LASA 2001 Paper Daniel Graham "Public-Private Partnerships in Violence: Hydroelectric Development in Honduras"

DRAFT VERSION: DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR

A preliminary report based on action research conducted over the summer of 2001
Prepared for presentation in the panel, "Rethinking Violence: Issues of Justice and Memory in Contemporary Local Practices," LASA Conference, Washington, D.C., September 6, 2001

Abstract

Multilateral lending institutions' blueprint for regional economic integration in the Americas calls for Honduras to rapidly develop its electrical energy production capacity. Accordingly, state policies have encouraged private investors to launch for-profit hydroelectric projects that will provide electricity to the national and regional energy grid. This paper examines the troubling tendency for Honduran state entities to collude with these private concerns in steamrollering local communities' opposition to ill-conceived projects. The paper is based primarily on participatory, activist research conducted from June 30 to July 23, 2001, in Olancho department and Tegucigalpa.

Acronyms

AHPROCAFE: Honduran Coffee Producers' Association
BCIE/CABEI: Central American Bank for Economic Integration
CODEH: Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras
COFADEH: Committee of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras
CONACIM: National Coordinator against Impunity
CONADEH: National Human Rights Commissioner of Honduras
COPINH: Civil Counsel of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras
ENEE: National Electric Company
IDB: Inter-American Development Bank
IMF: International Monetary Fund
MER: Regional Electricity Market
PHB: Babilonia Hydroelectric Project
PPP: Plan Puebla-Panamá
SIEPAC: System of Electrical Interconnection for the Countries of Central America
SURCO: Communal Regional Unified System of Olancho
UNAH: National Autonomous University of Honduras

On Tuesday, July 3, 2001, Honduras's Liberal Party candidate for president, Rafael Pineda Ponce, unveiled before the National Congress his plan for resolving the country's high-profile problem of gang violence. Pineda Ponce, who serves as President of the Congress, timed his bill-"The law for the prevention, rehabilitation, and social reinsertion of people integrated in gangs"-to coincide with the re-convening of the unicameral legislature after a one-month recess (La Prensa 2001a). If he were to win the tough presidential race against National Party candidate Ricardo Maduro, Pineda Ponce had to pull out all the stops. The Gang Rehabilitation Bill was to help Pineda Ponce launch the final stretch of his campaign for the November election, casting him as tough on crime while understanding of Honduras's disadvantaged youth.

One day after Pineda Ponce's coming-out party, hundreds of campesinos took advantage of the propitious date, July 4, to march on the National Congress building, roaring angry epithets at the politician for his hypocrisy. For these peasants from rural Olancho province in eastern Honduras, Pineda Ponce was as much a criminal as those he proposed to reform. At certain points the marchers cried out, "It's not the gangs that are the problem; the President of Congress is the one who needs to be rehabilitated!" At other times, the group chanted, "¡Pin Pon, Pin Pon, tu yerno es un matón!" in reference to Pineda Ponce's timber magnate son-in-law, Jorge Chávez. Chávez not so mysteriously remains free despite widespread allegations he contracted the assassination of environmental activist Carlos Luna in Catacamas, Olancho, in 1998 (e.g. Fiallos 1998; El Heraldo 2001a: 14).

The demonstrating campesinos came from several villages pertaining to the municipality of Gualaco, which borders Catacamas to the northwest. The immediate impetus for their spirited march occurred just days earlier, on Saturday, June 30, when six guards employed by a dam-building company called Energisa (S.A. de C.V.) murdered a community leader from the hamlet of El Ocotal, Gualaco. The victim, Carlos Roberto Flores, was one of the most vociferous of many townspeople who fiercely opposed Energisa's construction of the Babilonia Hydroelectric Project (PHB) on the nearby Río Babilonia. The demonstrators who came to the capital city to denounce the act considered the central state government complicit in the crimes both against Flores and against the river that the hydroelectric project would destroy. Over the course of the weeks-long protest in Tegucigalpa (which still continues), the protesters' rough treatment from several of the state agencies to which they directed their appeal, did little to alter their original, pessimistic appraisal of the government's moral and legal legitimacy.

This paper examines Flores' murder in the context of a community's fight to chart its own course of development. The Gualaqueños' ordeal is, in turn, mirrored to some extent at the larger politico-geographical scale of the Honduran state in the international arena. The details of Gualaco's struggle defy simple explanation, even in a country that perennially ranks near the top of international corruption indices (La Tribuna 2001a: 9). The present work, drawn together in the wake of recent events in Honduras, presents the tentative hypothesis that the "public-private partnership in violence" observed in this case owes in significant part to perceived pressure on the Honduran government to develop increased hydroelectric capacity for the national grid and, in coming years, for the regional market-the other Central American signatories to the Plan Puebla-Panamá.

My initial research findings suggest much that may be of interest to the social scientist in Honduras and elsewhere in Latin America. Apropos of the panel's focus on rethinking violence, this case (re-)exposes some of the consequences of economic and political elites' de facto oligopoly of the means of transmitting information to the public about violence and other social issues. Also, the information presented here points out more and less direct links between macro policy and ground-level repression in countries like Honduras. On the matter of methodology, it is important to note the problem of relying on traditional sources of statistics (etymology: state-istics) on the categories and culprits of social violence in the countries where we perform our research. These themes will appear more or less explicitly (and in various stages of intellectual ontogeny) in the pages of this preliminary report. However, the paper is largely descriptive and concerns itself primarily with imparting essential information to potential activists.

The remainder of this paper is divided into two main sections. The first part will briefly discuss the matter of Honduras's role in the scheme of increasing regional economic integration as exemplified by Plan Puebla-Panamá. I will argue that various historical and economic factors exert pressure within Honduras for regional integration and that various parties have cast the success or failure of private-sector dam development as a high-stakes litmus test for the economic future of the country. High-level functionaries feel multiple pressures-in particular, from neo-liberal, multilateral lending institutions and from national and international capital investors-to deliver economically successful hydroelectric projects, with little regard for the negative social repercussions that accrue in the process.

Legislators and government ministers have manifested their anxiety in brutal fashion upon the bodies and constitutional freedoms of the people of rural Honduras, as the second part of this paper seeks to show. The Gualaco case study bears the close scrutiny it receives in these pages both because it reveals much about the central government agencies' role in recent events and because it connects macro-level policy initiatives to ground-level consequences in, as it were, a concrete way.

