Resisting Babilonia - Crescendo and Coda

Intro

Today we pick up where we left off — on the capitol plaza in Tegucigalpa, protesting the murder of Gualaco coffee grower Carlos Flores, putatively shot by outsiders intent on building the Babilonia Hydroelectric project - a construction that usurped patrimonio and threatened the livelihoods of those living in affected communities. Let’s jump right in.

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Podcast Postscript

This concludes our story, though not of course the ongoing struggle over rural land and livelihood in Honduras. I hope you will come away with questions, curiosity, and an interest in learning more. If that happens, I encourage you to direct your energy towards educating yourself and others about ongoing struggles by rural and indigenous communities to control and steward their land, water, and other natural resources in Honduras and elsewhere around the world. 

In today’s narrative, you heard mention of Berta Cáceres, a key leader in COPINH, the Civic Counsel of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, invoking the name of the historical figure, Chief Lempira, in defense of local people’s right to collective usufruct of their land, rivers, trees, and lifeways. Berta was issuing a challenge to the dominant discursive notion that sustainable development in Honduras can be financed on the backs of rural people and underwritten by the wresting away of peasants’ and indigenous people’s access to the natural resource base that undergirds their way of life. In 2003, intrigued by Berta and COPINH, I traveled to the department of Intibucá to conduct a 15-month study into their movement. In the process, Berta and I became friends. In 2015, Berta won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize — considered by some the Nobel Prize for the Environment. The following year, she was assassinated by men in the employ of the Agua Zarca hydrodam project in western Honduras. As in the case of Babilonia, the intellectual authors of Berta’s killing remain free and largely unchallenged. You can help change that by learning more and speaking up. Start by reading Nina Lakhani’s terrific new book, Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet, available in hardback from Verso Books.

If you would like to reach out to me, drop me a line at danielgrahamphd@gmail.com.

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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 master's thesis. Here, however, are the works I cite in that volume:

Works Cited

Acker, Alison. 1988. Honduras: the making of a banana republic. Boston: South End Press.

"Agitadores que reciben dólares del exterior causaron disturbios: Gautama." 2001. Tiempo, July 20, http://www.tiempo.hn/edicante/2001/julio/20%20julio/nacion~1/nacio5.htm.

Amaya, Miriam. 2000. "Honduras, el eslabón más débil de la integración." La Prensa, September 5, http://www.laprensahn.com/economarc/0009/e05001.htm.

Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. 1983. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

Arnold, David. 1996. The problem of nature: environment, culture and European expansion, New perspectives on the past. Oxford, Eng.; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.

"Banco Centroamericano congela préstamo para proyectos hidroeléctricos." 2001. La Prensa, July 30, http://www.laprensahn.com/natarc/0107/n30004.htm.

Blok, Anton. 1988 [1974]. The mafia of a Sicilian village, 1860-1960: a study of violent peasant entrepreneurs. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press.

Bonner, Raymond. 1981. "Green Berets step up Honduras role." New York Times, August 9: 16.