The Honduran lab: Wire fences, yes; books, no

By Elíades Acosta Matos

Violence reigns not only on the streets of Honduras, crushed by the putschist boots. It also reigns in the silent libraries, in the bookshelves and especially in the offices of the de-facto authorities in charge of dismantling the libertarian culture of a people who democratically emerged from decades of repression and authoritarianism and began to leave behind the endemic illiteracy of one of the hemisphere’s poorest nations.

In private, away from the scrutiny of public opinion, working feverishly in the Honduran lab, are people who have been assigned to produce an alternative to the education and culture of the leftist governments that have been democratically elected in most Latin American countries.

The recurring dream of the U.S. neoconservatives who sponsored the Honduran coup, who were defeated at the polls by Barack Obama, resembles that of the slavery-driven Confederacy defeated in 1865 by Lincoln and the Union armies: to create armies abroad to organize a revenge and reconquest, a return and a payback.

At that time, the men in gray, the recalcitrant doctrinaires, formed paramilitary colonies in places like Australia and Mexico, where they continued to raise the secessionist flag. Today, the crumbs of the Project for a New American Century, the ruins of what was an integral program for global domination, for a definitive offensive against national freedom and sovereignty, have turned in this Central American nation into an anachronistic monster halfway between the fascist coups hailed by Curzio Malaparte and the post-modern glamour of a soft coup in times of soft power. Its defenders beat and kill on the streets, with the blessing of the legislative and judicial institutions that are back in the hands of the usual oligarchs.

This “democratic coup,” as defined by a seraphic neoconservative like Jaime Darenblum, was directed not only against President Zelaya, against the Honduran people and democracy, against the future and integration of Latin America, and against President Obama and his policies of change, but also (and especially) against the equality of opportunities, against critical thought and freedom of expression, all of them dangerous targets that need to be hit, according to the neoconservative credo of these worshippers of Leo Strauss’ elitist philosophy.

The coup was staged to again subjugate the Lenca Indians who were learning to read and write; to send back to the hell of drugs, gangs and garbage dumps the more than 1,500 young people from the barrios who had dared to study (for free) at the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana and to return upon graduation to serve in their communities, as 500 of them already did.

To keep national literature buried in the shadows of ignorance, and to continue to exacerbate a dangerous admiration for the banal culture of globalization, the putschists have not only soiled the Constitution, deposed the elected president, murdered teachers and young students, but also dismantled editorial programs, expurgated libraries and banned authors and books that, they say, “have communist content.”

Appointed by the usurper government to head the Secretariat of Culture, the Arts and Sports was lawyer Myrna Aida Castro Rosales, former chairwoman of the Congressional Committee on Culture and the Arts. This brand-new “minister” can only boast of a single legislative bill — introduced before the coup — that assigned a small amount of money to build a wire fence around the Alvaro Contreras rural school in the town of Santa Rita, Department of Copán.

She has now been given a greater task: to build a fence around national culture and corral thoughts and ideas; to keep education and culture from fostering an equality of opportunities and creating the social justice to which Hondurans aspire.

Mrs. Castro comes from a neoliberal organization — the Attorneys and Advisers Law Firm — that describes itself as “engaged in projects of privatization, repatriation of capital, and installation of industries with fiscal benefits,” a politically correct description of the maquiladoras. She cannot sympathize with the idea of public education and universal access to culture, goals sought in Honduras until recently by little more than 100 Cuban educators who fought illiteracy with a UNESCO-approved method called “Yes, I can” and were withdrawn from Honduras after the coup.

An exponent of that neoconservative way of doing politics, where lies and deceit are virtues, not sins, Mrs. Castro — who unhesitatingly defended the veracity of President Zelaya’s false “resignation” letter in an interview with BBC World the day after the coup, and who complained that 20 Venezuelan military advisers were in Honduras at a time when the U.S. kept more than 500 servicemen in the Soto Cano Base — has blithely denounced the alleged funding by ALBA of the Honduran public libraries “to incite socialism and communism.” The truth is that the only funds the libraries have received have come from the Swedish government and UNESCO.

Mrs. Castro, who has been the target of numerous complaints and repudiation by her country’s intellectual community (Natalie Roque has accused her of “ideological persecution, harassment and unjustified dismissal”), has suspended the activities of the Cultura Publishing House, whose only sin has been to rescue the almost-unknown national literature. Cultura has published the work of classic writers like José Cecilio del Valle, Clementina Suárez, Luis Quesada and Rafael Heliodoro Valle; it has issued travel books like those by Doris Stone and John Stephens, collections by Honduran poets, the magazine of the National Archives, Garifuna dictionaries, bibliographic yearbooks and the Bulletin of the National Library.

She has also stopped the work of a “bibliobus” (a traveling library) donated in 2005 by UNESCO, the Italian company Plasmon, and the Spanish organization Books for the World.

We Latin Americans remember the images of hundreds of thousands of murdered, tortured and disappeared people, inflicted by the dictatorships that decimated this region in the past century. We also remember the pyres of books, records and placards with which the dictatorships tried to stop the march of their people toward democracy and justice. As Karl Marx wrote in “Louis Bonaparte’s 18th Brummaire,” paraphrasing Hegel, history repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy, the next time as a farce.

To fence in an entire country, to lock up its ideas, to prohibit the circulation of books and bibliobuses, to censure its artists and intellectual, in short, the sad task to which Mrs. Castro has devoted herself in Honduras (a task for which she is eminently qualified), is indeed a farce, but also a bloody farce.

That spilled blood, those dying teachers, those battered students, those blocked ideas, the very need of wire fences to keep out democracy represent the utter failure of the Honduran lab. It is bound to end.

Elíades Acosta Matos, a Cuban writer, is a member of the Progreso Weekly team. He lives in Havana.