Writing by Benjamin Dangl

The Road to Zelaya’s Return: Money, Guns and Social Movements in Honduras

Posted on October 20th, 2009 Administrator No comments

Written by Benjamin Dangl

Monday, 21 September 2009

Nearly three months after being overthrown by a violent military coup, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has returned to Honduras. “I am here in Tegucigalpa. I am here for the restoration of democracy, to call for dialogue,” he told reporters. The embattled road to his return tested regional diplomacy, challenged Washington and galvanized Honduran social movements.

During a recent beach-side interview, with tropical breezes blowing along a sandy shore in the background, Honduran coup leader Roberto Micheletti told a Fox News reporter, “This is a quiet country, and a happy country.”[1] However, since Micheletti took over on June 28, Honduras has been anything but quiet and content.

Micheletti’s de facto regime has ruled the country with an iron fist while popular movements for democracy have gained steam with nearly constant strikes, road blockades and massive street protests. The coup inspired a movement that is now seeking more than just the reinstatement of Zelaya, but the transformation of the country through a new Constitution. Micheletti says presidential elections in November will proceed as planned, though few Hondurans, governments and international institutions say they will recognize the results given the violent situation in the country.

At least 11 anti-coup activists have been killed since Zelaya was ousted.[2] Following the coup, approximately 1,500 people have been jailed for political purposes, and many Zelaya supporters have been beaten.[3] Via Campesina offices have been attacked, and the Feminists of Honduras in Resistance said that there have been 19 documented cases of rape by police officers since the coup took place.[4] The newspaper El Tiempo reported that armed groups in Colombia have been recruiting demobilized paramilitaries for mercenary work in Honduras. Honduras business leaders are hiring these paramilitaries for their own private security.[5]

Though Zelaya was a relatively moderate president, his policies challenged the elite enough to inspire a right wing coup. While in office, he passed a 60 percent increase in minimum wage, bringing income up from around $6 a day to $9.60 a day.[6] Zelaya also gave subsidies to small farmers, cut bank interest rates and reduced poverty.[7] Salvador Zuniga, a leader of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) said, “One of the things that provoked the coup d’etat was that the president accepted a petition from the feminist movement regarding the day-after pill. Opus Dei mobilized, the fundamentalist evangelical churches mobilized, along with all the reactionary groups.”[8]

“Maybe he made mistakes,” Honduran school teacher Hedme Castro said of Zelaya, “but he always erred on the side of the poor. That is why they will fight to the end for him.” She continued, “This is not about President Zelaya. This is about my country. Many people gave their lives so that we could have a democracy. And we cannot let a group of elites take that away.”[9]

Ignoring the relevance of the Organization of American States, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on Zelaya and Micheletti to meet with Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to work out a solution to the crisis. Many believe Clinton made the move to impose conditions on Zelaya’s return and kill time as the November elections neared. Zelaya has accepted Arias’ proposed solution, which entails his return to the presidency with limited powers, plus amnesty for those who have committed political crimes in the country. Micheletti rejected the Arias’ solution.[10]

While repression of anti-coup activists increases, so does the movement for democracy in Honduras. This broad coalition of activists has the support of many of the governments in the hemisphere, and has the backing of the country’s 1982 Constitution, which explains, “No one owes obedience to a government which usurps power nor those who assume public functions or employment through the use of arms…. The people [of this country] have the right to recur to insurrection in defense of constitutional order.”[11] This insurrection is taking place right now.

Voices of the Resistance in Honduras

Protests, strikes and road blockades have been going on in the country almost daily since Zelaya was ousted. Many of the interviews with activists participating in these protests offer insight into the relationship between Zelaya and the movement, and what might lie ahead for the country.

“This struggle is peaceful, organized, and is not getting desperate. The coup leaders are getting desperate - they haven’t been able to govern a single day in tranquility and we will defeat them,” said Israel Salinas, a leader of the National Front Against the Coup in Honduras and member of the Unified Confederation of Honduran Workers.[12]

Honduran women’s rights activist Marielena spoke of the current reality under the Micheletti regime, “Today’s not the same as the ’80s because there’s a popular movement that the coup leaders never imagined … What Zelaya has done is symbolize the popular discontent accumulated over the years.”[13]

Bertha Cáceres, a leader of COPINH, the Front Against the Coup, and a mother of four children, spoke of the importance of the constituent assembly to rewrite the country’s Constitution. It was partly this push for constitutional reform, which Zelaya backed along with broad support from the Honduran people, that led to the coup. When speaking of the assembly, Cáceres says, “For the first time we would be able to establish a precedent for the emancipation of women, to begin to break these forms of domination. The current constitution never mentions women, not once, so to establish our human rights, our reproductive, sexual, political, social, and economic rights as women would be to really confront this system of domination.”[14]

Cáceres discussed the work of the women’s movement for the new Constitution “to dismantle this belief that others have the right to make decisions about our bodies, to start guaranteeing that women are the owners and have autonomous rights to their bodies. It is a political act; a political proposal…. The ability to have and guarantee access to land, territories, cultures, health, education, art, dignified and decent employment for women, and many other things, are elements that we must guarantee in this process of a new constitutional assembly that leads to a real process of liberation.”[15]

Gilberto Rios, from the Front Against the Coup spoke of how the coup has galvanized a broad movement in the country. “In the past, when we called for people to protest in the streets, they came out, but not in the same numbers as what is happening now. In recent days, we have had protests that start in the morning and stay in the streets all day. At night, there are convoys of cars in major cities. It shows that the workers are participating, and the middle class is also coming out.” He also affirmed that the movement is entirely grassroots. “The leftist political parties recognize they do not control any part of the popular movement.”[16]

Leticia Salomón, the director of Scientific Research for the National Autonomous University of Honduras said, “It doesn’t matter who wins the elections in November, the next government will have to deal with this important social force if it hopes to even minimally govern the country.”[17]

World Isolates Coup Regime

At the North American Leaders’ Summit in Mexico in August, President Barack Obama said, “Critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras are the same people who say that we’re always intervening and the Yankees need to get out of Latin America. You can’t have it both ways.”[18] But as New York University history Professor and author Greg Grandin points out, all many are asking is for the US to act multilaterally with the OAS - it did the opposite by defying the OAS and appointing Arias as the mediator between Micheletti and Zelaya. In addition, through its financial support to the regime, the US has been far from taking a neutral stance.[19] Indeed, Washington has been acting unilaterally since the beginning by not refusing to follow the lead of other nations in putting more pressure on the coup government.[20]

However, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said on September 3, “At this moment, we would not be able to support the outcome of the [November] elections [in Honduras].”[21] Zelaya was happy to hear this news from Washington. He said the move “puts the United States in line with Latin America, because it was not said before.”[22]

In addition to the US, the EU, the OAS, union leaders in Honduras and members of the Front Against the Coup say they will not recognize the election results.[23] Honduras business owners have devised their own plan to increase voting; they’ll be giving discounts to everyone who casts a ballot and then comes into their business with ink on their fingers, showing that they’ve voted.[24]

The US State Department did end up revoking the US visas of over a dozen officials in the coup government, including Micheletti.[25] But the US could go further by blocking members of the regime from using US banks.[26]

Various levels of funding to Honduras from the US and other governments and institutions have been cut since the coup took place. “On September 3, the State Department announced the termination of 33 million dollars, including $11 million in Millennium Challenge Funds and approximately $22 million in State Department funds,” according to Latin American analyst Laura Carlsen. The IMF said that due to the coup, Honduras won’t have access to $150 million in assistance.[27] A spokesperson from the IMF said the institution cut off all aid to the country three days after the coup.[28]

On July 2, the US cut the following spending: $1.9 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and $16.5 million in military funding.[29] The Inter-American Development Bank and the Central American Bank of Economic Integration all cut lending to the Honduran government.[30] The UN has cut off various forms of aid to Honduras.[31] In addition, the EU froze $92 million in aid and the OAS froze aid and began trade blocks against the coup government.[32]

However, “For legalistic reasons, [the US State Department] continued to fall short of calling the coup a ‘military’ coup,” explained Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy. “This means that some anti-poverty aid is being maintained, soldiers whose training was already paid for won’t be sent back to Honduras, and State can flexibly restore aid once democracy returns.”[33]

“State Department officials closed the door on determining legally that a military coup took place in Honduras and requiring application of Section 7008 of the Foreign Operations law,” Carlsen explained.

“They assured reporters that all funds that could be suspended under Section 7008 have now been suspended … The State Department has admitted that $70 million in aid - over twice the amount suspended - will still flow to the coup.”[34]

The Kansas City-based Cross-Border Network went on a delegation to Honduras after the coup and reported, “We met the U.S Ambassador who agreed it was a military coup even though the State Department won’t call it that, thus invoking the law requiring cut off of all remaining aid.”[35]

Declaring the coup a coup, according to Grandin, “would automatically trigger certain cutoffs, financial cutoffs, it also would have to be certified by Congress. And that’s a fight that I think Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton don’t want, because the Republicans, led by Connie Mack and other foreign policy conservatives, regime change conservatives, Republicans, have seized on this issue to basically try to link Obama with Hugo Chavez and the Latin American left. And they certainly don’t want to kick it into Congress, where it’ll be debated, because to call it a coup would have to be certified by Congress.”[36]

But the Obama administration needs to understand that what’s at stake is more important than winning a political fight in Washington. The future of a nation, and perhaps the entire region, hangs in the balance.

