Honduras : Zelaya to Return With 'Peaceful Popular Army'

Zelaya crosses the border, which is marked by a chain. Photo from La Jornada, Mexico.
Strikes and military crackdown continue
President Manuel Zelaya defies compromise

By David Holmes Morris / The Rag Blog / July 31, 2009

Deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya announced on July 29 that within days he will return to Tegucigalpa, accompanied by a “peaceful popular army” of his followers, to resume the office of the presidency.

Zelaya said his reinstatement will be the result of a political agreement with some members of the coup government, mentioning specifically the armed forces. “Let there be no doubt,” he declared, “that at any moment young military officers affected by the coup will detain Romeo Vásquez Velásquez.” General Vásquez Velásquez, head of the joints chiefs of staff, was a central figure in the June 28 coup d’état.

A statement attributed to the Movimiento de Oficiales Superiores y Subalternos de las Fuerzas Armadas (Movement of Superior and Subordinate Officers of the Armed Forces) and distributed on July 29 by anti-coup organizations criticized Vásquez for politicizing the armed forces. “Politicians,” it declared, “in collusion with military commanders, have implicated the armed forces and have damaged the good reputation we had with the Honduran people.”

The statement claims a group of businessmen distributed 30 million lempiras, about 1.6 million dollars, among the country’s top military commanders prior to the coup. “We declare that the armed forces are not the gendarmes of any elite economic group,” the statement continued, “but that we are with the people because most of our members, officers and enlisted men as well, come from the people.”

Speaking to a group of supporters in Ocotal, Nicaragua, about 20 kilometers from the Honduran border, Zelaya said the popular army will be formed from the estimated 500 Hondurans who have made their way on foot through dense jungle to meet him in Nicaragua. Once back across the border, he said, they will be joined by other Hondurans opposed to the coup and, armed with “the weapons of intelligence and reason,” they will proceed to the capital of Tegucigalpa.

Zayala supporters at the border. Photo from Indymedia Honduras.
After an attempt to return to Honduras by air on July 5 was foiled by the military, Zelaya announced he would return by land and actually crossed the border for a brief stay on Friday, July 24. He was greeted by several thousand supporters who had defied and evaded military roadblocks in their effort to greet him. Despite stern warnings from the coup government that he would be arrested if he entered the country, Zelaya spoke briefly and calmly with a Honduran lieutenant colonel before returning to Nicaragua. Later reports in the pro-coup press denied rumors that the lieutenant colonel, Luis Recartes, had been jailed for speaking with Zelaya without arresting him.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized Zelaya’s return to his country as reckless and urged him to seek a negotiated settlement through the ongoing efforts of Costa Rican President Óscar Arias, efforts which have failed so far and appear destined to fail again. The military has issued a statement of approval for Arias’ proposals and the legislature is expected to vote Monday on whether to accept them. But the proposals call for Zelaya to be reinstasted with severely limited powers, prohibiting specifically any attempt to write a new constitution or even to poll the citizenry on whether they want one, limits neither Zelaya nor the popular organizations behind him are prepared to accept. The legislature is divided on the question of amnesty for crimes allegedly committed by members of the Zelaya government in the days leading up to the coup.

The July 24 events came on the second day of strikes endorsed by all three of the country’s labor federations, which resulted in the occupation of a number of government buildings by public employees. In a strike by some members of the national police, including some in the anti-riot force, several police stations were reportedly locked by using handcuffs on the doors.

Teachers have been on a slowdown since the coup on June 28, working three days a week instead of the five demanded by authorities.

Union members block the highway. Photo from El Heraldo.
The military had set up road blocks at a number of points on the highway from Tegucigalpa to El Paraíso, near the Nicaraguan border, in anticipation of the crowds of anti-coup demonstrators expected to welcome Zelaya home. Some of the soldiers are said to have disobeyed orders by allowing demonstrators to proceed and many of the demonstrators evaded the roadblocks by walking long distances through dense jungle.

Some sources say as many as 3,000 were on hand when Zelaya crossed the border.

The military is reportedly not allowing demonstrators to leave and is denying access to food and water, although area residents have shared their meager resources. Many demonstrators are still in the El Paraíso area a week after the demonstrations began.

The coup government extended curfew hours in the border area several times until finally declaring an around-the-clock curfew, with all constitutional rights suspended, turning the curfew into a state of siege.

