Honduras: What A Resistance

By Angel Guerra Cabrera

The popular movement against the coup d’etat in Honduras has, in ten months, consolidated the struggle as a national political force of the first magnitude, capable of aiming for an important social and political transformation of the country. Facing growing repression and the demagogy of [Porfiro] Lobo, the new visible head of the pro-coup tendency imposed by a farcical election, the National Front of Popular Resistance [FNRP in its Spanish acronym] has managed to rope in the most diverse social forces and people, including the indigenous people and the Afro-descendants, appreciably increase the political consciousness of its members and ally its principled positions to tactical flexibility that allows it to advance in very adverse conditions in the political battle facing it.

The resistance has grown in the complex and treacherous situation created by the [U.S.] Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in imposing the mediation of her buddy, Óscar Arias [President of Costa Rica], to consolidate the coup which, till this moment, has been directly rejected by the United Nations and the European Union, which demand the “immediate and unconditional” restitution of Manuel Zelaya as President. It has grown again in the media silence imposed by the United States regarding the crimes and grave violations of human rights in Honduras while the State Department is employed in the background to make it seem that the country is returning to democratic normality. It is hardly worried by the killings of journalists and social activists, the military occupation of the agricultural zone El Aguán; in sum the death threats or disappearance for all those who condemn the dictatorship. In the heat of the battle, the FNRP has turned out to be one of the most combative and promising popular force of our region in the struggle for the second independence and the unity and economic and political unity of Latin America.

The imperial elite of the United States and the native oligarchy never imagined the spark that would be lit in people’s conscience by that the flowering of sensitivities and social commitment in a large landowner like Zelaya, who came to presidency from within the anti-people rules of the Honduran political system but in a tectonic Latin American epoch. Neither did it cross their minds the radicalisation and the redoubling of the will to fight which the coup nourished among the popular sectors. They had calculated that the resistance would last just a few days or weeks and, while it crumbled, the coup would be consolidated. I remember having read an honest anti-coup analysis from Honduras immediately after the military putsch which doubted the possibility of keeping up the fight for more than a few days.

And resisting the forcible regime appeared to be the curse of Sisyphus. It has demanded of the FNRP members that they fight against a singularly obstinate and selfish oligarchy – with its massive economic power, its ancestral cultural hegemony and political terrorism facilitated by the ownership of the large communication media – at risk of being beaten up or assassinated by an army and security forces servile to the empire and of emblematic anti-people progeny. All this in a country that is hugely impoverished by oligarchic and imperial plunder, whose budget depends a lot on Washington’s contributions, which maintains a military base there well known for its interference in internal matters.

In various recent marches all over the country, the FNRP raised the slogan of getting 2.5 million signatures demanding the convening of a Constituent Assembly for June 28, the first anniversary of the coup. This is a work that has already started and demands gigantic political work and organisation but there does not appear to be anything more important in continuing with the creation of counter-power than denouncing the Constitution and the anti-democratic social regime in power, children of the United States’ dirty war against the Sandinista revolution and the revolutionary movements of Central America. The coup in Honduras should underscore the first step of Obama’s farcical strategy against the people and progressive governments of Latin America, of which the current media campaign against Cuba is a cornerstone.

[The May Day rally in Honduras was joined by at least 500,00 to 700,000 people, surpassing the expectations of the organisers and is considered the most important event in the country after the 1954 strike by the banana workers against the Standard Fruit Company. Argenpress]

Source: La Jornada

Return To Home Page