Coup in Honduras enters its third month

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Coup in Honduras enters its third month
29 August 2009

It is now two months since Honduran soldiers abducted the country’s
elected president, Manuel Zelaya, forced him onto an airplane and flew
him out of the country.

The June 28 coup installed a right-wing regime backed by the military,
the country’s native oligarchy and the multinational corporations that
reap hefty profits from the exploitation of Honduran workers.

Despite mass popular resistance and formal condemnations of the coup
by Washington, the Organization of American States and various Latin
American governments, the coup regime headed by Roberto Micheletti
remains in power and is preparing to stage rigged elections to choose
Zelaya’s successor.

The regime has maintained its rule, in the first place, through brutal
and escalating repression. In recent weeks, reports issued by several
human rights organizations have documented the state violence
unleashed against Honduran working people, who in their overwhelming
majority have opposed the dictatorship.

Amnesty International documented wholesale arrests and beatings of
demonstrators, along with killings and “disappearances.” The human
rights group charged that the coup regime is “using excessive force
and mass detentions as a policy to manage demonstrators and peaceful
protestors,” while “denying the right to freedom of expression and
information, through the closure of media outlets, the confiscation of
equipment and physical abuse of journalists and camera persons.”

Similarly, a delegation from the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights (IACHR), an arm of the OAS, found “a pattern of
disproportionate use of public force, arbitrary detentions, and the
control of information aimed at limiting political participation by a
sector of the citizenry.”

The agency said it had “confirmed the use of repression against
demonstrations through the placement of military roadblocks; the
arbitrary enforcement of curfews; the detentions of thousands of
people; cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; and poor detention
conditions.” It estimated that up to 4,000 people have been subjected
to arbitrary detention.

The commission cited the shooting deaths of at least four
demonstrators, savage beatings of protesters, including elderly people
and women, with “police truncheons and other blunt objects made of
rubber, iron and wood,” and police gang rapes of women detained at
demonstrations.

In the face of this brutality, Honduran workers, peasants and students
have continued to carry out strikes, mass demonstrations and other
acts of resistance in a sustained mass movement without precedent in
the country’s history.

This heroic struggle has helped expose two great political fictions.
The first is the pretense that the Obama administration has
inaugurated a new era of non-intervention and mutual respect in
US-Latin American relations. The second is that the region’s bourgeois
regimes of a nationalist or populist stripe—from Venezuela’s Chavez to
Zelaya himself—offer any way forward for the working class and
oppressed masses.

Obama’s formal statements opposing Zelaya’s ouster notwithstanding,
two months after the June 28 military overthrow, the US State
Department has yet to rule on whether the events of that day
constituted a coup. Such a finding would trigger requirements to cut
off US aid to the Honduran regime.

Even more telling, neither Obama nor anyone else in his administration
has uttered a word of criticism of the killings, disappearances,
torture or mass detentions in Honduras. For its part, the US mass
media has virtually blacked out these crimes.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, continues military operations at the US base
in Soto Cano—its largest in the region—where some 600 American troops
and hundreds of US civilian contractors work closely with the Honduran
military that carried out the coup.

The likelihood is nil that the Honduran military and the country’s
ruling oligarchy, US imperialism’s most servile clients for over a
century, would carry out such an action without a green light from
Washington.

Far from ushering in a new era of peace and harmony, the Obama
administration is embarked on a campaign to reassert US domination in
Latin America, utilizing military means to offset growing economic
challenges from China, Europe and emerging competitors within the
region itself. The recent furor over Colombia’s agreement to provide
the Pentagon with bases capable of deploying US “rapid reaction
forces” anywhere in the hemisphere and the continuation of plans for a
revival of the US Fourth Fleet are indications of this strategy.

Washington’s primary response to the coup has been its instigation of
the mediation efforts by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias—a longtime
Washington asset—and support for his so-called San José Accord.

This proposal would return Zelaya to the presidential palace as a
powerless president, subordinated to a government of “national unity
and reconciliation” dominated by the military and political elements
that overthrew him. Those who carried out the coup and the vicious
repression that followed would be granted a full amnesty. Any attempt
to convene a constituent assembly for the purpose of amending the
reactionary 1982 constitution imposed by the US and the Honduran
military would be forbidden.

Such an agreement would secure the key aims of the June 28 overthrow
and have the effect of legitimizing military coups throughout the
hemisphere.

Zelaya’s acceptance of this scheme is a measure of his own inability
and unwillingness to challenge the framework of the bourgeois
political setup and imperialist domination in Honduras. Indeed, his
entire strategy for securing his return to office has been based on
appeals to the Obama administration to impose stiffer sanctions on the
regime headed by his old Liberal Party political ally, Roberto Micheletti.

The Latin American governments—including that of Chavez in
Venezuela—have demonstrated similar impotence, providing only verbal
condemnations of the coup, while also appealing to Obama to call the
Honduran oligarchs and generals to order.

With the events in Honduras, the class lines have emerged starkly. It
is the Honduran workers, backed by students and peasants, who have
fought intransigently against the coup regime, even as Zelaya has
sought a US-brokered deal with its leaders.

Zelaya’s willingness to participate in such a settlement confirms the
bitter lessons of the past period of defeats in Latin America, from
Brazil in 1964, to Chile in 1973, to Argentina in 1976. The working
class cannot defend itself from military coups and dictatorship by
subordinating its struggle to a supposedly “progressive” faction of
the bourgeoisie.

Only the working class, mobilizing its independent political strength
against the coup regime and the capitalist order that it defends, can
prevent a counterrevolutionary settlement in Honduras. This struggle
must be carried forward through the demand for a workers’ and farmers’
government, the expropriation of the oligarchy’s “ten families” and
the multi-national corporations that backed the coup, and the
socialist transformation of Honduras and the entire region.

In this fight, Honduran workers will find support neither in sanctions
from Obama nor in aid from Chavez and other Latin American regimes,
but rather from working people in Latin America and the US itself, who
are being driven into class battles by the historic crisis gripping
world capitalism.

Bill Van Auken

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/pers-a29.shtml

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