An Interview with President Ricardo Maduro
I am very happy to bring you this rare interview with the most recent President of Honduras, Ricardo Maduro. I found the President to be an insightful, intelligent and caring person. I am honored to introduce the former President of Honduras to the many English speaking people around the world.
Roatan Bruce: Mr. President, thank you for spending this time with me and with the English speaking people on The Bay Islands, Honduras and around the world!
President Maduro: I have not been prone to give interviews since I have finished my Presidency almost two years ago. I am happy to renew my visibility in the Bay Islands, a place I love and have loved for a very long time.
Roatan Bruce: How did the idea of becoming President come about?
President Maduro: I always had an inclination for service. I believe leadership is a category of service. I believe any kind of leadership that is not oriented or guided by the desire to serve is in fact illegitimate. If you go into leadership for other reasons such as notoriety, the use of power or the accumulation of wealth, I think you are not a legitimate leader.
I like feeling like I can serve and help others organize themselves, pursue objectives and goals better. I ran the campaign for the president running in the national party in 1985 and 1989. We lost in 85, but won in 89. The President then appointed me the President of the Central Bank of Honduras. I stayed there for the four years.
In 1997, my son was kidnapped. He as you did Bruce studied in Boston. He went to Babson College. He was twenty-five at the time and during the kidnapping, he was killed. At that time, I had to rethink my life. Many people insisted I think about running and my priority was of course security. I wasn’t inclined to it. I don’t like notoriety. I’ve lived with it and accepted it happily because it is part of being President.
I don’t like the use of power per say, I mean just for powers sake. I consider it a necessary preoccupation of being able to exercise influence in the country. So I accepted the power that the Presidency has. I feel proud and honored to be President.
The National Party has done a lot for Honduras and for The Bay Islands. I feel people in Roatan are starting to realize that they must take hold of and pro-actively take the future into their own hands. I feel that the best thing the federal government can do is support the Bay Islands and delegate, but delegate first. The first thing I asked when people of the Bay Islands came to me with their problems was, are you organized? Are you willing to take the reigns of your own future?
Now a days, the Bay Islands represents the largest face of Honduras to the rest of the world. You are representing the entire country. Not only must you administrate the natural beauty of the Bay Islands, but you have to do it in a way that is sustainable, environmentally and economically sustainable. It also has to be done in a way where people feel that they are welcome and treated fairly, justly and in a friendly way.
Roatan Bruce: Could you walk me through your four years as President?
(The President laughed and said it would be hard to put four years as President into a 30 minute interview.)
President Maduro: I feel one of the first thing a President has to do is comply with his mandate. Clearly my mandate was security and fighting crime. The will to support me and vote for me came from the conviction that I would fight crime. I lost my son to crime.
I did so with a clearly defined strategy that contained two pillars. The first was the immediate control of crime. That is the short term aspect. The other is fighting crime in the long term which is social problem. Crime in this instance is motivated and caused in many instances by a lack of values, which comes from the home, the family and the education system. It comes from a lack of adequate jobs and job opportunities. It comes from a lack of health services, a proper education and adequate housing. In other words, problems that go along with poverty, but not only material poverty, but also a poverty that I feel comes from not stressing our values and principals as much as we should. We are not teaching our children to have a strong sense of identity, self assuredness and self-worth where they love their own country and themselves.
I fought for education. I wanted values and principals back in education. I wanted universal values and principals in fairness, solidarity, discipline and compliance. The kinds of values I feel we should always have in our education. Well educated Honduran’s does not happen in four years. It takes one generation, twenty years. Not only does the school system have to work well, but you have to have a home where parents are able to transmit the importance of education. The child can go to the best school in the world, but if he doesn’t have support in the home, half of the formula is missing. I started the fight for better education. We still have a long, long way to go.
We emphasized and focused on tourism as a sustained source of growth for the future. At that time, it was a hope, a dream and promise. There is no doubt how important tourism is to us and I am proud that I played a part in that.
There was some good and some bad. I feel proud about doing some good things that were needed. I feel proud about helping islanders and tourism.
Roatan Bruce: How did you decide what money went where with such a limited budget?
President Maduro: One way to attend to the needy is to be able to prioritize expenses properly. You have to be able to recognize that if you give something to someone, you give up the right and opportunity to give it to someone else. You must be very careful that you assign that money to the ones that need it the most.
The second thing is, I believe the closer the money gets to the people that need it the most, the better it will be spent. What I mean by that is, I believe in delegation. When I got into the government, 1.5% of the public budget was distributed to the municipalities. When I finished, it was 5%, but I feel that is too little.
