Anarchic update news all over the world - Part 2 - 22.05.2018

Today's Topics:

   
1.  France, Alternative Libertaire AL #283 - Honduras: Radio
      Macompo, a community and feminist experience (fr, it, pt)
      [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
2.  Greece, Libertarian Initiative of Thessaloniki: Call for
      anti-war-anti-national course in Larissa Saturday 26/5, 12:00,
      Post Office (gr) [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1





In this state of Central America, one of the most violent on the planet, women are 
organizing to defeat machismo and patriarchy. Presentation of a radio made by women for 
their emancipation. ---- Honduras, a small Central American country of 8.7 million people, 
90% of which is a mixed race and 9% of Amerindians, has been marked by political violence 
since the birth of the sovereign state in 1838. succession of coups supported by the 
United States, marks the country XX th century until today: with the coup of 2009 against 
the democratic president Manuel Zelaya, the Constitution flouted by the current president 
Juan Orlando Hernandez, who represented himself in the elections of 2017 without having 
the right, and the suspicion of electoral fraud that tainted the elections of November 26, 
2017. Private militias protect the interests of the sectors of activity (mining, 
deforestation) in relation to the leaders of the army, and commit murders of activist. es. 
Honduras has the highest rate of political killings in the world, relative to its 
population. Environmentalists and trade unionists are particularly targeted, and impunity 
for social and political crimes is almost total.

Violence is also social with the maintenance of the population, especially the rural 
population, in a chronic underdevelopment, generating well-known illiteracy, delinquency, 
mafia, high infant mortality.

Political and social violence in Honduras
In this climate, the first victims of violence are women. Abortion is prohibited and 
punishable by imprisonment. The morning after pill is strictly forbidden. Violence against 
women every day is extreme: it is estimated that a woman dies every 16 hours. Femicide is 
the second leading cause of death: 95% of reported violence is not punished [1].

Honduran women are at the heart of struggles against deforestation and the privatization 
of health and education. They fight for political and social changes, for a transformation 
of society, a guarantee of a better future for their children. They have everything to 
gain and nothing to lose, not even their lives that are threatened even in the heart of 
their homes. They are at the same time the pillar of the family and the main object of 
violence [2].

Even though they struggle in trade unions or movements alongside men, women in Honduras 
also have a very great capacity to collectively assemble, among women, for local actions 
to transform their daily lives. Thus in La Unión, in Olancho, after Hurricane Mitch in 
1998, a group of women formed to create, manage and animate an associative radio.

The origins of Radio Macompo
The initiative goes to a small French association, the Latin American North-Cotentin 
Committee, some of whose members have stayed in Honduras for humanitarian health 
activities and kept in touch, particularly in Olancho. Olancho is a mountainous region, 
located in the north of the country, which lacks infrastructure. The inhabitants of 
Olancho have the reputation of being rebels to the central government (the Olancho 
demanded its independence in 1877), which has always " punished " them by leaving them in 
a social and economic underdevelopment (the first school dates from 1930 ).

Not having the means to make the emergency, the French association decided to mount a 
long-term project. She sent one of its members to the site to identify the needs of the 
population, that is, the needs of women. The contact was made through the Catholic nuns 
who live there and carry out health activities with mothers and children. They have set up 
a pharmacy of herbal products that they grow and process, a source of income for the 
village women who are employed there.

The women interviewed responded overwhelmingly that the biggest problem was isolation. 
They wanted to have a tool at their disposal to contact each other from village to 
village, to teach literacy, education, health and agriculture training, to spread their 
culture. . They asked for a radio.

Some women in La Uniòn began to meet and formed an association which they named Macompo, 
that is to say Mujeres Activas para comunicación de los pueblos de Olancho. The group 
consisted of teachers who were very motivated by the prospect of having an educational 
tool allowing them to involve both students and parents, a bank employee who volunteered 
to be trained on the radio, and other women around this core.

In each village, a meeting was organized by a woman at her home. The women came from the 
countryside to participate, having walked several kilometers, a child on the back. All 
showed the desire to have a radio for them. Their energy was impressive, at the height of 
their destitution. It was necessary to find a local, acquire the equipment, train 
personnel, buy a frequency and obtain the license to emit. The bishopric proposed to 
install the antenna on a hill belonging to it, without counterpart. It remained to buy a 
frequency whose price, given the corruption, can go double, and obtain a license to issue 
while the state is reluctant to promote totally free radios, that is to say to say 
non-evangelical or commercial.

Feminist and self-managed radio
In 2002, a commercial radio station in La Uniòn ceased broadcasting for economic reasons. 
The French association financed the purchase of the frequency and equipment already in 
place. Radio Macompo began broadcasting on February 14, 2004. Since then it has been 
broadcasting from 5 am to 9 pm.

The radio is objective, service, non-profit. She makes sure to stay independent. It is the 
Women's Radio, for women, led by women with the objective of enabling access to education 
for all through educational programs ; relay local and national information ; to inform 
the inhabitants of Olancho about the health of children and women, including an 
information program on birth control and sexually transmitted diseases, education, 
violence, environment, human rights, and to allow access to national and international 
culture.

The radio transmits in seven very isolated villages of the north of Olancho, about 20 km2. 
A survey conducted in 2007 shows that of the 50,000 inhabitants of the seven villages 
concerned, between 25 and 30,000 listen to Radio Macompo.

