A walk in repudiation of the Mining Law

Three hundred people made a 200-kilometer walk from deep inside Honduras to Tegucigalpa, the capital, in repudiation of the Mining Law and Model Cities Decree, which are closely linked anti-national and anti-grassroots projects. They also demanded freedom for Chabelo Morales, a fighter for the land. They fought by walking and sought paths with this initiative.

Ismael Moreno, SJ

The year already has an election smell, and this time, not just among the same parties as always. The LIBRE party candidate is muscling his way onto the electoral stage wearing Manuel Zelaya Rosales’ shadow, mustache and hat. Then there are other candidates, such as Salvador Nasralla, who comes out of advertising and sports television to fight with a gelatinous anti-corruption program, and General Romeo Vasquez Velásquez, the very one who gave the military order to depose Zelaya by a coup in June 2009.

Elections in Honduras are like the national soccer team in that both fill tens of thousands of people full of enthusiasm. But everyone knows that while both soccer and elections entertain, provide amusement and make a racket, neither one resolves anyone’s problems. Both mobilize, but go no further than euphoric ephemera. A popular grassroots leader called these spectacles the “ecstasy of the poor, skinny dog.” Throughout this year Honduran society will have both the national soccer team and the national election campaign.

With this being both a soccer and electoral year, a group of us, men and women from various organizations, got together to brainstorm about how to break with the logic of soccer’s enthusiastic inertia and the blindness of electoral politics. What could we do to leave a historic record repudiating the joint decisions taken by the National Congress, presided over by Juan Orlando Hernández, the governing National Party’s presidential candidate, and by the government as a whole?

The mining law and
the model cities decree

In January, with relentless drive, the legislators passed a new mining law and took back up the Model Cities decree that the Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional in October of last year. With very little retouching, they pushed the latter through under the name “Special Development Regions” after carefully replacing the justices who voted against Model Cities with others in tune with Hernández’s thoughts and power. They also approved the legal “impeachment” mechanism that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended for settling matters related to outrageous acts of senior government officials, including the President. But instead of being a tool to prevent a recurrence of events such as the coup that resulted in the capture and expulsion from the country of then-President Zelaya, politicians have ended up using it as an instrument to coerce opponents.

We had to do more

What were we to do about such decisions? We felt an urgent need to meet and discuss the main contents of the new Mining Law. But, is it enough just to have information and pass it on? Many people are well aware of what’s going on, but don’t do anything about it. Internet now offers all the information you need on whatever subject that might take your fancy. But, the more information you get, the less you’re inclined to analyze it and even less to mobilize around it.

We certainly needed to make people aware of the new law and how it props up the interests of transnational companies exploiting Honduras’ mineral wealth. And we certainly needed people willing to take action in defense of Honduras’ natural resources and the sovereignty of its territory.

Several of these people and organizations had already mobilized in the second half of last year, filing appeals against Model Cities on grounds of unconstitutionality, picketing the Supreme Court to demand that it be struck down and promoting an information and consciousness-raising campaign through the media. Together with other factors, the campaign had had an effect, leading to the Supreme Court’s unconstitutionality ruling on October 17, 2012. But later Congress president Hernández saw to it that institutionality was subordinated to his wishes and both the Mining Law and the new version of the Model Cities were passed. With that, we decided we had to make known the opposition to and rejection of these decisions against the community, natural wealth, national sovereignty and the citizenry’s dignity.

“Let’s go on a walk”

Someone proposed a “walk.” “Yes!” someone else chimed in enthusiastically, “like the walks of the indigenous peoples that belong to COPINH.” In the early nineties, those walks organized by the Civil Council of Grassroots and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) succeeded in waking the Honduran people up to the long-deferred demands of indigenous peoples.

“A walk like the ones Father Tamayo did,” said another. At the start of this century, this priest awakened national awareness to defend the forests and nature with walks he called Marches for Life.

“A walk like those indigenous peoples did centuries ago,” said yet another. Our ancestors walked and walked, hundreds of miles, to express their resistance to the big colonial land grabbers.

A walk? The idea began to take flight in the minds of the COPINH leaders present and those of the Fraternal Organization of Black Hondurans (OFRANEH) and the Broad Movement for Dignity and Justice, an organization born out of a hunger strike against corruption led by a group of public prosecutors in April 2008. After tossing around what at first seemed like a crazy idea, other organizations from the Sula valley, Aguán and the department of Atlántida and Santa Bárbara climbed on board.

