[News] Toppling a Coup: Electoral, Armed, or Something Else

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Toppling a Coup, Part VI: Electoral, Armed, or Something Else

Posted by 
<http://narcosphere.narconews.com/users/al-giordano>Al 
Giordano - August 25, 2009 at 11:55 am
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/3384/toppling-coup-part-vi-electoral-armed-or-something-else

By Al Giordano


For seventeen years, 
<http://www.caribe.hn/odeco>ODECO and the man the 
organization calls its principal strategist, 
Celeo Alvarez Casildo, have built what is 
evidently the largest and most advanced project 
of community organizing anywhere in (and one that 
reaches across a wide geographical swathe of) Honduras.

As Afro-Hondurans they have self-organized to 
defend and expand their civil rights and those of 
indigenous peoples and other minorities, to win 
proportional representation in Congress and other 
governmental bodies, to overturn NAFTA-style 
initiatives that would have opened the door wider 
to foreign ownership of Honduran property and 
resources and, among other conquests, to legalize 
32,000 hectares of communal lands.

“We had always been invisible,” Alvarez, 
fifty-years-young, explained to your reporters. A 
recent reminder of the unapologetic racism 
rampant in the mindset of the Honduran oligarchy 
came in the early days after the June 28 coup 
d’etat when the regime’s make-believe foreign 
minister, Enrique Ortez, expressed his views 
about US President Barack Obama: “Ese negrito no 
sabe nada de Honduras,” or “That little nigger 
doesn’t know anything about Honduras.” Alvarez 
and ODECO launched an all-out media offensive 
that forced the regime’s first defeat: Ortez’s 
resignation (the regime transferred him to a less 
visible sinecure in its bureaucracy).

Friday will mark two months of the coup regime’s 
illegitimate grasp upon the Honduran state, and 
today a majority of Hondurans of all hues feel 
that same curse of invisibility imposed upon 
them. They have been told again and again by the 
pro-coup media and its mynah birds of the elites 
that they don’t exist, that “everybody” favors 
the coup, even when the only public polling data 
available demonstrates the opposite to be fact. 
The paltry 30 percent that, 
<http://blog.taragana.com/n/gallup-poll-honduras-ousted-president-more-popular-than-replacement-110607/>according 
to Gallup, have a favorable view of coup dictator 
Roberto Micheletti - when coup defenders talk 
about “everybody” as if the only Hondurans that 
count are those among the owning class or its 
aspirants - reveal with their exaggerated and 
fantastic claims that they, too, are much like 
Ortez: so blinded by racism and class prejudice 
that it renders them incapable of rational 
action, much less democratic governance.

As the US Aid agency – no friend of authentic 
democracy in Honduras, historically – 
<http://www.usaid.gov/locations/latin_america_caribbean/democracy/honduras_profile.pdf>has 
noted:

“With a per capita income of US$800 per year, 
Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the 
region. Overall, 71.1 percent of Hondurans lives 
in poverty, and 77.7 percent of the rural 
population is poor. In urban areas, some 63.1 
percent are poor. Income inequality is a critical 
issue. The richest 20 percent of households 
receive 54.3 percent of the total income of the 
country, while the poorest 20 percent receive 
only 3.2 percent. Of the country’s 7 million 
inhabitants, 41 percent are under age 14. Because 
the population is fairly young and economic 
conditions are harsh, a large number of 
marginalized youths struggle daily to subsist. 
Youths head 10 percent of Honduran households, 
and 68 percent of these households are below the poverty line.”

It is that lumpen majority that the elites never 
include when they make their wild claims about 
“what everybody thinks” in Honduras. And yet 
their fear of its democratic participation is so 
great that it provoked them to resort to a violent anti-democratic coup d'etat.

