El Mito de Ciudad Blanca

(Para nuestros lectores en Honduras...Traducido del Inglés)
(This is for our readers in Honduras....translated from our English post)

Con titulares como Honduras: Afirman haber encontrado Ciudad Blanda, y Con rastreo satelital comprueban la existencia de Ciudad Blanca, la prensa Hondureña comenzó a tocar la trompeta, una vez mas, el descubrimiento de la Ciudad Blanca, la Ciudad Blanca mítica supuestamente situado en algún lugar en el oriente de Honduras.

La última "revelación" de que Ciudad Blanca había sido localizado fue anunciado por Porfirio Lobo Sosa en una reunión de gabinete el martes pasado.

Un artículo de uno de los diarios describe que el supuesto lugar cubre 5 kilómetros cuadrados. Áfrico Madrid, el Ministro del Interior, dijo que el equipo alegando el descubrimiento podría haber encontrado el legendario (sus palabras) Ciudad Perdida o Ciudad Blanca en la región conocida como la Mosquitia, y que podría ser más grande que el sitio de Copán, en el oeste de Honduras.

Virgilio Paredes, quien dirige el Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia, dijo:

"Sabemos que tenemos algo y que tenemos que ir a esta zona para saber lo que la cultura era lo que vivía allí".

Paredes también es citado diciendo:

Hemos encontrado lo que podría ser, según los arqueólogos e historiadores, lo que podría ser el mayor descubrimiento arqueológico en el mundo del siglo XXI, una ciudad perdida. No sabemos lo que es, no sabemos si se trata de una estructura (edificio), pero su estado afirmado por especialistas que conocen esta tecnología y la disposición de la tierra, que hay muchas estructuras artificiales.

"El mayor descubrimiento arqueológico del mundo en el siglo XXI"!

Ahora que ya ha escuchado la sensacional promoción, aquí están los hechos.

La fuente de tal emotividad es un comunicado de prensa por la UTL Scientific y el Gobierno de Honduras titulado The Government of Honduras and UTL Scientific, LLC Announce Completion of the Frist-Ever LIDAR Imaging Survey of La Mosquitia Region of Honduras.

Si usted lee el comunicado de prensa, usted encontrará que no tiene la pretensión de haber descubierto Ciudad Blanca.

LIDAR ("Light Detection and Ranging" en Inglés, "Detección Aérea de Luz y Medidas de Rango" en Español) rebota la luz de un láser desde un aeronave al paisaje y hace una imagen precisa tanto de la superficie del suelo y la vegetación en él. El procesamiento de las señales le permite quitar la imagen de la vegetación y obtener un modelo exacto de la topografía bajo ella.

Cuando esto se hizo con los nuevos datos de la Mosquitia hondureña, los analistas vieron algo que les parecía los restos arquitectónicos de antiguas ciudades, una serie de sitios arqueológicos.

El trabajo real del LIDAR fue hecho por el Centro Nacional para el Mapeo de láser aerotransportado (NCALM por sus siglas en Inglés), un laboratorio de instrumentación en la Universidad de Houston, financiado por la National Science Foundation de EE UU para ayudar a facilitar este tipo de estudios.

Por supuesto, el comunicado de prensa en realidad no viene de NCALM. Viene de UTL Científico, LLC.

UTL Scientific es una compañía de cine haciendo un documental. Se maneja la organización y la logística en Honduras para el reconocimiento de la superficie LIDAR. La gente de UTL, cuyas hojas de vida breves se incluyen en el comunicado de prensa, son cineastas, escritores y aventureros, pero no científicos.

El anuncio del martes no es el primer supuesto "descubrimiento" de la Ciudad Blanca por aventureros que utilizan la "ciencia". 

En 2006, James Ewing, junto con Francis Yakam-Siman y Nezry Edmond, afirmaron haber descubierto Ciudad Blanca utilizando imágenes de la Mosquitia de la técnica Radar de Apertura Sintética (SAR por sus siglas en Inglés).

El resultado final de la utilización de SAR es similar a LIDAR, un modelo de la topografía de una región. El estudio de la SAR en 2006 también pareció de mostrar los restos arqueológicos bajo el dosel de la selva de la Mosquitia. Las características recientemente descubiertas podrían incluso ser los mismos fotografiados en ese entonces. No lo sabremos hasta que suelten las coordenadas geográficas de la región, este último proyecto de crear una imagen. Todo lo que sabemos es que el proyecto se centró en un área marcada en un mapa realizado por el fabricante del primer mapa de Honduras, Enrique Aguilar Paz, como la ubicación de la legendaria Ciudad Blanca.

Que los datos LIDAR muestran posibles sitios arqueológicos en la Mosquitia no debe ser una sorpresa para nadie. Los trabajos pioneros arqueológicos de Chris Begley en la Mosquitia mostraron que habían numerosos sitios a lo largo de los ríos, y que algunos de ellos eran bastante grandes.

Begley explica los rasgos del mito de Ciudad Blanca en su página web.

La historia de Ciudad Blanca se basa en tres puntos de referencia, dos de ellas supuestos menciones históricas, la tercera con raices en las tradiciones Pech y Tawahka.

Los dos documentos históricos fueron escritos por Hernán Cortés (en 1525) y Cristóbal de Pedraza (en 1544). Si bien presentadas como descripciones coloniales de Ciudad Blanca, pero en realidad no se refieren a una ciudad blanca, o una ciudad perdida.

Cortés escribió su famosa quinta carta a Carlos I de España después de regresar de su igualmente famoso viaje a Honduras. En su viaje a Honduras permaneció cerca de la costa, sin llegar más allá del este de la ciudad de Trujillo.

Al hacer una discusión del valor de control de Honduras para el imperio español, escribió:

He recibido noticias de las provincias muy grandes y ricos con los señores ricos, ricos asistieron, especialmente la que llaman Hueytapalan o en otro idioma, Xucutaco que yo ... han descubierto, por fin, ocho o diez días de marcha de Trujillo, que es decir, unos 50 o 60 leguas.

La referencia es a las provincias, no a las ciudades. No hay mención de una ciudad blanca o perdida. Ya que Cortés no visitó la Mosquitia, lo unico que esta carta podría aportar son rumores acerca de las zonas más al este.

La fuente de la riqueza de estas provincias y sus señores suele inferirse de la segunda fuente histórica citada, una cuenta de la colonia de Honduras por su nuevo obispo Cristóbal de Pedraza, en 1544. Allí, él escribió observando desde la cima de una montaña en algún lugar al este de Olancho:

Vimos una muy parte de tierra de la otra parte della al este de muy grandes poblaciones y la tierra que nos parecia con muchos rios.

Pedraza mandó llamar a algunos indios de la region para preguntarles sobre las tierras que habia visto:

y preguntandoles por nuestros naguatatos que quiere decir interprete que tierra era aquella respondieron que taguisgualpa, que quiere decir en su lengua donde se funde el oro | por respecto que en el pueblo mas principal della esta una casa de fundición, y vienen de muchas partes de la tierra a fundir oro y de aquellas sierras que dicen que son cerca de Veragua.

La Provincia de Taguzgalpa corresponde a la parte oriental de Honduras. Fue ocupada por los Tawahkas, Pech, Misquitos y Sumos.

"Veragua" se refería a la costa de Centroamérica, desde Nicaragua hasta el río Belén, en Panamá. Históricamente, este era un lugar donde trabaja la orfebrería precolombina.

En contraste, los sitios arqueológicos en Honduras, aunque han provisto muchos ejemplos de objetos de aleación de cobre, no eran por lo general fuentes de oro. Una figura de oro completa que se encontró en el valle del río Ulúa era claramente un objeto importado, hecho en la zona de Costa Rica-Panamá. Fragmentos de otra figura semejante fueron enterrados debajo de la Estela H de Copán. Sin embargo, la zona productora de oro fue a un largo camino desde Honduras. Lo que estos descubrimientos prehispánicos atestiguan es la existencia de una red de intercambio y de viajar desde Honduras a Panamá - la misma red que transmitió los informes sobre lejanas provincias ricas en trabajos de oro a Cortés y Pedraza.

