An Unequal Fight

Drug trafficking is still dominating the agenda in Honduras and Central America and continues to affect relations between the region and the United States.

Here in Honduras, we are seeing it all. There is something for everybody. Some propose new legislation, others the incorporation of the military in the struggle, while the most radical recommend, among other things, machine-gunning suspicious light aircraft.

At the regional level, calls for decriminalization have frustrated a presidential summit in Guatemala, provoking a catalog of excuses from those presidents who failed to attend. Accused of having boycotted the summit, the absentees maintained that their failure to attend was not due to undertakings made with the United States.

The United States, for its part, sent its vice president to meet with members of SICA (Central American Integration System), and the U.S.’s drug czar arrived in Honduras to sign a $2 million cooperation agreement to fight drug trafficking, which, together with other organized crime activities, generates annual profits estimated at $500 billion worldwide, of which approximately $14 billion is generated in Central America. That’s rather like giving an ordinary civilian a sharpened guava stick to defend himself against an expert, battle-hardened soldier threatening to kill him with an AK-47.

According to U.S. sources, approximately 90 percent of the drugs reaching the U.S. pass through Central America, and our country is listed as one of many countries — the Vatican included — involved in money laundering.

Activities related to finance, construction, tourism and even entertainment, like music concerts, are among those most often used to launder money earned from organized crime.

Consider, too, the infiltration by organized crime into state institutions, into the judicial system and into political institutions. No one knows the magnitude of that infiltration, but it is feared to have reached alarming levels.

Add to that our diminishing productivity and exports, the absence of dollars (by official order, the banks are limiting the purchase of dollars and withdrawals from dollar accounts), the fiscal deficit caused by unbridled wastefulness and the extremely low rate of tax collection. There are also some unprincipled business people, who for decades have only declared losses and have ascribed all of their household expenditures, including health care, their children’s education and daily running costs, to company expenses. Not to mention the government’s increasingly aggressive attacks on investors.

Finally, there is the unbearable lack of security we live with countrywide, discouraging to investors at home and abroad — obliging the investor to reconsider the wisdom of maintaining investments in Honduras — and, together with extreme poverty, unemployment and our deficiencies too numerous to mention in health care, education, etc., it’s gotten us running scared, .

Under these circumstances, there is no doubt whatsoever that we are an easy prey to transnational drug trafficking, with the resultant exponential increase in other organized criminal activities.

We cannot take on this thousand-headed monster single-handed with our own limited resources. If we don’t organize as a region, and if the United States continues to be tightfisted with its cooperation, our fate is sealed.