https://socialistaction.org/2018/01/14/disputed-election-stirs-protests-in-honduras/
Disputed election stirs protests in Honduras
/ 2 days ago
Jan. 2018 Honduras Jan. 6
Opposition’s rally in San Pedro Sula on Jan. 6. Photo by CNN.com.
By WAYNE DELUCA
On Jan. 27, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández is scheduled to be
inaugurated for an unprecedented second term. Elections held Nov. 26
were disputed as both Hernández and challenger Salvador Nasralla claimed
victory, and the Organization of American States has called for a new
election. Hernández’s government cracked down on unrest in the weeks
after the vote, and at least 30 Hondurans were killed and hundreds
imprisoned.
Irregularities emerged while the votes were being counted. Nasralla
emerged with what was described by experts as an “irreversible” lead,
before the computer voting system stopped functioning for several hours.
When the system came back on line, Hernández had gained a slim lead,
which he would maintain throughout the counting.
In the days after the changed result, the popular response began as a
traditional Latin American cacerolazo, a noisy but nonviolent
demonstration banging pots and pans. They quickly escalated to
barricades and seizures of toll booths. A 10-day curfew was enforced
mostly in pro-Nasralla areas in early December. Militarized police,
developed as part of Hernández’s “mano dura” (iron fist) policy to
combat gangs, were turned against the civilian population. There was
even a brief period when the police refused to enforce the curfew in
several cities.
Protests grew to include burning tires and barricaded highways,
including as much as 80% of the youth in cities despite authorities
firing with live ammunition, but flagged as the month wore on. By Dec.
17 Hernández’s government was declared the winner, and plans have moved
ahead for a second inauguration.
Nasralla’s coalition has remained defiant, and filed numerous appeals to
the electoral tribunal, which is controlled by Hernández’s National
Party. Not surprisingly, they have all been refused. On Jan. 6, tens of
thousands marched and rallied in San Pedro Sula, the country’s second
largest city, in conjunction with Nasralla’s call for nationwide
mobilizations and a national strike. Former president Manuel Zelaya
declared, “Nobody should obey a usurper government.”
Jan. 2018 Nasralla
Salvador Nazralla addresses Jan. 6 protest rally in San Pedro Sula.
Ex-president Manuel Zelaya stands behind him.
No resident of Honduras has ever run for re-election. Anyone who has
already held executive power is barred by the Constitution from becoming
president, and there is a provision that immediately removes any sitting
president who suggests changing this rule. This was the pretext for the
2009 coup d’etat that removed Zelaya, who had called for a referendum to
hold a constituent assembly, from office. But Hernández was able to pack
the Supreme Court with his allies, and in 2015 they overruled this
provision and opened the door to his second term.
The 2009 coup was quickly legitimated by the State Department led by
Hillary Clinton. Zelaya was viewed as a second Hugo Chávez, and the
Obama administration wanted to clamp down on the anti-neoliberal turn
spreading to Central America.
Both the Obama and Trump administrations have courted Hernández as an
ally. Honduras has received over $114 million in security-related aid
from the United States in the past eight years, and Donald Trump’s Chief
of Staff John Kelly is a key ally of Hernández. While the recent
repression was ongoing, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson certified the
country’s human rights record, allowing military funding to continue,
and has endorsed Hernández as the winner of the election. The elite
security forces funded and trained by U.S. dollars, the Cobras and
TIGRES, are the same units that cracked down on dissent.
Hernández, who positions himself mostly as being tough on crime,
weathered mass protests and demands for his resignation in 2015 when it
came out that Social Security funds had been misappropriated for his
election campaign. His government survived by arresting several top
officials for bribery and defrauding customs funds. He is the prototype
of the new right-wing alliance in Latin America between local landowners
and neoliberal financial elites as the “Pink Tide” of social democratic
governments has receded. His government has been a student of neoliberal
capitalism, attacking wages while raising the sales taxes.
