When the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was deposed in a military coup last June, the response from the United States was unequivocal; “we believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the president of Honduras”, Barack Obama told reporters. “It would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition,”
Eight months later and Zelaya is in exile in the Dominican Republic. The new president of Honduras, Porfirio Lobo, won an election that only the US recognised. The main international election monitoring bodies, the UN, the EU, the OAS and the Carter Centre, refused to monitor the election, saying the conditions for free and fair elections did not exist. Reports suggested the much-vaunted turnout of 63% was exaggerated and that in reality, less than half the electorate voted, while opponents of the coup made claims of voter intimidation and coercion. When Lobo assumed office in January, his first act as president was to pass an amnesty law protecting those involved in the coup from prosecution. Leading figures from the de facto Government that ruled following Zelaya’s deposition, such as ‘interim president’ Roberto Micheletti, who was appointed ‘congressman for life’, have retained political posts. During a recent tour of Latin America, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton declared: “The Honduras crisis has been managed to a successful conclusion."
Throughout Clinton’s tour, she stressed that not only had stability returned to Honduras, but also that it had been returned through peaceful and democratic means. “It was done without civil war,” she said, “it was done without violence”. However, a few days before Clinton’s statement, around 10,000 Hondurans had tried to march on the presidential residence. Organised by the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), the marchers not only restated their demands for constitutional reform - the issue that initially sparked the crisis - they also demanded an end to state violence targeting activists. The protest was galvanised by the murder of Claudia Larissa Brizuela the day before. Brizuela, a union activist and the daughter of a prominent local FRNP leader, was shot three times in the head when she answered the door at her San Pedro Sula home. While the Lobo administration blamed the murder on “common crime”, opponents have no doubt that Brizuela was targeted because of her role as an anti-coup activist.
According to The Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), the murder of Brizuela was far from an isolated incident. COFADEH is a Honduran human rights organisation formed under the 80’s military dictatorship and is openly opposed to the Lobo Government. The organisation claims that in the first 28 days of Lobo’s presidency, they recorded 53 illegal detentions, two sexual assaults, two murders, eight cases of torture, two kidnappings and 14 raids on activist’s houses. They also claim that 23 neighbourhoods have been profiled by security forces as “resisters” and searched after hours, and that 150 people have left the country as political refugees.
While these abuses are difficult to verify, the allegations of state violence are supported by international human rights agencies. Victoria Cervantes, a Chicago-based human rights worker, who operated in Honduras said: “What we’re seeing now is a violence that’s very selective against people and communities in resistance… violence that is very much the style of the death squad and paramilitary violence. In other words, resistance people are found in their closets with their hands tied, ropes around their necks. People have been found with their tongue cut out… decapitated bodies… [Others have been] raped and tortured.”
Since the protestors took to the streets demanding Zelaya’s return last June, the anti-coup movement has waged a campaign that has seen street battles with police, blockades of major transit routes, strikes and occupations of national institutions. The de facto Government led by Roberto Micheletti responded with the legal suspension of constitutional rights, including the right to protest, freedom of association and freedom of movement. According to human rights organisations, including Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, they also responded with the violent repression of protest and anti-coup media, arbitrary detention, sexual abuse, disappearances, torture and targeted assassinations.
Although Zelaya has now left the country and Micheletti has handed power over to an elected successor, the campaign persists. The movement refuses to recognise the Lobo Government and continues to demand constitutional reform. Lobo’s calls for unity and reconciliation and Clinton’s assertions that the crisis has reached its conclusion, have fallen upon deaf ears. The movement signalled its intention to continue their struggle on the day of Lobo’s inauguration, when hundreds of thousands of protestors marched through cities and towns across the country.
The response of the Lobo Government has been not only to deny the political nature of violence directed at the movement but also to dismiss the movement as no longer relevant. The new Honduran minister of security, Oscar Álvarez, said the resistance movement “Doesn’t have any reason to exist”.
Since taking power, the Lobo administration has gone to great lengths to present itself as a solution to the crisis that has torn the country apart, rather than a product of it. In Lobo’s inaugural speech he called for unity and reconciliation and urged Hondurans to “forget the past”. He also called on the international community to pursue "dialogue and reconciliation with Honduras”. Since his inauguration, the Government has begun to assemble a ‘Truth Commission’ to investigate the coup and the constitutional crisis that provoked it – a move dismissed by the FNRP. Co-ordinator Juan Barahona said it was “pure show” that was “intended to clean up the image of the coup and encourage other countries to recognise his illegitimate Government.”
The new administration’s search for international recognition is proving more successful than its attempts to quell domestic dissent. Although his election was widely not recognised, Lobo’s inauguration was attended by representatives from the United States, Colombia, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Taiwan. Since then, Britain, Israel, Morocco and Turkey have announced they are to station ambassadors in Honduras. Many other countries, including France, Spain and even Brazil – which was one of Zelaya’s strongest supporters – have indicated they will soon be prepared to accept the new Honduran Government. Talks are underway to restore Honduras’ membership to the OAS, while aid money and credit, frozen in the wake of the coup, is being restored, with the United States and the World Bank leading the way.
Even before Clinton’s recent tour, the United States was at the heart of that success. The turning point in international relations came last October when Zelaya and Micheletti signed a US brokered agreement that Zelaya believed would lead to his reinstatement ahead of November’s election. He was mistaken. Although the agreement allowed for Zelaya’s return, the de-facto Government insisted it was conditional on a congressional vote. Congress voted against his return and Zelaya denounced the deal as “absurd” and declared his decision “not to continue this theatre.” While most countries refused to recognise the agreement unless Zelaya returned to power, the United States stood by it. Lewis Amselem, the US representative to the OAS, reportedly told the dissenting Latin American representatives: “I’ve heard many in this room say that they will not recognise the elections in Honduras. I’m not trying to be a wise guy, but what does that mean? What does that mean in the real world, not in the world of magical realism?” With that backing, the Micheletti Government effectively ended negotiations, confident that a US-backed elected president would soon see their opponents resolve weaken.
The return of Honduras to the fold of the international community now seems assured, leaving Zelaya and those Hondurans that oppose the new Government as internationally isolated as the de-facto Government of Micheletti once seemed. But, as the latest march showed, that opposition shows no sign of subsiding. Even with the return of Zelaya now a near impossibility, the coalition of dissenters that took on the coup continues to lobby for constitutional reform and organise in opposition to the new Government – while its seems still to be the case, that state security forces continue to respond with violence. While Clinton’s assurances of an end to the crisis may have been accepted internationally, on the ground in Honduras, it appears the crisis is neither concluded nor non-violent. Meanwhile, for many in Latin America, last year’s optimism following Obama’s promise of a “new day” in relations between the US and Latin America, is rapidly fading in the face of old fashioned power politics.