“The true significance of the coup, in one of the poorest and weakest countries in the hemisphere … lies in the test it poses to the inter-American system,” says Jorge Heine of the Balsillie School of International Affairs. “If the latter cannot succeed in restoring democracy in Honduras, it cannot do so anywhere. The message would thus be crystal clear: coup-makers can act with impunity.”[37]

Washington’s Ties to the Coup

Washington has played a bloody role in Central America for years and this coup carries on that legacy while setting some new precedents. Fernando “Billy” Joya has returned to the stage in Honduras as Micheletti’s security adviser after serving in Battalion 316 in the 1980s, according to Grandin. Battalion 316 was a paramilitary unit that disappeared hundreds of people.[38] Joya was trained in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship by Chilean police, and his Battalion 316 was created by the CIA to apply the repressive techniques used against “subversives” in Argentina and Chile.[39]

In 1981, John Negroponte arrived in Honduras as the US ambassador. While there, the military budget in the country rose from $3.6 million in 1981 to $77.8 million in 1985 “when his mission was completed - having created the Contras in Nicaragua and protected the El Salvadoran dictatorship,” according to Honduras-based reporter Dick Emanuelsson.[40] Negroponte met with Micheletti before the June 28 coup on a trip made primarily to convince Zelaya not to transform a US airbase in Palmerola, Honduras, into an airport for civilians.[41]

Venezuelan Robert Carmona-Borjas has also joined the coup government in Honduras. He was involved in the attempted coup against President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 2002. Carmona-Borjas’ Arcadio Foundation began a media campaign against Zelaya in 2007.[42]

Lanny Davis, a lawyer to Bill Clinton and campaign adviser to Hillary Clinton, has been lobbying in Washington for Honduran coup leaders and elites. Some of the businesses that support the coup in Honduras that Davis is representing in DC are US companies such as Russell, Fruit of the Loom and Hanes - all of which have benefited from the low wages, neoliberal policies and crackdowns on union rights in the country.[43] Davis recently testified before Congress on behalf of the coup leaders and backers, and has helped to get media on the coup’s side.[44]

The week before the coup, former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs Thomas Shannon and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Craig Kelly met with Honduran figures that ended up participating in the coup.[45] Days before the coup took place, John McCain and leaders from the International Republican Institute, invited future leaders of the coup to meetings in Washington.[46]

US businesses also hold a considerable amount of weight in the country: In 2006, 70 percent of exports from Honduras went to the US, and 52 percent of imports were from the US. That same year, US investments in the country totaled more than $568 million, two thirds of foreign investment.[47]

A Movement Larger Than Zelaya

Just as the coup may change the geopolitical landscape of the region, the grassroots fervor in Honduras will likely alter the country forever. And that might be Micheletti’s legacy - that in ousting a moderate president, he inspired a revolution.

When trying to break the political impasse Honduras finds itself in, Zelaya admits that much depends on the anti-coup movement of Honduras. “This movement is now very strong. It can never be destroyed,” he said.[48]

The coup leaders “were wrong here, they miscalculated,” Honduran activist Bertha Cáceres of the Front Against the Coup and COPINH explained. “They said it would be two days of resistance, and they were wrong. This population has demonstrated that we are capable of … a much longer struggle.”[49]

Gilberto Rios, from the Front Against the Coup, spoke of the similarities this coup has to others throughout the last century that still haunt the region: “The oligarchy made the coup with an old manual, but the people have changed and the world has changed.”[50]

Notes:

[1] Interview with Roberto Micheletti, Fox News, (September 17, 2009).[2] Greg Grandin, “The Battle for Honduras and the Region,” The Nation, [3] Daniel Luban, “US-Honduras: State Dept Condemns ‘Coup d’Etat’, [4] “Group Says Honduran Cops on Rape Spree Since Coup,” Latin American [5] Unidad Investigativa, “Estarían reclutando ex paramilitares para [6] Ginger Thompson, “President’s Ouster Highlights a Divide in Honduras,” [7] Tom Hayden, “Zelaya Speaks,” The Nation, (September 4, 2009). [8] Laura Carlsen, “Coup Catalyzes Honduran Women’s Movement,” America [9] Ginger Thompson, “President’s Ouster Highlights a Divide in Honduras,” [10] Juan Ramón Durán, “Honduras: Vote to Go Ahead Despite Int’l [11] Jennifer Moore, “Honduras’ Historic Two Months,” América [12] Dick Emanuelsson, “Military Forces Sow Terror and Fear in Honduras,” [13] Laura Carlsen, “Coup Catalyzes Honduran Women’s Movement,” America [14] Ibid.
[15] Laura Carlsen and Sara Lovera, “Honduran Constitutional Assembly Would [16] Kiraz Janicke and Federico Fuentes, “Honduras - Resistance leader: [17] Jennifer Moore, “National opposition to coup becomes a social force,” [18] Cheryl W. Thompson and William Booth, “Obama Vows to Focus on Borders,” [19] Greg Grandin, “The Battle for Honduras and the Region,” The Nation, [20] Amy Oyler, “The Resurgence of US Interventionism in Latin America,” [21] Ian Kelly, “Termination of Assistance and Other Measures Affecting [22] Tom Hayden, “Zelaya’s Coup,” The Nation, (September 3, 2009). [23] Juan Ramón Durán, “Honduras: Vote to Go Ahead Despite Int’l [24] “Honduran Resistance Boycotts Elections,” Weekly News Update on [25] “State Dept. Revokes Visa of Leader of Honduran Coup Government,” [26] “US stops issuing visas in Honduras,” Al Jazeera, (August 26, [27] Jorge Heine, “It’s time for Canada to take a strong stand on Honduras,” [28] “Honduran Resistance Boycotts Elections,” Weekly News Update on [29] Ibid.
[30] Mark Weisbrot, “IMF: Stop Funding Honduras,” The Guardian Unlimited, [31] “EU threatens further sanctions on Honduras,” Reuters, (September [32] Amy Oyler, “The Resurgence of US Interventionism in Latin America,” [33] Adam Isacson, “Another Baby Step on Honduras,” Huffington Post, [34] Laura Carlsen, Americas MexicoBlog, “Honduran Coup Squeezed From Above [35] OneWorld, “US Chided for Aiding Honduras Despite Coup,” Common [36] “US Cuts More Aid to Honduras as Zelaya Meets Clinton in Washington,” [37] Olivia Ward, “Raising the stakes in Honduras,” The Star, (September [38] Greg Grandin, “The Battle for Honduras and the Region,” The Nation, [39] Dick Emanuelsson, “Honduras: The Frontline in the Battle for Democracy,” [40] Ibid.
[41] Michaela D’Ambrosio, “The Honduran Coup: Was it a Matter of Behind-the-Scenes [42] Greg Grandin, “The Battle for Honduras and the Region,” The Nation, [43] Amy Oyler, “The Resurgence of US Interventionism in Latin America,” [44] Mark Weisbrot, “Who’s in charge of US foreign policy?” The Guardian [45] Michaela D’Ambrosio, “The Honduran Coup: Was it a Matter of Behind-the-Scenes [46] Amy Oyler, “The Resurgence of US Interventionism in Latin America,” [47] Amy Oyler, “The Resurgence of US Interventionism in Latin America,” [48] Tom Hayden, “Zelaya Speaks,” The Nation, (September 4, 2009). [49] Laura Carlsen and Sara Lovera, “Honduran Constitutional Assembly Would [50] Kiraz Janicke and Federico Fuentes, “Honduras - Resistance leader: /www.foxnews.com/search-results/m/26446742/roberto-micheletti-pt-1.htm#q=micheletti" target="_blank">http://www.foxnews.com/search-results/m/26446742/roberto-micheletti-pt-1.htm#q=micheletti
(August 12, 2009). http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090831/grandin/print
Curtails Aid,” IPS News, (September 3, 2009) http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48323
Herald Tribune. http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=341851&CategoryId=23558
que viajen como mercenarios a Honduras,” El Tiempo. http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/justicia/estarian-reclutando-ex-paramilitares-para-que-viajen-como-mercenarios-a-honduras_6086547-1
The New York Times, (August 8, 2009). http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/world/americas/09honduras.html?pagewanted=print
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090921/hayden_zelaya
Program, (August 20, 2009). http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6369
The New York Times, (August 8, 2009). http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/world/americas/09honduras.html?pagewanted=print
Refusal to Recognise,” IPS News, (September 9, 2009). http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48385
Latina en Movimiento, (August 28, 2009). http://alainet.org/active/32686ã
Americas Program, (August 13, 2009). http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6354
Program, (August 20, 2009). http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6369
Be a Step Toward the Emancipation of Women,” Americas Program, (August 19, 2009). http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6392
US is behind the coup,” Green Left Weekly, (September 7, 2009). http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/809/41602
América Latina en Movimiento, (September 12, 2009). http://alainet.org/active/32978?=en
Washington Post, (August 11, 2009). http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/10/AR2009081001797.html
(August 12, 2009). http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090831/grandin/print
Z Communications, (August 31, 2009). http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22466
the De Facto Regime in Honduras,” US Department of State, (September 3, 2009). http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2009/sept/128608.htm
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090921/hayden_web
Refusal to Recognise,” IPS News, (September 9, 2009). http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48385
the Americas, (September 13, 2009). http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/2009/09/wnu-1004-honduran-resistance-boycotts.html
Democracy Now!, (September 14, 2009). http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/14/headlines#7
2009). http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/08/200982601353122962.html
The Globe and Mail, (September 18, 2009). http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/its-time-for-canada-to-take-a-strong-stand-on-honduras/article1287401/
the Americas, (September 13, 2009). http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/2009/09/wnu-1004-honduran-resistance-boycotts.html
(September 3, 2009). http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/03/imf-honduras-aid-zelaya
15, 2009). http://www.reuters.com/article/homepageCrisis/idUSLF361596._CH_.2400
Z Communications, (August 31, 2009). http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22466
(September 3, 2009). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-isacson/another-baby-step-on-hond_b_276972.html
and Below - But is it Enough to Restore Democracy?,” (September 10, 2009). http://americasmexico.blogspot.com/2009/09/honduran-coup-squeezed-from-above-and.html
Dreams, (September 9, 2009). http://www.commondreams.org/print/46772
Democracy Now!, (September 4, 2009). http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/4/us_cuts_more_aid_to_honduras
6, 2009). http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/691633
(August 12, 2009). http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090831/grandin/print
Americas Program, (August 10, 2009). http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6337
Finagling by State Department Stonewallers?,” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, (September 16, 2009). http://www.coha.org/2009/09/the-honduran-coup-was-it-a-matter-of-behind-the-scenes-finagling-by-state-department-stonewallers/
(August 12, 2009). http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090831/grandin/print
Z Communications, (August 31, 2009). http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22466
Unlimited, (July 16, 2009). http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jul/16/honduras-coup-obama-clinton/print
Finagling by State Department Stonewallers?,” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, (September 16, 2009). http://www.coha.org/2009/09/the-honduran-coup-was-it-a-matter-of-behind-the-scenes-finagling-by-state-department-stonewallers/
Z Communications, (August 31, 2009). http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22466
Z Communications, (August 31, 2009). http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22466
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090921/hayden_zelaya
Be a Step Toward the Emancipation of Women,” Americas Program, (August 19, 2009). http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6392
US is behind the coup,” Green Left Weekly, (September 7, 2009). http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/809/41602

Honduras
Justice Follows Direct Action: Former Boss of Occupied Factory Jailed

Posted on September 14th, 2009 Administrator No comments

By Benjamin Dangl

September 14, 2009

Richard Gillman, the former CEO of Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors factory where over 200 workers organized a victorious sit-in last year, has been sent to jail on eight charges including felony, theft, fraud, and money laundering. After the judge announced the $10 million bail, the shocked and dazed Gillman, dressed in a pin-striped suit, was hauled away to the county jail.

