Razor wire, guns and crime: Judging risk in the big city

Spent the weekend in Tegucigalpa, which almost always gets me thinking about crime in Honduras.

It’s hard to avoid. The small hotel we use is in a nice residential area. The architecture is quite interesting - kind of mid-20th century modern, except with a lot of stone and traditional Honduran materials.

Of course, it’s hard to get a good look. Houses are walled and driveways are blocked by sliding steel doors. The views of the houses are marred by the circles of razor wire - one, two, sometimes three rows high along the tops of the walls. The truly security conscious add electric fencing. (The best business in the city has to be the razor wire franchise.)

It does not encourage a sense of safety for a wandering pedestrian from Canada. 

But I do wander, though only in the daytime and without any possessions. (The Cuso office is a nice 15-minute walk, but I always take a taxi because it would be foolish to attempt it with a laptop.)

A big problem for any hope of a tourism industry in Honduran cities is that it’s just so hard to judge risk. In our first couple of visits to Tegus, as people call the capital, we were extremely cautious. That reflected our reading and the in-country security briefing, which focused on appropriate responses to all the bad things that could happen. (If approached by a robber, avoid eye contact, move slowly, don’t get too close and hand over everything. Be sure to have some money so you won’t make him mad. I spent the first few days ready to throw my money at any vaguely dangerous-looking stranger.)

Now we walk fairly freely, though some neighbourhoods and streets are clearly no-go zones.

We also look a lot less like potential victims. In the first months, we were anticipating danger in a way that might have invited it. As I walked toward the centre of town Saturday, a young Honduran asked me for directions. I looked liked I knew where I was going and was comfortable. 

But most tourists look less certain. And they tend to stand out - there just aren’t that many visiting foreigners. Fish swim in schools in part because there’s less risk of an individual being chosen by a predator. 

For a North American, Tegus can be unfamiliar in an intimidating way. There’s the razor wire, and the armed guards or security bars at stores. (The photo above is a typical corner store.)

The traffic is chaotic and horns sound constantly. The city was founded in 1578 and streets are narrow and twisting, with small sidewalks. Buildings are often crumbling. That’s most striking in the centro, where many of the office buildings, even the big ones, look half-abandoned, with peeling paint and rust-stained walls. 

The pedestrian mall downtown

There is a pedestrian mall leading away from the main square, but vendors with everything from shoes to toothpaste to antibiotics spread on the ground likely detract from the tone the city planners were seeking.

Yet there is charm. The setting is superb. Tegucigalpa is nestled in the hills, with houses climbing the steep slopes and a Coca Cola sign and 30-metre statue of Jesus looking down on the centre of town. There’s are historic buildings - the national art gallery is good and housed in a 400-year-old convent. (Though it was closed for a while this year because there was no money to pay staff.)  

Of course, the real victims of insecurity are Hondurans, especially the ones who can’t afford razor wire or security companies or taxis or gated communities and guards. (More and more neighbourhoods in San Pedro Sula and Tegus are gating their communities and hiring guards, even if it means blocking public roads.) There is no public transit, and the private bus and rapidito services are sketchy and robbery a risk. 

In fact, the 1.3 million people who live in Tegucigalpa live in two different worlds. The poorest live in shacks and eke out a desperate living. But there are malls more opulent than any I’ve seen in Canada; the newest has an underground garage with sensors in each parking stall and lights overhead - green shows a space is vacant, so shoppers don’t have to drive up and down the rows. By one measure of inequality - the relationship between the average income of the richest 20 per cent and the poorest 20 per cent - Honduras is the third most unequal country in the world. The richest quintile have an average income 30 times greater than the poorest. Canada’s ratio is 5.5.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. When the people with power can insulate themselves from the problems of crime and insecurity, they don’t feel any urgent need to fix them. 

Footnote: Again I stress most of the country outside the two main cities is as safe as Canada and Hondurans are keen to welcome visitors. Copan Ruinas, Tela, Utila, Lago de Yojoa - there are spectacular places to see. Come on down.

A smarter way to deal with Honduran migrants

The flood of Hondurans trying to make it to the United States has become crazy.

Honduras is opening a diplomatic office in the border city of McAllen, Texas, joining Guatemala and Mexico in trying to deal with the migrants.

Since Oct. 1, the U.S. Border Patrol has arrested 20,000 Hondurans trying to make their way to America to work. That’s more than 70 a day, every day of the week. The new Honduras office will help handle the deportation paperwork (and look after shipping the remains who died trying). The costs for all involved are huge.

The deportees get bundled onto airplanes and flown back to San Pedro Sula at the rate of about 600 a week. Many turn around and start the journey again.

And those are just the people who get caught. Remittances from Hondurans working outside the country - mostly in the U.S., and mostly illegal - were $1.5 billion for the first six months of this year. 

That’s about 16.7 per cent of Honduras’ GDP. If the money stopped flowing, GDP per capita would fall from $2,260 to $1,890. (GDP per capita in Canada is just over $50,000.)

