kristin-a-musings

It wasn’t the immediacy of gun or gang violence that bannered local newspapers shortly after my arrival in Honduras. The lead story was about red bean hoarding, the primetime gig for Mother Nature and the Bean Profiteers, now playing across Central America.

You may wonder for a moment if you’re reading this right. I did. I consulted my dictionary to verify my translation. Bean hoarding? Still not sure of myself, I asked mi Catracho (my Honduran compañero Fredis) if I’d gotten it right. “Oh, yes,” he said. “You got it right. The price of beans is outrageous…it’s a tremendous problem.”

The staff of life throughout Latin America is the mighty nutrient-rich, hunger-satisfying bean—red beans, black beans, kidney beans, pinto beans. More beans than I can name. In Honduras, red beans are the most popular: Boiled and served “straight up” they are called parados; Mashed and refried into a heavenly nubby paste, they are called refritos. Mixed with rice into the perfect complete protein, they make a happy ‘marriage’ or casamiento. Add a little meat or egg, a tortilla, rice, a sweet plantain and some fresh cheese to the plate if you can afford it, and voilà: You have what is advertised as the plato típico hondureño, a typical Honduran meal, or as I experienced it, the “Blue Plate Special” of the day, available every day, for about U.S.$7.

The headline-stealing stockpile of beans was being intentionally kept off the tables of most Hondurans by the middlemen who stood to profit from the shortage. The scarcity of beans in the Central American marketplace this year has pushed the price of this staple out of reach for most in Honduras, skyrocketing from 28 cents per pound to nearly $1 in recent weeks. If you are one of the 60% of Hondurans who live below the poverty line, this is catastrophic. If you are one of the 3.3 million Hondurans who live far below that line in extreme poverty, it’s cataclysmic.

The riddle of the day is this: If you are earning an unpredictable $1.30 per day and subsisting mainly on rice and beans, what are your chances of eating beans tonight? Are your chances any better if a cache of 300 tons of red beans has been discovered and seized by Honduran security forces in San Pedro Sula, a 3-hour bus ride away from where you are in Tegucigalpa? The Bean Hoarders of that particular northern trove were still at large, although reports said that their arrest was imminent. How does a government combat the perfect convergence of Climate Change, Organized Crime, and Poverty? Officials announced plans to import beans from other countries, the imposition of price controls to make beans affordable again, and hefty rewards for informants of hoarding activities.

If you’ve paged through guidebooks about Honduras, you may have glimpsed its pine-ridged mountains, pristine beaches, and crystalline waters. If you’ve read State Department warnings about traveling to Honduras or have followed the plight of deportees from the U.S. to Central America, you may know that last year San Pedro Sula, the major Honduran city where the cache of red beans was discovered, topped lists of most violent cities in the world for the second year in a row. You may also understand that the Mara Salvatrucha, a gang that originated in Los Angeles, California, has “gone global”, its new-member recruitment plan in Honduras aimed squarely at recent deportees from the U.S. If you’re examining maps and it occurs to you that Mexico and the borderlands seem rather quiet these days, you just need to look a little further south to discover that Honduras is positioned as the favored way station these days for drug trafficking between South America and the United States.

Honduras. It has long-been among the most beautiful and economically impoverished countries of the Western Hemisphere. If you have studied its geography of poverty, you may know this: The United States’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency is expecting that 60,000 Central American children, many of them Honduran, will be apprehended at the U.S.-Mexican border this year. They will have journeyed over miles of unspeakable danger to reach the United States. They are part of a new wave of immigrants–unaccompanied minors–that U.S. border officials refer to as “the Surge.” The Surge. It seems both perverse and apt that the term we’ve been using to describe sudden increases in troop movements in times of war is also used to describe the movements of masses of young immigrants who are fleeing poverty and violence.

I imagine that those who make it across the border seek opportunity and family who may have gone before them. I imagine, too, that the risks of journey and deportation are outstripped by the possibility of jobs, education, and safety. I wonder how many mothers have said, “Go, m’ijo. You are my hope. Váyase m’ija, you are my salvation.” This is what my friend’s mother said to her nearly 30 years ago when she set out for New York from South America. I imagine this is the timeworn lament of struggling mothers everywhere as they urge their children to cross borders, and even oceans, that might lead them from the misery of dire poverty to a better life.

