Resisting Babilonia: Overture Paper Arrows

Today’s episode takes us from a municipal meeting in rural Gualaco to a roiling protest on the streets of Honduras’s capital city, Tegucigalpa. Gualaco Mayor Rafael Ulloa lured me into the municipal meeting under the pretext that I would meet people who could tell me more stories about Canuto. Instead what I got was a crash course on agrarian social movement dynamics, as charming stories of social bandits quickly gave way to a high-stakes struggle to oust an unwanted dam project and its employees from a local village. When gunfire felled one of the dam’s most vocal opponents, stories alone proved insufficient to the task of protecting patrimonio. I bring you along for the ride as I, too, got swept up in the action.
A word is in order about the text of Episodes 5 and 6. This podcast is essentially a straight reading of a master’s thesis I wrote in 2001 and 2002 and that represented the best information I had available at the time. While most of it still holds up, I want to issue a disclaimer with respect to the content you will hear today. The reading mentions that one important bone of contention surrounding a controversial dam project has to do with the site of the construction within the buffer zone of Sierra de Agalta National Park. Since the time of the Gualaco protests of 2001, however, careful cartographic and survey work have shown that the Babilonia dam in fact lies just outside the park’s original buffer zone, not within it, as I and others earnestly believed and argued at the time. This claim, and the belief behind it, formed one piece - an important one - of Gualaqueños’ multi-layered, counter-discursive narrative that the dam and its promoters had no rightful place within the moral community or upon the land that members of that community claimed as their own.
One additional error in the text that I caught upon performing this reading involves a detail to do with the dispatch of a statue of Christopher Columbus by the indigenous organization, COPINH. In the thesis, I incorrectly state that the Columbus statue previously toppled by COPINH had been located at the Capitol Plaza, where the Lempira statue now resides. I would later learn, in the course of my dissertation research into COPINH, that the Columbus statue had stood at a different park, several miles distant.
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Today's episode contains something of an alphabet soup of different organizations that are sometimes referred to by their acronym. Here, from the front matter of my thesis, is the master list of acronyms used in the paper:
List of Abbreviations
AHPROCAFE: Honduran Coffee Producers’ Association
BCIE/CABEI: Central American Bank for Economic Integration
CODEH: Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras
COHDEFOR: Honduran Forest Development Corporation
COFADEH: Committee of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared
in Honduras
CONACIM: National Coordinator against Impunity
COPINH: Civil Counsel of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of
Honduras
ENEE: National Electric Company
ENGO: Environmental Non-governmental Organization
IDB: Inter-American Development Bank
ILO: International Labor Organization
IMF: International Monetary Fund
PAAR: Protected Areas Administration Project
PHB: Babilonia Hydroelectric Project
PNSA: Sierra de Agalta National Park
PPP: Plan Puebla-Panamá
SERNA: Secretariat of Natural Resources and the Environment
SIEPAC: System of Electrical Interconnection for the Countries of Central
America
UD: Democratic Unification Party
USAID: United States Agency for International Development
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I owe a great intellectual debt to my research participants as well as to many journalists, historians, and social-science researchers. In the podcast, I sometimes shorthand the fuller citations contained in the written version of my...