Academics in Central America and Mexico in a Time of Insecurity

Academics in Central America and Mexico in a Time of Insecurity

(Part 1 of 2)

By Wendy Griffin

In 2013  I was invited to more international academic conferences in Honduras than in the last 27 years combined. After the meeting of the International Traditional Games Federation in San Marcos, Santa Barbara in April, there was the First International Pedagogical Exchange of Latin America and the Caribbean at the UPN in San Pedro in July and the Second Congress of the Central American Linguists Association (ACALING) in August. In October on the 8^th and 9^th,  there was a conference on the History of the North Coast of Honduras  sponsored by the Casa de Cultura (House of Culture) and CURLA, the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH)’s La Ceiba branch.

This is part of a growing trend for Latin American academics to meet in regional meetings in Latin America rather than try to attend US academic conferences.  The US conferences are usually in English, which most Latin American academics do not understand, the visa is hard to get, the hotels are outrageously expensive, the food is expensive and not what they like to eat, and the airfare is very high.  And in spite of the growing problems of insecurity, I did not hear of one incident of people being attacked or robbed during these conferences.

This does not mean that the conferences were not affected by the problem of violence in Honduras. The UPN said they did not do much publicity of the Pedagogical Conference in San Pedro because mareros (gang members) threatened to disturb the conference, but in fact it was held without major problems and many international speakers did come. The UNAH organizers said they held the Linguists’ conference in two different sites, because of the concern that there might be strikes which would block entrance to one site, but at least they would be able to regroup and do it in the other site if that happened. Again a number of international speakers came.

While the main Linguists’ conference was unaffected by strikes, the day before the conference the Volunteer Ambassador of Wikipedia in Mexico Leigh Thelmadatter, also a speaker at the main conference, tried to give a hands on training on how to edit Wikipedia pages at the UNAH’s Medical Library, next to Hospital Escuela (The Teaching Hopsital) to Indians attending the conference and Tegucigalpa librarians. The university students had indeed taken over the building and were on strike, apparently related to a nurse’s strike at Hospital Escuela, and we and the Honduran librarians and Indians who wanted to attend the workshop were unable to get in. The nurses, like the doctors, the teachers, etc. were on strike due to not being paid.

We had a meeting planned at the UPN in the afternoon, so we tried to reschedule the workshop there. In spite of having been a professor there, being with a current student from there, seeing several professors who came and verified that I had taught there, and having a written copy of the invitation sent three months ahead of time for the meeting at the UPN, until the secretary of the person who was coordinating the meeting came personally about half an hour later, we were left outside at the gate of the UPN  and they would not let us in the library at the UPN. I personally have a collection of about 14 books I have written at the UPN library and I could not get in to see them, for security reasons.

The professor who had made arrangements for the meeting said that security was tremendous at Honduran universities now with the current crime level in Honduras and since the coup against Mel Zelaya in 2009. The week before professors from Mexico had come to visit this UPN professor Dr. Jorge Amaya, a world renown researcher of immigrant groups in Honduras including Garífunas, Black English speakers, Jews, Arabs, Chinese, and the guards would not let these visiting Mexican professors on the campus.

At the UNAH, which is across the street from the General Cementary and near Suyapa, both areas infested with gangs, they are planning to require biometrics to be able to get on campus. While at the UNAH at the linguist’s conference, gang members set fire to a bus in Suyapa and about 5 people a night died of gunshot wounds often near the university, so there is a reason for security.

Obviously if anyone not attending these universities currently wants to use their libraries, they are out of luck.  Until 1950, the UNAH was one of only two libraries in Honduras, so for historical studies, their Honduran Collection is invaluable.  Currently anyone who presented personal documents at the library, could use the library and getting on campus is open.  Some Honduran parents have told me they do not send their children to the UNAH specifically because of the problem of assaults, and their buses used to be among the buses most often assaulted. One UNAH student I knew was assaulted 9 times before graduating.

 

Academics in Central America and Mexico in this Time of Insecurity

(Part 2 of 2)

By Wendy Griffin

While several international conferences were held in Honduras this year, other Central American conferences have been cancelled, such as the Association of Central American Anthropologists and that of Central American Historians and the members think it was because of the problem of insecurity. For example, the Association of Central American Historians had been held every two years since 1992 and its site varies from year to year.