The infrastructure of Honduras—both physical and familial—has yet to recover from 1998’s Hurricane Mitch, a storm that packed a punch like the more recent Hurricane Katrina did in the U.S.  Mitch killed tens of thousands in the region and displaced 1.5 million Hondurans. Ninety percent (90%) of banana crops, the primary export at the time, were lost along with 17,000 jobs in that sector. Neither banana production nor the number of banana workers has returned to pre-Mitch levels.

Before Mitch and After Mitch. These are the time demarcations of modern Honduran history. On my recent trip, mi Catracho points out the storm-scarred mountains as we drive along the rebuilt road from the capital to Valle de Ángeles and then on to the small town of Cantarranas.  On another day, I study building shells, remnants of the storm, that still haunt the Río Choluteca’s banks in downtown Tegucigalpa. El Mitch lo llevó–Mitch took it. It is a refrain that falls repeatedly from the lips of mi Catracho when he talks of that indelibly etched memory of destruction. 

Before Mitch, most Central American migrants to the U.S. came from the war-affected countries of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Mitch changed the landscape of Honduran migration from a domestic phenomenon to an international one. After Mitch, Hondurans began migrating to El Norte in great numbers; others went to work and study in Spain when economic times were better there. Today Honduran immigrants living in the U.S. are estimated to number about half a million, the majority undocumented. The money sent home by Hondurans who live in the U.S. accounts for about 17% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. Go, m’ijo. You are my hope. Váyase m’ija, you are my salvation.

Mitch, like Katrina, made the poor even poorer. After Mitch, the population of kids sent to live in “orphanages” and “homes for abandoned children” skyrocketed like the recent price of beans. At La Finca de los Niños, the orphanage where mi Catracho was raised after his mother fell terminally ill in the late 1960’s, the population burgeoned to more than 120 kids post-Mitch, stretching and straining its capacity to the max. La Finca now houses 80 boys and girls, more than three times the number of children it sheltered prior to the storm. The After Mitch economics of poverty and migration have changed the language used to describe La Finca and the many other places that had been known as “orphanages” or “homes for abandoned children.” “Homes for children” and “Homes for at-risk children” are now woven into the social fabric of country. Eschew abandonment and death; such excuses for giving a chance to your children are not needed in After Mitch Honduras.

Where there is poverty, hunger occupies a worried and often invisible space in the collective psyche of a people. I had been prepared for the in-your-face violent crimes, the more visible perpetrators of kidnappings, home invasions, and sicario (hitman-for-hire) activities in Honduras. But I wasn’t prepared for the slow, silent violence of hunger, the history of hoarding food in the age of Global Warming that has plagued Central America in the After Mitch era.

And yet, like the mother’s lament for her children and the exodus of migrants from the land of their birth, the story of the red-bean shortage is eerily familiar. Think The Potato Famine, a mid-Nineteenth Century Irish version of Mother Nature and the Bean Profiteers. An agricultural crisis of epic proportions hit Éire (Ireland), the land of my forbears, the land that 12% of today’s Americans proudly claim as part of their heritage. The nasty “potato blight” decimated the major food source of one third of the population, the poorest peasants, who had become potato-dependent for survival. One million Irish died of hunger. Another million emigrated during those seven years of crisis. The genocide and forced diaspora happened despite the fact that enough grain was produced and exported to feed the hungry and avert the monumental effects of natural disaster.

The politics of hunger. The brutality of bean-hoarding. These man-made disasters need not be the inevitable legacy of the poor. But poverty is complex, and until the “global we” has the will to reimagine borders, peace, profit, and so much more, people will continue to flee violence in all its forms. Mothers will continue to urge their children to migrate to secure a better life. And La Madre Naturaleza y Los Acaparadores de Frijoles will continue to headline in a country near you.

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*Catracho is a noun/nickname used to refer to a Honduran man. It originated in the mid-19th century to refer to the victorious Honduran troops of General Florencio Xatruch who had defeated the troops of American freeboater William Walker.