Republic workers captured the attention of the world when they occupied their plant on December 5, 2008 calling for the severance and vacation pay they were due. The sit-in ended six days later when the Bank of America and other lenders to Republic agreed to pay the workers the approximately $2 million owed to them. Recently, the workers won another victory with the arrest of Gillman.

The prosecutors charge that Gillman defrauded creditors of over $10 million, and then went ahead to use company money to complete payments on leases for two luxury cars – while his employees went without pay.

According to court records Gillman also secretly sent three semi-trailers full of equipment from the Republic factory to a non-unionized factory in Iowa without the consent of Republic board members and creditors. Luckily, however, the organized Republic workers followed the trailers, and during the occupation, prevented executives from entering the factory to take company documents that now make up much of the case against Gillman and other Republic officials.

“Gillman and others knew this company was headed for closure,” Anita Alvarez, the Cook County state’s attorney, told reporters. “And instead of fulfilling their legal obligations to their creditors and their moral obligations to their employees, they devised a scheme to benefit themselves.”

“We knew Gillman was lying to us for a long time, now the rest of the world knows it too,” said Armando Robles, the President of UE Local 1110, the Republic workers’ union. “Workers suffer with bad bosses all the time so this is a victory for all workers.”

Gillman’s arrest is just one of the results of the Republic workers’ actions. In February of this year, Serious Materials ended up buying up Republic for $145 million, promising to put the unemployed workers back on the job. The California-based Serious makes heating efficient windows.

“Having another company reopen the factory was always our hope when we occupied the factory in December,” Robles told the New York Times.

Kevin Surace, the chief executive officer of Serious, was drawn to the Republic workers’ story, leading him to eventually acquire the bankrupt factory. “It was very sad to see what looks like it could be a world-class operation just fall on terrible hard times and then all of the workers quite abruptly laid off,” he said. “We saw a great opportunity with a great facility and great workers.” Another thing that attracted Surace to the Republic plant was that 90% of the equipment was still there – thanks to the workers who prevented the bosses from hauling it away.

However, only fifteen former Republic employees have been rehired so far. According to Chicago-based journalist Kari Lydersen of In These Times, the delay in hiring more workers could have to do with the fact that Obama’s federal stimulus for green jobs and heating efficient windows has been slower in producing results than people had hoped. Yet Lydersen points out that the Republic workers “know they can’t just sit back and wait for the stimulus or the factory’s new owner to make everything all right.”

Meanwhile, Gillman is facing justice thanks to the workers’ actions. Melvin Maclin, a former Republic worker who is currently unemployed and the father of six children, commented on Gillman’s arrest in a UE statement, “We feel like justice has finally come and we all hope that this is the beginning of more bosses being held accountable for their crimes against workers.”

Unions, United States
Throwing Bullets at Failed Policies: US Plans For New Bases in Colombia

Posted on September 14th, 2009 Administrator No comments

Written by Benjamin Dangl

September 10, 2009

It was a winter day in the Argentine city of Bariloche when 12 South American presidents gathered there on August 28. It was so cold that Hugo Chavez wore a red scarf and Evo Morales put on a sweater. The presidents arrived at the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) meeting to discuss a US plan to establish seven new military bases in Colombia. Though officials in Colombia and the US say the bases would be aimed at combating terrorism and the drug trade, US military and air force documents point to other objectives.

Earlier his year, when Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa decided to not renew the US lease on the military base in Manta, Ecuador, the US set its sights on Colombia, a long-time US ally and one of the biggest recipients of US military aid in the world. Under the agreement the US eventually developed with Colombia, the US would have access to seven military bases for 10 years, stationing up to 1,400 US personnel and private contractors.

One US military document cited by the AP explains that the Palenquero base in Colombia – which the US plans transform with a $46 million upgrade – would be a stopping off point for the US military and air force so that “nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 (military transport) without refueling.”

Uruguayan analyst Raul Zibechi writes in an article for the Americas Program that the US is shifting away from large, immobile bases to more a more flexible model involving smaller bases. He cites the U.S. Air Force’s April 2009 report entitled “Global en Route Strategy” which “refers to the ability to utilize these installations above all for air transport, making it possible to have control from a distance and act as a dissuasive force, leaving direct intervention only for exceptionally critical situations.” The cooperation of local governments is a key aspect of this plan. Zibechi writes, “This ongoing cooperation is much more important than direct military presence, as current military technology allows troops to concentrate in any given area within a matter of hours.”

Considering the regional implications of the expanded US presence, the presidents at the Bariloche meeting agreed that UNASUR countries will “abstain from resorting to the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity” of other South American countries, and planned to investigate the military bases agreement further.

Yet what many of the region’s presidents already know is that increased US militarization is unlikely to curb violence in Colombia because the biggest perpetrators of violence in the country are already allies of the US, largely through the multi-billion dollar Plan Colombia.

“The largest number of killings of civilians each year in Colombia is not committed by the guerrillas,” Latin American political analyst John Lindsay Poland writes in the Americas Program. “A large majority of Colombia’s 4.7 million internally displaced people were forced from their homes by paramilitary violence, with more than 11 million acres of land violently stolen. The increased U.S. military presence won’t contribute anything to returning those lands to their rightful owners, nor to holding the Colombian Army accountable for more than 1,700 civilian killings committed since 2002.”

US soldiers in Colombia also reportedly committed 37 acts of sexual abuse from 2006 to 2007. Poland writes, “A U.S. soldier and contractor reportedly raped a 12-year-old Colombian girl inside the Tolemaida military base in 2006, dumping her outside the gates in the morning.” The two rapists remain free and are back in the US without facing charges.

An increased US military presence in a failed war on drugs is also unlikely to curtail narco-trafficking, as pointed out by President Morales at the meeting in Bariloche. Morales spoke of his experiences as a coca grower and union leader facing the brunt of US militarization. “I witness this,” he said, when describing repression. “So now we’re narcoterrorists. When they couldn’t call us communists anymore, they called us subversives, and then traffickers, and since the September 11 attacks, terrorists,” Morales said. “The history of Latin America repeats itself.”

Many analysts see the plans for these bases as an indication that Washington is not interested in changing its disastrous policies in the war on drugs. “This agreement is made within a framework of anti-drug policy that is overwhelmingly seen as a failure,” Michael Shifter of The Inter-American Dialogue told NPR. “Is there a better way to fight drugs without just continuing the same policy that hasn’t produced very much for decades?”

Morales said the root of the drug problem lies in the US, not in South America. “If UNASUR sent troops to the United States to control consumption, would they accept it? Impossible!”

US Military Colombia
Reclaiming a Continent: Latin American Experiments in Democracy

Posted on September 1st, 2009 Administrator No comments

Written by Benjamin Dangl

Tuesday, 25 August 2009

Reviewed: Reclaiming Latin America: Experiments in Radical Social Democracy, Edited by Geraldine Lievesley and Steve Ludlam. Zed Books (August 18, 2009), 288 pages

Reclaiming Latin America: Experiments in Radical Social Democracy provides an in depth and accessible introduction to Latin American politics for people seeking to understand this past tumultuous and hopeful decade. While avoiding superficial analysis and simplistic leftist cheerleading, this book addresses the complexity and diversity of the new Latin American left.

Many of the contributors to this book write of the leftist shift with sober exuberance peppered with undeniable facts that point to a geopolitical sea change. As analyst Emir Sader says, “Eleven Latin America presidents have been ejected before the end of their mandates over the last fifteen years, not by the traditional process of US-backed military coup, but through the action of popular movements against the neoliberal policies of their governments. The one old-style coup attempt of the period, against Chavez in 2002, was defeated.” This quote and other hopeful commentaries on the left throughout the book are shadowed by the coup in Honduras, which took place after this book was completed. As I mixed reading this book with reading reports from Honduras, I kept wondering how the authors of Reclaiming Latin America might have altered their assessments had they written their chapters after President Manuel Zelaya was ushered off in his pajamas to Costa Rica.

However, there have been many recent events just as profound as the coup in Honduras taking place in Latin America, and this book offers a rich field map of the currents that still move the continent. This book particularly shines when the authors’ gazes move toward the relationships between social movements and left-leaning governments in the region.

Central to the book are questions of power, autonomy and sustainable pathways to radical change. As editor Geraldine Leivesley writes, “Radical social democratic governments can support social transformation but they cannot develop, consolidate and sustain it. This can only really be done by people themselves, working in communities and forging links with other, like-minded communities within and across national borders. This does not mean that such groups should not deal with the state – this is inevitable – but that they should structure and take control of that relationship.”

