ENLACE -- Christian Commission for Development

ENLACE
CCD Newsletter: February 1998

The newsletter of the Christian Commission for Development in Honduras February 1998 - Number One

Printed copies of Enlace can be obtained by contacting CCD at ccd@sdnhon.org.hn or at Apdo 21, Colonia Kennedy, Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Enlace is published twice a year. Please contact us to add or remove addresses from this mailing list.

Contents of this issue:
1. Women build a new future - resisting violence, improving lives
2. Letting nature heal - traditional medicine finds new acceptance
3. Clues to reconciliation sought in secret documents from past
4. In the countryside, making a difference
5. A brief history of CCD
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Women build a new future
Resisting violence, improving lives

"Women are going forward," a group of women enthusiastically shout at the beginning of the 60-second radio message, "and those who don't like it can just learn to live with it!" Within minutes of broadcasting the short spot, the Choluteca radio station starts receiving phone calls from men who complain the message is divisive. None of the men are willing to give their name, however.

Machismo has deep roots in Honduran culture, and the struggle to overcome it, to build a society in which women and men enjoy equal respect and opportunities, is long and difficult. Yet it's a struggle to which the Christian Commission for Development is committed.

The radio spot was produced in August by a group of women in Nacaome who all participate in various CCD programs. They wanted to alert their neighbors to a September gathering of rural women at CCD's Monte Carmelo retreat center near Tegucigalpa. The "National Women's Encounter" was to be another step forward in building a national movement of peasant women, so the women in their radio message discussed how rural women had been marginalized for too long, and called for women to discover a new sense of their own power. They intended the message to be provocative. Judging by the response, they succeeded.

The week-long Encounter brought together 150 women representing 73 rural communities. All had participated in a series of 20 "pre-encounter" meetings during the preceding months. More than 3,000 women participated in the earlier gatherings, each group assigned one of five specific themes for discussion, including women's economic rights, women's political rights, and the rights of women to education, health, and property ownership. Each pre-encounter drafted a series of specific proposals to the National Encounter where the themes were discussed at length.

The women analyzed, dreamed, and made concrete proposals for change in their communities and organizations, including CCD. They talked about forming a national peasant women's organization. Although several peasant groups exist in Honduras, they are run by men and tend to downplay issues of particular importance to rural women. Since the meeting ended, the discussion of a new organization has continued in followup sessions being held around the country.

The gathering was the sixth such Encounter CCD has sponsored in the last eight years. Twenty-five quiet women came to the first one in 1989. Sixty showed up for the second Encounter. Hundreds wanted to come to the 1997 gathering but participation had to be limited because of space restrictions.

According to Teresa López, coordinator of CCD's department of organization and gender, the women who participated in the encounter "have the capability to analyze and interpret their reality. They are the experts. CCD's role is to facilitate their coming together and to nurture their efforts to organize."

Gladys Reyes, an indigenous Lenca woman from Intibucá who participated in the September gathering, says Honduran women "have to organize ourselves in order to live better. We're not beggars, we're only demanding the rights that legitimately belong to us. We can't be kept just in the kitchen any longer, we've got to get out and learn, and then organize ourselves to live better in our communities."

Reyes came to the meeting from her isolated rural village of San Miguelito, a place that's changed dramatically in recent years. With CCD's help, Reyes and other villagers have carried out a number of development projects, including the installation of latrines and the construction of a potable water system that delivers clean, safe water to each of the village's 22 houses. "We women used to have to walk 40 minutes to carry the water home on our heads," Reyes recalls. Women have been at the forefront of change in San Miguelito.

Reyes says the community's advances are in danger, however. "There's a man with lots of money who claims that he owns the spring where our water comes from," she says. "He wants to take our water away. But we won't let him. We're forced to struggle to keep it."

Reyes' determination is typical of the new generation of rural women in Honduras. "The women who participated in the encounter spoke with clear, strong voices about what they've already done and what they'll continue to do to improve the quality of their lives," says Lyda Pierce, a United Methodist missionary from the U.S. who works with CCD. "Most of these women went home to dirt-floored houses in remote corners of the country, but because of they're involved in this process their children are healthier, they are stronger, they participate in local governments, they organize for better prenatal care and to gain credit for small businesses, and they are able to challenge abusive and violent relationships. They are rereading the Bible from their own experience, and incarnating in their families and villages the abundant life that's promised them by the Gospel."