Mientras que Pedraza recibió una descripción de una ciudad dedicada a la producción de objetos de oro no obtuvo una mención de una ciudad blanca o perdida.

Chris Begley ha escrito trabajos académicos sobre la leyenda Ciudad Blanca. En su articulo "Leyendo y Escribiendo la Leyenda de la Ciudad Blanca: Alegorías del pasado y futuro", publicado en 2007 en Southwest Philosophy Review, Begley y Ellen Cox apuntan que Begley habia recogido más de 5 menciones diferentes de las ruinas que los informantes (personas no indígenas) dijieron eran la Ciudad Blanca.

Este artículo también arroja luz sobre la tercera fuente citada por los aficionados que afirman haber encontrado o que diecen buscar la Ciudad Blanca. Begley cuenta que los pueblos Pech y Tawahka de Honduras tienen mitos sobre Wahai Patatahua ("lugar de los antepasados") y Kao Kamasa ("la casa blanca") en la cabecera de la confluencia de dos ríos, al lado de un paso a través de las montañas. En la mitología Pech, esta ubicación es el lugar donde los dioses se retiraron después de la llegada de los Españoles. Begley dice que el Pech identificaron este lugar con la parte remota de sus tierras en la Mosquitia.

Ciudad Blanca, en otras palabras, no es una ruina específica con una herencia que va desde las historias de la época colonial española hasta el presente. No hay un solo lugar que sea la Ciudad Blanca. Por el contrario, como Chris Begley ha demostrado a través de su intensa investigación, hay una serie de sitios arqueológicos por debajo de la densa selva en partes no desarrolladas de la Mosquitia. Eso no es sorprendente ni es noticia.

La SAR y LIDAR son herramientas maravillosas y costosos para la búsqueda de yacimientos arqueológicos. Tampoco están dentro del presupuesto que normalmente tienen disponibles los arqueólogos.

El estudio LIDAR que promociona el gobierno hondureño, pero observamos no por algun arqueólogo Hondureño o internacional, fue valorada en $ 1,5 millones.

La historia de "Ciudad Blanca" es una gran leyenda. Por lo que no es de extrañar que una empresa de filmación apoyaría la historia del descubrimiento y la (posible) tesoro que representa.

Sin embargo, el Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia debe proporcionar un conocimiento confiable sobre el pasado al pueblo hondureño, y las audiencias internacionales.

Investigate Anti-Corruption Prosecutor

Henry Salgado, the anti-corruption Prosecutor, must step aside; that's the request of the Comisión de Reforma de Seguridad Publica.

That is the commission composed of three Hondurans and two foreigners charged to oversee the cleanup of the police, judiciary, and prosecutor's office.

Their first act was to ask for a meeting with the Public Prosecutor, Luis Rubí, to request that he follow recommendation 42 of the official Truth Commission, and put the anti-corruption Prosecutor on leave while his actions over the last several years are investigated.

The commission has no enforcement powers and can only make recommendations. Nonetheless, this is significant for a number of reasons.

In reiterating the Truth Commission recommendation, they noted that Salgado appeared to have not properly done his duty in investigating the Zelaya and Micheletti governments. Specifically, he only investigated and accused officials of the Zelaya administration. and did not investigate acts of corruption in the de facto government.

Rubí announced he would meet with the Comisión de Reforma de Seguridad Publica Monday so that they could discuss their letter and turn over any information they had. Asked if he will open an investigation, he replied:

We have to reach an agreement and follow procedures. We must follow the proper procedures.

Salgado pursued prosecutions against Zelaya and others for corruption, but has either lost those cases in court, or had them dismissed due to procedural improprieties. But Rubí isn't really any better: he has been a particularly ineffective Public Prosecutor, and his office has won few convictions. And then there's his role in the 2009 coup d'etat. It would seem that he should be a target for the commission, not the person in control of whether their recommendations are followed.

The State Department and Human Rights

The United States State Department released its world wide human rights reports on Thursday with much fanfare.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a series of remarks.  After lauding her teams work on "advancing human rights in a twenty-first century landscape" she noted:

Now, every year that we issue this, we take stock of ourselves. We say: What more can we do? Where have we succeeded or are succeeding? Where are we falling short? And we know we have to recommit to the work of advancing universal rights, building the partnerships that will move us forward, helping every man, woman, and child live up to their God-given potential. And we know we have to be able to speak out and speak up for those unable to use their own voices.

It's that taking stock at the State Department that interests us. There's been a blind eye to certain kinds of human rights abuses in Honduras that happen, but don't seem to warrant action by the Secretary or her employees, including the Ambassador. So, we turned with some trepidation to the country report on Honduras

It emphasizes corruption within the national police force, an institutionally weak judiciary, and discrimination and violence against vulnerable populations as the greatest challenges to human rights in Honduras in 2011.

In the executive summary, which is all many people will read, it states:

Police and government agents committed unlawful killings. Vigilantes and former members of the security forces carried out arbitrary and summary killings. There continued to be reports of killings of agricultural workers, private security guards, and security forces related to a land dispute in the Bajo Aguan region. Other human rights problems included harsh prison conditions, violence against detainees, lengthy pretrial detentions and failure to provide legal due process, child prostitution and abuse, trafficking in persons, ineffective enforcement of labor laws, and child labor.

The government took important steps to strengthen respect for human rights and promote national reconciliation, as well as to prosecute and punish officials who committed abuses. However, corruption and impunity were serious problems that impeded the effectiveness of the National Police.

So that's the State Department's conclusion.  There are very few human rights triumphs recorded in the Honduran report, but they state "there were no acts of anti-semitism" in 2011.

Obviously, we would take issue with their statement that in 2011 the government took important steps to strengthen respect for human rights.

They didn't.

What Honduras did do was create a cabinet level position for a Minister of Justice and Human Rights, and appoint Ana Pineda to the post.  But it is at best a symbolic nod to human rights, without effect in the real world, and at worst-- as here-- serves as a kind of blind to serious assessment of the government's abysmal human rights record.  When Pineda has criticized Congress for proposing laws that tread on human rights, or criticized the police for their handling of protests, she's been ignored.  Congress extended the period in which an arrested person may be held without charges from 24 to 48 hours despite Pineda's criticism of the change, as they have ignored her every time she protests their actions.  Her position lacks any kind of authority to actually compel observance of human rights.

Pineda did manage to get a government statement that Ricky Martin should be admitted to the country and allowed to perform his show, after immigration authorities and the government censorship committee threatened to ban him.  The State Department report also credits her as instrumental in getting an LGBT crimes investigation squad created, though its actual accomplishments are small: according to the State Department, they have filed a couple of cases, although nothing about these has appeared in the Honduran media, and none have come to trial. So we think we can reserve judgment: neither of these are significant antidotes to the wave of killings of LGBT activists, the most recent, the murder of journalist Erick Martinez. 

We won't dwell in detail on the many human rights violations the State Department country report describes because as a reader of this blog, you're familiar with many of them, but we would like to linger on the mention of police harassment through arrests, especially in light of events that happened on Thursday, the same day that the State Department released its human rights reports.

The State Department report on Honduras gives a good summary of Honduras's arrest laws, what police can and cannot do:

The law provides that police can arrest a person only with a court order, unless the arrest is by order of a prosecutor or is made during the commission of a crime, when there is strong suspicion that a person has committed a crime and may try to evade criminal prosecution, or when the person is caught with evidence related to a crime. 

 They add, "but authorities at times failed to observe these prohibitions (against arbitrary arrest)."

That's what happened to yet another group of campesinos involved in the dispute over land in the Bajo Aguan yesterday.

The government still has not paid Miguel Facussé for the land it agreed to compensate him for in the Bajo Aguan. Facussé issued an ultimatum this last week, saying that he would go to court and get the campesinos thrown off the land if he was not paid by June 1.

