Our man in Honduras and a gang truce

Gang members, Adam Blackwell, in El Salvador jail      elsalvador.com

Canadians don't make the papers in Honduras very often.

But last week, Adam Blackwell got a full page in El Tiempo when he showed up to talk about peace talks between the maras in order to reduce the murderous turf battles.

Blackwell is a Canadian and career diplomat, currently the "Secretary of Multidimensional Security at the Organization of American States."

He's also Canada's representative on one of the many efforts to reduce crime and corruption here - the 

Honduran Public Security Reform Commission, created by Congress earlier this year. The notion is that the independent panel will design and oversee a process to improve security, including investigating the work of the national police and the courts. There are three members named by the Honduran government - a former university head, a sociologist and former cabinet minister. Blackwell, named by Canada, and Aquiles Blu Rodriguez, named by Chile, are to provide independent international advice. (Rodriguez, a retired general in Chile's national police force, is a controversial choice. He was accused of corruption in 2011.)

It's not a great job. No job that comes with both driver and bodyguard is. The problems of corruption and crime - Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world - are entrenched.

But Blackwell's effort to promote - or at least explore - the idea of peace talks between the gangs shows a welcome willingness to take real action.

He's already been involved in a similar effort in El Salvador, which seems to be working. Murders have dropped from 14 a day to four, the government reports, as gang members quit killing each other. The OAS has been monitoring and supervising the truce.

It's a controversial idea, and is at best a first step. Just because the gangs have stopped killing each other doesn't mean they have cut down on the robberies and extortion that push up crime rates. (In fact, some critics have argued crime has increased since gang members don't have to worry about being gunned down. Blackwell says there are no statistics to refute or support the claim.)

But something has to be done to reduce the murder rate and start to address the gang problem. Estimates have put gang membership at 36,000 in Honduras. (There are 14,000 in the national police.) The two main gangs - Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, and Mara 18, or M18, - have their roots in Los Angeles, started by the children of a wave of Central American immigrants in the 1980s. They've grown into full-scale multinationals, in part because of a U.S. policy of deporting non-citizen offenders instead of dealing with them in the justice system. That's helped the gangs spread rapidly throughout this region.

They are ultra-violent. That's not surprising in a country with lots of guns, few economic opportunities, a large population of young men and an ineffective police and justice system, but the extent to which the taboo against killing has been lost is striking.

And they touch the lives of many Hondurans in urban areas, collecting "a war tax" from businesses and bus drivers and others, on penalty of death. (Why call it a war tax? The name is a leftover from the civil wars in Central America when non-government forces collected what they called war taxes to fund their operations.)

The El Salvador truce was negotiated by MS-13 and M18 gang leaders sharing a maximum security prison, who called on a Catholic bishop and leftist former politician to broker the deal. The OAS has effectively been a guarantor. The gang leaders said they were tired of the endless war and revenge killings. Thought the government might have promised better prison placements as part of the deal.

Blackwell was in Honduras to meet with Bishop Romulo Emiliani, who already has credibility with the gangs. He walked into the middle of a prison riot in March - and prison riots here are grisly - and not only wasn't killed, but got them to quit fighting and allow police in.

Central American countries have tended to opt for the "iron fist" approach to gangs. That's crowded jails, but hasn't made a dent in crime and violence. (Sounds familiar.)

So a truce - between the gangs, and between the gangs and society, makes sense. Stopping the rampant killing isn't a solution, but it's not a bad first step. And the Salvadoran agreement includes a commitment to quit recruiting adolescents, another good step if it holds up.

The next stage involves finding alternatives to crime - not easy in a country with widespread unemployment and poverty, especially for 35-year-old gang members with a web of tattoos across their faces.

But talking is a start. And it's interesting that a Canadian is taking the lead.

Update: 
La Prensa reports that a police raid on gang members seized Beretta, Ruger and Glock handguns, an Uzi submachine gun, three fragmentation grenades, 560 rounds of ammunition and homemade bombs. What makes the seizure particularly newsworthy is that gang members in question were in prison.

Pinatas at the wedding

 Back from a weekend bus trip to Santa Rosa de Copan, a town about 105 kilometres away - or three-and-a-half hours. The roads aren't great, but that's not the reason for the long journey. The Casasalo Express, despite the name, stops to pick up anybody who waves at the side of the road, and to let off anybody who wants to strike off into some hillside village.

Which is not a bad thing. The first stretch, from Copan Ruinas to La Entrada, is hilly and twisty, and a fast ride leaves me slightly queasy. The stops help.

The Express is a relatively comfortable and fast way to travel. The price is a little higher than the low-end local buses - $5 - but you don't end up with three people on a two-person bench.  And the speakers are pretty good. We had '80s rock on the way there, and a lot of Van Halen on the way back. 

Honduras doesn't get credit for its impressive scenery. Copan Ruinas is about 1,800 feet above sea level; Santa Rosa about 3,800 feet. The trip between the two takes you along the Copan River to La Entrada, a slightly druggy commercial town, and then climbing up through the hills, with stunning views at every turn. Big hills, or small mountains, with forests and cleared corn fields and dark green coffee plants under shade trees, broad valleys and houses and communities scattered sparsely across the background. 

The roadside is just as interesting - just outside La Entrada, there is about a kilometre of firework stands, fuego artificiales stacked up on shelves like books. Why there, and nowhere else? I don't know. Horses are tied up to graze roadside grass, and you get to peer into no end of tiny communities or individual homes, sometime a tin roof and mud bricks and a swept dirt yard. Every now and then a few people - often a family - are working, or feigning work on filling potholes, and holding out their hands for contributions from drivers. It's an unusual system of road maintenance.

It would have been more comfortable, but Jody had her accordion on her lap and I had a day pack with my computer. Our pack was up on the roof of the bus.

The accordion was along for the ride because we were going to the wedding party for Gaetane Carignan and Humberto Alvarado, and Gaetane - a musician herself - has asked Jody to bring it along.