Appended to this paper, for those interested, is a listing of actions that the reader might take to contribute to a happy denouement of the still-unfolding drama in Gualaco, Olancho.

I. Honduras's Place in Regional Integration

Honduras's history is long tied up with the Liberal project of uniting the Central American isthmus. The country's greatest hero, Francisco Morazán, served as the first president of the short-lived Central American Federation in the first years after the 1821 break from Spain. Morazán's vision of a single Central American state has left its imprint, if not on every Honduran's psyche, then (at the very least) on the stars of its flag and the volcano of its state shield. To draw from Anderson's discussion of 'imagined communities' (1991), the Honduran 'imaginary' cultivated by the state possesses a liminal identity as both a sovereign country-in-itself and as the mantle-bearer for the eventual, glorious, political and economic integration of the five countries (excluding Panama and Belize) of Central America. From an early age, all schoolchildren in Honduras receive the indoctrination on a daily basis in their required civics courses, and the nation-within-a-region theme resonates in the frequent incantation of the national anthem. Of course, this dual identity must contend with other forms of individual and community identity-for instance, spatial, kin, gender, and class identification (see especially Bonta 2001 for important insights on spatial and kinship ties in Olancho)-and falls short of achieving status as a hegemonic concept particularly among peasants in rural Olancho department. It nevertheless remains a powerful enough idea that even the staunchest opponents of the Honduran government tend to couch their discontent in the shared idiom of this binomial patriotism.

This cultivated affinity for Central American integration among Hondurans may serve to assist the current initiative of international capital to arrange itself in regionally integrated trading blocs. This part of the story begins with Honduras's long-term relationship with international lenders. The Honduran government, perennially in financial arrears, has received kudos from such organizations as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), and the World Bank, for the alacrity with which, in return for some debt relief and other assistance, it has adopted these multilateral lending institutions' tough prescriptions for greater economic health. A July 10, 2000, press release issued by the International Monetary Fund announced a $900 million debt service relief package for Honduras from all the above-mentioned banks as part of their Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative and in "recognition by the international community of the country's progress in implementing reforms in macroeconomic, structural and social policies" (IMF 2000: 1).

The $900 million, of course, is anything but free money. In order to secure this reduced interest-rate plan, Honduras has had to meet specific sets of preconditions and promise to implement a full complement of further structural adjustments-with each of the lending institutions. One precondition for IMF support was to boost revenues in the short-term by increasing tariffs on the sale of electricity; a further and related condition was the future passage in the Honduran Congress of modifications to the Electricity Sector Framework Law (Nuñez and Asfura 2000: Table 7 attachment) to facilitate the privatization of the sale of electrical energy, which have historically been the sole province of the state-owned Empresa Nacional de Energía Eléctrica (ENEE).

At the time of this writing, the prescribed modifications to the Framework Law have not yet been approved, but already several private, for-profit entities, including Energisa, have received concessions for the generation of electricity for sale to ENEE's centrally-operated national energy grid.

In pushing for these changes, the multilateral banks aim to facilitate the creation of a single, open, energy market spanning from Mexico to Panama. The Mexican government has spearheaded the Plan Puebla-Panamá (PPP). A priority of the Vicente Fox administration, the PPP represents an attempt to extend NAFTA southward in preparation for an eventual Free Trade Area of the Americas to encompass both North and South America. It seems likely that under the PPP, the poor south-southeastern states of Mexico and the countries of Central America will play a similar role vis-à-vis (particularly northern) Mexico as Mexico currently plays in NAFTA: as a source of cheap labor and natural resources (Pérez 2001: ¶ 13).

The major international lending institutions have all hied to the PPP with great enthusiasm and are currently working toward its rapid implementation through their ability to conditionally loosen their purse-strings to the financially embattled Central American governments. Even as they forgive some old debt, the banks are busy financing both social and physical infrastructure projects aimed at linking the countries of the region.

The attempt to create a single, regional energy grid is a key part of this effort and has been spearheaded by the Inter-American Development Bank, the principal financier for the $330 million Sistema de Interconexión Eléctrica para los Paises de América Central (SIEPAC) (IDB 2001: 10). The IDB and other PPP-affiliated lending institutions have been demanding changes in member countries' legal framework-such as the modification of Honduras's Electricity Sector Framework Law-in order to create a regional electricity market (MER for its abbreviation in Spanish) that will allow private-sector vendors to provision cheaper and more consistent electrical energy to the region through the new, unified power grid.

The IDB, CABEI, and the other international financiers view these infrastructural improvements as the sine qua non of expanded direct foreign investment of all kinds in the region, thus the concerted effort to push Honduras toward privatizing its electric utility. In this context, the June 21, 2000, concession allowing Energisa to build its 4.4-megawatt Babilonia Hydroelectric Project in Olancho department looked to many in the development community as the start of a bright new future for investment and progress in Honduras. CABEI became the project's chief financier, putting up approximately $2.7 million of the project's estimated $5 million total cost (Oliva 2001; COFADEH 2001).

The process of shaping a shared economic future, however, has not moved linearly or ineluctably forward. Saber-rattling and tariff wars stemming from territorial disputes with both Nicaragua and El Salvador over the past two years have caused great concern among some proponents of Honduras' economic integration with the rest of Central America. On May 2, 2000, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua announced a trinational declaration expressing these countries' intent to form a maritime transportation system that would obviate travel through Honduran territory, leading some prominent Honduran officials to worry aloud that their neighbors are colluding to economically exclude them (e.g. La Tribuna 2000). These events prompted Honduran President Carlos Flores Facussé to issue a stern warning to his colleagues in Honduras and the rest of Central America that integration would not be possible without a sincere effort. His public statement left little doubt about where his agenda lay: "No party flag, no electoral platform, no political proposition can be cleaner and more realist(ic) than those that take up the project of Central American integration" (La Prensa 2000).

