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BRP LEADER FRAN OMAR OF EL SALVADOR TOURS THE US FOR SUPPORT
Published on www.eastboston.com
Published with the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
THE DYNAMIC STRUGGLE FOR WORKERS’ RIGHTS IN EAST BOSTON
A Spectrum of Causes Displayed at the 2022 May Day Rally
May 4, 2022
Of the roughly 200 people at the May Day rally in East Boston, half were dressed in lemon yellow or lime green. At first glance, the crowd looked like it was saturated with security guards. But the vibrant t-shirts turned out to belong to the New England Regional Council of Carpenters and La Colaborativa, the latter of which co-sponsored the event, the former probably associated with the MA Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH), another cosponsor.
Most of the people in East Boston’s Central Square had marched from Chelsea City Hall to call for workers’ rights. Across the harbor, in downtown Boston, community organizations and nonprofits gathered ostensibly for the same purpose, although invitations to the two rallies bore notable differences in tone. Whereas the downtown rally sought to “celebrate the strikes of millions of farmers and workers of India … the victory of striking MNA nurses in Worcester, MA and the union organizing victory of warehouse workers at Amazon in Staten Island, NY,” the Chelsea/East Boston rally was promoted with language like, “the struggles of immigrant workers continue.” The subtle tension between celebrating victories and ongoing struggle mirrors Boston’s socioeconomic and geographical divides. It is one of many illuminating examples of how May Day’s significance is customized by its celebrators.
East Boston is the latest neighborhood in the city to succumb to the wave of gentrification that began around 2012. While rents have risen sharply in the area and dozens of major development projects are underway, Eastie remains home to thousands of workers in the city’s service sector. Those who have been priced out of Boston have relocated to nearby cities like Everett and Chelsea. These are the workers represented by those in attendance at East Boston’s May Day rally. Beyond the chanting in unison and identical t-shirts are thousands of unique struggles.
One of the most compelling stories told on the small stage in Central Square came from a middle aged woman named Yanis. Speaking in Spanish and English and fighting back tears, she told the crowd about a Guatemalan landscaper named José who suffered a heart attack on the job. The other members of his crew were afraid to call 9-11 because they were undocumented and suspected their call might alert the authorities to their presence in the US. Instead, they left him anonymously at a hospital where he was pronounced dead. With no information to determine his identity, the hospital was prepared to send his corpse to Lawrence, where unidentified bodies were disposed of. Fortunately, through Yanis’ efforts and connections at La Colaborativa, Jose’s family was able to identify him before it was too late. Heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time, anecdotes of this kind generate a clearer understanding of “the struggles of immigrant workers.”
East Boston and Chelsea are cities with major immigrant populations, primarily from El Salvador and Colombia, but increasingly from Honduras and Guatemala. The demographics of the area mean that any discourse here on workers’ rights inevitably finds itself entwined with questions of immigrants’ rights. For some, these questions force a critical view of governments abroad and their relationship to US aid.
Denise, a Swiss activist, stood on the fringes of the crowd with a sign that read “No US money to support the Bukele dictatorship.” She represents a Cambridge-based organization called CISPES, Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. She says she visits the country regularly to identify ways she can support the labor struggle from within the US.
“People always say to me, ‘you need [to] change American policy.’ Right now this country gives money to Bukele and he [is] not even letting people go to protests of Primero de Mayo.”
Ironically (or so it would seem), Denise said nearly a dozen ralliers from El Salvador approached her to express their support for Bukele. “Que los maten a todos,” (kill them all) said one young man named Wilmer. He’s referring to the month long state of exception imposed by Bukele’s government in response to the escalation of the murder rate. Since the end of March, Salvadoran police and military members have been rounding up anyone suspected of gang activity, causing worldwide concern over the state of human rights in the country.
To Wilmer, a 21-year-old who left Metapan at 16 with his mother to escape extortion, the crackdown is necessary. “Either way, there are no rights,” he says. “At least this way, the problem gets solved.” In his view, the freedom of assembly in the US and its restriction in El Salvador do not illustrate a double standard, but an order of importance. When public safety is dependable, public demonstrations are welcome. On the other hand, when violence is out of control protests can wait.
