I heard this piece several nights ago on the BBC…  I think it is worth the time.  On my first listen, I was only half awake and I heard bits and pieces only…I thought, “Where is this? It sounds like Juarez…”  I heard it again in full.

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“Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world. The People’s Funeral Service deals daily with the fall-out from these extreme levels of violence in the capital city, Tegucigalpa. Set up by the Mayor of the city, it distributes coffins, maintains two funeral homes, and even offers a mobile service where employees take everything necessary for a wake – including bread and coffee – to someone’s house or local church. All of these services are totally free for poor people in the city.”

Click here to read more Click to listen now

Then read today’s NYTimes story about US advisers to Honduran military and police in “fight against cartels…”
Neither story makes me very optimistic that any of these tactics that the  US proposes and/or advises or assists with reduces the violence.  All evidence seems to point to the contrary.  And in my most cynical depressed moments (like now) I believe that the US does not care as long as the people dying are poor Mexicans and Hondurans.  Seems it is all part of the
plan.  Who will be next?  molly

UPDATE:

Wow. Thanks to Dawn Paley for her excellent and rational critique of this
NYTimes article on the “new” US war in Honduras…I admit that when I read
it, I felt a kind of dread that interfered with clear thinking…the
article seemed to DREDGE up so much of that slime that accumulates at the
dirty bottoms of things. Dawn’s commentary is essential to clear away the
muck in order to get a good look at what this is really about.
I will note that this line from the end of the article:
“There are ‘insidious’ parallels between regional criminal organizations
and terror networks.”  … this really got my attention also.  In Central
America all though the 1980s (and beginning even earlier) all it took was
to call it COMMUNIST and then it could be attacked, disappeared, killed…
And IT could be a student, an indigenous person, a human rights worker, a
religious worker, a labor organizer or anyone else who might be seen as a
leftist or progressive or some other challenge to entrenched oligarchic
power allied with the US in those years. Now, the codeword is terrorist or
drug criminal. Or narco or zeta… This is the “new” National Security
Doctrine. And no, it isn’t new. But the result is the same: DEATH. I highly
recommend Dawn Paley’s post… molly