It's a romantic story. Gaetane was a Cuso volunteer, an agriculture expert. She met Humberto, whose family farmed near Santa Rosa. Despite all the obvious barriers, they fell in love and were married a few months ago. This was the chance for both families and their friends to come together and celebrate. The Canadians introduced the custom of striking wine glasses to get the couple to kiss and brought a toque and mittens and Winnipeg Jets jersey. (Dauphin, Man., is their destination once the immigration process is complete.) The Hondurans adapted the tradition of pinatas, usually a birthday rite, for the wedding party. Jody played the accordion, and a great band covered old hits and had everyone dancing to She Loves You. (Gaetane picked the dinner music; I’d wager it’s the first Honduran wedding party soundtrack that included the Barenaked Ladies doing Lovers in Dangerous Time.)

it was our first real visit to Santa Rosa, which we had only passed through.

It's bigger than Copan Ruinas - about 48,000 people, while Copan Ruinas proper is about 8,000 (though there are many thousands more in the tiny communities scattered around in the hills). More stores, at least two traffic lights and more bustle - a guy drove over the side of my foot minutes after we arrived. The instinct to yell at him was quickly overcome by second thoughts about the murder rate.

Santa Rosa has a longer history as a Spanish-influenced commercial town - some three hundred years. The Spanish made it the centre of the Honduran tobacco industry in 1765. (The industry has shrunk and the fields around Copan Ruinas are dotted with abandoned tobacco-drying sheds. But it hasn’t disappeared; Honduras, prompted by the big tobacco corporations, has joined a WTO complaint over Australia’s plan to force cigarette companies to sell their product in generic white boxes.)

Santa Rosa feels more Spanish, or Mexican. A tidy grid of streets and avenues, a church with more statues and paintings - including a couple of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s favorite saint. The larger size means food vendors are in the square every day - in Copan Ruinas, they tend to show up on weekend evenings.

Best wishes, Humberto and Gaetane.


Footnote:
My partner asked her co-workers about the fireworks stands. Apparently, the vendors manufacture them along that stretch of road and sell in front of their homes. (You can see why they would likely have trouble finding locations for a small-scale fireworks factory.) At Christmas, they will set up temporary stalls in town. Home-made fireworks, Jesus and presents - should be an interesting Christmas in Copan.

A tale of two sewage treatment debates, in Canada and Honduras

La Prensa

I've been following two sewage treatment debates this week, in Victoria, where I used to live, and San Pedro Sula, about three hours from our home in Copan Ruinas.
There are unhappy people in both cities.
I'm convinced B.C.'s capital region needs to treat its sewage. The 2006 scientific panel report on the issue was disappointing for its lack of precision, but it found seabed contamination at the waste outfalls had been documented, sewage plumes that currently rise to the surface are health risks and claims that the waste proves an environmental threat can't be scientifically refuted. "Prudent public policy" would see work on treatment begin, it concluded. (There has been lots of debate about the report; read it for yourself here.)
But the need is a heck of a lot more pressing in San Pedro Sula, Hondura's commercial centre with some 1.3 million people (and amazing murder rate). Sewage and waste just gets dumped, mostly in two rivers that flow into the Caribbean. That's bad news for the people living downstream, including some 165,000 in Puerto Cortes.
La Prensa has been writing about the troubled sewage treatment project this week. It started in 2000, when the city signed a deal with an Italian consortium to upgrade the water system and create a sewage treatment system. In return, the company would get operating rights for 30 years and recover its costs and make a profit by charging users.
Which makes the capital region's project, with up to two-thirds of the costs covered by the provincial and federal governments, look like a pretty good deal.
In a poor country, there is little money for infrastructure. Honduras is on a tight debt limit imposed by the IMF in return for setting up a line of credit. Borrowing is out of the question.
The plan could have worked, maybe. Water service has apparently improved.
Except for the problems with sewage treatment. The schedule called for the first stage to done in 2007, and the next in 2010. That would give the company 23 years to make its money by charging customers before its 30-year concession ran out.
But the city couldn't find the three sites needed for treatment plants. (Sound familiar, Victorians?) There were other snags, and, as things stand, completion won't happen before 2018.
That leaves just 13 years for the company to make its money, and rates would, as a result have to be 70 per cent higher than projected. The median income in San Pedro Sula is about $450 a month; any extra costs are a problem.
And at the same time, cost estimates have climbed from $70 million to $180 million, also meaning higher rates. (A development that should make CRD residents nervous, since provincial and federal contributions are capped - any problems or unexpected costs will be picked up by residents.)
So what happens, beyond political finger-pointing? Who knows. Some politicians want a search for international donors. That happened in Tegucigalpa, the capital, where the European Union funded a sewage plant and an Italian group got the contract.
Meanwhile, the sewage keeps flowing. And, as in Victoria, the federal environment department has given the city until 2013 to fix things, which is not going to happen.
Meanwhile, back in B.C., Green party leader Jane Sterk has weighed in with an interesting oped piece in the Times Colonist. Sterk says sewage treatment should be postponed - not cancelled - until the region the fixes the failing storm water system, which would reduce the scale of treatment. Water conservation should be a priority, again to cut he treatment needed. The delay, she adds, would allow better technology to reduce the environmental and physical footprint of the treatment plants and and more resource recovery as part of the process.
It's a credible argument, but the process is likely too far advanced - and federal and provincial governments too committed - for the project to be derailed now.
And as San Pedro Sula has learned, the longer you delay, the more these things cost.

Riding the train of death from Honduras

Every couple of days, a plane carrying discouraged Hondurans lands in San Pedro Sula or Tegucigalpa. 

They aren’t business travellers, or returning tourists. They’re deportees, caught living illegally in the United States, or trying to cross the border.

It’s the only time in their lives most will be on a plane.

And it’s an incredible contrast to their travels on their outbound journey - walking, hopping a Mexican freight train called ‘La Bestia,’ risking life and savings on a 3,100-kilometre overland odyssey through Guatemala and Mexico.

The numbers are staggering. So far this year, about 17,800 Hondurans have been deported by air from the U.S. - 660 a week. Another 15,700 have been sent back by bus from Mexico. More than a thousand people, every week who have travelled a huge distance and braved terrors for a better life.

No one knows how many more Hondurans make it across the border, but the U.S. government estimates one million are living there, 60 per cent of them “undocumented.” Most people I’ve talked to have a relative in the U.S., or recently returned.

The numbers, taken together, show a great migration - perhaps 275,000 a people leaving a year for a chance to make some money in the U.S.

It’s different from previous waves of immigrants to North America.

The border is supposedly closed and the migrants are illegal. They can be deported anytime, which makes them much less likely to put down roots. A few take children, but the journey is so dangerous most leave families here, and plan to return when they have made enough money.