The government has been complicit in a string of murders of indigenous
and environmental activists. Since the 2009 coup, 123 land or
environmental activists have been murdered. Most opposed development
plans that benefit companies owned by relatives of politicians. The most
famous victim of this violence was Berta Cáceres, who had won
international acclaim for her opposition to logging, dams, and other
projects that threatened indigenous lands. Cáceres was assassinated in
March 2016. Of eight men arrested for her murder, two received military
training in the United States at the former School of the Americas.
Nasralla is a television personality known as a sports announcer and
game show presenter, who came into politics as the leader of the new
Anti-Corruption Party during the presidency of Porfirio Lobo. He also
spent time as the CEO of Pepsi Honduras, making him a curious ally of
Zelaya, who was considered part of the “Pink Tide.” His 2017 candidacy
was on the basis of the Alliance of the Opposition against the
Dictatorship, known in Spanish as Alianza, which has a constituent
assembly as its central demand.
Corruption in today’s Honduras is systemic rather than individual. There
is an extensive network linking government, private businesses, and
organized crime. Companies with government ties are given inflated
contracts and offer proxy shares to the handful of families who control
most private enterprise in Honduras, and money laundering to the
criminal gangs. Drug trafficking is extremely lucrative in Honduras,
which is the route for most cocaine coming from Latin America to the
United States. Such links go to the highest level; Hernández’s brother
Tony has been linked to drug cartels.
These networks are, of course, international. The same machinery that
allows the capitalist class to hide much of its money in offshore tax
havens also allows politicians and criminals to conceal the public funds
they appropriate. Hernández has also used the national secrets law in an
unprecedented fashion to obscure the money flows. International
capitalism, of course, has encouraged this pattern as the post-coup
governments declared Honduras “open for business.”
Alianza has no program other than its opposition to Hernández.
Nasralla’s personal appeal is to a middle class sick of corruption, as
the rule of law is so degraded that police run protection rackets
indistinguishable from the criminal gangs. The coalition has come to
prominence in the political vacuum left by the rift in the Liberal Party
after the 2009 coup. Zelaya had won as the Liberal candidate in 2005,
but when he was overthrown four years later, he was replaced by Roberto
Micheletti, also of the Liberal Party.
Zelaya’s backing of this thoroughly middle-class candidate was based on
the hope of a constituent assembly that would allow many of the
inadequacies of the 1980 constitution to be corrected. But there was
little chance of this happening under Nasralla, who mostly wanted the
idea of the constituyente as a rhetorical weapon. There was no prospect
of a new progressive turn from an Alianza government.
The Honduran people showed tremendous resistance against the electoral
fraud, and for several days had brought the country to a standstill. It
is transparent that Hernández stole the election; tapes had been
received by The Economist before the election with instructions being
given to stuff ballot boxes for the president’s re-election. Rather than
continuing the insurrectionary protests of December, Alianza vacillated
over recount strategies and international support, and lost the initiative.
Bringing down Hernández’s government will require a national
mobilization and strike. It is imperative for democracy in Honduras to
hold new elections without Hernández or the electoral tribunal that
abetted his electoral fraud. Such a process would need to address the
deep-seated problems in Honduran society, primary among them the severe
inequality that sees almost 63% of its people living below the poverty line.
The fall of Hernández itself will not improve conditions in Honduras.
There is a need to end the worst excesses of capital and guarantee the
right of labor to organize. But the underlying issues will not go away
without building a new society free of the exploitation of capitalism.
Honduras needs a revolutionary socialist party as part of a
revolutionary international that fights against capital around the world.
In the United States, socialists have a special obligation to object to
the imperialist U.S. government’s role in the current state of Honduras.
American dollars go to fund the militarized police there, and American
companies profit from the despoiling of the nation. The Obama and Trump
administrations have both supported the post-coup governments and
whitewashed the decline of democracy in Honduras. No military aid to
coup governments! Solidarity with the Honduran people!
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January 14, 2018 in Latin America. Tags: Honduras
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