciences researcher Dr Nathalie Butt, the 1558 deaths recorded between 2002 and 2017 were largely due to external demand for the very resources they were trying to protect.

“The number of reported deaths of environmental defenders has increased, as well as the number of countries where they occur,” Dr Butt said.

“Environmental defenders help protect land, forests, water and other natural resources.

“They can be anyone — community activists, lawyers, journalists, members of social movements, NGO staff and Indigenous people — anyone who resists violence.

“And importantly, Indigenous peoples are dying in higher numbers than any other group.”

The reasons for the fatal violence are mainly related to conflict over natural resources, such as water, timber, land for agriculture or development, or minerals.

A third of all deaths between 2014 and 2017 — more than 230 — were linked to the mining and agribusiness sectors.

“Although conflict over natural resources is the underlying cause of the violence, spatial analyses showed corruption was the key correlate for the killings,” Dr Butt said.

“Globally, 43 per cent of all murders result in a conviction, while for environmental defenders this figure is only 10 per cent.

“In many instances, weak rule of law means that cases in many countries are not properly investigated, and sometimes it’s the police or the authorities themselves that are responsible for the violence.

“For example, in Pau D’Arco, Brazil, ten land defenders were killed by the police in May 2017.”

Dr Butt is calling for more transparency and accountability from multinational companies and governments, and awareness from consumers.

“The ecology of the planet is fundamental to the production of food and resources — that we all depend upon — and we are ultimately bound to support it, otherwise it will not support us,” she said.

“Part of this support is to protect the people who protect it.

“As consumers in wealthy countries — who are effectively outsourcing our resource consumption — we share responsibility for what’s happening.

“Businesses, investors and national governments at both ends of the chain of violence need to be more accountable.”

The research has been published in Nature Sustainability.

Data used for this study were collected by Global Witness.

THOUSANDS PROTEST HONDORAN PRESIDENT LINK TO DRUG GANGS Thousands of protesters took to the streets of the Hondoran capital on Tuesday to urge President Juan Orlando Hernandez to step down, just days after he was forced to deny taking money from drug gangs to secure his election in 2013. [Reuters]

GRIM REPORT SHOWS HOW MANY ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS WERE KILLED LAST YEAR Every week, an average of four environmental activists are killed. The Global Witness Defending Tomorrow report counted 212 people killed last year for their efforts to protect the Earth from the destructive effects of development for oil and gas, mineral extraction, agriculture, polluting waterways, displacing ancestral homes, destroying habitats, logging and other practices — a new record. “Our figures are almost certainly an underestimate,” the authors write. This comes alongside the news that nearly 3 billion animals were killed or displaced in Australia’s fires last year. [HuffPost]

Honduras coup, prelude to Trump’s border crisis

This 12 July 2019 video from the USA says about itself:

Ousted Honduran President Zelaya: The 2009 U.S.-Backed Coup Helped Cause Today’s Migrant Crisis

Since the 2009 U.S.-backed military coup in Honduras, extreme poverty and violence has skyrocketed in the country, forcing tens of thousands of Hondurans to flee to the U.S. with the hope of receiving political asylum. We speak with ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in the capital of Tegucigalpa about the 10th anniversary of the coup in Honduras, U.S. intervention in Central America and its link to today’s migration crisis.

Dengue epidemic in Honduras: here.

BORDER HORROR: MOM BEGS FOR ENTRY WITH SON The plight of a mother and son who had traveled some 1,500 miles from Guatemala to the border city of Ciudad Juarez, only to be stopped mere feet from the United States by a Mexican National Guard soldier, was captured by photographer Jose Luis Gonzalez. [Reuters]

BORDER CONTROL CHIEF WAS IN RACIST FACEBOOK GROUP The head of the U.S. Border Patrol said she joined a Facebook group whose members mocked migrants and lawmakers so she could read what her personnel thought about her. She said she knew little about the group. [AP]

Support those resisting the right wing in Honduras. We must stand in solidarity with the people of Honduras 10 years on from the coup, writes COLIN BURGON.

Military coup in Honduras, ten years ago

This 1 October 2016 video says about itself:

It’s well known where Hillary Clinton stood on regime change in Iraq and Libya, but what often gets forgotten is that she threw her support behind the 2009 Honduran coup that ousted democratically-elected Manuel Zelaya.

By Bill Van Auken in the USA:

Ten years since the US-backed coup in Honduras

28 June 2019

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the US-backed coup that overthrow the elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, who was dragged out of the presidential palace in his pajamas by armed troops, bundled onto an airplane and flown out of the country.

This event ushered in a decade of unending repression by a succession of extreme right-wing and deeply corrupt governments. They have ruled the country with a ruthless determination to defend the interests of the national oligarchy—the so-called “ten families” of multi-millionaires and billionaires—and of foreign finance capital.

