As the drugs war in Mexico rages, it is hardly surprising that the country has been named by the Inter Press Institute (IPI) as the most dangerous destination for journalists this year. But what’s perhaps more shocking, is that Honduras has come in second.
In recent weeks three journalists have been murdered, only one shy of Mexico since the start of 2010. On 15 March, dozens of journalists took to the streets in northern Honduras to protest the deaths of their colleagues Joseph Ochoa, David Meza and most recently Nahum Palacios, who was shot last Sunday in a hail of bullets by unidentified gunmen. A colleague of Ochoa, Karol Cabrera, has also been wounded, while a previous attack killed her pregnant 16-year-old daughter.
Two years ago there were few who could even place Honduras on a map, but for the small Central American country with a population of just over 8 million, the events of last June changed everything. In a shocking turn of events, Honduras’s democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya was ousted by a military coup, the first in decades in a region that is still recovering from the military dictatorships of the 70s and 80s.
Honduras soon descended into disorder and violence, and almost nine months later this situation continues unabated – despite the country voting in a new president. According to IPI, eight of the 10 journalists murdered in Honduras in the last 13 years have been killed since the beginning of 2009.
During the media blackout following the coup, soldiers cut off local broadcasts of international television networks such as CNN and Venezuela-based broadcaster Telesur. The interim military government suspended the constitutional rights of freedom of expression, freedom of movement, personal liberty, habeas corpus and freedom of association, and the government shut down pro-Zelaya media outlets Radio Globo and Canal 36. The decree suspending these rights was revoked in October. However, human rights abuses and press censorship persist. The election held in November won by conservative businessman Porfirio Lobo was not even monitored by international electoral observers, in part due to the censorship of the pro-Zelaya media.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, supporters of both sides have continued attacks against the press. Security forces have raided offices and confiscated equipment of pro-Zelaya media outlets, while homemade explosive devices have been hurled at the offices of El Heraldo, the Tegucigalpa-based national paper viewed as sympathetic to coup leaders. Assailants have also attacked the Tegucigalpa offices of Radio HRN, a station seen as supportative of the ouster.
While countries across Africa and the Middle East are mired in deadly conflicts, it is shocking that this tiny Caribbean nation has fared so poorly for journalists’ safety. Honduras is not the first nor will it be the last country in Latin America to face the threat of military intervention, both domestic and foreign. But as the damage to Honduras’s democracy spreads, it becomes clear that there are few things more dangerous for freedom of the press, and by default, a free society.
Brazil’s presidential elections are less than seven months away, and with popular leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva unable to run for a third term, many are curious to see if the new candidates have what it takes to live up to Lula’s legacy.
I’ll be travelling to Brazil to report on the 3 October presidential race, and in the mean time, I’d like to know what you think. Feel free to respond to the poll below, or even better, leave a comment.
Since new Labour wiped out the British unions in droves, it is no wonder that the recent activities of unions in the recession have been met with some surprise, if not distaste.
In June, the Transport for London (TfL) tube lines shut due to industrial action by its workers, grinding the national’s capital to a halt. At Christmas threats of a strike at British Airlines sparked fury as Britons worried about making it home over the holidays – and now a further threat of industrial action looms. And who could forget the postal strikes at Royal Mail in October, which at the very least, delayed a freelance cheque coming to me for over a week. Or at least that’s the story I was given by my editor.
But whatever the working conditions on TFL, job cuts at Royal Mail or restructuring at BA – since the combined efforts of Thatcher and Blair – workers are expected to take it on the chin, get on with things, and get the job done.
The idea of an upstart union demanding better rights for its members at the expense of commuters and customers is simply not acceptable. And looking at the high salaries of Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) leader Bob Crow and joint general secretary of Unite union Derek Simpson, the prospect of a longer commute to work on Monday due to rail strikes becomes even more infuriating.
Nowhere is this disruption of one’s daily routine considered more intolerable than in the UK’s capital, where even the suicide of a passenger on London’s tubes sparks an apology over the loud speaker for the delay to our journey, accompanied by derisive snorting and guffawing.
But despite these ghastly inconveniences, unions are necessary to the country’s labour force, and as a report on conditions in British factories has found, they are in serious need of strengthening.
According to an Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) investigation, thousands of UK factory workers that supply Britain’s largest supermarkets are subject to gross mistreatment, exploitation and physical and verbal abuse.
The report reveals accounts of pregnant women forced to stand for long periods and lift heavy objects under threat of losing their jobs; workers with bladder problems and women with heavy periods denied toilet breaks and made to urinate and bleed on themselves; and meat factory workers hit by line managers with frozen goods.
Out of 260 workers interviewed, a fifth reported having things thrown at them, being hit, kicked and pushed, and a third had suffered or witnessed verbal abuse.
EHRC director general Neil Kinghan told the Guardian yesterday, “We have heard stories of workers subjected to bullying, violence and being humiliated and degraded by being denied toilet breaks. Some workers feel they have little choice but to put up with these conditions out of economic necessity.”
Jack Dromey, the deputy general secretary of Unite added: “Supermarkets have driven down costs along their supply chain with tens of thousands of workers paying the price, suffering discrimination and unfair treatment.”
Unite has campaigned for better conditions for supermarket supply chain workers for four years, to little avail. Labour rights for British workers have reached a worrying low, and it is unlikely that this will improve as the nation copes with recession – under what is likely to be a Tory-led government following the general election in May. There is no doubt that the Bob Crow’s of Britain muster little public sympathy. But perhaps it’s time that Britons ask themselves why upholding the rights of the country’s conglomerates takes precedent over the people that keep them in business.
This was not about the green revolution or the government crackdown. The women’s rights group March 8 Women’s Organization of Iran and Afghanistan demonstration on Sunday had a simpler goal than the reformist opposition, if not more unattainable: equal rights for women in Iran.