Thursday, more than eighteen campesinos, both directors and rank-and-file members of Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguan (MUCA), were arrested in the Bajo Aguan and El Progreso, Yoro.  Their only apparent crime, being members of MUCA.

In the Department of La Paz, sixteen or more members of Consejo Civico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras (COPINH) were arrested while out working on their communal lands. Children who were part of this group were forced to perform yard work and clean out the latrines of the police post before being freed.

So, yeah, "authorities at times failed to observe the prohibition" against arbitrary arrest.

And that's just some of the evidence that Honduras has a long way to go, and why it will be interesting to see what changes in US policy towards Honduras come out of the State Department's process of "taking stock" of what's in their own country report on human rights in Honduras.

Emergency Police Cleanup

The Honduran Congress, which went into recess six days ago, was called back into session today to vote on an emergency decree requested by the Security Minister, Pompeyo Bonilla. 

The bill they are considering suspends all of the guarantees police have about due process before being dismissed.  Specifically, the new law requested by Bonilla suspends chapters V, and VI of the Police Charter contained in decree 67-2008, about disciplinary acts and protection against suspension, for 90 days.

The decree is for an initial 90 days but may be extended indefinitely at the determination of the Dirección y Evaluación de la Carrera Policial (DIECP).

Oscar Alvarez was fired last September as Minister of Security for proposing a law to clean up the police that similarly would have suspended the existing due process guarantees of police officers.  At the time, Lobo Sosa thought it was important to continue those guarantees.

Its not clear why the concerns about constitutional guarantees that called Alvarez's law into question don't equally apply to this law.

It's been a busy Congressional recess so far. 

Congress was called back Wednesday to create a new Executive Branch Directorate of Investigation and Intelligence, to be directed by General Julian Pacheco Tinoco. 

This morning Congress approved an anti-doping law which allows the DIECP to conduct drug tests of police officers and then act on them.

Added to the abrupt dismissal of the chief of police earlier this week, it seems something has made reform of the police urgent.

New Head of Police

Overnight, Porfirio Lobo Sosa fired his head of Police, Ricardo Ramirez del Cid, who had been in office about six months, and replaced him with Juan Carlos "el Tigre" Bonilla Valladares.  Ramirez del Cid will be assigned another job sometime in the future.  In the meantime, he'll still collect his salary.

What do we know about his successor?

Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares is a graduate of the Carabineros police academy in Chile.  Back in 2002 he was accused by human rights organizations of violations of human rights, but was acquitted by the Honduran courts when the prosecutor quit, mid case.

He had been alleged to be a member of "Los Magnificos", a group composed of ex-police and current police that was carrying out an assassination campaign against the youth of Honduras. Los Magnificos arose out of the Maduro administration's get tough attitude towards gangs.  Even suspicion of being a gang member was the crime of "illicit association", punishable by a mandatory 30 year jail sentence. 

(This, by the way, is when Honduras began to experience the jail overcrowding that led to the current prison problems and inhumane conditions.)

Marta Borjas, then head of Internal Affairs of the Honduran Police, said that at least 20 police units operating under the name "Los Magnificos" were murdering suspected gang members in Honduras.

El Faro published a profile of Bonilla when he was commander of the Police in the Department of Copán in 2011, where the drug trade with Guatemala thrives. Three villages in Copan were described as under drug trafficker control: El Paraiso, La Jigua, and El Espiritu.

Bonilla filed complaints about the commander to whom he reported, Jorge Baralaga, for overruling him and allowing the police force in Copan to provide security for the drug-linked mayor of El Paraiso, saying

"Why are we leaving the whole department unguarded to guard one lost mayor?"

Each of the 60 police officers that made up the Copan Department police force, and 20 soldiers, were paid 1000 lempiras by the mayor for their participation in his inauguration.

This reported complaint seems to suggest that Bonilla was not content to work for the drug trafficking political elite.

This is consistent with his actions after his transfer from the department of Copán, to Olancho in October 2011. There, he also named police officers allied with the drug traffickers.

In a press conference this morning, Bonilla said he took away three lessons learned during Ramirez del Cid's tenure as head of the police:  that he needs to speed up the cleanup of the police, that he needs full control of the penitentiaries, and that he needs to reduce crime.

Mythical Ciudad Blanca

With headlines like Honduras asserts it has found the White City and With a satellite search they proved the existence of the White City, the Honduran press began trumpeting, yet again, the discovery of Ciudad Blanca, the mythical White City supposedly located somewhere in eastern Honduras.

The latest "revelation" that Ciudad Blanca had been located was announced by Porfirio Lobo Sosa in a cabinet meeting on Tuesday.

One newspaper article describes the supposed site as being 5 square kilometers. Áfrico Madrid, the Interior Minister, said that the team claiming the discovery could have encountered the legendary (his words) Lost City or White City in the region known as the Mosquitia, and that it could be bigger than the site of Copan, in western Honduras.

Virgilio Paredes, who manages the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History, said:

"We know that we have something and that we have to go into this zone to know what culture it was that lived there.

Paredes also is quoted as saying:

We have found what might be, according to archaeologists and historians, what might be the biggest archaeological discovery in the world of the twenty-first century, a lost city.  We don't know what it is, we don't know if it is a structure (building), but its been affirmed by specialists who know this technology and the lay of the land, that there are many man-made structures.

 "The biggest archaeological discovery of the world in the twenty-first century"!

Now that you've heard the hype, here's the facts.

The source of the excitement is a press release put out Tuesday by UTL Scientific and the Government of Honduras, titled The Government of Honduras and UTL Scientific, LLC Announce Completion of First-Ever LiDAR Imaging Survey of La Mosquitia Region of Honduras.

If you read the press release, you'll find it does not claim to have discovered Ciudad Blanca.

LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) bounces lasers off the landscape and makes an accurate image of both the ground surface and the vegetation on it. Processing of the signals allows you to virtually strip off the vegetation and get an accurate model of the topography underneath.

When this was done with the new data from the Honduran Mosquitia, the analysts saw something that looked to them like the architectural remains of old cities, a series of archaeological sites.

The actual LIDAR work was done by the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) an instrumentation lab at the University of Houston, funded by the National Science Foundation to help facilitate studies of this kind.

Of course, the press release doesn't actually come from NCALM. It comes from UTL Scientific, LLC.

UTL Scientific is a film company making a documentary. It handled the organization and logistics in Honduras for the LIDAR survey. The UTL people, whose brief biographies are included in the press release, are filmmakers, authors, and adventurers, but not scientists.

Tuesday's announcement is not the first purported "discovery" of Ciudad Blanca by adventurers using "science".

In 2006, James Ewing, along with Francis Yakam-Siman and Edmond Nezry, claimed to have discovered Ciudad Blanca using Synthetic Apeture Radar (SAR) images of the Mosquitia.

The end result of using SAR is similar to LIDAR, a model of the topography of a region. The SAR study back in 2006 also appeared to show archaeological remains beneath the forest canopy in the Mosquitia. The newly discovered features might even be the same ones imaged back then. We won't know until they release the geographic coordinates of the region the latest project imaged. All we know is that the project targeted an area marked on a map made by the first Honduran map maker, Enrique Aguilar Paz, as the location of legendary Ciudad Blanca.

That the LIDAR data shows possible archaeological sites in the Mosquitia should come as a surprise to no one. Pioneering archaeological work by Chris Begley in the Mosquitia showed that there were numerous sites along the rivers, and that some of them were quite large.

Begley outlines the myth of Ciudad Blanca on his website.

The Ciudad Blanca story rests on three points of reference, two of them supposed historical mentions, the third based in Pech and Tawahka tradition.

The two historical documents were written by Hernan Cortés (in 1525) and Cristobal de Pedraza (in 1544). While offered as colonial descriptions of Ciudad Blanca, neither actually refers either to a white city, or to a lost city.