An eye on gender

When CCD was founded almost 16 years ago, the organization committed itself to accompanying the poor and oppressed of Honduras in their struggle for self-determination. Yet according to Norma Elisa Mejía, CCD's program director, during the preceding years the founders wrestled with exactly who were the most poor and oppressed in Honduras. "Are we going to talk in abstractions or are we going to talk about concrete realities?" asks Mejía. "Because it's obvious that if we're going to talk about economic and political realities, then women and children are the most marginalized people in our midst." Mejía says such questioning convinced CCD leaders in 1987 to design programs targeted especially at rural women.

Yet in many non-governmental organizations such "women's programming" can often serve as an excuse to leave "normal" programming—which absorbs the majority of resources—unaltered. So in 1989 CCD staff committed themselves to carrying out all of the organization's programs with an eye on gender issues. As a result, CCD makes an intentional effort to include women in the design and execution of all programs.

In credit programs, women are guaranteed at least 40 percent of all rotating funds provided to communities. And according to Sophia Pineda, CCD's credit coordinator in Intibucá, women are more responsible when it comes to paying back small business loans. "One hundred percent of the loans we've made to women's groups are paid back, sometimes months ahead of schedule," says Pineda. "But only about one-third of the loans we make to men are paid back."

Remijia Dominguez, an indigenous Lenca woman from Quebrada Honda who participates in a baking cooperative that got a loan from CCD, "We women are just as capable as men, but the whole world says that because we're women, because we're indigenous, we can't do anything. CCD is the only group that takes us Lenca women seriously."

In its community-based health programs, women and children take priority. "The subordination of women often begins with health, with her lack of knowledge about her own body," says Mejía. She says family economies, often controlled by the husband, rarely leave money available for women's health care. And government programs are limited. Reyes, for example, says she can walk three hours to a government health post and receive free attention. Yet if she needs medicine, there's none available, and she seldom has money to fill a prescription at a pharmacy. So CCD places an emphasis on training lay health workers and midwives, as well as helping the Honduran poor recover the rich resources of traditional medicine.

In CCD's pastoral and theological work, women play a key role. According to Mejía, this has been easy to do with Catholic women, as long as reproductive rights weren't discussed. Working with evangelical women has been more difficult, Mejía says, since "hierarchical authority gets expressed in a more heavy-handed way among evangelicals. The pastor, always a man, has to give permission for the women to go to workshops or seminars with other women."

According to Heydee de Bueso, director of interinstitutional relationships, even within CCD there were struggles over gender issues. "There were some male colleagues in CCD who resisted these changes," she says. "They felt threatened. We had to show them that what we wanted was equality. It was a long process, but we've all learned a lot, and now have a clear vision of mutual respect."

An alternative shelter

The special attention to women in CCD's programming has led the organization in new, previously unforeseen directions. "As we got more and more involved with women, some of the women started coming to us for help with the situation of domestic violence in which they were living," recalls Mejía. "We couldn't turn our backs on them, so as an institution tried to respond. Yet as we knocked on doors looking for someone to help these women, we discovered there were few options available." Mejía says that just before Christmas 1995, an indigenous Miskita woman on the Caribbean coast asked CCD for help in escaping a horrible situation of incest. CCD brought the women to the capital only to discover that the only women's shelter in the whole country was closed for the holidays. And in several other cases, although the shelter was open, it was terribly overcrowded.

"We realized that CCD couldn't continue helping women learn about and struggle for their rights unless we were willing to constantly accompany them in the process," Mejía says.

That experience helped CCD conceive how it could make a unique contribution. Using land it obtained an hour outside of Tegucigalpa, in 1996 CCD began construction of an alternative shelter. Unlike the existing shelter in the capital, which is run by a private women's group and provides emergency care for up to two months, CCD's shelter will house women who need a longer time to learn new job skills or otherwise recover from the trauma from which they've escaped.

Staff at the Tegucigalpa shelter will refer women to CCD whom they believe will need the extra time to restart their life.

Using mostly volunteer labor provided by work teams from the United States, CCD began construction in February 1997. No one will be crowded together; ten individual houses are being built on the 10 hectare (23 acre) site, providing the women and their children with independence and privacy. Each house has two bedrooms, kitchen, living and dining rooms, and a patio. Almost four houses were completed by year's end, progress this year will depend on donations and labor from supporters. Several common buildings are also being built. CCD leaders hope the shelter will eventually be self-sufficient; women living at the site will work together in producing honey, corn, and beef cattle. They'll also bake bread to sell.