“It has to be an action that awakens mystique and breaks with the traditional practice of the trade associations and political parties. It mustn’t be used for any political party’s election campaign, neither the old ones nor the newest ones.” And so it was decided in meetings held at the beginning of February, when the idea of the walk began to take shape.

With national demands

Closest in time to this initiative was the hunger strike in April 2008, which lasted 38 days and won sympathy throughout the country. That strike didn’t take on the demands of any specific group, despite many efforts to co-opt it. It was an ethical act against corruption to demand that corrupt businesspeople and politicians be brought to justice. “Without the 2008 hunger strike it’s very hard to understand the mobilization against the coup in June 2009” is how one political analyst put it. “Whatever we do now has to be similar to that hunger strike” was the argument that galvanized the walk’s organization. It was decided that the demand should be around national issues, not just sectoral ones. And there had to be a limit to the demands given that the country was overrun with problems, where everyone needs something. A laundry list of demands dilutes the fight.

We were clear that we should demand the repeal of the Mining Law and Model Cities Decree, and include all the other demands for water and against dams, in defense of the territory and struggles for land.

Chabelo Morales, a symbol
of the struggles in Aguán

And how could we make these demands still more solid? All the organizations know that the greatest conflicts in the country, everything having anything to do with land and natural resources, are concentrated in the Aguán region. One man has been locked up for over four years just for defending the earth. His name is Chabelo Morales; he’s the son of a delegate of the Word and a catechist, a family entirely dedicated to “the things of God,” as they say in peasant communities.

Chabelo Morales is from the Aguán community of Guadalupe Carney, named after a Missouri-born nationalized Honduran Jesuit priest who was reportedly murdered by the Honduran military in 1983. The issue revolves around land in Aguán that had a complicated conflictive history. Pressured by the US government, Honduras had earlier paid a Puerto Rican close to $20 million for the land, even though as a foreigner he had no legal right to own it because it was less than 40 kilometers from the beach. The land was then put under the safekeeping of the National Agrarian Institute, but Trujillo’s mayor fraudulently sold it to a handful of landowners. In 2000, the State tried to get the land back by paying them still larger sums of money to compensate for “improvements,” as they demanded, but they still didn’t leave.

In May of that year 000 the community had decided to reclaim the land, which the Regional Center for Military Training (CREM) had occupied one day. But the landowners continued pressuring, intimidating and threatening, and ultimately moving from there to murder. One day in August 2008, the landowners killed one of the community leaders and wouldn’t allow anyone to claim his body. The 700 families from the community, fed up with so much abuse and impunity, decided to tackle one of the most bloodthirsty landowners, whose fortress was built on a mound where special CREM troops had earlier set up a machine gun nest.

Everybody fro the community, some three thousand people from seniors to children, took the place by storm to recover the peasant leader’s body. In the melee, 12 people died. The landowner, who also happened to be a police officer, swore vengeance. The courts ordered the arrest of 32 community members accused of murder, Chabelo Morales among them.

All except 33-year-old Chabelo hid. He continued to peddle ice cream from a bicycle-mounted freezer chest in his community and neighboring ones. One day in October 2008, they captured him, tried him without legal representation and sentenced him to 20 years in prison for murder. Chabelo, who lost the use of one eye due to a work accident in prison untreated by prison officials, has become a symbol of the agrarian struggle and defense of the land.

Evoking the struggles of Aguán and Chabelo Morales we now had the demands of the walk decided on. There would be three: repeal of the Mining Law, repeal of the Model Cities decree and freedom for Chabelo Morales. The walk would be called “dignity and sovereignty, step by step.”

After four days, a Guancasco

We left on February 25 from two different points in the country: La Barca, in the heart of the Sula Valley, on the north coast of Honduras, and La Esperanza, department of Intibucá, in the west of the country. Both points are located 200 kilometers from the capital, political center of anti-national decisions and the walk’s final destination. COPINH’s people left from La Esperanza. And the people from Honduras’ Atlantic region—organizations from the Sula Valley, Santa Bárbara, Atlántida, Garífuna people and a strong representation from the Aguán area—left from La Barca.

After walking for four days, the two groups met up in the Siguatepeque highlands and through dances, songs and hugs celebrated a “Guancasco,” a traditional ceremony of the Lenca people that celebrates what the word means: a fraternal encounter between peoples.

Mining operations destroy

Everyone knew why they were walking and what to demand in the capital. But it was important that all walkers have the same criteria and information base about the issues, especially the Mining Law. Pedro Landa, a Honduran mining expert and founding leader of the Center for the Promotion and Development of Honduras (CEPRODEH), a nongovernmental organization opposed to mining, explained the new law’s main points in a simple, precise way.

