Category Archives: Honduras

Neo-colonial inertia and development plans for Central America

The shopping mall model of development (Honduras, 2009)

In October 2008, in a classroom in Ciudad Juárez—one of the most violent cities on the planet but on the border with the richest country—an international ecumenical group considered the latest official development plan for Mexico and Central America.* 

After hearing from Raúl Moreno, an economist from El Salvador long active in the Hemispheric Social Alliance of groups that questioned free trade and other top-down, capital-intensive development schemes, I wrote in a report:

“When you look at the extreme violence occurring in Juárez, the de-population of rural Mexico, the official development plans in Central America (and consequent dislocation of rural populations), and the extreme violence carried out in Colombia to drive rural populations from their land, you come away with the impression of a development model that has been continuously applied since the days of the “wild, wild west” in the United States. The model is now extended all the way to Colombia and beyond: drive Indigenous peoples on to ever more marginal lands; destroy small farmers; insert mines and hydro-electric projects where convenient to the interests of large capital; and reward allies by granting them the lands of the displaced.”

I suppose it’s progress of a sort that the masters now see the need to incorporate ecological goals into their development plans.

But these plans have at their core a neoliberal notion of development: cut protection for workers, reinforce free trade agreements, and protect private-sector investment. 

The latest plan, promoted by President Joe Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris and the leaders of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, does not correspond to the real needs and aspirations of the people: land redistribution, legal reform, ecological justice, human rights, and for Indigenous peoples: full implementation of free, prior and informed consent.

On Monday, April 26, the same day that Harris held a video conference with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, the progressive Mexican daily newspaper La Jornada questioned the U.S. approach. During the U.S.-led Earth Day summit that was held a few days earlier, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador proposed extending a Mexican government agricultural support program to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador—with U.S. financial support. 

The program, Sembrando Vida (Sowing Life), has been running in Mexico for two years and is intended to generate jobs in the small-farming sector, reactivate the economy in areas affected by out-migration, and overcome deforestation. “The plan seeks to overcome social exclusion and the poverty that afflicts 61 per cent of the rural population.” It includes focus on ejidos and other community-controlled farms overlooked or attacked by successive neoliberal governments in power between 1988 and 2018 in Mexico.

In her meeting with Giammattei, the Vice-president Harris announced $310 million in U.S. government support for humanitarian relief and to address food insecurity in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. This is in addition to $4 billion announced by President Biden on the day of his inauguration that is intended to “address the root causes of migration” from Central America.

Graffiti in Honduras, 2009: “Long live the people in resistance.”

“Without strong collective action, this will mean MORE money for militarization and neoliberal economic policies that will continue to displace people from their lands and communities,” said a statement from the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). CISPES, joined by other solidarity and religious groups, demanded an end to U.S. police and military assistance in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, and an end to development policies that “promote climate change, privatize natural resources and public services, violate workers’ rights and destroy Indigenous and communal lands.”

One of the last people I met before the pandemic lockdown began in mid-March 2020 was Giovanni Batz (G’io B’atz), a U.S.-Guatemalan researcher. He was in Toronto for a two-day conference about Central American migrants and refugees at York University. In this essay, he denounces the latest U.S. plan and explains why it will fail. By supporting further militarization and neoliberal development in Central America, the United States contributes to displacement. “When discussing climate change, hunger, and poverty as causes of migration,” he writes, “land redistribution, reform, and rights must be discussed as solutions.” 

La Jornada’s editorial noted that Biden-Harris roll-out is through a series of bilateral meetings. “The White House has not accepted multilateral treatment of human displacement and the environmental crisis, the newspaper said. 

It reflects the historic preference of the White House to negotiate individually with each country, a terrain in which the superpower can more easily impose its terms and conditions. As it confronts the migration issue, we hope that the Democratic administration will go beyond the colonial inertia that shapes every foreign policy action from a position of advantage over and against the other, and that it will recognize that behind the migration flows there are economic and social components apart from climate change which must, nevertheless, be confronted with the same urgency as global warming.