Arguably, the best thing that could be done to improve life for Hondurans in the near term would be to allow a lot more workers into Canada and the U.S., in a much safer way.

The journey now is incredibly dangerous. A main route involves crossing Guatemala and southern Mexico and piling on to La Bestia, a freight train, riding on top of and between cars. Gangs demand $100 from each passenger at stations along the line. People are killed and kidnapped. 

Hondurans keep on making the trek. The U.S. immigration office estimates about 105,000 Hondurans leave for the U.S. annually.

It’s too much to expect open borders. But the U.S. has sure gone a long way from the Statue of Liberty’s “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses, yearning to breath free.” 

Canada is no more welcoming, as David Suzuki’s recent comments that the country is full indicate, although there are few hundred Hondurans in the country under the temporary foreign worker program.

The money sent back from the U.S. keeps families afloat. Farming families buy land; people fix their houses and start businesses. 

And, based on an anecdotal sampling, my impression is that Hondurans come back from the U.S. with new skills and attitudes that help them start and build businesses. 

That might reflect the kind of people who choose to head off to America in the first place. But it might also show that many Hondurans come home once they have achieved their goals, bringing attributes that strengthen their country.

My four grandparents set off for Canada because they didn’t have opportunities in England. They were welcomed a hundred years ago. Today, they wouldn’t be allowed into the country.

There are legitimate concerns about the effect on the employment market of even foreign workers, legal or not, and worries about criminal elements.

That’s about it in terms of pragmatic issues. People living off the grid aren’t big consumers of government services.

The best solution, or course, is to deal with corruption and crime and poor education and all the barriers that keep Hondurans from building better lives in their own communities.

Meanwhile, coming up with a way to let Hondurans spend a few years in Canada or the U.S. to support their families, accumulate some capital and see new ways of doing things might be a good way to support this country.

How to save newspapers

I’ve painted a grim future for newspapers in the last few posts.

So what can be done?

One option for companies is to cash out. Cut costs, raise rates, make as much as possible for and then sell the assets and walk away. 

But let’s assume owners see value in the brands. Postmedia took in $830 million last year and generated positive cash flow. If newspapers can slow the revenue decline, trim expenses to fit a new model and find new audiences, they might have a viable, though much smaller, future.

First, newspaper managers have to admit they’re in big trouble and the business model is broken. Denial and delay kill companies. 

That means planning for a future without a printed product. Postmedia likely spent about $210 million last year printing and distributing newspapers - about one-third of operating expenses. The same information could be delivered online or through mobile devices for a tiny fraction of that amount. Maybe print papers will survive. But I doubt it, and it’s foolish not prepare for the alternative.

And that also means planning for a future with much less revenue. Newspapers, in their heyday, faced limited competition and benefited from barriers to entry.

But in the online world there are countless competitors and new ones emerging every day. Revenues are going to be lower. That means coming up with a new business with a much smaller cost base. (The Seattle PI, online-only for three years, has a 12-person newsroom.)

Second, newspapers have to figure out the distinct things they can offer to attract and retain readers. Newspaper websites are still a grab bag of content, at their base not much different from the print versions of two decades ago. A little entertainment, a little world news, a lot of local coverage organized along traditional lines.

But there are lots of great entertainment sites, and fine places to get world news. There is no reason for readers to go to their local newspaper website.

If newspapers don’t figure out what they want to offer, they can’t cut costs intelligently and ensure their most valuable coverage is protected.

Third, they need to experiment. When I left the Times Colonist for Honduras in 2011, we had the traditional newsroom cake and I got to offer advice. What we’re doing isn’t working, I said, which gives a great freedom to test bold, new experiments. There is little to lose. Try wild things.

Where are those experiments? Lay copies of Canadian daily newspapers from today and 15 years ago down side-by-side and they are eerily similar, despite the dramatic loss of readers. Look at newspaper websites across the country and you find sameness. 

There are small interesting efforts. The Vancouver Sun has developed useful information databases as way to be more valuable to readers. The National Post has decided opinion and analysis are its strengths.

But mostly newspapers have continued with a uniform model that has been in trouble for at least 15 years. Postmedia’s 10 newspapers could test different content, or ways of getting people to pay. They don’t.

What experiments are worth trying?

• A truly overwhelming emphasis on key local content is an obvious approach to test. That would mean making sure all resources are focused on community coverage that matters most to readers. Anything else just wouldn’t get done.

