Honduras Country Quotes

The devastation of the social fabric in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries is often thought of as a Central American “gang violence” problem that must be kept on the far side of the border. There is little said, for example, of arms being trafficked from the United States into Mexico or Central America, legally or not; little mention of the fact that the consumption of drugs in the United States is what fundamentally fuels drug trafficking in the continent.

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.

For generations the official U.S. policy had been to support these regimes against any threat from their own citizens, who were branded automatically as Communists. When necessary, U.S. troops had been deployed in Latin America for decades to defend our military allies, many of whom were graduates of the U.S. Military Academy, spoke English, and sent their children to be educated in our country. They were often involved in lucrative trade agreements involving pineapples, bananas, bauxite, copper and iron ore, and other valuable commodities. When I became president, military juntas ruled in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. I decided to support peaceful moves toward freedom and democracy throughout the hemisphere. In addition, our government used its influence through public statements and our votes in financial institutions to put special pressure on the regimes that were most abusive to their own people, including Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. On visits to the region Rosalynn and I met with religious and other leaders who were seeking political change through peaceful means, and we refused requests from dictators to defend their regimes from armed revolutionaries, most of whom were poor, indigenous Indians or descendants of former African slaves. Within ten years all the Latin American countries I named here had become democracies, and The Carter Center had observed early elections in Panama, Nicaragua, Peru, Haiti, and Paraguay.

the largest groups of people who migrate to the U.S.A.—voluntarily, forcibly, unknowingly, like them—do so because of what the U.S. government has done to their countries. How a trade agreement, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, drove millions of Mexicans out of jobs and led parents to cross borders and climb up walls so they could feed their kids. How six decades of interventionist policies by both Republicans and Democrats brought economic and political instability and sowed violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

I am here because you vivisected my ancestral country in two. In 1945, two fumbling mid-ranking American officers who knew nothing about the country used a National Geographic map as reference to arbitrarily cut a border to make North and South Korea, a division that eventually separated millions of families, including my own grandmother from her family. Later, under the flag of liberation, the United States dropped more bombs and napalm in our tiny country than during the entire Pacific campaign against Japan during World War II. A fascinating little-known fact about the Korean War is that an American surgeon, David Ralph Millard, stationed there to treat burn victims, invented a double-eyelid surgical procedure to make Asian eyes look Western, which he ended up testing on Korean sex workers so they could be more attractive to GIs. Now, it’s the most popular surgical procedure for women in South Korea. My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude.

Asked on a June 17, 2014 CNN Town Hall broadcast about what to do with thousands of minors from Honduras and neighboring countries seeking asylum in the United States, Hillary acknowledged that many children are fleeing from an “exponential increase in violence”. However, they “should be sent back as soon as it can be determined who the responsible adults in their family are”, she said; “all of them who can should be reunited with their families”. “We have to send a clear message: just because your child gets across the border doesn’t mean your child gets to say”, she said. Do we need to recall that Hillary began her career as advocate for “children’s rights”?

Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, often regarded as the most famous decorated US army officer of the early twentieth century, wrote a book after World War I aptly called War Is a Racket. Upon retirement in the 1930s, he gave speeches around the country to spread his message—a message that sheds light upon the hidden internal dialogue underlying US military history. In 1935, Butler boldly stated: I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

It is one of the eternal stories that are told about soccer: when Brazil gets knocked out of a World Cup, Brazilians jump off apartment blocks. It can happen even when Brazil wins. One writer at the World Cup in Sweden in 1958 claims to have seen a Brazilian fan kill himself out of “sheer joy” after his team’s victory in the final. Janet Lever tells that story in Soccer Madness, her eye-opening study of Brazilian soccer culture published way back in 1983, when nobody (and certainly not female American social scientists) wrote books about soccer. Lever continues: Of course, Brazilians are not the only fans to kill themselves for their teams. In the 1966 World Cup a West German fatally shot himself when his television set broke down during the final game between his country and England. Nor have Americans escaped some bizarre ends. An often cited case is the Denver man who wrote a suicide note—”I have been a Broncos fan since the Broncos were first organized and I can’t stand their fumbling anymore”—and then shot himself. Even worse was the suicide of Amelia Bolaños. In June 1969 she was an eighteen-year-old El Salvadorean watching the Honduras–El Salvador game at home on TV. When Honduras scored the winner in the last minute, wrote the great Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski, Bolaños “got up and ran to the desk which contained her father’s pistol in a drawer. She then shot herself in the heart.” Her funeral was televised. El Salvador’s president and ministers, and the country’s soccer team walked behind the flag-draped coffin. Within a month, Bolaños’s death would help prompt the “Soccer War” between El Salvador and Honduras.