The police and military have been using teargas and rubber bullets against the anti-coup forces, beating many and arresting an unknown number. The body of one man, Pedro Magdiel Muñoz, was found near the demonstrations with more than 40 stab wounds and signs he had been tortured.

Among those arrested was Rafael Alegría, a prominent Honduran activist and one of the founders of Vía Campesina, an international campesino organization, who was detained briefly and released.

Among those seeking to greet Zelaya were his wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, and several other family members, who were eventually given permission to finish their journey thanks to a court order.

[San Antonio native David Holmes Morris is an army veteran, a language major, a retired printer, a sometime journalist, and a gay liberationist.]

David Holmes Morris' previous Rag Blog articles on Honduras are here.

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Honduras : The Stalemate Continues; Repression Steps Up

Roberto Micheletti (left) and Manuel Zelaya in friendlier times. (Though Micheletti doesn't look all that friendly.) Photo by La Prensa, Honduras.

At the end of the meetings on July 19, [Costa Rican President Óscar] Arias asked for another 72 hours to work on ending the conflict by negotiation to avoid a bloodier resolution.

By David Holmes Morris / The Rag Blog / July 21, 2009

The second round of talks on the political crisis in Honduras, like the first, has ended in a deadlock.

Meeting in San José, Costa Rica on Saturday and Sunday, July 18 and 19, a week after the first effort, representatives of deposed President Manuel Zelaya and de facto President Roberto Micheletti failed for the second time to agree on Zelaya’s return to Honduras and on the restoration of constitutional government.

The major point of disagreement concerned the first of seven proposals offered by Costa Rican President Óscar Arias calling for Zelaya to be returned to the presidency and to serve out his term, which will end next January 27. The golpista government has consistently refused to consider Zelaya’s reinstatement and Zelaya’s supporters have insisted his reinstatement is not negotiable.

In an arrangement made by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Arias acted as mediator between the two sides during both rounds of meetings.

Other points in Arias’ proposal included the establishment of a government of national reconciliation composed of representatives of the major political parties; general amnesty for all crimes committed in connection with the crisis; Zelaya’s renunciation of any effort to hold a popular referendum in a manner not specifically authorized by the constitution; moving the next national elections from November 29 to October 25 and changing the dates for campaigns accordingly; placing the armed forces under the command of the electoral tribunal a month before the elections; and formation of a committee of respected Hondurans and members of international bodies like the Organization of American States to insure the fulfillment of the terms of agreement.

Counterproposals offered by the de facto government differed primarily in calling for Zelaya to be tried for his alleged crimes against the constitution upon his return to Honduras. They also called for formation of a truth commission to investigate alleged corruption in the Zelaya government.

Graffiti: 'Cardinal, you are the one responsible for this blood bath." Photo by Minga Informativa de Movimientos Sociales.
At the end of the meetings on July 19, Arias asked for another 72 hours to work on ending the conflict by negotiation to avoid a bloodier resolution. Arias pointed out that Honduran civilians and military alike have weapons. Hugo Chávez had warned of civil war if Zelaya were not reinstated. On July 14, Bastille Day, Zelaya had urged his supporters to practice their constitutional right to mount an insurrection to bring about his return to the presidency, thus following the example of the French revolutionaries. He called for peaceful demonstrations and civil disobedience.

After his first attempt to return to Honduras by air on July 5 was defeated by the military, Zelaya pledged to return by other means, suggesting he would cross the border from Nicaragua to a secret location.

Clinton associates represent Coup

Several sources have reported that at the first meetings in San José, on July 9 and 10, Micheletti was represented not by the four attendees stipulated in the original plan but by six. The additional two were Bennett Ratcliff, a public relations specialist and lobbyist from San Diego, and his interpreter. Ratcliff is said to be friends with the Clintons and to have worked for Bill Clinton.

Venezuelan-U.S. journalist Eva Golinger writes that during the meetings Ratcliff was consulted on every point by the Micheletti team and that he supplied the list of conditions for negotiation which, she says, had been approved beforehand by Secretary Clinton. The conditions were that Zelaya could return to the presidency but not to power, acting as a mere figurehead; that he could not pursue plans to rewrite the constitution; that he must distance himself from Hugo Chávez; that he must govern jointly with the legislature and the coup regime; and that he must grant amnesty to those involved in the coup.