August 2009 in Honduras

In every corner of Honduras visited by Narco News 
in recent weeks – from the capital city of 
Tegucigalpa and its state of Francisco Morazan, 
through the states of Comayagua, Olancho, Colón, 
Atlantida, Yoro, Cortez and Copán (more than two 
thirds of Honduras’ population lives in those 
seven states) – we interviewed hundreds of 
voices, perhaps more than a thousand from every 
walk of life, most of whom told us the same 
thing: the primary goal for which they struggle 
is precisely that which provoked the power 
structure to impose a coup d’etat. They seek, 
above all other goals, a Constitutional 
Convention (known here as a Constituent Assembly, 
elected democratically) to rewrite the nation’s 
poorly-authored 1982 charter, a document which 
had enough holes in its flimsy and contradictory 
protections to allow a wealthy few to think they 
could ram an unconstitutional coup d’etat through it.

Elections in Honduras are conducted through 
“urnas,” or ballot boxes. The first urn is for 
paper ballots for president. The second is to 
select members of Congress. And the third is for 
municipal offices. It was the proposal for a 
“Cuarta Urna,” or fourth ballot box in the 
scheduled November 29 national election that 
caused panic among the ruling minority, because 
it would have - if approved by voters - convened 
such a Constitutional Convention.

Truth is, there are millions of Hondurans 
eligible to vote that simply do not. They don’t 
like the two-party system of the National and 
Liberal labels. They don’t generally trust the 
politicians from either of them. And the low 
voter turnout has allowed, time and time again, a 
minority of Hondurans to gain a plurality of 
votes for one or the other. What the oligarchy 
feared from a ballot question regarding a new 
constitution – even the nonbinding consultation 
that had been planned for June 28 – is that, yes 
they can, the great mass of normally 
nonparticipating Hondurans would flood the polls, 
creating a mandate for now-exiled President 
Manuel Zelaya to successfully push the national 
Congress to add the Cuarta Urna to the November ballot.

The consequence for those in power, if a 
plebiscite for a new Constitution were to share 
the November polling places with those for 
politicians, was evident to all: Historic voter 
turnout by sectors of the population that want to 
rebuild their nation along more authentically 
democratic lines. There was no question that a 
“yes” vote on the Cuarta Urna would have won 
overwhelmingly. Indeed, even in the case of the 
proposed June 28 nonbinding survey, the coup 
plotters felt they had to go to the extreme of 
kidnapping the president to put a stop to it in 
the hours before it was to happen.

The powerful forces that favor the status quo and 
offer abusive interpretation of its milquetoast 
Constitution of 1982 chose not to oppose the 
ballot question the democratic way – they didn’t 
organize a “vote no” campaign or anything like 
that – because they felt, indeed they knew, that 
it was a foregone conclusion that the people 
would overwhelmingly opt to convene a Constitutional Convention.

And for the bosses of the traditional parties – 
Liberal and National – the prospect for such 
radically increased voter turnout in November 
brought nightmares that the smaller but feisty 
Democratic Union Party (UD, in its Spanish 
initials), which promotes the Cuarta Urna, would 
become the overnight sensation – Obama style – as 
a flood of new voters washed the dead wood of the 
twin oligarch parties from the Congressional seas.

“One thing we never understood is how the Cuarta 
Urna, something so good, could become the pretext 
for a coup d’etat,” Celeo Alvarez told your 
reporters when we first visited him last week at 
the ODECO headquarters. “The coup was an 
abortion. It killed the most constructive and 
democratic hope available to the people.”

Meanwhile, the corporate media – and often too 
much of what bills itself as “alternative media,” 
too – has focused more obsessively on the circus 
up above: Will exiled President Mel Zelaya return 
to Honduras? If and when he does will he be 
imprisoned by the coup regime? How long will coup 
“president” Roberto Micheletti last in power? 
Will military General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez be 
scapegoated and prosecuted for the original sin 
of demonstrating the coup’s illegality by 
forcibly exiling the President to Costa Rica? 
Lost in all this mediatic star gazing is the 
central aspiration that remains down below where 
the people live and work: the Constituent Assembly and the new Constitution.

As political analyst Ricardo Arturo Salgado 
<http://links.org.au/node/1215>wrote last week:

“There are essentially two possible short-term 
scenarios for what may happen in the country: a) 
the president returns; and b) the president does 
not return to his post. No matter the scenario, 
the struggle will continue because the ultimate 
goal is the re-founding of our nation, not just 
the return of President Zelaya.”

