All kinds of manoeuvres are taking
place after the coup in Honduras. The coup organisers want to hold on,
but pressure is being brought to bear for some kind of compromise
solution, which however cannot satisfy the masses. The only real answer
lies in the full mobilisation of the Honduran workers and peasants.
Sunday, July 5, a week after having been removed by a military coup,
Honduran president Mel Zelaya boarded a Venezuelan plane in Washington
with the aim of going back to his country. Hundreds of thousands had
marched to the Toncontin airport and broken through police lines to
make sure his plane could land. However, the army opened fire on the
unarmed demonstrators, injuring scores and killing at least one.
Zelaya’s plane was prevented from landing by the Army which positioned
vehicles on the landing strip. The government of Micheletti ‑ imposed
by a coup ‑ has closed down all of the country’s airports.
Men, women, children, workers, peasants, the poor, had gathered from
early in the morning to march to the airport to receive their
president. A report from Radio Globo put the figure at half a million,
others put the number at 200,000 people. The live broadcast from
Telesur showed a huge crowd of hundreds of thousands, far bigger than
the 65,000 that had marched against the coup the day before in
Tegucigalpa. Speaking from Honduras to In Defence of Marxism,
Democratic Unity (UD) party MP Tomás Andino said: “This demonstration
was unprecedented, probably the largest in the history of Honduras”. We
have to take into account that the population of the country as a whole
is only 7.5 million people. This demonstration was the biggest so far
against the coup and dwarfed any of the demonstrations organised by the
coup plotters during the week.
This massive movement of the people of Honduras has taken place
despite the fact that the new regime has imposed a curfew (which has
now been extended and is in place between 6pm and 6am every night), has
arrested dozens of known trade union and popular movement activists and
leaders, has killed a number of them (the correspondent from El Pais
has reported that people have been taken to hospital by the police with
bullet wounds every single night), has suspended constitutional
guarantees (a de facto state of emergency situation) and put in place a
media blockade (a number of radio and TV stations have been closed
down). According to police officials 651 people were arrested on
Saturday and Sunday alone. None of this has stopped the movement and
the strikes which have paralysed mainly the education system and the
telecommunications and electricity companies. Peasant and indigenous
organisations are maintaining road blocks in many of the districts in
the interior of the country.
of thousands had marched to the Toncontin airport and broken through
police lines to make sure Zelaya’s plane could land.The
scope of the movement against the coup and rising international
pressure is already opening up rifts within the camp of the coup
organisers. According to some reports, businessmen Ricardo Maduro,
Rafael Ferrari and Carlos Flores Facussémet met with representatives of
the coup organisers until early in the morning trying to get them to
reach an agreement. But the coup plotters, led by Micheletti, are
particularly obtuse representatives of the Honduran oligarchy, and
having taken the step of organising the coup, are now in no mood to
make any concessions. In a farcical press conference Micheletti alleged
that Nicaraguan troops were massing at the border in preparation for an
invasion of Honduras. When pressed by the journalists to give more
details, he changed his tune and said that it was just a “psychological
invasion”!
On Saturday, July 4, Micheletti’s junta also rebuffed OAS
general secretary Insulza, who had gone to Honduras in a last minute
attempt to reach a compromise. It is clear that this coup is highly
embarrassing for the current US administration and that pressure is
being put on the coup plotters to at least make some concessions which
could allow for a negotiated settlement, probably including some
guarantees on Zelaya’s part that he would not seek to call a referendum
on a Constituent Assembly.
The role of the United States in the coup
has been a lot of speculation about whether the Obama administration
was involved in this coup or not. On this question, Andino was very
clear: “We think it is impossible for the Honduran Army to have acted
without at least tacit approval on the part of US intelligence”.
