Honduran priest serves with his life at risk

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Seven months after a colleague in human rights work in Honduras was murdered, Jesuit Father Ismael Moreno is pragmatic about the possibility that he will meet the same fate.

Father Moreno, director of the Jesuits' Radio Progreso in northern Honduras, told Catholic News Service in a Nov. 14 interview in Washington that the April 11 murder of the station's marketing director, Carlos Mejia Orellana, remains unsolved. Mejia was stabbed to death in his home in El Progreso, near the crime-ridden city of San Pedro Sula.

Mejia also worked with Father Moreno in the Jesuits' research and advocacy organization, Team for Reflection, Investigation and Communication, known by its Spanish acronym, ERIC.

The gunshots heard regularly around the country "we say are normal," Father Moreno said. "That's probably how I'll die, not from natural causes.

"I am prepared for that," he said. "If something happens, people are prepared to run things. They know where my papers are."

Mejia's wasn't the first murder to hit the organization. In 2011, Nery Jeremias Orellana, a correspondent for Radio Progreso, was shot to death in a killing that also remains unsolved.

Father Moreno said authorities have refused to release any information about the investigation into Mejia's death, beyond saying that there was an arrest warrant on the books.

"They wouldn't show it to us or give us a name," he said. Then, about a month ago, the prosecutor in charge of the case was killed, Father Moreno said. The prosecutor also was investigating the August murder of Margarita Murillo, a prominent advocate for peasant landowners.

The priest said that on a day-to-day basis, his relatives and friends in Honduras face more risk of death than he does, because everyone's life is rife with danger from out-of-control crime.

"Our team has a security protocol," he said. "We don't leave town alone and we always tell someone where we are going."

"But we have a normal life," he said, in part because of a security guard assigned to him by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Father Moreno said the Honduran government also offered him the protection of a police officer, which he declined.

"According to studies, seven out of 10 police officers in Honduras are connected to organized crime," he said. "That would be like putting the enemy at my side."

Father Moreno explained that the dangers to journalists and social activists like himself in Honduras come not from being on the political left or the political right.

"The problem is if you transmit news" about what is really happening in his country, he said. "The law of the strong" is what prevails in Honduras, Father Moreno said. "And I am not one of the strong."

Father Moreno was in the United States for a series of events, including appointments with members of Congress, with members of the Jesuit community, and a planned speech at the 25th annual SOA Watch protest and vigil at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas. Graduates of the school in Fort Benning, Georgia, have been linked with human rights abuses across Latin America. Advocates seek to close the program, which trains military from across the Americas. This year's protest and related programs are Nov. 21-23.

He said that in his meetings in the U.S. he has been striving to help Americans understand why so many Hondurans have fled the country, including more than 18,000 unaccompanied minor children who were apprehended at the U.S. border in the 2014 fiscal year.

Ten years after the adoption of the Central American Free Trade Agreement, Father Moreno said it is time to recalibrate the trade compacts. CAFTA has brought new capital to his country, he said, but only to the tiny percentage of business owners who already controlled most of Honduras' wealth, he said.

Far too much of the profit generated by the loosened restrictions on trade goes out of the country, Father Moreno added.

The high rates of violence in Honduras -- it has one of the highest murder rates in the world, according to the United Nations -- its unemployment rate of more than 50 percent, the rapid deterioration of living standards and the high rate of immigration to the United States and other countries are all related to the inequities of CAFTA, he said.

He said he is encouraging a two-pronged solution to some of the economic problems: a "deep examination of this economic model" and investment to strengthen small and medium-sized businesses.

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