Indeed, the two months that have already passed 
under coup dictatorship leave only five more 
possible months in Zelaya's tenure, even if he 
does return briefly to power (a scenario that 
looks increasingly unlikely), until the scheduled 
January 29, 2010 inauguration of a new president.

And although Zelaya himself has agreed to the 
twelve-point deal known as the Arias Plan – one 
in which he would return as president but with 
vastly reduced powers – this US-backed 
“solution,” because it fails to address the 
popular yearning for a new Constitution, leaves 
the more-organized-than-ever-before Honduran 
social movements without an attainable 
institutional path to accomplish their most coveted grail.

That’s why, increasingly, at the grassroots 
level, the people and their organizers express 
that they, too, quietly prefer that the coup 
regime of the gorilla Micheletti and his Simian 
Council continues to reject the Arias Plan. “I 
hope it doesn’t happen,” Padre Fausto Milla of 
Santa Rosa de Copán told us yesterday (see the 
related 
<http://narconews.com/Issue59/article3779.html>report 
by Belén Fernández from that outpost along the 
Guatemala border). A consensus is emerging down 
below that the more direct paths to revert this 
abortion of a coup will become clearer once the 
nonsense cooked up above, via San José and 
Washington, will be recognized by all as 
fundamentally flawed since its conception. Plan Arias is already stillborn.

This upcoming Friday, August 28, is therefore 
cooking up to be a very powerfully symbolic day: 
the two-month milestone will mark the 
psychological end of all attempts to resolve the 
matter institutionally. The various human rights 
delegations - from the OAS, the Inter American 
Human Rights Commission and Spanish Judge 
Balthazar Garzón's international criminal court - 
are on their way out of town as we type, and the 
failure of international diplomacy as imposed by 
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will give 
way to the second stage of the struggle to remake 
the country more in the image of authentic 
Honduras and its dispossessed majority.

Three Paths: Electoral, Armed or Something Else

The social movements in Honduras find themselves 
in a dilemma with no ideal solution when it comes 
to the scheduled November 29 elections, devoid of 
any Cuarta Urna, and managed by a coup regime 
that has already demonstrated it cares not a whit 
for democratic process or such quaint concepts as 
the will of the people. Monsters that engage in 
coups d’etat won’t hesitate to utilize electoral 
fraud if they have to, and everybody knows it. No 
reasonable observer thinks that such “elections” 
can possibly be fair or free under a regime that 
establishes curfews, suspends basic 
constitutional liberties and pours acid on 
critical broadcast transmitters any time it feels 
the slightest bit threatened by nonviolent civil resistance from below.

If the Honduran social movements decide to 
participate in the November 29 simulation, they 
risk legitimizing a game that is already fixed 
against them. At the same time, because of the 
fracture in the Liberal Party between its 
golpistas and anti-golpistas, there would 
certainly be vast gains by the Democratic Union 
Party, gathering what the Liberals and their 
hapless standard bearer, former Vice President 
Elvin Santos, have spilled. And it would lead to 
a lot more of them in the national Congress, 
which is the body that can place a Cuarta Urna on 
the ballot, if not in 2009, then perhaps in 2010.

The opposition electoral forces are also plagued 
by tactical disagreements in their own ranks: 
While the UD Party nominated César Ham as its 
presidential candidate, another opposition 
personality, labor leader Carlos Reyes, is also 
on the ballot as the country’s first-ever 
Independent presidential candidate, one without a 
political party. UD leaders like Congresswoman 
Silvia Ayala tell Narco News that they’re 
suspicious that the country’s Electoral Tribunal 
put the Independent on the ballot – an 
unprecedented development in Honduran politics - 
to divide the opposition vote. Others, like labor 
movement veteran Pedro Brizuela in the San Pedro 
Sula region, express positive feelings about both 
Ham and Reyes but suggest that the somewhat older 
Reyes might be the stronger possible candidate to 
unite behind. And, finally, an important sector 
of the left simply will boycott any election 
called by the illegitimate coup regime, which 
makes victory virtually impossible even without 
the predicted electoral fraud due to suppressed 
voter turnout by an ambivalent population.