The fear of being left behind, whether by investors or by the rest of the Central American isthmus, has repeatedly found its way into the text and subtext of the Honduran development debate, effectively legitimating repressive measures taken against opponents of 'progress'. As recently as August 31, 2001, Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez carried this conservative theme in a speech delivered before the National Police, in which he lamented Hondurans' increasing propensity to strike and protest. "If we're going to continue to develop a culture of striking," he said, "the problem is that we are not going to have either investment or development, because logically no one wants to invest in a country where work doesn't get done" (IRC 2001). The "don't scare off progress" refrain has been heard repeatedly over the lengthening course of the Energisa dam embroglio, echoed in the halls of Congress, in the press, and in Energisa's paid advertisements. This seemingly weak justification for tolerating criminal activity on the part of Energisa has nevertheless thus far proven itself robust enough to keep the project afloat.

The following section of this paper will change lenses to provide a first-person, ground-level accounting of some of the effects on a specific group of campesinos of the macro-scale trends outlined in Section I. It is my contention that each perspective is necessary for making sense of the other. In addition, the first-person style of Section II makes clear the degree of my participation in the events I describe and adequately discloses my positionality, which would be impossible to do otherwise.

II. Energisa Case Study

I arrived in the municipal seat of Gualaco, Olancho, on Wednesday, June 27. My intent was to conduct oral histories of a famous bandit who hailed from this part of the country. Even from before the moment of my arrival, news came to me from people I met about a Honduran-owned company called Energisa that was attempting to install a small (4-megawatt) hydroelectric dam by force in the region. In order to gain entrée to community leaders for interviews for my bandit research, I accepted Gualaco Mayor Rafael de Jesús Ulloa's invitation to attend a June 30 planning meeting for an anti-dam march on the capital city of Tegucigalpa that was planned for July 4.

At the meeting, plans were laid to transport 150 men, women, and children to march into the capital and pitch camp under the National Congress's capitol building to protest Energisa's dam project. People from the various communities of Gualaco, and in particular the hamlet of El Ocotal, felt threatened both by the specifics of the project and by Energisa's violent response to local opposition. The dam, illegally slated to be built in Sierra de Agalta National Park (AHPROCAFE 2000) would inundate approximately 35 manzanas (60 acres) (Gualaco 2000) and destroy between 60 and 125 families' organic coffee plantations or require their displacement through afforestation (AHPROCAFE 2000; Graham and [name withheld] 2001). It would also destroy a 1,500-foot series of waterfalls that the people of Gualaco say they are conserving for its ecotourism potential (Gualaco 2000). In addition, the project would eliminate the possibility of developing running water systems in several small communities (Gualaco et al. 2001).

The company's initial environmental impact statement was so poor that the head of the biology department at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras (UNAH), Héctor Martínez, could scarcely conceal his contempt in his report on the EIS (Martínez 1999). Also, in violation of several national laws conferring authority for project approval to the municipal level of government, Energisa circumvented this step almost entirely and, according to villagers, kept their activities a secret until 1999. In spite of these irregularities, Minister Xiomara Gómez of the Secretaría de Recursos Naturales y del Ambiente (SERNA) granted Energisa environmental license number 077-2000 in May of 2000, allowing the company to proceed with construction (Gallego 2001).

Community members who opposed the project were subjected to terror tactics both by paid Energisa security guards and by paid-off police-tactics reminiscent of those employed in the early 1980s during the so-called dirty war that accompanied US military presence in the region during the Contra years. Police entered the villages (especially the village of El Ocotal, where the turbines are to be located) at all hours of the night, blaring their sirens and firing weapons into the air. Energisa security guards, some of them reportedly on temporary parole from prison in a highly informal work-release arrangement, stationed themselves outside community elementary schools with shotguns, rifles, or machine guns, prompting one school to close and another to cut back its schedule.

Various members of the community had false criminal charges leveled against them because of their resistance to Energisa's presence, and a few were arrested and jailed for brief periods (SURCO 2001). Community leaders saw themselves as the main targets, and they believed these tactics represented a threat: by building up (false) criminal records against these people, Energisa and the police were preparing the way for killing them with impunity by creating a set of ersatz facts and circumstances that might lend plausibility to a self-defense explanation for police or Energisa guards' taking the lives of these supposed criminals. It helped matters for Energisa that they also had the local correspondents for the national newspapers on their side.

On April 20, 2001, an umbrella human rights organization, the Coordinadora Nacional contra la Impunidad (CONACIM) placed a paid announcement in the Tegucigalpa newspaper El Heraldo denouncing Energisa and its government accomplices and demanding the repeal of the company's environmental license (CONACIM 2001). The following day, Energisa responded with its own paid ad categorically refuting every point made in the CONACIM piece of the day before (Energisa 2001) and flatly stating that the supposed community opposition to the dam project was in fact a one-man smear campaign launched by Mayor Rafael Ulloa for personal reasons. This is a charge that Energisa had made before and that was echoed by the U.S. Department of State's Honduran Mission in its March 2001 country report (United States 2001: ¶ 27). At the bottom of its April 21 "public clarification" and succeeding paid announcements, Energisa placed in large, bold type the following slogan: "Honduras needs to attract investment; let's not frighten it off."

Over the course of the first six months of 2001, Mayor Rafael Ulloa allegedly received numerous anonymous death threats over the telephone. Parish priest Fredy Benítez was stabbed in March, apparently for his role in the anti-dam contingent. Coronado Ávila, one of the demonstration planners, said at the Saturday, June 30, meeting, "The matter is urgent. If something isn't done soon, there will be deaths here." One hour later, Coronado proved correct.

The meeting ended at 12:30. Sometime between 2:00 and 2:30 p.m., as I was preparing to drive to the village of La Venta, which is another of the small communities affected by the dam, I noticed two police trucks roaring up the highway in the direction of La Venta and El Ocotal. I noticed that the six or so police officers who rode in the back of the first truck were smiling and laughing, and I wondered what they were up to. Normally, the National Police are notoriously scarce in this part of the country. On my arrival in La Venta for banditry-related interviews, I learned from one of my informants that Carlos Flores had been killed at about 1 p.m. that afternoon.

I realized then what the police had been up to. The briefing the mayor and other meeting participants had given me earlier that day convinced me that the police were not likely to conduct a thorough investigation of Flores's death, and they might even misrepresent the evidence, so I had my interviewee get in my truck with me and take me to where the murder had taken place. My thought was that, at the least, I could take photographs of the crime scene and present that information to independent (i.e., not government-affiliated) human rights organizations.