CCD is part of the Collective Against Violence Against Women, a coalition of 15 women's groups. The Collective has pressed for years for a law against domestic violence as a way of saving women's lives. According to Virginia Figueroa, the government's viceminister of health, four of every ten Honduran women are physically assaulted by their male partners, and every month an average of six Honduran women die from this violence.

Pressured by the Collective, the Congress finally approved a watered-down law in September, yet as of early February it had yet to be published in the official government newspaper—and thus had yet to take effect. Women's advocates nonetheless applauded the new law as a positive step. "Our victory wasn't so much to get the law passed as to force the Congress to discuss the problem, to begin to admit that there can be relationships between men and women that aren't plagued by violence," says Enma Mejía, director of the country's existing women's shelter. "For centuries, people saw violence against women as something natural, but now they're beginning to question it."

As a result of changing social attitudes, complaints to law enforcement agencies—including the Special Prosecutor for Women, an office created in 1995—have skyrocketed in recent years. Yet when prosecutors present the complaints to the courts, the response is often frustrating for the victim. "Sometimes it takes five months for the courts to hear the cases," Enma Mejía says. "When we protest, the judges say they've got more important things to do, like investigate the theft of a cow. So we tell them we'll bring in the woman when she's dead. It seems that you have to produce a cadaver before the authorities will act."

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Letting Nature Heal
Traditional medicine finds new acceptance

When Hernán Cortés landed in the New World, he was surprised by the wealth of herbs, roots, and plants used by the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica to cure whatever ailed them. In his second letter to Emperor Charles V, Cortés described the natural medicines available in the city of Tenochtitlan: "There is a street of herb vendors, where you can find all of the medicinal roots and herbs offered by the soil. There are houses of apothecaries where they sell the medicines already made up in ointments and poultices."

The culture which produced this bounty of natural medicines was soon under siege, however. The practitioners of indigenous medicine were persecuted as part of the generalized war against culture launched by the colonizers. The knowledge of how to use plants to cure illness became a subversive memory among the poor.

More than four centuries later, in the 1940s, northern pharmaceutical companies invaded Mesoamerica and the rest of the Third World to find both cheap labor for production and an expanding market of people that needed convincing that modern ways were best. Signs for Alka-Seltzer appeared outside corner stores. Advertising persuaded people, particularly urban dwellers, that pharmaceutical products from the north were better than the remedies prescribed by grandma. As traditional medicine was denigrated, its practitioners were persecuted anew as witches and charlatans. Even God was on the side of gringo medicine, and the village healer was denounced as demonic by priest and preacher alike.

Recovering the past

Although transnational drug companies still view the Third World as one big untapped market, throughout the region interest is growing in recovering a heritage that can mean a better quality of life for the poor majority. Researchers, health educators, and church activists are seeking out old women and others who still know how to use plants to cure infections and treat diseases. A virtual renaissance in knowledge is taking place, as people search for readily-available medicines that don't require scarce foreign exchange to purchase.

In some countries, political pressures have sped up the search for alternatives. Neighboring Nicaragua made great progress in "rediscovering" natural medicines during the 1985-1990 trade embargo imposed by the U.S. When drugs from the north were no longer available, Nicaraguans looked closer to home--in the forest and their own backyards--for curative resources.

Elsewhere in the region, the imposition of neoliberal economic measures has motivated the search for alternatives. In 1998, the Honduran government will spend 31.7 percent of its budget on repaying the foreign debt--almost four times the 8.6 percent of the budget dedicated to health care. Not surprisingly, 42 percent of the population has no access to medical care, according to government figures released in December.

This crisis pushes natural medicine into the public spotlight. "Even many middle class people can't afford prescription drugs any longer," reports Heydee de Bueso, director of interinstitutional relationships for the Christian Commission for Development (CCD).

De Bueso grew up in the Honduran countryside, and remembers her mother curing her childhood ills with compresses and teas made from plants. "Yet later when I went to nursing school," says de Bueso, "they turned me into a promoter of western chemical medicine as the only option for health." De Bueso says it was through CCD's work with the poor that she was converted back to faith in nature's ability to heal.

"Nature gives us a treasure," de Bueso argues, "and we've got to be humble enough to learn from the poor women who know how to use nature to heal. Doing so can help us be reconciled with God and nature, both because of the natural product that heals as well as through the process of learning from each other regardless of social class or formal education."