He began with a very vivid example: in the Siria Valley, municipality of San Ignacio, department of Francisco Morazán, about 100 kilometers from the capital, people used to grow large quantities of beans and corn before the arrival of the Entremares mining company, a subsidiary of the Canadian-based Goldcorp Inc. “They even used to celebrate the bean fair in February,” recalled Landa. This festival is now consigned to nostalgia because there are no longer any beans in the Siria valley. Before the mining company started its operations in the late nineties, there was enough land and water to grow crops there, but after only three years of extracting gold and silver, 18 of the 21 water sources had disappeared. Water has not only become scarce, but the little that remains is contaminated.

They steal our water

Landa continued to explain what this meant: mining not only extracts mineral wealth—and if the mining operation is foreign it only takes that wealth outside the country—but devastates the communities’ water supply as well, and without water there can be no crops, or even life.

The people listened and assimilated what Pedro Landa was saying. In one hour a mining company consumes the same amount of water a family needs for 20 years. This means that foreign companies not only remove mineral wealth, but steal the water; they usurp it. “What can I do with an ingot of gold, if I don’t have water? These companies turn up in communities to steal our water and by doing so they rob us of our lives.”

Large nations such as Canada, China, Chile and the US, while seeking to protect their own domestic resources, want to take over the resources of more defenseless countries, so they find businesspeople and politicians willing to facilitate this international investment in exchange for participating as local partners.

Honduras is a mine

Some 600,000 tons of iron ore leave Honduras for China every month, the biggest percentage of which is extracted from the Agalteca mine in the department of Yoro, northern Honduras. The Honduran government has to invest in building and maintaining roads for containers loaded with iron using money that comes mainly from the taxes of the Honduran people. In return, China esports this same iron back to Honduras turned into pots, fans, sheet metal and all kinds of other products, at a very uneven rate of exchange.

The Mining Law would ensure 15% of Honduran territory to transnational mining companies for exploitation. Companies have conducted explorations confirming that Honduran territory is a real mine, that our land contains enormous gold, silver and silver oxide reserves, highly desirable to manufacturers of sheet metal for roofs, cell phones and all kinds of household appliances. There are also enormous oil reserves in the Mosquitia region, and of course various oil companies are after this. Exploitation of all this wealth is the reason for the Mining Law. With funds from the mining companies themselves, the Honduran government “socialized” the law’s “great benefits” with the population before its approval.

China’s interests

The Mining Law and Model Cities Decree go hand in hand. China is very interested in promoting the Model Cities project because it would allow it to save on transport for all the iron it takes out of our country. It’s cheaper for China to build its factories in Honduras, under laws autonomous of Honduran law, than to transport the iron in ships that take more than a month to get from Honduras to China. The Mining Law and Model Cities are two projects of the same transnational plan to seize Honduras’ natural resources.

In addition to China, two other countries have played a very important role in promoting the Mining Law: Canada and Chile.

Canada’s interests

Canada owns 80% of all the mines in the world and became the Honduran government’s main adviser in getting the Mining Law passed.

Canada was one of the first governments to recognize the government of Porfirio Lobo and was the one that most intensely lobbied OAS governments to readmit Honduras after its expulsion following the coup in June 2009. Canada was also one of the first countries to set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with the aim of enhancing the legitimacy of Honduran public administration, tarnished to the core by the coup.

After months passed, Canada appeared once more, this time as one of the countries ostensibly supporting the purging of the Honduran police and the institutions of justice through its offer to join the Commission for the Reform of Public Security along with Chile. Canada’s sole interest was the Mining Law, which opens the doors to open-pit mining using cyanide.

To promote adoption of this law the Canadians urged the establishment of 2% of the profits for senior police officers and the Ministry of Security. This way, the police and army will benefit from these operations and provide protection to the mining companies in return, saving them having to pay for their own security.

Enemies of “public order”

Pedro Landa further explained to the protesters that “if the transnational companies’ mining operations sustain the police and the army, it means that all people and organizations opposed to those operations will become direct enemies of the police and the army. The chiefs of the police and military will protect not only the multinational mining companies, but also themselves because they are direct beneficiaries of their profits. If a mine isn’t worked, it’s money lost to the officers protecting the mining operations.”

This way, the Mining Law turns people and communities that defend mineral wealth into enemies of public order. The law will bring greater legal security to multinational companies and greater repression, persecution and intimidation to communities and social sectors opposed to mining.

Open-pit mining

The new Mining Law replaces the one passed in 1998 that was questioned by many environmentalists and even by the Supreme Court, which declared thirteen of its main articles unconstitutional.

