Honduran sham election.

This article is interesting in that it not only gives a history of the coup negotiations recently but also notes some of the splits within those who support the coup. The parts about the military are particularly frightening. It remains to be seen if anything such as descrribed really happens. In the US there is virtually no discussion of the issues and the whole Honduran farce is off the radar of mainstream media. The article should have mentioned that the US brokered agreement was quite vague and had no timetable for a decision to be made by congress on Zelaya's re-instatement but of course it was understood that it would be before the formation of a unity government and the the Honduran Congress would simplify ratify the agreement. If it did not do this then the agreement would be null and void. But Micheletti stalled and now the congress will not meet until after the elections and also an opinion has been received from the Supreme Court that Zelaya cannot be legally re-instated. This whole affair has shown the US to be just as it was under Bush as far as Latin American policy is concerned just the rhetoric has changed but the reality remains the same as reactionaries such as Jim Demint are able to force the Obama administrations hand and get them to recognise the coup elections. Of course this may have been what the Obama administration wanted anyway.

Honduras en lucha!


Honduras' sham election
Shaun Joseph analyzes the upcoming elections in Honduras--a sham vote orchestrated by the coup regime after it broke its commitment to restore Manuel Zelaya.

November 24, 2009



JUST OVER five months since the June 28 coup d'etat against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, elections scheduled for November 29 will complete the current phase of the struggle over Honduras' future--but only by opening another, perhaps darker, period.

A "peaceful" resolution to the Honduran drama was widely expected after October 30, when U.S. negotiators brokered the Tegucigalpa/San José Accords between representatives Zelaya and the golpista (coup-maker) government headed by Roberto Micheletti.

But Washington's hands-off behavior in the following week allowed Micheletti to break the agreement by unilaterally announcing the formation of a "unity government," headed by himself, while the golpista-controlled Congress deliberately dithered on the question of restoring Zelaya to office, which was the prime condition of the opposition to the coup regime to recognize the elections.

Although the Accords are obviously in tatters--members of the "unity government" aren't even known, nearly three weeks after they were supposed to be installed--the U.S. insists on acting as if everything is still going according to plan. This is because the agreement, were it not a fiction, would legitimize the upcoming elections and lead to the normalization of Honduras' international relations, which is important for North American corporations, especially in the fruit, textile and mining sectors.


For more on the situation in Honduras, Spanish speakers can find live streaming video from the Venezuelan TV station TeleSur. The Honduran TV network Cholusat Sur and radio station Radio Globo also provide live streams, although both are frequently pulled off the air by the golpistas.

English speakers can find frequent updates at the excellent Honduras Oye!, Honduras Coup 2009, Honduras Resists and Quotha.

The Facebook page Miguel and Shaun in Honduras also posts frequent updates from a variety of sources in both languages.


Although the concessions to Zelaya--which were actually minor and largely symbolic--have been voided by the golpistas, the U.S. wants to retain the provisions dear to its own capitalist interests.

But while the U.S. plans to recognize the November 29 elections, it has so far found no other country willing to join it, at least publicly. On the contrary, a number of Latin American countries have openly stated that they won't recognize elections carried out under the golpista dictatorship. These countries include Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

It will be difficult for the U.S. to carry any Latin American countries with its line, even traditional allies. Not only is Latin American popular opinion solidly opposed to the Honduras coup, but a section of the region's elite also understands the toppling of Zelaya as an attack on attempts to build capitalist links independent of U.S. imperialism. The Organization of American States (OAS), traditionally a U.S. instrument, has refused to send observers or provide technical assistance for the elections.

So the Obama administration--supposed advocates of "smart power" in contrast to the Bush presidency--have demonstrated their "smartness" by devising a diplomatic fiasco in Latin America much worse than anything its predecessor ever bumbled into.

Of course, U.S. imperialism's priorities of defending American power limit its prospects for success in any circumstance. But the Obama administration has cut a sorry figure, even on the tactical level.

The clearest statements on Obama's Honduras policy seem to be funneled through Republican senators: Jim DeMint of South Carolina was first to announce Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's promise to recognize the Honduran elections, regardless of Zelaya's status, and Richard Lugar of Indiana announced that the State Department would fund "election observation missions" organized by the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute (international fronts of the Democratic and Republican Parties, respectively).

In the meanwhile, the administration had no response to two letters from Zelaya himself, despite the fact that he is Honduras' legitimate head of state, according to every nation and international body in the world.

The Obama administration seems to think it can erase five months of dictatorship through a ready-to-order election. In reality, they are inviting a more severe crisis.

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THE CALL of the National Resistance Front Against the Coup d'Etat to boycott the coming elections has been widely taken up across Honduran civil society. A letter renouncing the elections signed by over 300 candidates was delivered by U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky to Obama, although the names haven't been released due to fear of reprisals from the golpista regime.

Among those known to have withdrawn from the vote are independent presidential candidate Carlos H. Reyes; Rodolfo Padilla Sunceri, the incumbent Liberal Party mayor of San Pedro Sula, Honduras' second city; Elvia Argentina Valle Villalta, the incumbent Liberal Congress deputy from Copán; and Margarita Zelaya de Elvir, the Liberals' vice presidential candidate. There have been resignations by candidates of all parties--including, incredibly, at least one from the center-right National Party.

