The Long Honduran Night by Frank Dana;

Author:Frank, Dana;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2018-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

Birthday Parties

January 25, 2014, two days before Juan Orlando Hernández’s inauguration, was my birthday. It also happened to be the birthday of women’s suffrage in Honduras, celebrated as Honduran Women’s Day.

The afternoon before our birthdays, I took off for the Aguán Valley with my friend Iris Munguía, Secretary of Women for FESTRAGRO (Federación de Sindicatos de Trabajadores de Agroindustria), the newly expanded federation of Honduran agricultural workers’ unions, joined by Chema Martínez, at the time still FESTAGRO’s Communications Director, and Gloria Guzmán, one of its organizers.127 Chema was quiet the whole trip; it was like he had a new personality, living with the death threats. At least while he was with me he was less likely to be killed and could breathe a bit. This time we turned right after we crossed main the bridge in Sabá and drove away from the campesino collectives and palm oil estates and toward the opposite end of the valley. The Upper Aguán, along with chunks of land throughout the rest of the valley and the north coast, has been Dole territory ever since it was conquered in the early twentieth century by its predecessor, Standard Fruit. In 2014, over twenty-four hundred people worked for Dole in Honduras, a third of them women laboring in packinghouses. For complex historical reasons, their biggest union, SUTRAFSCO (Sindicato Unificado de Trabajadores de la Standard Fruit Company, Unified Union of Standard Fruit Company Workers), still had an excellent union contract with Dole, dating back to the famous Honduran General Strike of 1954. The contract included small bits of paid time off for union education.128

The next morning, we drove out along a dirt road near the top of the Aguán and wound back and up and down into a smaller, rolling valley, where a classic banana corporation enclave opened up. It was like going back in time. White, two-story buildings with green trim were arrayed among well-coifed lawns and tall, wide trees—a magic imperial kingdom managed for a hundred years by North American bloodsuckers. In 1950, Ramón Amaya Amador called its banana plantations a green prison, in Honduras’s most famous novel, Prisión Verde. He grew up in Olanchito, right nearby, on the main road.129

We pulled up in front of a small building on the right and trudged up an exterior stairway to a large room upstairs. Thirty-one smiling women banana workers from SUTRAFSCO awaited us—round-faced, round-bodied women in their twenties, thirties, and forties, wearing brightly colored T-shirts or green polo shirts with the union logo, and high-heeled sandals, a few in sleek dresses. Four male leaders greeted us, in jeans and their own matching red polo shirts with union insignia.

Iris took charge and ran a workshop about women’s empowerment. She started with a speech, about everything from supporting women’s self-esteem to gender politics in the family to the importance of women educating themselves about political issues so they could understand their union contracts, the company’s practices, and the broader political world—“So we can sew it all together,” she concluded, deliberately using a metaphor from women’s work in the home.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.