De Bueso cites the experience of her son Gustavo when he finished his training as a physician and went to a rural village for a year of social service. "He complained that the drugs he had learned to use in medical school simply weren't available in that poor community," she says. "He wanted my advice about what to do. I told him to go talk to the old women in the community and ask them how they heal sickness. He did just that, and he became convinced of value of natural medicine."

Under de Bueso's direction, CCD has coordinated an interdisciplinary team of nongovernmental organizations and university researchers which has to date produced two books on the use of Honduran plants as medicines. The group helped the university's medical school get natural medicine on the curriculum for future physicians, and is working with the government ministry of health to "officialize" the use of traditional medicines, beginning by recognizing the use of 17 well-known plants common to the area.

In rural villages where CCD works, community leaders receive training in how to analyze what plants are already used and how to encourage the use of additional plant resources. CCD has helped at least eight rural villages start "popular pharmacies" where natural medicines are made available to the community.

De Bueso says new plants that are "discovered" in the course of CCD's work are taken to university laboratories for study. "We want to use these resources in a proper, scientific manner," she says. "Yet that starts with rescuing and revaluing popular wisdom and culture."

De Bueso travels throughout the region, leading workshops in natural healing practices, including reflexology, a kind of foot massage she says can contribute to better health. "Natural medicine isn't a panacea for everything," she cautions. "But it's the first tool we have at hand in the struggle for good health."

As interest grows, de Bueso reports that one of the challenges facing proponents of natural medicine is how to share knowledge and expand distribution in a way that favors the poor, takes advantage of small-scale entrepreneurs, and yet doesn't hand over valuable biogenetic information to transnational corporations seeking only to maximize profits in the north. "We need to find ways to share what nature gives us," says de Bueso, "without letting control of this wisdom become concentrated in the hands of the rich. Natural medicine is a gift from God that belongs to the people of God."

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Clues to reconciliation sought in secret documents from past

Leo Valladares has a hard job. As the Honduran government's human rights commissioner, Valladares is charged with monitoring the observance of basic human rights in Honduras. He's also in charge of investigating past abuses, particularly those related to the political violence of the 1980s. According to Valladares, "true reconciliation is impossible until citizens can know the truth about what has happened in their country."

In January 1994, Valladares released "The facts speak for themselves," a preliminary report on the disappearance of 184 political activists from 1980 to 1993. Since the report's release, Valladares has continued his investigation, but it hasn't been easy. When he went to search Honduran army records for information relating to the disappearances, military officials steered him to empty file cabinets, lamely suggesting they had destroyed documents because of space limitations. Valladares also travelled to Argentina, which had sent military trainers in the 1980s to teach interrogation techniques to Honduran soldiers and Nicaraguan Contras based in Honduras. Yet he returned home empty-handed from there as well.

Frustrated at home and in South America, Valladares nonetheless had hope he could find what he was looking for in the massive archives of the U.S. government. In late 1993 he requested information from the Clinton administration on the cases of six disappeared persons, including James Carney, a U.S. priest who was disappeared in 1983. Valladares also asked for files on a former Honduran defense chief and an elite U.S.-trained counterintelligence battalion believed responsible for many of the disappearances. "The United States played a unique, and at times dominant, role in Honduras, and therefore has a unique knowledge of events that transpired," Valladares stated.

His optimism now appears misplaced. In January of this year, an angry Valladares released a lengthy new report, In search of hidden truths, detailing the "exceedingly frustrating" process to obtain U.S. documents.

The report describes how Valladares received from the U.S. government more than 3,000 pages of documents on the Carney case. Yet the declassified material had been heavily censored, and the Valladares report states that the information gleaned from the documents "has been scant, fragmented and vague."

Valladares complains that he has yet to see a CIA internal investigation into its activities in Honduras, despite a promise by President Bill Clinton that the document would be delivered by year's end. Valladares suggests the CIA report is "critical to closing the wounds of abuse" in Honduras, and says it amounts to "a diplomatic affront that none of its findings have yet been shared with the Honduran government."

Colonels on the lam

Within days of the release of Valladares' report, another chapter in the demilitarization of Honduran society came to an end. On January 27, President Carlos Roberto Reina was replaced by Carlos Flores, who had been elected in November 30 general elections.

During his four years in office, Reina had whittled away at the military's power, abolishing obligatory military service and appointing civilians to head several government ministries previously run by military officials. He also supported the gradual conversion of the country's military police into a civilian-controlled force, a process expected to culminate later this year.