• Focusing on context and commentary, while creating stars, is worth trying. If a newspaper has the best political columnist, or a specialized reporter, then he or she needs to be promoted as a big reason to read. Newspapers have done a lousy job of selling the quality of their people. And when news is shared in Twitter within minutes of it happening, maybe context and commentary are things people will pay for.
• It would be good to see a newspaper experiment with being a deep information resource. Report the political news, but also post the videos of the scrums and the tapes of interviews, the key documents and the Hansard transcripts and comments from other media. Put the city council agendas and the video feed of the school board meeting online. Create crime maps. See if people value more raw material.
• Some paper should try the celebrity/scandal/outrage model, although I’m not sure it would work in Canada.
• La Presse’s experiment in planning for a paperless future is worth watching. It’s spending $40 million to develop a totally new product for tablets. There is a separate newsroom with about 100 people working on the project. 
• A newspaper based on reader-generated content would be a good experiment. One of my old employers is launching four community newspapers in Liverpool, and content will come almost entirely from readers. Trinity Mirror has hired 20 community content curators for its papers to handle readers’ photos and stories. People spend time reading each other’s work on Facebook; why not on a newspaper website. (Especially edited and properly presented.)
• Someone should try a premium product - a brand extension - at an extra cost. Promise special information, hire a staff and charge readers. (Crikey, an interesting Australian experiment, offers news and analysis and has found a niche, with some 16,000 paying customers.)

I’d bet on local, commentary, stars and reader-generated content and make determined spending cuts on anything that didn’t support those areas.

But what’s needed are dozens of experiments, driven by a mix of desperation and hope. And not just in content in presentation and delivery.

The clock is ticking. 

Footnote: Aaron Kushner’s experiment with the Orange County Register is one of the boldest. He bought the paper and has spent heavily adding newsroom staff and content, counting on readers to pay much more for the paper. The experiment is not likely to be duplicated in Canada.

How I killed newspapers, Part Three: The bad news

Newspapers will find a way out of these bleak times, some journalists maintain.

Here’s hoping. But the situation is grim and there’s no clear path to a viable future. 

I like newspapers and believe they’re important on many levels. 

But they are in big trouble.

Two years ago, RBC Capital Markets started “following” Postmedia, Canada’s largest newspaper company, and issuing reports for investors. 

RBC’s first report set a target share price of $14. That valued the company at $635 million, much less than the $1.1 billion Postmedia paid a year earlier for the newspapers from Canwest, then in bankruptcy protection.

Last week, RBC knocked its target price down to 75 cents. That values Postmedia at $34 million - barely one-twentieth of the value the bank set two years ago. 

One good question is how RBC’s researchers could have been so spectacularly wrong. Any investors who relied on the bank’s advice two years ago would have lost a lot of money.

But the main point is that RBC’s analyst has decided Postmedia faces a bleak future and has no convincing plan to turn things around. It’s valuing the 10 daily newspapers, on an operating basis, at about $3.5 million each. (That doesn’t include balance sheet items like real estate.)

All newspapers face similar challenges. They are shedding circulation and revenue at alarming rates. Postmedia, as a true newspaper company, happens to provide public reports that offer a good look at the industry’s core issues.

Postmedia’s strategy is to cut costs, try to get more revenue from readers and hope some better approach to the business will be found. (Or at least that’s my translation of CEO Paul Godfrey’s statement on the quarterly report: “We will continue on this path, transforming a traditional media company into one that leverages future opportunities with a structure that supports a new model.”)

It’s a reasonable short-term strategy. But RBC is probably right not to see it as a solution.

For starters, it’s hard to cut costs fast enough these days. Postmedia, like other newspaper companies, is reducing staff, chopping publication days, centralizing production and looking for savings in every area of operation. It launched a “transformation” program last fall that aims to cut expenses by 15 to 20 per cent by 2015.

But revenue fell 7.4 per cent last year, and is down 9.3 per cent in the first three quarters of the current fiscal year. Those losses wipe out the gains of the transformation program. 

And last month, PwC forecast the Canadian newspaper would see a continuing revenue losses of almost 20 per cent over the next four years. The cost-cutting targets are already much too small.

Getting readers to pay more is a reasonable goal. North American dailies kept newspapers’ cost low, because more readers made advertisers happy. In 2005, a Statscan study found, circulation provided only 17 per cent of revenue for Canadian newspapers. Postmedia hopes it will be 50 per cent in future, compared with 25 per cent today. (One way to reach that percentage is through falling ad revenues.)

Paywalls - ways of making readers pay for online content - are a key part of the strategy for Postmedia and other newspapers. Online readers will get a few free articles each month, then be forced to pay a subscription fee or be cut off.

It’s a good way to buy some time and bring in a little extra revenue. For some newspapers, it’s a sound strategy. The New York Times or Wall Street Journal offer unique content to an audience that’s willing to pay. (In part because people aren’t paying - they are charging their online subscriptions to their employers.)

But after years of free information, why would people be willing to pay for the content of most newspapers? What would convince people it’s worth paying for a local newspaper website? How much would they pay, and how - by the article, or by month, or on a contribution basis? (Postmedia’s approach has been disappointing. With 10 papers, the corporation could try different paywall approaches, including pay-per-article, or different levels of access. Instead, it has imposed a common model.)

So far, paywall revenue is not enough to fix the business model. And there is the obvious problem in reducing costs and content just when you’re asking people to pay for what was once free. 

The Vancouver Sun, for example, just cut about 15 per cent of staff through buyouts. There is no arguing with the need to cut costs. But the departures include David Baines, the skilled, experienced reporter who exposed investment scams and regulatory incompetence, Scott Simpson, an exceptionally knowledgeable energy reporter, and Craig McInnes, whose columns were smart, fact-based and untainted by conventional wisdom or cheap contrariness. 