On the way to El Ocotal, we picked up Esteban Solís, a lay minister at the tiny Catholic chapel in that hamlet. As we drove, Esteban quickly related to me the main points in the history of the community's resistance to Energisa's hydroelectric project on the Río Babilonia. He blamed the government for granting Energisa the license to build the dam in spite of numerous irregularities and for various government agencies' complicity and/or participation in the repression the community had experienced. He grieved for the young man, Carlos Roberto Flores, who had been killed, but he said it was not just one person who was threatened with extinction, but an entire community. To sum it up he stated the obvious: "This is a struggle against economic power."

On arriving in El Ocotal, we repaired to the Catholic church, where Carlos Flores's body lay in repose. I learned that Carlos's house was across the dirt road from the church and that he had been shot in his front yard by six Energisa security guards. Some of the guards used shotguns; others had used AK-47s and Uzis, possession of which is illegal in Honduras. Two of the guards had shot at Carlos from under the eaves of the church. Carlos's grandmother sat by his body and cried repeatedly, "The ingrates did not respect the church!" I also learned that Carlos was unarmed and mostly unclothed at the time of his murder because he had been preparing to take a bucket bath. The bucket he was to use was riddled with bullet holes, as was the guapinol tree near the water faucet in Carlos's front yard: witnesses say the security guards fired at least fifty rounds.

As well as I could tell, Carlos had only been hit by three bullets. I asked Carlos's father, Martín de Jesús Solís, to show me the wounds that had killed his son. Martín lifted Carlos's shirt, and we had to roll him over to see the two entry wounds in the upper-left portion of his back that were probably made by 9-millimeter bullets (this is the kind of bullet we found in the dirt near the spot where Carlos was killed). Villagers informed me that these 9-millimeter caliber bullets were fired from Uzi machine guns. These bullets apparently did not exit his body because I had not noticed blood or wounds on his chest. There was also one bullet entry wound to Carlos's left temple; that one exited through the back of his skull. I asked if the police had taken photographs of the cadaver. Martín shook his head no. I asked if they had brought a forensic expert; the answer again was no. I had arrived a little after four p.m.; that meant the police could have spent no more than one hour at the scene of the crime. The villagers told me the police had neglected to attempt to arrest the responsible parties, though it was known they were in the Energisa compound about 1/4 mile away.

I photographed the wounds as well as the crime scene. The photographs and other evidence I gathered showed that Carlos had likely been unarmed at the time of his death. It showed he had been killed by weapons that are illegal for private security personnel to possess. It showed he had been shot at by numerous persons in a premeditated attack (discarded shells that the police neglected or deliberately failed to collect demonstrated that the guards had triangulated their attack). The police had attempted to gather the automatic weapon shells and bullets (perhaps to dispose of them) but had left a few behind. They apparently did not bother to collect the discarded shotgun shells. We did so, taking care to try to preserve any fingerprints that might be on them.

I also conducted a few tape-recorded interviews with witnesses who clarified certain details. It had been explained to me in the protest planning meeting that morning that several community members were under threat because, like Carlos, they had been the subjects of false criminal charges and arrests in the preceding months. I gathered the most imperiled members of the community together and took their photograph with the notion of publicizing it and thereby perhaps reducing the risk that Energisa would opt to kill them, too. I also left a small, point-and-shoot camera with Isidro Zúniga, the president of the village council, to help him document any other threatening activity conducted by Energisa in the coming days.

I spent that night in La Venta, then traveled with a knowledgeable person from Gualaco to the provincial capital of Juticalpa early the next day to try to publicize Carlos's murder. We had a difficult time of things-partly because it was a Sunday and partly because radio and newspaper reporters appeared to be either scared or paid-off by Energisa. Nevertheless, we did manage to get the story aired on the Catholic radio station and one other radio station. That night, my travel companion (who wishes to remain anonymous) and I composed a Spanish-language press release that came to appear on several activist web sites.

The following morning, Monday, July 2, my colleague returned to Gualaco, and I continued on to the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa with the rolls of film, the taped interviews, the spent shotgun shells we had collected, and the press release. I headed directly to the office of the Comité de Familiares de los Detenidos-Desaparecidos en Honduras (COFADEH), an independent human rights organization. Upon seeing the evidence and hearing my testimony, COFADEH president Bertha Oliva contacted Amnesty International, the national press, various government ministries, and other human rights organizations in Tegucigalpa.

Using the photographs I developed and others that Carlos's family had entrusted me with, artist Johnny McDonald worked with other COFADEH employees to put together a large, 4'x8' poster displaying the case against Energisa. This poster was transported to the capitol building on Wednesday, July 4, to coincide with the arrival of the Gualaco protesters. For the first several days after Carlos's murder and our reporting of it to the media and others, this poster represented almost the only non-fictional accounting of events available to people in the capital city because the media were either collaborating with Energisa or chary of covering the story at all.

One of the earliest stories about the killing was published in La Tribuna, which is owned by Honduran President Carlos Flores Facussé, on July 3. The author of the article, Omar Saíd Mejía, did not visit the village where the crime was committed. His article was based on police reports and perhaps received input from Energisa representatives. According to this newspaper article, Flores was killed in "a confrontation" with Energisa employees who felt threatened by his well-established criminal tendencies, as evidenced by his arrest record. The public prosecutor of the region, Omar Menjívar, was reported as suggesting that Flores belonged to an organized crime ring that ostensibly operated in the sector. In Mejía's article Menjívar said, "The security personnel of [Energisa] will not respond with candies; if [the townspeople] assault them, they'll react" (Mejía 2001).

Over the coming weeks, such poor reporting in the newspapers and on some of the television channels was to be common, and it was difficult to combat this. To some extent, COFADEH was able to counter the problem of prejudicial media coverage with its own connections. The NGO enjoys good relations with well-placed persons on one television channel, one of the four national newspapers, and two of the most-listened-to radio networks in the country. Also, COFADEH has a weekly half-hour program that airs on radio stations around Honduras. Through these outlets, the media was reporting something resembling the truth of the matter, while other media organizations either kept mum, disseminated mis- and disinformation, or aired half-hour segments paid for and produced by Energisa. Meanwhile, hundreds of people a day were stopping by the capitol building to look at the poster COFADEH had put together. One morning, a passerby warned some of the protest leaders that people were lurking nearby, offering up to $10,000 to anyone who would steal and destroy the poster.