Cortés wrote his famous fifth letter to Charles I of Spain after returning from his equally famous trip to Honduras. While in Honduras he stayed close to the coast, reaching no further east than the city of Trujillo. Making an argument for the value of controlling Honduras to the Spanish empire, he wrote:

I have received news of very large and wealthy provinces with wealthy lords, richly attended, especially the one they call Hueytapalan or in another language, Xucutaco which I....have discovered at last is eight or ten days march from Trujillo, that is to say, some 50 or 60 leagues.

The reference is to provinces, not cities. There is no mention of a white or lost city. Since Cortes did not visit the Mosquitia, all this letter could provide would be rumors about areas further to the east.

The source of the wealth of these provinces and their lords is usually inferred from the second historical source cited, an account of the colony of Honduras by its new bishop, Cristobal de Pedraza, in 1544. There, he wrote of standing looking east from the top of a mountain somewhere east of Olancho, Honduras:

We saw a large piece of land, and in the other part of it, to the east, with large towns (or populations) and the land with many rivers.

He sent for some local Indians to ask about the lands that he saw:

and asking through our interpreters what land it was, they replied that it was Taguisgualpa which in their language means the place where they smelt gold because in their most important city there is a gold work where they come from many parts of the land to smelt gold, and from the surrounding mountains that they say are close to Veragua.

The Province of Taguzgalpa, as it became known, corresponded to eastern Honduras. It was occupied by the Tawahka, Pech, Miskito, and Sumo.

"Veragua" referred to the lower Central American coast, from Nicaragua through to the Rio Belen in Panama.  Historically, this was a location of Precolumbian goldworking.

In contrast, Honduran archaeological sites, although yielding many examples of copper alloy objects, were not generally sources of gold. One complete gold figure found in the Ulua River valley was clearly an imported object, made in the Costa Rica-Panama area. Fragments of another such figure were buried below Stela H at Copan. But the gold-producing area was a long way from Honduras. What these pre-hispanic discoveries attest to is a network of exchange and travel reaching from Honduras to Panama-- the same network that conveyed reports about distant wealthy provinces of gold workers to Cortes and Pedraza.

While Pedraza was given a description of a city focused on the production of gold objects (Cibola anyone?) he did not get a mention of a White or Lost City.

Chris Begley has actually written scholarly papers about the White City legend. In "Reading and Writing the White City Legend: Allegories Past and Future", published in 2007 in Southwest Philosophy Review, Begley and Ellen Cox note that Begley has been taken to more than 5 different sets of ruins that informants (non-indigenous people) said were the Ciudad Blanca.

This article also sheds light on what is usually the third source cited by enthusiasts claiming to have found or to be seeking Ciudad Blance. Begley recounts that the Pech and Tawahka people of Honduras have a myth about Wahai Patatahua ("place of the ancestors") and Kao Kamasa ("the white house") at the headwaters of the confluence of two rivers, by a pass through the mountains. In Pech mythology, this location is the place to which their gods retreated after the Spanish came. Begley says the Pech identified this location with the wild and remote part of their lands in the Mosquitia.

Ciudad Blanca, in other words, is not a specific ruin with a charter that runs from the colonial Spanish histories to the present. There is no single place that is Ciudad Blanca. Rather, as Chris Begley demonstrated through hard fieldwork, there are a series of archaeological sites underneath the heavy forest in undeveloped parts of the Mosquitia. That's neither surprising nor news.

SAR and LIDAR are wonderful and expensive tools for finding archaeological sites.  Neither is within the normal budget of archaeologists.

The LIDAR study being touted by the Honduran government, but not, we note, by any Honduran or international archaeologists, was valued at $1.5 million.

The "Ciudad Blanca" story is a great legend. It is hardly surprising that a media company would support the storyline of discovery and (potential) treasure that it represents.

But the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History should be providing reliable knowledge about the past to the Honduran people, and international audiences.

Collateral Damage

Usually the stories we cover about Honduras are invisible in the US press.

So it has been notable that the New York Times has over the last few weeks published a series of stories about Honduras. Such coverage, potentially, could give US readers much more insight into the conditions of a country that has been wracked by violence under the powerless government that was installed through flawed elections held in 2009 while the country was controlled by a de facto regime operating with impunity.

I hope you caught that "potentially". Because as all of us who actually work on Honduras have noted, the New York Times has used this opportunity to advance story-lines that are essentially propaganda, claims that the current Honduran government is cleaning up its police force, using the armed forces to protect its citizenry, moving rapidly and supposedly effectively to investigate the kidnapping of at least (some) journalists, and oh, yes, collaborating with the US Drug Enforcement Agency in ever-more effective drug interdiction.

When the subject matter of these celebratory "we're helping the backward nation stop drugs before they reach your suburb" line was illustrated mainly by crowing about cutting the time it took to get helicopters in the air, this didn't even strike us as reporting about Honduras. Indeed, the NY Times actually used that opportunity to make a case that the US was employing "lessons" it "learned" in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, making it clear that Honduras was interchangeable with all the other threatening foreign places whose specificities we are being allowed to ignore in our new reality that construes the world in terms of friends, enemies, and potential enemies in the "war on terror".

But the latest New York Times coverage is indeed about Honduran reality: the reality that the US has assisted in the killing of innocent civilians, redefined as what once would have been clinically labeled "collateral damage": people in the wrong place at the wrong time, because their country was in our way, people who can be categorically suspect because they can be assumed to be guilty (in this case, of working for drug traffickers; in other times and places, of being terrorists or insurgents...).

The latest episode in this long and shameful history has led to demands by the Honduran people affected that the US cease operations that endanger innocent citizens of the country.

The BBC covered the story properly, titling its story Honduras protest over shootings, writing that

The leaders of several of the ethnic groups in the area said in a joint statement that "the people in that canoe were fishermen, not drug traffickers.

"For centuries we have been a peaceful people who live in harmony with nature, but today we declared these Americans to be persona non grata in our territory."

The ever-awful Washington Post titled its version of the story Angered by deadly drug operation, Honduran Indians burn offices, demand DEA leave. The stereotypes in that one sentence are horrifying, but the article at least specifies that the statement was issued by representatives of the Masta, Diunat, Rayaka, Batiasta and Bamiasta, a detail absent from the BBC story.

Unfortunately, no one at the Washington Post seems to understand what these names are: MASTA is described by David Dodds as "an indigenous federation...formed by a group of Moskito schoolteachers" that brings together village-level affiliates representing largely autonomous Moskito villages. Tanya Hayes identifies BAMIASTA as one of these chapters/affiliates of the larger group, centered in Ahuas, the village whose mayor Luis Baquedano has been quoted most widely as the source for the information about the murder of local people. Hayes identifies RAYAKA as the affiliate for Banaka, another village, and I assume that DIUNAT and BATIASTA are representative organizations of other local Miskito villages, not, as the Post described them, "ethnic groups".

As as recently as yesterday the New York Times coverage still emphasized the goodness of having DEA in security operations in Honduras: D.E.A.'s Agents Join Counternarcotics Efforts in Honduras. It would be hard from that title to predict what the actual lead was:

agents accompanied the Honduran counternarcotics police during two firefights with cocaine smugglers in the jungles of the Central American country this month, according to officials in both countries who were briefed on the matter. One of the fights, which occurred last week, left as many as four people dead and has set off a backlash against the American presence there

"Backlash"?  That's what's important here-- that the Honduran people have expressed their outrage at becoming targets for US-funded, equipped, and guided murder?

The murdered villagers from Ahuas, a small community in indigenous Miskito territory, included pregnant women.

The Times coverage includes that fact-- but it also trots out a lightly veiled smear that attempts to undermine the otherwise clearly acknowledged fact that the boat destroyed was not a boat of drug smugglers:

it is often difficult to distinguish insurgents from villagers when combating drugs in Central America. One official said it is a common practice for smugglers to pay thousands of dollars to a poor village if its people will help bring a shipment through the jungle to the coast.

The difference between our reaction and that of the Times is this: if you are likely to be shooting at people from a "poor village", you shouldn't be shooting. Period.

Honduran security forces are incapable on their own of discriminating between the citizens of the country engaged in lawful activities, and legitimate targets of policing efforts, as the history of violent repression of protests and murder by corrupt police has amply demonstrated.

