Honduran Quotes

My confessor? ... Neither he, nor anyone else, God is my confessor.

One might say that modern Honduran history began in 1873, when Jules Verne introduced Americans to the banana in his novel Around the World in 80 Days, where he praised it as being “as healthy as bread and as succulent as cream.

As Rebeca reveals what scraps of story she does have to Luca, he starts to understand that this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond.

As Rebeca reveals what scraps of story she does have to Luca, he starts to understand that this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond. Some, like Rebeca, share their stories carefully, selectively, finding a faithful ear and then chanting their words like prayers. Other migrants are like blown-open grenades, telling their anguish compulsively to everyone they meet, dispensing their pain like shrapnel so they might one day wake to find their burdens have grown lighter. Luca wonders what it would feel like to blow up like that. But for now he remains undetonated, his horrors sealed tightly inside, his pin fixed snugly in place.

Graham states, “Because average country income levels do not matter to happiness, but relative distances from the average do, the poor Honduran is happier because their distance from mean income is smaller.” And in Honduras, the poor are much closer in wealth to the middle class than the poor are in Chile, so they feel better off.

San Pedro Sula: second-largest city in Honduras, a million and a half people, murder capital of the world. Out loud, he says, “Ah, you are Honduran.” “No,” Rebeca corrects him. “Ch’orti’.” Luca makes his face into a question. “Indian,” she explains. “My people are Ch’orti’.” Luca nods, even though he doesn’t really understand the difference.

Trust the holy instincts within you—the instincts of compassion aroused by the Holy Spirit. Yes, politics are always complicated, but what does Jesus want your attitude to be toward Syrian refugees, Honduran asylum seekers, and undocumented day laborers? You already know. You’ve always known. Some will say power trumps everything, but you’ve always known that mercy triumphs over judgment.

this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond.

As Rebeca reveals what scraps of story she does have to Luca, he starts to understand that this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond. Some, like Rebeca, share their stories carefully, selectively, finding a faithful ear and then chanting their words like prayers. Other migrants are like blown-open grenades, telling their anguish compulsively to everyone they meet, dispensing their pain like shrapnel so they might one day wake to find their burdens have grown lighter.

In many places, the past fifteen years have been a time of economic turmoil and widening disparities. Anger and resentment are high. And yet economic policies that might address these concerns seem nearly impossible to enact. Instead of the seeds of reform, we are given the yoke of misdirection. We are told to forget the sources of our discontent because something more important is at stake: the fate of our civilization. Yet what are these civilizations, these notions of Muslim-ness, Western-ness, European-ness, American-ness, that attempt to describe where, and with whom, we belong? They are illusions: arbitrarily drawn constructs with porous, brittle, and overlapping borders. To what civilization does a Syrian atheist belong? A Muslim soldier in the US army? A Chinese professor in Germany? A lesbian fashion designer in Nigeria? After how many decades of US citizenship does a Spanish-speaking Honduran-born couple, with two generations of American children and grandchildren descended from them, cease to belong to a Latin American civilization and take their place in an American one? Civilizations are illusions, but these illusions are pervasive, dangerous, and powerful. They contribute to globalization’s brutality. They allow us, for example, to say that we believe in global free markets and, in the same breath, to discount as impossible the global free movement of labor; to claim that we believe in democracy and human equality, and yet to stymie the creation of global institutions based on one-person-one-vote and equality before the law. Civilizations encourage our hypocrisies to flourish. And by so doing, they undermine globalization’s only plausible promise: that we be free to invent ourselves. Why, exactly, can’t a Muslim be European? Why can’t an unreligious person be Pakistani? Why can’t a man be a woman? Why can’t someone who is gay be married? Mongrel. Miscegenator. Half-breed. Outcast. Deviant. Heretic. Our words for hybridity are so often epithets. They shouldn’t be. Hybridity need not be the problem. It could be the solution. Hybrids do more than embody mixtures between groups. Hybrids reveal the boundaries between groups to be false.

Was Pius X, a canonized saint, entirely wrong about Modernism? Was the First Vatican Council wrong to denounce the trend? If a Roman pontiff and an ecumenical council could be wrong a century ago, how can Catholics be confident that another pope and another ecumenical council are right today? Yet that is precisely the message that Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga delivered to an audience in Dallas in 2013. The Honduran cardinal, the chairman of the pope’s top advisory board, said that the Second Vatican Council had been convened to “end the hostilities between the Church and Modernism, which was condemned in the First Vatican Council.” Lest anyone miss the message, he added, “Modernism was, most of the time, a reaction against injustices and abuses that disparaged the dignity and the rights of the person.

It was only after God prepared the place that he pulled Adam and Eve out of the earth. Like the drawings made by my Honduran first-graders hunched over their wobbly desks, people didn't exist until the place existed, until the green stretched across the whole white page. It is as if God announced in the very beginning that place comes first, that we're secondary - we come from our land, our land doesn't come from us.

