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From Our Own Correspondent: Can Honduras uproot the drugs trade?

Magazines & Reviews

30/04/2022 GMT

Can Honduras uproot the drugs trade?

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Can Honduras uproot the drugs trade?

Coca-growing creeps across Honduras; stories from Sao Tome & Principe, Ukraine and France

The cocaine crop coca creeps north through Central America; Sao Tome faces into climate change; Odessan opinions on Russia; political fashion in France.

Pascale Harter introduces stories from reporters in Honduras, Sao Tome & Principe, Ukraine and France. 

Honduras never used to be known as a drug-producing nation – though it was often a transit country, through which traffickers smuggled cocaine north to the United States. But under the government of its disgraced former president Juan Orlando Hernandez, coca plantations have sprouted in some parts of the country. As Hernandez is due to be tried by a court in the United States for his alleged role in drug trafficking and money-laundering, Honduran authorities are trying to tackle the problem on the ground. Will Grant went out with an eradication team. 

São Tomé and Príncipé is a textbook 'small island nation' - a tiny string of islands off the coast of Gabon, in the Gulf of Guinea, it only has a few hundred thousand citizens and not much territory. But like many other small island nations it’s dealing with a huge problem: climate change. It’s losing land to the sea and having to relocate whole communities. But as Tamasin Ford finds out, with the smallest economy in Africa, it has few means to fight what the United Nations calls 'the biggest threat modern humans have ever faced'. 

Across Ukraine, millions of people are not only having to survive the daily shocks of war. They’re also having to deal with the shock of being targeted by Russia. So many old alliances, friendships and relationships, and lifetimes of memories, are now in question. In Odessa, Jen Stout heard plenty more about how deeply feelings have soured.

And from France there’s a tale of a change in political fashion. Hugh Schofield got kitted out smartly for the recently presidential election, only to find his sharp new suit hewing perhaps a little too closely to the personal style of President Emmanuel Macron. Has the narrow-cut, blue-wool two-piece become the uniform of the Paris political class – and what impression does it make on voters in the rest of the country?

Producer: Polly Hope
Production Co-Ordinator: Gemma Ashman



(Image: Anti-narcotics and Military Police officers incinerate cocaine seized in southern Honduras. Credit: Orlando Sierra/AFP via Getty Images)

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