In Honduras, despite our leader Steve’s best laid plans, we never knew what the day would bring. The day before, the ten of us Canadian teachers, well actually five, because the other five identified as Quebecois, had been up visiting leaders of COLPRUSUMAH, the Elementary Teachers’ Union in their hilltop centre on one of Tegucigalpa’s many hills. Our next stop was to have been the university education department, but we were told abruptly that the student teachers had gone on strike. “We’ll go support them on their picket line, then,” we suggested. “No, you will not!” our Honduran teachers union host told us. “Foreigners might make good hostages!”
The next morning we left Tegucigalpa, the mountainous city of shacks and mansions perched on rolling green hills, on the next leg of our teachers’ solidarity tour. We’d stopped to visit the Canadian Consulate first. We were there to advocate for our Honduran teacher union colleagues and to announce our presence in a country that even then was a little dicey for travelers. The Consul, although always more interested in the business of the Canadian mining companies than the plight of Honduran unions, had listened to us politely. He bid us farewell, advising us that by no means should we be on the road in the dark because of the dangers of bandits, wandering cows and semi trucks without running lights.
We set out at noon in the union’s yellow mini-bus driven by Orlando, who like many Honduran teachers we met, had two jobs. We saw places where Hurricane Mitch had ravaged hillsides, sweeping away shacks and their inhabitants into a deep gullies below. We stopped for lunch at an American style truck stop at Seguatepeque, where we saw a former Honduran president (a good one we were told) quietly lunching .
There are few straight roads in Honduras. The road curved endlessly around green mountains with stunning views. Although the mountain roads were not quite as bad as I’d feared, I had to learn to accept that Orlando was a skilled driver and that a semi could pass a van and a bus on a narrow two-lane highway with some inches to spare. A few times we went around curves and did see cars and even semis that had not managed a turn and were rusting below on the hillside.
The road curved on and on winding through dense forests, past little villages, corn fields, banana groves, roadside stands where young children helped their parents sell coconuts or corn, past small open air diners, little village homes with wisps of cook fire smoke and past their small subsistence gardens.
Tropical twilight fell as we drove up what seemed like a small road through a hillside village. Boys playing soccer on the road moved aside for us to pass. We drove on carefully past the little houses lining the side of the road. Not long after, Orlando pulled over to consult a map, admitting we were lost. I think we’d had to detour at some point because a mud slide had closed a road.
At that point, we had to drive back some distance to another road junction and continue on in the dark. Only once did we encounter any reason to have to stop on the dark road. Someone flagged us down to warn of a broken down vehicle stopped ahead. We finally reached the colonial town of Santa Rosa de Copan about four hours behind schedule. The teachers who had been waiting to meet with us had finally had to go home, so our meeting was limited to the union president, who had a late dinner with us at the old colonial hotel we were staying at.
We did get a meeting the next morning with people at the union centre and then went on our way to the ancient Ruinas de Copan and on to the eastern coast, where we attended a teachers’ union research conference, hiked in a malarial mosquito infested nature reserve (I was taking chloraquine), visited schools and went to several agricultural co-ops, where I learned about the politics of the palm oil industry. Only once did we get stopped at a roadblock on the road in the dark. We were apprehensive. Was it the army? Was it bandits? It was the army and they let us travel on.
On our way back from the coast to return to Tegucigalpa, we were supposed to stop in the manufacturing centre, San Pedro Sula, to meet with a maquiladora organizing committee we were connected with. Unfortunately, there were a number of smokers in our group, so each time we stopped for gas or food, the smokers prolonged our departure getting in their second cigarettes, but we had probably been late getting away anyway.
By the time we finally arrived in San Pedro Sula, it was already well after 3 pm. Our union host, who was travelling with us, made a quick call on her cell phone and reported that she had just cancelled the meeting. “We have to clear the 100 km stretch of highway ahead before dark because it is not safe to travel at night, especially with foreigners in a van.” So we headed out without stopping and got back to Tegucigalpa safely later that evening.
When I got on facebook a decade ago, I reconnected with Carmen Gloria in Chile and found out that she had been in Santa Rita de Copan just a year after I was there. She had been setting up the country’s first women’s shelter and had had to travel with an armed guard at all times.
Honduras is much worse today for the teachers and most everybody, except the rich. Rights have seriously eroded since the coup in 2009, which the Canadian government, like the US, gave diplomatic recognition to right away. The gang problem, which we were told in 2005, originated when ex-combatants from Central America’s wars drifted into gangs in places like LA in the US, and then were deported back to Central America, is much worse than it was then. Climate change-aggravated drought has forced many subsistence peasant farmers off their lands. The combination of these has factored heavily into the tide of refugees on the US southern border. Some of the little kids I saw at the roadside stands may now well be the parents with small children in hand that we’ve seen pictures of at the border.
Coincidentally or fittingly, the last meeting I attended before the big shutdown was with Steve, the four other people who ventured out, and Maria Luisa Regaldo, a maquiladora leader from San Pedro Sula, who we didn’t get to see when we sped off in 2005. Her meetings with Canadian unions for the next week had all been cancelled. We sat at social distance and then we had to get her back on a plane for Honduras before the border closed. The best laid plans………
Your descriptions are beautifully evocative. I can ‘see’ the mountains and winding roads. Makes me realize once again how good we have it.
My visit to Nicaragua back in ’88 was never as risky as this. I do recall travelling in the countryside in the back of a pickup truck, donated by a veteran’s group in the US. At some point we caught up with a group on foot. I thought it’s too bad we couldn’t offer them a ride as we were full. Turns out we weren’t full. They managed to get them all on board.
“Foreigners might make good hostages!”
I wonder who might have taken hostages, the strikers or their opponents?
the student strikers we were told