FROM A POND OF PIRANHAS INTO A SWAMP OF CROCODILES

 

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Running away from Honduras towards the USA

For more than 60 years, we, the missionaries of the SME, have walked along with the people of Honduras. With a straw hat on our heads and a machete in our hands, we have walked at their side, riding on mules, by foot, by motorcycle, by jeep…In the oppressive heat, in spite of malaria, the amoeba, and other details, we have overcome the mountains, opened roads, built schools, dug water wells. Through radio and other means, we have transmitted basic knowledge that allowed to shake fear, resignation, the feeling of helplessness. From the religious faith of that beloved people, a sincere faith but often paralyzing, we have made a motor of awakening, of hope and of dynamism so as to walk together towards a better world. We worked tirelessly at the formation of thousands of humble agents of social and ecclesial transformation. Some of us were at the heart of a movement that led a good number of families grappling with insoluble problems of poverty towards new rich lands in the middle of the jungle. We saw thousands of brave people take charge of themselves and find themselves capable of being masters of their life and of their destiny. Violence that was everywhere had mostly disappeared from the scene.  But all of a sudden appeared at the horizon something that we had not foreseen: the plague of drugs.

Cocaine, the queen of drugs, left Columbia (and also Peru and Bolivia) and went up towards the USA, where it can be purchased at a good price and where it is consumed as manna coming from heaven. It made its way throughout central America, sowing fear everywhere on its journey. It was used to finance the strong forces that confronted one another  in the region and fed the atrocious wars that caused more than 300,000 deaths in El Salvador and in Guatemala. As a result, thousands of people of those two countries, including from neighbouring Honduras, took refuge in the USA and went to fill up the reserves of cheap labor at the center of the Empire. Cramped in the most obscure neighbourhoods of California and in the surrounding areas, many different groups initiated themselves with the latest refinements of drug trafficking, and also learned how to create gangs capable of imposing their rules. Those gangs drew so much attention among the criminal networks of the USA that the American authorities began to hunt for them and sent them back to their countries of origin. Back home, those gangs called "maras",  engaged in never-ending battles among themselves so as to control the territory. That violence goes on until now. In Honduras only, we count everyday about twenty murders connected to drugs. As for Mexico, it has transformed itself into a real human slaughterhouse. 

The madness of drug…fed by what? By the north American market. The Americans wage wars throughout the whole world pretending to «render service» to humanity, but they are incapable to combat the plague of drugs on their own territory. Why? Because they don’t want to. And they don’t want to because drugs earn them billions and billions of dollars.

During that time, we, the missionaries of Honduras, are powerless looking at the huge fire that threatens to reduce to nothingness our most beautiful dreams for that country. Yet, through the dense smoke of that kind of "quema", we can only but admire the "kamikaze" courage of those caravans that are heading for the Wall, even if we have no illusion about the issue of so a desperate adventure.

And God in all that?

"Quién sabe"..It is not impossible that he is there, in the middle itself of those caravans, walking, suffering or dying with those brave people, with his eyes fixed on an Earth without walls where, tomorrow maybe..., humans will all be welcome like beloved children of the same home.

                                                  

                                                                          Eloy Roy

Translated from the French by Jacques Bourdages