What is a country to do when it comes time to participate in a United Nations Year of the Woman. Well to be honest things aren’t too good for women in Honduras. So how about just show the First Lady and the youth centers she claims to have done so much for. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
This stamp shows a youth center in San Pedro Sula and First Lady Gloria de Lopez Arellano. I can find no current listing for the youth center, though it may have evolved into the San Pedro Sula Dream Center that allows Americans to sponsor a poor child there and hosts Christian mission trips. Speaking of not being current, the stamp is from 1976 when the year of the woman was 1975. Also not current, the First Lady, her husband General (de facto President Lopez Arellano) had been forced out the year before after being caught up in Bananagate.
Todays stamp is issue C575, a 30 Centavo airmail stamp issued by Honduras on March 5th, 1976. It was a 7 stamp issue in various denominations. Overprints with various currency revaluations of this issue were coming out into the late 1980s. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 45 cents used.
Former Honduran Air Force General Oswaldo Lopez Arellano had first served as de facto President after a coup in 1963. In 1971 there were elections that installed a new President. The new President left Lopez Arellano as head of the armed forces and was rewarded with another coup a year later. The central American countries were attempting to form a cartel to control and get paid more for banana exports to the USA. Europeans were getting their bananas from the Guyanas and were not involved,. The cartel attempted to impose a doubling of the fee per case on bananas exported. Allegedly half of the increase went to the governments and half went to independent farmers.
United Brands, the parent company of Chiquita Bananas got much of their supply from Honduras. The new fees were costing the company 7.5 million dollars a year. The then CEO Eli Black had the idea to bribe Lopez Arellano 1.25 million dollars of company funds immediately with an additional 1.25 million when the export fee in Honduras was cut in half. When this was done it spelled the end of the central American banana cartel. The American Securities and Exchange Commission found out about the bribes. When Eli Black could not convince the SEC to drop the case, he committed suicide by jumping from the 47th floor of the Pan Am building in New York City. Two months after Black’s suicide, Lopez Arellano was forced out by a coup by a rival General. The new General naturally blamed Chiquita and nationalized the local facilities. The episode is known in Honduras as Bananagate
A year of the woman stamp requires that we check in how women are fairing in Honduras. The UN keeps such statistics. Their Gender inequality index is .479 which means women there have 52% of the prosperity of men. The UN includes much talk of toxic machismo and introduces a term I hadn’t heard before. They claim the country on average suffers 32 instances a month of femicide. A femicide is the gender based murder of a woman or a girl by a man. The UN further ranks Honduras 132 out of 189 countries based on their treatment of women.
Well my drink is empty and I am wondering if Honduras would have been better off skipping their late celebration of the year of the woman. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.