Sarah Bueter is an MCC service worker in Honduras working with MCC partner ERIC (Equipo de Reflexión, Investigación, y Comunicación – Team for Reflection, Investigation and Communication).
It’s early morning, but the temperature is already rising, exacerbated by the heat-absorbent properties of Honduras’ main highway. A caravan of conscientious men, women, and children pull handkerchiefs tighter around their necks to ward off the pernicious sun as they plod from northern Honduras to their capital.
This caravan marches on.
Organized and accompanied by MCC’s partner organization ERIC (Equipo de Reflexión, Investigación, y Comunicación – Team for Reflection, Investigation and Communication), this is the Caravan for Dignity, walking in solidarity with its sister and brother Hondurans fleeing the country, whose chronic crisis has recently been made visible by the joint caravan of over 7,000 men, women, children, and babies. This Caravan for Dignity walks not toward the USA, but towards Honduras’s capital city, Tegucigalpa, to demand justice before a regime that has exacerbated and accelerated the increasingly hostile conditions that force so many to abandon their livelihoods.
ERIC, a ministry of the Jesuits, is actively involved in assisting communities to organize, uphold their sovereignty as a people, and promote an integral human development. Their close accompaniment with the poor has as its end goal the liberation of communities. As Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino writes, “There is no doubt that the only correct way to love the poor will be to struggle for their liberation.”
As I monitor the caravan from the roadside, I’m reminded of our call as Christians:
The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind,to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19)
Setting the oppressed free in Honduras requires addressing migration’s root causes. ERIC’s participation in the Caravan of Dignity stems from the recognition that violence is not dissociated from concrete historical realities and the socio-economic structures that shape them.Violence is much more than a gunshot or physical blow. Gandhi reminds us that, in our commitment to nonviolence, “the whole gamut of man’s activities today constitutes an indivisible whole. You cannot divide social, economic, political, and purely religious work into watertight compartments.”
Addressing the root causes of migration provokes retribution in Honduras, and the communities and ERIC face repression and slander. Yet as martyr and saint Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero preaches,
“[O]ne must not love oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life which history demands of us, that those who would avoid the danger will lose their life, while those who out of love for Christ give themselves to the service of others will live, like the grain of wheat that dies, but only apparently.”
The caravan marches on.
From my perch among the human rights observers and coordinators distributing water, I watch the line of Hondurans approach a recently constructed tollbooth that effectively privatized the main highway. It’s a telling scene. To the tollbooth’s left, dozens of police officers stand in military gear, a sign of the increasingly militarized state of the country. To the tollbooth’s right, a lone campesino pays the caravan no mind, but methodically plants seeds on his parcel of land from a belted tin can.
The juxtaposition of the police and the lone campesino is a scene of violence, but suspended—no blow is thrown. It reveals a violence deeper than the bullet of gangs and a poverty greater than quantifiable unemployment rates. Here in this scene, I see root causes of migration.
Here is increased militarization and the threat of brutal repression against those who resist. Here is inimical wealth inequality. Here is a traditional farmer now threatened by the encroaching extractivist model of “development” that contributes to Honduras’ environmental destruction and deteriorating social fabric. And here, underlying each of these root causes of migration, as well as those such as gang violence and extreme poverty, is the violence of humiliation and loss of dignity.
The caravan bisects the scene. As it cuts through, I believe that it unifies both police officer and campesino in the quest for a liberated Honduras. This is la lucha, roughly translated as social resistance. La lucha is not only for the liberation of the migrant and the liberation of the farmer, but also for the liberation of the police officer. Their liberation is all bound up together, for all are shackled to the disruptive social evils and systems.
The caravan marches on.
Trappist monk Thomas Merton reflects, “The good is not assured once and for all by one heroic act. It must be recaptured over and over again.” The caravan is wearying. There are miles to go, and even more for the thousands of Hondurans who flee north.The nights make one shiver; the days make one sweat. This is but one action toward building up a just peace, for building peace in Honduras requires the continuous investment in communities’ ability to organize, determine, and carry out their own integral human development.
Despite the chafing jeans and burning sun, the caravan continues to chant and walk with passion. Addressing migration means addressing complex realities. Addressing complex realities is building peace. And building peace is this caravan, solidarity in action. Step by step.
The caravan marches on.