Unfortunately, the leftist Democratic Unification Party (UD), which previously associated itself with the anti-coup resistance, made the astonishing decision to participate in the elections, affirmed a party conference on November 21.

UD claims that it doesn't want any offices vacated by its members to fall into golpista hands. But in the unlikely event that UD kept all its positions, or even gained more, its officials would have zero effect in a regime spawned by a military dictatorship.

To be sure, as the sole organized party of the left, UD would lose a great deal by withdrawing from the elections, as the party would certainly be stripped of its legal status. But now, UD will lose something far more precious: the respect of the most politically conscious militants in Honduras. (Some individual UD candidates have withdrawn from the vote.)

Naturally, the boycott question is forcing everyone in and around the anti-coup resistance to take sides. More surprising, however, is that the elections, instead of giving the oligarchy's leadership the opportunity to regroup and reorient, seem to be tearing them apart. The key fault lines lie between the two major parties on the one hand, and between the politicians and the military on the other.

Both Zelaya and Micheletti are members of the Liberal Party. After the coup, a "melista" (Zelaya-supporting) faction of the Liberals went over to the resistance, where it tended to constitute a more conservative, compromising wing of the grassroots opposition to the golpistas.

If the Accords had been implemented, the melistas would have been a natural bridge back to electoralism and rapprochement with the Liberal mainstream. In the face of golpista intransigence, though, the Liberal Party is now hopelessly split--its presidential candidate, Elvin Santos, is running a distant second to Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo of the National Party.

Unfortunately for Lobo, the fact that the elections will not be monitored by any credible organizations, but a motley crew of pro-coup kooks and flunkies, greatly increases the chances for fraud. Suspicious results could have the two golpista parties at each others' throats.

The second, perhaps graver, division is between the politicians and top military officers. As Andrés Pavón of the Honduran human rights organization CODEH said in a statement on November 14:

The military command feels profoundly nervous about the current situation they confront, as the politicians have left them alone for weeks, and [the commanders] have sniffed out, with good reason, the incapacity of the new government, which will be derived from the fraudulent electoral process, to completely protect them from the consequences of their criminal actions at the national and international levels.

No government in Honduras will willingly accept economic and diplomatic sanctions imposed on the country just to protect military officers from jail. So the military could become convenient scapegoats to calm cries for justice in the wake of the election.

Pavón says that inside sources leaked to him plans for a military provocation on November 29--with paramilitary units, disguised as a fictitious "Armed Command of the Resistance," committing a massacre. The massacre will then be used as justification for a campaign of terror against the National Resistance Front. The plan is said to have been devised by Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, head of the Honduran military and a graduate of the School of the Americas.

Pavón's credibility is impeccable, so it is likely that this heinous scheme is at least being discussed in military circles. The Front apparently considers it a serious threat and referred to the plot specifically in its most recent communiqué.

Indeed, there is a distinct possibility of a "coup within a coup," with the military taking direct power and demagogically blaming the politicians for the crisis. Micheletti's bizarre declaration that he intends to "absent [himself] from the exercising of [his] public functions" from November 25 to December 2 increases the chances of such a military seizure of power.

This would truly take Honduras back to the dark ages, turning the clock back further than even the golpistas intended.

Repression everywhere, plans for possible bloodbaths, rumors of coups, free speech trampled, an election that promises more violence than voting--and the U.S. government clings to the idea that the November 29 elections will be a step forward for stability and democracy!

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INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY is critical--the resistance needs the time and political space to reorient itself for a new period in the struggle.

Simply exposing the plans for provocations can help defeat them, since they require some degree of secrecy to work. Activists in the U.S. should also agitate against recognition of whatever regime emerges after November 29, against special trade status for Honduras (such as membership in CAFTA), and against all international aid (including "humanitarian" aid that cannot be trusted to an anti-popular regime).

One remarkable victory for international solidarity came November 17, when Russell Athletic agreed to rehire 1,200 Honduran workers who had been fired after they formed a union at their factor. The victory was a result of a campaign by United Students Against Sweatshops, which got several universities to sever licensing deals with Russell and exposed the company's misdeeds at a series of public events. This should serve as an inspiration.

The stakes are much higher in the struggle over the coup. It involves not just an economic struggle in one factory, but the political class struggle nationally and internationally.

Still, for all its power, U.S. imperialism is isolated, exposed and discredited in Latin America today. An international resistance can win.


Fuente: socialistworker.org

Honduras election sets return to business as usual.