In the lead up to international women’s day, up to 100 protestors joined the march from the Iranian embassy in London to Trafalgar Square. The demonstrators – many of them Iranians living abroad – carried pictures of Neda Agha Soltan, a young student protestor gunned down by the Iranian police during the election protests in June. Neda has become a symbol of Iran’s opposition party. But to many women living under the Islamic Republic, she has come to mean much more.
“In the last nine months women have come to the forefront of the struggle in Iran, especially young girls like Neda, because this sector is most affected by the government’s policies and sharia law,” says the coordinator of the demonstration and March 8 Women’s Organisation activist Laila Parnia. “Women in Iran have fought for their rights for 31 years, and today they are really angry – they do not want this regime.”
One Iranian woman living in the UK, who wishes to remain anonymous, explains: “I’m out here to support the Iranian movement because since the elections I think it is worse for women in Iran, and people need to know that Iranian women need help.”
The women’s movement has been buried in a sea of green since the election aftermath thrust the opposition into the international media spotlight. But the majority of the protestors gathered in central London were not supporters of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
“This so-called green revolution is part of the Iranian regime,” says Gissoo Shakeri, an Iranian activist living in Sweden. “The opposition party does not even mention women’s rights. We are fighting for a secular society, which the opposition does not support.”
According to Parnia, Mousavi is part of the problem. “Hundreds of political prisoners were executed when Mousavi was prime minister in the 1980s. He is part of this government and he is not one of us,” she says.
The protestors want much more than Mousavi is offering. They want an end to forced marriages of girls as young as 13, the abolishment of laws that allow stoning and require Iranian women to wear headscarves, and they demand a secular society.
“Women should have the option to make their own choices about what to wear, what to do, and what to say,” says Shakeri, who also says that Iranian women should be given the option to have an abortion.
But while the green revolution may not represent the women’s movement in its entirety, there is no doubt that it has helped their cause in some respects.
“For years, women’s defiance in Iran came in carefully planned flashes of hair under their head scarves, brightly painted fingernails and trendy clothing that could be glimpsed under bulky coats and cloaks. But these small acts of rebellion against the theocratic government have been quickly eclipsed in the wake of the disputed June 12 presidential elections.”
In the aftermath of the elections, Iranian women have marched (and fought) alongside their male counterparts during the protests, and as MSNBC points out, few will forget “the sobering footage of a young woman named Neda, blood pouring from her mouth and nose, minutes after her fatal shooting.”
The green movement has become a loudspeaker for all marginalized groups in Iran to express their political discontent. But as the protestors in London have demonstrated, it’s worth remembering that there is more than one voice booming out from behind the megaphone.
“The media want to show that there is one voice – the Mousavi supporters,” says Parnia. “We want to raise the Iranian voice in the west, and show the western world that there is another voice in Iran: the women of Iran are shouting no to the Islamic regime.”
For more information on this event you can check out the Hands of the People of Iran website.
Latin America is slowly breaking away from its wealthier neighbours, and frankly, it’s about time. The region was one of the first areas in the world exposed to the spectre of colonialism. It began with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the sixteenth century, consolidated through the forced slavery of indigenous peoples and the robbery of natural resources, and ended with more than a few military coups, bloodbaths and social uprisings. If the summit last week- which excluded the US and Canada- is anything to go by, after centuries of imperial interference, the region’s leaders are proving they can go it alone.
On Tuesday the Caribbean Unity Rio Group Summit -composed of 32 countries in the Americas-met in Mexico to approve the so-called Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. The organization aims to provide an alternative to the Organisation of American States (OAS), which has come under fire from a number of Latin American presidents, not least of all Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, for excluding Cuba and allegedly pushing a US-centred agenda. Cuban President Raul Castro unsurprisingly welcomed the move. He described the decision as “historic”, echoing the sentiments of Chavez, Brazil’s president Lula da Silva and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, among others.
But this is not the first occasion Latin American leaders have signalled their intentions to form a regional bloc. The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), a trading bloc comprised of eight countries including founders Venezuela and Cuba was created in 2004, with the purpose of offering inter-regional trading as an alternative to the US-led Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).
But with the advent of an emerging, stronger Latin American market, how will the region’s new makeup affect the international playing field? And will it set a precedent for other regions in the developing world?
Mark Weisbrot commented in the Guardian last week: “The increasing independence of Latin America has been one of the most important geopolitical changes over the last decade, affecting not only the region but the rest of the world as well.”
Weisbrot cites Brazil’s backing for Tehran to develop enriched uranium and rejection of sanctions as a sign of the region’s shift away from US influence. And the consensus reached at the Summit on backing Argentina’s claim to the Falklands has also demonstrated considerable regional unity.
Today, few commentators will deny that Washington has become less important to the regional economy. A growing number of countries in Latin America have turned inward or toward the East for trade relations, and with the US struggling to combat recessionary woes, this trend is likely to continue. Though, perhaps most interestingly, Latin America has started to look toward markets in Africa and India. This development could signal a growth in trade between countries of the global south, giving rise to a more multipolar world order.
At the very least, the fact that Latin America’s new regional organization was approved by the likes of Mexico’s president Felipe Calderon – the leader of a rightwing administration with ties to the previous US government – should warrant some food for thought. Latin America has hardly yielded in unison to the whims of President Chavez, but the wide spectrum of support from far left to far right is an indication of the region’s growing consensus for sovereignty, with some very real repercussions for its neighbours and the wider world.
As the drugs war in Mexico rages, it is hardly surprising that the country has been named by the Inter Press Institute (IPI) as the most dangerous destination for journalists this year. But what’s perhaps more shocking, is that Honduras has come in second.