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Columbus on his fourth and last voyage, in 1502, left the Southern coast of Cuba, and sailing in a South-westerly direction reached Guanaja, an island now called Bonacca, one of a group thirty miles distant from Honduras, and the shores of the western continent. From this island he sailed southward as far as Panama, and thence returned to Cuba on his way to Spain, after passing six months on the Northern coasts of Panama. In 1506 two of Columbus’ companions, De Solis and Pinzon, were again in the Gulf of Honduras, and examined the coast westward as far as the Gulf of Dulce, still looking for a passage to the Indian Ocean. Hence they sailed northward, and discovered a great part of Yucatan, though that country was not then explored, nor was any landing made. The first actual exploration was made by Francisco Hernandez de Cordova in 1517, who landed on the Island Las Mugeres. Here he found stone towers, and chapels thatched with straw, in which were arranged in order several idols resembling women—whence the name which the Island received. The Spaniards were astonished to see, for the first time in the new world, stone edifices of architectural beauty, and also to perceive the dress of the natives, who wore shirts and cloaks of white and colored cotton, with head-dresses of

British Honduras became Belize in 1973, but not before Jack Borland was Governor-General of the colony, the Queen’s own representative to this small country.

in October 2014, the United States was inundated with more than fifty thousand unaccompanied children from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. “They’re fleeing from threats and violence in their home countries,” noted Vox.com, “where things have gotten so bad that many families believe that they have no choice but to send their children on the long, dangerous journey north.” Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador are among the most environmentally degraded and deforested regions in Central America. They cut their forests; we got their kids. It

...most of the parade's attendees clung to a notion of what their town was, what values it embodied, what hopes it carved out, though by 2007 its once-largest employers, a steel tube plant and two plate glass manufacturers, were over twenty years gone and most of the county's small farms had been gobbled up by Smithfield, Syngenta, Tyson, and Archer Daniels Midland. Many of those residents who had not been born in this country but who'd made their way from Kuala Lumpur or Jordan or Delhi or Honduras waved those flags the hardest when the casket went by.

The damage United Fruit had done to Latin America was beyond imaginable and, even as the Cavendish shift occurred, beyond healing. The dictatorial governments the company installed in Guatemala and Honduras ruled their respective countries for decades, releasing wave after wave of abuse, assassination, and even genocide. In Guatemala, death squads sponsored by the successors to banana-installed governments roamed the countryside, killing anyone suspected of being-or even becoming--a left-wing sympathizer. That meant just about anyone who labored on a banana plantation, and their families. It was the obscene, logical extension to the sentiment that had crushed Jacobo Arbenz and his efforts to bring justice to the country's banana lands. Over 100,000 native Mayas died at the hands of the Guatemalan military; tens of thousands more fled the country (most now live in the United States).

My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude.

bring up Korea to collapse the proximity between here and there. Or as activists used to say, “I am here because you were there.” I am here because you vivisected my ancestral country in two. In 1945, two fumbling mid-ranking American officers who knew nothing about the country used a National Geographic map as reference to arbitrarily cut a border to make North and South Korea, a division that eventually separated millions of families, including my own grandmother from her family. Later, under the flag of liberation, the United States dropped more bombs and napalm in our tiny country than during the entire Pacific campaign against Japan during World War II. A fascinating little-known fact about the Korean War is that an American surgeon, David Ralph Millard, stationed there to treat burn victims, invented a double-eyelid surgical procedure to make Asian eyes look Western, which he ended up testing on Korean sex workers so they could be more attractive to GIs. Now, it’s the most popular surgical procedure for women in South Korea. My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude.

Every kleptocratic network I have examined, from Afghanistan to Honduras to Central Asian or African countries, has included a skein of outright

Pew Research Centre, a self-described “fact tank” based in Washington.* This found that only 69% of adult Latin Americans are now Catholics, down from 92% in 1970. Protestants now account for 19%, up from 4%. Over the same period the share of those with no religious affiliation has grown from 1% to 8%—though most of these people still believe in God. Pew’s study finds sharp variations from country to country. In four Central American countries—El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua—barely half of the population is still Catholic. Though 61% of Brazilian respondents say they are Catholic, 26% are now Protestant. In many other countries there are still firm Catholic majorities. Whatever their denomination, most Latin Americans remain deeply religious. Only Uruguay stands out as a bastion of secularism—a tradition dating back more than a century. Two things distinguish Latin American Protestantism. First, it is mainly a result of conversion (see chart). Second, two-thirds of Latin American Protestants define themselves as Pentecostal. Much more often than Catholics, they report having direct experience of the Holy Spirit, such as through exorcism or speaking in tongues. Indeed, the words “evangelical” and “Protestant” are used interchangeably in the region. Pew finds that Latin American Protestants are conservative on social and sexual issues, such as gay marriage and abortion. As Catholics become more liberal on such questions, that points to looming American-style “culture wars”.