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<h1><font size=4><b>Toppling a Coup, Part VI: Electoral, Armed, or
Something Else</b></font></h1><font size=3>Posted by
<a href="http://narcosphere.narconews.com/users/al-giordano">Al
Giordano</a> - August 25, 2009 at 11:55 am <br>
<a href="http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/3384/toppling-coup-part-vi-electoral-armed-or-something-else" eudora="autourl">
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/3384/toppling-coup-part-vi-electoral-armed-or-something-else<br>
<br>
</a>By Al Giordano<br><br>
<br>
For seventeen years, <a href="http://www.caribe.hn/odeco">ODECO</a> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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:
<i>“Ese negrito no sabe nada de Honduras,”</i> 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).<br><br>
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,
<a href="http://blog.taragana.com/n/gallup-poll-honduras-ousted-president-more-popular-than-replacement-110607/">
according to Gallup</a>, 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.<br><br>
As the US Aid agency – no friend of authentic democracy in Honduras,
historically –
<a href="http://www.usaid.gov/locations/latin_america_caribbean/democracy/honduras_profile.pdf">
has noted</a>:<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>“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.”<br><br>
</dl>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.<br><br>
August 2009 in Honduras<br><br>
</b>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.<br><br>
Elections in Honduras are conducted through “urnas,”</i> 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,”</i> 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.<br><br>
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</i>, 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.<br><br>
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</i> 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.<br><br>
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</i>, that it was a foregone conclusion that the people would
overwhelmingly opt to convene a Constitutional Convention.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
As political analyst Ricardo Arturo Salgado
<a href="http://links.org.au/node/1215">wrote</a> last week:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>“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.”<br><br>
</dl>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://narconews.com/Issue59/article3779.html">report by Belén
Fernández</a> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Three Paths: Electoral, Armed or Something Else<br><br>
</b>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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).<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
What Is “Something Else?”<br><br>
</b>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.<br><br>
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</i> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
“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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Update: </b>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<a href="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</a> 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,
<a href="http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2009/aug/128349.htm">in
English</a>, from State.)<br><br>
Update II:</b> 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</b>. And we're here monitoring the
situation. Developing...<br><br>
<br><br>
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