A More Just Society

On Monday morning of last week, a Honduran lawyer was shot dead on the Avenue of the Armed Forces. His name was Dionisio García, he was married, with a 7 year old son. He worked for a well-known organisation called the Association for a More Just Society (ASJ). They carry out investigations, and at the time of his assasination, García was working on the exploitation of private security personnel, who are ubiquitous in Tegucigalpa. He took the cases of the vigilantes, many working for fast food chains, and demonstrated how they were often victims of private vendettas (and often lose their lives as a result of vengeance campaigns targeted at their employers); and how their labour rights are constantly ignored and abused. He also demonstrated that important government officials were aware, and complicit in this situation. García and his colleagues had received threats on their lives repeatedly over the last three months: two of his colleagues have gone into hiding since his murder. Link to an English language story - the Spanish version has much more detail.

ASJ is an important organisation in Honduras, and my boss - ever immersed in high political drama of all types - attended García's funeral on Tuesday. It's been a disturbing precedent: the assasination of lawyers hasn't been a feature of Honduran life in recent years. But what's just as disturbing is the failure of the media to report it as a precedent of any sort: Another High Profile Death, announced the Channel 5 news on Monday evening, as though García had been yet another victim of violent petty crime in the capital. When you're accustomed to seeing corpses on the front pages of the papers every day, their clothes tugged up the better to reveal their bloodied flesh, it's tricky to distinguish between political violence and the typical murder-for-mobile-phones.

Is the difference even significant? I had the old Veronica Guerin row with my friend's boyfriend on Tuesday night: García had it coming to him, he should have stepped away, what good is he to anyone, now that he's dead? Cam, ever the cynic, gave us his father's great life advice: no jodes con el mundo, y el mundo no te joderá - don't fuck with people, and they won't fuck with you. My Canadian friend, who spent last year in Managua, claims that this is a fundamental difference between Hondurans and Nicaraguans: Hondurans will do anything for a quiet life, they'll look the other way, just to keep themselves out of all the shit going on around them. Is that why there was never a civil war here? There were no Romeros, no heroes willing to put their lives on the line to expose the atrocities committed by a military dictatorship. Where is Romero now, asks Cam: he's under the ground. And the killings with impunity in El Salvador, they still happen, committed by the mining companies and private businesses instead of the state.

Arriving back in Tegucigalpa from my road trip yesterday afternoon, I saw a large hoarding for a shopping centre near my house. You know the sign on the Naas dual carriageway (before it became the M-something or the N-something): the one that says Welcome to Naas, a Nice Place to Shop. This one welcomed us to Tegucigalpa, to El Dorado, a Safe Place to Shop.