A US-inspired policy of shooting at poorly identified targets in civilian areas makes a bad situation worse. While no one could have predicted the specific time and place that innocent people would be affected, that something like this would happen was inevitable.

It is time, and long past time, for the US to stop supporting the militarization of everyday life among the already suffering innocent people of Honduras.

Is Honduras Too Backward to Have Sovereignty?

Pardon us for being blunt. But that is, really, the question at the heart of Paul Romer's promotion of his charter cities idea for Honduras.

The most recent volley in this campaign is a blog post on NPR by Romer and an associate. It follows a longer piece in a recent edition of the New York Times described by NPR as a "profile" of Romer.

The NPR piece inaccurately describes the plan as to "build a city from scratch — and get foreign governments to help run it".

The inaccuracy here comes from the fact that foreign governments have in fact declined to be involved. Romer may have wanted the experiment to have a veneer of international development, but it hasn't quite attracted the international support he apparently thinks it should.

Why? Maybe the terms of engagement hinted at in these two news stories give an idea of what might give pause to other governments.

The New York Times piece was titled Who Wants to Buy Honduras?

Too ugly for you? Try the seemingly nicer NPR headline: How Honduras Can Pull Off Five Centuries of Legal Reforms in a Decade.

Are you still not getting the message? Honduras is a backward country that can only be saved from itself by being sold to someone more advanced.

The NPR piece presents this as an opportunity for Honduras to "leverage" the experience of countries that supposedly have been "down [the] long and arduous path" to the rule of law. The authors are not clear about what countries they have in mind, but they quote former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown saying "the first five centuries are always the hardest" in developing the rule of law.

Apparently, Honduras can profit from the five centuries of experience Great Britain has had in-- what? what do Romer and his associate imagine is relevant experience here? Five hundred years ago, Great Britain was launched on its way to becoming the model of modern colonial power. One presumes that isn't the part of their experience with the rule of law that Romer meant to invoke.

Romer and company ignore the actual history of Honduras including progress in the rule of law-- progress that was erased in the coup d'etat of 2009 and its aftermath, which seems beneath Romer's notice.

Instead, the NPR piece describes the challenges Honduras faces as if they have no recent historical causes, and as beyond any efforts of the Honduran people to solve in ways that would preserve their autonomy:

The rule of law is grounded in trust and shared norms, but establishing trust and shared norms is impossible if people live in fear – rural farmers fear repression; landowners fear expropriation; businesses fear that rivals will gain advantages through bribery; government officials fear that businesses will break contracts with impunity; urban residents fear violence from criminal gangs.

No. The issue in Honduras today is not fear: it is impunity on the part of the rich and powerful.

Rural farmers suffer from the impunity of the powerful who can attack them with private security forces, or can influence the government to call in the army for "enhanced" policing.

Landowners either have impunity-- and can act as they wish, ignoring laws about land use intended to encourage uses that benefit the entire country-- or are at the mercy of those with impunity, not, as the original suggests, government expropriation. As the prolonged negotiations to compensate landowners in the Bajo Aguan show, even when there is a case to be made for claims on the land by dispossessed peasants, the person holding the land in questionable legal circumstances can count on being paid for it, can demand a particular amount, and the peasants who in theory should be receiving land can be bound in almost feudal economic relations to the business of those landowners-- with impunity.

It is notable that the only use of the word impunity in Romer's description refers to a claim that the government "fears" that businesses will break contracts. Really? What we see is a government complicit with the wealthy in letting contracts to shell companies, often with inadequate compliance with environmental protections, without guarantees that the recipients of contracts will ever actually deliver on what they have promised.

And oh, the utter lack of knowledge betrayed in that "urban residents fear violence from criminal gangs". People in cities like San Pedro Sula fear crime-- in large part, because the police will not investigate, the legal system offers no promise of justice. Violence is complicated and multi-centered: reducing it to "criminal gangs" ignores the documented role of the security forces in visiting violence on citizens. It ignores people who, armed with all-too-easily obtained guns, take their defense into their own hands, with fatal results.

We are not going to revisit our previous critiques of the charter cities proposal in detail here. The neocolonialist structure is clearly based on ignoring the external causes of the difficulties of countries like Honduras-- including more than a century of interference in internal politics by foreign governments protecting their economic exploitation of Honduran resources.

Instead, let's look at how weak the current arguments in favor of this proposal are, even in these openly promotional pieces. Here's the New York Times attempting to praise Romer:

Romer’s charter city is trying to avoid this dark side of urbanization by adapting older, more successful models. The United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and Singapore were able to build well-designed cities that housed and employed millions, in part by persuading foreigners to invest heavily. Dubai created a number of micro­cities — one of which, for instance, is governed by a system resembling English common law with judges from Britain, Singapore and New Zealand. 

Each has had well-known flaws, but Romer said the core idea can be replicated without them. The new Honduran charter city can work, he said, if its foreign leadership can similarly assure investors that they’ve created a secure place to do business — somewhere that money is safe from corrupt political cronyism or the occasional coup. If a multinational company commits to building new factories, real estate developers will follow and build apartments, which then provide the capital for electricity, sewers, telecom and a police force.

This makes it quite clear what the charter cities are about: safety for investors, security for business, a place where "money is safe". People become ancillaries to money in this nightmare vision.

Who will the servants of money residing in these mini-states be? Romer has visions of a city of 10 million people, more than the entire population of Honduras. Romer himself wants to be the chairman of the board that will run the Honduran experiment (required because no international government would sign on). No suggestion that he will move there (which the enabling Honduran law requires of the governing board). But obviously, his goal is to promote others to emigrate, although only the right kind of compliant laborers:

His charter city will have extremely open immigration policies to attract foreign workers from all over. It will also tactically dissuade some from coming. Singapore, Romer said, provides a good (if sometimes overzealous) model. Its strict penalties for things like not flushing a public toilet may make for late-night jokes, but they signal to potential immigrants that it is a great place if you want to work hard and play by the rules.  

Work hard and play by the rules. Unlike who?

Unlike Hondurans themselves, who haven't managed to make any progress toward the rule of law, and need a benign dictator to come and rescue them-- or at least, to rescue the money to be made in the land they currently occupy, without realizing its full potential.

After all, as the fawning author of the New York Times' piece reminds us

It’s easy to criticize experimenting with the livelihoods of the poor, but... the poor are already conducting daily experiments in how to make life better outside the formal economy. By and large, it isn’t working. We have to try some new things, probably many new things. And we have to accept that some of them won’t work.

That's what Hondurans deserve: to be made the material of international experiments taking place without their consent, against the protests of even the business community (contrary to the NPR article's counter-factual claim of broad support), that will deprive them of the right to control their own country, and that if successful, will pay international investors with the fruits of their labor.

This has been tried. It was called slavery. It is no prettier dressed up in academic dreams and ignorance.

Honduras and Drugs: Fact Check

Porfirio Lobo Sosa made a plea Saturday for the United States to cut its drug use because doing so would reduce the level of criminal activity in Central America.  He said the US must reduce its demand for drugs to zero because Honduras cannot change its geographic position.  He claims that a State Department document says that 79% of the cocaine that transits Mexico from South America is destined for the United States.

On the surface, at least, Lobo Sosa's argument seems logical, but is it supported by data on increasing drug use in the United States that could be correlated with the increasing criminal activity in Honduras?

Oh that it were so simple.  Lobo Sosa is dead wrong.

When we talk about drug trafficking in Honduras, we are, these days, talking about cocaine.  Cocaine is by far the most common drug to be seized in Honduras.

To support Porfirio Lobo Sosa's claims we would expect to see increasing cocaine use in the United States over a period when criminal activity also rose in Honduras. We would see an increase either in the number of users of cocaine, or in the per capita amount that each used in a year.  Sadly, the numbers fail to support Lobo Sosa's argument.