The article mentions little about the conditions under which the elections are taking place. It is a criminal offence to recommend boycotting the elections among other things and rallies can only be had with permission of the coup government. The US will no doubt recognise the elections no matter what. It seems that Senator Demint's agreement to allow the nomination of the ambassador to Brazil and of Arturo Valenzuela to go through was conditional upon the US recognising the Honduran presidential elections. This will put the US at odds with the Rio group. There is going to be more and more conflict between the US and many Latin American countries but with some such as Panama and Colombia seeking to ally themselves with the US. No doubt Honduras will also do so. Honduras was a springboard for anti-Sandinista operations funded by the US.
This article seems to think that there might be some accommodation between the new president and Zelaya but that seems unlikely although perhaps this might be useful in gaining recognition from other Latin American countries. This is from antiwar.com


Honduras election sets return to business as usual

Zelaya platform dead as Honduras presidential election marks return to business as usual

OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ
AP News

Nov 22, 2009 14:38 EST

The coup last summer in this tiny, Central American country blew up into an international incident, with thousands of Hondurans taking to the streets while everyone from Barack Obama to Fidel Castro lined up behind ousted President Manuel Zelaya.

Now, with Zelaya still holed up in the Brazilian Embassy, voters will choose a new president Nov. 29 from the political establishment that has dominated Honduras for decades.

No one is pushing the leftist agenda of the ousted leader, who said he was trying to lift a country where seven in 10 people are poor.

That's because Zelaya was disturbing a deeply conservative society that has long cherished peace and stability.

"It's a risk-averse culture," said Manuel Orozco, a Central America expert with the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue.

The months of turmoil as Zelaya pressed for his reinstatement, the negotiation and U.S. shuttle diplomacy are about to be overtaken by business as usual — Honduran style.

Even many of the poor who supported Zelaya as he aligned himself with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Latin America's new left say they will vote for conservative front-runner Porfirio Lobo, a 61-year-old wealthy businessman who is ahead by double digits in the polls.

"I will vote for the one who can fix this and give us work right now, because those suffering are the poor," said Reina Gomez, 53, a single mother who washes clothes for a living and who supported Zelaya in 2005.

Zelaya, a commanding figure whose standard uniform includes a white cowboy hat, was prohibited by the constitution from running for more than one term — even before the military whisked him out of the country at gunpoint in the June 28 coup.

His opponents said he wanted to follow in Chavez's footsteps and revise the constitution to extend his time in office. Zelaya denies any such intention.

Honduras has always been run by a handful of families who control the news media, economy and every power sphere from the military to the Supreme Court.

As many of Central America's conservative governments battled leftist insurgencies from the 1960s to the 1980s, Honduras had no civil war and served as a key staging area for U.S.-backed Contras fighting Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.

But in one of the Western Hemisphere's poorest nations, gaunt workers in torn shoes and worn clothing trudge from their hillside shanty towns past Tegucigalpa's gleaming shopping malls to work in garment factories or American fast food restaurants.

Most survive on $250 a month.

"Here the politicians don't appreciate the people. They promise you all kinds of things but one comes in and then the next, and things are still the same," said construction worker Mario Espinal, 52, whose work diminished by half when international loans were cut off in the political crisis.

Like his counterparts from Nicaragua to Ecuador, Zelaya began preaching reform that favored the poor. He raised the minimum wage by 60 percent and pulled in Venezuelan aid that included free tractors and $300 million a year for agricultural investment.

"President Zelaya gave us hope that the people of Honduras would finally be able to emancipate themselves from a group of oligarchs that have kept this country subjugated through a constitution that was shaped to protect their interests," said Andres Pavon, a human rights activist.

While many Hondurans want reform, they were reluctant to trust Zelaya, a wealthy rancher elected from one of the two major conservative parties.

Orozco notes that other Latin American leftist leaders — from Chavez to Bolivia's Evo Morales and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil — grew up poor. They also spent years building their grass-roots movements, while Zelaya — with support from a couple unions and student groups — started shooting from the hip late in his term.

Zelaya "belongs to the elite, and he chose to dismiss his own peers and paid the price for that," Orozco said. "Those leaders have a hard time communicating their message. They think that because you like the poor, the poor are going to like you."

According to the CID-Gallup Poll, Zelaya's job-approval rating dropped steadily from 2007 to just 38 percent in October 2008, though it had rebounded to 53 percent by February and has held steady around 50 percent since. But beyond the first week of his ouster, he had a hard time amassing large numbers of supporters demanding his return.

Meanwhile, the left in Honduras is divided into small parties with few resources — and without a charismatic leader to unite them into a movement strong enough to challenge the conservative stronghold.

Presidential front-runner Lobo, who lost to Zelaya in 2005, is campaigning on a return to normalcy and blames Zelaya's Liberal Party for thrusting the country into international turmoil. His main opponent is the Liberal Party's Elvin Santos, a construction magnate.

The U.S-brokered pact with the interim government of Roberto Micheletti leaves the decision to reinstate Zelaya with the Honduran Congress, which has yet to vote. Zelaya has said he would not return to the presidency if Congress votes to restore him after the elections because that would legitimize the coup. The new president chosen in next week's elections will not take office until January.

But some say Zelaya might have done just enough to awaken a leftist movement in Honduras — either led by him or someone else.

"I can see Lobo setting something up and smoothing over things with Zelaya because he wants to ensure Zelaya won't be a nuisance," said Heather Berkman of the Eurasia Group. "I don't think his political career is over. I can see him coming back in some shape or form."

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Associated Press Writer Alexandra Olson in Mexico City contributed to this report.