The last meeting was held in Chiapas, Mexico, which required the Central American professors to cross the Mexican-Guatemala border by bus. This border is notorious for being controlled by a gang known as “Las Zetas”, who have attacked and killed peasants in the border areas and illegal aliens crossing the border, as reported in La Prensa.     After that conference, although no one died, apparantly people just felt it was too dangerous to be travelling like that. These professors did travel in the 1990’s, even though it was hard to find a meeting ground because, particularly for historians from Guatemala where many historians were in political exile, because of the civil wars.

The problems with “Zetas” come up in stories of academics involved in cultural exchanges or field schools with university students.  David Flores used to take members of his Honduran folkdance group “Zots” who are all high school students in Tegucigalpa, to dance in Mexico. They were always a hit at the Tapachula, Mexico festival. But the parents will no longer let him take students across the Mexican border to present folk dances because of the fear of the bus being attacked by Zetas.

A US professor said that his university would not let him take students to Copan Ruinas, Honduras, because of fear of crime in Honduras, but they did let him take them to Eastern Guatemala. They went into a cafeteria to have lunch and they shared the restaurant with 7 armed Zetas also having lunch.  The Zetas did not bother them, but it certainly raises questions of security about bringing US undergraduate students to Central America in general. The day after my article on crime in Trujillo came out, the atlantic.com did a story on the Most dangerous place in the World is not where you think, and named the whole Northern Triangle of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala as this center of violence.  

At least two foreign student groups who were planning to visit the San Pedro Museum of Anthropology and History cancelled before arriving due to concerns of bringing students to the city with the highest murder rate in the world.  The schools argue that if Honduras is too dangerous for the Peace Corps, which was here in huge numbers during the Contra War, then it is probably too dangerous for the university to say to the parents, “ Let your children go on this event, we believe they will be safe.”

Some Japanese university students studying in California wrote me to ask me to give an opinion on their safety if they came to Honduras to observe water projects. Their university did not want to approve their travel grant because of concerns of dangers. The NGO which was sponsoring the water project offered to meet them at the Tegucigalpa airport in a van with an armed guard, travel to the site with the van and the armed guard, and they would sleep in a compound with a high fence and an armed guard. The anthropologist advising them commented, “What kind of anthropological experience could the students have if they were going everywhere with armed guards and high fences?”

Since as my recent Honduras Weekly.com article showed, in Trujillo even with armed guards, people are getting broken in to, and people’s cars are attacked on the highway sometimes causing their death, so I recommended that not even under these circumstances could anyone guarantee the safety of a van full of Japanese university students.

While a few foreigners in Trujillo objected to my  Honduras Weekly article about is Trujillo safe for foreigners, another said they could have named twice as many cases of crimes against foreigners as the ones included in the article. The day I sent the article to Honduras Weekly, a university Sociology  professor from Ontario, Canada who was planning to do a baseline study  of Trujillo before and after cruise boats, decided to walk from his hotel at Tranquility Bay to Trujillo, the exact walk mentioned in the article, and as I warned in the article, he and his girlfriend were in fact robbed. They had been walking into Trujillo to sign papers to buy land, in an area other foreigners say floods in the winter and becomes a swamp, but since they were robbed, they filed their police report and left town.

The same week the article came out, an American retiree with a Honduran husband in Trujillo said that there was a long gunfight less than half a block from her house in the early evening. She said in the US there would have been half dozen cop cars, a helicopter, if such a firefight was reported, but in Trujillo nothing happened. La gringa who has a blog out of La Ceiba reported that she heard shots the night before the gun battle this woman heard in Trujillo. The next morning she went out and found out her next door neighbors had been held up at gunpoint and tied up and robbed.

The exact same moment this week the tour organizer for the cruise boats in Trujillo was telling a Trujillo neighbor that Trujillo was safe, that you could walk around at 3 am in the morning and nothing would happen, the radio announced that Marco Tulio Castillo, a prominent Trujillo lawyer was kidnapped and they were asking a lot of money for his rescue. Just that morning La Prensa had announced that 68 Honduran lawyers had been killed since Pepe Lobo took office.   So I am not making up the fact that it has become more dangerous here recently and that this crime is often in the areas where gringos are and the crime sometimes affects the gringos themselves. The US Embassy website for Tegucigalpa, Honduras talks about Americans murdered in Honduras and their cases remained unsolved, like most Honduran murder or theft cases. The Honduran police actually are very active when there is a kidnapping case and many people are rescued still alive.  