Mexican right-wing talk radio wants a fence built on their southern border to keep out those damned Hondurans and Salvadorans and Guatemalans. I heard a radio host in Guadalajara decry these “aliens.” It seems Hondurans want to take Mexican jobs. Want to steal health care, get an education. They don’t share the proper language, and they carry disease and lower the standard of living and want to steal social security benefits. Rushito Limbortinez in the house!

The leader of the Drexel refugees was Leon Black, a husky, brash, Dartmouth and Harvard Business School graduate in his 30s who was running the Drexel merger group out of New York. Black was a native New Yorker born into privilege. But his world shattered in 1975 when his father, Eli Black, then the chief executive of Chiquita banana importer United Brands, leaped to his death from his office in the Pan Am building above Grand Central Terminal. In the days after his death, United Brands was discovered to have made millions in bribes to Honduran officials in order to reduce taxes on banana exports.

The main perpetrators of violence against the homeless tend to be other homeless people, or drug dealers, according to people who have lived on the streets. “There wasn’t a day that went by without violence on the street,” said Tom about his time living homeless in the Tenderloin. “Someone getting in a fight. Beat up. Shot for drugs. One of the Hondurans [drug dealers] would whip out a machete and chop at a guy’s arm because he had used a counterfeit five-dollar bill. That doesn’t get brought up at the community meetings. The only people talking to the Board of Supervisors are Harm Reduction Coalition and homeless advocates who paint this very different picture of the homeless being victimized. They point at the politicians saying, ‘You’re all victimizing them!’ with the sweeps.

I have long found bats to be one of the more fascinating creatures our animal kingdom has to offer. From the dog-sized Malaysian flying foxes down to the adorable and puffy Honduran white bats, they intrigue me to no end.

Although the Honduran debt would mostly go unpaid, Zemurray had achieved a remarkable personal victory. He had outmaneuvered Knox, successfully defied the US government, poked J. P. Morgan in the eye, and ended up a much wealthier man. In engineering the “invasion,” he had covered his tracks so well that contemporary investigations into the scheme were never able to connect him to it or prove he broke any laws. But he had also intentionally overthrown a government to achieve his own financial ends.

The tramp steamer entered my field of vision as slowly as a wounded saurian. I could not believe my eyes. With the wondrous splendor of Saint Petersburg in the background, the poor ship intruded on the scene, its sides covered with dirty streaks of rust and refuse that reached all the way to the waterline. The captain's bridge, and the row of cabins on the deck for crew members and occasional passengers, had been painted white a long time before. Now a coat of grime, oil, and urine gave them an indefinite color, the color of misery, of irreparable decadence, of desperate, incessant use. The chimerical freighter slipped through the water to the agonized gasp of its machinery and the irregular rhythm of driving rods that threatened at any moment to fall silent forever. Now it occupied the foreground of the serene, dreamlike spectacle that had held all my attention, and my astonished wonder turned into something extremely difficult to define. This nomadic piece of sea trash bore a kind of witness to our destiny on earth, a pulvis eris that seemed truer and more eloquent in these polished metal waters with the gold and white vision of the capital of the last czars behind them. The sleek outline of the buildings and wharves on the Finnish coast rose at my side. At that moment I felt the stirrings of a warm solidarity for the tramp steamer, as if it were an unfortunate brother, a victim of human neglect and greed to which it responded with a stubborn determination to keep tracing the dreary wake of its miseries on all the world's seas. I watched it move toward the interior of the bay, searching for some discreet dock where it could anchor without too many maneuvers and, perhaps, for as little money as possible. The Honduran flag hung at the stern. The final letters of the name that had almost been erased by the waves were barely visible:... cyon. In what seemed too mocking an irony, the name of this old freighter was probably the Halcyon.

The greatness of Zemurray lies in the fact that he never lost faith in his ability to salvage a situation. Bad things happened to him as bad things happen to everyone, but unlike so many he was never tempted by failure. He never felt powerless or trapped. He was, as I said, an optimist. He stood in constant defiance. When the secretary of state teamed up with J. P. Morgan and the Honduran government in a way contrary to Zemurray’s interests, he simply changed the Honduran government. When United Fruit drew a line at the Utila River and said, “You shall not cross,” he crossed anyway. When he was forbidden to build a bridge, he built a bridge but called it something else.

One Honduran teenager I met in southern Mexico had been deported to Guatemala twenty-seven times. He said he wouldn't give up until he reached his mother in the United States.

Because amphotericin is expensive and not available in Honduras, the Honduran members of the expedition were being treated with an older drug, a pentavalent antimonial compound.

EXCLUSIVE: LOST CITY DISCOVERED IN THE HONDURAN RAIN FOREST In search for legendary “City of the Monkey God,” explorers find the untouched ruins of a vanished culture.

The Lost City of the Monkey God is a throwback to the golden age of adventure archaeology, the thrilling true story of a group of explorers penetrating one of the toughest jungles on earth in search of a lost city…and finding it. Preston is a terrific writer of both non-fiction books and bestselling novels and makes you feel the dark heart of this lost Honduran wilderness.” —John Sandford, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author