A 2011 study by the United States National Institute on Drug Abuse found that in general, cocaine use in the United States has been declining since 2003.  They also cite significant declines in the use of methamphetamines and amphetamines, while marijuana and ecstasy use has been increasing since 2009. The usage of other hallucinogens and inhalents remained steady. The US National Drug Threat Assessment for 2011 cites the above data to raise an alarm over increasing levels of student drug use (mostly marijuana, with a little ecstasy alarm too).

OK, that didn't support Lobo Sosa so let's try another angle.  The US Drug Enforcement Administration seizes drugs from traffickers in the US every year.  Given that enforcement efforts have been maintained or increasing, seizures should have increased if the amount of drugs entering the country was increasing.  What trends do these seizures show?

The DEA Stride system data shows that cocaine seizures (by weight) have declined by about 50% since 2007. Marijuana seizures have about doubled in the same time period, suggesting that there hasn't been either a general decline in drug imports or in efficacy of the DEA.

OK, that doesn't support Lobo Sosa either.  Let's look at see what the world consumption of cocaine is like.

The UN World Drug Report for 2010 puts a final stake in Lobo Sosa's argument.  It shows that the area under cultivation for coca has remained relatively constant since 2007, well below the high of 2000, and that yields of cocaine have also remained relatively constant since 2007.

In Colombia, coca cultivation decreased by 58% from 2000 to 2009 while Peru and Bolivia increased their production during the same period.  There were slight declines in the yield from processing coca leaves in 2008 and 2009, with Colombia being responsible for about half of the total cocaine production, Peru accounting for slightly more than a third of the total production, and Bolivia making up the rest.

While cocaine seizures skyrocketed in the last several years in South America, Central America, and the Caribbean, they have declined slightly in North America.

In the two largest cocaine markets, for the last decade the number of cocaine users has remained fairly constant, at 6.2 million users in North America, and 4.1 million users in Europe.

It is precisely in Central and South America that use has been rising during this same period, to 2.7 million users consuming about 20% of the total production, versus 41% for North America and 26% for Europe.

Most of the drug planes that crash in Honduras are Venezuelan flagged.  The UN suggests Venezuela handles about 10% of the world cocaine exports, almost all of it grown and produced in Colombia.  Venezuela's ultimate customers are in the United States and Europe, but their transhipment points are in the markets where drug consumption is increasing, Central America and the Caribbean.

So to sum up, there an inverse relationship between cocaine consumption in the US and Canada and rising levels of criminal activity and drug trafficking in Honduras.  There is a clear correlation with increasing cocaine consumption among Latin Americans, and particularly Central American and Caribbean populations.

And in any event, cocaine trafficking might be on its way out for Hondurans.  Drug synthesis appears be the new drug trafficking business in Honduras.  Recent news stories suggest that such a change has taken place.

The Mexican authorities in the port of Lazaro Cardenas in Michoacan  recently stopped 136 tons of chemicals being trans-shipped from China to Honduras, all of them with legal as well as illegal uses.  The fact that the shipping manifest listed the shipment as aluminum sulphate when it arrived at the port of Veracruz from China, but the contents were found to be things like methylamine, used to make the synthetic drug methamphetamine, and phenylacetate, used in making phenyl-2-propanone (P2P) which in turn is used in synthesizing amphetamines, was the basis for believing it was destined for illegal drug manufacture.

Combine this with the April 1 interdiction of 320 tons of precursor chemicals in Guatemala, also being shipped to Honduras and we get the impression Honduras has already become a center for drug synthesis.

That's 456 tons of synthetic drug precursors that were bound for Honduras intercepted in two months of this year.  You'd need industrial scale facilities to make use of that volume of chemicals.  So far, no drug labs synthesizing these drugs have been identified in Honduras. 

Perhaps Porfirio Lobo Sosa should do a little research before he assigns blame to United States demand, which is not increasing, for increased criminal activity and drug trafficking in Honduras. He could look closer to home, at the impunity with which crimes are committed in Honduras, in order to help explain increased criminal activity there.

Ultimately the cocaine that transits Honduras, whatever its destination, comes from Colombia whose president Lobo Sosa counts among his closest advisors.

Maybe they should chat about this?

Westport Energy Contract Update

This is an overdue update on one of the many dicey energy contracts that blossomed in the wake of the 2009 coup.

Back in November, 2011, the then-head of the Empressa Nacional de Energia Electrica (ENEE), Roberto Martinez Lozano entered into a contract with Westport Finance LLC, and Ira Ginsburg as its legal representative, for the installation of emergency power generation capacity totaling 100 megawatts for 16 years. 

It was a lucrative contract for Mr. Ginsburg, if carried out, and he stood to make a ton of money.  Martinez Lozano said Westport Finance LLC was backed by the Finnish energy equipment company Wartsila. Westport Finance LLC is run out of Ira and Carla Ginsburg's home in Westport, CT.  The full contract is available on ENEE's web site here.

Shortly after the contract was signed, approved by Congress, and published per Honduran law, Martinez Lozano was dismissed as head of ENEE.  It turned out that Martinez Lozano had lied about one of the steps necessary for the contract to be approved by ENEE prior to its submission to Congress.  The contract was never properly approved by a majority of the directors of ENEE when a quorum was present.  To date it still has not be properly approved.

When contacted in February, 2012 by a blogger in Westport, CT, Ginsburg said:

Politics in Honduras are unique.  My contract is in full force and effect.  The Minister of Energy's problems pre-date the negotiation of my deal, in 2009; they go back several years.  Honduras is ruled by an oligarchy of three families.  They own 100 percent of power generation and all the newspapers.  The fact that a power company from outside the country came in -- they don't like that.

Yikes.  Westport Finance LLC was founded in 2009, and began negotiating for a Honduran energy contract in its first year of business?  Was that pre- or post- coup, we wonder?

Westport Finance missed every milestone in the contract, and appears to have done nothing since the signing.  The new head of ENEE, Emil Hawit, told the press on April 23 that Westport Finance LLC had attempted to file the financial guarantee with the Honduran government, but it was returned because it didn't meet the legal requirements: it didn't follow the template attached to the contract. 

Hawit also told the press on that day that sometime prior to April 23 he had notified Westport Finance LLC in writing of their non-compliance.  Under the terms of the contract, Westport has until one month after notification to begin remediating all the non-compliant issues, and if they do, up to two more months to come into full compliance with the terms of the contract.  Otherwise, if Westport does not begin correcting its compliance, two months after notification, the contract is terminated.

As of today, there is no indication that Westport has done anything to come into compliance with the contract terms. Depending on when, exactly, Hawit notified them that their contract was non-compliant, the one-month clock should be getting close to running out. It should be an interesting couple of weeks.

Ex-Police Kidnap Reporter

Radio HRN reporter Alfredo Villatoro was kidnapped at 4:30 this morning while on his way to work.

A ex-police sergeant dismissed from the force in September, 2011, has been arrested for participating in the early morning kidnapping of Villatoro.  The ex-officer, Gerson Basilio Godoy, was dismissed for suspicion of belonging to a band of kidnappers and extortionists.  He was caught by a police checkpoint driving a Toyota pickup that had been seen parked in front of the reporter's house early this morning, and which had collided with the reporter's car, transferring paint.  Two other occupants of his truck,  Alpidio Fernández (father in law) and Allan Padilla (brother in law), were detained on suspicion of having participated in the kidnapping as well.

Godoy was also stopped in March and questioned regarding an attempt on an official who had just withdrawn a large amount of cash from the bank.

Alfredo Villatoro has not been found, but his kidnappers have communicated with his family.

As we reported back in early March, Minister of Security Pompeyo Bonilla continues to stonewall the Public Prosecutor, Luis Rubi.  Bonilla has failed to transfer the files on more than 100 police officers dismissed since last fall for alleged corruption or linkage to organized crime.  He transferred an initial 18 files, in early April then stopped.

Nor has there been one iota of progress in cleaning up the police since we last reported on this in early March.

Reporters Without Borders has condemned the kidnapping, along with the murder of another journalist, Erick Martinez, just days ago, .