As passed, the law leaves the door open for open-pit mining using cyanide, provided that it is approved by a plebiscite of the affected communities. Mining companies and their domestic partners have correctly understood the Honduran process. They know it was always enough to pay a good sum to the president of the community board so the ballot boxes of a plebiscite would be filled with votes favoring the position of a given political party. They know these experts in fulfilling politicians’ wishes will now fulfill their own wishes.

Indigenous peoples
are the most solid

Various sectors of society went on the walk: peasants, community organizations, cooperatives, feminist organizations, a couple of priests, Garifunas, Lencas, Tolupanes and other indigenous peoples.

“Indigenous people are something else,” was heard from several on the walk. They impressed us all by their extreme discipline and resistance to sun, rain, winds, chill and mosquitoes. They were the most silent and solid on the walk, without haste and without trouble, never stopping. They have resources others do not: their historical resistance and ILO Convention 169, which gives them the right to mandatory consultation when activities or business they don’t accept want to work their lands.

In Marcalá, deep in the west of the country, the Lenca have filed a lawsuit against the area’s mayor, the National Congress and the Department of Natural Resources, because in this municipality, which is in the heart of Lenca territory, a concession was granted to build a dam with no consultation whatever. Convention 169 is an instrument for indigenous peoples to defend their wealth and their lands, and this is another reason they are “something else.” On the walk everyone included them and they blended in with the other organizations and cultures.

How was the walk seen?

The walk was an exercise in sovereignty arising out of cultural, ethnic, gender, political, social and religious diversity. It was a mobile exercise of grassroots power and popular education. But as always happens with all grassroots action, it went unnoticed by the well-placed in this world, including the educated middle classes in urban centers. Even people from these sectors who were aware of it minimized or ridiculed it.

Neither big business nor leaders of the two traditional political parties took any notice of the walk. For them it never happened. It was just like US President Nixon’s response when asked to comment on the half million demonstrators filing past the White House one Saturday afternoon in November 1970 to protest the Vietnam war: “What protestors? I’m watching the football game.” Nor was it relevant to the top leaders of the new political parties, including Zelaya’s party, LIBRE. In an imposed prejudice, they saw the walk as an expression of leftwing sectors opposed to LIBRE and the electoral process.

For NGO sectors the walk was a feat of courageous people who should be commended, but from a distance without being tainted by it or mixed up in it. The walk didn’t exist for sectors of the Catholic Church hierarchy either, because for them things only exist if they exist for the mass media or spokespeople of the business or political elites. For the media, however, the walk did exist because it occurred at a critical moment in which they could use it to continue confronting the decisions of the government, with which they have pending negotiations regarding the elections.

Generosity and solidarity

If it didn’t find an echo among sectors with power, the walk did penetrate the heart of many communities and rank-and-file sectors. The 200 kilometers we walked were filled with gestures of generosity and solidarity from start to finish. “I’ve never eaten like I’m eating here,” said a Tolupan man, as he embarrassedly turned down a meal because only a few minutes before he’d eaten two platefuls of tortillas, beans, cheese, egg and avocado.

Every day, all along the way, we were given oranges, pineapples, bananas, plantains, corn on the cob, coffee, tamales, bread, tiger nut milk, tortillas, beans, meat and cheese, all gifts from humble people. One 77-year-old man, Carlos Altamirano, came out into the road, hunched over and moving slowly, asking to get closer to someone on the walk. “I’ve got a stomach disease, I’m going to die soon; I can’t walk and don’t have any money,” he told us, but put his hand in his pocket to give us a 20-lempira note. “You’re doing what I would do against the corrupt of our country,” he told us. “Take these lempiras. I can’t give you any more, but I give this with all my love.”

He spoke softly, his breathing slow and difficult. But with his eyes he approved the walk, satisfied to see in his last few days that the future might be different from the unfair life he had led in the Honduras of corrupt politicians.

Martha, from Aguán

I always had the company of many people, weather-beaten from the sun, smelling of sweat. After four days of walking, all of us now had tight skin. Much more of the tightness our lives now have.

There was a young woman in the group named Martha who I associated with the women who accompanied Jesus. She didn’t miss a single step of the walk. She walked the whole 200 kilometers without over accepting a ride in a vehicle and never complaining. And she always had a smile. She was from Aguán, president of a peasant business association formed otherwise only by men. She was 29 years old with five children; an impeccable and implacable owner of her own poverty. She talked from time to time with her children and relatives by cell phone to give them hope and comfort, and we could overhear complaints from them about the absence of a mother and certainly of food.