Also present in many of the pages are discussions of the role social movements played in electing leftist governments. Fransisco Dominguez writes, “The Brazilian [Workers Party] PT originates in the militant trade unionism of the 1970s, and the Bolivian MAS originates in the cocalero union of coca growers… In Argentina it was mainly the four thousand-odd actions of the piqueteros (roadblockers) which led to President Fernando de la Rua’s ousting in December 2001.”

Democracy and Social Change: From Montevideo to Caracas

Uruguay is set up in Reclaiming Latin America as a fascinating and emblematic example of a left of center leader taking power with support from grassroots networks. Lievesley writes that the Frente Amplio (Broad Front), the political party and coalition of current President Tabaré Vázquez, was created in 1971 out of a collection of Christian Democrats, leftists, communists and socialists that united to break the two party rule of the Blanco and Colorado Parties. Those two parties had run the country since 1830 when Uruguay had won independence from Spain. “The Frente’s founders formed comités de base, grassroots committees which they hoped would promote participatory democracy and contribute to the transformation of what was a hidebound political system,” writes Lievesley. The primary goals of the FA from the start were land reform and a stronger public sector.

Though the FA coalition faced widespread repression, torture and disappearances during a dictatorship which began in 1973, it re-emerged as a political force with the return to democracy in 1984. The momentum of these early years culminated in 1989 with the election of Tabaré Vázquez as the mayor of Montevideo, the capital city. However, the Lievesley writes, “Since 2004, a growing distance has developed between the Frente’s ambitious hierarchy and its grassroots… Veteran activists do not share the same values as younger Frente members, who have no memories of the years of clandestinity and struggle, and view the organization as a means to further their careers.”

The Bolivarian political process in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez has been more dynamic than that of the FA in Uruguay. One chapter in Reclaiming Latin America explores social democracy within the educational, health and community programs in the country. Author Sara C. Motta describes some of the government’s social programs in the La Vega barrio in Caracas, Venezuela. Motta writes that while access to healthcare certainly helps people’s lives, the institutionalization of social movements in this process can be harmful to community organizing. “[H]ealth can become a particular issue solved in a functional manner that undermines the community’s organization and therefore the development of a participatory social democracy. Individuals who were once organizers of their communities become functionaries of the state.” This can have a weakening effect on the community’s autonomy and capacity to self-organize, Motta explains.

With Mission Ribas, classes are taught in neighborhoods across the country to meet the local needs of the community. Students use their education to solve problems in their communities with projects and planning. Elizabeth, a participant in this process, reflects, “We have organized all over La Vega. Many of the students are women. It has been an emancipatory experience for me and many others who have begun to believe in their ability to solve problems in the community.” Yet in seeking to solve a housing or public service problem, writes Motta, the education “seeks to enable the student to find solutions for particular problems, such as inadequate housing, within the limits of broader structures of power. In doing so it attempts to democratize these broader structures, but not transform them.”

Motta also writes of the Consejos Comunales, which provide a means for regular citizens to participate in governance and the management of funds and resources. Through this program, communities can organize themselves into a Consejo with a representative, then design proposals and projects. “Consejos are an attempt to create a new set of state institutions that bypass the traditional state, and distribute power in a democratic and participatory manner,” writes Motta.

At one national meeting addressing this process a working group concludes, “We must obtain the tools to be able to struggle against the bureaucracy and search for a way to get rid of leaders that want to control us, look to maintain their own power and who divide the community.” Participant Edenis Guilarte says, “What we are doing is training, creating consciousness, which is a process that goes beyond repairing a road, obtaining a service, enabling access to water, it’s a macro process, a process of social change, a fight over ideas and practice.”

In spite of any setbacks to the Consejos Comunales, they do offer new spaces for growth, localized responses to development which can and do dismiss clientelistic tendencies, and assert autonomy over time. The Consejos have given the people the seeds to grow beyond the state. Yet Motta concludes, the political struggle “revolves around the question of whether [the consejos comunales] become an institution that channels the demands of poor communities to a localized social democracy (with all the possibilities and limitations that this entails) or whether they enable the expansion of demands for community self-management that challenge capitalist and social relations.”

Protests and Parties in Bolivia and Brazil

John Crabtree contributed a chapter on Bolivia which provides a brief overview of the country’s political and social history, the roots and policies of the Evo Morales government, and the social movements’ actions in directing the country’s future. Crabtree looks at the role the state has played in managing natural gas resources since Morales took office, as well as describes the constituent assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution and the regional and political divisions in Bolivia. He looks at Morales’ new social programs in health, education and housing, and describes Morales’ relationships with other regional leaders seeking independence from Washington. In spite of success in a number of areas, Crabtree does say, “The MAS lacked a clearly articulated program; it lacked experience in government; the machinery at its disposal for administering change was absent; and it was in no way a tightly disciplined party.”

In a chapter on Brazil, Sue Branford describes the euphoria of Lula’s victory, but goes on to write that in spite of leftist rhetoric and promises to his base on the campaign trail, upon taking office for the first time Lula turned his back on his progressive supporters: “The agreement with the IMF was quickly reaffirmed, and the target for the public sector surplus, required to service the internal debt, was set higher, at 4.25 per cent of GDP, than even the IMF demanded.” Lula later announced a 45% budget cut which disproportionately affected social programs for the poor. Unemployment and poverty skyrocketed across the country; in May of 2003, unemployment reached 20.6%, a new record at the time. Thanks to Lula, foreign corporations now dominate industrial, agricultural and banking sectors, and GM crops, specifically pushed by Monsanto, are produced across the country.

Reclaiming Latin America sets out to cover a lot of ground, and succeeds in doing so with other chapters on Argentina, Cuba, Chile, Mexico and the entire region. Over all, the contributors to the book maintain a healthy balance of analysis and reportage, throwing in the occasional anecdote and prose that keep the pages turning. The book, much like this past decade in Latin America, offers important lessons from ongoing experiments in democracy.

Reviews, Uruguay, Venezuela
Why We Should All Boycott Union Busting Beer Corporations

Posted on August 13th, 2009 Administrator No comments

By Benjamin Dangl

Monday, 10 August 2009

\When Obama sat down for a beer in the White House Rose Garden with Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley, they all turned their backs on the smaller, craft brewers of the country. Obama chose Bud Light, Gates asked for Red Stripe, and Crowley drank Blue Moon.

One of the major craft brewers based where I live in Vermont is Magic Hat, a brewery with a delicious array of brews. That brewery issued a press release following the “Beer Summit” explaining, “Craft Brewers the country over are chagrined by the President’s choice to consume a beer owned by a company based outside of America’s borders. Bud Light, owned by Belgium-based AB InBev, and Blue Moon, owned by London-based SAB MillerCoors, together control 94% of the beer market in the United States. However, the United States boasts over 1,500 craft brewers, the majority being made up of small Main Street Businesses that employ less than 50 people.”

This encounter at the Rose Garden provides a perfect time to reflect on why we should all boycott the beer monopolies of the world.

One reason to boycott large breweries is the union busting, right wing culture that dominates some of the biggest breweries in America. Yuengling, America’s oldest brewery, and Coors, America’s largest brewery, both offer insights into the ugly political and labor practices of this multi-billion dollar industry.

In 2007 Yuengling owner Dick Yuengling told his workers, “the writing was on the wall” and that if they didn’t get rid of the union he would close the Pennsylvania-based brewery and open up shop in a location in the southern US where labor was cheaper. Faced with the choice of looking for work in an area with few jobs, the workers decided to kick the union out.

At the time, Patrick Eiding, then-president of the AFL-CIO union in Philadelphia said of Mr. Yuengling, “If he doesn’t want union people, then I would say union people shouldn’t drink his beer.”

Municipal worker Don Long said he would follow along with the boycott, explaining that Yuengling “doesn’t care for his workers — he just cares about how much money he can make.”

I’ve joined in a boycott against this beer, and have convinced some of my friends to do so as well. But it’s really Coors Brewing Company that takes the cake for supporting conservative causes and busting unions.

Over the years the Coors family has contributed handsomely to plenty of conservative projects and organizations. Reading about their family’s philanthropy is like reading a history of the right wing in America.

Joseph Coors was an advisor to Ronald Reagan, provided the founding grant to the infamous Heritage Foundation as well as the right wing Free Congress Foundation, which asks the following question on its website: “Will America return to the culture that made it great, our traditional, Judeo-Christian, Western culture?” If not, the US will, revert to “no less than a third world country.”

Joseph Coors really put his money where his right wing heart was when he donated a $65,000 plane to the Contras in the covert US war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas in the 1980s. It’s high time to raise a glass of non-Coors beer in solidarity with the Sandinistas. But here’s another reason to boycott America’s most successful brewing company: their union busting.

In 1977, in Colorado, home to the company’s brewery, Coors hired scabs to replace workers on strike at the plant. Jeff Coors, the president of the family company at the time, told the Los Angeles Times that he wouldn’t back down because agreeing to union demands was like “inviting the Russians in to take over America.”

The family’s repression of workers’ rights didn’t stop there. Annika Carlson writing about the Coors’ legacy at Campus Progress, says, “Until 1986, prospective Coors employees were sometimes required to take lie detector tests, answering questions about their sexual orientation, communist leanings, and how often they changed their underwear.”

In 2004, when Peter Coors, the chairman of Coors Brewing Company ran for Senate as a Republican from Colorado, local union leaders were quick to criticize the company’s poor labor relations. Steve Adams, the president of the Colorado AFL-CIO at the time, told USA Today, “Peter Coors is a Republican, and there are very few Republicans who support workers’ rights. The Coors company track record is not friendly to workers’ rights.” To this day, many of Denver’s 23,000 Food and Commercial Workers union still boycott Coors beer due to the company’s crackdowns on labor rights in the 1970s.

You can show that drinking is a very political act by turning your back on the big breweries. Or, as Carlson says about Coors, “When cracking open a cold one, remember to toast the things that make the Coors family great: union-busting, lie-detecting, Heritage-funding, double-talking and, of course, its beer.”

