The mass national
resistance movement against the June 28 coup remains a viable and
significant political force. Photo by James Rodriguez. By Felipe Stuart Cournoyer, Managua
January 26, 2010 -- During the dubious Honduran election process leading up to voting day on November 27, 2009, the people would chant “Santos[1] de santo no tiene nada. Lobo de lobo lo tiene todo” ["(Elvin) Santos gets nothing from the saints; Lobo’s taken it all from the wolf.”]
On January 27 new puppets will take centre stage in the puppetry act Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Elected
"president" Pepe Lobo (no doubt called "wolf, or little wolf" by his
gringo controllers at the US embassy) will accept the strings of
attachment to the invisible government and state power that continue to
rule in Honduras. This obscure and menacing group is an unelected corps
of representatives of the army high command and of the ten ruling
oligarchic families. They meet under the informal moderation of the US
ambassador of the day, and with the blessing of the ranking cleric of
the Roman Catholic Church.
Lobo
has agreed to offer a "safe conduct" visa to ousted President Mel
Zelaya, who is still exiled in the Brazilian embassy along with
supporters. The January 26 edition of the Tegucigalpa daily El Heraldo reported that Arturo Valenzuela (US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs) and
US ambassador Hugo Llorens, accompanied by a Canadian government
diploflunky, will meet with outgoing (and ousted) President Mel Zelaya
in the afternoon at the Brazilian embassy (see http://www.elheraldo.hn/Ediciones/2010/01/26/Noticias/Funcionarios-de-EE-UU-afinan-salida-de-Zelaya
). The photos that will certainly be taken of the encounter, and
Zelaya’s subsequent helicopter trip to Toncontín airport, will offer a
somewhat sublime (or obscene, depending on viewpoint) symbol of how
this scene began, and how the curtain dropped.
Zelaya was kidnapped by
armed soldier-thugs on June 28, 2009, and hustled out of the country to Costa
Rica, with a brief stopover at the US-controlled Soto Cano (Palmerola)
airforce base near the capital. Costa Rica's president Oscar Arias, who
was later to play a back-stabbing role in the San José talks between
coup leaders and President Zelaya's representatives, knew President Mel
had been kidnapped prior to his arrival in the Costa Rican capital,
clad only in his pyjamas. Arias’ perfidious role in helping to disguise
and camouflage Washington's role in the coup, and later to legitimise
and consolidate the coup regime, was foretold the day of the flight
from Soto Cano to Costa Rica.
Defeat?
Some
sectors on the international and Latin American left have expressed a
sense of despair or fatalism with respect to what has been, in many
circles, been interpreted as a defeat for Latin American independence
from the overwhelming power of Washington and the weighty US
military-industrial-communications complex.
Obama, after all, it seems,
pulled one over on the Organization of American States' (OAS) majority that had vowed never to accept the
coup. He managed to entice the servile and discredited Oscar Arias to
broker a negotiations process whose only purpose was to confuse and
disorient the resistance forces in Honduras, the international
solidarity movement, and to buy urgently needed time to bring the coup
regime into a smooth, uneventful landing, safe and out of harm’s way.
This maneuvre succeeded, despite warnings from grassroots leaders in
Honduras and wise counsel from international revolutionary leaders
including Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.
But,
did the San José maneuvre and the survival of Roberto Micheletti's coup
regime until the end of the constitutional period of the deposed
president bring about a clear, certain and stable victory for the
Honduran ruling class and its imperial backers in Washington?
That
question has already been answered on the streets and university
grounds of the country, in the factories and workplaces, in the
public employees' sector, in the rural fields and agricultural work
centers, and in the ports and transport industries. The mass national
resistance movement against the June 28 coup remains a viable and
significant political force. It was not disoriented either by Oscar
Arias or by the electoral sham on November 27. Despite disagreements
over how to respond to both challenges and obstacles, the movement
remains strong and united. This resistance is without precedent in
Indo-Latin America and the Caribbean. Never has such a prolonged
resistance to a military coup held its ground and outlasted formal
political stalemate.
Mass movement
This
movement has united and educated forces across the traditional barriers
of class, race, ethnicity, language, gender, age, rural-urban
differences, culture, regionalisms and educational backgrounds. It has
demonstrated political sophistication, not just here and there, or at
the most critical moments, but consistently. It has resisted, and continues to
resist, provocative efforts of the secret police and CIA agents to entice
its younger elements into violent and criminal acts in order to create
public support for even harsher repressive measures. It has evaded
efforts to promote provocations against the police and rank-and-file
soldiers in order to keep the largely poor and rural soldier ranks
isolated from the mass protests and propaganda in favour of democratic
rights and the constitution of the republic. It has risen over and over
again to the challenge of uniting very diverse class and political
tendencies and forces into a fist of defiance, without falling into the
temptation of silencing the ranks in order to lend an appearance of
more solid support for leadership decisions.
By maintaining openness
and ample space for the voices of the grassroots, the resistance
has demonstrated over and over again that an essentially harmonious
relationship prevailed between different levels and sectors of the
movement. Differences were and are treated as a normal eventuality in
any genuine mass upsurge involving forces barely acquainted with
working together, especially under conditions of fierce, violent
repression and the silencing of opposition media.
Part
of the "miracle" of the movement's unity, in my view, stemmed from the
fact that the entire movement held firm and intransigent around the key
demands of the resistance -- rejection of the unconstitutional de facto
regime and the restoration of the constitutional presidency; an end to
all repression and for the return of the army to its barracks;
restoration of press freedom and re-opening of banned TV and radio
stations; release of all political prisoners; no impunity for those who
carried out the coup, nor for military and police personnel involved in
crimes against the population, including assassinations, torture,
disappearances, beatings and rape.
