Articles with the Tag Manuel Zelaya

Honduras: unions call for general strike against the coup

Honduras
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the Hondurian unions, through bitter experience well aware of what a rightwing regime can do to their country, have been out in force against the coup from the start. Now they’re calling for a general strike, as deposed president Zelaya has sworn to return soon:

The CUTH represents 250,000 workers in both urban and rural areas.

Previous protests against coup leader Roberto Micheletti have been confronted by large numbers of armed soldiers and police.

Mr Salinas told the Morning Star that opposition to the coup is gathering strength. “We have been in the streets for 22 days and our movement is becoming stronger and stronger.

“Our aim is to stop production, trade and transport,” he said.

Despite the resistance of the oligarchy, Mr Zelaya’s government had doubled the minimum wage and the trade unions predict that unless the coup regime is removed from power, it will attempt to reverse this and other progressive measures.

So far the coupists seem to have kept somewhat of a low profile: repressive, intransigent, but just standard issue repression rather than football stadiums full of dissidents being tortured and shot. They seem to be playing for time, establishing the facts on the ground and count on the “international community” to lose interest. They’ve been trying to spin the coup as an emergency measure to prevent the constitution from Zelaya’s supposed depravity, urged on them by the people. If they can keep Honduras quiet without too much visible repression, this old trick might just work. Hence the importance of a general strike as a very visible show of support for Zelaya.

By the way, it would be a mistake to think that this is just about Zelaya and his return. Until he came in office he was your fairly establishment candidate, who was half pushed into taking some measures to better the existence of the majority of Hondurians. He isn’t a socialist or populist reformer like Chavez, but hopefully if he does return, he will be radicalised like Chavez was, rather than cowed as happened to Ariste in Haiti. More important than Zelaya’s fate however is what this struggle is doing for the working classes in Honduras: if they win it’s a huge boost; if they lose they know everything that was achieved during Zelaya will be taken away again.

Honduras.

South America
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Let’s see. Honduras’ leftist president, Manuel Zelaya is lifted from his bed in the middle of the night by the army, sent into exile into Costa Rica. The speaker of the Hondurian national congress is instead sworn in and immediately sets a curfew for the next two days. All of this is justified with claims that Zelaya was violating the Hondurian constitution. In the background is a deeper social struggle between the old elite and the reformist government of Zelaya. Oh, and the Honduran Joint Chief of Staff was a graduate of the School of the Americas, the US infamous torture school.

Does or does this not sound like a classic South American coup?

UPDATE: According to Eva Gollinger, it does. She provides some background about the conflict between leftist president Zelaya and the coupists:

The current constitution, written in 1982 during the height of the Reagan Administration’s dirty war in Central America, was designed to ensure those in power, both economic and political, would retain it with little interference from the people. Zelaya, elected in November 2005 on the platform of Honduras’ Liberal Party, had proposed the opinion poll be conducted to determine if a majority of citizens agreed that constitutional reform was necessary. He was backed by a majority of labor unions and social movements in the country. If the poll had occured, depending on the results, a referendum would have been conducted during the upcoming elections in November to vote on convening a constitutional assembly. Nevertheless, today’s scheduled poll was not binding by law.

In fact, several days before the poll was to occur, Honduras’ Supreme Court ruled it illegal, upon request by the Congress, both of which are led by anti-Zelaya majorities and members of the ultra-conservative party, National Party of Honduras (PNH). This move led to massive protests in the streets in favor of President Zelaya. On June 24, the president fired the head of the high military command, General Romeo Vásquez, after he refused to allow the military to distribute the electoral material for Sunday’s elections. General Romeo Vásquez held the material under tight military control, refusing to release it even to the president’s followers, stating that the scheduled referendum had been determined illegal by the Supreme Court and therefore he could not comply with the president’s order. As in the Unted States, the president of Honduras is Commander in Chief and has the final say on the military’s actions, and so he ordered the General’s removal. The Minister of Defense, Angel Edmundo Orellana, also resigned in response to this increasingly tense situation.

This is a pattern we’ve seen before, a carefully proscribed democracy in which it’s impossible to change the status quo without going outside its legalistic boundaries, at which point the mkilitary has an excuse to intervene to “restore democracy”.

UPDATE II: leftwing politician killed when soldiers attempted to arrest him.