Beer
Dissecting Utopia: New Book Assesses Latin American Left

Posted on July 31st, 2009 Administrator No comments

Written by Benjamin Dangl

July 28, 2009

Reviewed: The New Latin American Left: Utopia Reborn, edited by Patrick Barrett, Daniel Chavez and Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito. Published by Pluto Press (2008), 320 pages.

The conflict in Honduras has been an ongoing challenge for governments across the political spectrum in Latin America. In the years leading up to this tense and decisive event a number of leaders and social movements have pushed the region to the left. It is this regional shift that is the focus of The New Latin American Left: Utopia Reborn, edited by Patrick Barrett, Daniel Chavez and Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito.

This book includes a series of insightful chapters by various experts on the roots and rise of the new Latin American left in nations such as Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay. Many of the authors are progressive academics and analysts from the countries they are writing about. Packed with behind the scenes information and eye-opening analysis, this book should be required reading for anyone interested in the most dramatic leftist political events of the decade.

At the start of The New Latin American Left the authors explain that so far, most analysts looking at the region have focused exclusively on “partisan politics” or “grassroots mobilization.” Yet in this book, the country and regional case studies examine the political parties, governments and social movements as three separate forces in the new Latin American left.

The authors write that social movements have perhaps been the most important forces of these three players in bringing about progressive change, or paving the way to the election of various left-leaning presidents. In some cases movements called for national change based on rights, against privatization by a corporation, or from a class or ethnic based position.

Central to the discussions presented in the book is the relationship between political parties and social movements. A political party, write the editors in the first chapter, “can serve as the political arm of social movements, enabling them to project their social power and express their demands in the political arena and providing them with a necessary means for gaining access to the state.” Alliances between movements and parties can help promote important policies, fight against the right, and advise politicians.

At the same time, the “electoral logic” of parties can operate at odds with the movements’ logic, write the editors. As parties need a broad base, movements are often going to make up a smaller part of that base than other sectors. Plus movements, as in the case of Brazil, are often asked to refrain from actions that could make the movement look bad during or outside of an election season. The editors argue that an ideal situation is one in which the parties and movements can operate together, or at least co-exist, in the defense of human rights and against neoliberalism and the right wing. However, as The New Latin American Left illustrates, such collaborations between the street and the state often turn out to be rockier than planned.

Brazil, Lula and the Landless Movement

The rise to power of the Workers’ Party (PT) in Brazil under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) says a lot about the challenges of moving from the grassroots to the government palace.

The PT began as a working class party, with a worker (Lula, a former steel worker) as its leader, and won 11 million votes in the 1989 presidential elections. The PT’s directions were initially conceived by the workers and party base. Lula was elected president for the first time in 2002, and quickly turned his back on the working class orientation of his party.

While Brazil’s Landless Farmers Movement (MST) formed some of the crucial backbone of the PT’s electoral and social power, the authors write that in Lula’s agricultural policies since he has become president, “priority has been given to huge farms with extensive tracts of land that make intensive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and which are devoted to the production of monocultural export crops.” Most of this industry focuses on the production of sugarcane, soybeans and coffee.

Many of Brazil’s social movements (particularly the MST), are completely at odds with these devastating policies, and have been working for a small scale network of family and community farms, aimed at helping the some 5 million family farmers without the necessary amount of land to survive, and the other 4 million family farmers without any land at all. Some of the aims of this movement are agriculture without pesticides, employment, respect for ecology, soil and biodiversity, and not using GMO seeds.

However, the authors explain that in 2006 Lula did implement the Family Grant program targeting low income families with social support, including grants for food, school and cooking gas, and which impacted some 11 million families – approximately 25% of the population. In exchange for receiving the support, “the benefiting families with children under 15 years of age must enroll their children in school and guarantee their attendance, keep their vaccinations up to date, seek prenatal care and participate in educational programs on breast feeding and nutrition.” In some places this support goes to nearly half of the families in a town or city.

Yet, the authors write, “the implementation of this program was not accompanied by policies that addressed the causes of poverty in Brazil, such as access to land or privileging propertied and wealthy classes in the tax system. Hence, Brazil continues to be one of the most unequal societies in the world.”

In 2006, Lula won the presidency again, in part thanks to support from unions and movements such as the MST, which supported him largely because the alternative was worse; the lead opposing candidate represented the most destructive forces of the right wing and elite. One editorial in the progressive newspaper Brasil de Fato at the time explained, “An analysis of the four years of President Lula’s first term in office leads to a disappointing balance for the working class, above all with respect to the economy.” Yet the editorial asked readers to “properly distinguish between our principal enemy, our adversaries and our allies. Wherever we get this wrong, we end up defeated… Thus, to vote for Lula, even with no illusions about his economic policy, is the duty of all of us who constitute the working and the Brazilian people.”

Power and the Grassroots in Venezuela and Argentina

Edgardo Lander, the author of the chapter in The New Latin American Left on Venezuela, strikes an interesting balance when assessing the hopes and challenges in this country. Lander discusses the abundance of new neighborhood groups, communal councils, Bolivarian circles and electoral battle units have been developed by the government in collaboration with social sectors. The relationship between the communities participating in these programs and the state has varied in intensity and autonomy over the years and involves a broad range of experiences. On the other hand, Lander writes that many of the widely applauded social and political programs of the government “are heavily dependent on oil revenues, to the point that a significant decrease in the latter could endanger their continuity.”

Regarding President Hugo Chavéz, Lander says his “style of leadership could become an obstacle to a process of democratization if many of the key and small decisions of the process remain in his hands, thereby closing the door to the urgent necessities of the institutionalization of public administration and of the organization and autonomy of the popular movement. The great dependency of the transformative process on one person makes the process itself very vulnerable.”

In a chapter on Argentina, Federico Schuster writes that the Nestor Kirchner government ignored and isolated radical sectors of piquetero movement in order to demobilize them. Kirchner did not repress the movements, knowing that doing so would generate an enormous backlash as it did with the two deaths of piqueteros under former President Eduardo Duhalde. “Faced with this prospect, he has preferred a strategy of wearing out the resistance,” Schuster writes. Due to their relative lack of structure and unity, the movements proved to be unsustainable in this context.

“Instead of encouraging the development of these movements,” Schuster explains, “the majority of the leftist parties that have begun working with the unemployed have only ended up contributing to division, attempting to bring as many people as possible into their ranks, rather than building an authentic movement, a broad space that respects the movement’s self-determination. This has contributed to one of the greatest problems of the piquetero movement, which has ended up exacerbating its weakness – namely, dispersal.”

At the start of The New Latin American Left, the editors explain that the book is not a conclusive work; many of these movements and governments that the authors focus on have still only recently come to power, so it’s hard to make “definitive evaluations.” Yet in dissecting the recent history of the new Latin American left, the book sheds light on immediate challenges posed by the relationships between social movements, political parties and governments elsewhere in the region, from Lima to Tegucigalpa.

Brazil, Reviews, Venezuela
Argentina: Turning Around - Interview with Mark Dworkin & Melissa Young

Posted on July 21st, 2009 Administrator No comments

Conducted by Benjamin Dangl

Monday, 20 July 2009

Argentina: Turning Around is an exciting film which captures the spirit of Argentina’s grassroots response to economic meltdown. Drawing from diverse interviews and incredible footage, the film offers an inside look at the victories and challenges of Argentina’s neighborhood assemblies, protest movements and worker-run factories. Argentina: Turning Around skillfully transmits the country’s courageous examples of social change.

In this interview, the film directors Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young talk about what led them to make the film, how the social and political environment in Argentina has changed since the 2001 economic crash, and how Argentina’s methods of combating economic crisis on a grassroots level might offer lessons to activists in the US facing economic trouble.

Argentina: Turning Around is a documentary available from Bullfrog Films

Benjamin Dangl: What led you to make this film, and how is it connected to the story of your previous film on Argentina, Hope in Hard Times?

Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young: Just as we prepared to leave for the World Social Forum in southern Brazil, and then to visit Argentina, the dominant U.S. media reported Argentina’s economic and political collapse of late 2001 with pictures of people pounding on the shuttered banks and the news that 30 people had been shot and killed by the police in just one day. We almost cancelled our plans to visit Argentina for fear that it might be too dangerous or depressing. But friends in Buenos Aires encouraged us to come anyway.

And when we got there we saw what was not reported in the dominant media – a remarkable resurgence of grassroots democracy, mutual aid, and cooperation, with street corner assemblies that sometimes led to takeovers of unused banks to form neighborhood centers, factories that had been shut down and were re-opened by their workers in defiance of the law, large scale community gardens, and daily mass blockades of streets and highways to demand government action to help those most hurt by the economic crisis. We pulled out our travelling camera and began to film. Although we were only able to stay for a couple of weeks, we continued to follow events in Argentina and returned 6 months later for more filming. The result was Argentina-Hope in Hard Times (2004) which has screened all over the world in its English and Spanish versions and has even been translated into Chinese for a screening in Hong Kong.

We were invited to screen Hope in Hard Times at the 2005 Festival de los Documentalistas in Buenos Aires. While in Argentina again, we tried to assess if things were back to business as usual, or if there were some fundamental changes from when we were last there. We revisited the grassroots projects in our film with camera in hand, and we even screened Hope in Hard Times in a couple of the worker run factories. Many neighborhood assemblies were no longer active, but the factories that had been taken over by worker cooperatives were surviving and thriving, and we filmed at a few more.

We also visited a new community cooperative run by unemployed workers in the poor suburb of La Matanza, and a villa de miseria (slum) on the outskirts of Buenos Aires founded by cartoneros (recyclers). We met with economists, journalists and activists, including Esteban Magnani, author of The Silent Change, who helped us to appreciate that the long term significance of the events of 2001-2002 goes well beyond the accomplishment of a given factory or neighborhood. As Magnani puts it in Argentina-Turning Around, “It was a miracle! People took over the scene again. We said that we are the protagonists of our own history, and we want to be the protagonists.”

BD: Could you describe some of the main ways that Argentina’s social and political environment has changed since the 2001-2002 economic crash and subsequent popular activism and organizing?