All the information that has come out over the last week confirms what we said just after the coup:
“It is clear and public knowledge that the US knew that a coup was
being organised. They had had conversations with the leaders of
Congress in which the coup had been discussed. The advice from the US
had been against taking the step of arresting Zelaya. Probably the US administration,
faced with the mass mobilisation on Friday and having learnt some
lessons from Venezuela, was not very confident in taking what might be
seen as an illegal step and were more in favour of continuing with the script of the “constitutional coup”, leaving the removal of Zelaya for another, more favourable, moment.” (Defeat the reactionary military coup in Honduras – Mass mobilisation in the streets and general strike!)
US ambassador Hugo Llorens had stated on a number of occasions that
he was against the consultation being proposed by Zelaya on the
possibility of a referendum on a constituent assembly, but he phrased
his opposition in typical diplomatic language: “one cannot violate the
Constitution in order to create a Constitution”, he said (La Prensa, June 4). This was precisely the argument used by the oligarchy to block Zelaya’s proposed consultation.
Llorens stressed that: “whatever is finally done, it should be done
within the law, within the Constitution”. On June 17, he echoed the
arguments of the Honduran capitalists: “The political situation in the
country does not help to create an investment friendly climate.
Uncertainty in a country does not help investment” (La Prensa). And he added that the dispute about the consultation should be resolved by Congress. What he was saying, loud and clear, was that the US were in favour of a “democratic constitutional coup”.
Right up to the eve of the coup, US ambassador Llorens was talking
to the coup plotters. On June 21, there was a meeting in the US embassy
with the presence of president Zelaya, as well as all the coup
plotters: Congress president Micheletti, Liberal and National Party
presidential candidates Santos and Lobo, and the head of the Armed
Forces, Romeo Vásquez. According to the report in the Honduran La Prensa,
Zelaya was told that “the best way out of the crisis” would be for him
to “cancel the consultation and carry out an opinion poll instead”. (La Prensa, June 22).
The very fact that the US ambassador is meddling in the internal
affairs of a sovereign country in this manner is a clear indication of
the status of Honduras as a “banana republic” dominated by US
imperialism. The message to Zelaya was clear: cancel the referendum or
else.
would be extremely naïve to think that Llorens did not know of the
plans for a coup ‑ in fact this was being openly discussed in the
Honduran media in the days leading up to it ‑ and even more naïve to
think that he had not reported to Washington. Llorens is not a
newcomer, he was nominated as US ambassador to Honduras by the Bush
administration and had been Head of Andean Affairs at the National
Security Council in 2002 and 2003. This position made him Bush’s main
advisor on matters related to Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and
Ecuador. He therefore was well aware of the failure of the 2002 coup in
Venezuela.
The policy of the new Obama administration regarding Latin America
has been one of hiding the stick and mainly waving the carrot. The aims
are the same, but after the fiasco of Bush’s bullish policy in the
region, Obama is keen to push back the revolutionary wave sweeping the
continent by leaning on the “reasonable left” governments in the
region. He cannot, therefore, afford the embarrassment of a military
coup. Certainly the US administration wanted to remove Zelaya, who had
become a thorn in their side, by joining ALBA, siding with Chavez,
refusing for months to accept the new US ambassador, Llorens, as a
gesture of solidarity with Bolivia (where the US were involved in
another attempted coup in September last year) and by generally
contributing to a sharpening of the class struggle (“polarisation”) in
Honduras with his “irresponsible” statements about the rich and poor,
and “freeing the country from imperialism”. They merely preferred to do
so by constitutional means.
of the president. The coup was averted at the last minute with the
intervention of Llorens and even, according to some reports, of US
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself. But this only delayed the
coup until Sunday 28, when the army took Zelaya in the middle of the
night and put him on a plane to Costa Rica.