Denise’s organization, CISPES, paints a more complex picture. According to press releases leading up to May Day, labor leaders and union organizers sought to draw attention to economic and human rights issues like the privatization of water, which threatens the survival of the nation’s rural poor. The World Water Day protests at the end of March anticipated the enactment of the Water Resources Law. These protests were followed days later by one of the largest crackdowns on criminal violence El Salvador has ever seen. And the repression shows no signs of easing.
Behind the stage at Central Square were pallets of canned goods, dry goods, and prepared meals. Throughout the rally, La Colaborativa’s mobile food bank served a steady line about a hundred long, which zigzagged down the sidewalk all the way to Border St. No one in this crowd sported a neon t-shirt, and few spent any time in front of the stage before or after picking up their food. Hardly anyone paid attention to the demonstration just a few feet away. Although both were run by the same organization, the two gatherings were visibly distinct, almost a tableau of the whole event, an organizing effort where differences shone through as much as the common cause.
LET'S NOT REWRITE HISTORY WHEN WE DISCUSS UKRAINE
March 2022
The West is united in a chorus of condemnation for Russian aggression in Ukraine. But there’s dissonance in the narrative it seeks to spread. For some politicians, the chance to stand on the right side of history isn’t enough. They have to rewrite it as well.
Former Costa Rican president Oscar Arias had an op-ed in the Miami Herald two weeks ago, in which he called for more effort towards dialogue to minimize Ukrainian need for arms. This is the right call. But look how he establishes credibility:
“Having reached agreements in the Central American wars of the 1980s taught me that the interlocutors must be of the highest level. On Aug. 7, 1987, the presidents of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica reached an agreement around my government’s Peace Plan that silenced the weapons.”
I would love to know which weapons Arias is talking about. The Esquipulas Peace Agreement took place in 1987, but conflict throughout the Central American isthmus persisted. The Salvadoran Civil War didn’t end until 1992. The Guatemalan Civil War went on until 1996. Honduras, meanwhile, continued to serve as the primary location from which the US ran supply flights to the Nicaraguan Contras in violation of international law, despite the Sandinistas’ initial adherence to the terms of the agreement. Supply flights increased almost immediately after the supposed peace plan was signed.
Arias didn’t mention the other major negotiation over which he presided, the terms of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya’s surrender after his illegal ouster in 2009. Civil war did not break out in the coup’s aftermath, but the usurping regime carried out countless massacres of unarmed peasants and protesters while emptying the state coffers for party members’ personal enrichment. During this time, Honduras’ murder rate rose to the world’s highest. Far from the silent-weapons scenario proclaimed in Arias' op-ed.
And why the insistence that negotiations be held at “the highest level?” The phrase has an attractive bravado, but it's imprecise. Arias clarified last week in an interview with Andrés Oppenheimer, revealing a remarkably frank elitism:
“Obviously, the highest level are the presidents, the prime ministers, heads of government, heads of state, who don’t have to ask permission of anyone and who have all the authority to compromise for the sake of laying down arms and searching for a way out.”
What Arias says here is true. The leaders of even the most ostensibly democratic countries suffer little public accountability when it comes to foreign policy, especially war. But it isn’t a reality he laments. On the contrary, it’s the way he prefers things. The outcome of the dialogue he mediated between Zelaya and Micheletti after the 2009 Honduran coup certainly supports this viewpoint. And sociological studies of Central American conflicts during the 1980’s (take, for example, the work of Jeffery Paige, University of Michigan) indicate that the Esquipulas Agreement had less to do with silencing weapons than with making sure weapons didn’t interrupt coffee production. The real victory of Arias’ diplomatic efforts has been the prevention of revolution in Central America, and this outcome owes much to violence.
It is best that the Ukrainian conflict be resolved peacefully. Dialogue could achieve that. But calling for peace negotiations must be done without fancying oneself a savior. In his op-ed, Arias overtly bets on a righteous position in one war to erase the sins of another. But slightly subtler examples of this same attitude are out there. Recently, Biden declared that Russia's “aggression cannot go unanswered … America stands up to bullies. We stand up for freedom.” We do indeed. But we also don’t. Ask Yemen, Palestine, Western Sahara, nations whose bullies we support.