MD and MY: This is what Argentina-Turning Around addresses. For most people life has become more normal again. Once the emergency passed, the intense grassroots activity subsided, but many efforts in communities and workplaces continue. In 2003, Nestor Kirchner was elected President, and he was succeeded by his wife Cristina Fernández in 2007. They both talked a more populist line, and persuaded the courts and government agencies to give worker run factories a chance to prove themselves [even as former owners tried to get them back]. Argentina paid off its entire debt to the IMF with help from Venezuela. They began to prosecute human rights offenders from the military dictatorship of 1976-83 (also touched on in Turning Around). As the economy recovered substantially in 2004-2007, official unemployment rates dropped from over 20% to 8%. We were told that people would never again let the Argentine government favor the demands of global corporations and institutions at the expense of regular people such as what happened in the 1990s.

Of course, now Argentina is feeling the effects of the global financial crisis, and right now too, the swine flu. The economy is down and unemployment is up. The expansion of lands planted with transgenic soy has raised food prices and contributed to inflation. And President Cristina Fernandez’s party lost seats in the June mid-term elections, with criticism from both right and left. (For more information, see Argentine journalist Marie Trigona’s writings about swine flu and recent elections in Argentina.)

On a return visit earlier this year we found that the 200 or so worker run factories continue to “occupy, resist, and produce.” A few have failed but others have started up. When eviction has been threatened by former owners, often the public has shown up to demonstrate their support for the worker run enterprises. For the history of the Zanon ceramics plant, one of the first to be seized by its workers, see this article. Similar worker run enterprises have taken root in Brazil, Venezuela and most recently, Uruguay.

BD: Could Argentina’s experience with economic crisis and methods of combating that crisis on a grassroots level offer any lessons to activists in the US facing economic trouble?

MD and MY: Although there is seldom inspiring news from Latin America in the U.S. press, we believe we can learn a lot from Argentina’s activism, especially from the can do spirit of horizontalidad (non-hierarchical organizations). As Esteban Magnani puts it in Turning Around, “There is a vibe in the air that the important thing is to do it, to find your own way to do it, and to help other people find their own way!”

When Hope in Hard Times came out over 4 years ago, people at screenings in the U.S. would say, “We have seen similar policies, such as off-shoring of jobs and privatization of public services here in the U.S. Will we have an economic collapse of our own? And if we do, would we pull together as people did in Argentina?” Fast forward a few years and we are in the worst economic crisis since the great depression. The corporate agenda of globalization and privatization has been discredited.

Many in the U.S. have quit expecting solutions from the top and are becoming active with others in their local communities, with a particular emphasis on local food and alternative energy. Workers at Republic Windows and Doors occupied their Chicago factory late last year, to demand severance pay and benefits after the factory closed, and they won. That factory is scheduled to re-open under new management to produce energy conserving windows. Their example was followed by workers at Hartmarx clothing, who voted in May to sit-in at their plants to protect their jobs.

But so far, we haven’t seen workers begin to run these plants themselves. Even in Argentina, self-management didn’t happen right away. At the beginning of Argentina-Turning Around, Soledad Bordegaray of the Union of Unemployed Workers says, “It’s not like people began with the idea of running things ourselves, we weren’t taught to think that way. But no existing institutions were responding to our needs for jobs, education, and health care. People got together and said, why wait for someone else? Let’s see what WE can do!”

We produced these films to encourage our own resurgence of grassroots democracy here in the U.S. It is hard to imagine resolving the current economic situation and the challenges of energy and climate change by relying on the same top down, profit maximizing institutions that got us into this mess in the first place.

BD: What are you working on now?

MD and MY: Earlier this year we visited Argentina again and personally delivered copies of Argentina-Turning Around to all who appear in the film. Our travels led us to film some of the current struggles of indigenous peoples in northwest Argentina. The expansion of mining contracts, burgeoning grape production for wines, and the lucrative soy plantations that produce animal feed for export are exerting pressure on the traditional lands of indigenous peoples. We also witnessed the successful vote in Bolivia for the new constitution that provides more rights for indigenous peoples. Some short pieces about these struggles will appear soon on You Tube. At the moment we are preparing our most recent documentary for public TV broadcast in English and Spanish, Good Food. Recently we signed a license with public TV in Argentina to broadcast Buena Comida. Our website is http://www.movingimages.org, and you can contact us through info@movingimages.org

Argentina: Turning Around is from Bullfrog Films

Argentina, Interviews
Grassroots Lessons From Latin America: An Interview with Michael Fox

Posted on July 21st, 2009 Administrator No comments

Conducted by Benjamin Dangl

Tuesday, 16 June 2009

Michael Fox is a Brazil-based independent journalist and co-producer of the new documentary Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas (PM Press). He is also the co-author of an upcoming book called Venezuela Speaks: Voices From the Grassroots, also available through PM Press and set to be released this fall. Throughout his research for this film and book, and as a radio and print reporter who has covered political and social issues across Latin America, Fox has come to know to hopes and struggles of the region’s social movements, and what US activists might learn from the experiences of these movements.

In this interview, he talks about what lessons US activists might consider from social movements throughout Latin America, and the challenges of applying Latin American activist strategies in the US under an Obama administration.

Benjamin Dangl: Taking into account the challenges posed by an Obama administration and the current economic crisis in the US, what lessons do you think US activists could learn from social movements in Brazil and Venezuela, as far as methods and strategies to radicalize and pressure politicians and combat economic strife?

Michael Fox: First off, folks in the states need to remember that just because Obama is in office doesn’t mean that US activists should sit back on their heels and consider their “mission accomplished”. For Obama to be able to push for changes, he needs to be pushed. That’s just the reality. It can be difficult for activists in any country to maneuver the subtle balance of demanding their rights from a friendly elected official, while not playing in to the game the opposition (in this case the Republicans). Nevertheless, this must be done. In Brazil - as I wrote in an article for Toward Freedom – shortly after Lula was elected in to office, Brazil’s progressives “gave Lula time”. They were willing to work with him and humored his embracing of international economic norms as shrewd. A year and a half later, they had had enough, and they formed a dissident party called the Party for Socialism and Freedom (PSOL). The MST held off on land occupations for a period, until they realized that despite Lula’s commitments to agrarian reform, the Brazilian president had befriended the international agro-industry, and he wasn’t looking back. In hindsight, perhaps they should have pushed harder from the beginning of the Lula government, supporting his administration and at the same time demanding their rights. This is what you see often in Venezuela, although you wouldn’t know it by reading the mainstream press.

Autonomous Venezuelan social movements like the Ezequiel Zamora National Campesino Front (FNCEZ) and the National Association of Free and Alternative Community Media (ANMCLA) are very clear that they support the Chavez government, but that they are autonomous social movements and that they have their own demands which they expect to be met. It may at first appear contradictory when you see hundreds of Venezuelan campesinos and community media activists come marching through Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, to block a major intersection for hours, and at the same time they say they support the President, but that is the reality. They understand – as activists in the United States need to learn quickly – that they have an agenda rooted in the community and in the grassroots, and the President (albeit friendly) is going to have another. There are many interests at the top. And often a President – even Chavez or Obama – isn’t going to be able to do what he or she would like, without really hearing it from the people on the streets.

US activists need to be aware of these dualities, and not be afraid of what may appear contradictory. As one of Venezuela’s founding fathers Simon Rodriguez once said, “o inventamos o erramos”, That’s the motto of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Movement: “Either we invent or we fail”, meaning that we need to be free to take chances, leaps and bounds, try things that seem crazy and if those things don’t work, get up and try something else.

Especially in this time of global economic crisis people need to come together and look to develop their solutions in their local community. Last fall, my partner and I traveled all across the United Status showing our movie, Beyond Elections, about these new democratic experiences all across Latin America. At the same we interviewed communities and individuals from California to Virginia about their alternatives and solutions, about their thoughts, hopes and opinions of this ridiculous bank bailout. Nearly everyone – from urban progressives to salt-of-the earth Midwestern farmers – said the same thing, “Get all the politicians out of Washington” and turn the government back over to “we the people”. We now have a new president, elected to do just that with his platform of change, but that is just the beginning.

Latin Americans know this story well, and over the last three decades a number of experiences have been developed across the region, from which activists in the United States can learn. For me they are all based around democracy and place-based organizing, two ideas which may seem irrelevant, but they can be transformative.

You ask your average North American for his or her definition of democracy, and the answer is usually free and fair elections. But as I said above, that is just the beginning, it’s not the end.

Latin Americans, especially in Venezuela and Brazil, have been developing these concepts and working with these themes in transformative ways.

Since President Hugo Chavez came to office in 1998, Venezuelans have been working to shift the hierarchical organizing to horizontal in local community-based committees – first the Bolivarian circles and then local water, electricity, land committees, etc…   In 2006, Venezuelans all across the country have been organizing themselves in to tiny local “communal councils” which are made up of 100-200 families which elected spokesperson for the local community in order to carry out local projects. The concept is powerful, because it is the community which decides on local issues and projects. If the community needs to fix a road, it develops the project, brings it to the pertinent institutions and they can receive funding. The concept is radically different from the past, when the community would have to fight with the local government for public works projects, and radically different from the former community associations in which a select group of people decided for everyone. In Venezuela, right now these communal councils are trying to put decision-making power directly in the hands of citizens, and there is talk of expanding the power of these communal councils out, so they would also have decision-making power in the municipal, region, state and national level also. Optimally they make decision by consensus, sometimes by voting. The spokespersons of the council are the spokespersons- that elaborate the project and the communal council, but not representatives, which means that the entire community must be consulted on important decisions. There are now tens of thousands of communal councils all across the country, being funded by more than a billion dollars from the Venezuelan government.

Participatory Budgeting (PB) began in Porto Alegre, Brazil and has now spread throughout the world. It is a process in which everyday citizens participate in the allocation of a chunk of city funds. Each year community residents vote on their priorities and demands for the next year, and throughout the year representatives hold weekly or biweekly meetings to ensure that the community’s will is carried out. The idea is giving communities a democratic say in the direction of government. While Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting now has its problems, and some of the PB delegates and council-members have turned in to more bureaucratic positions, the program has become a necessary element of the local government and citizens have learned to see themselves as part of a larger picture, to see their needs together with the needs of those around them.