The eight nations that belong to ALBA, the 
Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas – Antigua and 
Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, 
Ecuador, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent and the 
Grenadines, and Venezuela – have declared they 
will not recognize the winner of Honduran 
elections held under a coup regime, and its 
highly probable that neither will the Organization of American States (OAS).

And so the electoral path, if not fully closed, 
is littered with enough obstacles and landmines 
that those that haven’t disregarded it yet will 
likely come to that conclusion a day late and a 
dollar short, on November 30 of this year, once its tragedy is fully realized.

Upon collapse of the idea that fixed elections 
hold a path out of the coup, talk in some corners 
turns to armed struggle: of mounting a guerrilla 
war. There are always those of limited 
imagination who see only two paths possible: 
electoral or armed. Yet the most basic rule of 
guerrilla combat is one has to measure the 
“correlation of forces” before marching out on that highly exposed limb.

That correlation, if objectively analyzed, does 
not at present contain the successful ingredients 
that would be necessary to overturn the coup 
through the barrel of a gun. Unlike neighboring 
Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala – where well 
organized guerrilla movements have both won and 
lost against entrenched oligarchies and coups 
d’etat – Honduras has little experience in a 
field that, over recent decades, technology has 
made even more difficult. Unlike in the 1970s, 
when the Sandinistas in Nicaragua toppled the 
Somoza regime and when the FMLN in El Salvador 
came extremely close to doing the same for its 
nation, today there are telecommunications 
satellites orbiting above the earth that make 
clandestine insurgency, even in jungle terrain, 
virtually impossible. Ubiquitous cell phones, the 
Internet and the surveillance they bring with 
them over their own users add to the impediments.

Advocates for the armed path – they tend to speak 
in whispers, and certainly have not yet organized 
wide support for that scenario – accurately point 
out that there are tens if not hundreds of 
thousands of Hondurans at present so committed to 
winning back their country that an armed 
resistance could conceivably outnumber and even 
overpower the 9,000 members of the Honduran Armed 
Forces and the 14,000 National Police, perhaps, 
maybe if everything went right. True, but that 
measurement of the correlation of forces omits 
another powerful sector: that of organized crime.

That narco-traffickers and other crime 
organizations are heavily armed in Central 
America is no secret. In the upper echelons of 
this milieu are the international crime 
syndicates, including the ex-Cuban supporters of 
terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles as well as 
Mexican and Colombian traffickers displaced by 
the preference by governments in those lands for 
competing crime organizations. Honduras, under a 
coup regime that is now cut off from much legal 
international aid, has put up the “welcome” sign 
to these bandits in search of a new flag to 
provide them with safe haven for their activities 
along the cocaine route between Colombia and the 
United States in exchange for the vast resources they bring.

And then there are the retail level narcos. As 
the above-mentioned US AID report notes, 
“According to police statistics, at the end of 
2003, there were 36,000 gang members in 
Honduras.” Whether that estimate is exaggerated 
or undercounted its number has surely grown since 
then, and these must also be measured in the 
correlation of forces. Confronted with a 
guerrilla insurgency, the coup regime and its 
police agencies would have it in their power to 
bring these notoriously brutal armed sectors of 
organized crime into the counter-insurgency, and 
to do so literally overnight. Simply with a 
promise of impunity for their commerce in 
contraband, the coup regime can enlist the full 
weight of such armed organizations, networks and 
gangs to bring a wave of terror not just against 
any armed insurgency, but also against all social 
players that remain peacefully in resistance, and 
- coup defenders should be careful what they wish 
for - the vast law abiding civilian population, 
including middle and upper class coup supporters, 
expats and tourists, too. The demons would be 
unleashed upon the entire population, not just those from one political camp.

An honest assessment of the correlation of forces 
has to conclude that, at present, both the 
electoral and armed paths that have changed 
history in other lands are closed, or about to shut, in Honduras.

Which brings us back to the slogan over that 
building in La Ceiba, Honduras’ third-largest 
city, that invites: “We Seek Voices that Hush the Silence.”

What Is “Something Else?”