Predators rape, rob and kill migrants, or kidnap them and demand ransoms from their families - typically $300 to $500. Mexico's National Commission for Human Rights reports 11,000 immigrants were kidnapped in 2010.

People die in the desert, or fall from the trains, where they cling to the roof and between cars. (Authorities have decided it’s easier to let desperate migrants ride the Beast and other trains than deal with thousands of them trying to walk to the U.S.)

Some pay coyotes to help with the journey - some $2,000 just for the final stage across the U.S.-border, often with money borrowed at high interest rates.

It’s dangerous and desperate. But it’s just part of life here for many Hondurans.

Many make the journey, work in construction or restaurants in the U.S., and then return to Hondurans, at least for a family visit. Though that means another dangerous trek northward if they choose to try to make it back to North America.

Life would be even tougher here without the migrants. They sent $240 million a month back to their families in Honduras in the first six months of this year. That’s 17 per cent of GDP - more than the contribution from any industry, six times as much as the banana exports.

But nothing comes without a price. People have to choose. Stay with your family, in poverty, or cut ties with them for two or five or 10 years, risk your life, and send money home. 

U.S. anthropologist Daniel Reichman wrote The Broken Village, a look at a small coffee community in Honduras. He noted the stresses as people balance the importance of family with the chance to make money in the U.S., and the jealousies when one family’s ‘ambición’ - not seen as a positive attribute here - provides a flashy house or new car. 

And then the inevitable cases when someone fails to make good in the U.S., or turns his back on those life behind.

Reichman notes another aspect of all this. Governments and corporations have pushed free trade for goods and capital, eliminating borders. But for people - workers and families - there is no such freedom to move from country country.

Canada signed a free trade agreement with Honduras last year, but immigrating is still almost impossible for Hondurans. (Although La Prensa reported last month that some 25,000 Hondurans are living “el sueño canadiense” - the Canadian dream. About 15,000 of them have legal resident status; most of the rest are working on it.)

I don’t know what it all means. I am struck by the contrasts. 

My grandparents packed up and headed to Canada to find better lives. It was brave, but they were welcomed and didn’t risk their lives. We’ve turned into a much meaner, more fearful country.

Then there is the contrast between some 250,000 people looking for a better life, and Canadian hysteria over a few hundred Chinese migrants travelling in rusty boats, posing absolutely no real risks.

And I’m troubled on another level.

For a Cold War kid, there is something familiar in the desperate risks Hondurans are willing to take to get to the U.S. It evokes those grim images of East Germans tangled in barbed wire, shot dead as they tried to scale the Berlin Wall.

And who is condemning the desperate to death today?

And now, the hokey pokey, from Honduras

My partner, Jody Paterson, has been helping out the local orphanage/foster home, a fairly grim place. I have been doing a little too, mostly helping with occasional swimming expeditions, which I wrote about here.
Jody wrote about the orphanage here, which prompted B.C.'s most consistently interesting blogger, The Gazetteer, to request a video of the kids doing the hokey pokey, one of the cross-cultural elements Jody has brought to the place.
And here it is.

And, should you be in a position to help out, check the fundraising page she has set up here.

(And note the fine cinematography.)

What Honduras needs most

(Reposted, because I accidentally deleted the first version.)

It's easy to see what's wrong in Honduras. It's hard to figure out what to do about it.

I spent the last two days in a "taller," the Spanish term for workshop, looking at development priorities for Honduras.

There are an endless number of grim stats. 

Want to worry about the environment? Between 1990 and 2008, Honduras lost 33.2 per cent of its forest land. Only six countries in the world, all in Africa, had greater deforestation. 

Poverty? The World Bank says 65 per cent of the population live in poverty, and 18 per cent in extreme poverty. In the nearby centre of Santa Rosa de Copan, 56 per cent of the households report income of less than $50 a month. Even for subsistence farmers, that's poor. 

Inequality? Based on the income gap between the top 20 per cent and the poorest 20 per cent, Honduras had the third greatest inequality in the world, behind Namibia and Angola.

Honduras ranked 129th of 164 countries on Transparency International’s 2011 Corruption Perception Index. The teen birth rate is 26 per cent higher than the Latin America/Caribbean average.

And on and on.

The workshop brought together some Cuso staff, volunteers and people from the partner organizations they work with in the country. You can’t do much in a day-and-a-half, but it was a chance to start gathering perspectives on where the need is greatest, Cuso’s role and future directions.

That’s ultimately complex. Cuso International has set five priority themes, and in Honduras is attempting to focus on two of them - secure livelihoods and natural resource management, and citizen participation and governance. But the partner organizations have their priorities. And they get funding from a wide range of international sources, and the funders have their own ideas on the most important areas of work. 

There are obvious tensions. If you’re a Honduran development organization working in rural communities, you’re going to feel a great pressure to look for quick ways to bring small - but important - improvements for families and communities. Help a family begin to grow a couple of crops besides corn and beans and they can get a few dollars more in annual income, which means less hunger.

But a few dollars more might not mean that the children go to school, so the basic problems of people with limited skills, lousy land (or none) and no path to a better life continue for another generation.

And programs to improve incomes in their communities don’t develop people’s knowledge of their rights and potential political and community power, or how to exercise them. The political system doesn’t work for people here; government scarcely works at all. Leaving those issues aside, many communities could do more collectively on their own.

It’s not all a question of hard choices. Some organizations are working on both things at once, offering tiny loans for women to start micro-businesses while helping poor families to get title to the little patch of land they farm. 

In the cities, as soon as the smallest construction project starts, even a house being built by three workers, a woman sets up a food stand on the street to sell them lunch. An aid worker said they surveyed the women to see what would help them. One said she bought the worst fruit at the market each night to make liquados - fruit smoothies popular here - but had to make them one at a time by hand. Customers got tired of waiting so she lost business. A $30 loan to buy a blender would give her and her family a better future.

Ultimately there will be hard choices. (And not just about programs in one country - Honduras or Guatemala? Central America or Africa (or Canadian reserves)?)

I don’t know enough about Honduras or development work or anything to have firm views. In fact, there were moments in the workshop when my Spanish skills left me unsure what the heck we were talking about.

But I’m struck by the vast numbers of little kids in Copan Ruinas, and birth rates are even higher in rural areas. About 30 per cent of the population is under 10. (In B.C., it’s 9.8 per cent.)