* Plan Puebla Panamá had just given way that year to the Proyecto Mesoamérica (the Project for the Integration and Development of Mesoamerica), which would later become the Comprehensive Development Plan and then the Comprehensive Regional Protection and Solutions Framework (MIRPS).

Standing up for gender justice: the case of Development and Peace

As I write on Monday, March 29, I am listening to world leaders and heads of international financial institutions talking about the need for lasting solutions to foreign debt, which constitutes a severe impediment to pandemic recovery and the potential to live better in the world’s so-called “developing” countries.

I remember with pride the collaboration among churches and their development agencies in the Canadian Ecumenical Jubilee Initiative in the late 1990s as they gathered 640,000 signatures to demand cancellation of the debts of the world’s poorest countries.

Among that campaign’s enthusiasts were the people of the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace (CCODP, or D&P). Over many years, I have worked alongside D&P staff, volunteers and partners in Canada, Africa and Latin America to seek justice for people who affirm that another world is possible. 

It was collaboration with D&P staff in the wake of their support for communities in Honduras affected by a gold mine that engaged me more deeply in similar struggles in Guatemala, El Salvador, and elsewhere. D&P continues to work with other allies in the Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability (CNCA) to ensure that Canadian mining companies may be held accountable here for their actions overseas.

I write with full appreciation for all of these compañer@s.

But a small band of religious extremists has pressed Canada’s Catholic bishops and D&P leadership into breaking relations with some of D&P’s global south partners.

Since 2009, a far-right “news” site (banned recently by YouTube for posting fake reports about COVID vaccines) has published allegations about some D&P partners. The accusations came from people with no experience of North-South collaboration or of work in coalitions, and tended to focus on groups that empower women or that work in coalitions with women’s organizations. Subsequent developments have been well-covered in French-language media (especially Présence Information Réligieuse). In recent weeks, a stream of news releases and commentaries have also appeared in English, and I will provide some links below.

On Feb. 25, the CCCB and D&P released a news release summarising their review of D&P’s international partners. From a total of 205 global partners, 63 were examined. Of those, funding will be discontinued for 24 groups. Partnerships with 19 others had either ended or was about to end.

Decisions to cut the 24 partners were based on “a lack of clarification to resolve serious questions regarding support for positions or actions in conflict with the Church’s social and moral teachings,” the report said. Names of the groups affected were not divulged.

On March 8, Présence-Info published more detail about the methodology that was used to decide which groups would be cut. 

“The issue of abortion and the sexual health of women, as well as fear of scandal, were the principle reasons that pushed D&P to delist 24 of its international partners,” said Présence-Info after reviewing dozens of pages of internal documents. The partners were pressed to “justify themselves on questions that touched exclusively on sexual morality, particularly concerning women.” No questions were asked about corruption, racism, complicity with violent groups, or other development or solidarity issues.

On March 17, the Canadian Religious Conference (the body that represents members of religious orders) called on D&P to respond the Présence-Info report: 

“Is that what happened? If not, what happened? Development and Peace’s continued silence would be harmful to its credibility, which is already undermined by this lengthy partner review process.”

Canadian Jesuits published a statement of their own on March 22. “We are deeply saddened to learn that so many CCODP partners are losing this vital support from CCODP. We regret that the process to arrive to this decision was not marked by the transparency and collaboration that the Church knows are key virtues to witnessing to the Good News and to becoming a synodal Church,” the statement said.

“It appears that a review was undertaken with the purpose of judging the partners on their adherence to the Church’s teachings on sexual matters.  We believe,  however that the partners should be viewed with gratitude for their demonstrated and consistent commitment to the core richness of the Church’s social teachings. If consulted, lay people and the Religious of Canada, many of whom have worked in the Global South and who personally know many of these organizations and their contexts, could have provided more accurate information on the partners under review.”