Yet Reina lacked support within his party for further changes, and was rattled by a string of bombings linked to disgruntled army officers and anti-Castro Cubans upset by the possibility of Honduran rapprochement with Cuba. So Reina ended up supporting a blanket amnesty for human rights violators and refused to push the police to capture officials wanted by the courts for questioning about their involvement in the disappearances of the 1980s.

At the beginning of 1998, thirteen army officers remained at large, and the head of the civilian investigative police--which replaced the secret police in 1994--admitted he knew where the outlaw generals were hiding but was afraid to take action. "While we are familiar with the movements of the fugitives, we cannot capture them because we want to avoid a bloodbath," said Wilfredo Alvarado, reporting the officials had military bodyguards. "These people are armed to the teeth, and if we decide to capture them, what will occur is a massacre."

With most civilian officials afraid to push the powerful military too hard, the intimately linked processes of demilitarization and democratization stumbled forward all too slowly. As is often the case, it fell on civil society to push for further advances, as in January when a human rights leader charged the head of the army with disappearing a leftist student leader in the 1980s.

Ramón Custodio, president of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, charged on January 14 that the current head of the army, Gen. Mario Hung, and two other high officials were responsible for the April 1988 disappearance of Roger González. Custodio turned over secret army documents showing how military officials had moved González from one clandestine torture center to another to prevent rights activists from finding him.

Hung denied involvement, but was forced to respond to the allegations before a judge in Tegucigalpa. Despite the dramatic changes of recent years, such questioning of high military officials remained an unusual scene.

Another human rights leader charged in January that the repressive official structures of the past have not been dismantled. "The structure of the death squads that ravaged the country in the 1980s remains intact and active," said Bertha Oliva, coordinator of the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared. "These armed groups now are making a clandestine effort to carry out social cleansing and eliminate criminals."

Criminals escape to Congress

In the November elections, Flores--the candidate of the ruling Liberal party--beat his closest opponent, the National Party's Nora de Melgar, by ten percentage points. Three smaller parties-- including, for the first time, a leftist coalition--also ran presidential candidates. The election of Flores marked the fifth consecutive democratic election of a Honduran president since the end of military rule in 1981, no minor accomplishment.

Yet many human rights activists fear the conservative Flores will display less interest in democratization and demilitarization than his predecessor. With his administration stacked with wealthy business colleagues, Flores' agenda seems geared to creating a better climate for investment and faithfully making payments on the country's US$4.3 billion foreign debt. Jousting with the military appears low on Flores' agenda.

Neither is it a high priority for the new Congress, also elected in November. Given that Honduran legislators enjoy immunity from prosecution while they are in office, many criminals have bought their way onto candidate lists as a way to escape the short reach of the law. Several of those in Congress, according to investigators from the attorney general's office, are known narcotraffickers who use their personal vehicles for transporting drugs, yet their legislative immunity prohibits law enforcement officials from searching the vehicles.

Many of those cars are fancy. Jesús Martínez, the dean of the law school at the National Autonomous University of Honduras, said in November that Honduras was a "shameless country" because it could boast more Mercedes and BMWs per capita than any other country in Latin America. He said most of those cars came from the "new rich" who earned their wealth through money laundering and corruption.

With Central America becoming a center for activity related to drug trafficking, in October the region's presidents signed an agreement to reform banking laws in an attempt to cut down on money laundering. Yet given the influence that narcomoney is alleged to have in political campaigns (no candidate in Honduras has to reveal the source of campaign funds), few observers expect strict laws as a result of the pact. That was the case in Honduras, where on December 15 the Congress passed legislation against money laundering. The proposal had spent three years in Congress. Legislators finally approved it only after considerable pressure from international financial organizations and the U.S. government, and not before stripping the law of most of its teeth.

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In the countryside, making a difference A personal reflection on development

By Tim Wheeler

As I travelled along the road to Concepción del Norte, a village in the northern part of the Honduran province of Santa Barbara, things seemed to be pretty much the way they were ten years before. My vehicle rattled over the dirt road and the heat poured in the window. We turned in the center of the village and headed to the project site near the Ulea River.

Concepción was the first community to get cows through a joint CCD-Heifer Project program that provided livestock to beneficiaries of the government's agrarian reform of the late 1970s and early 1980s. As in several other attempts at land reform in Latin America, these rural peasants received land but little credit or technical assistance to help make the land produce. The cows could help make a difference.

We drove up to the simple barn with its tin roof and rustic corrals and found Hernán Ríos waiting for us. One of the cooperative's leaders, he spoke of the changes over the years. The project began with 10 cows in 1986. Today it boasts more than 100 cows, heifers and bulls, supports an educational fund for the children of the members, and gives away milk to the needy--like the elderly widow who lives at the edge of the cooperative.

