MORE THAN JUST A MOVEMENT: RESISTANCE TO THE COUP IN HONDURAS

[Judi Lynn]

6th July 2010

MORE THAN JUST A MOVEMENT: RESISTANCE TO THE COUP IN HONDURAS
One year after the military coup in Honduras which ousted the leader and installed a neo-liberal cabal, grassroots groups across the country are aligning to create a popular movement.

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets all over Honduras (and in cities around the world) on Monday 28th June, the first anniversary of the military coup. Not that they were commemorating the coup of course, but to celebrate the first birthday of the National Popular Resistance Front. The FNRP is a remarkable coalition of brave people from all the traditionally oppressed sectors of society: the Committee of Families of the Disappeared; a myriad of feminist organisations; indigenous groups; the Afro-descendant garífuna people; youth movements; the gay community; human rights activists and trades unions. The FNRP is an alliance of hundreds of grassroots organisations which, despite the risk to the lives of all involved, have refused to give in and accept the illegal takeover of their country by a ruthless and self-serving elite.

Heavy military forces drove around the capital in a bid to intimidate, and extra troops clustered around the Presidential Palace and other public buildings in the capital city of Tegucigalpa. It didn’t take long for violence to break out – by midday on Monday police had attacked a peaceful rally in Villas del Sol with clubs and teargas.

SchNEWS readers may remember that a year ago, democratically-elected Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya was abducted from the Presidential Palace by 200 military troops in balaclavas, bundled onto a plane (which stopped at a US airbase on the way) and dropped onto a runway in Costa Rica (see SchNEWS 712). The Chair of Congress, fellow Liberal Party colleague Roberto Michelleti, took over as ‘de facto’ president, with full backing of the military. According to Berta Cáceres, leader of COPINH, the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisations of Honduras, who was arrested on Monday but quickly released due to massive national and international pressure, ‘it’s a twenty-first century dictatorship, which…deploys new strategies to give the appearance of democracy. However, there is no doubt that it’s a dictatorship… and its goal is to undermine the processes of liberation that are sweeping across our continent.’

June 28th is also the anniversary of an intended opinion poll, which the coup prevented, to determine whether the Honduran people supported the idea of calling a national assembly to discuss the country’s constitution. The right wing coup-makers and the media seized on this as a leftist attempt on Zelaya’s part to seize power unconstitutionally for a second term, but in fact he would have been long out of office by the time the meeting was assembled. Honduras’s constitution was written in 1982 following ten years of ruthless military dictatorship, and as Cáceres has pointed out, it doesn’t even mention women once.

More:
http://www.schnews.org.uk/features/show_feature.php?feature=15