The Honduran Coup is the Caribbean’s business

On April 11, 2002, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez was briefly removed from office by an abortive coup d’ etat. A documentary on this episode, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, shows how an alliance of big business, wealthy landowners, and elements of the military conspired to remove him, with the active support of the Bush Administration and the local and international media.

False stories

State-owned TV stations were closed, coverage of pro-Chavez demonstrations was blanked and false stories circulated. Fortuitously, on the day of the coup, an Irish television crew happened to be inside the Presidential Palace making a documentary and the end-result was a film that offers an alternate and compelling viewpoint to the pro-coup stories.

It documented the pro-poor policies of the Government, the fact that it had been democratically elected and enjoyed extensive support among the working poor, it refuted the lie that Chávez had resigned and revealed that he was being held prisoner, and showed the massive street demonstrations in his support.

There are disturbing parallels with Honduras, where on the morning of June 28, the incumbent President Manuel Zelaya, democratically elected in 2006 , was taken prisoner by soldiers and put on a plane to neighbouring Costa Rica, a forged letter of resignation was produced and the President of the National Assembly, Robert Micheletti, proclaimed President.

Honduras, a Central American nation of seven million people that recently overtook Guyana as the third poorest country in the hemisphere, still exhibits the deep racial and class inequalities that are a legacy of Spanish conquest and colonisation of the indigenous majority.

75 percent of the people live in poverty, while the top 10 percent of the population gets 45 percent of the national product (Background to the Honduran coup: Poverty, exploitation and imperialist domination, by Rafael Azul). The unemployment rate is 30 percent and the average working day for adult men and women is 14 hours. Around 30,000 employees in the maquiladora (export assembly) plants have reportedly lost their jobs since the onset of the global economic crisis.

Popular demands

Manuel Zelaya, himself a wealthy landowner, had angered the Honduran business elite and military by moving increasingly to the left during his presidency, raising the minimum wage by 60 percent, reducing fuel prices in response to popular demands, and most controversially, taking Honduras into the Venezuelan-led ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. His plan to hold a non-binding referendum was the trigger of a series of events which led to his ouster.

Contrary to widespread media reports, the June 28 Referendum was not about extending Zelaya’s term of office. The actual question on the aborted June 28 ballot read, “Do you think that the November 2009 general elections should include a fourth ballot box in order to make a decision about the creation of a National Constitutional Assembly that would approve a new Constitution?”, “Yes” or “No.”?

Extend his rule

To quote Mark Weisbrot, Director of the Washington-based Centre for Economic Policy and Research writing on July 8 for the London Guardian, “There was no way for Zelaya to “extend his rule” even if the referendum had been held and passed, and even if he had then gone on to win a binding referendum on the November ballot.

The June 28 referendum was nothing more than a non-binding poll of the electorate, asking whether the voters wanted to place a binding referendum on the November ballot to approve a redrafting of the country’s constitution. If it had passed, and if the November referendum had been held (which was not very likely) and also passed, the same ballot would have elected a new president and Zelaya would have stepped down in January”.

What was launched, therefore, appears to have been a pre-emptive strike by the Honduran elite in an attempt to thwart Zelaya’s plans to deepen the democratic process in a country that has historically excluded the poor and indigenous majority from effective participation in social and economic life, a process similar to that underway in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.

An inadvertent revelation of inbred racism and classism of this class was the statement by Enrique Ortez Colindres, named as interim Foreign Minister, dismissing US President Obama as a ‘little black man [who] doesn’t know where Tegucigalpa is’. A lukewarm apology was proffered, but a further remark by Colindres surfaced which translated reads ‘I have negotiated with queers, prostitutes, leftists, blacks, whites.

Por Norman Girvan, Andaiye and Alissa Trotz