[News] Canada's Long Embrace of the Honduran Dictatorship

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/gordon03192010.html
March 19 - 21, 2010


Imperialism Re-Booted in Latin America


Canada's Long Embrace of the Honduran Dictatorship

By TODD GORDON and JEFFERY R. WEBBER

Peter Kent recently returned from a three day 
trip (February 17-20) to Honduras, proudly 
declaring the mission a success. As Canada’s 
Minister of State for the Americas, Kent is the 
Tory government’s point person for Canada’s 
growing political and economic interests in the 
region. Honduras has become an important focus of 
those interests, since the military coup last 
June against the moderately left-leaning 
president, Manuel Zelaya, swung the country sharply back to the right.

Ignoring the ongoing abuses of human rights in 
the country under the new coupist presidency of 
Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, Kent has been following 
through with his promise to promote the 
normalization of the country’s relations with the 
rest of the hemisphere. Lobo won fraudulent 
elections held in November under the military 
dictatorship in a context of repression and 
intimidation. The election was boycotted by the 
anti-coup movement, and the Organization of 
American States and European Union refused to 
send official observers. Despite this, 
immediately following Lobo’s inauguration on 
January 27, Kent declared that Canada will 
“support President Lobo’s efforts as he moves to 
fully reintegrate Honduras into the international 
and hemispheric community, including in the Organization of American States.”

Canada, Honduras and the OAS

On his way to Honduras Kent met with the 
Secretary General of the Organization of American 
States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, on February 
16. Kent used the meeting to push Canada’s goal 
of recognizing the Lobo government onto the OAS 
agenda. Roberto Micheletti, the dictator that 
replaced Zelaya after the coup, withdrew Honduras 
from the organization when it became clear that 
the majority of member states were going to vote 
to kick the country out. While some staunch 
imperial allies in the region, such as Colombia 
and Peru, have recognized the Lobo government, 
other countries, notably Venezuela and Brazil, 
have refused to do so. The re-admittance of 
Honduras into the OAS will be a contentious and 
divisive issue, pitting the U.S., Canada, and 
their right wing allies, against those countries 
that want less influence from North American imperialism in the region.

Kent’s visit to Honduras, following his meeting 
with Insulza, was thus intended to strengthen the 
new government’s claim to legitimacy and its case 
for reinsertion into the OAS. Acting as if 
everything is once again well and good in 
Honduras also makes it easier for Canada to 
deepen its economic ties with the country. Canada 
is the largest mining investor in Honduras, for 
example, and its interests will increase 
significantly should Lobo and the right get their 
way and pass a new mining law that increases the rights of foreign capital.

Peter Kent and the Boys in Honduras

Unsurprisingly, then, Kent was all praise for 
Lobo and his administration during his latest 
trip. He was pleased that “President Lobo is 
beginning the process of national reconciliation, 
including supporting the formation of a truth 
commission.” Besides meeting with Lobo, Kent also 
met with three of the latter’s cabinet ministers. 
These included Micheletti’s spokesperson, 
Minister of Planning and Cooperation, Arturo 
Corrales. Corrales supported the Micheletti 
government’s refusal to implement the San 
José-Tegucigalpa Accord, which it had initially 
signed along with Zelaya and which called for a 
government of national reconciliation (itself a 
very problematic feature of the Accord from a 
democratic perspective). Kent also met with 
Foreign Minister, Mario Canahuati. Canahuati is 
the son of one of Honduras’s most powerful 
capitalists, the maquila magnate, Juan Canahuati. 
His brother, Jesus, is the president of the 
Honduran Manufacturers’ Association. Mario, 
meanwhile, was Lobo’s vice presidential candidate 
in the 2005 election, which Lobo lost to Zelaya, 
and is the past president of the Honduran 
National Business Council, a pro-coup organization.

Kent also met with Canadian business leaders in 
the country, though he didn’t publicly disclose 
which ones (requests from his office for the 
names of companies with which he met went unanswered).

Who Kent Didn’t Talk To

Kent suggested the Lobo government was taking 
crucial steps toward, “healing the wounds created 
by the recent political impasse,” steps which 
will allow “Honduras to regain a sense of trust 
in their country’s democratic institutions.”

This depiction of political developments in the 
country is hard to square with facts on the 
ground – namely, political assassinations, 
repression, torture, and mass arrests. Kent might 
have grasped this had he bothered to meet with 
the Committee of Family Members of the 
Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), the country’s 
most prestigious human rights organization, founded in the 1980s.

On January 30, three days after the celebrated 
inauguration of Pepe Lobo, COFADEH reports that 
Blas López, a Secondary School Teacher and known 
member of the anti-coup resistance, was 
discovered dead from multiple gun shot wounds. On 
February 2, Vanessa Zepeda, a 29-year-old union 
activist and active member of the resistance, was 
killed after she was thrown from a moving vehicle 
in the streets of Tegucigalpa. On February 15, 
just two days prior to Kent’s arrival in 
Honduras, Julio Fúnez Benítez, a union activist 
and resistance member who had received multiple 
death threats by coupist supporters, was gunned 
down and killed by men on a motorcycle. Four days 
after Kent left the country, and only a day after 
the release of his press communiqué exalting the 
successes of Lobo’s administration, Claudia 
Larisa Brizuela Rodríguez, the 36-year-old 
daughter of a prominent radio journalist and 
resistance activist was shot in the face in front 
of her children after opening the front door to her home.

