Heroic Resistance in Honduras
Ten Years after the 2009 Coup d'État
- Margaret Villamizar -
Tegucigalpa, Honduras, May 27, 2019.
June 28 will mark ten years since the democratically
elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was kidnapped and
forcibly removed from office and from Honduras in a U.S.-orchestrated
military coup d'état. Zelaya has said the main impetus for the
coup was his government signing on to the Bolivarian Alliance for the
Peoples of our America (ALBA) in 2008 -- something the U.S. could not
tolerate. ALBA had been founded four years earlier by Venezuela and
Cuba as an alternative to the Free Trade Area of the Americas being
pushed at the time by the U.S. The coup forces quickly installed their
own de facto president. A few
months later through a fraudulent election that was boycotted by the
majority of Hondurans and carried out under conditions of state terror
aimed at suppressing the people's resistance to the coup, a
representative of the National Party, entrusted by the U.S. with
implementing its neo-liberal agenda in the country, was brought to
power. Two electoral coups followed -- in 2013 and 2017 -- putting
current president Juan Orlando Hernández of the same party in
office, then handing him an illegal second term. Despite ample evidence
of fraud, especially during the November 2017 election, the results
were quickly accepted by the U.S. and Canada. This ensured that the
Honduran people would once again be prevented from electing a
government of their choice and would have one imposed on them by
foreign interests, mainly U.S., intent only on plundering the country's
natural and human resources and using it as a strategic military base
to threaten and carry out aggression against the sovereign nations and
peoples of the region.
In spite of the perfidy of the last ten years, the
people of Honduras have never resigned themselves to the fate assigned
to them by the rancid oligarchy of their country and the foreign
masters they serve. Following the coup, the people's forces immediately
mobilized and organized themselves in opposition to it, and have
remained in action ever since, forcefully asserting their rights under
the most difficult of circumstances -- deteriorating living conditions,
with 65 per cent of the population now living in poverty and 40 per
cent in extreme poverty, the systematic violation of human rights,
insecurity from the terror of targeted and random assassinations, the
militarization of their country and violent repression for daring to
oppose the neo-liberal dictate of the coup governments.
The last ten years have also seen the concession of territories to
foreign mining companies, the concession of rivers for extractive and
hydroelectric projects of national and foreign capital, eviction of the
Indigenous Garifuna people from their ancestral lands to open up new
areas on the Caribbean coast to the tourism market, bankrupting of
state enterprises and their subsequent privatization (telephony,
electricity, water, ports and airports, hospitals and clinics, with
banking groups buying up many of the former public health care
facilities). With the Free Trade Agreement Canada signed with Honduras
in 2012, Canadian companies are among those that have cashed in on this
agenda facilitated by the successive coups.
The rallying cry that since the stolen election in 2017 has come to
symbolize the people's rejection of all this and their determination to
get rid of the illegitimate president who helped deliver it is "Fuera
JOH!" (Juan Orlando Hernández, Out!).
As the tenth anniversary of the coup approaches, the
people's resistance and fight for their democratic rights has gained
steam and broadened, taking on important new dimensions. One of the
forms this is taking is a sharp fight being waged by doctors and
teachers in defence of the people's right to public health care and
education. For almost two months now, unions representing doctors and
teachers working in the public health and education systems, organized
as the Platform for the Defence of Public Health Care and Education,
have engaged in a nationwide strike initiated in opposition to decrees
passed by the government calling for the "restructuring and
transformation" of the national health and education systems --
understood to mean the privatization of both.
The teachers and doctors have been joined in the streets
and outside schools around the country by students, parents, private
school teachers, nurses and other hospital workers, taxi drivers,
transport truck operators and many others to demand the government
address their concerns. For periods of time during the past week the
country has been reported to be paralyzed, with roads blocked and
transportation and commerce of all types halted. The response of the
government has been to order the police, and increasingly the military,
to attack the demonstrations with tear gas and fire live ammunition at
people to force them to disperse. Several young people are reported to
have died from bullet wounds, with more than 20 being injured since the
strike began. The persecution of leaders of the movement has increased
with Twitter and Facebook closing down accounts and spreading lies
about their whereabouts so as to disorient the resistance movement
which is gaining momentum.
While continuing to back up their demands with strike
action, organizations that make up the Platform have taken their
political fight in defence of public health care and education to a new
level. On June 18, they held the inaugural session of an Alternative
Citizen's Dialogue on Public Health Care and Education, which they
convoked to involve not only members of the teaching and medical
professions, but students and parents, patients and community members
generally to join in discussing and designing a comprehensive plan to
improve the national health and education systems which they say are
grossly underfunded and have been allowed to deteriorate to an extent
that is deplorable. Hundreds of people showed up at the Medical College
of Honduras, which hosted the event. Organizers consider it to have
been a resounding success. Invited national and international experts,
diplomats and two deputy ministers sent by the government as well as
social movements from around the country were among the overflow crowd
in attendance. Earlier, the Platform had rejected a government attempt
to split their ranks by holding a "dialogue" and signing an agreement
with a hand-picked group of doctors and teachers but not
representatives of the Platform's leadership. Speaking at the inaugural
event, President of the Medical College and Platform Coordinator Dr.
Suyapa Figueroa said the fight of doctors and teachers was a fight of
the people of Honduras, arising out of their actions to demand health
care and education as basic rights, instead of commodities in the
marketplace, which she said they had become under the existing corrupt,
outsourced system.
Inaugural session of the Alternative Citizen's Dialogue on Public
Health and Education initiated
June 18, 2019, to counter the government's undemocratic
"dialogue."
The Platform has announced that the Alternative
Citizen's Dialogue will continue for at least five weeks, with members
organizing discussions at schools, hospitals and clinics in all parts
of the country, after which a report with the findings will be
released. It has also announced a set of demands, including that any
future dialogue with the government must involve all the Platform's
organizations and be transmitted live on television and other media.
Others are that military and police forces immediately be withdrawn
from those communities where they have been repressing community
members defending their right to health care and education, and that
there be an impartial investigation to determine those responsible for
the deaths, injuries and damages committed by state security forces in
the course of carrying out these repressive actions. Shouts from the
audience of The People United Will
Never Be Defeated! and Fuera
JOH! punctuated what Dr. Figueroa said as well as the speeches
of other spokespersons.
The context in which all of this is occurring is one
that favours the people, if they continue to stick to their just
demands and organize to realize them by uniting in action to put an end
to the dictatorship and its anti-national, anti-people agenda, keeping
the initiative in their own hands. Juan Orlando Hernández, who
is becoming more unpopular by the day and has to rely on the repressive
forces at his command and the military might of the U.S. to keep him in
power, is being abandoned even by some of his traditional backers and
members of his fractured National Party. There is even speculation
about a coup against him being in the works to prevent the people's
forces from winning important victories and taking revolutionary action
to assert their sovereignty and remove Honduras from the clutches of
imperialism. Whatever the case, the people have learned to be wary of
any notions that the solution to their problems will come from anyone
or any force that is not under their control and accountable to them.
This is bound to stand them in good stead as they press ahead with the
fight to empower themselves and realize their goal of becoming the
masters of their own destiny in a new and sovereign Honduras – a
Honduras whose people no longer have to flee their homeland as migrants
and refugees in search of safety and the chance to make a living, and
that no longer serves as a base for foreign aggression in the region
but contributes to making Latin America and the Caribbean a zone of
peace.
This article was published in
Volume 49 Number
23 - June 22, 2019
Article Link:
Heroic
Resistance in Honduras: Ten Years after the 2009 Coup d'État -
Margaret Villamizar
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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