Since the June 2009 military coup, large landowners in the fertile Aguan Valley of Northern Honduras have used the military, police, and private security guards, to terrorize villages and expand their lucrative African palm plantations. Canadian and US corporations are pushing mining and tourist projects that displace Garifuna and other indigenous communities. Popular Movements - under the umbrella of the National Front for Popular Resistance - are targets for assassination and repression. But unions, teachers, campesino organizations, students, artists, the LGBTQ community and others are unified as never before.

Honduras today is a study of terrible violence and repression under a coup-spawned government supported by the United States and Canada. But it is also a study of courage and organizing by a unified, nonviolent citizens’ movement to restore democracy and re-found the State based on economic justice and sustainable development.

Join Rights Action’s Karen Spring, whose experience accompanying the Honduras Resistance, especially the campesino movement which is the primary target of repression, is unparalleled. Karen has led many delegations of US and Canadians since the coup. She will lead the delegation to meetings with the top Resistance leaders and with the most humble of campesino farmers.

DATES: Arrive into San Pedro Sula on Saturday May 19; Depart from Tegucigalpa on Monday May 28. (There are no delegation activities on these days)

This delegation will begin in San Pedro Sula, the gateway to the fertile Aguan Valley and the Caribbean Coast, and will end in the capital city of Tegucigalpa. It will focus on the threats of mining, tourist development, and African Palm monoculture export agriculture, as well as the neoliberal threats to public health and education and political repression of the nonviolent resistance to the coup.

And it will focus on community-based and sustainable alternatives promoted by the popular movements. Delegation members will learn about the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP), a broad-based non-violent movement for democracy that comprises every sector of Honduran civil society: from campesinos, urban workers and indigenous people to the LGBTQ community, artists, musicians and youth.

FEE - $850: This delegation fee will cover two meals a day, hotel (double occupancy), translation, and in-country transportation, including pick-up from and delivery to the San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa airports. The fee does not cover international airfare to and from Honduras.

FOR AN APPLICATION: Write to AFGJ@AFGJ.org

Rights Action and Alliance for Global Justice are both members of the North American Support Committee of the Permanent Human Rights Observatory of the Aguan Valley. This delegation is open to the general public – anyone (citizens, journalists, donors, students, etc) who are concerned about the on-going crisis situation in Honduras. We also encourage people who might consider becoming long-term human rights accompaniers with the Observatory to participate in this delegation.