Three Eights: (III/III)

Juan Almendárez

05/04/2010

Opinión

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“Number 8 symbolizes equilibrium (balance) ... because upon the creation of heaven and earth, everything was distributed in four parts. Four are the the cardinal points. Four are the wooden columns supporting a home. And 4 plus 4 give 8. This is a good day to ask a bride in marriage, for commemmoration is made of creation, of the union of man and woman, of human gestation represented in the umbilical cord which means the beginning of life and of time infinite."

“Eight threads symbolize that which is tied and untied. They refer to how the threads of time continually become unwound. For the Maya, the thread is the symbol of the continuity from the past. It is the presence of ancestors who are not dead, but who are present in another dimension."

Rita María Roech.

Mesoamerica is the navel of Our America. The place where peace is tied and war is untied. The epicenter of the military geopolitics of Neoliberal Globalization in Latin America. This is a geopolitical, geostrategic, military and economic space. Colonialism power has denied our native people's Mother Earth a cosmic vision of love and instead has found its bearings in the cumulative logic of Capitalism characterized by separation of human being from Nature. And in the space's technologic, scientific and cultural domain, by the mercantile, productive/industrial, and international speculative financial capital.

As told by Andrés Barreda [1] historically the geographical thought is formulated as "a huge productive and strategic force in the Capitalist development theory." There cannot be a multinational operation without armies, violence, torture and violation of people's human rights, environmental rights. Violent eviction of native and afrodescendant peoples, to the detriment of food sovereignty; conducive to water pollution by mining; destruction of forests, biodiversity, agricultural ecology and the cultural life of the native peoples and the peasants.

Such structural, historic violence intensifies climate change, seismic phenomena, hurricanes and tropical storms; hence it increases hunger, poverty, disease and death.

In the nineteen eighties, military geostrategy resulted in more than 200 thousand deaths in Guatemala, 75 thousand in El Salvador, more than 50 thousand in Nicaragua, besides several million refugees and migrants to the North, Europe and Latin America. In the late Twentieth and early Twenty First Centuries eight geo-strategic threads inform the military, economic and political fabric to cover Mesoamerica, Latin America and the Caribbean.

The first one is the Plan Puebla-Panamá (also known as Project Mesoamerica which includes Colombia and the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean), financed with World-Bank and IDB loans, at a cost of 700 billion dollars.

The second one is Plan Colombia, whose initial cost is US$4,500 million dollars, with the United States contributing US$3,500 , the European Union US$1,000 and various financial organs US$900 million dollars.

The Merida Initiative is thread number three, with total figures around the US$1,400 million dollars. (US$450 million for Mexico and US$100 million for Central America. Main goal, drug-trafficking control).

The fourth thread is the Honduras-Colombia Military Plan; its costs are unknown... According to the Honduran Security Ministry it includes units for intelligence-counterintelligence and to combat drugs, terrorism, kidnappings, human trafficking and abuse of minors subjected to child-prostitution rings and related internet crimes. However what prevails in Honduras as a consequence of the June 28, 2009 military coup is insecurity and violation of human rights, to which is added the presence of Colombian assassins, national paid guns and local landholder oligarchy's private guards, whose objective is to annihilate the National Popular Resistance Front and the Peasant Unified Movement of Aguán (Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguán, MUCA).

This April 1, 2010, Maundy Thursday, marked the assassination of compañero Miguel Alonso Oliva, 22, on this "sacred" date. His body was buried this "Good Friday". According to MUCA, the murderers were the African Palm (oil palm) plantations' owner René Morales's private guards.

The fifth thread/Military Plan is reactivation of the Atlantic Fourth Fleet. Fleet IV is under the orders of SouthCom, one of the nine [US Military Regions in the World], located in Miami, Fla. Its primary area of intervention is South America, Central America and the Caribbean surfaces. Total territorial action covers 40.4 million square kilometers or thirty nations. Those with the higher number of American troops are Honduras (1,550, without counting intelligence and counterinsurgency agents); this number, however can increase according to circumstances; Colombia with seven military bases, 800 U.S. troops and 600 war counselors...

The sixth thread/plan is "The Fourth Generation War", which by means of developed technology and globalized communication has a mission of persuasion through the invention of lies and the creation in the collective imagination of the notion that peoples struggling for liberation are enemies of mankind.

Cognitive and manipulative technologies are used to create fear and terror and hide mankind's true enemy: the international financial capitalism with its troops and multinational think tanks... Eloquent witnesses being the denial of the Honduran military coup and the world-level campaign of defaming and lies against Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, which have been accused of invading our territory, when in reality our country is a Pentagon's military base.

The party leaders and intellectuals who understand too well these eight geo-strategic threads pretend to be neutral: as Dante says in entering the Seventh Circle of Hell: "This place, the most hideous and fiery in Hell, is reserved for those who in time of moral crisis choose neutrality."

The seventh thread/plan is religious fundamentalism --led by the high Catholic and Christian hierarchy in opposition to the liberation theology and the church of the poor. They act as capitalist corporations owners of universities private educational and health centers, televised, radio and printed media. They practice Neoliberal Theology and keep mum in the face of torture, murder and criminalization of poverty exercised by the oligarchy colluded with the international financial capital (in Honduras). (Honduras).

Nonetheless both Catholic and Evangelical grassroots are part and parcel of resistance and liberation processes. That is the reason why, exceptionally, some channels fail to follow the hierarchical official guidelines and become defenders of human rights.

The eighth thread is the privatization of water, education and health, i.e., transformed into marketable goods as corresponds to the sale of nations to Supranational States. Its greatest manifestations of violence are hunger, poverty, disease and out- and immigration.

According to the UNDP's Human Development for Central America 2009-2010 report, the world's most violent zone (excluding that of Iraq war) is that of Central America, with the highest homicide rate. Here two million eight thousand illegal arms exist and seventy-nine thousand persons were killed between 2003 and 2008. In 2006 violence led to expenses for US$6.5 billion dollars. In 2010 homicide rate in Honduras is the highest in the world (66.8 per each 100 thousand residents). The countries with the lowest homicide rates are still Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

The roots of the violence will not be found in the collective nature or personality of Central-Americans; much less in the men and women peasants inhabiting Bajo Aguán, Honduras; they are to be found in the weaving of the eight threads or plans created by the Imperialism of Neoliberal Globalization.

Before the ambushes laid in the 21st Century it is indispensable for us to arrive at the analytic, critical and deliberative understanding of those phenomena as well as at the consolidation of our solidarity at an organic level and through our own globalizing conception of Liberty and Justice.

Objectively in our country, in the face of this situation, solidarity with Movimiento Campesino MUCA and of course the National Popular Resistance Front is urgent.

We call on the European Union, the European Commission; the Human-Rights international organizations; Friends of the Earth International, Oil Watch International; intellectuals, scientists, artists and religious people for peace and justice, in order that, as soon as practicable, all of them send delegations and manifestos to Bajo Aguán to prevent a massacre of peasants which has been planned for some time by the Honduran repressive bodies allied with the oligarchy and the international capital.

Let us prevent April 22, Earth's Day, being remembered as the Bloody April of the Wretched of the Earth.

Tegucigalpa, April 2010.

- Juan Almendares is Ejecutive Director of CPTRT, http://www.movimientomadretierra.org/

https://www.alainet.org/es/node/140480?language=en