As I mentioned, PB is now in cities and local governments all across the planet, and is promoted as a way in order to ensure transparency in the local government. What if participatory budgeting were implemented in local governments, organizations, and groups across the US? What if the $700 billion bank bailout had an incorporated a component of participatory budgeting in which US citizens could have participated in where they wanted the bailout funds to be allocated? A sector would have had to have followed up with the implementation to ensure that the funds actually went to where they were supposed to go, rather than the US government handing over billions to the same people that got us in to this mess, without any checks and balances. Is that democratic?

In terms of social movements, Brazil’s Landless Worker’s Movement (MST) recently turned 25 and while there has been little said about the MST for quite some time in the US press, it is as alive as ever. As a local organizer in Brazil’s Southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, João Amaral confirmed last July, this is largely due to the fact that in the MST, decision-making is rooted in the community, in the everyday MST members and in local grassroots groups of 10-20 families that make up the base nuclei of the movement in MST encampments and settlements. A spokesperson from each of these groups then joins with the spokespersons from each of the other “base nuclei”, where they also work with consensus to make decisions or return to the local groups to debate further. Only with this process they are: 1. Able to truly reflect the will of the movement overall and 2. Ensure that everyone feels like their voice is heard and is, and 3. Willing to continue with the decision of the group, even when it perhaps was not their first choice.

This is the heart of the MST, truly one of the most radical social movements. You feel the sense of community as you walk in to an encampment or settlement and spend some time with those around you. It is astounding: one group cooks for everyone else, another group is taking care of the children, another is planting- and that’s how they live their life. There is a sense of oneness with those around them, and their form of decision-making – rooted in these local groups. They decide by consensus, and the added focus on gender neutrality ensures that everyone’s voice is heard and that everyone feels a part of the process.   From its humble beginnings in 1984, the MST has won millions of acres of land and says it now has 370,000 families settled across the country and 100,000 camped.

BD: What are some of the challenges posed by transferring such strategies to the US to be applied there?

MF: The sense of community in the above Latin American examples cannot be highlighted enough.  Oftentimes in the United States it is easy to feel separate from one another. Many times you don’t live near those with whom you are used to organizing, and especially in the suburbs, our lives are created to keep us isolated from one-another. There are many forms of poverty across the globe, but truly that which most affects the United States is a poverty of community, a sickness of community, in which individuals feel isolated and separated from one another, basing their decisions not on communication, collaboration, deliberation, but on the fear they feel from the negative news that is spun at American citizens through one of the most highly consolidated media in the world.

This is why I mentioned place-based organizing. All of the above experiences are “place-based”, not issue-based. They are rooted in solving the issues of the local community, and can then move in to the larger issues from there. Some activists in New Orleans are starting to develop this, such as Khalil Shahyd of the New Orleans Citizen Participation Project, who is promoting Participatory Budgeting in the Louisiana city. The Survivor’s Council, which takes place in the Katrina-devastated Lower 9th Ward, is inspired by Venezuela’s communal councils and is a way for community residents to connect, debate, discuss and work towards to resolve the problems in their community.

Activists also need to remember – as my Brazilian wife highlighted during our tour around the states last fall showing our film Beyond Elections – that the best way to support movements abroad, is to make change at home.

In the United States, the Left is often fragmented in to factions and issues. How many times have you gone to an event on “Venezuela” or “Cuba” or some specific issue in the community, and you know everyone in the crowd, because they are the same handful of people that go to all of these types of events. That’s great, they are active, but they are often disconnected from the other issues, and from the community and the issues affecting the local community sometimes only a few miles from where the event is being held.

Activists in the United States may be quick to protests loudly against the “illegitimate” US war on Iraq or Afghanistan, but when it comes to the internal illegitimate low-intensity warfare waged by the US government against poor communities in the United States, many middle-class activists don’t make the connection. US activists need to bring the “buy local” banner of local farmers, in to the activist realm – “organize local” around local issues – which are, of course connected to the big picture.

Activists need to think about not only how to create organizations but movements with grassroots committees that will ensure that everyone has a roll to play, and that their voice is heard. I believe that San Francisco lost a huge opportunity in 2005, when the SF People’s Organization was founded. I excitedly asked one of the new directors when the general assembly would meet again and if we would be setting up local grassroots committees in the communities around San Francisco. He responded that we wouldn’t have to meet again until the next year, and until then, he and the two-dozen organizers would fight throughout the year for our interests.

He didn’t get it. I tell this story to my foreign friends and they laugh. In the United States, activists are used to getting out on the streets to protest, e-activism – clicking buttons to sign protests and forward urgent actions, but with all the other activities US citizens are involved in (with music, sports, dance, art, socially etc…), many don’t want to think about joining another group. That’s not the point.

The only way that Uruguay’s Leftist political coalition, Frente Amplio, retained so much of its support, despite being brutally repressed and exiled during a more than decade-long dictatorship, was because of its grassroots committees. As I pointed out in an article in 2007, Frente Amplio’s rise to Uruguay’s Presidency in 2005 was an important victory, but by turning its back on its grassroots activists, the coalition has lost the fervent support on the streets which kept its dream alive for so many years.

Many of these examples take time. Consensus takes time. Local grassroots committees take time. And that is not something that US activists have a lot of. They could, but they don’t, in large part due to an entertainment industry which ensures that we are encouraged away from such activities.

Another issue that US activists must contend with paradoxically is the traditional lack of needs. Participatory Budgeting, Communal Councils, MST organizing works because the local community has a series of very immediate needs that aren’t being met: Perhaps it’s electricity, or potable water, or land. Only by joining forces will the community be able to accomplish their demands. In the United States, many communities have traditionally not had these desperate needs. Of course, some have, but many have not. Which means that individuals haven’t felt the desperate need to come together because they are content with their homes, their cars, their jobs and their cable TV.

But times are changing. Even suburban neighborhoods are falling apart as a result of the Mortgage Crisis. The financial crisis is growing, and rather than correct the failures of the system, Washington promises to hand over more to those that got us in to the problem in the first place. Meanwhile, unemployment is rising, homelessness is rising, and no one has resolved the lack of health care for millions of US residents. These are pressing issues, and they are issues which must be dealt with from the bottom up, from the local, from the community out. As they say in Venezuela, “endogenous development”

So, in the United States, activists have to contend with:

-people’s busy lives

-lack of community

-lack of interest or needs

Of course, no model can ever be simply lifted up and plopped down on top of a completely different reality and expected to work. That concept is part of the same hierarchical system which these experiences are trying to correct. These experiences must be a creative process and collaborative. Activists need to listen and work together.   Deliberate and build shared space together that are rooted in faith and love, and not fear. And this can be done without the large funds many in the United States believe you need for a healthy organization.

Of course resources help, but if they don’t exist we just need to be creative. Like the barter trade systems which were set up across the Southern Cone after the December 2001 economic crisis, in which community members came together to trade what they had for things that they need, or things that others had to offer.

Lastly, Latin Americans are more than willing to support these experiences across the US, and to share experiences and trade ideas. Activists in the United States just need to be willing to take chances and unite with those around them.

To learn more about these experiences in local democracy, or to watch and/or purchase, Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas, visit www.beyondelections.com.

For more from Michael Fox, visit www.blendingthelines.com.

Interviews, Social Movements
High Stakes For Honduras

Posted on July 14th, 2009 Administrator No comments

Written by Benjamin Dangl

Published by The Guardian Unlimited

When rallying in the streets of Tegucigalpa for the ousted President Manuel Zelaya, Alejandra Fernandez, a 23-year-old university student told a journalist why she supported Zelaya: “He raised the minimum wage, gave out free school lunches, provided milk for the babies and pensions for the elderly, distributed energy-saving light bulbs, decreased the price of public transportation, made more scholarships available for students.” Others gathered around to mention the roads and schools in rural areas the president had created.

“That’s why the elite classes can’t stand him and why we want him back,” Alejandra explained. “This is really a class struggle.”

But it’s not just because of these relatively progressive reforms that Zelaya enacted that he deserves our support. Nor is it simply because this democratically-elected leader was ousted in a repressive coup led by right-wing oligarchs and military officials trained at the infamous torture and counterinsurgency school, the School of the Americas, now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, based in Georgia.

He also deserves our support because he was ultimately overthrown in response to his plans to organise a popular assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution.

According to Central American political analyst Alberto Valiente Thoresen, Honduras’s current constitution, written in 1982, “was the product of a context characterised by counter-insurgency policies supported by the US government, civil façade military governments and undemocratic policies.” In an assembly made up of elected representatives from various political parties and social sectors, a new, likely more progressive and inclusive constitution could have a lasting impact on the country’s corrupt politicians, powerful sweatshop owners and repressive military institutions.

Many commentators have said that Zelaya sought to re-write the constitution to extend his time in office. Yet nothing indicates that that was the case. Leading up to the coup, Zelaya was pushing for a referendum on 28 June in which the ballot question was to be: “Do you agree that, during the general elections of November 2009 there should be a fourth ballot to decide whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political constitution?” This non-binding referendum - not plans from Zelaya to expand his power – was enough to push right wing and military leaders to organise a coup.

If the Honduran people approved the formation of a constitutional assembly in November, it would likely take years – as it did recently in Bolivia – to rewrite the document. Zelaya would not be president as he would not be running in the upcoming elections. His term in office finishes in January 2010, too short a time to complete a national assembly’s rewriting of the constitution.

