The people of Honduras will know how to answer to the imperialist, academic plunder.

Another Bowman Expedition, now in Honduras

By Gilberto López y Rivas

Source: La Jornada

The people of Honduras will know how to answer to the imperialist, academic plunder.

Since the publication of my article on the silences and complicity of academia and school professionals of social sciences regarding the Bowman Expeditions in our country through the so called Proyecto México Indígena (Native Mexico Project) (La Jornada,9/5/14), I received an email from Honduras in which a native professor from Honduras informed me of his concern regarding what seemed to be another U.S. geo pirate counterinsurgent project in the ethno regions of this sister republic.

The letter contained a document in the enclosed archive in which the University of Kansas made an agreement with the Francisco Morazán National Teaching University (UPNFM) the native project that publically called for a work contest whose requirements included: being a first or second year student of UPNFM, belonging to any of the indigenous peoples of Honduras and their respective native language, recognized leadership in their community with a basic knowledge of computer sciences for the collection of data. Those interested should present their documents in the Faculty of Humanities in this university between October 24 and 31, 2013. In other words U.S. researchers required assistants – informants – linguists – operators in the indigenous communities for the collection of information of already ongoing research whose objectives, purposes and sources of funding are not specified in the notification and much less consulting the peoples and their organizations: the modus operandi of the Bowman Expeditions.

Another Honduran colleague sent me some information and that most confirms the early fears. It is a research project on a national level whose title, this time, “Indigenous Municipalities, use of land and conflicts”, a recurring subject of the counter insurgent geographers and their object is to digitally map all the native communities.

The composition of the Board of Directors leaves no doubt: in charge of the research is Peter Herlihy, the very same cultural geographer how coordinated the Native Mexico Project, two more geographers whose names are not supplied (Could one be Jerome Dobson who recently received 3 million dollars for research in “Central America”?) and a social anthropologist that could not be left out in the Bowman Expedition. Herlihy is known in Honduras for his work in a German agency of cooperation in the 90s in the indigenous organization Moskitia and for participating in the zoning of the biosphere of the Platano River – in the opinion of our colleague – and has much influenced in the Moskitia´s; already known for collaborating in the management of natural resources”.

What is perhaps not public knowledge in Honduras are the accusations in Mexico that have named professor Herlihy for being repeatedly financed by the Department of Defense of the United States, specifically by the Office of Foreign Military Studies (based in Kansas) to do research conserved geo-piracy and practice of cultural geography aimed at counter insurgent objectives and corporative benefit.

The source in Honduras points out that certain Tawahkas and Miskitos native leaders were in favor of the project ant that even some were invited last year to the University of Kansas. The offer of paid work for students and professors of the “host nation”, a term used in the manuals of counter insurgence) as well as signing collaboration agreements with local university, play their role for the unrestrained support of U.S, “scientific interventions” that deal with a wide range of occult interests and seem to be very discrete to reveal their sources of funding. At the same time university authorities are at least left in the dark regarding the key factor of all exchange of inter institutional “academic and scientific cooperation”: “follow the money, advised Dark Throat to the journalist who investigated the Watergate affair: if the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosi in Mexico and now the Francisco Morazán National Teaching University in Honduras had “followed the money” they would have arrived at the Pentagon. The other hypothesis is that these authorities were aware of the economic support of the Office of Foreign Military Studies or their affinity with the ideological and pragmatic reasons had no trouble to continue maintaining the “scientific exchanges” with the geographers of the University of Kansas. In this direction it is significant that the promotional Society of American Geographers using the Indigenous Mexico project as a “blue print” for the Bowman Expeditions that hold the logos of the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, the University of Kansas, the University of Carleton, Canada, the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources with a very visible logo of the Foreign Military Studies of the Office of the U.S, Department of the Defense. See to believe! In any case it can be explained – in part – that the Garifuna organizations have been denouncing that the Bowman Expeditions in their country have communicated that their charges are amply ignored by the Honduran academic and government authorities and the mass media. It is not by chance that Honduras, a country that has suffered a fierce coup with the hidden support of the United States, with an important citizen, native, black and popular movement brutally repressed, many deaths, missing, prisoners and tortured and with at least eight military bases and key U.S. intelligence services in their territory; is the subject of the Bowman Expedition. We should recall that the counter insurgent geographers appear in moments of full mobilization of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). The Honduran people will know how to answer this academic and imperialist plunder.

For my buddy Galeano, vote for the Zapatista dignity.

Translated by the Network in Defense of Humanity

Tweet