Honduras This Week, Honduras's English language newspaper 1988-2009, Remembered

Honduras This Week Remembered

By Wendy Griffin January 2015

Honduras This Week was an English language newspaper edited in Tegucigalpa, Honduras between 1988 and 2009. In 1988 and 1989 the newspaper was called Tegucigalpa This Week, but at the request of people from all over Honduras, the name was changed to Honduras This Week. From 1995 to 2013 there was also an online version called Honduras This Week Online which had the URL’s of http://www.marrder.com/htw and www.hondurasthisweek.com.  The webmaster was Stan Marrder, a Honduran programmer who lived in Houston, Texas, USA, the owner of Marrder Multimedia, which still exists.

The founder and senior editor until 2006 of Honduras This Week was Honduran Mario Gutierrez Minera. He was born in Barrio El Centro, Tegucigalpa to one of Honduras’s first pharmaceutical chemists, a pioneer in the soap and candles industries, and his wife a Mexican journalist in Honduras. The doctor who brought him into the world was his neighbor, Dr. Ramon Villeda who went on to be the President of Honduras known as “Pajarito.” Once while editor of Honduras This Week Gutierrez Minero wrote an article about Historic Barrio El Centro which had once been a neighborhood with families living in it like his, but now is just the urban center of Tegucigalpa.

Before founding the paper he had worked helping to organize the Ministry of Culture under the military government of Osvaldo López Orellano. He was inspired to found the English language newspaper Honduras This Week after working in the Honduran Embassy to the Vatican in Rome, Italy. He found the only things Europeans heard about Honduras were coups, corruption, and disasters like hurricanes. He started the paper with a vision to present a more balanced view of Honduras. The first year of the paper’s existence it was called Tegucigalpa This Week, but people from all over Honduras requested that they change the name to something that represented the whole county, so after 1989 it was known as Honduras This Week.

Mario Gutierrez’s wife, Rosibel Gutierrez, then an UNAH Math and Computer professor, helped at the newspaper with technical aspects and also sometimes wrote articles. They divorced before he died, and she is currently retired. As they finished college, his son Mario Jr. and his daughter began to work in the office both with Honduras This Week Video and the Honduras This Week newspaper. After the death of Mario Sr. in 2006 after a short illness caused by liver cancer, Mario Jr. took over both parts of the Company. While Honduras This Week newspaper ceased to be published after the 2009 coup against Mel Zelaya due to decreased revenue from tourism related advertising, Honduras This Week Video still continues and can be found at www.hondurasthisweek.com.  Even before Mario Sr's death., Honduras This Week Videos was the more profitable part of the business.

The newspaper covered a wide range of topics, having particularly good coverage of the Honduran environmental movement, Honduran culture, the movements of Honduran Blacks and Indians, tourism information, and Honduran law explained to foreigners, as well as general and economic news of Honduras. For example, both the authors of the articles on the Black Bay Islanders and on the Miskitos, Garifuna, Pech and Tawahkas in the book Endangered Peoples of Latin America: Struggles to Survive and Thrive (Susan Stonich ed. 2001) recommended Honduras This Week Online as a good source of importance on these peoples and these areas.

The newspaper received 15 awards including the Amy Foundation Writing Award for an article on a Christian topic, and awards for elegant web design such as an EyeCandy Award. Encyclopedia Britannica Online linked to it as a “good source on modern Honduras”.  About half the articles on Stanford University’s Honduras Teacher’s Corner are links to Honduras This Week Online articles.  W. E. Gutman, an American journalist who wrote for the paper but also for many big name newspapers in the US covering Central America, called Honduras This Week, “The bravest little newspaper in Central America”.

From 2009 when the newspaper ceased to publish new articles until 2013, the archived versions of Honduras This Week Online, remained available online. In 2014 they were no longer available.  The children of the original owner have the entire paper archive of Honduras This Week in Tegucigalpa. The paper was printed by the printing press owned by the Spanish language daily newspaper El Heraldo, also based in Tegucigalpa. At its height the paper version included about 12,000 copies and went to more than 100 countries, as well as being sold in Honduras. The Honduran mail service did not favor the newspaper as it took 3 weeks to get the paper mailed from Tegucigalpa to Trujillo and 4 weeks to receive it by mail in the US and Canada. For this reason, it was sometimes jokingly called Honduras Last Week.   Its website sometimes received over 1 million hits a month.

Besides being the editor of Honduras This Week Mario Gutierrez Minera was an expert in Honduran coins. According to Gilberto Izcoa, the president of the Numismatics Club of Honduras, most of the photos in coin catalogs of Honduran coins were from Mario Gutierrez. He had an extensive personal collection which was sold upon his death, but remained in the country.

