by Adrienne Pine
: "Corruption", violence as statistics, and "governability" = criminalizing democracy (and you'll hear a lot of this from certain NGOs)
[update below]
Honduras Has Highest Murder Rate in Central America shouts the headline, which goes on to cite the deep concern of National Human Rights Commissioner Ramon Custodio (who has been broadly condemned by human rights leaders and organizations around the world for his central role in justifying the coup and subsequent police and military violence against peaceful resisters) that "the right to life is so little respected in this country."
What's going on here? Not a concern for Honduran life, certainly not a concern for Honduran democracy. What's going on is an attempt to re-legitimate a draconian state of exception, in which state and state-sanctioned murder of "dangerous" Honduran bodies is made virtuous through statistics emphasizing outrageously high murder rates. The Giuliani-derived Zero Tolerance and Mano Dura Honduran crime control policies authored in large part by Pepe Lobo under Maduro's administration, and administered by Oscar Álvarez, depend on a notion of violent ungovernability of the undifferentiated masses. So while I don't doubt the veracity of the statistic, this is both a masking of political violence as normative "culture" and a justification for genocide of the criminalized poor--a multitude that, unlike when Lobo's 2003-anti-gang law went into effect, is today in full-scale resistance against an illegitimate military state. In effect, Ramon Custodio's decontextualized condemnation of Honduras's war-level murder rate of 66.8 for every 100,000 inhabitants is a central tactic in the U.S.-led policy of criminalizing democracy.
***
I should explain why I put "corruption" up there. Corruption is a vague and depoliticizing term that is being used, again, to indicate a "culture" of ingovernability (recall that Social Darwinist arguments generally link back to colonialist policies) that stems back decades before the coup. It's being used by the State Department, by Pepe Lobo's government and other golpista agencies, by Washington Office of Latin America, and by U.S. Congress members to disappear the military coup d'etat into an epistemic murk. But the coup was real, it wasn't an act of "corruption," but rather a violent usurpation of democracy that has led directly to the murders of real human people (like you or your family), hundreds of them, joyful people, people working with passion and enthusiasm for a real democracy, for a new Honduras.
I should explain why I put "corruption" up there. Corruption is a vague and depoliticizing term that is being used, again, to indicate a "culture" of ingovernability (recall that Social Darwinist arguments generally link back to colonialist policies) that stems back decades before the coup. It's being used by the State Department, by Pepe Lobo's government and other golpista agencies, by Washington Office of Latin America, and by U.S. Congress members to disappear the military coup d'etat into an epistemic murk. But the coup was real, it wasn't an act of "corruption," but rather a violent usurpation of democracy that has led directly to the murders of real human people (like you or your family), hundreds of them, joyful people, people working with passion and enthusiasm for a real democracy, for a new Honduras.
Source:http://quotha.net/node/835
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