Another associate of the Clintons, Lanny Davis, has been hired by the Honduran branch of the rightist business group Consejo Empresarial de América Latina to lobby for the coup regime. In an appearance before the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the House of Representatives on July 10 he claimed that “democracy and civil liberties are flourishing in Honduras.” Davis attended Yale Law School with the Clintons and was special counsel to Bill Clinton during his presidency. He was prominent in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Honduran activists have charged that rightist Cubans and Venezuelans in exile were involved in planning the coup. Robert Carmona-Borjas, a Venezuelan lawyer living in exile in the United States since his involvement in the coup of 2002 that briefly deposed Hugo Chávez, was thanked publicly at a pro-coup rally in Tegucigalpa shortly after Zelaya’s ouster and may in fact have been in attendance. Carmona-Borjas is co-founder of the Arcadia Foundation, a U.S.-based group claiming to be dedicated to eradicating corruption throughout Latin America but whose only specific known projects involve Hondutel, the state-owned Honduran telephone system that pro-coup Hondurans charge is run by corrupt associates of Zelaya. There has been talk of privatizing Hondutel.

Listed on the Arcadia web site until last September was the name of Otto Reich, the Cuban-born former undersecretary of state and ambassador to Venezuela who was involved in the Iran-Contra affair of the ‘80s. In a July 9 op-ed in the Miami Herald, Reich denied persistent rumors of his involvement in the Honduran coup.

Resistencia Feminista demonstrates at Instituto Nacional de la Mujer. Photo by Revistazo.
In the meantime, the most ardently pro-coup newspaper of Honduras, El Heraldo, claims to have discovered a plot led by Hugo Chávez to destabilize the country through acts of sabotage and vandalism, to be carried out by Nicaraguans and by Honduran drug traffickers and gang members. The plot would include occupation of the country’s largest airport and the assassinations of leading political figures. The conspirators, El Heraldo says, would block all major thoroughfares, force hospitals to close and provoke widespread bloodshed and massacres by firing on demonstrators, blaming the deaths on the police and military.

Assassinations and clamp down on press

Repression against the opponents of the coup has intensified. In a preliminary report issued on July 15, the Comité de Familiares de Detenidos y Desaparecidos en Honduras (COFADEH –- the Committee of Families of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras) said that the coup had resulted in 1046 arrests, most of them on charges of creating “escándalo público>,” or public disturbance, the charge traditionally lodged against demonstrators. It reported that 59 people had been beaten by the police or the military and three had been assassinated. The report charged that Battalion 316, the most notorious of Honduran death squads of the ‘80s, had been reactivated. It said the situation in the department, or state, of Colón was particularly serious, with many arrests, including the detention of minors and at least one U.S. citizen.

The report stated that the mayors of a number of municipalities had been subjected to death threats, persecution and searches and that the military had taken control of a number of municipal buildings.

Police at hotel in Tegucigalpa looking for foreign journalists. Photo by Raices, El Salvador.
The organization deplored the widespread persecution of the press and attacks on the freedom of information. A large number of Honduran journalists have been jailed and journalists with Telesur, a multinational satellite television news service, and Venezolana de Televisión have been harassed, detained and finally expelled from the country.

The report cited the case of José David Murillo Sánchez, whose 19-year-old son, Isis Obed Murillo, was shot to death at the Toncontín airport on July 5, the first death in demonstrations against the coup. Murillo, the father, was arrested as he left the COFADEH office on July 9 on charges dating from 2004. He had earlier talked with the prosecutor’s office and with Telesur about his son’s death. He is reportedly being held in isolation in a three-meter by three-meter cell.

In incidents widely thought to be political assassinations, two prominent members of the leftist Unificación Democrática party were shot to death on July 11. That afternoon Ramón García was pulled from a bus in the western department of Santa Barbara and killed, and later in the evening Roger Iván Bados was shot to death at his home near the northern city of San Pedro Sula. Both men were active in organizing demonstrations against the coup.

Activism against the coup continues unabated, however. In an effort to slow commerce, major highways are being blocked, with unions in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala showing solidarity by blocking highways to and from Honduras on their sides of the border.

And several women’s organizations working together as Resistencia Feminista surrounded the headquarters of the Instituto Nacional de la Mujer (INAM) in Tegucigalpa on July 14 and 15 to protest the replacement of the director with a supporter of the coup. “This is a peaceful occupation of INAM,” said Gilda Rivera of the Centro de Derechos de las Mujeres, “as repudiation of the appointment of María Martha Díaz as minister. Our position as a women’s movement is that we won’t accept any official named by this usurping, fascist, golpista regime.”