It’s hard to ask people to pay more when you are giving them less.

Or when you haven’t thought through what you are selling. Postmedia wants to save money by sharing content on things like fashion across the papers.

But there are scads of good fashion sites, local and global. If there is no local element, why spend money on fashion coverage at all? Why would any reader pay for a generic fashion coverage from a Canadian newspaper group?

The hopefulness of newspaper stalwarts is heartening. But it is also a bit reminiscent of the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, insisting his chopped off arm is “but a scratch.”

What can be done? Next, enough with the gloom and at least some ideas. 

How I killed newspapers, Part Two

OK, I didn’t really kill newspapers.

But my career began when newspapers were doing extraordinarily well, and continued as they did less and less well. For much of the time, I was in newspaper management. So I’m hardly blameless.

Looking back, it’s amazing how many mistakes we made.

In my early days at The Red Deer Advocate, we published two 96-page newspapers in the run-up to Christmas. Advertisers needed to use the paper, and we benefited. (The paper made lots of money, circulation was increasing and we were adding newsroom staff every year.)

A chunk of that advertising was from big grocery and department stores, which would buy six or eight pages of advertising at a time.

Then the stores thought of a cheaper way to reach readers. They printed flyers and pay us to insert them in the newspaper. Eight pages of actual ads might have cost them $7,000. The flyer would cost about one-third of that.

The newspaper industry didn’t like flyers, naturally. One response was to charge high rates to insert them in the paper. (Arguing in part that the charges were justified because being part of the newspaper added value.)

So other businesses charged less and grabbed the business, especially community newspapers that were emerging, in many markets, as strong competitors.

Newspapers were nicely profitable in those days. Revenue was strong and subscribing to your local paper was practically an act of citizenship. Technology was reducing labour costs. The days of a reporter typing a story and then having editors hand the copy to a higher-paid composing room employee who would type it again to produce the type were ending.

But there were already warning signs of trouble ahead, and not just from low-cost competitors. Any research showed newspaper readers skewed old. The younger people were, the less likely they were to pick up the paper. We made small and ineffective efforts to reach them, but mostly told ourselves they would grow into our products. And readership fell, for almost all papers, year after year.

The world changed much faster than we did. Newspapers were slow to experiment with the Internet and online distribution of news and information. We watched as Craigslist scooped away classified advertising. (A double blow that meant lost revenue and one less reason for people to read the paper.) 

And we never really worked at understanding how people’s information needs - and sources - were changing. In the mid-90s, when I was at the Times Colonist, we did a research project on readers’ needs and interests. After polling and focus groups, the consultant reported people in Victoria had very low news needs. They just weren’t interested in news as much as they were in working in their gardens or sailing. That’s partly a reflection of Victoria’s population, but I suspect they were in vanguard in terms of their attitudes toward news. Around the same time a young woman told me she didn’t need the media because if something important happened, someone usually told her about it. That attitude, amplified by a flood of information, is increasingly present.

There were certainly a few efforts to tinker with the product. But not many. And few sustained, bold experiments. (The National Post was innovative when launched, but hardly a bold new direction for newspapers.)

Why? I’d suggest four big reasons.

First, newspapers were a “mature industry.” Ian MacDougall, a consultant whose work involves corporate lifecycles, warns that stage brings the risk of complacency and an environment where innovation or even raising problems is discouraged. Short-term financial results take priority over long-term growth.

Second, corporate ownership brought a focus on short-term results. Corporate managers needed to report growing quarterly profits, or investment analysts would write bad reports, shareholders would sell and stock price would fall. Investing in research or new products doesn’t get much support in that kind of environment. And the response to any drop in revenue is to look for quick expense reductions, even if that risks long-term damage.

Third, many papers - most larger papers - had costly, inflexible union agreements, signed when times were good. National advertisers, for example, began sending completed ads for publication in the 1970s so they had control of the way they looked. Union contracts gave some composing rooms jurisdiction over all production. So, as a compromise, compositors typeset and made up versions of the ad, which was then thrown in the garbage. The Vancouver Sun and Province quit accepting inserts last year. The union contract called for mailroom staff to be paid more than $90,000 and ‘stuffers,’ who put the flyers into the papers, to be paid the equivalent of more than $60,000 a year. 

And, fourth, many people in the industry at every level were delusional. I started writing about newspapers after after a lively exchange on Twitter, which was started by a tweet from a journalist that “you can't beat your daily newspaper for value... less than a cup of coffee... ante up, folks.”

We kept telling each other what great value we were and how much people needed us, even as they were sending the opposite message. And, in many ways, we still are.

So what will work? That’s another blog post.

How I killed newspapers: Part One

Found myself in a lively Twitter exchange today about the future of newspapers, sparked in part by Postmedia’s grisly quarterly report.