Maybe the driving theme should be on changing the future for those children, whether by building more capable families, improving education, boosting family incomes or teaching them about rights, political power and community organizing.

The bizarre cult of granite countertops

What is it with granite countertops? I thought I had left them behind in Canada, slowly leaking radon gas into all those updated kitchens, to be blamed in future for a cancer epidemic.
And often quite ugly.
But in La Prensa this week there was an ad for Las Colinas Residencial, a little housing development outside San Pedro Sula. And the selling features included "cocino con mueble de granito."
These are tiny houses, crammed onto small lots. The two-bedroom houses are 675 square feet; the big four-bedroom, two-storey models are 1,130 square feet.  Two colours of paint, PVC windows, 10 per cent down and payments as low as $257 a month, even at 10 per cent interest rates. (Interest rates are remarkably high here, a big drag on the economy. The problem, a business guy said, is that people just don't feel an obligation to repay loans. I got the impression he didn't.)
But the houses still had granite countertops.
A cultural anthropologist could probably do a doctorate on the allure of granite countertops. They can be nice, I'm sure, cool and smooth. But how did they become totemic, a necessary feature in every remodelled kitchen or condo development in Canada and Honduras?
I've never actually had a granite countertop. In the first house I co-owned, we replaced the bad formica with better fake wood-strip formica, one of the few home handyman projects I've done that has worked out. We painted the cabinets white and added red plastic knobs from Ikea and stuck a portable dishwasher into a space under the counter. Presto, a kitchen reno.
In our place here, which rents for about $325, the counters are tile, and not all that well done. But they serve.
But many Hondurans, like Canadians, apparently want granite. Maybe they plan on some serious baking, and need a cool surface to roll out their brioche dough.

Christy Clark three times as popular as President Lobo

OK, Christy Clark's approval rating in the latest Angus Reid poll is worrying for Liberals. Only 28 per cent of British Columbians approve of the job she's doing, compared with 45 per cent approval for Adrian Dix. Conservative leader John Cummins is tied with Clark.
And 55 per cent of British Columbians say their opinions of Clark have worsened in the last three months, despite the party and government's efforts to win back lost suport.
It could be worse. La Prensa published a Gallup poll yesterday that found eight per cent of Hondurans approve of the job President Porfiro Lobo is doing. Only twelve per cent of Hondurans said they think the country is generally going in the right direction.
It's pretty tough to get into single digits. People here tend to be partisans of one of the two main parties, so even the people who voted for the president are giving him failing grades.
Though I have noticed an interesting phenomenon. People often say they support the Liberal or National party. But they rarely seem to think it would actually make much difference for the country if their side wins.
There's one big difference in the positions of Lobo and Clark. Presidents can only serve one term under the Honduran constitution. The election isn't until next fall, but the elaborate primary process is underway and it's difficult for a president to get anything done in the last 18 months of his term. (No women presidents yet. The left/reform Libre party has nominated Xiomara Castro Zelaya, wife of the Maunel Zelaya, the president deposed in the 2009 coup, but she is a long shot.)
By the end of the process, his party - National - will have a new leader for the election.
Clark, however, is 10 months away from an election. The party is in trouble in the polls, tainted by scandal and abuses and unable to convince people it actually has a vision or a plan that goes much beyond slogans. And there is the sense of desperation, which is never attractive and rarely produces sound decisions.
And Clark, who faced the huge, maybe impossible, challenge of undoing the perception of arrogance and dishonesty caused by the HST fiasco, is now actually a drag on the party's fortunes.
A new leader is always an option. But not a likely one. The obvious candidates - Kevin Falcon, George Abbott, Rich Coleman - are all associated with the Campbell government's failings. An outsider, like Surrey Mayor Diane Watts, might have a better chance.
But every potential candidate would have to look at the polls and the prospects and judge whether the election next year is winnable. There's might not much satisfaction in spending four years in opposition.

Health care in a poor country

I'm still getting used to living in a really poor country. I know all the stats. I've been doing research for the last six days for a project, so I really know them now. But the reality still surprises.
I'm in Tegucigalpa, the capital, working on a project. At breakfast in the hotel today - tipico, which means eggs, cheese, beans and toast (tortillas for most people) - I was reading the paper and there was a story about 430 doctors who want to work for free. (It was a slightly eerie breakfast, as I think I'm the only guest today.)
They're Hondurans who went to medical school in Cuba. They need to be certified in Honduras and do two years of service before they're allowed to practise. (Their counterparts from Honduran universities only need to do six month of service.)
But there's a catch. The government pays new doctors $310 a month during their period of service. And it doesn't have enough money to pay the 430 new Cuban grads. So for the lack of $133,000 a month, desperately needed medical care isn't available. (That's an oversimplification, because the government is also worried about the future, higher costs of paying those doctors when they're certified.)
On one level, it's not really a choice, at least in the short-term. The Honduras government has a budget of about $3.2 billion, for the army and education and police and health care and everything for 8.2 million people. The B.C. government spends $5.2 billion on elementary and high schools for a population barely half the size. (The reasons that Honduras has so little money rates another post.)
And, in fairness, B.C. takes the same approach, limiting residency placements to save money even though more foreign-trained doctors are keen to practise and need a residency to qualify.
But the system is much worse here. And the problems are much broader. Nursing assistants have been on strike in recent weeks because promised payments have not been made. Interns staged a long strike. Last week, the main hospital in Tegucigalpa cancelled surgeries because it didn't have the chemicals needed to test blood for safety before it was used. Doctors said the problem was that the hospital hasn't been paying suppliers, who won't deliver any more reagents.
It's a mixed public-private system here, and doctors can practise in both. Good luck if you're entirely dependent on the public system. (Which explains the widespread use of plants and herbs for healing in Copan, even in town. When my partner fell and made a mess of her knee, she was offered mango bark to make a antibiotic healing poultice. It seemed to help.)
And good luck if those who are so keen to slash health care spending in Canada get their way. The World Health Organization reports Canada spends 9.2 per cent of GDP on health care. Honduras spends 6.2 per cent.
President Porfirio Lobo criticized the health system Saturday, blamed administrative problems and vowed to sort things out. But with 17 months to go until the next election, he's already a lame duck. Presidents can only serve one four-year term in Honduras, and attention has shifted to this fall's primaries to pick candidates for the parties.
What should happen? Who knows. That's the first lesson from life in a poor country - there are no easy, quick fixes.