This was revealed in the lukewarm and belated statements of the
Obama administration in the aftermath of the coup. The first official
pronouncement of the White House was along the lines of an appeal to
“all political and social players in Honduras to respect democratic
norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic
Charter”. That was an appeal for all players to respect
democracy, when some of them had just carried out a coup! It was only
after the strongly worded condemnation of the coup by the ALBA member
countries, led by Venezuela, that the US was forced to utter the word
“coup”, and threatened to curtail military aid to Honduras. However,
ambassador Llorens was left in Honduras, in order to keep an open line
“with all players”.
though Zelaya has been in Washington for a few days, neither Obama nor
Clinton have thus far met with him, preferring to allow the OAS to deal
with the matter. The Organisation of American States has been charged
with trying to find a reasonable solution to this mess, one that would
save face by bringing Zelaya back, but on the basis of neutralising him
– and above all the masses who support him. After all, even if he came
back, he does not have control of Congress, nor the Supreme Court, nor
the Army, and there are elections scheduled in November in which he
cannot legally participate. When Zelaya announced that he was going
back to the country on Thursday, July 2nd, the OAS gave the
regime a 72-hour ultimatum, thus delaying his return. Then Zelaya
announced that he would go back on Saturday 4th, only for OAS general
secretary Insulza to announce his own visit to Honduras on that day,
delaying Zelaya by one more day.
But Insulza was met with derision on the part of the coup plotters
who announced that, before anyone kicked them out, they would be
leaving the OAS. There are certain elements in politics that are never
completely under anyone’s control. Here we saw the most obtuse
representatives of the Honduran oligarchy biting the hand that was
offering them a way out.
always reflecting faithfully the opinions of imperialism, put it quite
bluntly last week: “It is urgent to find a way out within the agreed
[OAS] deadline, in order to prevent Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez,
from filling the vacuum which might be left afterwards. If the OAS,
with US support, does not reinstate Zelaya, the road would then be open
for the insurrectionary solution that Chavez is suggesting. The US
seems to be conscious of the fact that it is running more risks here
than they could have ever imagined in a country like Honduras, and is
attempting to be very careful in its moves, so that Zelaya can win but without a victory for what he represents. In other words, without a victory for Chavez and populism”. (El Pais, July 2nd, Ultimátum de la OEA a los golpistas)
El Pais, incidentally came out against the coup but
supported the reasons for it, after having written a vitriolic
denunciation of Zelaya the day before the coup, in an editorial which
ridiculed Chavez’s warning that a coup was being prepared in Honduras. (Editorial: Crisis en Honduras, June 26th)
Negotiations and mass action
in the next few days, more pressure will be exerted on the coup leaders
to reach a settlement. This was confirmed today in an article in the Washington Post:
“U.S. officials confirmed that Honduras’s de facto government had sent
a message to the OAS seeking to open negotiations, a move that one
official described as positive. ‘We think this could create the basis
for continuing movement by the OAS on diplomatic initiatives,’ one
official said.”
Tomás Andino, the UD deputy, told us that Carlos Flores was in
negotiations with Washington to find a negotiated way out of the
current crisis. “They want to bring back Zelaya, but bound hand and
foot”. He pointed out that the businessmen fear that if the current
efforts do not force the coup plotters to step down they will be faced
with an armed mass uprising of the people which would threaten the
whole of the capitalist regime.
we must be clear on one point: no amount of diplomatic pressure can
defeat the coup in Honduras unless the masses of workers and peasants
fight for it on the streets as they have done in the last few days. It
may even come to pass that Zelaya is returned to Honduras, only for
Congress to start proceedings to remove him from the presidency before
the end of his term in January.
Over the last week, the mass movement in Honduras has become
broader, more confident and more radicalised. This is precisely what
the coup plotters feared, and the reason why they organised the coup.
The struggle of the hundreds of thousands of Honduran working people,
who have come out on the streets over the last week braving repression,
is not only for the reinstatement of the president, but also for the
trial and punishment of the coup plotters. Even more than that, it is a
fundamental struggle for jobs, bread, land, dignity, and national
sovereignty. None of this will be achieved simply with the return of
Zelaya alone. If a negotiated settlement is finally reached, this will
not satisfy the demands of the masses for justice, and it will
certainly not solve the economic and social problems that have pushed
them to rally behind Zelaya.
to Tomas Aquino, from the Honduras Democratic United Party, he made it
very clear that the Peoples’ Resistance Front Against the Coup rejects
any kind of negotiation with the coup-plotters and stands for the
unconditional reinstatement of the president. He added that the masses
of the people have become radicalised through their own experience.