The original plan provided for the French association to withdraw completely after three 
years. The salary of the manager was taken care of until the end of 2006. To finance the 
salary and to be totally free from the French association, Macompo set up a coffee 
production and marketing cooperative. Radio Macompo is now part of a community radio 
network. Community radio plays a very important role in the education of women in a 
country where the fertility rate is very high, as well as in teenage pregnancies, and even 
very young girls who are just pubescent.

Of course, the risks are great and require caution. Some radios were closed at the time of 
the coup and during the long years of dictatorship (1972-1983). The women of Radio Macompo 
know how to be cautious and the radio has never, until now, stopped broadcasting for 
fourteen years. But Radio Macompo must also resist the pressure of the evangelicals and 
the Catholic Church who are trying to have slots to proselytize. Religious programs exist 
nevertheless at the request of the inhabitants, without privileging a religion in particular.

Like many others in Honduras, Macompo's women work quietly, but silence is perhaps their 
first and only protection. Beyond the resistance, Honduran women undermine the foundations 
of a patriarchal, macho and violent society. It will no doubt be necessary, when political 
conditions permit, for their actions to become visible, to be recognized, and to be part 
of a political project of social development.

Christine Gillard (AL friend)

Listen to Radio Macompo on Linkedin.com

[1] Report on violence against women in Honduras, July 26, 2007, to be found on Un.org.

[2] " Honduras a Calvary for Women ", Le Monde, November 23, 2014.

http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Honduras-Radio-Macompo-une-experience-communautaire-et-feministe

------------------------------

Message: 2





At the moment, global capitalism is experiencing another structural crisis of 
over-accumulation, which emerges clearly from its inherent internal contradictions. A 
fundamental feature of capitalism is the accumulation of profit through the exploitation 
of human labor and nature. Expansion and reproduction of capital is a necessary condition 
for the perpetuation of capitalism. States as well as capital are expansive, with each one 
wanting to expand its radius of power and influence. In order to survive in market 
competition, capital needs to spread and find international investment paths. The most 
direct way to achieve this is war. ---- As the weather passes and the rivalries between 
states - and especially the major powers - are becoming more and more intense, the 
possibility of a war of enlarged dimensions is quite large. After all, a war of local 
dimensions is being carried out, and even close to us - we see the bombing of the United 
States, Britain, France, Russia and the Assad regime in Syria every day. The big wage of 
the war is the control of rich energy sources mainly in the Middle East and the wider 
eastern Mediterranean. The "big players" on the energy control board are the states that 
are high on the pyramid of the imperialist hierarchy like the US and Russia. Of course, 
regional imperialist powers (Israel, Turkey, Iran, the powerful EU countries) play a minor 
but important role in this game, but having managed to gain relatively high negotiating 
power in the face of superpowers. Greece wishing to prove that it is a "pillar of 
stability and peace" in the Eastern Mediterranean invested in making international 
alliances in the US. However, the chances of engaging the Greek state in a war with the 
Turkish are well founded. In recent months, we have witnessed competition between the two 
countries for the prevalence of each other on energy sources in the Aegean and the Eastern 
Mediterranean. Marine plots, EEZs, airspace, coconuts, and so on are just a few of the 
reasons for a conflict and, by extension, a national war. But for us, this kind of war 
means something very specific: it means war for the interests of our bosses.

At a time when war plans are dwindling and are slowly approaching the "West" itself (eg 
Ukraine), all oppressed and exploited are those who are destined to become northerners in 
the canons of the sovereigns. War is a passage to capital so that it can emerge from the 
structural crisis of over-accumulation that capitalism itself gave birth, destroying 
stable and variable capital - through production and workers - creating new markets with 
business opportunities of excessive profitability, so that capitalists can exploit raw 
materials and workers in utterly derogatory and degrading terms so that capital can be 
reconstructed and developed after a long period of destruction, staring on the corpses of 
the international proletariat.

As anarchists we will not fight for the bosses. We are not going to turn arms barrels to 
our class brothers, from which they are only separated us artificially from top border 
lines, nations and religions, in order to reinforce the disorientation of the underpowered 
political oppression and economic exploitation that exist and divide themselves among 
themselves rather than the community of their material interests. The only war we are 
involved in is the endless social and class war,

To express this, their explicit refusal to fight for the interests of their bosses and 
their explicit aversion to the idea of picking up a weapon against any oppressed, any 
nationality, many comrades all over Greece and all over the world have decide to follow 
the path of total refusal to serve (not serving in the army in any "alternative way"). 
This decision bothers every state mechanism around the world as it challenges the basis on 
which its own existence rests: the "people" rallying around a national idea - always to 
cover up the class exploitation. Against this ideology that all he does is serve the 
interests of capital, we answer that there are no Greeks or foreigners. There are only 
proletarians,

NO WAR BETWEEN THE EMPLOYEES - NO PEACE BETWEEN TAXES

WE DO NOT WANT TO FIGHT FOR THE INTERESTS OF OUR AFFECTS

ANTI-POLITICAL-ANTI-NATIONAL PORIA IN LARISA: SATURDAY, MAY 26

12:00, MAIL SIDE

Eleftherial Initiative of Thessaloniki - member of the Anarchist Federation

https://libertasalonica.wordpress.com/2018/05/18

------------------------------