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Things could not go on, in Honduras, as they were, with a constitution written by Reagan's henchmen. Venezuela re-wrote its constitution. Bolivia did. Ecuador did. It is not only a common practice in Latin America (quite different from us) but it was happening in the course of a widespread, grass roots, powerful leftist movement of the disenfranchised poor majority, throughout Latin America. How to keep this movement, in Honduras, from resulting in real democracy, better wages and working conditions, better wealth distribution, better health care, fairer taxation, preservation and expansion of "the commons" and public services, a better balance of socialist/capitalist policy whereby the rich and the multinational can't just rip off everybody, and how to keep Honduras as a U.S. client state with a U.S. military base and a U.S. "School of the Americas"-trained military, was the problem faced by the designers of coups in Washington DC.
And now these coup-masters are in charge of the "reform."
And ain't it interesting that all that Zelaya proposed was an advisory vote of the people--"Do you or don't you want constitutional reform?"--that had NOTHING TO DO WITH TERM LIMITS!
All lies, all the time, from our corpo-fascist press and their scribblers in Langley.
This, too, is a lie--that Lobo, his rich backers and U.S. multinational corporations and war profiteers want real reform in Honduras. They do not. But it's interesting that they feel compelled to look like they do--a credit to the courageous people of Honduras and their democracy movement, and also to the leftist democracy movements in other countries, which have pressured the Lobo government.
I can see why those whom this article describes as the "hard-liners" of the Resistance--people whose friends or family members were shot to death (a teacher, in front of his students, labor leaders, journalists and others), decapitated (labor leader)--hundreds of such murders by rightwing death squads--or who themselves, or their friends or family members, were raped, beaten, tortured, imprisoned, threatened, fired from their jobs--are sickened by the notion of the U.S. and Honduran fascists controlling reform.
I am with them, and yet, "we the people" must learn to be smart about strategy. Crucial to strategy is an assessment of the power situation. In what mechanisms does power reside and who controls them?
We, here in the U.S., need to realize that our fundamental power as a people--our vote--has been taken over by one, private, far rightwing-connected corporation--ES&S, which just bought out Diebold--which is 'counting' most (80%) of the votes in the U.S. with 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code--code that we are forbidden to review--with virtually no audit/recount controls. We need to understand how this happened. And we need to attack it directly, if we are ever going to get our democracy back.
We can scream and yell and protest all we want. We can mourn the dead--a hundred thousand innocents in Iraq, more in Afghanistan, and thousands of U.S. soldiers--or we can express our revulsion at the torture of prisoners, or the Patriot Act, or Social Security now being on the rightwing/corporate chopping block. But if we don't know, and don't do something about, WHO is 'counting' all our votes, and HOW they are 'counting' them, all our protests are for naught. You must look to the power mechanisms.
Martin Luther King knew this. That's why the civil rights movement was LOCAL. They sat in at the LOCAL lunch counter, long before there was a "march on Washington." And, most pertinent, they marched down to the LOCAL county registrar's office to demand their right to vote. Courageous black citizens and civil rights workers did this in county after county. Voting is a LOCAL matter (and so is the voting system). The power to register people to vote was LOCAL. They had to address that power where it resided.
Similarly, the democracy movement in Honduras needs to strategize, which means assessing the power situation. The murders and oppression are appalling. So was the murder and oppression in the south in the 1960s. So is the mass murder and oppression of the Forever War that has been inflicted on us, here in the U.S. You don't ever "get over" such horrors, but you need to think long term, if you yourself survive, for the good of humankind.
I know that the death squad murders in Honduras are on-going. So is the horror in Afghanistan and other horrors. But if you don't have the power to stop it--or if your previous democratic power mechanisms (big marches, transparent vote counting) have been neutralized--you need to realize that and change tactics. This is NOT "incrementalism." It is a step back from passion, into the more rational part of our mind. Is what you have done the way to get the next thing done?
