Honduras
Protest Reaches Boiling Point
- Emile Schepers -
Mass protests, San Pedro Sula, Honduras, June 19, 2019.
Since the re-election of Honduran President Juan
Orlando
Hernández of the right-wing National Party in 2017, mass
protests
have been ongoing in the streets of Honduran cities. That
election was considered fraudulent by many, but now a court
decision in the United States has added to the anger against
Hernández, a close ally of the Trump administration.
On October 18, a U.S. federal court in New York
found the
president's brother, Tony Hernández, guilty of major drug
trafficking charges. And although Juan Orlando Hernández had
previously stated that his brother alone was responsible for
whatever he had done, the evidence presented against Tony also
implicates Juan Orlando and his predecessor, former Honduran
President Porfirio Lobo.
A major witness in the trial, gangster Devis
Rivera Madriaga,
testified that he had bribed both Presidents Hernández and
Lobo
to allow the Cachiros drug cartel a free hand to run drugs
through Honduras on their way to sale in the United States.
Furthermore, evidence was given that President Hernández's
first
election campaign, in 2013, had received support in the form of
drug money.
The rise of Lobo and the Hernández
brothers to power in
Honduras was the result of the 2009 military coup d'état
which
overthrew left-leaning President Manuel Zelaya. At that time, the
United States had maneuvered to prevent Zelaya from returning to
power, and this resulted in the election of Lobo in November
2009, in circumstances in which the security forces were
repressing the opposition, part of which boycotted the vote.
The Hernández regime has been
exceptionally violent. The
police have been militarized, protests have been repressed, and
there have been murders of grassroots opposition figures,
including the well-known Indigenous environmental defender Berta
Cáceres, who was shot to death in March 2016, clearly
because of
her activism in opposition to an environmentally destructive dam
project.
Poor Honduran rural and urban people have borne
the brunt of
the repression, as rapacious big business interests have worked
with the security forces to repress their efforts to defend their
livelihoods. For example, in Lower Aguan, there have been
numerous deaths of farmers resisting encroachments of landowners
who want to expand the cultivation of African palm for the
international biofuels market. On the Caribbean coast, the
Afro-Indigenous Garífuna population is under great pressure
from
powerful interests that want to push it out to make room for
lucrative tourist operations. Labour, women's, youth, and LGBTQ
activists face violent repression.
So it was no surprise that on Friday, October 18,
after the
conviction of Tony Hernández and in the context of the
revelations about his brother the president, Hondurans hit the
streets in more demonstrations. Ex-President Zelaya, who now
leads the LIBRE left-wing political party, joined demonstrators
in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. On Monday, October 21, more
demonstrations took place in the capital and elsewhere, with
barricades and burning tires in the streets. They were violently
repressed by security forces. Clouds of tear gas fired by the
police filled the campus of the Francisco Morazán
Pedagogical
University, near the site of one of the major protests in the
capital.
The long series of demonstrations and clashes with
the
security forces have resulted in deaths and injuries, and
numerous Hondurans are in jail for their active opposition to the
corrupt Hernández regime. Although right now the central
demand
of the demonstrators, and a broad sector of the opposition, is that
Juan Orlando Hernández resign or be removed from the
presidency,
long struggles are also ahead to repair the damage done to this
extremely poor nation of 9.3 million people since the 2009
coup.
Up until recently, the Trump administration has
staunchly
supported the sleazy and violent regime in Tegucigalpa. That the
government of Juan Orlando Hernández was fraudulently
elected,
corrupt, and undemocratic did not faze Mr. Trump and his minions,
any more than the narcotics involvement did. However, earlier
this year, aid to Honduras was cut back as part of Trump's
hysterical anti-immigrant frenzy. Trump and his people don't mind
that the Hernández government robs and represses workers and
poor
farmers; it only bothers them that when the victims of this
violence try to escape it, they [go] to the United States.
Ironically, for several years, many people in
Congress have
been trying to put a stop to U.S. financial support for
repression in Honduras. Currently, there is a bill in Congress
that aims at this: the Berta Caceres Human Rights in Honduras
Act, H.R. 1945. The chief sponsor is Rep. Hank Johnson,
D-Ga., and it has 73 co-sponsors to date, all Democrats. It would
end almost all U.S. financial support for the Honduran security
forces. But for this legislation to advance, people concerned
about the Honduras situation will have to get cracking to ask
their Congressional representatives to add their names to it.
Human rights organizations have been energetically
pushing for
pressure to support the Honduran people at this crucial moment.
The Honduras Solidarity Network, with the support of the
Alliance for Global Justice and others, points out that there are
numerous people in Honduras already imprisoned or facing jail for
their courageous protests against the illegal government of Juan
Orlando Hernández. These organizations are asking that the
U.S.
public exert pressure immediately to force Honduran authorities
to release all political prisoners.
Emile Schepers is a veteran civil and
immigrant rights
activist. Emile Schepers was born in South Africa and has a
doctorate in cultural anthropology from Northwestern University.
He has worked as a researcher and activist in urban,
working-class communities in Chicago since 1966. He is active in
the struggle for immigrant rights, in solidarity with the Cuban
Revolution and a number of other issues. He now writes from
Northern Virginia.
This article was published in
Volume 49 Number 26 - November 10, 2019
Article Link:
Honduras: Protest Reaches Boiling Point - Emile Schepers
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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