QC: From Tocoa to Tegucigalpa, “I didn’t vote!”

[Downwinder]

http://www.quixote.org/blog/tocoa-tegucigalpa-%E2%80%9Ci-didn%E2%80%99t-vote%E2%80%9D

[Judi Lynn]

1. Great article. Posting some paragraphs:

From Tocoa to Tegucigalpa, “I didn’t vote!”
Tue, 12/01/2009 - 1:18pm | Quixote Hondura...
Tegucigalpa, November 30, 2009
Jackie McVicar, Common Frontiers Canada


After a long bus ride back from Tocoa in the northern department of Colon, we arrived in the capital today just in time to join a massive caravan organized by the Popular Resistance Front. Like the other demonstrations held since the coup d'etat on June 28, the mobilization winded through the "barrios", the neighborhoods in Tegucigalpa where supporters left their homes to show their support. This time, instead of walking, organizers decided to drive their cars in a caravan, to avoid confrontation or repression that they feared by the State security forces. Hundreds of cars and people drove through the streets honking their horns, with flags, horns and music. Both those in the caravan and people yelling support from the streets, "I didn't vote!" showed their ink-less fingers, to show they had not been registered at a polling station where a finger print as part of your id is normally taken. Though the media is reporting record high turnouts for Sunday's election, no one is buying it. One woman I interviewed who didn't want to be identified because of fear ("if they see my picture, they will come after me"), said, "I have over 150 people in my family and not one went out to vote."

Another man, when asked what the streets of Tegucigalpa looked like yesterday, said with pride, "The streets were deserted. That is the reality. Those who went to vote were just a few...I didn’t go out to vote, precisely because we don't support the de facto regime. And conscious people who didn’t vote in Honduras, is 65%. It’s the majority who didn’t go vote and the Tribunal wants to cheat us by saying the majority went to vote. In Honduras, people are conscious after the 28th of June. And it’s the majority who won, it’s the popular resistance."

Yesterday on election day at 3pm, the TSE announced that they were having a large turnout and didn't have enough paper and ink so were going to extend voting by an hour. Others suggest that they extended the voting hour precisely because there wasn't a large turnout and there are reports that police started going into neighbors announcing that all citizens must vote. Despite this, many didn't. One taxi driver I asked from Tocoa, in the department of Colon, said, "I didn't leave my house yesterday. I shut the door and didn't open it all day. Who knows what they would've done."

This driver had reason to be nervous. Five members of our delegation were in Tocoa the day before the election and we saw at least five unmarked trucks and SUVs with tinted windows driving through the small town, reminding those on the streets they were being watched. Some didn't even bother taking the National Party banner off the vehicles as they drove past folks walking on the streets or pulling up in front of the homes of resistance leaders homes. When our delegation met with the Sub-Chief at the National Police Station in Tocoa on election day, after receiving a call that up to eight people had been illegally detained, he said that the Police were, "doing all they could to ensure the safety of citizens." He noted that the Police register any unmarked cars they see to ensure they do not have dangerous materials inside and that they are registered to the right people driving the car. When I asked why the police hadn't stopped the unmarked vehicles we saw, despite the fact that every other car was being stopped and registered at the police check point, he simply didn't answer. Later that night, a pipe bomb exploded in the Liberal Party Headquarters in Tocoa and the eight missing still have not been found or the story cleared about their whereabouts.

Outside of Tocoa, in the municipality of Trujillo, we visited the community of Guadalupe Carney (named after an Irish American Priest who worked there and who was killed in the 1980s), who had heard the night before that military were encircling the community from both directions. Thankfully, they never raided the community, but they sent a message loud and clear: be careful, we're not far away. Reports are that the military in part were camped out a Colonel's hacienda near by. The police had Guadalupe on their radar and had been "prepared for the worst" in that community, according to Officer Sauceda. When we visited, we saw signs posted: Don't vote! And the community took head. Of the over 800 families living in the community, they suspect only a handful went to vote. The campesinos in this community know this will be a long battle, but one man, Augustin at age 75 said proudly, "I have seen a lot in my life time. We continue the struggle because it is part of who we are, we are conscious and we believe in the struggle."

In other polling stations, we saw political hype but not too many voters. In Corosito, Colon, we visited the polls with members of the Coordination of Popular Organizations of Aguan (COPA) and saw many empty rooms in the school where the poll had been set up. Military and police guarded the door, the first time for this kind of security during a civilian election. In other parts of the country, including San Pedro Sula where people in resistance had planned a peaceful march to show opposition to the election process, tear gas and water bombs served to control the crowds.

~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks for the link, Downwinder.

[struggle4progress]

2. I hope the popular movement starts a long national discussion of a new constitution: it would be

great if they eventually came up with something definite, enforceable, and clear, that they could organize around -- but preliminary widespread extensive discussions of how power is shared, transferred, and limited might be really useful

To get around the existing bs restrictions on proposing to limit the president's term, they might have to discuss something like a parliamentary system

Any sort of national discussion like this would, of course, provoke the reactionaries

[Peace Patriot]

3. Even that US toady backstabber Oscar Arias said "It's the worst Constitution in the world!"

Yes, the Resistance movement will surely convert to the Constituent Assembly movement. In fact, that's been the issue for them all along. Initially, the long standing Constituent Assembly movement--consisting of labor unions, human rights activists, religious advocates of the poor, community organizers and others--turned into the Resistance when the coup occurred.

