By Jane Guskin

Navidad hondureña, crisis e incertidumbre

In Colombia there is an expression: la paz del cementerio — the peace of the graveyard.  This is the kind of peace that powerful forces enjoy when everyone who resists them is dead and buried.

Colombia’s government and its military and paramilitary forces have spent decades working diligently for this kind of peace.  They’re so intent on winning it that they’ve even dispensed with the graveyard: according to Senator Gloria Inés Ramírez, more than half a million people have been forcibly disappeared in Colombia in the past 33 years.  The government’s own “Justice and Peace Unit” has reports of 210,000 forced disappearances, based on complaints lodged by family members between 2006 and mid-2009.  That suggests the 500,000 figure may be low; Yanett Bautista of the Nydia Erika Bautista Human Rights Foundation — named for one of the disappeared — estimates that family members have filed complaints in only 10% of the disappearance cases.  Of the cases investigated so far, fewer than 2,500 bodies have been located, mostly in mass graves.

Israel, meanwhile, has spent six decades building its own brand of graveyard peace in Palestine.  December 27 marks one year since Israel began a massive attack on the residents of Gaza, killing more than 1,400 people, including nearly 400 children, and transforming the tiny strip of land from a de facto prison into a cemetery.  Israel continues to strangle Gaza through a blockade and greets nonviolent protesters with tear gas and bullets.

In Honduras, the right-wing elite and military high command, which have close ties to the extremist Catholic group Opus Dei, seem similarly committed to a graveyard peace.  Last June 28 they toppled an elected president who in their eyes had bowed too far to pressure from progressive grassroots sectors.  Already strong, the country’s diverse social movements — including indigenous, African-descended, unionists, and lesbian and gay activists — responded to the coup by uniting and launching a coordinated nonviolent struggle from the streets.

Since the coup, 18 gay and transgender Hondurans have been among those murdered in a campaign of repression against the resistance movement, according to data compiled by the lesbian activist and research group Cattrachas.  Killings of transgender women in Honduras were already rampant: in four years from 2005 through 2008, Human Rights Watch reports that 17 transgender women were killed.  Now in just six months the coup government has doubled the number of victims.

MRZ for more