Such para-military terrorization of peaceful 
resisters has been a continuous stain on 
Honduras’ human rights record from the moment of 
Micheletti’s coup on June 28, 2009, through the 
transition to Pepe Lobo, and on until the present 
day. According to COFADEH, by the end of 
February, 2010, there had been 43 
politically-motivated assassinations of civilians 
associated with the resistance since the coup. 
This number is almost certainly a low estimate, 
the human rights organization acknowledges, as 
community members and the families of those 
killed are often too afraid to come forward for 
fear of reprisal. Many political murders are 
passed over in the mainstream media as “gang 
killings.” As far back as January, the Frente 
Nacional de Resistencia Popular (National Front 
of Popular Resistance, FNRP) claimed that over 
130 activists had been assassinated.

In a communiqué released on March 5, 2010, 
COFADEH argues that the selective attacks against 
members of the resistance are part of an 
orchestrated campaign to demobilize and fragment 
the FRNP. They document 250 violations of human 
rights since Lobo’s inauguration.

According to the report, the government is also 
engaged in a full-blown disinformation campaign 
through the domestic, coup-backing, private 
media, and the mainstream international media 
outlets, to consolidate the image of Pepe Lobo as 
a legitimate, democratic, and civilian government 
open to foreign investment and good relations 
with North America and the European Union. 
Disgracefully, the EU fell in line with North 
American imperialism and decided at the end of 
February to normalize relations with Honduras.

Imperialism Re-Booted in Latin America

The first decade of this century witnessed mass, 
extra-parliamentary mobilizations overthrow a 
series of heads of state in Argentina, Ecuador, 
and Bolivia, followed by the election of a vast 
array of self-described left and centre-left 
governments across South and Central America. 
Overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US 
state has felt its grip on the region loosen.

Recent years have seen renewed efforts by the 
Bush and Obama governments to reconstitute the 
contours of a new counter-reform offensive. The 
Obama administration, today, sees new sources of 
hope in the consolidation of right-wing 
governments in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Panama, 
and, more recently, Honduras and Chile. New U.S. 
military bases in Colombia and Panama illustrate 
the utility of such clients. Washington is also 
betting on its ability to turn a number of 
centre-left regimes – Kirchner in Argentina, 
Funes in El Salvador, Colom in Guatemala, and 
Mujica in Uruguay, among others – against the 
relatively more independent regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent the 
first five days of March on a whirlwind tour of 
the region, denouncing Venezuelan leader Hugo 
Chávez and attempting to pressure various 
governments into normalizing relations with the Honduran dictatorship.

Clinton met with Lobo in Guatemala City on March 
5. “We support the work that President Lobo is 
doing to promote national unity and strengthen 
democracy,” she told journalists gathered at a 
news conference. Earlier in the week, during a 
visit to Buenos Aires, she claimed that the 
“Honduras crisis has been managed to a successful 
conclusion.” It was also apparently “done without violence.”

As Eric Toussaint, president of the Committee for 
the Abolition of Third World Debt, recently 
pointed out in the Socialist Worker, “we can see 
that the Obama administration is in no hurry to 
break with the methods used by its predecessors: 
witness the massive funding of different 
opposition movements within the context of its 
policy to ‘strengthen democracy’; the launching 
of media campaigns to discredit governments that 
do not share its political agenda (Cuba, 
Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Manuel 
Zelaya’s Honduras and so on); maintaining the 
blockade of Cuba; the support for separatist 
movements in Bolivia (the media luna and the 
regional capital, Santa Cruz), in Ecuador (the 
city of Guayaquil and its province), and in 
Venezuela (the petroleum state of Zulia, the 
capital of which is Maracaibo); the support for 
military attacks, like the one perpetrated by 
Colombia in Ecuador in March 2008; as well as 
actions by Colombian or other paramilitary forces in Venezuela.”

Canada’s imperial role in the region has taken on 
a similar guise as the U.S., although shaped more 
specifically around Canadian mining and other 
capitalist interests in the area.

Kent’s last trip to the region, prior to the 
Honduras visit, saw him in Venezuela. Apparently 
there was insufficient time to meet with any 
representatives of the democratically-elected 
government of Hugo Chávez, although he met with a 
number of groups associated with the far-right 
opposition. On January 28, after having returned 
to Canada, Kent issued a news release declaring 
that there was “shrinking democratic space in 
Venezuela” under Chávez. “During my recent visit 
to Venezuela,” Kent said, “I heard many 
individuals and organizations express concerns 
related to violations of the right to freedom of 
expression and other basic liberties.”

