NPR “Reports” on How Climate Change is Impacting the Central American Country of Honduras
“The press is the hired agent of a moneyed system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved.” --Henry Francis Adams, acclaimed historian (1838-1918)
One of my main duties as a climate reporter is to expose ubiquitous misreporting at the hands of our most trusted institutions, including the United Nations, the New York times, the Sierra Club and, in this case, National Public Radio (NPR).
I don’t enjoy this task. I would rather tell you to go solar, buy an EV and blame our lack of progress on those annoying “climate deniers.” That would be easy. Easy, but not effective.
The real solution lies in getting our climate news from sources that are not lying on behalf of their corporate sponsors.
“Lying” is a strong word. Reporters are not sitting around making up lies. But they know who signs their paycheck. They know what their editors are looking for, and their editors know what the owners and sponsors are looking for.
It gives me no pleasure to critique NPR. After all, they speak politely and play jazz in the background.
But here we go.
NPR published this article about how “climate change” is affecting Honduras. Uprooted: How climate change is reshaping migration from Honduras
It’s a nice article, by nice people about nice people. It’s a story about Honduran farmers who cannot make a living on their land because of “climate change.”
The term “climate change” is understood to mean that which is caused by excessive emissions of CO2 via the burning of fossil fuels. This is the dominant story in climate coverage. But it omits 1) abuse of the land and how this affects climate, 2) military violence directly sponsored by the United States, and 3) the long history of economic oppression by U.S.-based corporations.
In so doing, this story, and countless thousands like it, lie by omission. It leaves out important facts that, if included, would change the story entirely. The good people at NPR are in a position to uncover these facts. Anyone with an internet connection can expose this brutality. But, in the words of Upton Sinclair, “It’s hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.”
NPR, here and elsewhere, has omitted any (consistent) discussion of the following facts.
U.S. Military Domination
Honduras is home to Palmerola Air Base, the largest military base in Central America. The U.S. military is the largest institutional emitter of carbon in the world and is a notorious polluter, responsible for over half the Superfund cleanup sites in the U.S. Palmerola Air Base is home to over 1200-1500 troops, according to Wikipedia. Supposedly, we are, defending ourselves from some foreign threat.
Nor do they say anything about the violent and ineffective War on Drugs.
Election Interference
They omit any discussion of U.S. election interference as well as CIA-backed coups.
Latin America has long borne the brunt of armed hostility, from the ousting of a very moderate Jacobo Arbenz by the Eisenhower administration, to the assassination of two heads of state within 60 days in 1981 (Jaime Roldos of Panama and Omar Torrijos of Ecuador), to President Reagan’s genocidal war on the duly elected Sandinista government throughout the 1980s, to George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton’s response when the people of Haiti elected the “wrong” guy, the populist priest Jean Bertrand Aristid. And in 2009 President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.
How does this relate to climate change? Well, is climate action a technocratic exercise or a humanitarian exercise? Will we ever be good to the planet if we cannot be good to our neighbors?
IMF and the World Bank
When we are not waging military war on Central America, we are waging economic war. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, both entirely controlled by the U.S., lend money to the elites of poor countries. The elites use the money for their pet projects, such as dams, typically built by U.S. construction firms. Then, when the country cannot pay off the loans, the country’s taxpayers have to pay off the loans under conditions of “austerity.”
Austerity means that when you (the poor country) default on your loans, you have to cut social programs, limit the minimum wage, discourage unions, and transfer your country’s most valuable resources to U.S. corporations. This process is vividly portrayed in John Perkins’ classic exposé “Confessions of an Economic Hitman.”
Trade
Somehow, the elites of the world have made it so that land is dedicated to export crops, not food for local consumption. Land that could be used to grow local food for local people is instead dedicated to plantations for export commodities, like cotton, palm oil and bananas.
To do this, you have to drive peasants from their land. The U.S. has facilitated this process for time immemorial. It’s bad for local water, wildlife and forests. It takes a lot of carbon and “bunker fuel” (the most toxic fuel in existence) to ship these commodities around the world. And it’s bad for the great majority of people in all countries, who could otherwise eat healthy, own their own small farms and breathe fewer gallons of pesticide per year. But it benefits the wealthy, and that’s what really matters.
NPR is not telling you about this, not with any regularity.
Deforestation
According to the excellent environmental news site Mongabay, Honduras lost 37.1% of its forests between 1990 and 2005. Assuming this rate of deforestation has continued--a safe assumption--Honduras has lost over half its forests since 1990.
My sources attribute most of this loss to “illegal logging.”
It’s like, “Yea, but whuddaya gonna do?” (Homer Simpson).
Well, you’re not going to do anything if you’re the U.S. and both political parties are dedicated to supporting coup regimes that have no interest in anything resembling law and order. According to Human Rights Watch, following the 2009 U.S-backed coup, Honduras experienced a 95% impunity rate. This means 95% of crimes go unsolved.
The worst of these unsolved crimes are, of course, murders of innocent people caught in the crossfire of gang violence. But violence and unsolved crimes do not occur at such high rates without the complicity of “public servants,” i.e., the U.S.-backed government.
The Murder of Berta Caceras
Fortunately, authorities solved the 2016 murder of Honduran Environmental Activist Berta Caceres. They convicted eight people, including Roberto David Castillo, former head of a dam company, Desarrollos Energéticos. Caceres had led opposition to dam construction, causing delays and financial losses.
Note that big construction projects, such as dams are only possible with loans from the IMF and the World Bank, who lend to all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons, according to John Perkins (above) and other reliable sources.
Of course, NPR covered the Caceres murder and the conviction. But are they connecting ecological devastation--such as this dam project, which Caceres opposed--with U.S. foreign policy? And are they connecting climate change with ecological devastation? (There is a strong connection between ecological devastation and climate change, a major theme of my reporting.)
CONCLUSION
In summary, NPR is supporting the story that says: We desperately need to lower carbon emissions and then … dust off hands … mission accomplished! 😂
As if lowering carbon emissions will help Hondurans return to a normal life.
No. Hondurans will have a normal life when we start treating them like human beings. To do that, we the people have to be aware of the real problems. That only happens when we know who is telling us the WHOLE truth and who is lying by omission.