Finally,
the key demand that ties all this together into a perspective for
democratising the Honduran state is the call for a constituent assembly
-- a political process leading up to an assembly empowered to change
the country's constitution, and to set in motion democratic and fair
political processes that must form the basis of a responsible and
credible electoral and political exercise for deciding which political
forces will form the national government.
This
is an ongoing struggle. It "ain´t over 'til it’s over" as the US
baseball saying has it. The final innings in this fight lie ahead, not
behind the Honduran and Central American people.
Much at stake in the region
Much
is at stake, not just in Honduras, but across the region. One immediate
impact of the coup was to give courage and sustenance to reactionary
forces in Panama and Costa Rica to finally come out into the open in
their opposition to the process of Central American unity. Its most
advanced recent expression was the SICA (Central American Integration
System) and the C-4 Accord (through which citizens of Nicaragua,
Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala can travel between the four
countries without a passport or visa -- an important step towards
establishing a common labour market, something prized by local
capitalists).
Costa Rica's president Oscar Arias has made it clear that
his country, if he has his way, will turn away from the SICA and join
Panama and Colombia in a different sort of alliance, whether formal or
informal. That tripartite arrangement is a direct threat not only to
Venezuela and Ecuador, which border on the Colombian narco-state
(and Washington's South American "Israel") but also against Nicaragua, which
has significant border disputes with both Colombia (maritime) and with
Costa Rica (territorial disputes over the Rio San Juan and
environmental issues stemming from the contamination of Costa Rica's
feeder rivers with heavy metals and other poisons).
Looking
at the geopolitics of the Honduran coup from an even higher vantage
point, it is clear that the coup was part of Washington's strategy to
re-militarise its relations with South and Central America, and with
the Caribbean countries. The coup was followed by the agreement to
install military bases in Colombia, and later in Panama; and by the
decision to take the US Fourth Fleet out of mothballs and redeploy it to
the southwest Caribbean theatre -- offshore from Venezuela, Colombia,
Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras.
Hence,
Obama has demonstrated not only his skills at what Eva Gollinger
described as "smart diplomacy", but also his readiness to use the big stick, even if he has to go through denial acts and blame Hillary
Clinton, his secretary of state, for the more crude moves in this
warfare.
We like to remind ourselves in Nicaragua that "Sandino vive, la lucha sigue"
(Sandino lives on, the struggle goes on). It does. Francisco Morazán
lives on in the mass resistance movement that has changed politics and
governing in Honduras forever.
[Felipe Stuart Cournoyer is a Canadian-born
Nicaraguan citizen who divides his time between the two countries. He is a
member of the FSLN and a contributing editor to Socialist Voice, published in Canada.]
Note
[1] Elvin
Santos was the candidate of the Liberal Party, while Porfirio Lobo
won the presidency for the Partido Nacional. The two parties are both
traditional and conservative, and play the same tweedledum, tweedledee
role in Hondura's electoral charades as the Democrats and Republicans in
the USA. Coup leader Roberto Micheletti is also a leading Liberal Party member,
as was ousted legitimate president Mel Zelaya.
Massive demonstration as Lobo takes power
January 27, 2010 -- Honduras Resists -- De facto president Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo
took power today as the international business press suggested that the
coup had finally triumphed over the resistance, or at the least the
crisis is over. Meanwhile, despite the ongoing human rights crisis,
kidnapping, murder and intimidation, hundreds of thousands of Hondurans
of all ages, classes, and from all regions, took to the streets to mark a cleartheir
rejection of the legitimacy of Lobo's presidency, and to prove that
their demands for justice and a constituent assembly would not fade.
Organisers
say it was the second largest demonstration since the June 28, 2009, coup d'etat.
There were marches in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, and smaller
marches in other places. The one in the capital went to the airport,
where a sea of Honduran citizens danced, shouted slogans and showed
tremendous spirit as they waited to watch their elected
president Manuel Zelaya board a plane for a brief flight to the
Dominican Republic. A stage was set-up on the field where Is Isis Obed
Murillo was murdered by the army on July 5, 2009. Musicians played
resistance songs, all sections of the resistance gave speeches and the
names of the martyrs of the resistance were read out.
The
energy in the streets was exhilarating, a fresh tidal wave of unified
opposition that revealed the National Resistance Front has only just begun to fight.
The demonstrations saw little
repression despite the presence of droves of police and soldiers, armed
and in riot gear. The transfer of power to Lobo was not completely
spotless, as demonstrators were harassed coming into the city, taken
off buses and manhandled by police. Worse, soldiers and police in the
northern province of Colon carried out the second raid this month on
campesinos organised by the CNTC, which has carried out land recoveries
that were being legalised by Zelaya. Three campesinos were wounded by
gunfire from police and paramilitaries, and one remains in critical
condition.
This drives home the message that
we heard all day from the Honduran people in resistance: "!Por que el
futuro nos pertenence, el presente es de lucha!"
January 27, 2010 -- In Honduras, ousted president Manuel Zelaya is due to leave the country today after President-elect Porfirio Lobo is sworn into office. Zelaya has taken refuge in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa since returning to Honduras in September. On Tuesday, the Honduran Supreme Court dismissed all charges against six military commanders involved in the June 28th coup that removed Zelaya from office. We go inside the Brazilian embassy to speak with Democracy Now!’s Andrés Conteris. Click HERE for transcript.