Things look bleak for most newspapers. Postmedia is Canada's largest newspaper company. Its report set out the problem. Revenue - ads and circulation and digital - was down 9.4 per cent on the previous year. Expenses were down 9.1 per cent, thanks to a big cost-cutting drive. Based on those numbers alone, next year’s financial performance will be worse, and the next year worse still.

Circulation - the number of newspapers sold - is down by 14 per cent in the quarter. Some of the decline reflects the decision to kill Sunday papers in Ottawa, Edmonton and Calgary, which were judged money-losers. But that’s still a huge loss in readers.

Postmedia newspapers have been losing about five per cent of their subscribers a year. Which means a paper can shed 25 per cent of its customers in a little over four years.

Newspapers once sold themselves as mass media. Buy one ad, in the 1990s, and you had a chance of being seen by more than two-thirds of the adults in a mid-size city. (Numbers were higher in small communities, lower in big ones.) Now an ad might reach 50 per cent of the population in a mid-size city. Advertisers will pay much less - or find a more targeted media.

When everyone read the paper - or it seemed that way - there was pressure to subscribe. Otherwise, you might not be in on the next day’s conversation at coffee break.

And, of course, fewer readers means less circulation revenue.

Paywalls and digital subscriptions were supposed to help address the problem. It’s not a bad short-term strategy to pull in some revenue. But the early evidence is that - for almost all newspapers - the hope that people’s payments for online content will come close to covering the bills is delusional. (Which is the subject for another blog post.)

Postmedia has tested paywalls and introduced them in all its papers. The quarterly reported noted 100,000 people had signed up as digital subscribers. But it didn’t disclose how many were existing print subscribers, who would pay nothing, and how many were real, new, revenue-producing online readers. Which means there were not that many paying customers. Companies like to share successes.

Overall digital revenues - online ads and subscriptions - were up 2.2 per cent for the quarter. 

That’s not good. The corporation lost $21 million in ‘traditional’ revenues, and gained $500,000 in new digital revenues. Postmedia management has been pitching a “digital first” strategy, counting on double-digit revenue growth to help offset print declines. It hasn’t happened.

That’s a fairly bleak look at the industry. 

But we haven’t even got to one of the big problems.

Michael Brown, then the slightly scary head of the Thomson Corporation, talked about the virtuous circle. Newspapers would invest in the product and get more readers and advertisers, and use some of that revenue to make the paper even better, and on and on. (Brown made the decision to sell off Thomson's newspapers in the mid-90s.)

Now, the focus is on cutting costs. And the chosen approach involves reducing the quality of the newspapers, which will mean fewer people will buy them and more cost reductions will be necessary. The opposite of Brown’s virtuous circle is the death spiral. Why start paying for a newspaper as it cuts content?

Doom and disaster aren’t the inevitable outcomes. 

But they aren’t a bad bet. It was hard to see anything in the Postmedia report to shareholders that hinted at a strategy to build a sustainable business based on providing news and information in Canadian cities. 

Many Postmedia papers - like the two in Vancouver - are still operating with crushing cost structures. The  contracts were freely negotiated by both sides in the good old days. But paying a semi-skilled mailroom employee $90,000 a year, as the business crumbles, is folly. 

It’s not a pretty picture. But there is a powerful argument for the importance of newspapers, or at least news organizations that pay competent, trained people to report what’s going on, and offer commentary. That is not a slag on bloggers and citizen journalists. (I am one.) But there is value in having a paper that will stand behind you when you are sued, or come up with a cheque every week while you check out stories and gain understanding of issues. 

But the industry isn’t responding in a way that shows it understands the crisis. That is consistent with at least 30 years of failure in responding to change. 

That’s tomorrow’s blog post. (The post title - How I killed newspapers - is tongue in cheek. But I did work in the biz during the years of decline, for many of them as a manager. It's hard not to feel some blame is in order.)

Where have all those post-Olympic tourists gone?

The mass protests in Brazil are big news down here. In part, Brazilians are mad that the government is spending billions to host the World Cup and the Olympics, and don’t buy promises of economic benefit.

B.C.’s post-Olympic tourism stats support the protesters’ skepticism.

The promised increase in visitors didn’t happen. In fact, two years after the Games British Columbia actually lost ground as a tourist destination.

In 2007, B.C. had 4,837,000 international visitors, 26.9 per cent of the Canadian total. The numbers plummeted in 2008 and 2009, not surprising given the global recession and financial crisis. International visitors increased slightly in 2010, fell in 2011 and inched up 1.1 per cent last year.

The number of international visitors in 2012 - 4,220,000 - was 13 per cent below the 2008 total.

And B.C.’s share of the total visitors to Canada was 25.9 per cent - the lowest in  at least seven years.

You can rationalize changes in the raw numbers, pointing to external factors.

But B.C.’s tourist visits aren’t just flat-lined. They’re declining. The Games impact has been non-existent.

That’s not surprising. How many British Columbians decided to visit Turin after watching the 2006 Games?

But in selling the public on the Games, the government promised big benefits. It commissioned a study in 2002 that predicted the Games would result in 1.7 million to 2.7 million additional international visitors between 2008 and 2015. That’s at least 200,000 per year.

