Honduras’ religious intellectual is Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, AKA ‘vice Pope,’ he was born in Tegucigalpa in 1942. At 19 he joined the Salesians and went on to receive three doctorates. The first one was in philosophy at the “Don Rua” institute in El Salvador, then a doctorate in Theology from the Salesian Pontifical Institute in Rome and Lastly, yet another doctoral title in Moral Theology from Pontifical Lateran University. A bit oddly he also received a diploma in clinical psychology and psychotherapy and has become a professor of moral theology and ecclesiology at the Salesian Theological Institute.

In one of his more significant statements Cardinal Maradiaga pressed for debt forgiveness by financial controllers such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. His eminence Maradiaga doesn’t shy away from controversy, he states that politicians that publicly support abortion excommunicate themselves. Yet another one of his more quoted statements is: “to divert attention from the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, Jews influenced the media to exploit the current controversy regarding sexual abuse by Catholic priests.”

Cardinals to Pope Francis, has also a dark side and was forced to flee a mob at Toncontín International Airport. The Honduran Cardinal has been accused of corruption. The Vatican launched an inquiry into allegations of financial misconduct against Maradiaga, including large sums received from the Honduran government through a Church-controlled agency. In other words, Maradiaga is no stranger to controversy. Like him or not, he is the leading intellectual Honduran voice of the current times.

Independent artists and thinkers shape Honduras’s soul.

Not many Honduran musicians could be called intellectuals, but one exception was Guillermo Anderson who performed dozens of times on Roatan. Guillermo Anderson was in many ways the national musician of Honduras and the voice of the country’s soul.

He composed the lyrics of his songs about ecology, landscape, social ills and Honduran idiosyncrasies. Guillermo Anderson, 1962-2018, was perhaps the most widely known Honduran singer and musician. His musical group played Garifuna percussion and emulated the sounds of Honduras’ Caribbean coast. He combined reggae with salsa and Garifuna Punta and parranda music.

His song “En Mi País” for example, became practically a second national anthem in Honduras. “En mi país rumor de mar, selva y quebrada. Están el sabor de la naranja y la guayaba. Está el color de la flor que no marchita. Está el olor a café en la tardecita,” Anderson nostalgically sang.

Honduras is home to Copan, the ‘Athens’ of Mayan Civilization, and home to Honduras’ premiere archeologist Ricardo Agurcia Fasquelle. This renowned archeologist was born in 1952, in Tegucigalpa, hailing to decadence to French ancestry.
Agurcia graduated from Duke University and received his MA from Tulane University. In 1989 he discovered the fascinating Rosalila Temple in Copán. Agurcia’s research focuses on the founder of the dynasty YaxK’uk Mo’ and the uniquely preserved Rosalila Temple, has a cave and a symbolic passageway to the world of the dead. He specializes in the temple number 16 associated with K’inichYaxK’uk’ Mo.’

Rosalila Temple sits in the middle of a long sequence of constructions built over 400 years by the ancient Maya. It is built in the year 571 AD by Moon Jaguar, the 10th ruler of Copán. Just like all the other buildings in the central axis of the Copán Acropolis, it is dedicated to the memory of the founder of the dynasty, K’InichYaxK’uk Mo’.

Agurcia is also the director of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History. He developed a hypothesis that the wood used in the construction on the temples caused a major deforestation of the area. With Virginia M. Fields and Dorie Reents-Budet he authored “Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship.”

Honduras is full of stories; stories that defy belief, stories that hold the key to understanding history and geopolitics of the western hemisphere. Fortunately there are several writers that write down these stories. Writer Julio Escoto was born in San Pedro Sula in 1944. He studied at a Teaching University in Tegucigalpa and at the University of Florida and in 1976 he moved to Costa Rica where he founded CSUCA (Asuntos Culturales del Consejo Superior Universitario Centroamericano).

Escoto received an MA degree in Spanish American Literature at the University of Costa Rica, and in 1986 he returned to Honduras to take the position of the literature professor at the UNAH. He was an editor of a literary journal “Imaginación.” He writes a column for El Heraldo and is the director of the National University of Honduras.

Escoto is a Honduran short-story teller, a novelist and an essayist. His notable novels include El árbol de los pañuelos, Días de Ventisca, Noches de Huracán, El General Morazán marcha a batallar desde la Muerte, and Rey del Albor.