Besides academic conferences and bringing US students, even some Honduran university professors are afraid to go out to the villages to do field research now. One Honduran anthropologist who went without fear past the Aguacate Airbase where the Contras used to be stationed and Honduran military would search vehicles to make sure they did not have arms or cameras in the 1980’s to work with the Pech, said to visit the Chorti now he calls them  ahead of time and they meet him in town with a 5 man escort with machetes to go out to the villages. He said after they killed the President of the Pech Federation Blas Lopez, a bilingual education teacher in El Carbon, Olancho, he no longer went out to the visit the Pech in Olancho.

I was shocked at the condition of the Pech of El Carbon when I visited them in July 2013, with non-Pech people being brought there, executed on their land and then left for dead, that 88 manzanas of land had been invaded and the forest cut down and set fire to, and the government was doing nothing, which the wife of the community’s chief  sick from nerves serious enough to require medical treatment, because when she heard gunshots at night, she was worried they were coming to kill her and her children because of the land dispute.  Over 50 Tolupan leaders have been killed since the formation of FETRIXY. In the community of Subirana, Yoro they buried three leaders in one year.

At several of the academic conferences, the issue of insecurity has come up as part of papers or panal discussions. The person who came from Mexico to present on Mexican education said they tried to do an evaluation, but at first got few or no responses. So they talked in depth to a few school directors and got reports of school directors or teachers being threatened by drug traffickers, and violence and drugs affecting the schools. 

After I did a report on similar situation in San Pedro schools for Honduras this Week, the school teachers who were also my university students were paniced the gangs would take reprisals against them for having had the interviews with the gang members end up in an international newspaper. Apparently the gang members read the article in the US on the Internet and got back to the Honduran gang members within the week.   I do not think any of the teachers were harmed, but I stopped printing up student stories about gangs for the safety of the students.

At the Linguists’ Conference, the Pech representative asked in his panel presentation that the Three Tolupan Indians who had been killed that week during a protest against an active antimony mine and a proposed hydroelectric project in Yoro be remembered. The Association of Central American Linguists (ACALING) included at the end of their Second Congress in Tegucigalpa  a resolution denouncing the violation of human rights of the Indians including the murder of 6 Indians in Honduras that week.

Archaeological research in the Ulua valley which is near San Pedro is almost impossible now. One well known site is near the maras  (gangs) of the Colonia Planeta, and people said it is not possible to be visited. To visit another site, a Honduran ethnohistorian suggested I try to get a San Pedro Sula municipal police escort, even though the site is more than an hour outside of San Pedro.  This ethnohistorian also arranged an escort for a French linguist to be able to go from the San Pedro Sula airport to come to Trujillo to work with the Pech, because as an employee of the French government, the French government was not keen on having her exposed to the level of danger in Honduras, and especially thought the buses or travelling alone by car were too dangerous.  

While academics can choose to not go to the countryside, to Colonia La Planeta, to not visit Honduras, to not report on maras,  a lot of Hondurans are stuck here. What about them? What quality of life do they have? In San Pedro, a Honduran historian said the gangs are collecting war tax “Impuesto de guerra” as protection money is called in Honduras on everyone down to the women who sell tortillas. More than 1,000 Businesses have gone out of business for the inability to make a profit above the war tax and when people lose their jobs, they are hesistant to start new businesses because of concern they can not make enough to pay the war tax, expenses, and eat, too. Taxi drivers often leave the business for the danger and for the problem of not being able to make a living paying the war tax, too. The Honduran newspapers have done reports just on the estimates of how much war tax the gangs have collected from bus companies, and the total was around $26 million. Maybe they should be hiring gang members to collect Honduran government taxes, as they seem to have collected more than the legitimate government taxes.

 Hondurans who had houses in areas controlled by gangs sometimes just abandon the houses and even a church, because it was impossible to sell in the gang infested area and it was better to get out alive with their families. A number of maquilas have left the San Pedro and Choloma areas, some of which moved to Nicaragua, partly because the owners are in danger of kidnapping or being killed and the workers are threatened by maras. As the jobs disappear and the ability to start their own little business impeded by the war tax, the crime situation just gets worse, noted this historian.