Those were among the benefits a contribution from taxpayers equal to some $450 per person - kids included - to pay for the Games.

And the promise of tourism increases has turned out to be entirely empty.

Those Brazilians have good reason to be worried.

International visitors

	BC	BC Share	Canada
2006	4,811	26.5%	18,175
2007	4,837	26.9%	17,975
2008	4,459	26.1%	17,089
2009	4,179	26.4%	15,804
2010	4,271	26.5%	16,093
2011	4,174	26.1%	15,976
2012	4,220	25.9%	16,311

You don't have to be religious to help - but the people who do mostly seem to be

I’d certainly argue that you don’t have to believe in God to help others. It seems a natural thing to to do for any thinking, feeling creature.

But it’s striking that the people who actually show up to help in Honduras are driven by their faiths. 

A posse from a Louisianan church was here this month to help an orphanage/care home in Copan Ruinas. They built beds for the kids, with cupboards for personal stuff. They worked hard, dealt with the inevitable problems and left the home much better off. The kids were big fans of the guys. The new units replaced wrecked beds with stinking mattresses, where kids often slept two to a single bed and gave them a place to store their few possessions. It simply would not have happened if the guys from Louisiana had stayed home.

There is personal satisfaction, I’m sure. A chance to see a new country. But really, the group were here because they believe helping others is a tenet of their faith. It’s what Jesus wants them to do.

There are many others. Last year, I rode up into the hills with a church group from Tyler, Texas. They were working on a water project. The core group had been doing annual missions for at least 12 years. Projects in their community and another country were built into their church plan each year.

When we were in Tomala, we bumped into a mission group doing eye care. They had collected thousands of eyeglasses back in the U.S., and volunteers had tested each pair, and labelled them with the prescription. The group tested people in poor communities and gave them the correct glasses so they could actually see to perform basic chores.

Missions are a big deal here. There are some 2,000 a year, according to an article in Honduras Weekly. Most days in the San Pedro Sula airport you can spot people - Americans - matching t-shirts, often with religious slogans. Honduras got about 286,000 U.S. visitors last year; 34,000 were on missions or aid work.

They aren’t all alike. Some groups are more interested in proselytizing than the day-to-day problems of Honduras. Some are poorly planed, and it probably would have been better if the people had just collected the money they spent on travel and donated it to an organization down here. (Although there is merit in simply giving North Americans a chance to see life in a poor country firsthand; no amount of reading offers equivalent understanding.)

And there is a lot of debate about the projects, and whether some actually have a negative impact. Will struggling communities learn that it’s easier to wait for a bunch of gringos to come down and fix the collapsed school roof, rather than come up with a solution? Will there actually be a teacher for the school? Will the new water system break down within a year because there’s no money, or knowledge for maintenance? (About 50 per cent of water projects in Honduras fail within five years, a consultant said at last year’s Project Honduras Conference.)

Those are all arguments for well-planned mission trips, not against the concept. (Or excuses for inaction.) And a certain percentage of failures - for missions, NGOs or anyone else - is just part of the process in a country like Honduras.

There are lots of people travelling here to contribute who aren’t religious. But they are wildly outnumbered by the faith-based groups who come down to work, or send cash or contributions. 

That’s true in Canada, too, according to most research. People who go to church give more to charity - secular charities, not just their churches - and are far more likely to volunteer.

I’m not prepared to draw any sweeping conclusions. And I still believe religious faith is no prerequisite for acting to help others.

But it is sure striking that the people doing most of the heavy lifting in Honduras are brought here by faith.

The Honduras' crime problem and 'advisories'

Another grisly warning from the U.S. government this week about travel to Honduras, and an off-key response from the Honduran government.

The State Department advisory cautioned in the first sentence that “crime and violence levels remain critically high.” Things mostly went downhill from there.

La Gringa, an ex-pat blogger living in La Ceiba, did a useful comparison of this advisory with the last warning from Nov. 21.

Generally, the new version paints a picture of greater danger. For instance, both documents say U.S. citizens do not appear to be targeted. But the new advisory adds “Crimes are committed against expatriates at levels similar to those committed against locals.” 

Not good when you’re writing about the country with the the world’s highest murder rate. And not accurate, based on my experience. Locals are at much greater risk of crime. 

The advisory is bad news. Hondurans need U.S. visitors and investors. When the American government talks about “critically high” crime, they stay home.

The Honduran government’s response was uninspiring. President Porfirio Lobo instructed staff to prepare a map for foreign visitors that would show where they should and should not go and provide safety information. But being greeted at the airport with a map of danger zones won’t likely inspire confidence. (And Hondurans might wonder why they are expected to live and work every day in areas too dangerous for foreigners to visit.)

There were the usual complaints that other countries also have crime and that Honduran media do too many graphic crime stories. Possibly true, but unlikely to have an impact on prospective visitors.

Pompey Bonilla, who was replaced as security minister but remains a presidential aide, said things aren’t so bad, but many Hondurans would disagree.

