Portside

Portside's posts did not go out as scheduled Saturday and Sunday. Our service provider, May First, upgraded all of their servers Saturday, to prevent coordinated hacking and DOS - Denial of Service attacks. Unfortunately there were conflicts between the new server software and the software that Portside uses to send posts. We have identified the problem, and are now working to correct it. Below is an Index of the posts that were posted to our website over the weekend.

The names of Berta Cáceres’s murderers are yet unknown. But we know who killed her.

The March 3rd assassination of Berta Caceres, coordinator of the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (COPIHN), sent shock waves across the country, sparking outrage and demands for an independent investigation. Last month COPIHN issued an international appeal warning of government complicity in the increasing violence directed at the indigenous opponents of the notorious Aqua Zarca Dam Project. Caceres won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015.

Along the Atlantic coast of Honduras, Afro-Caribbean Garifuna communities are being forced from their land, as proposals for the creation of mega-tourism projects and corporate-run “model cities,” gain momentum. Mega-projects are just one of the problems Honduran Garifuna communities have had to face in the six years since a U.S-supported coup d’etat removed then-President Manuel Zelaya from power. But the Garifuna are organizing to defend their land and culture.

The Obama Administration continues to champion Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández as a key regional partner and wants to send even more money to his corrupt regime. Hernández’s government, on a six-year-long march against human rights, the rule of law and civilian policing, is now embroiled in an exploding corruption scandal. Just how heinous does the Honduran regime have to be before the U.S. stops supporting it?

Enforcement is not the solution to the latest version of the United States’ immigration issue. To stem immigration, if that’s indeed what is desired, the United States needs to make Central America habitable again, especially since the U.S. government has been the major instigator in the region for at least the past century.

Washington policymakers fail to see that social movements, rather than individual leaders like Zelaya, Chávez, or Morales, are the most enduring and potent force of change in Latin America today. These movements were spurred by the very economic policies that the United States has promoted in the region, and repression won’t make them go away.

Reader Comments - Cecily McMillan Update - Occupy Activist Faces Seven Years in Jail - Trial Postponed to March 3rd; Africa; Latin America; Learning from History; Slavery; UAW Campaign at Volkswagen; Amiri Baraka; Pete Seeger memories; Announcements - CISPES Delegation to El Salvador; Workers Get a Cut on Powell Books purchases; New Video - The USA's new underclass; Labor Notes conference - April 4 - 6 - Early bird discount

... this social democratic culture in Latin America, this notion that democracy entails some form of economic justice, which is deep and can’t be rooted out and can’t be expunged, no matter how much Washington and local elites have tried in Latin America ...