Honduras

Lost and Found

Jessica Isla

20/08/2012

Opinión

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Yesterday I lost my son.

My son will be turning two and has a beautiful name that means message or word. Born into a period of violence because of the coup in Honduras, he was for many of us a symbol of life and hope amidst a reality informed by pain and death.

Panic overwhelmed me when I realized that he was lost. I was unable to react properly. I was unable to ask anyone for his whereabouts. I was unable do almost anything. Someone in my head or outside of me would observe me jumping uncontrollably from here to there screaming out his name. I could feel my breath abandoning me as my throat tightened, my trembling and sobbing body became weak. Complete helplessness.

Fortunately, by those wonders of life, the elderly sisters found him about to cross a street, calm, as if nothing was happening and unaware that I was dying of anxiety.

In those brief moments when the madness threatened to take over my mind, as I suppose has happened to many mothers, I saw myself at the police stations reporting the disappearance of my son. I also saw him, alone and crying when he realized that neither his father nor his sister, nor his mother accompanied him. I also wondered at the time if I would see him alive again. And frankly that’s what terrified me, the possibility of a world without him.

My gaze then turned to other mothers, the friends that endured every day the loss of their sons and daughters. I also thought about the victims of the recent attack in the Honduran Mosquitia. According to various human rights organizations[1] in Honduras the attack was advised by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Patuca in the Honduran Mosquitia, who under the banner of the war on drugs have been present in the region where the U.S. recently opened a military base in 2010.

Four people were killed in the attack, including two pregnant women, Candelaria Jackson Pratt Joan Nelson, a 14 year old, and twenty-one year old Emerson Brooks Hasked Martinez. They traveled the Honduran Mosquitia transport routes by night, in a small boat carrying them to another village.

According to the report entitled “Collateral Damage of a Drug War” by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and Rights Action, “The boat carried passengers with legitimate reasons to travel” in the area[2]. According to the newspaper Proceso Digital, the U.S. Ambassador in Honduras stated, “it is a tragedy, but in this case, as I understand, they were acting in self-defense (DEA) and that it is their duty, because the fight against drugs is important. ”

In light of these statements, one wonders was it necessary to kill a young pregnant women, and a child under the justification of the war on drugs? Were they a threat? It is obvious that no, they could not verify that they were transporting drugs, or weapons, and to date they cannot justify that they acted in “self-defense”, as quoted by the report[3].

Clara Wood, mother of the 14-year-old boy, recounted sobbing in a COFADEH press conference[4], how they started shooting and explained that as they jumped into the water to avoid the bullets Hasked was hit by four shots to the face and legs. She found this out after two days of searching after they found and identified the body. Clara, torn with anguish, wept for her lost son who was slain when he was just beginning to live. The cries of the other mothers accompanied Clara’s. Hopeless, inconsolable cries.

It’s amazing how many memories are contained within a short span of time and how “life passes before our eyes”. That’s what happened to me in the short time that I lost my son. I was overwhelmed with so much angst, this feeling of interconnectedness with others, and the thought that my situation could easily be their reality. I needed to know nothing bad had happened to him, that I would find my son safe and sound so that the world, my world, could keep spinning.

Amid the tears and shortness of breath, and with the child in my arms, relieved but still more terrified by that brief glimpse of misfortune, a woman approached me out of nowhere with a bottle of water and said: “Please, take it, that happens to us sometimes”. I thanked her infinitely, although I could not articulate any words. I only remember her brown face, her hair in a ponytail and a touch of blue in her eyes.

I thought with relief in the solidarity and strength we as a people have recovered after the coup and I say this not only as mere demagogic speech. Sometimes when you least expect it, solidarity bursts in your face like a gush of fresh air, a shower of flowers. A small gesture that reminds us that despite the burden we carry of violence, underdevelopment, poverty and the rawness of militarization, they have failed to stifle solidarity and our ability to feel with the other, to hug her, to be with her.

We are with Clara Woods and the families of victims of La Mosquitia. We want our solidarity to reach them in a warm embrace not only in the form of a caress, a glass of water, a shared memory, or a shoulder to mourn on but also in the form of justice for the victims, the cessation of attacks on civilians, the withdrawal of the region’s army and U.S. military bases. The pain of Clara and the other mothers is also ours.

That way we remember that our cries of indignation go out and find us every day here in Honduras. Although sometimes it may appear to be lost, although sometimes it seems that the world is falling because we cannot find it. However small it may seem, it is what keeps us standing.

- Jessica Isla is a Honduran journalist, author, and member of Feminists in Resistance. She collaborates with the Americas Program as a monthly columnist.

Source: Americas Program http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7779

https://www.alainet.org/en/active/57337?language=en