The experience of the peasants in Concepción stands out from the general background of misery in Honduras. The average Honduran worker makes less than US$2 per day, 70 percent of children are malnourished, and only one in eight children makes it past the sixth grade. Those are national figures--in rural areas it's even worse.

The project's members now get paid for working, and every year each of the 23 participating families receives an educational stipend for buying notebooks, pencils, and shoes for its schoolage children. Milk production averages 50 liters a day. At a low price of three lempiras per liter, that means the three project members who work each day are earning at least twice the daily minimum wage.

Hernán told us how the cooperative had delivered 16 animals to other community-based projects nearby, along with money to build animal pens and other infrastructure. It was the cooperative's way of paying off the original animals--and helping other rural residents improve life in their own communities.

As the cows filed into the corral, the stillness of the midday heat was challenged by the smiles of pride from the project members. In Concepción, the struggles of daily life have become a little easier because of these big-eyed, hoofed creatures. The sacrifice and sweat of years of work have paid off. I came closer to understanding what the project meant for them when one of the members said to me, "Before we dreamed of having enough milk so that our children wouldn't be malnourished. Now that dream has come true."

As I drove the dusty road away from the community I thought of other villages that had begun similar projects, places like El Limon, Nueva Granada, and El Temblor--all communities with their own dreams, with their own struggles to build a better future for their children. The success I witnessed in Concepción del Norte will be theirs as well. They are working so that their children have enough milk to drink and their families sufficient resources to keep their kids in school. Like Concepción del Norte, the other communities already possess the will to change, as well as the compassion to feed the truly hungry. What they have lacked was sufficient resources to get started.

(Tim Wheeler, a Presbyterian Church (USA) mission worker, is a staff member of CCD and coordinator in Honduras for Heifer Project International.)

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A brief history of CCD

The Christian Commission for Development was born in the turbulent 1980s, when all of Central America became a battleground in the Cold War. Honduras in those years played an auxiliary role to many neighboring conflicts, and the country was flooded with refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

A Honduran church organization, the Evangelical National Emergency Committee (CEDEN), was contracted by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees to provide services to thousands of those refugees. Yet providing such assistance, in the political climate of the time, was viewed as a subversive activity by the military and the U.S. embassy, as well as by many people in the churches. Pressure mounted on CEDEN leaders, who finally decided to end their work with refugees in February, 1982.

Outraged by the decision, 35 CEDEN staff members resigned en masse. Nine of them, refusing to succumb to political pressure and threats, announced they would form a new group to continue the refugee ministry. Thus the Christian Commission for Development was born. (For a while it was called the Committee for Development and Emergency, but since it kept getting confused with another organization with a similar acronym, it was later changed to the Christian Commission for Development, or CCD.)

Several church agencies in the U.S. and Europe responded enthusiastically to the new organization, allowing it to continue its work with refugees. At the same time, CCD also began working with five rural, marginalized communities, helping fellow Hondurans organize and build water projects, decent houses, latrines--the myriad changes that make possible the abundant life God promises.

Such work bothered some people, however, and in June 1982, Honduran soldiers entered CCD's offices one night, stealing everything, all the files, even the photographs on the walls. They captured and tortured two staff people. Although the two were eventually released, both required months of hospitalization for the psychological and physical damage they suffered.

At the same time, a death squad hit list was made public. The second name on the list was Noemí de Espinoza, the executive director of CCD. The first name on the list had already been killed. Both de Espinoza and Daniel Medina, another CCD leader, were forced to go into exile for several months. Yet the rest of CCD's courageous staff kept working.

Sixteen years later, the refugees have gone home. Honduras has an elected president, and the military's role in national life has been steadily reduced. Yet the majority of people in Honduras remain poor. The root causes of their poverty remain largely unchanged.

To address those causes of poverty, CCD today has more than 60 staff members and works with people in 113 communities in the poorest areas of the country. Its primary focus is to help a community organize itself so that it has a functioning, representative body of leaders that can work for the benefit of the community with or without CCD's presence. Developing this leadership means helping the community learn about itself and define its own needs and priorities. CCD then accompanies and assists as people work together to change their community for the better. CCD often provides assistance in such areas as sustainable agriculture, alternative credit, community organization, literacy training, community-based health care, gender awareness, pastoral attention, theological training, and the rescue of cultural identity.

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