We are witnessing the early stages of a war whose final outcome might be humanity’s end. With such high stakes, the importance of true humility cannot be exaggerated. Almost every industrialized nation working to marginalize the Putin regime has at some time carried out unjustified violence. Especially the US. Particularly in Central America. The US-led coalition against Putin would do well to recognize this truth. It could lower hostility in peace talks if they ever happen.
BERTA CÁCERES: A LEGACY AT ITS TIPPING POINT?
March 3, 2022
March 2nd marked six years since Honduran organizer and activist Berta Cáceres was shot dead in her home by a troupe of hired assassins. This year, preceded by significant changes in the Honduran political sphere, among them the election of the first female president and the expected extradition of former president Juan Orlando Hernandez, the anniversary of Cáceres’ murder arrived at a moment of cautious optimism for those who monitor the current state of human rights and environmental justice.
For 25 years, Cáceres was on the front lines of climate activism, cultivating networks and alliances among the most dedicated defenders of the planet. Her death was a horrific, yet logical, result of a decade of infrastructural dismantlement carried out by an illegitimate and corrupt government, transnational banks and businesses, and decidedly blind policymakers in Washington DC. Nonetheless, the last six years have shown the world that Cáceres' organizing efforts are unlikely to collapse in her absence. In the glimmers of hope presented by a new administration in Honduras and the hard fall of the last one, the environmental movement has a unique opportunity to capitalize on this auspicious confluence of democratic advances.
In addition to the recent regime change, there are also new developments in the prosecution of the architect of Cáceres’ murder. In April of this year, the Honduran supreme court will announce the sentence of David Castillo, the first intellectual author of the crime to appear in court. Despite the tardiness of the victory for the Cáceres family, it still represents a tremendous step in the grassroots struggle against corruption and impunity in Honduras, especially with regards to the interests of multinational corporations and the routine silencing of local activism.
David Castillo is ex-military (trained in the School of the Americas) and a former director of the company Desarrollos Energeticos Sociedad Anónima or DESA. In the summer of 2021, he was found guilty of coordinating the 2016 murder of Cáceres with the then director of security, Douglas Geovanny Bustillo. Cáceres, who received the Goldman Environmental Award in 2015, had dedicated 3 years to the frustration of the Agua Zarca project, a hydroelectric dam initiated by DESA in 2009.
The fight against DESA is only one of various initiatives promoted by the organization COPINH (Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras), which Cáceres founded in 1993. The organization’s mission is to advocate for the rights of indigenous communities in Honduras, but the key to its success up until now has been its alliances with other social justice movements. COPINH established itself as a true political force in Honduras only a year after its foundation when it organized the Walk for Life, Liberty, and Justice, a demonstration in which over 4000 participated. Over the next fifteen years, it became a global humanitarian force.
COPINH’s work became more urgent on June 28, 2009 when then president Manuel Zelaya was deposed in a coup d’etat. It was an international act and a severe, symbolic response to the democratic wave that had swept across all of Latin America during the previous decade. In October of 2008, less than a year before the coup, COPINH hosted the 2nd Hemispheric Conference against Militarization, which attracted representatives from 27 countries. A few months before the conference, president Zelaya announced that he intended to transform the Soto Cano military base at Palmerola into an ordinary civilian airport. Zelaya, ironically, was flown into exile from the same base shortly thereafter, and COPINH found itself with much less sympathy in the Honduran government under the Micheletti, Lobo, and Hernandez administrations.
Zelaya was not simply ousted for his amenability to demilitarization (although democratically elected leaders in Latin America have certainly been deposed for much less). Rather, his growing openness to a host of social reforms caused concern among the country’s elite and just as importantly among the global industries doing business there. Before his ouster in 2009, Zelaya raised the minimum wage in Honduras and also conducted a national survey to gauge Hondurans’ interest in constitutional reform. Perhaps unsurprisingly, rather than cut military funding to Honduras upon his ouster, the Obama administration allowed the coup to take place. When asked about this decision at the Daily News Editorial Board in April 2016, Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state in 2009, replied, “our assessment was we will just make the situation worse by punishing the Honduran people.” In its tacit support for the Honduran coup, the US did exactly that.
It’s estimated that 30% of Honduran land has been conceded to private interests under the National Party in the years since the coup. A large portion of these contracts stemmed from the invasion of indigenous lands, a direct violation of Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization. Moreover, the coup regime presided over a campaign of extortion, in which local gangs demanded routine payments from small landholders while the authorities looked the other way. Those who couldn’t pay were forced to sell their houses or be killed. Either way, the abandonment of properties on a grand scale opened the way for the expansion of industrial agriculture, mostly the production of palm oil.