The capital city of Tegucigalpa is the first 
place that foreign media, human rights observers 
and solidarity missions go when they visit 
Honduras, and that is understandable. It is the 
seat of state power, whether in times of 
legitimacy or in this hour of illegitimacy. It is 
also the central headquarters of the national 
unions and other organizations that have come together in civil resistance.

Yet few international media or observers have 
taken the time and attention to head beyond 
Tegucigalpa and out into the provinces to study 
the dynamics on the ground in the rest of the 
country. The conditions are not the same as they 
are in the capital. They are, in fact, better. 
The civil resistance at the local level in the 
rest of the country is generally not as tied up 
in the emergencies du jour that the cycle of 
marches, repression, more marches, more 
repression, and the media circus around both, 
that have characterized much of the resistance in the capital city.

Out in the field, there is simply more air and 
room to think, to observe calmly, to have 
lengthier conversations and listening sessions, 
to ignore the daily scandals and distractions put 
forward by the dishonest national and 
international media, and whether along the 
northern coast, the Olancho breadbasket or the 
Mayan mountain regions to the west, the outlying 
grassroots focal points of the resistance are 
characterized by more mid-to-long-term thinking 
about strategy and tactics than can occur under 
the state of siege situation in Tegucigalpa and 
its constant crises and interruptions. Set and 
setting will always influence how humans think 
and act, and among the more than 80 percent of 
the Honduran population that lives outside the 
capital’s metropolitan area the current set and 
setting are simply less bipolar.

“Here, we struggle to become the subjects of our 
own story and not mere objects of it,” Celeo 
Alvarez explains while providing a tour of the 
three-story building that ODECO inaugurated two 
years ago in La Ceiba as its new central command. 
Long term planning is the watchword here, where 
ODECO prepares one hundred and more youths each 
year, selected at the grassroots level by 
community organizations, through its Leadership 
Training Program in Human Rights. The 
headquarters includes dormitories with 64 beds, 
kitchen, assembly hall and other resources. It 
was constructed with funds from Nongovernmental 
Organizations, mainly from Europe, that support ODECO’s work.

Celeo Alvarez Casildo and his collaborators have 
some ideas for how Hondurans can replant their 
struggle and put it back on the path to a new 
Constitution. We’ve spent various days listening 
carefully to them, prodding, poking and testing 
them with questions and antitheses, as well as 
studying what he and his organization have 
already accomplished, and how they did so. Those 
ideas, and the stories behind them, will be the 
subject of the next chapter of this series on 
Toppling a Coup. Meanwhile, we invite our readers 
to think aloud about what “something else” might 
look and be like in this country of more than 
seven million Hondurans, where a majority now 
feel the weight of an imposed silence that they know, too, must be hushed.

Update: Perhaps because it, too, feels its Plan 
Arias "solution" slipping away, the US State 
Department today announced that beginning 
tomorrow, Wednesday, August 26, it 
is<http://noticias.terra.com/articulos/act1914003/EEUU_suspende_servicio_de_visas_en_Honduras_a_partir_del_miercoles_oficial/> 
suspending the process for all travel visas not 
classified as "emergency" for Hondurans that wish 
to visit the United States. It is a move designed 
to put maximum pressure on the coup regime to go 
along with Plan Arias, since it affects the 
regime's political base: the oligarch class that 
can afford to travel to the Miami, Disney World, 
and such. The coming days will tell whether this 
last-gasp effort comes too little, too late to 
save the botched diplomacy efforts from 
Washington. (Here's the statement, 
<http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2009/aug/128349.htm>in English, from State.)

Update II: Radio Globo reporter Eduardo Maldonado 
is reporting, live, his eye-witness account of 
members of the Honduran military brass and the 
top chiefs of the National Police who recently 
arrived a building near Morazan Boulevard in 
Tegucigalpa and are meeting inside "on the third 
floor." The radio is also reporting that the 
Catholic Church hierarchy and various Chambers of 
Commerce have determined to back the San José 
solution of reinstating Zelaya to the presidency 
"regardless of the stance of the Micheletti 
government." Looks like the visa suspension is 
peeling away some inner layers of the coup onion 
rather rapidly. Something's up. And we're here 
monitoring the situation. Developing...




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