The comments elicited a response from Chávez on 
his weekly Alo Presidente TV program. The 
Venezuelan President said he wouldn’t take advice 
from an “ultraright” government that had just 
“closed” parliament. Chávez was referring to 
Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper’s, 
notorious suspension, or “proroguement,” of the 
Canadian parliament on December 30 until March 3 
to avoid debate surrounding Canadian military 
abuses in occupied Afghanistan. The Vancouver Sun 
reported that Roy Chaderton Matos, Venezuela’s 
ambassador to the OAS, accused the Canadian 
government of backing “coup-plotters” and “destabilizers” the country.

Last week, Peter Van Loan, Minister of 
International Trade, made a further show of whom 
Canada considers its friends in the region, 
tabling legislation to implement the 
Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Of course, 
no word was uttered of the infamous record of 
human rights violations committed by the Álvaro 
Uribe regime in Colombia, nor of its intimate 
ties to paramilitary networks operating with 
impunity throughout the country. “The 
Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement will provide 
greater market access for Canadian exporters of 
goods such as wheat, pulses, barley, paper 
products and heavy equipment,” the press release 
from the Department of Foreign Affairs and 
International Trade declared this week. “An 
increasing number of Canadian investors and 
exporters are entering the Colombian market, and 
it is also a strategic destination for Canadian 
direct investment, especially in mining, oil 
exploration, printing and education.”

The effort to consolidate the coupist 
installation of the far-right in Honduras is, in 
other words, merely the latest puzzle piece in a 
much wider and reviving North American imperial 
project in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Resistance Continues

In Honduras, as elsewhere, the resistance has not 
been cowed. On March 8, the FNRP released their 
51st communiqué. They announced that they would 
be organizing a poll of the Honduran people on 
June 28, 2010 to assess the popularity of the 
call for an Inclusive and Popular Constituent 
Assembly. The date will commemorate the first 
anniversary of the coupist regime, and will 
represent the unbreakable will of the Honduran 
people to resist, and to build an authentic 
democracy that transforms at its roots the 
reigning system of injustice and repression.

The communiqué condemned the U.S. government’s 
efforts to construct a legitimate face for this 
dictatorship, especially the role played by U.S. 
ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens.

The resistance also pointed to the role played by 
the private media in defending the Honduran 
oligarchy and the coup regime that serves its 
interests. In particular, the FNRP pointed to the 
way in which the daily newspapers La Prensa and 
El Heraldo, owned by business tycoon, Jorge 
Canahuati, have portrayed working class families 
and popular leaders aligned with the resistance 
as terrorists. The FNRP also highlighted the 
parallel part played by the TV station 
Corporación de Televicentro, property of Rafael Ferrari.

The Communiqué closed with a call to popular 
movements to attend the Second Gathering for the 
Refoundation of Honduras, in the city of La 
Esperanza, between March 12 and 14.

According to Claudia Korol’s América Latina en 
Movimiento report, dispatched from on scene in La 
Esperanza, over a thousand delegates had gathered 
by March 13th, representing an array of different 
popular sectors: Lenca and Garífuna peoples’ 
movements; feminists; environmentalists; rural 
and urban trade unionists; peasants; and 
different currents of the revolutionary left – 
many with links going back to the Central 
American revolutionary struggles of the 1980s.

A mix of popular political traditions focusing on 
decolonization, anti-imperialism, and socialism 
converged as those gathered broke off into twenty 
simultaneous popular assemblies to discuss a 
variety of themes: the preservation of water, 
forests, land, subsoil, traditional territories, 
and air; the political system and popular 
sovereignty; culture; justice; autonomy; sexual 
diversity; health; communications; foreign policy 
and international relations; anti-patriarchal 
struggles; anti-racism; national security; work 
and workers’ rights; the economic system; 
indigenous and black communities; youth; fighting 
corruption and learning about popular accounting.

These different general discussions then fed into 
issues of strategic orientation: What does 
refounding Honduras mean, and how is it different 
than mere reform? What will a refounded Honduras 
look like? What are the necessary stages to get 
there? What do we mean by constituent power and 
the building of popular power from below? How can 
we strengthen our popular organizations to foment 
this popular power? What are we really calling 
for when we demand a Popular and Democratic 
Constituent Assembly? How can we shape our 
participation as a resistance movement to ensure 
that the genuine interests, aspirations, and 
proposals of the people will be included in the new constitution?

In the coming months these questions will begin 
to take concrete form through the 
extra-parliamentary struggles in the streets and 
the countryside, in defiance of selective 
assassinations, intimidation, media obfuscation, and imperialist meddling.

Todd Gordon teaches political science at York 
University, in Toronto. He is the author of Cops, 
Crime and Capitalism: The Law-and-Order Agenda in 
Canada (Fernwood), and the forthcoming Imperial 
Canada (Arbeiter Ring Publishing).

Jeffery R. Webber teaches political science at 
the University of Regina. He is the author of two 
forthcoming books: Red October: Left-Indigenous 
Struggles in Modern Bolivia (Brill) and Rebellion 
to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous 
Liberation and the Politics of Evo Morales (Haymarket).

Together they are currently writing a book on 
Canadian imperialism in the Americas in the age of neoliberalism.




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