The July 4 protest march brought in more people than the 150 that had been predicted during the Saturday meeting. In spite of severe economic restraints, about 200 people from the various communities of Gualaco made the trip to Tegucigalpa. Entire families came, including infants; for most of the protesters, it was their first time to the capital. Progressive organizations from the Tegucigalpa area joined in the march. The size of the crowd oscillated as sympathetic Tegucigalpa residents joined the marchers for a few blocks at a time before returning to their homes and businesses. At some moments, as many as a thousand people may have been participating. About 500 people arrived at the capitol building as evening set in, and the core group from Gualaco settled in for a long stay.

Honduran politicians make much of the country's Constitutional democracy. One favorite proof of the government's liberal disposition is the fact that popular protests-even protracted ones-are allowed to take place at the steps of the capitol. Television crews are summoned to take note of the government's forebearance of such rabblerousing, as though to give the lie to the very foundation of such protesters' displeasure. If the government were truly corrupt, it is implied, surely we wouldn't allow these misguided citizens to voice their calumnious accusations against us. Thus it was with the explicit understanding of, and cooperation with, the capitol police contingent, that the protesters set up camp under the auspices of the capitol. A one-toilet restroom and a large sink, accessible from outside, were placed at the disposal of the demonstrators, and police helped protect the protesters by limiting access to the capitol after dark to any visitors not affiliated with the Gualaco group.

The demonstrators modeled the camp after a working village. Deciding it would be unsafe to return to El Ocotal until Energisa were made to leave, the protesters turned the area beneath the capitol building into their interim village. With donations from various popular organizations in and around Tegucigalpa, the demonstrators had enough food to eat. A cooking committee was set up, and various women, using giant cauldrons over open fires, busied themselves cooking beans, cassava, and tortillas about twenty hours a day. The first two nights, many adults and several children had slept on the ground with no bedding and suffered from cold. Extra mattresses and blankets were purchased. Also in the first few days, many children became sick with diarrhea from drinking untreated tap water and from generally unsanitary conditions in the camp. The incidence of sickness quickly dropped, however, as the women from the kitchen patrol learned how to chlorinate the drinking water with bleach. Some of the adults began teaching classes to the children for a part of each day, while others patrolled the camp for suspicious strangers or were in charge of communicating with the media.

The protesters deemed this final element particularly important because prominent Energisa allies-most notably Liberal Party Congressman and head of Congress's Energy Committee, Jack Arévalo-were attacking the dam protests in the news on a daily basis. On July 5, La Tribuna reproduced Arévalo's assertion that the anti-dam mobilization was being financed by the Unificación Democrática Party in order to gain votes in the November election (La Tribuna 2001b: 7). A July 13 article in El Heraldo featured Arévalo warning that the anti-dam campaign was "provoking investors to be frightened away from the country" (El Heraldo 2001b), On July 14, Diario Diario Tiempo quoted Energisa legal counsel José Torres Torres as saying that the government should not allow itself to be manipulated "by a small group of bored people who take an interest in hindering the development of this country" (Padilla 2001a).

By Sunday, July 8, it was clear that the problem would not be quickly resolved. As many of my would-be research informants were here in the capital and would probably not be leaving anytime soon, I came to the conclusion that I had to abandon my banditry research in Olancho and focus more fully on the dam protest. That being the case, I decided to stay with the protesters both night and day, and from that point I also began to sleep under the capitol.

The Gualaco protesters appreciated this gesture, and they were almost embarrassingly attentive to me while I was there. Still, they did not hesitate to make frequent use of me and my camera. Several times daily someone from the camp would ask me to photograph some suspicious-looking person they'd seen perambulating in the vicinity and listening in on planning meetings. I became aware that, in fact, numerous people were spying on the group. Several of these people also began following me whenever I would leave the camp to run errands; they usually went away when I conspicuously photographed them. Two of these people, however, approached and harassed me, speaking English as they did so. In each case, the harasser angrily yelled at me that I was a meddling foreigner who was sabotaging Honduran efforts to develop its industry and economy.

In spite of these unpleasant incidents, or perhaps partly because of them, I realized that my presence among the protesters afforded a modicum of protection to them because of my status as a United States citizen. I guessed that attacks on the Gualaco community gathered at the capitol were unlikely to take place while I was there. Still, this role was somewhat unnerving.

As the protest entered its second week, the protesters realized they would have to communicate and coordinate with the members of the Consejo Civil de Organizaciones Indígenas y Populares de Honduras (COPINH), a Lenca Indian organization from western Honduras that was planning its own yearly march on the capitol. July 20 is Día de Lempira, when martyred Chief Lempira is honored. Several years ago, COPINH activists erected a statue of Lempira in the capitol plaza without government permission. Removing the statue would have been politically untenable for Congress, so the politicians made the best of things by embracing the image and attempting to co-opt it. Every July 20, Congress lays a wreath next to the statue and proclaims its pride in Honduras's shared Indian heritage, and every July 20, COPINH activists arrive to denounce the Honduran government's hypocrisy and to demand Congress keep its promises to the primarily Lenca communities of western Honduras.

On Sunday, July 15, several of us drove to the western city of La Esperanza and met with COPINH leaders. These leaders pledged COPINH's solidarity with the Gualaco protest and promised to adopt the dismantling of Energisa as one of its own primary demands before the government. Further, they would send an advance dispatch of 80 members to join the Gualaco group on Monday. Another 1,000 or more would arrive on Wednesday, July 18.

The first group arrived on Monday, as promised. On Tuesday, members of the COPINH leadership, together with Mayor Ulloa and other community representatives from Gualaco, called a press conference at the capitol plaza to denounce Congress's indifference to Carlos Flores's murder and to the community's demands. After reading their statements, the spokespeople led the protesters into the street in front of the capitol and blocked traffic for one hour. This action took place with the understanding of the police, who facilitated the re-routing of traffic to minimize the chance of automobile accidents. That afternoon and evening, spirits were high.

That night, I was planning to rise early and travel to Olancho with the mayor to quickly retrieve some things I had left there. I went to sleep fairly early-about 11 p.m.; because of street noise, it was difficult to try to sleep any earlier than that (or to sleep in past 5:30 a.m.).

At about 12:30 am on the morning of July 18, one of the women protesters shook me awake, whispering urgently, "Daniel, the police have come!" I looked in the direction she was pointing, toward the street, and saw about fifteen police standing at the plaza entrance. I asked the woman if she knew what the police were doing there, and she answered, "I think they're here to kick us out."

