February 10, 2020 - Meet the Honduran Water Protectors

courtesy: Pablo Ibáñez AraInfo

Most people have heard of the late Berta Caceres, the Indigenous environmental activist and movement leader assassinated for her activism in Honduras. What do you know, more generally, about feminist movements and women’s activism in Honduras? What do you know about Black Honduran women’s struggles?

In the first half of today's show, host Margo Okazawa-Rey speaks with Juana Esquivel, a feminist human rights defender who is one of 12 water-protectors jailed by the Honduran government as she and others struggle to protect natural resources in  Guapinol Honduras. Esquivel was among four activists who toured the US in October 2019 to expose US audiences to current events in their region. 

In the second half of the show, African-American feminist scholar and activist Kia Melchor Hall discusses the situation of Black Garifuna women in Honduras and the connections between their activism with the struggle in Gaupinol and other locations facing the destruction of the land, water, and human life caused by government-supported extractivist industries. Melchor Hall is Melchor Hall is a faculty member in Fielding Graduate University’s School of Leadership Studies in Human and Organizational Development programs. the author of the new book, Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework: Writing in Darkness, just released by Routledge Press.

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Monday, March 21, 2016: Murder in Honduras

Central America is not in the mainstream news as much as it was in the 1980s, but U.S. support for repressive regimes and destabilization of populist governments continues. In 2009, after a military coup ousted the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, Hillary Clinton campaigned actively among U.S. allies in Latin America to prevent Zelaya's return.  In the years since the coup, assassinations and arrests of indigenous, environmentalist, feminist and LGBT activists, repression of journalists, and murders in general, have skyrocketed.  In the last two weeks, two important Honduran environmental and indigenous leaders, Berta Caceres and Nelson Garcia, have been murdered, in what the government describes as random and unrelated acts.  Suyapa Portillo, professor of Chicano/a and Latino/a Transnational Studies at Pitzer College, discusses the life and work of Berta Caceres, who she says never failed to connect the struggle against patriarchy to the fight for land rights.


Click here to listen now. 59:50 min

Also on today's show:
Zika in El Salvador
A sit-down with radio host Kris Welch

Monday August 10, 2015: Countering Dehumanization

Challenging Dehumanization

Interview with Margo Perin

We talk with Margo Perin, founder and director of Write & Rise, about how she uses narrative to help incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, at risk youth, as well as police and their families, heal from trauma.  Perin is the author of the autobiographical novel The Opposite of Hollywood, and contributing editor of the anthologies Only the Dead Can Kill:  Stories From Jail, and How I Learned to Cook and Other Writings on Complex Mother-Daughter Relationships.

"I don't think the system can change unless work is done on both sides." Margo Perin



Listen now or Get MP3. 25:29 min.

Not Throw Away Women: Black and Indigenous Women Disrupt Violence

And from Making Contact: Not Throw Away Women: Black and Indigenous Women Disrupt Violence.  We learn how one community is undoing the silence around the violence women of color face. We also hear about how serial killers were able to hunt down mostly Black women for three decades in South Los Angeles. Then to the Yucatan where pregnant indigenous women struggle under a health care system failing to provide proper medical care.

"If you are a woman of color and you're impoverished, you're at the very bottom and your life is seen as not worth anything."

"We may never know just how many women have died."

Click here to listen to this segment from Making Contact.  There are 4 audio files so be sure to scroll down. 34:21 min.

Host: Laura Flynn and Jasmin Lopez
Contributing Producers: Rochelle Robinson and Karen Stefan Tenorio

Featuring:
Rochelle Robinson, Making Contact Fellow
Kimberly Smith, community member attending Her Resilience mural project
Gabrielle Rae Travis,  Her Resilience Community Outreach Coordinator
Margaret Prescod founder of Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders and host of KPFK’s Sojourner Truth
Mirna Aracely Tuz Acosta, Safe Maternity for the Indigenous Population in East Yucatan
Neyi Amparo Cime Arceo, resident of Xanlah.
Thanks to the Mary Wohlford Foundation for funding towards this program.

For more programs from Making Contact go to: http://www.radioproject.org/.  Making Contact airs every Friday at 3:30 on KPFA 94.1 FM or www.kpfa.org.


Click here to listen to entire KPFA Women's Magazine show. 59:50 min.