Bonilla also rightly noted that a lot of crime in Honduras is related to the country’s role as a big cocaine trans-shipment centre. The trade exists largely because of failed U.S. drug policies, he said, and Honduras pays the price.

The gangs are another big problem here, and the U.S. has a role there, too. The two main gangs developed in Los Angeles, among migrants from this region and their American-born children. When the gang problem grew too large, the U.S. government launched a policy of deporting people convicted of criminal offences. 

Between 2001 and 2010, the U.S. sent 44,042 criminals to Honduras, many of whom had been in U.S. prisons. Convenient for the U.S., but bad news for Honduras, flooded with gang members with skills honed on the hardest streets of America.

There aren’t many easy solutions to the crime problem. But there are some simple first steps.

For example, the State Department warning - like the last advisory - notes that “A majority of serious crimes are never solved; of the 18 murders committed against U.S. citizens since January 2011, police have closed none.”

Given the stakes, surely the government and police could have a made it a priority to solve a few of those murders. (The real goal, of course, is to improve the overall effectiveness of police and courts, so that literally getting away with murder isn’t the norm. But progress has been dismal.)

Americans still come here. There were 286,000 visitors from the U.S. in 2012, an increase from the previous year. 

But Costa Rica had 864,000 U.S. visitors in 2012. Honduras has similar, if untapped, potential.

And only 34 per cent of visitors to Hondurans - about 97,000 - were tourists. About 100,000 were visiting relatives, about 57,000 were on business and about 34,000 were on missions and aid work.

Honduras is a great country to visit. The two big cities, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, are dangerous and demand caution. Many Hondurans suffer greatly from crime.

But in Copan Ruinas, where we live, visitors are probably safer than in their hometowns. We’ve travelled pretty widely through the country and felt secure.

The country has extraordinary potential as a tourist destination. Mayan ruins, beaches, reefs, jungles, mountains, lagoons and rivers, indigenous cultures, wildlife - it is a knockout.

But the infrastructure isn’t there. And won’t be, if travellers and investors are scared off by grim travel advisories. 

Laurie Watt scores a win for real journalism over sycophancy

Score for one for competent, responsible journalism.

A communications officer in the Prime Minister’s Office sent an email to The Advance, in Barrie, Ont., encouraging the paper to do a story on a speech that Justin Trudeau gave in the community six years ago.

Trudeau got $10,000; the local college lost $4,118 on what was supposed to be a fundraiser.

An OK little story, although Trudeau wasn’t an MP at the time.

But PMO communications staffer Erica Meekes asked that the the information - including a poster for the 200 event - be identified as coming from a “source.”

Instead, reporter Laurie Watt reported the story, including where the information came from.

Why did Meekes want to hide the role of the Prime Minister’s Office? Maybe she thought it looked bad that people on the public payroll are spending their days on partisan work for the Conservative party. Maybe secrecy is just a way of life for PMO staff. Maybe she thought the story would be more credible if the source of the information wasn’t identified.

Who cares? She wanted to hide information from the public, and Meekes and The Advance recognized their role was to report, not keep secrets.

Sources sometimes require anonymity. People might have legitimate fears about repercussions. But at a minimum media should say why, specifically, they aren’t identifying the source of the information. It’s a critical part of the story for readers and viewers.

(And while they’re at it, media should push back against the growing and destructive practice of accepting vapid, anonymous email responses from government and other institutions instead of demanding real interviews and accountability.)

Why it's bad when ministerial assistants are transformed into chiefs of staff

Useful editorial in the Times Colonist today on the big increases in salary scales for political staffers in the Christy Clark government.

Noteworthy, for example, that salaries for ministerial assistants - sorry, deputy chiefs of staff, as they are now called - have increased 53 per cent since 2003, while the average British Columbian has seen a 28-per-cent wage increase. (The premier’s pay is up 60 per cent.) The top pay for minister's aides is now $102,000.

The grandiose new job title is alarming in itself. Ministerial assistants - usually one or two per minister - are support staff. The main responsibility is making the minister look good and keeping him or her on top of the ministry. The principal qualification is effective service to the party in power - active Young Liberals and New Democrats, keen campaign workers and volunteers. A few have broader work experience, but not many.

The Liberal government, for example, just gave one of the new chief of staff jobs to the party’s defeated candidate in North Island. His resume lists no work experience beyond a co-op stint in a paper mill.

‘Chief of staff’ also suggests some considerable responsibility.

But the chief of staff for Teresa Wat, minister of international trade, the Asia-Pacific strategy and multiculturalism, supervises one administrative support person. He's a Young Liberal with a work history as a government political appointee. (Nothing wrong with that, of course, for partisans of any party. Politics can be a career choice.)

It’s just a title, some might say. 

But if a ministerial assistant calls a business, or government employees, they assume he or she is seeking information or action on behalf of the minister, but that they are dealing with an assistant. If necessary, they will ask to hear directly from the minister.

