Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Day 8: Dinner with a Side of Politics

This evening, I had dinner with a fellow Thunderbird and his girlfriend in a local hangout, Pecos Bill. One of the things I love most about having graduated from Thunderbird is that I can be in any country in the world and almost always find a Thunderbird alum.

Much of our dinner conversation revolved around current events and national politics. According to my friends, Honduras has become a staging area for drug trafficking, as the Mexican government has clamped down on the trade through its borders. Within Honduras, there are a number of unpaved runways deep in the countryside where the Colombians land with their products. About a week ago, there was a land dispute between farmers and cattle ranchers in eastern Honduras that resulted in ten people being killed with AK-47s. While land disputes are common, the use of automatic weapons almost certainly points to the drug trade’s involvement. Apparently, some of the Mexican drug cartels have come to Honduras to set up operations that transport the illegal substances by both land and sea to the lucrative American market.

On the politics front, I have learned that Honduras’ president, Manuel Zelaya, has populist tendencies and is friends with Venezuela’s notorious socialist, Hugo Chavez. In Honduras, the president has only one four-year term with no provision for reelection. National elections will occur again in November 2009.

Joel Montgomery


View Joel Montgomery's profile on LinkedIn Add to Technorati Favorites

1 comment:

Jill Dawson said...

While kids open their gifts from Santa and find all that they ever wanted all year long, their happiness and excitement is equally complimented by the light songs of Christmas playing in the background. The 2010 International Experimental Media Congress, the first Congress of its kind since the 1989 Toronto Experimental Film Congress, will assemble film, video, new media artists, theorists, archivists, and curators from around the world, who will be in Toronto through April 11 for panels and discussions related to experimental media production, exhibition, dissemination, criticism, pedagogy and reception. Whites of the South and country in general had things to complain about like anyone else but it rang whiney and hollow, just like its ubiquitous steel guitars. But you have to be cautious while dealing with them.