One academic reported that the Lencas in particular were angry that some people who had studied them had turned out to be fair weather friends, because when the violation of their human rights became worse after the coup against Mel Zelaya in 2009, these academics were in silence. Reportedly in the villages associated with COPINH, there is a list of academics who have been silent since the coup  and the local people will not let them do studies in their villages anymore, that they are not welcome to do studies in the villages of the Lencas, if they are not willing to speak out when the Lencas’ rights are violated. Two Lencas have died in their more than one year struggle against a dam at Rio Blanco, Intibuca.

An “academic” study of the geography of the Honduran Mosquitia, coordinated by the University of Kansas, but funded with money from the US military’s Minerva projects, was also denounced by OFRANEH, the Garifuna ethnic federation, as part of the militarization of the Mosquitia by the US on their blog www.ofraneh.wordpress.com.  These studies of geography with the US military money have been associated with problematic areas of southern Mexico, Columbia, and the Iraq/Iran area, and in addition to being associated with the military are associated with the interest in possible oilfields in the Mosquitia region, reported OFRANEH.  Said one Canadian geologist, “For geology and for the military, you can never have too many maps.”  I was concerned that this confusion of US academics and  US military projects put me in danger as a US academic. In fact in arriving in San Pedro Sula within an hour of arriving in the summer of 2014, I was accused by hotel employees of being a spy.

When the information about the University of Kansas mapping project first came out on the Internet under the name Centroamerica indigena (Indigenous Central America) and it said it was going to be in areas with more than 45% indigenous language speakers, I was concerned that it also was going to cover Guatemala’s indigenous areas and I alerted US anthropologists and linguists that I knew were going to be in Guatemala and in Nicaragua that information about this project was on the Internet and floating though channels of Central American and Mexican Indian communications and the reaction against this by the Mayas or the Nicaraguan Miskitos might put them in danger, too.

In the case of the previous mapping exercise México Indígena in Chiapas and Oaxaca, even Mexican anthropologists hundreds of miles away in Mexico City at the UNAM and five years later still felt that that project had compromised them in the indigenous communities of Mexico. The Honduran and Costa Rican linguists because of this experience in Mexico already had the term “antropologo mercenario” (a mercenary anthropologist) in Spanish before I alerted them to the new mapping project.   What a reputation for US anthropologists to have to try that it does not apply to them.

 In fact in spite of the name, the University of Kansas Minerva funded project only affects Miskito and Garifuna areas in Honduras and not even all of them, but only those in the ZEDE  (Zone of Economic Development) Sico Paulaya in the Honduran Mosquitia (see the Honduran government’s official website on Model Cities www.zede.gob.hn) . The purpose of ZEDE’s or Model Cities is to open the area to foreign investment, which is very suspicious in this area as the  borders of the project encompass the majority of  the Rio Plátano Biosphere.

Miskitos of MASTA, Pech (usually those in the Biosphere are represented by MASTA), and Garifunas of OFRANEH in the Biosphere are concerned about lack of land titles for their communities, but Miskito land use in particular is very hard to title as Westerners or the World Bank PATH (Program for the Adminsitration of Lands in Honduras) project understand land titles as Miskito land use includes lands on the coast but people in that community will also own lands in the interior to farm, and use hunting lands  and trees in the forest for crafts which are often days away from the Coastal village. Gold bearing rivers artisanally panned by all ethnic groups also complicate the picture.

Since the information about the Department of Defense funded US academic supervised mapping project is floating around with the name Centroamerica Indigena, including on UNAM and ACALING websites in Spanish, usually not connected to maps, US academics who travel to Central America should be aware of the potential for more hostility than in the past. According to a recent article of the journal of Society for Applied Anthropology this confusing of who is your friend and who is against you and causing identity conflict is part of the Counter Insurgency policy again being used by the US military. When applied to an area where AK 47’s are common and even the nurses wear pistols like the Rio Platano Biosphere, the dream of ecotourism so glowingly reported in the Wikipedia article on the Rio Platano Biosphere, seems very unlikely to return in the short term.

Most of the new hotels I have heard of in Honduran indigenous areas like in Moradel, Trujillo, Colon and Vallecito, Olancho next to the Salto del Diablo (jump of the devil named for evil spirits that live there) waterfall among the Pech, Sangrelaya, Colon among the Garífunas seem to be designed to give drug traffickers passing through places to stay out of the way while waiting for buses for the next part of their journey.