But a chief of staff - even if there is only one staff - sounds rather grander. Maybe people won’t ask. And the people with the new titles can’t help but have an inflated sense of their own importance.

When Alberta MP Brent Rathgeber quit the federal Conservative caucus this month, he complained political staff in Stephen Harper’s office ran roughshod over MPs, telling them what questions to ask in committees and what to say and to vote “like trained seals.” Those are the federal equivalents to the new provincial chiefs of staff. And his complaints suggests the risk in elevating the power of political staff.

In my past days in the Press Gallery, we joked with ministerial assistants about their roles as ‘dog walkers,’ accompanying the minister to the caucus and legislative chamber each day, file in hand and earnest expression firmly in place, as if even the one-minute walk from the office could not be wasted. (We also joked that some ministers simply couldn’t find the caucus room without help.)

Practically, it’s an important political job. Ministerial assistants keep the minister informed and briefed, help decide who gets access and schedule the days.  They are valuable.

But the elevation of ministerial assistants to chiefs of staff implicitly redefines their roles and increases their authority. And increasing one person’s authority inevitably means diminishing someone else’s - in this case, likely the people actually elected to govern.

Taking on a culture of violence with street art in Tegucigalpa

I came across the Mona Lisa with a pink gun on a wall near a Tegucigalpa hotel on a previous visit.

The work is part of a series by a Honduran artist who uses the name Urban Maeztro. The prints mixed classic art images with the weapons that are part of life for many Hondurans.

Street art can be dangerous work here. Authorities don’t like it, as in most cities, but they express they’re disapproval more forcefully. And gangs aren’t sure if Urban Maeztro is mocking them.

It’s not going to end violence. But anything that challenges the status quo is a good thing.

You can read more about Urban Maeztro and his work here. 

The Canadian government and the Honduran drug business

You can draw a straight line from the Canadian government’s stupid and cynical drug policies to crime here in Honduras.

Canada and the U.S. continue to follow a drug policy that has failed every test since Prohibition in the 1920s. The governments spend billions in a futile effort to block the supply of drugs and lock up users and dealers. 

It has never worked. Over the 42 years since Richard Nixon declared the “war on drugs,” nothing has changed. Drug use and drug-related crime haven’t been reduced.

The beneficiaries are criminals. Gangs make big money because drugs are illegal and widely desired. The risks are worth the huge rewards. It’s simply a question of market forces.

Honduras has become a big trans-shipment point for cocaine bound from South America to the insatiable North American and European markets. Planes land on strips carved in the jungle, boats race to dark beaches. They even use submarines.

The U.S. state department estimates 80 per cent of cocaine bound for American consumers passes through Honduras. Maybe 130 tonnes, or $80 billion in street value. 

In a desperately poor country, the chance to be part of an $80-billion business is irresistible. At the low end, people can earn a month’s pay by carrying a backpack of cocaine over the hills and into Guatemala. At the upper end, there is big money to be made. A narco in a community about 40 kilometres from here has lives in a replica of the White House.

It’s not all bad. A woman told me a narcotrafficante was elected mayor in her hometown. He had money to fix things up, and muscle to discourage troublemakers. People were happy with his administration.

But an illegal drug trade always has fallout. Participants settle disputes with guns. They bribe police and governments to look the other way. Corruption become corrosive. 

The drug industry in Honduras thrives thanks to the policies of the Canadian and U.S. governments. 

That could be defensible if those policies were based on evidence and made sense.

But they aren’t.

The latest Canadian example is the government’s response to a Supreme Court ruling rejecting its effort to close Insite, the B.C. government’s supervised drug injection site in Vancouver.

The issue has travelled through the courts - the B.C. Supreme Court, the province’s appeal court and the Supreme of Court of Canada - since 2008.

The rulings have been consistent, and based on the evidence from supporters and opponents. The supervised injection site saves lives and reduces illness. People manage their addictions and some seek treatment. Public disorder is reduced and community life improved.

And opponents were not able to show any compelling pragmatic reasons not to allow the centre to operate. Significant benefits, including lives saved, and no good reason to close the site.

The Canadian government should have said we don’t like drug use in any form, but accept the evidence and ruling on supervised injection sites. Our polices will be based on what works.

Instead, it introduced new legislation governing supervised injection sites. The health minister has full discretion to say no, without appeal. Applicants must include letters of support from provincial cabinet ministers, municipalities and police forces and broad consultation.

The legislation is written to ensure the sites won't be approved, despite the toll in lost lives, health care costs and damaged communities.

If there was any doubt about the intent, the governing Conservatives erased it. Even as the health minister announced the new law, the Conservative party launched a website petition headlined “Keep heroin out of our backyards.” It warned “special interests” and opposition parties want safe injection sites across the country.

The governing party once again played cheap and sleazy politics with drug policy.

The results stretch across a hemisphere. Canadians are hurt, of course. But so are Hondurans. The continued allegiance to failed policies in Canada and the U.S. ensures a lucrative market and thriving illegal industry dedicated to meeting the demand. Decades of efforts have failed to change that equation.