Good News Good Music, Not Good News, COPINH and Environmental Prize Invisible News from Honduras

Good News, Good Music, Not so Good News,  and Invisible News out of Honduras

By Wendy Griffin 4/24/2014

 

I looked at the Lenca website of COPINH this morning .  The head of the Honduran Lenca organization COPINH Berta Caceres who like Miriam Miranda has had her life threatened and has had legal problems that included the Honduran pólice looking for her won last week the most prestigious US prize for environmental activism the Goldman Prize. Her acceptance speech in San Francisco California is on the Copihn website.  For those of you supporting the Hondurans in their struggle through teaching your students, the 3 minute  Rio Gualcarque music video is on the front page of the COPINH website and ends with the simple statement of the names of the Lencas who have died in the Rio Blanco struggle and that they would have liked to have Heard this song if they were still alive. Both the first video with yukai a Lenca Elder and Berta's speech thanks God and the spirits of the land and the rivers who give us strength and what we need to live. The Rio Gualcarque music video is a gift of a non-Lenca songwriter to the Lenca people in their struggle. You might want to hear it and share it with your students to celebrate this one note of beautiful news.

The previous in Honduras activist who won the Goldman Prize Father Tamayo for his work with the Environmental Organization of Olancho was found to have violated the Honduran law that prohibits foreigners from being active in political activities and had his permission to be in Honduras revoked. The Environmental Movement of Olancho was on the list of 5,000 NGO's to have its personaría jurídica or corporate chárter revoked which came out at the beginning of current Honduran president's Juan Orlando Hernandez's administration, which also listed Padre Fausto Milla's organization which Works with medicinal plants and healthy food among the Lencas and the Maya Chortis and who supports the peasants in the Lower Aguan conflict.   Padre Fausto Milla's female assistant had to seek political asylym in Spain for the threats against her, and it was given.  

 

While the Lencas have lost most of their language Lenca place names remain and while the spanish may call the struggle the Rio Blanco (White River) struggle, the name Rio Gualcarque remains. Guala means hand, and by association refers to racoons (mapuches)  who are famous for washing their food with their Little hands, and the place where streams come together to form rivers like  Gualaco (Rio Sico in Olancho), gualala, gualcalpa a lot of house of  guala, place where rivers are born)  the mountain where Lempira and Lazaro Flores's ancestors personally  resisted  in Honduras. Nahua does not the sound r so Gualcarque is a Lenca Word that remains pure,  not even mispronounced by the Nahuas unlike the Lenca place name Guarcho a type of colorful bird became Belen Gualcho in Western Honduras, bordering on Ocotepeque (the mountain of fat back pines in Nahua).

 

Some good news related to Honduras. You might enjoy the guitar piece in the music video on the COPINH website. This is why the Guardian was carrying the piece on Honduras having the highest number of murdered environmental activist in Latin America, although it was since 2002, over the last year it has been Brazil with 26 murdered. As one Honduran reporter said, they don't have to murder us to silence us in Honduras.

 

The list of the 10 families who control Honduras and who Vos el Soberano accuses of having financed the 2009 coup against Mel Zelaya   includes an extraordinary preponderance of people who control the media in Honduras, newspapers and TV, most of whom are Palestianian Arabs, with one Rumanian Jew (also considered a turco because rumanians also came to Honduras with old Ottoman empire Passports). I am working on a series of articles about Honduran Banks and Honduran lending institutions particularly Fundación Covelo of Adolfo Facusse and Ficohsa, the owner of FICOHSA is on this list of 10 families and is the Facusse family.

 

I am partly woring on these articles  this is a because the head of the FICOHSA is also the head of the Latin American businessmen's association and she and Juan Orlando Hernandez invited the rest of the businessmen to follow Honduras's example. I am also trying to clarify who might have the English ability, the knowledge of banking, and the power related to the devalutation of the Honduran lempira exactly as Juan Orlando Hernández was declared oficially the winner of the troubled 2013 election, which was around Christmas 2013, below 20 to 1, which is a topic I had discussed in a now invisible Honduras This Week article where a Wall Street Journal writer said he would short the lempira at 20 to 1 when Rafael Callejas became to let the lempira be devalued. Rafael Callejas and Ricardo Maduro also come from banking families as I will also discuss in the article on Gilberto Izcoa's new book on Billetes de Honduras.   

 

Because this article is now invisible, but memorable the issue might be insider trading which is not a crime in Honduras, because the penal code has not been updated in 30 years and thus predates the founding the Honduran stock market but is in the US. I was told by the late Dr. Edward Kaplan my profesor of Chinese Economic History and a follower of Austrian Economics that that article by me  on 10 years of the effects of devaluation and a book review of Alcides Hernandez's From Structural Adjustment to being Wounded by a the structual adjustment package of reforms (the translation of Del Ajuste Estructural al paquetazo) that my Honduras This Week article was as good as anything he has read on the topic, which to me was similar in praise  to winning  the Nobel Prize.

 

I saw a novel while in the  hospital again on the "humor cart" called The  Silent Oligarch, about a Russian oligarch in oil, London and Gran Caymanian banker, countries that fall over backward and bend rules like Kazakstán and newspaper reporters who lose their lives to unravel it. Not only do they make whole novels out of Nigerian Internet swindles, called something like 719 for the violation of the section of the  penal code under Nigerian law, but they make "novels" out of banksters. It is written by an English man who spent 13 years working for the largest business intelligence organization, (apparantly not including Google), in the oil and gas industry. Honduras is now playing where sharks fear to tread. Kazakstán is one of the only countries in the top 5 countries of the most corrupt countries of the world that usually displaces Honduras in Transparency International's most corrupt countries scale. But the last time I saw it was before th 2009 coup.