Ludyn and Spiro, a couple

A couple named Ludyn and Spiro always walked next to Martha. He was a native of Greece who, when passing through Puerto Cortes in the Honduran Atlantic region 30 years ago, saw young Ludyn’s face, fell in love and stayed evermore in Honduras. She has now become his eyes, because Spiro lost his sight. But with hers he continues to walk the paths of Honduran resistance. Both keep the doors of their home open to the people’s struggle for a more decent and human life. They live in Atima, about 200 kilometers from San Pedro Sula in the western department of Santa Bárbara, a place that still has green mountains and coffee plantations. Whoever visits their house immediately smells in the coffee and hears in their voices the beautiful reality of two cultures merged together in a single embrace of solidarity.

Orbelina, the singer

Another woman with us, 56-year-old Orbelina, was from the board of directors of the Unified Peasant Movement of Aguán (MUCA). She sang throughout the ten days the walk lasted. We never saw a sign of sadness in her face. “I carry pain in my heart,” she told me when we ate tortillas with beans and cheese together at one of the stops along the way. At home were the ten children she bore and for whom she walked: “So they don’t live the sadness I had to suffer because of those who took away our land,” she interspersed with her joyful song and firm step along the road.

Women belonging to the Women’s Forum for Life from San Pedro Sula joined us on the first day. And women belonging to the Center for Women’s Rights joined half way through. Women always led the walk and when we would reach the places where we would spend the night they took it on themselves to see that everything was in order, participating in cultural activities and radio programs.

The taste that stays with us

While indifference and calculation defined the walk in the political heights, the definition was sympathy and solidarity in communities. In the eight places we stopped to rest and sleep there were no differences between LIBRE party supporters or activists and those who, being from the Resistance, have preferred to keep themselves independent of it. There were no differences between blacks and Indians, between city-dwellers and peasants, between those from political parties and those from social movements. With its demands, the walk had a mystical force of unity and harmony, such as we had only experienced in the first few months of struggle against the coup in 2009 or the hunger strike initiated by the prosecutors in April 2008.

The walk entered the capital and ended on March 6. Hundreds of shoes, worn to pieces, were left by the side of the road that leads to the capital from the north. The feet of the 300 walkers were full of blisters and a lot of people suffered a reaction with high temperatures, flu and infections. But we had lived in a mobile popular education and communication school. A beautiful memory of the meeting between the walkers and dozens of communities remained, a good taste of the solidarity experienced by walkers from different places, experiences and cultural realities.

In cold Tegucigalpa

There remained too the cold welcome from the capital, and not only because Tegucigalpa was trapped in a cold front the day we arrived and during the night we stayed. The cold also came from the capital’s professional, political and social organizations, which didn’t open up to the “Guancasco,” to meeting people from the interior of the country. Expressions of solidarity were isolated, scattered and spontaneous, not organized, concentrated or massive. While the reception in the communities along the way was warm and full of life and solidarity, in the capital you could feel the coldness of distance and calculation.

Meager political results

A second-tier committee of the National Congress met with the walk’s leadership to hear its demand for the repeal of the Mining Law and Model Cities decree. The legislators argued that we had gotten there too late, that prior to passing the Mining Law there had been a consultation and discussion of its contents. With respect to the Model Cities Decree, they told us it had been repealed after the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional and that what was approved at the end of January was another decree, guaranteed constitutional, since it respects national sovereignty and seeks the country’s development. A Supreme Court delegation then received the walkers to address the case of Chabelo Morales. Thus, an extraordinary endeavor with dedication, generosity and mystique concluded with very meager political results.

The result was the path

We shouldn’t look for results in the official political response. We already know that political and business sectors are impervious to people’s demands. Neither elite has the ability or desire to meet the demands of grassroots sectors. Neither is ready to rearrange its agenda.

It is necessary to search for, discover and order the results in the walk itself. The results are on the road rather than on arrival. The real results were the coming together of different cultures and organizations around the same walk and shared demands. They were the meeting between walkers and communities along the way, the political unity on the ground between sectors that at the political heights don’t understand each other and are filled with mistrust, and the construction of grassroots political culture, in which we had come together and agreed on very precise demands among dozens of endless demands, all of which are both fair and necessary. The results are the leading, the creative role and the resistance of women, a leadership that achieved a link between old and new generations, the resilience to overcome obstacles.

These results will stay in the minds and hearts of the walkers as a political contribution to continue discovering ways... while we keep walking. Because today we’re walking together seeking, and that’s also a way of fighting.

Ismael Moreno, sj, is the envío correspondent in Honduras.

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