For many years, the day to day editor was American photojournalist Eric Schwimmer. He did an excellent job of ensuring the newspaper was interesting to read and also visually pleasing. Lack of income from the paper seems to have been the reason the owner could not pay Eric Schwimmer a better salary and they parted company, which led to quality problems for the paper, but it struggled on for a few more years. In the last years of its existence most of the reporters were unpaid, and included volunteers from the English journalism internship program Eye to Eye.

While Honduras This Week is no longer online, a number of its articles have migrated to other sites on such varied subjects as Honduran pickled vegetables (encurtido), Honduran Spanish (the use of vos), The History of English speaking Black Churches in Honduras, Homeless Street Children in La Ceiba, Sun Coffee and Its Threat to Local Wildlife, the Educational Program Education for All (EFA),  the life and work of the Black English speaking author Sabas Whittaker, and The Story of Punta, a Garifuna dance.

Sometimes whole articles have been published in other books. For example, in Jorge Amaya’s Los Chinos de Ultramar he includes in Spanish Wendy Griffin’s article on the Stories Behind the Honduran Chinese restaurants as the first article on the Honduran  Overseas Chinese by a social scientist, and in Artlie Brooks’ 2012 book "Black Chest" on the history of Bay Islanders, he includes one of Wendy Griffin’s two article series on the History of English speaking Black Churches. Honduras This Week articles are cited in academic books including on Garifunas, the Garifuna language, Palestinian Arabs in Honduras, the Contras in Honduras, and English speaking Blacks in Honduras. They are also cited in articles on Wikipedia such as about Los Horcones Massacre and Ciudad Blanca. Especially interesting is that Black Bay Islanders like Artlie Brooks and Garifunas like Ruben Reyes author of the Trilingual English-Spanish-Garifuna dictionary would quote Wendy Griffin's Honduras This Week articles about their own ethnic groups, which gives some validation that they thought they what was said in the articles about their own ethnic group was valid.  This is often not the case of what is written about minority ethnic groups. Garifunas and Hondurans in the US in general were one of the target audiences of the newspaper, and also  for much of Honduras's online news media today.

From Newspaper Journalists to Book Authors

More than half of its journalists went on to write books including W. E. Gutman, Melanie Wetzel, Candice Bergman, Maria Fiallos, Erling Duus Christensen, and Wendy Griffin. Other reporters included Howard Rosenweig (Copán Update column from Copan Ruinas),  Larry Lee (who also wrote under Señor Banana), and Honduran journalist Blanca Moreno.

W. E. Gutman—A Paler Shade of Red (his memoirs, very interesting),  Journey to Xibalba: The Subversion of Human Rights in Central America: Reporter’s Notebook  (an anthology of some of his Central American articles, published in Tegucigalpa), Novels: One Night in Copán, Flight from Ein Sof, The Inventor, Nocturnes: Random Echoes from the Dreamtime, and his screenplay One Last Dream which  was also published in French, Un Dernier Rêve. His books and his screenplays, published by a publisher out of Vancouver, Canada  are available from Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com.

Erling Duus Christensen- (1999) Jesús Walks in the Garden of the Parque Central and other Honduran Essays. Tegucigalpa: Litografía Lopez  (on WorldCat).  His brother also arranged for more of his writings to be published in a second volume in Honduras after his death--Erling Duus Christensen (2002) "The Quiet Revolution and Other Honduran Essays from the Pen of the Prairie Populist" Tegucigalpa: Litografía Lopez. An American artist in Honduras Guillermo Yuscarán wrote the introductory essay for the first book and one of his paintings appears on the cover of the second book.

Melanie Wetzel- Honduras Law. Her memoirs of her time in Honduras as a journalist (she wrote the column on Honduran law), law student at the UNAH,  and  a lawyer for the real estate firms in Roatan, Bay Islands where free market is the polite way to describe the situation, where people actually die, US Marshals swoop in and take away the real estate agency owner in a country with no extradition treaty with the US as a result of unresolved disputes. One of the real estate companies in Roatan are old business associates of a member of the Bush family in relation to the savings and loan failure in the US.  Presences of both the Bush and their business partners the Walker family, also in Honduras related to Contras, proposed gambling casinos, Zapata Oil leases offshore of Central America and possible ties to United Fruit, etc. continue  in this part of Central America and the nearby Honduran North Coast in recent decades, but these two last names appear on and off in the historic record of the area in very interesting situations at least since the 1860's. Available from Amazon.com  

Candice Bergman. She wrote a book called Wee Speak about Bay Islands English. Regrettably no university in the US seems to have purchased it as it is not on WorldCat.