And the golpistas will recede behind the curtain, with their local and imported death squads, and continue to try to pick off members of the Resistance/Constituent Assembly movement, with impunity and with implicit US support (if not outright cash for 'heads on platters' payments).

Negroponte deja vu all over again.

This is what the Obama administration has done--given LEAVE to these murderers to CONTINUE their bloody repression.

And I'm fairly convinced that what's next is Vietnam deja vu all over again. 'Just a few hundred military advisors' in Colombia (with no limit on their number), for the "war on drugs" (seven new US military bases in-country!), who need full diplomatic immunity for whatever they are doing, and access to all civilian airports and other facilities. Nothing to see here, move along.

Honduras was the "launching pad" for US wars in the 1980s, but the reach from there was limited (El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala). Now they've added Colombia (also Panama and the 4th Fleet in the Caribbean). Much bigger theater of war. Haunting parallels to Vietnam; and similar goals--war profiteering, slaughtering leftists and, in this case, oil--a big motivator for the Pentagon and US-based global corporate predators. The real target of the repression in Honduras is Venezuela. And this is no P.R. game. ("Ha-ha on Hugo!"--Mary Degraded, of the Wall Street Urinal.) This is a Big Board game about oil.

I believe the US will lose any such war. And that will be our "Waterloo," at long last--after half a century of killing leftist democrats all over the world, and creating nothing but mayhem and oppression. We did some good with the Marshall Plan, in the decade after WW II, but that was it. Everything else the US government has done has been in the service of the war profiteers we failed to demobilize after WW II and our ever-growing monster corporate predators.

Where does this leave the Honduran people? At "ground zero" like the Colombian people in US Oil War II. I think the US military buildup in the region is going to include a buildup in Honduras. That was devastating to the Honduran people the last time it occurred. But the political landscape in Latin America has dramatically changed since then--for the better. The people of Honduras are not alone.

Things happened too fast in Honduras, I'm afraid. That may have been one of the purposes of this precipitous and--on the surface--unnecessary coup. Zelay had only six months left to his term, and absolutely was NOT trying to extend his term. The coup catapulted the Constituent Assembly movement into an acute crisis, overnight. They have had to suddenly deal with death squad murders and imprisonment and all the rest. They haven't had the longer, slower development of grass roots activism that we've seen in Bolivia, for instance, and Nicaragua, and every other country, really. They need to do that now--but in quite difficult conditions. It looks to me like they had a 60% to 70% boycott of the election--a truly great achievement in martial law conditions. They now need to do something even greater, which is to rally the country for reform with the golpistas still in power and possibly in the midst of a US buildup to a war against Venezuela, and probably simultaneous (or preliminary) "dirty wars" against their neighbor countries.

But there is a lot more political savvy, unity and leftist political power throughout Latin America now than during the 1980s Reagan horrors. The OAS will likely help them with their constitutional movement. Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala have whips to crack over the Lobo regime--its illegitimacy, non-recognition of its 'election,' ostracism and economic sanctions. They can use these whips to help the Honduran people--to alleviate repression and create some space for democratic organizing.

The problem (of restoring and improving Honduran democracy) may be made yet more difficult--if not impossible--by a US war in the region. Whatever "hawks vs doves" discussion may have occurred within the Obama administration (out of the earshot of the people of the US--but just barely audible to those of us following things closely, as Obama wobbled like a drunk between demagoguery/the Monroe Doctrine and talk of peace and cooperation, in his public statements), the "hawks" seem to have won. The corporate predators and war profiteers running things here seem to have concluded that they can't crack Latin American democracy and its new solidarity on notions of sovereignty and independence, without bloodshed.

However, all things considered, my guess is that this war won't happen for a couple of years. It could happen tomorrow (with a 'Gulf of Tonkin'-type incident on the Colombia-Venezuela border--say, in conjunction with getting the Colombia-US military agreement through Congress, no questions asked; and with no limit on troop deployments, bang, we're in). But--given the "surge" in Afghanistan, US bankruptcy, and the need for the Pentagon to get its bases set up in Colombia and get our immunized troops and 'contractors' jungle-ready with some turkey shoots of FARC guerrillas and peasant farmers--I'm thinking two years, and maybe their Diebolding a bloodythirsty fascist into the White House, before it's a "go." And this may mean that there is time for the Honduran people to get their democracy back and some control over their situation, backed up by the leftist leadership of the region.

Things could fall apart in the US, too. The US is in such precarious shape in so many ways. Zip election transparency. Rightwing corps in charge of vote counting, with 'TRADE SECRET' code everywhere in the US. Banksters looting us, hand over fist. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld running around free. Corpo-fascist media gone bonkers. Great Depression conditions in many communities. And on and on. Our corporate rulers could suffer the fate of the Tsar during WW I (the foolishness and mass slaughter of that war was his downfall), if they dare to drag us into an oil war in South America, especially against people (like the Vietnamese) motivated by their passion for independence.

Tragic how the US calls its great democratic holiday "Independence Day" when that is the last thing in the world that the US wants other people to achieve.