I believe the federal government is the least efficient of any group in terms of spending money. There is always a tendency for the technocrat, the technician in Tegucigalpa to think he knows better what the needs are for the people on Roatan than the people of Roatan. That is just not the case! If the people of Roatan spend the money, even if there is some corruption involved, everyone will know about it. The people of Roatan at the very least will say…I am not going to vote for that person again.
Also, if the spending is done by the people of Roatan and they know they are doing it for their own children and family, they are more likely to do it in a more efficient way.
Roatan Bruce: The education system that we are dealing with is a tough one to patch up. What a lot of foreigners are doing is coming to terms that their kids will be needing either right now or very soon. We feel that we may have to take the education system into our own hands so our kids can have a chance of having a quality education.
President Maduro: I go further than taking control of it because you don’t feel like it is going well. Parents should take control of it anyway at all times. Meaning that they should have a very proactive roll along with the teachers. In the United States, The PTA is a very fundamental part of the administration of the school system. I think it should be here too.
When you see a well run rural school in a poor neighborhood, you can be absolutely certain that the parents are helping the teachers to make things happen. Unfortunately, our Latin society and as is the case in many Latin societies, tends to delegate unconsciously the vast majority of the responsibility of the education of the kids on the mother.
When you see the most successful societies in terms of promoting good education like Asia, you will see that both parents are present in meetings with parents and teachers. When I asked some Asian parents what they feel about their kid’s education, they said that is our biggest and best investment that we make! That is something that we have to change as Hondurans.
I feel very, very strongly about the parents participating in their kid’s education. I think they should be present in the Parent and Teachers organizations. Parents should help the teachers to teach better. I think they need to know what to expect from the school. I think they need to support the teachers and the school to get them physically fixed. Parents should influence the curriculum content and they should insist on modifying it to take it into account the local needs.
A student on Roatan should not receive the same curriculum as a child in Western Honduras. The child in the western part of the country has very different needs. That child should learn more about agriculture and raising crops. On Roatan, they need to learn about tourism. They both have to have their values. The cultural heritage in The Bay Islands is very different from Western Honduras.
One of the enormous advantages that The Bay Islands has is that they are bi-lingual because they have the English heritage too. It is a huge advantage for tourism and for the well being of the residents of The Bay Islands in a globalized world where the English language is likely to be the most important language commercially and businesswise.
Our law did not take into account bi-lingual education. Not only that, but teachers were named to places like the Bay Islands from the mainland where they knew nothing about the Roatan culture. We were able to change that with a treaty that we signed for the rights of minorities.
In our legal system, first comes the constitution, second comes international treaties and third, our law. In other words, treaties are above the law. Based on the treaty that I signed for rights in minorities, I was able to name teachers for The Bay Islands from The Bay Islands. The Bay Islanders should insist that the curriculum content for The Bay Islanders reflects their needs and preserves their identity.
I am spending a lot of time now working on the foundation that carries my son’s name. We have had strong success in opening kindergartens nationwide. Directly with the foundation and the government, we have opened over 4000 kindergartens which serves over 60,000 children.
Roatan Bruce: Can you give me your view of the new “Free Trade Zone” that officially started on December 15th, 2007.
President Maduro: As President, I was not in favor of it. The Free Trade Zone will work and be benefit all of The Bay Islands only if it is only seen as a compliment and support tourism. As soon as The Free Trade Zone is seen as something else, in other words, a way to get duty free things into Honduras, then it is going to be in serious trouble.
I have no doubt that the future of the Bay Islands will be tourism. It is about doing a good job of sustainable tourism, and that means a lot of things. It means social organization, it means fairness, it means rules of law. It means being an open and welcoming place for foreigners. The minute it is seen as something else, whereby it will become a transit point for commerce or even contraband onto the mainland, then it will be in serious difficulties.
I believe San Andreas, which is a Free Trade Zone area, has lost its tourist attraction because it has become a waypoint for commerce into Columbia. So I think you have to be very careful.
I think the key to success with The Free Trade Zone will be that the commission that administrates this will do so with clear objectives and convictions that it is to be tool to supplement and strengthen tourism and nothing more than that. When you lose sight of that vision, there will be problems. If anything is done to damage the golden egg of the potential of tourism and the natural beauty of the islands, you may end up getting more money in the short term, but you are certainly going to be putting the long term future of the islands in danger.
I would like to thank the former President Ricardo Maduro for allowing the English speaking people of The Bay Islands and the world to learn more about him and his wise perceptions about The Bay Islands and Honduras.
Bruce Starr is the host of The Roatan Bruce Show heard on 106.5 FM weekdays from 9 am to 1 pm. 106.5 FM is now the Voice for English speaking people across the Bay Islands and Northern Honduras. Please visit roatanbruce.com or contact me at roatanbruce@yahoo.com with your comments and suggestions.
Tags: Free Trade Zone, Honduras, Honduras education, Presidents