Honduras is full of stories; stories that defy belief.

Poetry gives us an insight into a human soul and poets give us a glance at what is the Honduras soul. Poet Roberto Sosa, born in Yoro in 1930, was considered the greatest living poet in Honduras. While it is Nicaragua that is the cradle of Central American poetry, Sosa has brought a Honduran voice to the top of poets of the region.

His poems were translated into several foreign languages and he was awarded the Adonais Prize in Spain, and Casa de las Americas Prize in Cuba, and the prestigious Order of the Arts and Letter in France. Sosa was an editor of Presente Magazine and was president of the Honduras Journalists’ Union.
He also taught literature at the UNAH.

His poems: The Common Grief and The Return of the River were some of his most known. “Nothing flickers now but pain… In this instant that is already eternity… And a day,” eloquently wrote Sosa in The Common Grief. While he passed away in 2011, his presence is still felt.

Few of us question the lack of responsibility in attempting a precarious journey like that. Even fewer discuss the toll it takes to bring up a child without a father or a mother. That youngster will most likely have low self-esteem, more likely will drop out of school, and more likely join some of Honduras’ notorious gangs. The absence of these migrants from home contributes to the destabilization of the already weak fabric of the Honduran society.

The migrant’s children are taken care of by extended family if they are lucky, or by gangs if they are not. The migrants pay thousands of dollars to travel to the US and that debt is guaranteed by families that stay behind.

Irresponsible dreams of economic riches in far away lands are nightmares for Honduran families left behind. Currently $10,000 is being raised on Roatan for the release of two Roatan residents, Elvis Gutierrez and his son, who have been kidnapped by the Zeta Cartel during their trek across Mexico. Sadly, payment of extortion money to kidnappers not only encourages further kidnappings, it also offers no guarantee that the victim will be released alive.

The life of Honduran migrants with no language or professional skills that do make it to US is far from easy. Many women end up working as cleaners, while men end up working at construction jobs and chicken slaughterhouses. These “dream chasers” are often paid off books, live in fear of immigration authorities and acquire no benefit of US social security pensions.

These migrations are a manufactured phenomenon.

The disintegration of Honduran families, the boom of street gangs and focus on material growth has caused a steady degradation of the fabric of Honduran society and rise in the Honduran security state. While violence terrorizes Hondurans at home, the armed to the teeth Honduran police and military patrol the streets and trolling facebook posts. That is just part of the emotional and economic cost paid, originating from disintegrated families and fractured communities.

According to World Bank, Honduras has the world’s ninth largest share of remittances as part of its GDP. In 2018 it reached 20.1% of the country’s GDP and continues to rise. Honduras has gradually joined the ranks of Haiti, South Sudan and Gaza as a place that exports its people as a resource. Honduran migrants bring more cash for government officials then coffee. Stateside companies like Western Union or Tyson Chicken benefit greatly from Honduran labor and remittances.

The systematic exploitation of Hondurans isn’t just happening due to incompetence and corruption, it is in its nature malevolent. These migrations are a manufactured phenomenon and migrants are being used to destabilize traditional, family centered societies and debase whatever remains of Western culture.

The central American migrant caravans’phenomena are organized by nonprofits, Pueblo sin Fronteras, and CARA, a coalition of four other NGOs (non-governmental organizations) three of which are funded by George Soros. Soros, a billionaire currency manipulator and revolutionary agitator, who uses his front groups to promote global social causes, useful to the oligarchs he serves. Soros’ NGOs have been promoting euthanasia and abortion since 1990s, drug legalization in the 2000s, and for the last seven years, the issue became open borders in selected countries: yes, for Europe and North America, but not Japan, Israel or Saudi Arabia.

In 2008 Honduran President Manuel Zelaya said at a Soros funded Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy conference held in Tegucigalpa: “Drug use ought to be legalized as a way to combat violence.” Soros has been part of the 2009 upheaval in Honduras and continues is interest in the present crisis.

While we are told that economic wealth is very important to our happiness, this is a lie. What makes us happy is family, fulfillment in our work and appreciation of our fellow neighbors and coworkers.

What we should be discussing, is not how to help Honduran economic migrants get to the US, but how to keep their skill, energy and family obligations here. Hondurans have found themselves as useful pawns in the global game of forced, coordinated population exchange.