On March 24, the Christian feminist collective L’autre Parole said the situation was unacceptable. It has had “particularly harmful repercussions for women in the Global South” and is “contrary to elementary principles of law and social justice.”

Over the years, some groups were targeted by the fake-news outlet, and others came forward themselves to say that they were under investigation. Among them are Radio Progreso, a Jesuit-backed community station in Progreso, Honduras, that I visited in 2009 a few weeks after the coup. Another is Famn Deside, a women’s group (founded in the late 80s by nuns, the Soeurs du Bon-Conseil) in Jacmel, Haiti. I had planned to visit them in February last year, but civil unrest and the pandemic prevented me from travelling. A March 25 article in Présence-Info describes both groups.

Like all development agencies that receive public funding, D&P has a gender policy. It includes a statement from Pope Francis, who is also a target of attacks from the religious and political far-right.

“History is burdened by the excesses of patriarchal cultures that considered women inferior…. There are those who believe that many of today’s problems have arisen because of female emancipation. This is false, untrue, a form of male chauvinism. The equal dignity of men and women makes us rejoice to see old forms of discrimination disappear, and within families there is a growing reciprocity…. [W]e must nonetheless see in the women’s movement the working of the Spirit for a clearer recognition of the dignity and rights of women.”

  • Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia (2016)

    • L’autre Parole says that Famn Deside is still receiving its funding. “We are delighted. And we are convinced that the majority of recently excluded groups should regain their funding if the principles of social justice were applied in their assessment.”

    In coming days, I will share more about the vision and origins of Development and Peace. Their work provides lessons for all who strive to build North-South alliances of solidarity.

    Migration and the development prescription: Let’s do better

    A new president is in office in Washington. For the sake of immigrants, LGBTIQ people, women, and racialized and religious minorities, one cannot help but be glad of this change, and of the opportunities that are re-opened for people who were excluded or attacked during his predecessor’s term. 

    But once again, the notion of development is again prescribed as a remedy for whatever it is that drives migrants—notably and urgently, those from Central America—towards the southern border of the United States. 

    On his first day in office, President Joseph Biden’s administration promised to invest $4 billion in the region to address issues of security and employment. A new immigration reform bill, the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, was introduced. Aid and investment from the United States, it is hoped, will encourage people to stay home.

    President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Jim Hodgson photo)

    Two days later, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, spoke with Mr. Biden and concurred. “We believe that the causes of the migration phenomenon must receive attention. People do not abandon their families, their towns, their cultures, out of pleasure. They do it because of need. We want migration to be optional, not forced, that all the people of the Central American nations and our own have options, that they be able to get ahead where they were born, where their families are, where their cultures are. And for that, development cooperation is very important.”

    With history as a guide, however, we can see some problems with the prescription. Two decades ago, another new president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, launched the Plan Puebla Panamá for regional economic development. The name has changed several times since then, depending on which countries were in and which were excluded because their citizens had made electoral choices that were unacceptable to donors. Airports were expanded, highways widened, mines dug and hydro-electric dams built, but still, people left by the thousands, tens of thousands, especially from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. 

    Those large-scale projects enable the rich, expanding the divide between rich and poor within the region and indeed, everywhere. And no one is acknowledging that among the root causes are wounds left from US-sponsored coups and civil wars, along with deportations of alleged criminals into unstable systems—or rather, into systems whose only sector capable of their social integration is the criminal one.

    We know what to do differently. Development assistance should always be focused on building “economies of solidarity”—innovative agriculture that respects ecology, local markets, cooperatives and credit unions, leadership by women, full consultation with communities and civil society organizations. Indigenous people and farmers should never be driven from their land by transnational corporations—a key consequence of a generation of free trade agreements in Mexico, Central America and Colombia and driver of migration—but rather trade and investment should benefit all people.

    With this post (during International Development Week), I am reviving a blog I that I used while I worked with The United Church of Canada as its Latin America/Caribbean program coordinator. Please look here for more information about me.