Héctor Delgado came to town, and we missed him

What me missed

I think we blew it last night, victims of shoddy research. For the last while, posters have been up around Copan Ruinas promoting the appearance of Héctor Delgado, sponsored by a local evangelical church. He was to perform in the square, as part of an evening of evangelism.

Christian rock is big down here, as I can attest after a long bus ride with a TV showing a concert featuring many soaring ballads about Jesus. I just figured the show in the square was more of the same.

We went, of course. What's the point of living in a strange land if you don't go out and see what's going on?

We're wiser after five months. The event was supposed to start at 6 p.m. We got there around 7, which meant only a 20-minute wait for something to happen. Long enough for Jody to buy a 50-cent cone of cotton candy.

The crowd was huge, which should have been a tip-off. I didn't do a formal estimate, but I'd say 1,500 to 2,000, and I take pride in being a key player in press gallery estimates of legislature lawn protests. It was surely many times the largest gathering we'd seen in the square. Even more than for the Mayan soccer game with a flaming ball.

The stage was slick, with a backdrop of about 2,000 CDs suspended in plastic sleeves as a kind of curtain, catching the light, and smoke machines and a couple of eight-foot screens, one showing live video of the concert, the other, most of the time, the computer screen of one of the stagehands.

And the band was high energy. Drums, keyboard, guitar, bass, violin, three backup singers, and a compelling, if not vocally gifted, lead singer. (Though he may have overexploited the pogo as a stage move, a mistake I have made in the distant past on the dance floor.)

The crowd knew some of the songs, and pumped their arms. The chicas were dressed to the nines, in a slightly subdued version of Canadian clubbing clothes. (Actually, quite subdued version.) There were teens and kids and families with babies. It was good.

We bailed after four or five songs, working our way through the crowd in the dark. Pollo Express had no more chicken by then, but eight or nine food vendors set up on the street by the square on weekends, and we got grilled chicken, served over fried plantains, pickled sliced onion and beets, with beans and cheese. But that meant we left before Héctor Delgado.

And, after googling him belatedly today, I fear that might have been a mistake. He used to be Héctor "El Father" and Héctor "El Bambino," and was a reggaeton pioneer, a genre combining reggae, hiphop, salsa and Latin influences. Héctor was a star, hot producer, clothing designer and celeb. He sold 130,000 copies of an album in Puerto Rico, his country, in two days. Héctor is a talent.

In 2008, he announced the death of Héctor "El Father" and said he was going to pursue a religious calling. And after a couple of years of farewell concerts, he eventually came to our town.

And we missed him.

Which is just another reminder that we don’t know much, and information is in short supply. The posters didn’t say Héctor Delgado, former music force. The sponsors were an evangelical church and half-a-dozen small stores. I've never heard of reggaeton. There is no newspaper to write about his appearance. Who knew?

Next time, I’ll do the research first. And I won’t miss the next Héctor Delgado.

Thinking of Honduras as an African country

I've been doing some research on Honduras for a project, and, while it's early days, I'm working toward a theory that would see the country, in many ways, as an African nation.
I've been mining the United Nations Human Development Report 2011, which I highly recommend for its exhaustive quantitative comparisons of 185 countries.
There are obvious findings. Northern Europe and North America are good places to live. Most of Africa isn't. And there are broad regional trends. Neighbours will generally be similar in a lot of ways.
Honduras, again based on first looks, seems an outlier.
Take income inequality. The HDR uses the relationship between the average income of the richest 20 per cent and the poorest 20 per cent as one measure.
In Honduras, the average income of the richest group is 30.4 times the income of the poorest. Only Namibia (52.2) and Angola (31) have greater inequality. (Canada's ratio is 5.5.)
That's partly because the poorest 20 per cent are really, really poor. But Honduras still has more in common with African states than its neighbours.
The other data supports the finding. On the Environmental Performance Index, based in 25 indicators across 10 categories, Honduras scores 49.9, on the average for countries with "Medium Human Development." But its peers in the Latin American and Caribbean group score an average 65.2, significantly better.
Honduras is below the medium development group for under-height and underweight children ("stunting and wasting," in the language of the reports. But the rate is almost twice as high as the average for the region.
About 64 per cent of the eligible population is attending high school, a little worse than the average for the medium group. But in Latin America, 90.7 per cent of potential students are in high school.
It's striking, across most measures, that Honduras is out of step with its neighbours and, perhaps, more like countries in Africa.
I'm not sure what that means. But I expect the nature of most things - aid, trade, government relations - is different for African nations than for countries in the Americas. And it might be time to think of Honduras as a lost piece of Africa.

Living in the space between cultures

We're finishing a brief trip back to Canada to visit friends and families and so my partner could pick up an honourary degree from the University of Victoria. It was, of course, much fun, and it was especially great to visit with family after five months away.
It was also crazy busy, as we ran from appointment to party to storage locker. (The storage locker, six feet by eight feet, contains the last of our worldly possessions in Canada. After five crime-free months in the murder capital of the world, we returned to find someone had broken into our supposedly secure locker and made off with some clothes - the few things we liked well enough to keep - and a pair of speakers.)
I quickly realized life in Victoria, even after such a short time away, was foreign. We don't rush to appointments in Copan Ruinas. Our lives are self-contained. There are no big stores and few restaurants, so beyond my almost daily walks to Bodega Gloria and the market stalls, life is simple.
And we don't have a car. We rented a nice Ford for our time in Victoria, which was handy. But I was surprised how irritating and unpleasant I found it to have to pile into a big metal box and cope with crowded streets to get anywhere. I missed the sunny, warm strolls to run errands.
It was, in short, a time of culture shock, and a persistent feeling that I didn't belong here.
But the culture shock is just as real in Copan. Language, attitudes, values are almost all strange and unfamiliar. In Honduras, saying someone has 'ambicion' is a term of disapproval. Striving for a better education, house or job is seen as putting yourself above the community. 'Comformismo' is a compliment, praise for the way a person fits in and accepts the values and unwritten rules of society.
In my most recent stint in Spanish classes, the maestra and I spent a while talking about homelessness and mental illness. We shared many of the same views. But she also described a woman in her father's community who walked in the woods at night and began to act more and more oddly. Surely evil spirits are sometimes the explanation for mental illness, she suggested.
I've always felt a bit apart, but it's striking now how much I'm a man without a country.
Which is not a bad thing. Distance gives you perspective on cultures' strong and weak points. As an outsider, I can observe that religion in Honduras can serve, for some, as an excuse for inaction. God gets thanked or blamed for a lot of things, when really people could just try a little harder to make change themselves.
And with the benefit of distance, I have a greater appreciation of philanthropy and "good works" in Canada. There is a tradition of giving, and of service clubs and churches stepping up to help when needed, that is a much greater strength than Canadians recognize.
One of the week's chores was paying my taxes. The endlessly patient accountant who works with me observed that I was probably happier paying taxes after five months in a country where services are non-existent or substandard.
He was right. The 'all taxes are bad' crowd should spend a year in Honduras, where schools are overcrowded, policing ineffectual, the health-care system is struggling and basic infrastructure is crumbling. Those people insisting that Canada must cut health care spending would benefit from a tour of a Honduran hospital. Health spending in Canada is about 9.6 per cent of GDP; Honduras spends about 6.2 per cent. That level of spending translates into more illness, deaths and costs to families.
I don't mind the feeling of being between cultures. And I consider it a good sign that I'm much looking forward to getting home, and back to walking the cobble streets to the market.

