Germany’s ruling SPD party is ready talk reparations with Poland. The Polish government is demanding 6.6 trillion zlotys, or 1.6 trillion US dollars, in reparations from Germany for material and humanitarian losses during the World War II. The Polish government states that a 1953 Stalinist era agreement of relinquishing all reparations claims were made under duress from pressures of the Soviet Union and are therefore are null and void. Polish side claims it never received fair compensation for the 1939-1945 war that left the country in ruins. If the compensation is paid, it would amount to $41,000 per Polish citizen, or 230% of the country’s GDP. That amount surpasses the restitution paid out to Holocaust victims and their heirs that Germany paid out in the amount of $87 billion.

Gangs in Honduran Prisons

On June 20, 46 female inmates were massacred at a Tamara women’s prison outside of Tegucigalpa. The Barrio 16 street members smuggled in guns, grenades, machetes, and flammable liquid before subduing prison guards. The female gang members then attacked a cellblock where a rival gang was housed; victims were shot, hacked with machetes, and set on fire. Honduras, with a network of 21 prisons, is making efforts at replicating neighboring El Salvador’s crackdown against gangs and gang members. El Salvador recently moved 4,000 of its 70,000 jailed gang members to Terrorism Confinement Center, a specially built maximum security prison that can hold 40,000 prisoners.

Nicaragua Distances US for Iran

In mid June, Iranian president Ebrahim Rainsis visited Latin America’s Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. “During all these (years?), you resisted against the conspiracies of imperialism and triumphed,” said president Rainsi to the Nicaraguan parliament. “The United States wanted to paralyze our people with threats and sanctions, but it hasn’t been able to do it,” he told Nicaragua’s president Daniel Ortega. Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Nicaragua in 2007 and this visit is yet another sign of multi polarization of the region and Central America. While the Iranian president visited the most established leftist regimes in the Western Hemisphere, he was not yet invited by the new left governments that took power in Brazil, Colombia, and Chile.

From Volcanoes to Bitcoins

El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele has presented a plan of constructing several volcano powered energy plants devoted primarily to bitcoin mining. This is a fast track project. The state owned geothermic company La Geo estimates that the country generates around 200MW, or 22%, of its energy through geothermal power. The estimates also show the capacity of increasing that to 644MW, where around 70% of El Salvador’s energy would come from volcano power. That would make the country one of the biggest bitcoin miners in the Americas. Volcano generated and geothermal energy bitcoin mining operations have been in operation since October 2021. That was just weeks after El Salvador declared bitcoin, alongside the US dollar, to be its legal tender. El Salvador abandoned its Colones for the US dollar in 2001.

War is good for Business

The Ukraine-Russia war is providing a great boom to international military manufacturing complex Black Rock and other global players. Many new types of armaments are being manufactured, and development in munitions manufacturing should maintain the war for the next decade or two as the wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. The British government is supplying depleted Uranium ammunition to Ukraine. The Biden administration is considering providing Ukraine cluster bombs that are banned by the UK, France and Germany for being too dangerous to civilians. Ukraine is deploying scatter mines that the country itself has banned. Russia has developed intercontinental nuclear “vanguard” missiles that can travel at 27 times the speed of sound, and has stationed them near the Finnish border and other locations. Iran is finishing construction of low cost Shahed kamikaze drones outside of Moscow. Iran’s drone technology comes in significant part from a captured US stealth drone, RQ-170 Sentinel.

Roatanians Line up to Be Counted

“We will have an actual census on ‘adultos’ when we are done,” said Jesús Reyez, coordinator of the project “Identificate” in charge of a team 38 people that conduct the registering of Hondurans in the four municipalities of the Bay Islands.

The last 2012 census undercounted Bay Islanders reporting 59,170 people living on Roatan’s two municipalities. With the new numbers coming during the ID registrations it could become obvious that Bay Islands department is eligible for not one, but two congress seats. The 128 Honduran deputies in Congress are assigned per population and currently each deputy represents around 62,000 Hondurans. Bay Islands department have likely surpassed the 124,000 needed for second deputy.

On national level around 45,000 people are registered for new IDs daily and the data collection is expected to last until December. Around the country there are 86 teams of 3,000 paid employees and volunteers doing ID data processing.

Out of the estimated 8.2 million Hondurans, the government believes 6 million are adults and 5.5 million will end up with new IDs. This ID will have 20 security features including a chip: fingerprints, signature, and photograph with facial recognition. The IDs have to be distributed to individuals before March 14, 2021 in time for the first round of national and local elections in Honduras.

The contract for printing the new Honduran IDs has been awarded to French consortium of Thales and Selp and will be printed by Thale’s subsidiary in Poland. Thales is multinational company specializing in defense and security contract.

According to Rolando Kattan, president of National Persons Registry, the cost of printing the ID will $1.88 per unit. The entire cost of the project is estimated to be $50 million, of which $20 million comes from the donation of the International Development Bank, and the rest from the European Union.

Benjamin Franklin warned that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither.” The two extremes of security are anarchy and prison and not many of us would consider living in either of these extremes.

For many of us living on Roatan, working toward and preserving one’s sense of autonomy is very important. The pirates, sailors, immigrants, desperados, divers, and ex-company men that came here were often searching for that sense of freedom. This is why I like living in Honduras and on Roatan in particular. You can be free and live in conditions that provide basic security, basic infrastructure, basic healthcare and basic order. Orwell wrote that freedom “is the ability to say that two plus two is four. All else will follow.” I think Roatan offers a unique place to state that basic math.

Living on such an island teaches you many things though perhaps the most important is self- reliance. I don’t mean self-reliance as in an individual going it alone, I mean self-reliance in the sense of a community relying on itself. We can’t rely on things going right all the time, or on the government doing its job, nor on Roatan skies unleashing only average rainfalls. Life on the island teaches us to be resourceful, to anticipate crises and to be prepared for them. When hurricane Mitch hit, many islanders were prepared and had plenty of food to share. Island life teaches you to work with others as Roatan is not a place to be alone, or count on government organizations to step in when things get complicated. Here you have to work with your neighbors, friends, sometimes even with individuals you dislike in order to solve issues at hand.

Life on the island teaches to be resourceful, to anticipate crisis

Roatan also teaches you humility. Living in a big city teaches you that consequences of casual individual interactions have little impact on the future, as it is very unlikely you will see that person ever again. Not so on Roatan. Here we constantly run into the same people and relationships do matter.

Living here teaches you to appreciate life. We are surrounded by often rugged coastline, and seas that offer up deluges and occasional hurricanes. We are plagued by power outages, ill-maintained infrastructure, and never-ending traffic accidents that remind us how very fragile life can be.

Island life teaches you that answers to many questions should and will not come from the tax funded, say-it-all and know-nothing government. The solutions to island problems will come from members of community itself. Here, dozens of functions normally fulfilled by government agencies are fulfilled by good-willed volunteers and donors feeling strongly about an issue.

In many places: Nicaragua, Europe, and the US, the public forum, fueled by rampant social media use, is becoming what philosopher Hobbs described as “war of all against all” – an ever increasing compartmentalization of groups and individuals into opposing fractions with differing points of view on things of increasingly less significant, but given increasing exposure. This has produced a reaction from the opposite side: a surge in of authoritarian state and increasingly authoritarian regional state blocks: the Chinese state telling you if you can have a child, the European Union telling you what you can post on social media, the US telling you precisely what to do and how to act in an airport.

While visiting these places is nice, on Roatan two plus two is still four.