I hid behind some boxes and quickly set up my video camera to record what was happening. I did not know at the time what would be the nature of the police's actions or whether they would allow me to record without confiscating the cassette or the camera, so I did this as inconspicuously as I could. It obviously helped that it was very dark on the plaza. I set the camera to work with the infrared option and left it in place on top of the boxes.

More police troops were arriving, forming a line, shoulder-to-shoulder, on the street side of the plaza. Isabel Solís, one of the women from Gualaco, began to pray loudly, asking Jesus to deliver the group from evil. Other demonstrators, both women and men, began to loudly supplicate the police to remember their rural roots, not to act against the poor campesinos of Olancho. While this was going on, I shuttled my belongings to the locked box in the bed of my truck, with the exception of my video camera and my 35-millimeter camera.

From its distant vantage point, the video camera was not catching everything, so I made a decision to try to film and photograph everything I could, getting as close as possible to the police, until they made a move to confiscate my film or cameras. I was able to approach the police, whose numbers had grown to something approximating fifty, and I filmed and photographed all of them from close range so as to be sure they could all be identified by their faces. After I had filmed all their faces, I ran back to my truck, swapped out my film for fresh film, and drove my truck a couple blocks away to get it out of the way (it had been parked on the plaza next to the Lempira statue, and I was worried the police might break into it or confiscate it). Then I returned to the plaza and continued filming.

The police had moved from the west (street) end of the plaza to the south end. In a nice metaphor of respective status, the plaza the protesters were occupying is located physically beneath the Congress building, which is raised above street level on pillars. This works out well for the demonstrators because it provides a roof that protects them from sun and rain. The police plan was to push the demonstrators out from under the Congress building and onto an adjacent, unprotected plaza to the north. They began to move slowly forward while the higher-ranking officers who were with them barked to the protesters to leave the plaza.

The demonstrators would not willingly cede the plaza to the police, and they were furious that such an action should happen at one in the morning. They yelled at the police, reminding them that some of the people they were pushing around were small children and pregnant women. Esteban Solís, the Catholic lay minister I had met on my first trip to El Ocotal, took the group's megaphone and began speaking, trying at once to calm his neighbors and reason with the police. "Imagine how you will feel," he said to the police, "if a child is harmed by your actions." He urged them to exercise reason and compassion.

It was clear that some of the gathered policemen and policewomen did not want to be there; others appeared eager to engage the demonstrators physically. I continued photographing them from close-up, and I was also asking them to use their own judgment, telling them they weren't obligated to obey illegal orders. Of course, my comments had no useful effect; I only succeeded, I think, in making several of the police more upset than they already were. I also angered one of the higher-ranking officers, but no one ever made a move to interfere with me or stop me from photographing or filming what was going on. I was able to move freely, even passing behind the police cordon as they began to push the Gualaco villagers out of the plaza.

Despite the climate of fear and confusion among the protesters, one of the demonstrators, José Zúniga, had the presence of mind to convince the women with young children to remain in place. He reasoned that the police would not dare to harm any of the infants; most of the women agreed, and they remained where they were.

This delaying tactic worked with partial success. Most of the women with small children were lying rather closely together, and they formed an island that proved difficult for the police to remove. Police closed in around these women and children but did not act immediately to remove them; the rest of the police continued forward, pushing the other demonstrators out from under the Congress building. Only hours later did the police manage to move the last remaining women and children.

The male demonstrators, wanting to protect their families, picked up lengths of firewood and brandished these against the advancing police. All of a sudden, police and protesters clashed physically, trading blows with clubs and firewood. I think the violence began when police roughly shoved Teresa Martínez de Ávila, Carlos Flores's seven-months-pregnant widow; the outraged protesters responded by attacking the police line. Martín Solís, Carlos Flores's father, cut a tragicomic figure as he flourished his stick as though it were a rapier, waving and thrusting it at the shield of one of the oncoming policemen.

I yelled for the protesters to drop their weapons, fearing they were only giving the police justification for their strong-arm tactics. "I'm filming this," I told them, " and I want to be able to show that the police's actions were unprovoked." The protesters dropped their sticks; this probably prevented serious injury to police as well as to themselves, but police also took advantage of this confusion to push the group the rest of the way out from under the capitol.

The police had successfully pushed the group onto Plaza La Merced, an unprotected square just north of the Congressional plaza, by about two a.m. Several of the Gualaco group's leaders had fled early on and were hiding elsewhere in the city, concerned that the police might act on the spurious, outstanding warrants for their arrest. Most remained, however, and several were in shock. Others, angry and indignant, demanded answers from the higher-ranking police officers. One of these officers asked the group to be reasonable. "We did everything we could," he said, "to avoid any violence." He assured the group that their access to the bathroom would remain in effect and that those who needed attention for any medical problems would receive it. Shortly after he said this, the police blocked access to the bathroom.

I took my leave, then, not sure if the police would change their minds and confiscate my film. I made my way to a 24-hour internet café and issued a press release to several U.S. newspapers, none of which (to my knowledge) carried the story. The following morning, and with the help of COFADEH, I developed the film, made duplications of the video I had shot, and distributed the materials to the press.

While I was doing this, a convoy of four busses and nine large trucks made the trip from Honduras's western provinces into the capital city, full with several hundred COPINH activists. Police held up the convoy various times on technicalities and pretexts, twice along the highway and once more as the Lenca Indian protesters marched on foot toward the capitol building. When the marchers reached the capitol plaza, they peacefully retook it with the original Gualaco protesters and the COPINH advance guard of eighty that had arrived earlier in the week. The augmented group celebrated its victory, but the celebration was short-lived: hundreds of anti-riot police poured onto the plaza and surrounding streets and routed the protesters from the plaza and adjacent blocks under a heavy assault of rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannon, and clubs.

When I heard over the radio that this was happening, I ran the five blocks from the COFADEH office to the capitol with my camera. The scene was reminiscent of Seattle, Quebec, and Genoa; there were bloody people everywhere, with shopkeepers and their employees peering timidly from their shuttered businesses. In the end, fifteen to twenty protesters were hospitalized with injuries sustained at the hands of police (seven police were also reported injured). Several protesters were jailed, and some of these people claim they were beaten while in police custody (IRC 2001).