Wise words from the doctor

Dr. Jody Paterson: 'There's nothing saintly or special about social justice - it's just work.'

We're back from Honduras for a week, after five months. While it's great to see everyone, we were strongly motivated, because my partner and inspiration, Jody Paterson, was getting an honourary degree from the University of Victoria.
Yesterday was the big day, and it was a big day, from the ceremony and on through the celebrations.
The Times Colonist ran most of her speech today. I recommend it. One of the many things that make Jody such a powerful person is her consistent willingness to ignore all the problems and obstacles and just start working when something needs to be done.
As she told the convocation when talking about working for social justice, "You don't need to be a miracle worler. You just need to be the kind of person who shows up.'

A few acres of beans and corn, a cow that fell off a cliff: Farming in Honduras

I’ve been reading about land occupations and protests in the Honduran papers since April 18, when several thousand campesinos and supporters moved onto private lands and claimed them.

Like almost everything else in Honduras, it’s baffling. Land titles are a mess, laws routinely ignored and small farmers claim their land has been confiscated illegally and sold or given to large landowners. There are laws limiting the size of holdings, but they aren’t enforced.

It’s a long dispute, with some 60 activists reported killed in the last two years. In the big direct action started in April, some 1,700 campesino groups occupied land.

The government has promised to expropriate some 3,600 hectares from sugar companies and give it to small farmers, but when isn’t clear. The process is long. And, of course, the companies are unhappy and warn expropriation will hurt foreign investment.

This kind of dispute has been going on at least since the 1970s. Land reform has been an on-again, off-again enthusiasm of Central American governments - though usually off-again.

Acess to couple of acres of steep, marginal land is the difference between poverty and extreme poverty. (More than 60 per cent of Hondurans live in poverty and 40 per cent in extreme poverty.)

I’ve been back in Spansh classes for two weeks. At this stage, we mostly talk for four hours a day, which means we cover a lot of topics to keep from getting bored. Religion, family, mental illness, illegal immigration to the U.S. - and farming, since my current teacher’s spouse has a small farm.

Copan Ruinas is a sort-of familiar market economy. People mostly trade their labour for money (or run tiny businesses) and buy things in stores.

But go two kilometres outside town and everything changes. Subsistence economies are the norm. Families try to grow enough beans and corn between May and November, in the rainy season, to make it through the year. Frijoles and corn tortillas are the staple foods. If they have more beans or corn than they need for the coming 12 months, they sell or barter it in the local community. If they are fortunate, and good managers, they have chickens and maybe a cow for milk, and work for some cash.

That all requires at least a little land. Ridiculous land, often. People farm rocky slopes than I would be reluctant to try and climb because they’re just too steep. A woman told me how she and her spouse had bought two calves and raised them to be healthy cows, but one fell off a cliff on their precipitous land and was killed. They ate it, but it cut their milk supply in half. (They use some milk, sell some to neighbours for 40 cents a litre, about one-third of the store price, and sometimes make quejada - fresh cheese.)

It’s hard work. Plant by hand, weed by hand, bend the corn stalks over before harvest to let the sun dry the ears, pick them, husk them - the husks bring a few pennies because they’re used to wrap corn meal in for steaming - pick out the bad kernels, put the ears in a net bag and beat them with sticks until the kernels come off. Clean, use and sell.

That’s if you have land. If not, you’ve got it even harder. There is work; even small farmers will hire help with the backbreaking labour. 

It’s piecework. The standard unit is a tarea, about 20 by 30 metres. Chop the weeds in a tarea, and you make $1. A fast worker might do two or more in a day; an older campesino one. Sometimes, the landowner doesn’t have money, so the  payment is in corn - a day’s work for five or 10 lbs of corn. It’s not much, but it’s more than you would make cutting sticks for firewood with your machete and carrying it into town on your back to sell.

Even if you have land today, you might not tomorrow. We did a horse ride into the hills with a guy Jody met who works in the sewage lagoons (a very good place to see birds). As we plodded up the dirt track - the campesinos use even steeper, shorter footpaths to town, children and women with babies making their way home with supplies - we asked if the families own their little adobe one-room houses and tiny plots. No. The dueno - landowner - lets them squat. If he sells, the new owner could tell them to move on.

USAID is the American government agency providing economic and humanitarian assistance, like CIDA. It has a really useful land tenure and property rights project. In Honduras, it found, land distribution is highly unequal and a small percentage of the population owns much of the land. Ownership rights, including exclusive use and transferability, are generally the province of large landowners and multinational corporations.

“Approximately 80 per cent of the privately held land in the country is untitled or improperly titled,” USAID reports. “Only 14 per cent of Hondurans legally occupy properties and, of the properties held legally, only 30 per cent are registered.”

And the most insecure are “minifundistas,” the small farmers working on 70 per cent of the land.

There’s a limited supply of good land. About 15 per cent of Honduras is suited for agriculture - it’s surprisingly mountainous. Big companies have had some of the best land tied up for 120 years, since the Vaccaro brothers, Italian immigrants living in New Orleans, started exporting coconuts and bananas. Today, the best land is used for sugar canes and bananas and palm oil.