While Honduran lands were being sold off, there were simultaneously various attempts to take over the country’s rivers. Some of these efforts were successful, such as the Aurora hydroelectric dam on the Zapotal river. The impact of this project has been the total disappearance of water in the river’s natural course and the devastation of the Lenca people, who have inhabited the region for years.
Perceiving a threat to the Lenca in the proposed Agua Zarca dam in 2013, COPINH launched a major campaign of resistance which transformed the local conflict into an international struggle, a battle that cost the lives of many activists, including Berta Cáceres. DESA had received the permits to construct the dam in 2009, and COPINH made it clear then that it was against the project. Regardless, DESA proceeded with its plans, and when the first construction vehicles arrived at the Gualcarque river in 2013, COPINH led actions to prevent them from breaking ground.
In July of that year, Tomás Garcia, a COPINH member, was killed by Kevin Yasser Saravia, a Honduran soldier guarding the construction site during a demonstration against it. The violence caused DESA to move the Agua Zarca project to another part of the river while one of its contractors, SINOHYDRO, abandoned it altogether. None of this, however, changed COPINH’s position. As it was not possible to access the new zone of construction, due to its militarization (under the name “Operation Liberty”), COPINH dedicated itself to organizing more visible demonstrations. COPINH was present at the trial of Kevin Yasser and Berta Cáceres continued raising global awareness of the indigenous struggle against DESA, receiving visits from prominent humanitarian figures like Victoria Tauli-Corpuz of the United Nations and the former Colombian senator, Piedad Cordoba.
In a way, the Goldman Prize was a testimony to the countless friendships that Berta Cáceres has formed throughout the world; but it also represented her special ability to convince those who listened to her that the fight against DESA was just one battle in a war we all witness between human greed and nature. In her acceptance speech at the Goldman ceremony, her battlecry was, “wake up humanity,” a direct call to action which illustrated what she understood about her own work: done right, a local campaign can have a worldwide impact. This is true both in the sense of one small movement inspiring another and of all things being interconnected. Through Agua Zarca, Rio Blanco in Honduras found itself at the mercy of some of the world’s major investment banks seeking to back the next big thing in the global energy sector. Through the Goldman Prize, a single activist from a nearby village in a small country achieved an international platform to deliver a message as urgent as it was dangerous.
Politicians like to reference Machiavelli when making a distinction between reformers and those who suffer reforms. They say that reformers are vulnerable because the changes they promote don’t bear immediate results; meanwhile, those who benefit from the status quo are prepared to do anything to make sure reforms don’t take place. The conviction of Berta Cáceres’ assassins exemplifies this notion. David Castillo and Douglas Bustillos hatched an elaborate plan to eliminate Cáceres over her role in the obstruction of the Agua Zarca project. But the Honduran state and the architecture of international commerce are also responsible for generating the circumstances that permitted this tragedy in the first place and moreover for not participating voluntarily in the honest search for justice. If it weren’t for the work of the legal team contracted by COPINH and Berta Cáceres’ daughters, no one truly involved in the crime would have been tried. According to this team (known as GAIPE), there is still financial information out there that could reveal international actors who deliberately ignored the murder.
Six years after her death, the story of Berta Cáceres remains unfinished. There is still much work to be done, and we all have a part to play in it. The circumstances of the crime need to be further illuminated. It could be necessary to advocate for a more appropriate sentence of David Castillo if the Honduran supreme court is conspicuously lenient. But most important is global vigilance. In Honduras alone, there are hundreds of projects involving energy, mining and agriculture, whose existence is owed to the repression of defenseless people. And the same tragedy is playing out in practically every country on earth. But the lesson that can be taken from Berta Cáceres and her many allies is that no government is immune to public pressure, although it may be dangerous to apply. In Honduras, hopefully, 2022 will be the year when such danger begins to lessen.
THE WALLS AROUND THE RING
Senior Editor Mary Bast
Bacopa Literary Review 2018's Poetry Prize winner, Patrick Synan, has published a chapbook that includes his prize-winning poem, "Outside the Clinic." From his publisher: