Tag: golpes de estado

Today there are presidential elections in Honduras.  The US says that it doesn’t matter that the golpista government of Roberto Micheletti is still in control despite international condemnation, that Manual Zelaya, the democratically elected president, is still stuck in asylum in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa, and that Brazil and Venezuela have announced that they will not recognize today’s election results.  Nor does it matter that the US originally denounced the coup, cut off non-military aid, and demanded the immediate reinstatement of Zelaya.  All of that, amigos, is stuff you’re supposed to forget about.  Just forget it.  Yeah, after today, democracy will be magically restored in Honduras via an election.  And we’re back to the same old same old.  The power of El Norte continues, the maquiladoras make Fruit of the Loom for export, the bananas are back on the shelves, and the military puts its boot on the throat of anyone in Honduras who complains about the lack of democracy.  It’s 1910 all over again.

The AP reports:

A new Honduran president chosen Sunday faces the challenge of defending his legitimacy to the world and to his own people, who are bitterly divided by Central America’s first coup in more than 20 years.

Porfirio Lobo and Elvin Santos, two prosperous businessmen from the political old guard [both of whom support the golpistas], are the front-runners. But their campaigns have been overshadowed by the debate over whether Hondurans should cast ballots at all in a vote largely shunned by international monitors.

Manuel Zelaya, the left-leaning president ousted in a June 28 coup, is urging a boycott, hoping overwhelming abstention will discredit the election. As polls opened Sunday, he vowed the United States would regret its decision to support the vote.

“Abstention will defeat the dictatorship,” Zelaya told Radio Globo from the Brazilian Embassy, where he took refuge after sneaking back into the country from his forced exile Sept. 21. “The elections will be a failure. the United States will have to rectify its ambiguous position about the coup.”

The US’s “ambiguous position about the coup” isn’t all that ambiguous. Especially in historical context.  The US has said explicitly it will support the government elected in this election. Period. It just doesn’t matter to the US government that is imposing democracy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and who knows where else, that there be actual democracy in its own hemisphere.  That would require the restoration of Manual Zelaya and an election supervised internationally.  Instead, we have an election supervised by the golpistas and their military.  One can only wonder why US warships have not arrived off shore to preserve order and democracy.

The word from the streets isn’t ambiguous at all:

“The best thing for this country is not to vote, to show the world, the United States, which stabbed us in the back and betrayed us,” said Edwin Espinal, whose 24-year-old wife, Wendy, died of from asthma complications a day after soldiers hurled tear gas to disperse protesters demanding Zelaya’s return.

There is, of course, the expected golpistas’ repression.  Narconews reports:

The free speech necessary to guarantee free elections is not the message being transmitted to the resistance front. Intimidation, torture, illegal detentions and in extreme cases assassinations are being carried out to prevent mass mobilizations on Election Day. The National Front Against the Coup D’état has encouraged all week a ‘popular curfew’ on Election Day to prevent clashes with the opposition. The Center for the Investigation and Promotion of Human Rights in Honduras (CIPRODEH), has documented aggression directly from the police and the military towards nearly all human rights groups working in Honduras.

And now, hypnotically, the promise that the US under Obama would have a new relationship with Latin America, one in which democracy would be fostered and coups would be discouraged, one in which the oligarchies would not be permitted to exploit and repress poor people, one in which popular leaders could be elected even if they disagreed with El Norte and not be the immediate objects of golpes de estado,  those promises will be forgotten.  They will be erased from your memories.  And life as we knew it in 1910 will resume.

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simulposted at The Dream Antilles

The news of an impending resolution to Honduras’s coup was hopeful, but apparently too good to be true.  Today it’s clear that nothing has been decided, that rightful, democratically elected President Manual Zelaya is still stuck in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa, and that the negotiations to resolve the crisis are now totally dead.  This should not be a big surprise to anyone.

The New York Times reports:

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya pulled out of talks with the country’s post-coup de facto leaders on Friday, throwing efforts to resolve a months-long political crisis back to square one.

Zelaya pulled his representatives out of meetings with envoys of de facto leader Roberto Micheletti that were the latest in a series of attempts to resolve the political deadlock sparked by a June 28 military coup.

“As of now we see this phase as finished,” Zelaya envoy Mayra Mejia said shortly after midnight (7 a.m. British time) at the hotel where both sides have been negotiating for three weeks.

All attempts to reach a deal have snagged over whether Zelaya can return to power for the last few months of his term, which ends in January.

“Post-coup de facto leaders” is an interesting turn of phrase.  I prefer “golpistas.”  Or if you prefer, “leaders of the coup d’etat.”  But the bottom line is that no matter what you call Roberto Micheletti and his friends in the oligarchy, their coup continues despite virtually universal condemnation.  And it only has to continue, as far as the golpistas are concerned, until November 29, 2009, the present date for elections of a new president.  That date is right around the corner.  The golpistas have no intention, none whatsoever of restoring Manual Zelaya to his rightful presidency.  That is the one, single thing they will not permit.  And, unfortunately, that’s the one single step the rest of the world believes is an essential first step to end the crisis.

This is what is called a deadlock.

The rest of the world may insist on restoration of Zelaya to the presidency as an initial step, and it may insist as well that the coup’s running the national election in November undermines the legitimacy of the “democratic election.”  But the golpistas don’t see it that way.  At all.  To them, surviving all the diplomatic initiatives and the sternly worded verbal condemnations and the impounding of funds until there’s an election is the goal.  They’ll happily argue about the legitimacy of the election after its been held.  And nothing is going to budge them from their present stranglehold on Honduras’s government or move them to restore Manual Zelaya to the presidency.

The golpistas would rather clamp down on the demonstrators than move their position toward a possible resolution.  This is what one should expect of them.  The burden of the unrest, and especially the present damage to the Honduras economy fall on the poorest people in Honduras.  These are not the golpistas.  They are quite powerless to resist the military government and the US equipped and trained army.

And what of the US and it’s recently announced “better relations” with Latin America?

The deadlock in Honduras is proving a challenge for U.S. President Barack Obama after he vowed better relations with Latin America. Washington suspended the visas of more figures in the de facto government this week to pressure a settlement.

“The two sides need to seal this deal now. Time is running out,” U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said on Friday. “We have not given up on a deal yet … We are focussed on these guys sitting down and agreeing,” he said.

This is nice.  There is no deal to seal.  There is no agreement.  And now there are no talks.  Put another way, US insistence on an agreement is and continues to be an utter non starter.  Similarly, negotiations brokered by Oscar Arias.  Similarly, the impounding of non-essential US aid to Honduras.  The golpistas have raised their middle finger and most observers are making believe it’s to tell which way the wind is blowing.

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simulposted at The Dream Antilles