 Dr. Luther Castillo Photo: Bill Hackwell |
On Oct. 29, the negotiations between the coup government and representatives of the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, reached a U.S.-sponsored agreement to end the four-month standoff, or so many thought. From Pakistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said: “I want to congratulate the people of Honduras as well as President Zelaya and Mr. Micheletti for reaching an historic agreement. … I cannot think of another example of a country in Latin America that having suffered a rupture of its democratic and constitutional order overcame such a crisis through negotiation and dialogue.”
With Clinton’s statement, the White House again legitimized the military coup regime in Honduras, thanking them for their “peaceful” participation in the matter, and applauding their cooperation.
The new agreement was brokered after four months of on-and-off negotiations and presented a platform to return President Zelaya to the presidency. The agreement’s real objective was to block any reforms that were in process, as well as returning Zelaya to a symbolic presidency. The “unity” government was to be formed by Zelaya’s forces and the coup plotters, and included a suspension of any vote to hold a constituent assembly for possible changes to the constitution, and Zelaya’s restitution only after approval of the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court. Furthermore, the agreement asked the international community to revoke all the economic and political sanctions against Honduras.
The agreement, however, fell apart from its inception. The Honduran Congress delayed their resolution until the Honduran Supreme Court took a decision on restitution of President Zelaya to power. Adding to the snail’s pace of implementing the agreement, the Micheletti coup government moved forward to build the new government completely disregarding the need for that government to be headed and created by the legitimate president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya.
On Nov. 6, a week after the “historic agreement,” President Zelaya declared that the agreement had failed. Referring to Micheletti, President Zelaya said, “A de facto president recognized by no one in the world cannot head a government of unity and reconciliation.”
Zelaya’s representative in the negotiations, Jorge Arturo Reina, presented a seven-point document outlining the failure of the agreement. The points included charges of violation of human rights and political persecution as well as total rejection of the November sham elections.
U.S. government maneuvers to legitimize the coup
The declarations of President Zelaya and his allies exposed the true intentions of the new agreement, the illegal Micheletti government, and their supporters in Washington, D.C. Since the military coup, the United States has been involved in three negotiations and subsequent pacts, represented by their neo-liberal puppets of the 1980s, first Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, and now Ricardo Lagos of Chile.
All the agreements have legitimized the coup government giving it political space to speak and buying it time to consolidate its grip on power. Through the four months since the military coup, over 20 political activists have been murdered, thousands of activists have been incarcerated and tortured, and the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa—the refuge of President Zelaya and dozens of his supporters—has been savagely and psychologically attacked by the Honduran military using American military equipment.
In the four months since, the White House has refused to call the takeover a “military coup.” Their silence regarding these atrocities only shows their approval and celebration of their henchmen in the coup government of Micheletti.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while in Pakistan stated: “We’re looking forward to the elections, and working with the people and government of Honduras to realize the full return of democracy and a better future for the Honduran people.”
The objective of the White House-sponsored agreement was never to return Honduras to the constitutional rule of President Zelaya. They simply wanted an election to save the shattered façade of the coup regime.
The Honduran National Resistance Front, encompassing all the popular mass organizations—including unions, churches and students—has continued protesting throughout Honduras for the many weeks since the coup. Despite U.S. government efforts to block Zelaya’s presidency, it cannot stop this new movement that has arisen, and a greatly heightened consciousness of the masses.
Resistance leader speaks
One resistance leader is Dr. Luther Castillo, a young medical doctor of the Garifuna ethnicity in Honduras who received his training in Cuba and founded a community clinic. He spoke on a national tour in October in the United States to assure audiences that the movement’s demands go far beyond the matter of Zelaya’s presidency.
In fact, Castillo explained that the constituent assembly was a project of the popular organizations, whose activists gathered an incredible 600,000 signatures from all the country’s regions. They presented them to Zelaya early this year, calling for a June popular poll that if approved would have proposed a “fourth ballot” in the Nov. 2009 presidential, congressional and mayoral elections. That fourth ballot was for people to vote on whether to make changes to the constitution.
But the oligarchy, headed by 10 of Honduras’s richest families, instead overthrew Zelaya on June 28 to stop the popular poll scheduled for that day. The Honduran people have continued resisting.
He said, “Everything that we have ever achieved for the people has been the product of struggle in the streets, of taking over the highways, hunger strikes, of sit-ins at the Congress, at the Supreme Court, of confronting the police to bring forth the desires of the majority.
“The mass organizations have decided to embark on a road to rescue our country, [a road] of equality, where we can truly feel represented, for the humble, the Indigenous, the Lenca, the Maya, the Garifuna … the faces of all our people, which today only appear in tourist photos but are not in the constitution of our country.”
