Dr. Rath Health Foundation

Responsibility for a healthy world

Global Battlegrounds for the Survival of the Pharmaceutical Drug Cartel

Draining away the cartel’s financial life-blood in South America

Early in the morning on Sunday, June 28, two hundred soldiers surrounded the home of the Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, and, following a twenty-minute gun battle with his ten-man personal guard, he was arrested. Zelaya was then taken by airplane to nearby Costa Rica where he gave a press conference denouncing the coup and calling on the people to mobilise in the streets.

Behind the scenes, however, it emerged that the Honduran coup had taken place with the backing of the pharma cartel.

Zelaya had undertaken a number of progressive reforms during his presidency.  Of these reforms, his measures against the pharma industry were arguably the most significant. Pharmaceutical multinationals control eighty percent of all drugs sold in Honduras, all of them imported at high cost to its national health service.

To the intense anger of these drug makers, Zelaya had signed an agreement with Venezuela and Cuba to import cheap generic versions of the most commonly used drugs.

As such, fearing the possibility of its financial life-blood being drained away, the cartel became involved in yet another desperate battle for its survival.

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