Circumstances suggest that various state agencies colluded to bring about the violent confrontations of July 18. On July 14, Security Minister Gautama Fonseca called on National Police troops to prove themselves in the field, announcing that he would fire "seat-warming" police officers and promote those officers who exerted themselves (FRE 2001). The commanding officer present at the forcible removal of Gualaqueños in the early morning hours of July 18 indicated her orders came from "the highest authorities" in Congress. President of Congress Rafael Pineda Ponce-whose presidential campaign managers cut their teeth working as advisers for General Pinochet in Chile (OH 2001b)-denied he personally ordered the police action, but he asserted it was "time to put order in the house" (Diario Tiempo 2001a) and said the police were right to strike (back at) the protesters: "Some people think that when they strike an agent on one cheek, the police officer should turn the other. In fact, it's his right to protect himself and if possible strike both his adversary's cheeks" (Diario Tiempo 2001b).

At any rate, the morning after the cheek-striking incident, Pineda Ponce used the heavily-guarded capitol plaza as his platform for awarding the Gran Cruz con Placa de Oro award to the Taiwanese ambassador in recognition of Taiwan's significant financial contributions to Honduras' development efforts. According to a Diario Tiempo newspaper article, Ambassador Ching Yen Chang took the opportunity to note that "democracy is an irreversible world tendency and the will of the people is its absolute priority" (OH 2001a).

In the aftermath of the July 18 action, Honduras's National Police filed criminal charges against 21 people, including members of the leadership of COPINH, COFADEH, and CODEH (Comité para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos en Honduras) for "going too far in the exercise of their Constitutionally guaranteed rights" (Diario Tiempo 2001c). Bertha Oliva, President of COFADEH, was accused of inciting the riot even though she left COFADEH the same time I did and only arrived toward the end of the fracas.

At the same time that the police were filing charges against leading Honduran activists, Security Minister Gautama Fonseca publicly dismissed the possibility that Hondurans were capable of protesting of their own accord. A newspaper article that appeared on July 20 cited Fonseca as saying the protesters were "being used by intellectuals, in quotes, who live in Tegucigalpa looking for foreign money to organize this type of disorder" (FRE 2001). An Irish citizen, Sally O'Neill, was charged with helping to incite the riot. Police claimed she had IRA ties and was provoking disorder in Honduras. In fact, she belongs to an Ireland-based Catholic organization called Trocaire, has worked in cooperation with Honduran government agencies on various matters, and was not present in Honduras on July 18. During a radio interview on July 19, I was asked if I was affiliated with suspected IRA agent Sally O'Neill, but I was never formally accused of wrong-doing either by the media or the Honduran government.

One result of the police violence on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 18, was that the protesters were forced to retire to various yards and shelters around the city which were provided them by COFADEH, CODEH, the Catholic Church, and a sympathetic labor union. Many of the mattresses and other possessions were ruined, trampled or stolen by police or inundated by the water cannon. A large number of protesters were forced to sleep in the dirt or on bare cement. Many of the protesters had a glazed-over, shell-shocked look for days afterwards.

The following morning, July 19, several participants and observers of the events of the previous day conducted television and radio interviews. Demonstrations were tense but peaceful as protest leaders decided not to try to break through the heavy police cordon that had been placed around at least five square blocks surrounding the capitol.

On Friday morning, as members of COPINH, COFADEH, CODEH, and the Gualaco leadership met with high-level government ministers to discuss grievances and try to find solutions, Congress's Casa Cultural arrived on the plaza to bestow a wreath upon the statue of Chief Lempira. Schoolchildren played marimba while congressional staffers taped comic-book-style cardboard arrows onto Lempira's quiver and placed a large flower wreath on a pedestal next to the statue.

The spokeswoman at the event addressed the assembled cameramen as though she were speaking to a vast throng: "Today is el día de Lempira, a day to celebrate what it means to be Honduran," she said. She turned to face me then and continued, "And to be Honduran means to be born in Honduras and to respect the law!" At that point, she received a hearty applause from her small retinue of colleagues. Then, patting her blonde hair, she spoke of Pineda Ponce's blood relation to Lempira (d.1537). In fact, she proclaimed, Lempira's "blood runs through all our veins."

A few minutes after the presentation had ended, the COPINH Indians arrived at the plaza en masse. They ascended the steps to the Lempira statue and loudly decried the government's duplicitous treatment of indigenous and other disadvantaged peoples in Honduras. Bertha Cáceres, one of the COPINH organizers, said, "They want to give Lempira a wreath because they think he's dead. But they're wrong! He is still alive!" A great cheer went up as several of the COPINH members picked up the wreath and threw it to the ground where it was trampled under dozens of stomping feet. Lempira's cardboard arrows were similarly dispatched. For several hours and in sweltering heat, COPINH demonstrators railed at the government while dozens of police troops stood on guard to prevent anyone from returning to the covered part of the plaza.

As this was going on, coordinators from CONACIM and from COPINH carried on negotiations with a government panel at the Ministry of Governance. At the end of the day, negotiators came out to announce that several government ministers were going to make a trip out to Gualaco to see things for themselves. They would be flying out the following morning, Saturday, by helicopter. Despite misgivings, I took one of two truckloads of Gualaco community leaders back to Olancho that night to try to organize the remaining villagers in a show of opposition to the dam project.

Meanwhile, someone tipped off Energisa about the visit. On the morning of Saturday, July 21, both the anti-dam group and Energisa-affiliated people made numerous trips into the hamlet of El Ocotal, hauling their respective constituents in to "prove" that the community was for/against the project. The contrast in demographic breakdown was marked between the two groups. The anti-dam group was comprised of women, children, and men of all ages, while the pro-dam group consisted overwhelmingly of young men from their late teens through their thirties. According to some of my anti-dam companions, the vast majority of the ostensibly local, pro-dam group, were actually from the neighboring municipalities of San Esteban and San Francisco de la Paz. Congressman Jack Arévalo later cited the significant pro-Energisa turnout as confirmation "that more than 50% of the population is in favor of the project and that those who are opposed are the mayor, the priest, and a few other people" (La Prensa 2001).