[San Antonio native David Holmes Morris is an army veteran, a language major, a retired printer, a sometime journalist, and a gay liberationist.]

David Holmes Morris' previous Rag Blog articles on Honduras are here.

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Honduras : Angry Protests as Coup Blocks Zayala Return With Violence

Supporters of Honduras' ousted President Manuel Zelaya march near the presidential residence in Tegucigalpa, Monday July 6, 2009. Honduras' interim government closed its main airport to all flights on Monday after blocking the runway to prevent the return of ousted President Manuel Zelaya. Photo by Esteban Felix / AP.

One demonstrator, a 19-year-old man, was killed, although some sources report as many as four deaths... Witnesses say military snipers perched on the control tower and other buildings were responsible for the bloodshed, the worst so far in protests against the coup.

By David Holmes Morris / The Rag Blog / July 7, 2009

After a tense and confusing weekend at the airport, demonstrators gathered near the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa on Monday, July 6, to continue voicing opposition to the coup d’état that had deposed President Manuel Zelaya a week earlier.

Zelaya had pledged to return to Honduras but soldiers and police kept Zelaya’s plane from landing at the Toncontín Airport on Sunday afternoon by parking military trucks on the runway and by threatening an attack by an air force plane that followed it closely as it approached the airport. The president’s plane, which also carried Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, president of the United Nations General Assembly, and a number of journalists, flew to Managua instead and shortly afterward to El Salvador.

In what some describe as the largest political demonstration in the history of the country, thousands of demonstrators had marched to the airport on Saturday to greet Zelaya, whose planned return on Thursday had been postponed until Saturday and then Sunday. The de facto government had said they would arrest Zelaya as soon as he entered Honduran territory.

The coup government had tried to prevent Hondurans living outside the capital from joining the demonstration by stopping busses, beating and arresting the passengers and, in at least one reported case, shooting out the tires with machine guns.

The reported 2,000 police and military at the airport on Sunday had been swept aside without incident several times by the mass of demonstrators, who greatly outnumbered them. But a clash with the military occurred when demonstrators near the end of the runway rushed toward the soldiers and trucks blocking it as Zelaya’s plane circled overhead. One demonstrator, a 19-year-old man, was killed, although some sources report as many as four deaths, and an undetermined number were wounded. Witnesses say military snipers perched on the control tower and other buildings were responsible for the bloodshed, the worst so far in protests against the coup.

It is not known how many demonstrators were arrested.

Later in the afternoon, the government announced the curfew declared a week ago would begin at 6:30 instead of the usual 10:00, giving demonstrators little time to reach safety. The original hours were restored the next day.

“If the United States can live together with those who perpetrate coups, democracy is finished,” Zelaya declared to reporters on the plane. “I ask the powers with economic and commercial influence to take action when attacks based on barbarism and terror are launched against legitimate governments, as in Honduras.”

In El Salvador, Zelaya met with that country’s president, Mauricio Funes, as well as Presidents Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, and Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, and also with José Miguel Insulza, secretary general of the Organization of American States.

The coup government has sought to gain support within Honduras by spreading fear of attacks by foreign elements inside the country and at its borders. The pro-coup paper La Prensa reported on its front page that Tegucigalpa has been suddenly invaded by foreign terrorists, most of them Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Cubans, bent on destroying the country’s institutions and sowing chaos. They have supposedly bombed several government building within the past week. The head of the Honduran Human Rights Committee says the government has launched a “ferocious campaign of xenophobic repression” against foreigners living in Honduras, particularly Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.

And de facto president Roberto Micheletti has been quoted as saying the Nicaraguan military was gathering at the border with Honduras in preparation for an invasion, a charge Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has flatly denied.

Meanwhile, nineteen members of the legislature are not convinced. Thirteen representatives who belong to Zelaya’s own Partido Liberal and six who belong to other parties have reportedly issued a statement opposing the coup and asking for Zelaya’s reinstatement. And Porfirio Lobo Sosa, presidential candidate for the conservative Partido Nacional, has also publicly condemned the coup.

The Organization of American States has rejected the Micheletti government’s withdrawal of Honduras from that organization on the grounds that it is not a legitimate government and has no authority represent the country.

[San Antonio native David Holmes Morris is an army veteran, a language major, a retired printer, a sometime journalist, and a gay liberationist.]

Also see: Haiti and Honduras: Considering Two 'Coups d'État' by David Holmes Morris / The Rag Blog / July 2, 2009

And see all Rag Blog coverage of the coup in Honduras here.

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