For the masses of Honduran workers and rural poor, the policies implemented by the right-wing regimes that followed the ouster of Zelaya have proven disastrous. Honduras is today the most unequal country in Latin America, itself the most unequal region in the world. Nearly 70 percent of the country’s population lives in poverty, while over 60 percent lack formal employment. The murder rate, which soared to the highest in the world, still remains nine times that in the United States.

One result has been a mass exodus. The US government has reported detaining 175,000 Hondurans on the US-Mexican border in the last eight months. The country accounts for by far the largest share of migrants and refugees fleeing to the US border—30 percent of the total. This is nearly double the 16 percent share recorded just three years ago.

These masses of workers and their families fleeing their own country because of intolerable conditions created by imperialism and the native ruling class confront the same horrific circumstances that have shocked the population of the US and the world with the recent publication of the photograph of a Salvadoran father and his daughter who drowned together in the Rio Grande.

Just last April, an adult and three children from Honduras drowned in the same river when their raft capsized. On Thursday, Mexican authorities reported that a young Honduran woman traveling north with her family fell from a train and was crushed beneath its wheels.

Now these refugees are confronting the combined repression, detention and abuse from the governments of the United States, Mexico and Guatemala, which have united in the use of naked force in an attempt to prevent them from escaping poverty, state terror and rampant violence.

Democratic Party candidates and congressional leaders have shed crocodile tears over the deaths in the Rio Grande and postured as defenders of immigrants. These sentiments are belied, however, by the fact that … then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, presided over the coup that devastated Honduras, driving its people in desperation to flee the country despite the threats of death, persecution and being thrown into a US concentration camp.

After Zelaya’s overthrow, kidnapping and expulsion from the country, the Obama administration sought to preserve a veneer of commitment to “democracy” in Latin America—and deniability for its military, intelligence and diplomatic operatives—by publicly deploring the ouster of Zelaya.

Clinton, however, pointedly refused to describe the military’s seizure and deportation of an elected president as a “coup”, a designation that under the US Foreign Assistance Act, would have required the Obama administration to cut off aid and ties to the coup regime.

The administration likewise failed to demand Zelaya’s reinstatement. Given that the US accounted for 70 percent of Honduran export earnings and provided the guns and aid upon which the country’s military depended, it had unquestioned power to force a reversal of the coup.

Its formal reservations notwithstanding, however, it was soon revealed that top US officials had been in discussions with the military commanders and right-wing politicians who organized the coup shortly before Zelaya’s overthrow.

… Zelaya earned Washington’s enmity by becoming swept up by Latin America’s so-called “Pink Tide”. …

For Zelaya, the clear attraction was cheap Venezuelan oil and loans. However, US imperialism, which had sought seven years earlier to overthrow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in a civilian-military coup, was determined to eliminate a government aligned with Venezuela and Cuba in Honduras.

The Central American country has longed served as a staging ground for counterrevolutionary operations in the region, from the 1954 CIA overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala through to the CIA-organized “contra” war against Nicaragua in the 1980s. The civil wars and counter-insurgency campaigns carried out by US imperialism in the region, using Honduras as its base, would claim the lives of hundreds of thousands. It remains the site of the largest US military base in Latin America at Soto Cano.

Much the same US personnel involved in the 2002 coup against Chavez in Venezuela under George W. Bush were involved in the 2009 coup against Zelaya in Honduras … . And the same strategic policy guides the Trump administration’s present regime change operation against the government of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

Underlying this clear continuity in Washington’s foreign policy, under both Democratic and Republican administrations alike, is the drive by US imperialism to reverse the decline of its global economic hegemony by military means, particularly in the region that it has so long regarded as its “own backyard”.

The Honduran working class responded to the 2009 coup with immense heroism. It staged continuous demonstrations and strikes in the teeth of savage repression. This included the arbitrary detention of thousands, the shooting of protesters, the gang rape of women detained at protests and the organization of death squads to assassinate journalists and opponents of the coup regime.

Washington ignored this savage brutality, and the US corporate media largely passed over it in silence.

…

Honduras is today confronting its most severe crisis since the coup of ten years ago. For over a month, mass protests and strikes by teachers and doctors against sweeping IMF-dictated cuts and threats of privatization of education and healthcare have rocked the country. Students have joined these mass protests, occupying their schools and confronting riot police and troops.

Today will see mass demonstrations throughout Honduras marking the coup anniversary. These protests will pay homage to the 136 killed during the repression of the protests against the coup, as well as the 14 murdered by death squads and the 13 disappeared. Since then, many more have been slain, including four killed in just the most recent protests.

They will undoubtedly also advance the demand for the bringing down of the government of Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), the corrupt president and overseer for the International Monetary Fund, who is kept in power by the Honduran military and US Marines.

Zelaya, now the leader of the Partido Libertad y Refundación, is advancing this demand.