There is no police cleanup.

 It is being actively blocked by Pompeyo Bonilla refusing to turn over the case files to the Public Prosecutor, by the Government of Canada which has stonewalled on nominating a candidate to the Consejo de Seguridad Publica,  There's the acceptance of a Chilean member of the Consejo who in turn has been accused of corruption in his own country, and the obstruction by the Government of Canada, which has so far refused to name a member of the commission despite lengthy security negotiations.  There's the failure of Lobo Sosa to exhibit any leadership.  We could add the apparent incompetence of the Public Prosecutor's office, which seems to lose most cases it does bring, but why bother.  The police in Honduras will not be cleaned up by any of the proposed processes.

And Alfredo Villatoro is still missing.

(Updated 3:50 PDT to correct names of those arrested.)

How Many Clandestine Airstrips?

The new math has come to the Armed Forces of Honduras!  If you follow the statements by the Honduran Armed Forces, you are forced to conclude that 24+26= 70

There are 70 clandestine drug airstrips known to the military in Honduras.  Think about it;  they know about 70 clandestine drug airfields, and haven't done anything about them.  When they first made this admission a few months ago it puzzled me.

If the enemy is using a resource, deny that resource to the enemy.  That seems obvious, right? Among the constitutionally assigned duties of the Honduran military is fighting drug trafficking.  So destroying those landing strips seems like an obvious tactic.

Why weren't they doing anything to destroy these airfields until now?

Now they're doing something.  As a recent New York Times article informs us, in association with the stationing of US military forces at four US built forward bases at Guanaja, Puerto Castilla, Aguacate, and Morocon, joint operations are now targeting the destruction of some of these airfields.

Three Honduran departments hold the majority of these airfields: 25 in Olancho, 15 in Colon, and 10 in El Paraiso.  In case you're counting, that adds up to 50 airfields, or roughly 71% of the total 70.

Notice that the Department of Gracias a Dios, bordering on Nicaragua, is not mentioned.  More about that later.

The Honduran military are working with a DEA FAST (Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team) team to now blow up airstrips, some of which have been known to the Honduran military for years.

Since the military love naming their projects, this one is called Operation Armadillo 2.  The second phase of Operation Armadillo 2 ended in April with the destruction of 17 clandestine airstrips.  How are they destroying the airstrips?  Helicopters fly teams from these forward bases to the airstrip, where US trainers guide Honduran Special Forces in the placement of 5 to 7 explosive charges to create craters in the runway.

The 17 destroyed airstrips were apparently in the department of Gracias a Dios.

Reading between the lines, it seems likely that the Honduran military lacked the explosives and expertise in using them, and that may, in part, account for their lack of action until now.

Honduran Joint Chiefs Chairman General Rene Osorio Canales told the Honduran press that the third phase of Operation Armadillo 2 was about to kick off, but he couldn't mention details.  He assured us that all of the known airfields will be destroyed by the end of 2012.

But the official spokesperson for the Defense Ministry, colonel Jeremías Arévalo Guifarro, has some different numbers.  He says that there are only 50 clandestine airfields known to the military, and that they have already destroyed 24 of them.  The other 26, according to Colonel Arévalo Guifarro, are scheduled for destruction.

So which is it?  50 total airfields, as Arévalo Guifarro claims, or the 70 that the Armed Forces previously announced?  17 airfields destroyed as reported by General Osorio Canales, or 24 as reported by Colonel Arévalo Guifarro?

While Osorio Canales assures us that all of the known clandestine airfields will be destroyed by the end of 2012, Arévalo Guifarro says 50 of them will be destroyed.

It seems pertinent to point out that Colonel Arévalo Guifarro is the same spokesman who seemed out of touch in reporting on the "forced" landing of a drug plane in Yoro a few days ago.

Still, I find myself left with a question. These are grass-covered dirt landing strips build in remote areas by labor organized by the drug traffickers long before airplanes could land there.  Why can't they just fill in the holes in the same way that they created the airfield? or level the terrain adjacent to the existing landing strip in the same way they created it in the first place?  Isn't this just a game of Whack A Mole?

The drug traffickers almost certainly can restore these airfields, so without a program of continued surveillance of these locations this is just an inconvenience for them.

The only clear enduring product of this campaign is Armed Forces PR. And they can't even get their math straight.

And the Winner Is: Miguel Facussé!

Winner for what? we're glad you asked: selected by Reporters Without Borders as one of its group of 41 global "Predators" threatening freedom of the press.

What, you ask, is a Reporters Without Borders Predator? They are described as "predators of the freedom to inform":

“Let there be no witness to our crimes” and “let there be no voice but ours” – these are the watchwords of authoritarian regimes and armed groups that are hostile to freedom of information.

We suspect there won't be a lot of celebration on Facussé's part. Even authoritarians want to be perceived as nice guys.

So what has Miguel Facussé done to deserve this distinction?

The citation is succinct, describing him as

one of the leading supporters of the June 2009 coup that toppled President Manuel Zelaya and paved the way for a still-continuing crackdown on opposition and grass-roots media. Its targets include small radio stations that defend the interests of local communities and often challenge those of big landowners.

Reporters Without Borders goes on to note that he  "has a private militia that can count on support from the police and army to impose his will".

It ends with the sobering tally of deaths of journalists: 26 over the last ten years; since the coup d'etat in 2009, a total of 19 journalists have died in Honduras.

Six newly added Predators were announced on May 2, World Press Freedom Day, bringing the list up to a total of 41.

What seems most remarkable on reviewing the list is that most of the others on it are either government officials-- presidents and kings abound-- or armed forces of one kind or another, whether official security, criminal cartels, or insurgents.

In Honduras, uniquely, all it takes is to reach the exalted rank of predator of the freedom to inform is to be a powerful businessman with political connections.

What a way to bring international attention to Honduras.

MINERCO: Chiligatoro and Sayab Updates

MINERCO Resources, Inc. is one of those strange energy deals that we've written about previously.  It is a company lacking financial resources, which hired a new CEO in 2010 and switched corporate directions.  It went from being a company that acquires oil and gas leases, to one that pursues the development of renewable energy sources in Latin America.  It has "financed" the purchase of two hydro-electric projects and one wind farm project from Honduran energy companies by issuing stock, but none of these projects is anything more that a bunch of paper at this point.  Its stock trades on the OTC market for less than $0.01 a share today.

Its flagship potential project is the Chiligatoro Hydro-Electric project, a power generation project that will take water out of a river, let it drop several hundred feet in elevation running inside pipes to feed turbines, then reintroduce the water back into the river.  In addition to the income from the power, they expect to receive carbon offset credits for the facility, and further credits for reforestation.

There's a catch looming over them.  Their purchase agreement over the rights to the project from ROTA Inversiones, S.A. of Honduras calls for them to raise $12 million to invest in the project by May 27, 2012, or the rights to the project revert to ROTA.  They haven't raised $12 million; they haven't raised $1.  Instead they've spent money to issue a series of optimistic press releases as the deadline approaches.

On April 24 they issued a press release stating that they were simultaneously applying for the project power purchase agreement with ENEE, the Honduran National Electrical company, and soliciting bids for the final Design.  They still need approval from the Honduran Congress as well, before any construction can start, and of course, financing.

Only the bit about soliciting bids is actual new news.  The "applying for the Power Purchase Agreement" was already a statement in their March 31, 2012 10Q filing with the SEC, which says "Final approval and start of construction is anticipated by early 2012."  Oops.  That's not going to happen.

MINERCO uses PR Newswire to issue its press releases.  Anyone can use their service, if they can pay.  According to this column, MINERCO paid $2,500 for the April 24 promotional campaign.  The columnist speculated this release was to help support their falling stock price.

Then on May 1 MINERCO announced they are negotiating with an unnamed equity partner who might acquire 25-60% of the Chilligatoro project, with an investment of $3 million to $7.2 million. Scott Vanis, MINERCO CEO, said:

We are very excited about the potential of obtaining an equity partner in our Chiligatoro project. This would lower our capital expenditure outlay and expedite the construction of all 3 phases of Chiligatoro. This also opens up the possibility of partnering on future projects as well.