The commission swooped in more than three hours behind schedule, leaving the ministers only thirty minutes to spend in El Ocotal. As the helicopter made its approach, more than one hundred pro-dam supporters flooded onto the main road through El Ocotal and faced off against the dam's opponents. When the government officials arrived, escorted by armed guards, they expressed what seemed to be disingenuous surprise at the sizable number of pro-dam constituents. Members of the significantly discomfited "legitimate" group were largely unable to articulate their case in the fifteen minutes the commission gave them to say their piece. One group leader accused Minister of Governance Vera Rubí of close connections with Energisa; the minister angrily denied the charge. The dam's opponents did manage to express to the gathered commission members that the dam supporters were not members of the community, that they had been paid off to lobby for the dam.

The ministers, then, went to hear out the other side. At one point, one of the ministers decided to verify whether the dam's proponents were really from the community. He asked the crowd, "How many of you are from this region?"

Everybody yelled, "All of us!"

And, "And how many of you are from Gualaco?"

"Everybody!"

"Okay, then!" said the minister, apparently satisfied.

I was recording this with my tape recorder, as I had run out of video tape. Someone in the pro-dam group yelled out, "¡Fuera, gringo!" Pretty soon there were dozens chanting "Fuera, gringo!" Governance Minister Vera Rubí asked me to leave the immediate area, since I wasn't Honduran. I did so.

Following their brief visit, the ministers left. Soon after, a lot of trucks pulled out of the Energisa compound and headed out of El Ocotal with their beds full of passengers. I took photos of the vehicles as they left and made sure to get their license plate numbers, thinking this might be important if these trucks were used in future Energisa terror campaigns. I received many angry glares and threatening gestures from the trucks' drivers and passengers as they passed.

As evening set on, I returned to Tegucigalpa with some of the protesters. We were tailed most of the way by a series of pickup trucks that seemed to be coordinating the pursuit in series, each vehicle following me for a distance of some miles before passing me, then pulling off to the side of the road. This continued for most of the length of the 150-mile trip. As our truck made the final descent into the capital at about midnight, a large 4x4 followed us through the winding city streets to the COFADEH headquarters. When we got inside the building, the truck continued circling around the block, honking and revving its engine at times, for the next two hours.

At that point, I decided it was time for me to leave the country. On Monday, July 23, I flew back to Berkeley.

The Gualaqueños' battle, of course, did not cease with my departure. When it was discovered that the Central American Bank for Economic Integration was the primary lender for the project (Oliva 2001), the protesters laid plans to appeal to the bank to freeze its loans to Energisa. After the protesters lobbied in front of the Tegucigalpa-based international headquarters for CABEI, news reports announced that the Bank was suspending all its funding not only for the Babilonia Hydroelectric Project but for all hydroelectric projects in the country, pending some assurance about the state of Honduras's juridical health. The announcement was made by Jack Arévalo, who explained to reporters that 160 megawatts' electrical production would be lost because foreigners have grown leery of investing in a country where what's approved today can be destroyed tomorrow by capricious protesters (La Prensa 2001b).

In fact, however, the Bank never did suspend its financing of the bank. In a newspaper advertisement entitled, "Banco Centroamericano no suspendió financiamiento a Energisa," CABEI corrected Arévalo's latest misstatements, explaining that project funding remained online for the Babilonia Hydroelectric Project but that the Bank would require mitigation measures be taken if technical deficiencies in the project were discovered (cited in Oliva 2001).

On the morning of Monday, July 23, the same day I left Honduras, Mayor Rafael Ulloa, Padre Fredy, and Sister Carmelita Luis David Pérez were shot at from a passing truck as they drove from Tegucigalpa to Gualaco. The government continues to stonewall the Gualaco protesters and persecute their friends from COPINH. Despite numerous newspaper reports announcing that Energisa had been ordered to suspend its project pending further Congressional review, people in the zone assert that dam construction continues, that the number of people employed by Energisa has ballooned from fifty to 500, and that the National Police assigned to monitor the area have rapidly sided with the dam company rather than with the townspeople (Padilla 2001). At the time of this writing, construction moves forward.

III. Conclusion

The refrain, "Let's not frighten off investment," has so far resonated more among Honduras's public servants than has the ample evidence that Energisa has broken numerous environmental laws, threatened people's lives, and killed one opponent of its small, 4-megawatt dam. The agencies of the central state government have spent precious monetary resources employing police troops to push and beat the Gualaco campesinos, and for their efforts they have attracted unwelcome attention from such organizations as Amnesty International and the United Nations. But they seem to have successfully protected private property-and not just any private property, but the vanguard of the coming regime of unfettered, efficient energy production in Central America.

---

References

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Padilla, Emy. 2001a. Energisa ya construyó la mitad de la hidroeléctrica. Diario Tiempo, July 14 [online version]. URL:http://www.tiempo.hn/EDICANTE/2001/ julio/15%20julio/NACION~1/nacio3.htm. Accessed August 2, 2001.

2001b. Ministra Xiomara Gómez acusada ante tribunal por abuso de autoridad. Diario Tiempo, August 17 [online version]. URL: http://www.tiempo.hn/sucesos/suceso3.htm. Accessed August 17, 2001. URL will have changed; navigate from the "Ed. Anteriores" link.

2001c. Pantomima ecológica: Marcha con cruces realizan ahora pobladores de Gualaco: Dos meses clamando por detener el proyecto hidroeléctrico Babilonia. Diario Tiempo, August 21 [online version]. URL: http://www.tiempo.hn/NACION~1/nacio3.htm. Accessed August 21, 2001. URL will have changed; navigate from the "Ed. Anteriores" link.

Pérez Rocha L., Manuel. 2001. The Social Hemispheric Alliance in the Context of Latin American Processes and the FTAA. Transnational Institute. April 9 (online version]. URL: http://www.tni.org/altreg/analysis/manuel.htm. Accessed on August 31, 2001.

Sistema Unificado Regional Comunitario de Olancho (SURCO). 2001. Pronunciamiento. March 13. Juticalpa, Olancho: SURCO. CODEH archives, Tegucigalpa.

United States Department of State [Honduras Mission]. 2001. Subject: Honduran Economic Highlights - March 2001 - Part I [online version]. URL: http://www.usmission.hn/english/mission/sections/eco_03.htm. Paragraph 27. Accessed August 2, 2001. Modified August 14, 2001 [?]; cited passage in paragraph 27 no longer appears on electronic document.