The Doctor Who Became Public Enemy #1

Dr. Luther Castillo has been an unwavering supporter of universal health care and minority rights in Honduras. That support has made him an enemy of the military coup.

Dr. Luther Castillo’s voice is heard across Cuba every night. From somewhere in Honduras, Dr. Castillo calls into the television program Mesa Redonda (The Roundtable), a nightly news and opinion program broadcast out of Havana. Using his cell phone, and the cell phones of others, he tells Cubans about the military coup in his homeland. He talks about how the situation is unfolding from the point of view of those who need medical care as a result of the military’s brutality.

Before the coup, Dr. Castillo had been the Director of International Cooperation in the Honduran Foreign Ministry. His job was to build cooperative partnerships to bring much-needed medical services to the poorer regions of the country. Now he’s switching from cell phone to cell phone and sleeping where he can, because the military has marked him as public enemy number one.

On July 3, the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights added Dr. Castillo’s name to a list of persons whose lives are at risk because of the coup. On July 7, we learned that the Honduran army plans to arrest and detain Dr. Castillo. If he resists, their orders are to shoot him where he stands.

And for what? Before he joined the Honduran Foreign Ministry, Dr. Castillo operated the only free clinic in Honduras’s Garifuna region, the place where he was born. A coastal region populated almost entirely by indigenous peoples, the Garifuna rarely gets attention from journalists, doctors, teachers, or other important members of society. What it does get is preventable diseases, illiteracy, and rampant poverty.

After receiving a medical scholarship from Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine in 1999, Dr. Castillo returned to the Garifuna to build the clinic. Today, it provides affordable and accessible health-care services to 20,000 people. The local community considers this a saving grace. The military considers it the sort of socialist insubordination that must be wiped out. For believing health to be a human right, Dr. Castillo has put his own life at risk.

His ideas are also under threat. Relations between the Garifuna and the government have never been good. Under the coup, things could get even worse. The minority Garifuna, like many minorities in the Americas, tend to get mistreated by the army. The military government’s targeting of a pioneer of universal health care is alarming and requires international reaction. The international community’s apathy towards the Garifuna as just another poor minority, not worthy of our attention, is just as upsetting.

We cannot tolerate this sort of bullying. We must demand that Dr. Castillo appear on the T.V. tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. Our refusal to ignore him will keep him alive. If we turn our backs, who can say what will happen to him.

We must demand our own institutions, and anyone else that has a stake in Honduras, help to ensure that Dr. Castillo makes it to tomorrow. We cannot ignore his need, nor can we ignore the reasons why his life is in danger.