Honduras: News & Updates

One week ago, 33 Democrat representatives urged the U.S. Trade Representative and State Department to eliminate investor-state dispute settlement provisions from current and future trade deals in Honduras and the rest of South-and Central America. In a open letter they state that the investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS) is a "problematic corporate handout" system, which violates affected countries sovereignty.

For US companies the ISDS mechanism is a tool that is supposed to secure investments in Central-and South America by allowing corporations to sue nations for compensation if they abruptly change their policies towards corporate involvement and investment. The ISDS mechanism is closely related to the "Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement" (CAFTA-DR). The Free Trade Agreement allows companies to acquire land in these countries and establish autonomous zones in which constitutional labor and environmental requirements are suspended.

In the specific case the congresspeople brought forward the U.S. investment company, Honduras Prospera Inc. claims of, close to $11 Billion in compensations from Honduras, after the Honduran congress repealed the law allowing the autonomous zones. If the compensation claim goes through, the small country would have to pay more than a third of its GDP to a greedy US corporation securing profits through agreements between the strongest and one of the smallest economies in the Americas, while draining Honduran tax payers for its losses.

The claim comes after the Honduran congress repealed the autonomous zones as unconstitutional and made an effort to expel them from their land. Throughout the Americas, the agreement led to a total of $27.8 Billion in ISDS settlement orders, most of which were against Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, and Ecuador. If the $10 Billion settlement demand against Honduras would go through, this would blow every other claim out of the water and would open the doors for more companies suing for massive amounts of compensation.

In their paper, the lawmakers wrote that, "the broken ISDS has time and time again worked in favor of big business interests while infringing on the rights and sovereignty of our trading partners and their people." 

We as IRTF are hopeful that the lawmakers' fight against the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement is successful, as it takes away Cental-and South American countries sovereignty and opens the door for human rights abuses, exploitive labor and environmental destruction, though this is unlikely.

But no matter what the outcome will be, we as IRTF will keep on fighting corporate greed and unjust business making in Central America.  

Read the full letter here: https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2023.05.02%20Letter%20to%20T...           

On behalf of IRTF’s Rapid Response Network (RRN) members, we wrote six letters this month to heads of state and other high-level officials in Colombia, El Salvador, and Honduras, urging their swift action in response to human rights abuses occurring in their countries.  We join with civil society groups in Latin America to: (1) protect people living under threat, (2) demand investigations into human rights crimes, (3) bring human rights criminals to justice.

IRTF’s Rapid Response Network (RRN) volunteers write six letters in response to urgent human rights cases each month. We send copies of these letters to US ambassadors, embassy human rights officers, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, regional representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and desk officers at the US State Department. To read the letters, see https://www.irtfcleveland.org/content/rrn , or ask us to mail you hard copies.

On February 20, the Honduras Solidarity Network (HSN) hosted a webinar to launch its new report:  US Intervention Monitor Report: One Year of Xiomara Castro, One More Year of US Intervention in Honduras. With the participation of more than 90 people, primary report author Karen Spring related how the US State Department has been reacting to, responding to, and intervening in the reforms that President Castro is trying to put forward. Many of her policy initiatives are campaign promises she made  in response to calls from communities all over the country who have suffered tremendously during the 12 years of the narco-dictatorship.  Continuous interference from the US is aimed at  weakening the Honduran government’s agenda and undermining President Castro’s progressive platform.

Things got so bad that on October 31, 2022, Honduran Foreign Affairs Minister Enrique Reina requested a formal meeting with U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, Laura Dogu, to present a formal protest against the ambassador’s public statements disapproving of new government reforms. Specifically, the ambassador criticized the new president’s Energy Reform Law, Temporary Labor Law, and the repeal of the legislation that gave birth to the widely unpopular Zones of Economic Development and Employment (ZEDEs, or charter cities).

It would be impossible to overstate the damage done to Honduran democracy and economic development by U.S. domination historically and in the recent past.  Public comments, behind-the-scenes meetings, and political coercion are some of the many ways that U.S. interventionism seeks to maintain U.S. power and its economic interests in the region. There’s a pattern to these actions which repeats again and again in both Honduras and the rest of Latin America.

See the article below for the Facebook Live recording and the link to the complete report. PDFs are available in both Spanish and English. See also the link to the opening remarks by HSN member Judy Ancel who set the context for the webinar and report by giving us an overview of US imperialism in the region, past and present.

What can we do? At the very least, we can share this report with foreign policy staffers at the offices of our US representatives and senators. For a sample email script, please contact brian@irtfcleveland.org or call (216) 961 0003. Thank you.

U.S. INTERVENTION MONITOR: One Year of Xiomara Castro, One More Year of U.S. Intervention in Honduras

Madam President… the decision to halt the massacre of rural peasants in El Aguan is in your hands

Published Feb 18 2023

The Movement for Dignity and Justice (MADJ) condemns the February 12th, 2023 assassination of peasant leader Santos Hipolito Rivas and his son Javier Riva. This shameful criminal act is followed by an uplifting of the demands of family, friends, cooperative members, and other relations of the deceased:

1. Santos Hipolito Rivas was active in fighting for peasants’ rights and for recuperating land from agrarian reforms, and received a lot of threats to his life because of this. The Honduran government has an obligation to protect him, and to seek justice against the unpunished perpetrators of his murder and the murder of many others.

2. They demand an immediate investigation into the murders and for justice to be served, for the crime against Santos Hipolito Rivas and for all of the crimes committed against peasants in the Aguan Valley. They call on the government to stop acting as servants and accomplices to the agribusiness powers that have been usurping peasant lands since the 80s.

3. They remind the Honduran government and President Xiomara Castro that this is the seventh assassination of peasant leaders in the course of two months. They further remind the government that it is supposed to be a government of the people, and to ensure the life and integrity of peasant families.

4. They denounce the businesses and narco-dictatorships directly responsible for the critical situation in Bajo Aguan. They further question why so many military and police personnel can be mobilized to protect agribusiness, but not to stop the murders and human rights abuses committed against rural peasants with impunity by agro-industrialists and their gangs.