Sustainability Efforts Suffer Along With Human Rights in Honduran Coup

By CSRwire Contributing Writer Francesca Rheannon of Sea Change Media

Poor communities lose an educational radio drama about water and sustainability, while Chiquita, Dole and others bring back the original “banana republic”.

The 2009 World Water Week just came to a close in Stockholm on August 21. Sponsored by the Stockholm International Water Institute, its focus was “Accessing Water for the Common Good”. It’s an urgent theme. Each year, more than 3.5 million people die because they don’t have access to clean, safe water. An overwhelming number are children: 85% of water-related deaths occur in kids aged newborn to fourteen and it’s the leading cause of death for those under five. Almost all of the deaths from water-borne disease are in the developing world. Access to safe water is an issue both of sustainability and human rights.

One country where access to safe water is in crisis is Honduras. Less than 14% of water supplies in that country are safe for drinking. The reason is often environmental destruction. That’s the case in the communities around the Valle de Ángeles river basin, where illegal logging, agricultural pesticides, and poor sanitation have contaminated drinking water supplies.

An innovative effort to tackle the area’s water crisis has been upended by the national political crisis: the coup of June 28 that ousted democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya. An educational radio soap opera called Agua de Ángel (Angel’s Waters) had been on the air for just a few months when the coup happened. It was the lynchpin of a multimedia campaign to educate the communities of the Valle de Ángeles river basin on protecting and conserving water supplies.

Developed by PCI-Media, in collaboration with the Red de Desarrollo Sostenible (Sustainable Development Network), the radio drama featured community members as actors in dramas showing the environmental and health consequences of contaminated water supplies and depleted natural resources.

But it ran into trouble after the coup and the show had to be suspended. Its producer, Victor Hugo Avila, emailed the following reasons to this reporter in response to a question about what happened:

1) The changes in the political, social and economic situations that have arisen since June 28.

2) The radio broadcaster (Radio Nacional) where we were broadcasting the program has suffered technical difficulties, which have not been resolved. They interrupted service in the target community...

3) Radio Nacional forms part of the government communication network, and the programming is now subject to political and government interests.

Broadcasting was successful from May 22 through Friday July 12...Since then, 10 weeks have passed, during which the situation of the country has not permitted us to continue the program as planned...

Those “political and government interests” involve not just the native Honduran oligarchy, which has a decades-long history of brutal repression in the service of its economic rule, broken only (briefly) by Zelaya’s election. Look behind the curtain and you’ll find the same U.S. companies that were the icons behind the term, “banana republic”, Chiquita Banana (formerly United Fruit) and Dole. The companies have been linked to law and public relations firms engaged by the new de facto government.

When the coup happened, most Americans heard that it was sparked by Zelaya’s attempt to have a referendum on extending his term of office (which ends by January). The implication from much of the U.S. media was a power grab by Zelaya. But the so-called “referendum” was nothing of the sort. Zelaya was just asking for a non-binding poll of voters on whether they would support an actual referendum on extending the presidential term in the future: even if he got what he wanted, it wouldn’t have applied to him. Zelaya would have been out in January, and he indicated he would not seek another term.

So why the coup?

Some are pointing to the fact that Zelaya had increased the minimum wage by 60%. He also raised teachers’ salaries and public pensions. In a country where 62% of the population lives in poverty, those moves spelled significant social change. Earlier this year, Chiquita and Dole criticized the government in Tegucigalpa for raising the minimum wage; Chiquita complained the new regulations would cut into company profits.

Other companies joined Chiquita and Dole in supporting the coup, especially those representing apparel makers that employ workers in Honduran maquiladoras, where the average wage of a worker in free trade zones is 77 cents per hour. And because Honduras (along with that other coup-prone country, Haiti) has always set the bottom of the minimum wage in the region, any increase in Honduran wages could lead to raises elsewhere.

But not all US business leaders operating in Honduras favor the coup. Nike, The Gap, The Adidas Group and Knights Apparel were part of a group that sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calling for a restoration of democracy and basic civil rights and liberties in Honduras.

And the radio drama Agua de Ángel is hoping to get on the air again. An online fundraising drive through GlobalGiving's Open Challenge is raising money to bring the show to a commercial station. PCI-Media has until September 18 to raise $10,000 to make that happen. In a country where brutal repression of peaceful dissent by ordinary people is making a comeback, empowering a community to protect its environment could help keep the spark of democracy alive.