Maria Fiallos-Guide to Investment and Relocation to Roatan, Includes Utila and Guanaja. Available from Libros Centroamericanos on the Internet.

Wendy Griffin-Dioses, Heroes, y Hombres en el Universo Mítico Pech (with Dr. Lazaro Flores), Los Garifunas de Honduras (with CEGAH), Los Pech de Honduras (with the Pech Indians Juana Carolina Hernandez Torres and Hernan Martinez Escobar) She was also Coordinator of the project to publish El kisi que llevó a un niño and La gente de Miskut which were bilingual Miskito-Spanish storybooks and her research also appears in David Flores’s Evolución Histórica de la Danza Folklorica Hondureña, and Adalid Martinez’s Antropologia Alimenticia.

 Her books are in US university libraries where she also has several other manuscripts which can be found through WorldCat or Google books. Her whole book on The History and Culture of the Bay Islanders and North Coast English speakers of Honduras is available for free on the Internet, as is the video she is in on the Ciudad Blanca archaeological ruin in Honduras “Discover The Rio Plátano Biosphere in Search of Ciudad Blanca”, available in 1 part in Spanish and 4 parts in English on Youtube. The makers of the Ciudad Blanca video found her through reading her articles in Honduras This Week and contacting her through the newspaper. International researchers from England, Denmark, Canada, and the US who were investigating diverse topics in Honduras have done the same, arriving on her doorstep in Trujillo, Honduras after contacting her through the newspaper.

The Dream Continues

After Honduras This Week stopped publishing, another English language online newspaper HondurasWeekly.com appeared, edited by Marco Caceres, a Honduran resident in Washington, DC.  Some Honduras This Week writers like W. E. Gutman and Wendy Griffin wrote for this newspaper, too. In 2014, another English language online newspaper about Honduras appeared, so at least some news of Honduras is still getting out to the English reading public. Honduras is described in the beginning of Tanya Kerrsen of Food First's  book (2013) "Power Grab" as “the great unknown country”.  During the crisis of the flood Honduran Women and Children arriving on the US border in 2014, even Fox News was saying, “Why don’t we know what is happening in Honduras that is causing this?”

According to the HondurasThisWeek.com website perhaps the greatest contribution of the paper was that it opened opportunities for businesses, non-profits, authors who publish or research in Honduras, for artists and tourist destinations in Honduras, and Honduran Indians and Blacks to be discovered, by people who wanted to connect with them as clients, funders, researchers, or volunteers.   Parts of the Honduran collections in US libraries were obtained through the Honduras This Week Book Club which sold Honduran books or books about Honduras during the early years of the newspaper, including Wendy Griffin's book 1991 book with Honduran anthropologist Lazaro Flores "Dioses, heroes, y Hombres en el Universo Mitico Pech" (Gods, heroes, and Men in the Pech Mythical Universe).

Upon seeing that book listed in the newspaper and seeing they were covering the first major controversy of the Honduran environmental movement the giving of a lease to log the forest in the Honduran Mosquitia to the Stone Container Company, a Taiwanese owned Company based in Chicago, Wendy Griffin got interested to see if the paper would want to carry stories about the Honduran Indians and Garifunas, and that is how their long relationship began. At first she did not go into the office, but just sent things by mail.  Since both she and the wife of the editor of the newspaper Rosibel Gutierrez were professors at the UNAH in the same building, one day Rosibel Gutierrez went to look for Wendy Griffin in the English major office. Rosibel was surprised when they met because she said "I assumed you were one of those negritas  (little Black people) from the Coast, since you were always writing about them and the Coast." 

Maybe it is even nicer that Honduras This Week still published Wendy Griffin's stories over the first year before they met her, even while thinking the author was Black. Wendy Griffin has known cases of other white people in Honduras like Francis Burns the son of third generation workers for Texaco in Honduras, who had English last names who got turned down for jobs sight unseen, because the person hiring did not want to hire "one of those negritos". While things that end in -ito and -ita can show caring and loving, in this case it shows looking down on them, similar to calling a 60 year old Black man in the US "boy" or calling international consultants with Master's degrees and over 40, "gringuita" and addressing her as "Vos" (which in Honduras shows a degree of being so familiar that in  Honduras it is only used with your children, between children, and only sometimes between partners in married couples,mostly when they are angry at the other partner). Only after having written for the paper for over 10 years, the editor Mario Sr. asked, "And what are you? (Meaning what did you study as a university major?) Are you an anthropologist?"  In fact, I did not study anthropology, but rather history, languages, and international development education and business administration, but he did not know, since I never submitted any credentials, just articles. Very different from the present a resume and cover letter and interview way of usually getting to write for newspapers in the US.