“They no longer demand a referendum on the Constituent Assembly, they
want a Constituent Assembly full stop, as they are not prepared to deal
any more with the political institutions that organised the coup”.
The return of Zelaya, if it does finally take place in the next few
days, will only be a real victory for the mass movement if it is
achieved without concessions on his part. If so, it will strengthen the
resolve of the workers and peasants, it will increase their confidence
in their own strength.
last week of struggle has been a very rich school of political
education for the masses. Under the whip of repression their political
understanding has developed by leaps and bounds. All that Zelaya
wanted, apparently, was to carry out a consultation on the possibility
of a referendum to decide on a Constituent Assembly! And just because
of that, the oligarchy en bloc organised a military-civilian
coup. As Andino explained to us, the coup has the support of all
traditional political parties, the hierarchy of the Evangelical and
Catholic churches, the monopoly mass media groups, the owners of
industry, the landowners, the judiciary and the tops of the Army. The
whole of the capitalist political establishment is against a minor
democratic reform! Because they are terrified of the revolutionary
implications of the direct participation of the masses of the workers
and peasants in politics. The capitalist system cannot allow it. Andino
added that, “what we see is the beginning of a revolution”, and he is
correct.
The two main lessons to be learnt from these events are, on the one
hand, that the oligarchy in these underdeveloped capitalist countries
cannot allow even the most moderate progressive reforms if these are
accompanied by a process of politicisation and mobilisation of the
masses. They fear the revolutionary consequences of the active
participation of the masses in politics. On the other hand it should by
now be clear that it is utopian to expect that the institutions of the
capitalist state (the judiciary, army hierarchy, mass media, police,
etc.), will allow genuine revolutionary change to take place without
them stepping in to defend the interests of their masters, the ruling
class. This is a serious warning for the revolutionary movement in
Bolivia, in neighbouring El Salvador, in Ecuador, etc.
only way forward for the movement in Honduras is to continue the
mobilisation against the coup. This must be organised and coordinated
nationally through committees in every workplace, neighbourhood and
village. An appeal must be made to the ranks of the Army, the ordinary
soldiers who are also part of the people. Mass demonstrations must be
protected by defence committees made up of the workers and peasants
themselves. The army generals have already shown what they are capable
of, the people cannot face them unprotected. Tomás Andino reported to
us lots of different examples of fraternisation of police officers and
soldiers with the protestors. These have not yet crystallised in any
section of the army openly rebelling, but this could happen in the next
few days.
Finally, the main weapon of working people against the oligarchy and
the coup is the general strike. Without the permission of the working
class not a wheel turns and not a light bulb shines in Honduras.
Workers can bring the country to a halt and prevent the coup regime
from functioning. Andino reported to In Defence of Marxism that about
60% of public sector workers had participated in the strike against the
coup and that this week would see the spreading of the strike movement
to the private sector. The call for strike action had been made by the
three trade union confederations, all of them part of the Peoples
Resistance Front.
Tomás Andino also made an appeal for action to the international
working class. “There should be blockades against Honduran products on
the part of dockers and transport workers. This can hit the capitalist
class where it hurts”.
International solidarity on the part of working people and the
labour movement internationally is also crucial. We stand firmly on the
side of the Honduran people and against any attempts to water down
their fundamental demands.
For the immediate return of Zelaya!
Trial and punishment for the coup plotters!
Full support for the struggle of the people of Honduras!
(Article orginally posted on www.marxist.com 6th July 2009)
Click here to read Jorge’s earlier article on the coup
Click here to see pictures from the London picket of the embassy
