Honduras

During an August 17-19, 2009, international seminar on the economic crisis hosted by the Party of Liberty and Socialism in Sao Paolo, Brazil, Green Left Weekly/Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal journalists Kiraz Janicke and Federico Fuentes, together with journalists from Marea Socialista (Venezuela) and Alternativa Socialista (Argentina), were able to interview Gilberto Rios from the international relations commission of the National Popular Resistance Front against the Coup about the growing resistance movement against the US backed coup which ousted the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, on June 28.

August 26, 2009, marks 60 days since Honduras' oligarchy overthrew the elected president of the country. As protests against the coup continue without let up, Western governments have refused to do anything concrete to support democracy, or as in the case of the US administration of President Barack Obama, been complicit.

The international corporate mass media has shunned providing coverage of the mass opposition in the streets of Tegucigalpa. This news blackout, and the resulting heightened state repression, has done little to deter the ongoing resistance to the coup inside Honduras.

By Ricardo Arturo Salgado, translated by Felipe Stuart Cournoyer

August 22, 2009 -- Pre-revolutionary situation? Some analyses of the situation in Honduras are fairly static. We have to differ with many local and foreign analysts who have tried to understand the situation in Honduras by imposing pre-existing parameters and by using basic concepts of the Marxist dialectic without any scientific criterion. Many have seen a failure of the Honduran grassroots resistance, failing to understand that historical materialism is not a mathematical formula where only variables change, but rather, a way to interpret reality objectively.

By Ricardo Arturo Salgado, translated from the Spanish by Felipe Stuart Cournoyer

August 21, 2009 -- Tegucigalpa -- A lot has been written on the Honduran situation, more in solidarity with opposition to the coup than in favour of it. The media seems to feed on scandalous news -- no blood, no news. Unless what’s involved is a people on the way to liberation...

A few weeks ago I publicly exposed a potential collapse of the health system in Honduras; today public hospitals have only four basic medicines. They are being told to make emergency purchases from pharmaceutical firms owned by golpistas [coup makers]: Laboratorios Finlay, owned by Jorge Canahuati Larach, who also owns the newspapers el Heraldo and La Prensa, and is an arms supplier; Elías Asfura, owner of  Laboratorios Karnel, also has various TV Channels and now owns the once government-owned Channel 8; MANDOFER, owned by the Andonie Fernández family which also owns Audio Video, a golpista group that includes Radio América.

By Felipe Stuart Cournoyer

August 8, 2009 -- The people of Honduras have now suffered more than 40 days of military rule. The generals’ June 28 coup, crudely re-packaged in constitutional guise, ousted the country’s elected government and unleashed severe, targeted and relentless repression.

Grassroots protests have matched the regime in endurance and outmatched it in political support within the country and internationally. Its scope and duration is unprecedented in Honduran history. Popular resistance is the main factor affecting the international forces attempting to shape the outcome of the crisis. It weighs heavily on the minds of the coup’s authors and their international backers.

Call from the National Front against the Coup d'Etat in Honduras to the worldwide working class 

August 3, 2009 -- Tegucigalpa -- June 28 of the this year when the Honduran population was preparing to participate in a popular opinion poll on ... whether or not to convoke a Constitutional Assembly, thousands of soldiers kidnapped the constitutional president of the republic, Manuel Zelaya Rosales, and they expelled him to the neighbouring country of Costa Rica; they occupied the Presidential House; they violently closed all of the independent radio and television stations; they persecuted all the functionaries of the government and they implanted a state of siege in the whole country.

July 31, 2009 -- We, the undersigned social, political and solidarity organisations, faced with the ongoing coup d’état in Honduras and the imperialist project of installing military bases in Colombia whose objective is to throttle the hope for liberty and emancipation across the Latin American continent,

Declare:

1. Our complete support for the immediate and unrestricted return of President Manuel Zelaya and the restitution of constitutional order, without conditions, to Honduras. Furthermore, we demand the punishment of those responsible for the coup d’état and the recognition of people’s sovereignty to freely decide their future, through referendum, consultation or any other means of participative democracy.

2. We denounce the cynicism shown by the US government and its satellites in the Organisation of America States, with an attitude which speaks of the recognition of the constitutionality of Zelaya’s Presidency at the same time as they reach agreements and hold conversations with the organisers of the coup, and carry out all types of delaying tactics with the objective of demobilising the impressive resistance movement which has been awakened in the interior of Honduras, coordinated in the National Resistance Front against the Coup.

By Felipe Stuart Cournoyer

Update, July 24, 2009 --  Today, Honduras has been totally paralysed by a general strike, and Honduran resistance activists and protesters are chanting.

Zelaya - get used to it. The people are rising up
(it rhymes in Spanish).

Also common is the resistenCia, resistenCia, resistenCia, el pueblo unido jamas sera vencido (people united will never be overcome) and so on...

This afternoon Zelaya crossed over the frontier at Las Manos north of Esteli. He stood technically just inside Honduran territory, having crossed the chain separating the two countries in the "neutral" strip between them. Zelaya remained there for about two hours, hoping to meet up with members of his family and others who were trying to join him.

Compiled and introduced by Felipe Stuart Cournoyer

July 10, 2009 -- Most of the coverage of the military coup in Honduras from bourgeois and liberal circles, and from many Western foreign ministers, has focused on what various governments are doing to influence or force an outcome to this struggle.

Statements from Honduras' President Manuel Zelaya, his foreign minister Patricia Rodas, and from leaders of other ALBA countries (especially Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, Ecuador's Rafael Correa and Bolivia's Evo Morales) have emphasised the role of the mass movement in Honduras. So have the most astute analysts of the rapidly moving events unleashed by the coup.