IN a debate about which political system killed more people—communism or democracy—Sartre sadly said to Camus: We are reduced to throwing bodies at each other as arguments.
Meaning, we cannot excuse our misdeeds by citing the worse misdeeds of our accusers. Yet, we are at it again because we have no choice but to throw at those who criticize us for the corpses on our streets, the mountains of corpses in bombed-out cities and communities wiped out to take out a terrorist. (The most recent drone strike in Afghanistan to take out a terrorist or two.) And so to Western accusations I answer:
According to Dana Frank in The New York Times, on March 2 of this year an elite unit of US-trained Honduran special forces shot dead the indigenous peoples’ rights and environmentalist activist Berta Caceres, for opposing the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project, one of the biggest of its kind in Central America.
On June 21, the Guardian reported: a Honduran soldier testified that his US-trained death squad was given a hit list that included Berta Caceres. The soldier deserted rather than obey the order to kill.
Now that’s a credible witness. On the other hand, Edgar Matobato testified that he personally killed 50 out of 1,000 killings in which he took part. The killing so outraged the US Congress that a “Berta Caceres Human Rights in Honduras Act” was filed in the US Congress to stop further US-sponsored training of death squads. To stop the bill, Obama offered a set of toothless initiatives because bare gums have no grip.
In 2009 the military ousted the democratically elected president. Honduras “turned into a sewer of government corruption, rampant criminality and gang violence. The incumbent president, a key backer of the coup, threw out—a third?—of the Honduran supreme court. He stole $300 million from the National Health Service” to fund his presidential and his party’s campaigns.
But he did not take money from drugs. He established a 3,000-strong Special Action Force with the special mission to trample on the Honduran constitution and to kill small farmers and land-rights’ activists. The six authors of the Caceres law say, “As long as the US continues to fund Honduran security forces without demanding justice for those threatened, tortured and killed, we have blood on our hands.”
In response, the US State Department has repeatedly certified that everything condemned by the Caceres law never happens, so the special training continues. Tawag dyan, “plastic na pantastic.”
When we were children, we complained, “Why is yours bigger than mine?” referring to ice cream. When we were older, we bragged, “Mine is bigger than yours,” regarding something else. But when we grow into adults we say, regarding the numbers of people our countries kill, we say, “Ours is smaller than yours.”