Here's the thing.  Real companies only announce done deals, not deals that might be, because they might not be. If it is far enough along to announce, its also far enough along to name the partner. Everything else is fiction.

Cui bono?

MINERCO had revealed in the March 10Q filing that they are in negotiations with ROTA Inversiones for a 12 month extension of the May 27 deadline to raise the capital.  Was the May 1 press release meant to help convince ROTA Inversiones to sign that extension? Without an extension, MINERCO will lose the Chiligatoro project.

But this is only part of MINERCO's headaches.  In theory, on  June 18, 2012, they need to have invested a further $10 million in the Sayab Wind Project which they purchased from Energia Renovable Hondureña, S.A.  However, because the project still lacks environmental approval from SERNA, the deal has not been consummated, and no shares of MINERCO stock have been conveyed to Energia Renovable Hondureña, SA according to the latest 10Q filing.  They state there that they expect this approval, and the transfer of stock and title to the project, to happen in the second quarter of this year.  At that point the clock will start ticking for them to raise the $10 million investment in that project.

The company lost $552,844 in the 3 months ending January 31, 2012 and had $115 in cash and claimed a further  $715,615 in assets. 

Drug Plane "Forced" to Land!?

On Tuesday the Honduran newspapers were full of a story that seemed to involve helicopters or maybe fixed wing aircraft  intercepting and forcing a drug plane to crash-land in Yoro.

More details have appeared in the press today, enough to call into question parts of the story.

The official story on offer by spokespeople for the Air Force in Honduras (unnamed) is that two helicopters (or maybe fixed wing aircraft) of theirs intercepted and followed a Cessna 310R aircraft with a Venezuelan tail number.

According to the official story, the plane was forced to land, and attempted to use a rural road previously used by drug aircraft as a landing strip, but struck some tree branches and ended up wrecked, in pieces, alongside the road. A bad enough crash to wreck the plane, but not severely injure the pilot.

The military helicopters (or fixed wing aircraft), instead of landing, or reporting the event to the nearest authorities on the ground, flew back to their base, and it wasn't until the next morning when residents of the area found the aircraft and called the police that someone came out to the "crash" site to investigate.

By then the lone pilot, and his cargo, were long gone.

Residents of the area report that the plane, which landed around 11 PM Monday night, was met by strangers in cars who unloaded the plane and left in the direction of Jocon, Yoro.

These details make it seem clear that the plane, tail number YV1440, intended to land on this road. It was met by people prepared to offload the pilot and any cargo.  You don't organize such a project at the drop of a hat.  It had to be pre-arranged.

So if this aircraft always meant to land there, where's the "force"? We've seen photos of many wrecked planes that attempted to land on rural Honduran roads, all without military intervention.

As of Tuesday afternoon the official spokesperson for the Honduran Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Jeremias Arevalo, knew nothing of the event, according to La Tribuna.

So what part of this story is true?

Well, there is a Cessna 310R, tail number YV1440, lying in pieces next to a road in Yoro.

According to a website that tracks flight plans, that tail number belongs to a Cessna 182 Skylane from Venezuela, which clearly is not the plane pictured in Yoro, which is a Cessna 310R.

An airplane with the listed tail number that does match the one on the side of the road in Yoro shows up in this ad from Venezuela, for sale for about $230,000, offered by a Miguel Angel Gonzalez in Venezuela.  The phone number listed is that of the Restaurant White, a Mediterranean-style restaurant in Caracas, Venezuela.

It seems clear from the photos in the Honduran newspapers and on the website offering the plane for sale that the two planes are one and the same.  Same paint job, same configuration, but with all the seats, except for that of the pilot, removed.

Maybe some Air Force helicopters or planes intercepted this Cessna and followed it for a while, but it seems unlikely they actually forced it down.

Judging from the reception party waiting, it always intended to land there, or somewhere nearby, or there would not have been cars ready to pick up the pilot and cargo and spirit them away.

What about the lack of reporting the plane back to anybody on the ground?  This leads me to believe that at best, the Honduran Air Force intercepted and chased the plane (which flies slowly, top speed about 220 MPH), but lost it before it landed, as some reports stated on Tuesday.

Someone seems to have felt the need to make up a better story: but on the face of it, this is another in a series of unchallenged flights using small planes treated as essentially disposable-- presumably transporting drugs.

The continued inability of the Honduran Air Force to actually do anything about this traffice casts General Rene Osorio's recent statements about shooting down drug planes into a different light. Presumably, his subordinates would report it if they shot one down.

Then again...

Lobo Sosa Celebrates the End of the World

"Did the ancient Maya believe December 2012 would bring the apocalypse?"

No.

Now can we get on to real issues?

Apparently not.

News media in Honduras are reporting that Porfirio Lobo Sosa is off to help open a new museum exhibition in the US. As the University of Pennsylvania PR website describes it,

Porfirio Lobo Sosa, president of the Republic of Honduras, and Penn Museum Director Richard Hodges will lead a ribbon cutting.

The quote at beginning of this post comes directly from the press release for the Penn Museum opening. The weirdness of having museums, which are supposed to combat ignorance, playing off the pseudo-science claims of an impending apocalypse supposedly predicted by the prehispanic Maya, is something we guess we will simply have to get used to for the rest of this year. Certainly, it has already become clear that Honduras is going to try to milk 2012 in a so-far vain, and quite bizarre, effort to increase tourism to Copan.

The oddest thing about both the Spanish and English articles, though, is that there is no acknowledgment of the controversies in the town of Copan Ruinas that were triggered by the loan of objects from Copan to Penn.

Proceso Digital reports that Lobo Sosa will be accompanied by his wife and a string of Honduran government notables: María Antonieta Guillén, Arturo Corrales, and Diana Valladares from the executive branch; Copan Ruinas's representative in Congress, Julio Cesar Gámez, who has been instrumental in the campaign to alienate resources from the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia and redirect them to Copan; and Helmy René Giacoman, the mayor of Copan Ruinas who gained illegal concessions as a result of the so-called "Copan Accord".

While both the minister of Tourism, Nelly Jerez, and the replacement Minister of Culture, Tulio Mariano Gonzales, are listed, notably absent from the list is Virgilio Paredes, who has been functioning as the director of the Institute of Anthropology and History since the last days of the de facto regime installed by the coup d'etat in 2009.

Returning to the University of Pennsylvania's coverage of the museum opening, it says the exhibit will cover "end-of-the-world prophecies and many other intricacies of Maya culture". It goes on amazingly-- and utterly inaccurately-- to say that

the ancient Maya reigned over what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, and El Salvador...Though their culture was largely destroyed by the Spanish conquest, people of Maya descent continue to live today.

This kind of writing is supposed to have disappeared from global archaeology.

For the record:

There was no ancient Maya political hegemony that can be described with the verb "reign". The Classic Maya were organized in a series of independent states, some of which joined in coalitions to oppose other coalitions.

Much of Honduras and El Salvador were occupied by people who were not Maya in language or culture; the largest such groups were the Lenca of Honduras and El Salvador, the Pipil of El Salvador, the Tol or Torrupan and Pech of Honduras, but there were many others, whose histories are erased by exaggerated claims like this. (We could even include the Xinca of Guatemala, a people whose history has simply been erased by sloppy scholarship.)

Maya culture was not "destroyed" by a "Spanish conquest". Maya populations (like those of the other peoples named) were decimated during the first century after Europeans invaded, but using traditional practices and rapidly learning newly introduced legal, economic, social and religious institutions, Maya people (and Lenca people, and Pipil and Tol and Pech and...) stabilized their communities which continued to change throughout history, as all peoples of the world change in history.

The "people of Maya descent" who live in Central America today number in the millions; speak multiple different languages; engage in political struggles, including against the government of Honduras; and have real historical roots in what museums of the world continue to represent as the works of now-vanished people.

And neither they, nor their predecessors, predicted the end of the world.