Which is fine. Exports are important.

But give families - or co-ops - a little usable land, and some support, and... 

I was going to write lives are changed, but that might not be true. The difference between poverty and extreme poverty is important, but might not mean a different future for anyone.

But it would mean a slightly better life for children and families today.

Footnote: Of course, the other useful measure is improved farming practices, which Jody Paterson writes about here.

Swimming with the happy angels

It's been a stretch without posting, and I'm not sure why.
But today I headed to the piscina to help Jody on an outing with the orphans.
That meant four hours of Spanish school in the morning - I'm back for a two-week stint - then finishing up a report on a security survey of volunteers for Cuso Honduras. (Mostly, they feel pretty safe, despite the country's crime problems. The biggest concerns are around travel, because the roads are dangerous and buses iffy.)
Then I headed out in the very hot midday with a plastic bag of newly purchased towels and banana chips in one hand and a five-litre bottle of some sort of powdered juice in the other. Jody - or Dr. Jody as I now call her - had left earlier to head up the steep hill to the orphanage, or group home, or whatever you want to call it. As it happened, her procession - five kids, plus a woman who lives at the orphanage and her two children - came down the avenue as I emerged from Calle Independencia, our street. They looked a little like orphans because Sunday was haircut day, and the three boys had prison-style buzz cuts.
The pool is nice. We go one day most weekends. It's the pool for one of the hotels, but located about 800 metres away from town, past cantina row, in a little garden with palm trees and hammocks and lounge chairs. Hardly anyone uses it. At night, there's a disco - Papa Changa's - but except for the Bob Marley CDs, it's quiet in the daytime.
Jody had arranged for the orphans to swim for free, but of course the guy at the pool knew nothing about that. So we paid, and they swam with wild enthusiasm. They ranged from one to 12, and some could swim and some were a little freaked by the big pool.
But they were all responsible and no trouble. I had wondered if I would have to rescue someone, but no. I supposed looking after yourself becomes a habit. And they hung in the water for a long time, getting us to toss them around and showing off for each other. Then they ate the banana chips and gulped the powdered drink and the rain came. We waited for a while, then trudged back as torrents ran down the streets.
We'll be back. There are about 25 kids old enough to swim, but you can only take five or six at a time.
I've sure spent a lot of time in swimming pools with kids over the years.

Jody's recent post on the orphanage, worth reading, is here.

Two dead pregnant women, and the war on drugs

I meant to do a post last week, when the the New York Times carried a story saying the U.S. was taking the war on drugs into Honduras. DEA agents are operating out of three small remote bases, using U.S. helicopters and other equipment, and working with Honduran police.

"This new offensive, emerging just as the United States military winds down its conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and is moving to confront emerging threats, also showcases the nation’s new way of war: small-footprint missions with limited numbers of troops, partnerships with foreign military and police forces that take the lead in security operations, and narrowly defined goals, whether aimed at insurgents, terrorists or criminal groups that threaten American interests," the NYT enthused.

What got my attention was this sentence."The effort draws on hard lessons learned from a decade of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq, where troops were moved from giant bases to outposts scattered across remote, hostile areas so they could face off against insurgents."

Come on. Iraq is a mess. Nothing lasting has been accomplished in Afghanistan, at a cost of thousands of lives and billions of dollars.

Jon Lee Anderson did a fine piece in The New Yorker on the reality of the anti-drug effort in Afghanistan. U.S. contractors, hired to do the work, made money, but not much else positive happened. 

Why would it? If people want something, suppliers will provide it. That's the lesson of prohibition.

The New York Times report went on about the safeguards and rules of engagement in Honduras. 

But on Friday, days later, El Tiempo reported, four "humble and honest citizens" were killed when DEA agents and Honduran police in a helicopter opened fire on a boat on the Patuca River in northeastern Honduras. They were after narcotraficantes, but apparently got the wrong boat. Two men, and their pregnant partners, were killed. Four other people were wounded.

Area residents, El Tiempo reported, set fire to four houses because they blamed local authorities for the deaths.

The local mayor, Lucio Baquedano, was not happy. "These operations were performed irresponsibly because it assumes that the people involved are specialists who will act against drug traffickers and not against healthy people."

Not a great translation. But the point is clear. 

There is increasing support in Latin America for legalizing the drug business. The U.S. isn't doing anything meaningful to reduce or manage demand, the argument goes. 

Why should Honduras and other countries engage in an expensive and futile battle against narco traffickers, and deal with the crime and corruption that comes with the drug trade?

There is real money to be made in supplying Americans and Canadians with cocaine, in a country where people are poor. People can be expected to seize the opportunity, whatever the risks, and to fight, and kill, each other for the chance to escape poverty.
Bringing the war on drugs - with real armies - to Honduras means more deaths and, at best, that the cocaine route moves on to some other country.

Lost in Translation, or in conference with OCDIH

Back from a two-day annual planning meeting with OCDIH, the agency I'm to help in Honduras, and I must say it went brilliantly. I succeeded in managing their expectations down to the point that any contribution I make will come as an enormous and pleasant surprise.

The entire team - some 40 people - gathered to review plans and current issues. It was my introduction to them, and the organization.

To the extent that they are thinking about me at all, the OCDIH team is probably hoping that my Spanish is really weak. It's either that, or I am just not terribly bright.

The meeting only happens once a year. I tried to weasel out the day before, but Edgardo, the top guy, made it clear to the local office that I should be there.

So at 4:45 a.m. Thursday, in the pre-dawn dark, I was in the square to catch a ride in a truck with the local OCDIH office staff. They probably weren't thrilled. I was the sixth person in a truck that seats five. Fortunately, Carlita was small enough to perch on the front console.

We roared along the winding, hilly road to La Entrada, about an hour, and then went another 15 minutes to Nueva Arcadia, where OCDIH has another office. Farmers are burning off the hillsides so they can plant before the rainy season, a bad but common agricultural practice. The haze is everywhere, so thick at one point we were driving the speed limit - a rarity unless a giant truck is in the way - with our four-way flashers on.

We then piled onto a bus, chartered for the occasion, that usually runs between two towns. It was a yellow school bus declared surplus by some district in upstate New York. 

Improved, of course. The row of seats on the driver's side had been lengthened by 10 inches to hold, nominally, three people. A 32-inch LCD TV had been mounted over the driver. And a giant 'Jesus Christo' decal covered the top half of the front window.

