by Miles Stryker
Early Sunday morning, June 28, two hundred soldiers attacked the residence of the Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya. After his personal bodyguards waged a brief gun battle, he was arrested. He was then spirited away by plane to nearby Costa Rica. Upon landing, he gave a press conference proclaiming that a military coup by “right-wing oligarchs” had taken place, and he called on the people of Honduras to support his democratic election (in 2005) by mobilizing in the streets to prepare the way for his return to his country and office. As of late July, he has been blocked from re-entry. Negotiations between Zelaya and the leaders of the coup are currently taking place.
The immediate impetus for this reactionary military coup was conflict over Zelaya’s plans to call a referendum on the need for a constituent assembly, which was opposed by both Zelaya’s own center-right Liberal Party as well as the more conservative opposition, the National Party. Support for the coup was based in the right-wing-dominated Congress, the high echelons of the military, and the highest levels of the judiciary.
Even though Zelaya is a wealthy rancher and landowner, the political polarization in this small impoverished country pushed him to take some measures in favor of the poor, the workers, and the peasants. His proposals for minor reforms included raising the minimum wage (by a good 60 percent), cutting interest rates for small farmers, expanding literacy programs, and making health care and pharmaceuticals more available to the poor. Zelaya may not yet be a revolutionary socialist, but he is a progressive reformer.
When Honduras joined with the developing left and progressive bloc of countries in the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA), the regional alliance promoted by Venezuela, the U.S. capitalists in Washington and the State Department as well as the Honduran oligarchy began to really worry. Seeking to give the appearance of breaking with the long history of U.S-backed coups d’etat and support of right-wing oligarchies in Latin America, the Obama administration outwardly backed the OAS’s condemnation of the coup but at the same time admitted the State Department had prior knowledge of the coup and had had talks with its leaders. (See Monthly Review [MRzine], July 15, 2009, for a devastating article by Eva Golinger about U.S. connections with the coup.)
Obama’s statement on the coup called on “all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter,” and added that the situation “must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference.” The obvious contradiction seems to be that a democratically elected president (Zelaya) was basically kidnapped by a section of the military, taken abroad, and deposed, while a non-elected oligarch was installed as president. Even when the State Department uses the language “temporary interim president” or “interim caretaker president” in reference to the dictator who illegally took power during the coup, Roberto Micheletti, it is acknowledging, rather than condemning, the destruction of the democratic process in Honduras and legitimizing the right-wing despot and his supporters who seized power.
Though the Obama administration may not fully agree with the tactics of the coup leaders (who, by the way, were trained in the United States), it certainly sees the long-term benefits of making sure Zelaya does not retain his presidency for any length of time if he is able to return, and it has acted in a way that would maintain capitalist and imperialist interests in the region through its neo-comprador national representatives who have seized power in Honduras.
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