The pressure on the illegitimate, rightwing Lobo government, from Honduras' own people and from the Leftist democracy movements and its leaders in Brazil, Venezuela and other countries, has resulted in a tactical opportunity, if the Honduran movement can realize this and take advantage of it. The ultimate result could be what most Hondurans have wanted for decades--real reform of the constitution. And, if the Lobo government and the U.S. mess with the election, on constitutional reform initiatives, then they need to look to that--election integrity (as we do here).
And here's a warning, as to the Honduran movement's use of this opportunity:
After what just happened in Haiti--the U.S. conducting a fraudulent election recount (after a fraudulent election)--Hondurans need to be very aware of U.S. moves to compromise the integrity of OAS election monitoring.
I'm sure Hondurans are well aware of what the U.S. did on the Lobo 'election' --the importation of groups like John McCain's "International Republican Institute" to oversee a martial law election, even while leftist activists were being imprisoned and murdered. No reputable election monitoring group in the world would touch it, including the OAS. And the illegitimacy of that election--and the OAS refusal to endorse it--has presented the U.S. with a problem. They must somehow acquire a legit monitoring group NAME for their rigged elections.
And here is what may be only the first of such moves by the U.S.:
Recently, the U.S. puppet government in Haiti held a rigged election, which Haitians and others have rejected. The U.S. then apparently got around the normal OAS election monitoring process, and formed their own election monitoring group, under the OAS name, comprised of six people from the U.S., Canada and France, and one Jamaican, to do a recount in Haiti. The U.S. is notorious for interfering in Haiti. Canada has a rightwing/corporatist government. And Francis is Haiti's old slave master. The U.S.-run recount was so incomplete as to be fraudulent. And the reason that the U.S. and its corporate/former slavemaster allies--fraudulently operating as the OAS--won't re-do the whole election is that this would provide an opening for the majority party in Haiti--the leftist Lavalas Party, which was excluded from the ballot--to get on the ballot.
Lavalas is the party of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the hugely popular, elected president of Haiti who was brutally removed by the Bush Junta in 2004. He is living in exile in South Africa. The U.S. does NOT want him to return and run again. (This is much like the Mel Zelaya situation.) They just permitted the return of the former, very bloody-handed and corrupt dictator, "Baby Doc" --landing at an airport that is controlled by the U.S. military--possibly intended as a warning to Haiti that, if Haitians continue to insist on honest elections--including the majority Lavalas Party being on the ballot--the result will be more "Baby Doc" death squads, oppression and looting.
The U.S. wants to force Haitians to choose between a Sorbonne-educated "centrist" who is friendly to U.S. corporate interests ("capitalism with a friendly face")--Mirlande Manigat --and a very corrupt fascist--Michel "Sweet Micky'' Martelly. Those are the U.S. choices for the run-off, resulting from the fraudulent U.S. recount.
The U.S. has thus far succeeded in hijacking the OAS name to their purposes in Haiti. The OAS had an excellent rep as election monitors until this. Their election monitoring process has resulted in honest vote counts and thus in leftist governments getting elected in numerous Latin America countries. So this U.S. business in Haiti may be a portent for Honduras, and for other countries, where the U.S. succeeds in creating chaotic conditions, in order to inject itself directly into elections, by their own hand-picked "first world" election 'monitors' parading as the OAS. Very clever, in a diabolical sort of way--but lethal to Latin American democracy.
The U.S. may not succeed with this ploy, in Haiti, and may not be able to "leverage" this ploy into direct U.S. interference in other elections. But it is worrisome, as to votes in Honduras. Hondurans may have to do battle for election integrity before they can get their constitutional initiatives passed. But that is a worthwhile--and essential--battle, if Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala (all now with leftist governments) are any guide--and if the U.S. corpo-fascists' successful effort, here, to make the vote count a secret, far rightwing corporate business is any guide to how important voting is, and the integrity of the count.
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