Muzzled security  Juan Almendares is a Honduran Medical Doctor, ex-rector of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras (UNAH), and was a presidential candidate for the Unificación DemocráticaI party (UD).

Muzzled security is a masked security, a fraudulent notion, a false idea of democracy that results from the freedom of the market, and which has its greatest expression in war. It creates the fallacious notion of an internal enemy and the perverse idea of an "internal war" when in reality it is the maintenance and the reproduction of the accumulation and expansion of transnational capital; these are the true roots of violence, manifested through racism, gender aggression, inequality, extreme poverty and environmental degradation.According to Zubiri, the word "emet" means truth, derived from the hebrew verb "aman", whose meaning is to have confidence, or security. In Latin "security refers to securus: tranquil, without the need to take care, without danger."Identity is a historical and dialectical process. A culture develops when communities or nations organize themselves, mobilize and transform themselves in order to make their own political decisions; to satisfy their material, spiritual and cultural needs in order to achieve good living (buen vivir), social justice and the historical dignity of peoples. True security is based on the integral life of all living beings. It is human, with due respect for the rights of Mother Earth, and it is planetary as well.In the neocolonial context of Latin America, the word "security" has been associated with the policies of the state ordered to oversee, punish, repress and discipline peoples through patriarchal obedience and humiliation. In synthesis, this is the total domination of peoples subjected to new ways of consolidating imperialism through local, para-state or supranational apparatus to impose hegemony.

Security gives rise to insecurity

 The design and the architectural structure of houses and cities have been transformed. Closed spaces now prevail, with electric fences, walls, metallic doors and windows. Visible communication between neighbours has been broken. Television cameras are everywhere in houses and streets to ensure greater control, justified by delinquency. The city is the image and likeness of prisons. Political and daily life corresponds to an imprisoned democracy.Prison policy is a system in which the condemned of the earth live. The fires and massacres in prisons in Honduras have shaken international conscience. Health is profoundly altered with the architectural change. Esthetics has become twisted. A lack of family and community communication prevails. Paranoia is the norm. Every new person is a potential enemy. One lives in a world of suspicion (with "a carnation of suspicion in one's buttonhole", said the poet Roberto Sosa). Trees are cut down because they may hide aggressors. Accidents and deaths are frequent in cases of fire; people cannot exit their houses because at times they do not know the system for opening iron-barred doors and windows. People live under stress for fear of assaults and the frequent noise of alarms and firearms at night.The policy of neoliberal privatization has been extended to security and has resulted in a most lucrative industry, both local and multinational. The private training in the use of firearms has grown, especially among young people from wealthy families. There is the presence of every kind of electronic equipment to spy on and keep track of neighbours and people in the streets. This is a world in which we are all under surveillance except the powers that control the situation. There is no intimacy in communication since the laws allow for telephone tapping and cybernetic interference.In the case of Honduras one lives in a Subordinated Military Police State; Private Security has more than 60 thousand armed men and women, more than the total in military and police ranks. Hired assassins constitute a system that bargains with death and becomes a mechanism of security for those who pay for crime.The President of the Republic, the Secretaries of State in Justice and Human Rights, the National Agrarian Institute and Education have all been threatened. The oligarchic element enjoys impunity in the assassination, persecution and torture of campesino families, women, youths, defenders of human rights and opposition and popular resistance cadres.In the name of security human rights have been violated, lands confiscated from original peoples, campesinos and Garífunas, and coups d'état and the installation of military bases are in effect crimes against democracy

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