The decal was reassuring, given the state of Honduran roads. And we had more insurance. OCDIH stands for the Organismo Cristiano de Desarrollo Integral de Honduras (Dearrollo being development). And on both legs of the journey, we watched a big Christian rock concert on the TV. If our bus went off a steep embankment, the faithful would have some tough questions for God.

We gathered more people from OCDIH offices along the way. Hondurans value greetings. They shook hands, kissed, greeted each other in ways that conveyed real warmth. Edgardo, the boss, made a point of introducing me to the puzzled crew.

Guest today, lunch tomorrow

And, after three hours, we bumped into Monte Horeb, a kind-of hotel "capacitacion centre" outside Gracias Lempiras. First, a big breakfast in an open-air area restaurant - eggs, beans, cheese, tortillas, pickled vegetables - served up cafeteria style, then into the meetings.

Which began with a devotional. Religion is central to NGO life in Honduras. So we had a prayer, and then broke into groups to talk about seven scriptural passages - my group met outside in the sun - and  how they related to our goals of planning for OCDIH. We sang some religious songs, thankfully with lyrics projected on a screen - one to the tune of Red River Valley - and shared our thoughts on the scriptures.

And the meetings were good, if a little undisciplined in terms of time and schedules. Hondurans value inclusiveness, so a one-hour session can stretch into two without any compensating changes in the schedule.

But I was impressed with the presentations and the contributions. I learned a lot about the organization, which works with farmers and poor communities in economic and political development, and the challenges. 

Which is amazing, since I understood about two-thirds of the presentations and maybe one-fifth of the discussions.

Powerpoint was my best friend. In Canada, as soon as I hear the quiet hum of a projector in a meeting room, my mind began to drift. Here, my spirits soared anytime the agenda promised a 'Ppt.' I can read Spanish much better than I can speak it. The more detailed - and likely more tedious for rest of the audience - the better.

And in Canada, I’m good at meetings. I’m quick to grasp things, strategic in finding common ground, purposeful and pretty articulate. Here, I felt like a Grade 3 student thrust into a management meeting on take-your-kid-to-work day. Even if you have something to say, silence seems a wiser option.

The last such event I attended was at a Florida golf resort and conference centre. We ate well, drank some and each had a suite.

At the OCDIH meeting, after lunch, we crossed a field to see our rooms. One for men, one for women, two rows of metal bunks, each about two feet apart. A pillow, sheet and bar of soap. Five showers, one sink and three toilets in an annex at the end. It felt like a cross between summer camp and prison. (Based on my one summer stay at Camp Pinecrest, they are not conceptually that dissimilar.)

Anyone who donates to international aid organizations should be pleased. A chartered school bus, accommodation that almost certainly cost less than $5 a head and meetings that left no real down time. Pretty good value. (And I mean no down time. I woke at 4:50 a.m., because two guys had started talking about some organizational issue as they lay in their bunks.)

The meals were tough for me. The fare in Honduras is built around three staples - beans, tortillas and  queso - a white, salty cheese.  They were part of breakfast, lunch and supper. 

That was fine. I like beans. The challenge was making conversation in my tortured Spanish. Lord knows what I said, or the answers I offered to questions that weren’t actually asked. I spent half an hour talking communications with Gloria, the lead OCDIH person in that area. I’m sure her spirits sank with each passing minute.

But as we retraced the journey on the bus - through some beautiful country, big hills, broad valleys, narrow gorges - I was running through some ways I could help. They have some great stories to tell, and some issues came up in the meetings that cry out for a communications solution. I am good at that. If I can make myself understood. 

And everyone included me in their elaborate goodbyes as they got off the bus.

I don’t think they’re expecting much. But I’m aiming to surprise them.

Starting from scratch in Honduras

From New York Times

I wrote not long ago about the plan - or hope, anyway - for charter cities in Honduras. The idea is that all the current efforts to improve things haven't worked, so it's time to try something radical. Set aside a big chunk of land, start a new city from scratch, suspend democracy and let technocrats make the rules, with the help of a foreign government or two.
Effectively, create a brand new country within Honduras.
There are obvious perils, as I noted. But once you've lived her for a while, it's hard to dismiss the idea out of hand.
There's an interesting piece in the NYT today on the topic.

The Liberals and the point of no return

Having been in the provincial press gallery during the collapse of public confidence in Glen Clark and the NDP, I can claim some familiarity with government tipping points.
There is a day, or maybe a week, when something shifts, and political recovery, already difficult, becomes impossible.
It's not a question of one issue. The casino-licence scandal would have been bad for the NDP administration, for sure, but might have been survivable if it had not messed up so badly on other issues, substituting spin and empty announcements for competent government.
It appears the Liberals might have reached the same desperate point.
The BC Rail scandal will not go away. The government's decision to pay $6 million in legal fees for Dave Basi and Bob Virk appears to be fatal.
Government policy - and the agreement with Basi and Virk - were crystal clear. If they were found not guilty, the government would cover their legal costs. If they weren't, the two would be on the hook. Basi had signed a lien on his home, at the government's demand, as part of a deal.
But, as the BC Rail trial was about to hear potentially damaging testimony, the government cut a deal. It agreed to cover $6 million in legal fees for Basi and Virk. If they pleaded guilty. The special prosecutor also promised no jail time, which would have been expected in a breach of trust case of this magnitude.
The government's position has been that the guilty pleas and the $6-million payment were unrelated.
But that's simply incredible. No matter what clever legal and bureaucratic moves moves were made, the deal was that the government covered the $6 million as part of a deal to get guilty pleas. It appears a  government inducement to get guilty pleas and end the trial.
Vaughn Palmer offers a good review of the government's claims - and their weaknesses - here. The government's arguments might impress legal scholars - or 18th-century Jesuits - but average citizens will find them unpersuasive.
Which, like the casino scandal, might not have been determinative.
But the Christy Clark government has not shown competence on other issues. With 11 sitting days left, the Liberals have not yet introduced the bill to repeal the HST, the mea culpa citizens are awaiting. It has floundered on other issues and shown no clear direction.
The polls have been bad for some time. But this week might mark the point at which recovery became impossible

Update:
There is a very good look at the evidence establishing that the $6 million was an inducement to obtain guilty pleas, ending the trial, at The Gazetter's site here.