Given that it was the call for the constituent assembly that led to the coup, it appears that the coup leaders are more worried about an assembly in which the people could re-write their own constitution, than Zelaya himself. Clearly it’s the Honduran oligarchs, rather than Zelaya, who are more interested in concentrating and conserving their own power.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Zelaya in Washington today, and one development was that Costa Rica’s president Oscar Arias will act as mediator for the return of Zelaya. But there still is plenty of room for improvement in the US’s stance. The Obama administration should listen to Zelaya’s demands rather than impose preconditions for US support. And it should avoid bullying Zelaya into dropping his plans for the new constitution, or limiting any progressive reforms he may want to enact upon returning to office. The Honduran people should decide what course Zelaya should take, not the Obama administration and certainly not any right wing junta.

Although the Obama administration has been critical of the coup and relatively supportive of Zelaya, it should go much further. Some clear signs that Washington backs Zelaya would be withdrawing the US ambassador from the country, following in the footsteps of the other nations that have condemned the coup. The US should also cut off all of its aid to the rogue government, and end all military aid to the country. These actions would put pressure on the already weak military and send a clearer message to the region that, at this point, Washington is entirely against the coup, and willing to respect demands from Latin American leaders, all of whom have called for Zelaya’s reinstatement.

This past Sunday, after his plane was turned back upon trying to land in Honduras, Zelaya told reporters: “the United States, which has tremendous power, should take action. Specifically, the strongest government in economic matters, in aspects of the sphere of the dollar, for us is the United States. If they decide to live with the coup, then democracy in the Americas is over.”

Barack Obama, Honduras, Imperialism
Showdown in Honduras: The Rise, Repression and Uncertain Future of the Coup

Posted on July 14th, 2009 Administrator No comments

Written by Benjamin Dangl

Monday, 29 June 2009

Worldwide condemnation has followed the coup that unseated President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras on Sunday, June 28. Nation-wide mobilizations and a general strike demanding that Zelaya be returned to power are growing in spite of increased military repression. One protester outside the government palace in Honduras told reporters that if Roberto Micheletti, the leader installed by the coup, wants to enter the palace, “he had better do so by air” because if he goes by land “we will stop him.”

On early Sunday morning, approximately 100 soldiers entered the home of the left-leaning Zelaya, forcefully removed him and, while he was still in his pajamas, ushered him on to a plane to Costa Rica. The tension that led to the coup involved a struggle for power between left and right political factions in the country. Besides the brutal challenges facing the Honduran people, this political crisis is a test for regional solidarity and Washington-Latin American relations.

Manuel Zelaya Takes a Left Turn

When Manuel Zelaya was elected president on November 27, 2005 in a close victory, he became president of one of the poorest nations in the region, with approximately 70% of its population of 7.5 million living under the poverty line. Though siding himself with the region’s left in recent years as a new member of the leftist trade bloc, Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), Zelaya did sign the Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2004.

However, Zelaya has been criticizing and taking on the sweatshop and corporate media industry in his country, and increased the minimum wage by 60%. He said the increase, which angered the country’s elite but expanded his support among unions, would “force the business oligarchy to start paying what is fair.”

At a meeting of regional anti-drug officials, Zelaya spoke of an unconventional way to combat the drug trafficking and related violence that has been plaguing his country: “Instead of pursuing drug traffickers, societies should invest resources in educating drug addicts and curbing their demand.”

After his election, Zelaya’s left-leaning policies began generating “resistance and anger among Liberal [party] leaders and lawmakers on the one hand, and attracting support from the opposition, civil society organizations and popular movements on the other,” IPS reported.

The social organization Via Campesina stated, “The government of President Zelaya has been characterized by its defense of workers and campesinos, it is a defender of the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA), and during his administration it has promoted actions that benefit Honduran campesinos.”

As his popularity rose over the years among these sectors of society, the right wing and elite of Honduras worked to undermine the leader, eventually resulting in the recent coup.

Leading up to the Coup

The key question leading up to the coup was whether or not to hold a referendum on Sunday, June 28 – as Zelaya wanted – on organizing an assembly to re-write the country’s constitution.

As one media analyst pointed out, while many major news outlets in the US, including the Miami Herald, Wall St. Journal and Washington Post, said an impetus for the coup was specifically Zelaya’s plans for a vote to allow him to extend his term in office, the actual ballot question was to be: “Do you agree that, during the general elections of November 2009 there should be a fourth ballot to decide whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political constitution?”

Nations across Latin America, including Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, have recently re-written their constitutions. In many aspects the changes to these documents enshrined new rights for marginalized people and protected the nations’ economies from the destabilizing effects of free trade and corporate looting.

Leading up to the coup, on June 10, members of teacher, student, indigenous and union groups marched to demand that Congress back the referendum on the constitution, chanting, “The people, aware, defend the Constituent [Assembly].” The Honduran Front of Teachers Organizations [FOM], with some 48,000 members, also supported the referendum. FOM leader Eulogio Chávez asked teachers to organize the expected referendum this past Sunday in schools, according to the Weekly News Update on the Americas.

The Supreme Court ruled that the referendum violated the constitution as it was taking place during an election year. When Honduran military General Romeo Vasquez refused to distribute ballots to citizens and participate in the preparations for the Sunday referendum, Zelaya fired him on June 24. The Court called for the reinstatement of Vasquez, but Zelaya refused to recognize the reinstatement, and proceeded with the referendum, distributing the ballots and planning for the Sunday vote.

Crackdown in Honduras

Vasquez, a former student at the infamous School of the Americas, now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), went on to be a key leader in the June 28 coup.

After Zelaya had been taken to Costa Rica, a falsified resignation letter from Zelaya was presented to Congress, and former Parliament leader Roberto Micheletti was sworn in by Congress as the new president of the country. Micheletti immediately declared a curfew as protests and mobilizations continued nation-wide.

Since the coup took place, military planes and helicopters have been circling the city, the electricity and internet has been cut off, and only music is being played on the few radio stations that are still operating, according to IPS News.

Telesur journalists, who have been reporting consistently throughout the conflict, were detained by the de facto government in Honduras. They were then released thanks to international pressure.

The ambassadors to Honduras from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua were arrested. Patricia Rodas, the Foreign Minister of Honduras under Zelaya has also been arrested. Rodas recently presided over an OAS meeting in which Cuba was finally admitted into the organization.

The military-installed government has issued arrest warrants for Honduran social leaders for the Popular Bloc Coordinating Committee, Via Campesina and the Civic Council of Grassroots and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, according to the Weekly News Update on the Americas.

Human rights activist Dr. Juan Almendares, reporting from from Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, told Democracy Now! that due to government crackdowns and the electrical blackout, there is “not really access to information, no freedom of the press.” He said, “We have also a curfew, because after 9:00 you can be shot if you are on the streets. So we have a curfew from 9:00 to 6:00 a.m.”

In a statement on the coup, Via Campesina said, “We believe that these deeds are the desperate acts of the national oligarchy and the hardcore right to preserve the interests of capital, and in particular, of the large transnational corporations.”

Mobilizations and Strikes in Support of Zelaya

Members of social, indigenous and labor organizations from around the country have concentrated in the city’s capital, organizing barricades around the presidential palace, demanding Zelaya’s return to power. Sixty protesters have been injured and two have died in clashes with the coup’s security forces.

“Thousands of Hondurans gathered outside the presidential palace singing the national hymn,” Telesur reported. “While the battalions mobilized against protesters at the Presidential House, the TV channels did not report on the tense events.” Bertha Cáceres, the leader of the Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares y Indígenas, said that the ethnic communities of the country are ready for resistance and do not recognize the Micheletti government.

Dr. Almendares reported that in spite of massive repression on the part of the military leaders, “We have almost a national strike for workers, people, students and intellectuals, and they are organized in a popular resistance-run pacific movement against this violation of the democracy. … There are many sectors involved in this movement trying to restitute the constitutional rights, the human rights.”

Rafael Alegría, a leader of Via Campesina in Honduras, told Telesur, “The resistance of the people continues and is growing, already in the western part of the country campesinos are taking over highways, and the military troops are impeding bus travel, which is why many people have decided to travel to Tegucigalpa on foot. The resistance continues in spite of the hostility of the military patrols.”

A general strike was also organized by various social and labor sectors in the country. Regarding the strike, Alegría said it is happening across state institutions and “progressively in the private sector.”

The 4th Army Battalion from the Atlántida Department in Honduras has declared that it will not respect orders from the Micheletti government, and the major highways of the country are blocked by protesters, according to a radio interview with Alegría.

The Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), condemned the coup, media crackdowns and repression, saying in a statement: “[T]he Honduran people are carrying out large demonstrations, actions in their communities, in the municipalities; there are occupations of bridges, and a protest in front of the presidential residence, among others. From the lands of Lempira, Morazán and Visitación Padilla, we call on the Honduran people in general to demonstrate in defense of their rights and of real and direct democracy for the people, to the fascists we say that they will NOT silence us, that this cowardly act will turn back on them, with great force.”

Washington Responds

On Sunday, Obama spoke of the events in Honduras: “I am deeply concerned by reports coming out of Honduras regarding the detention and expulsion of President Mel Zelaya. As the Organization of American States did on Friday, I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Any existing tensions and disputes must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference.”

But the US hasn’t actually called what’s happened in Honduras a coup. Hillary Clinton said, “We are withholding any formal legal determination.” And regarding whether or not the US is calling for Zelaya’s return, Clinton said, “We haven’t laid out any demands that we’re insisting on, because we’re working with others on behalf of our ultimate objectives.”

If the White House declares that what’s happening in Honduras is a coup, they would have to block aid to the rogue Honduran government. A provision of US law regarding funds directed by the US Congress says that, “None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available … shall be obligated or expended to finance directly any assistance to the government of any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.”

“The State Department has requested $68.2 million in aid for fiscal year 2010 [for Honduras], which begins on October 1, up from $43.2 million in the current fiscal year and $40.5 million a year earlier,” according to Reuters.

The US military has a base in Soto Cano, Honduras, which, according to investigative journalist Eva Golinger, is home to approximately 500 troops and a number of air force planes and helicopters.

Regarding US relations with the Honduran military, Latin American History professor and journalist Greg Grandin said on Democracy Now!: “The Honduran military is effectively a subsidiary of the United States government. Honduras, as a whole, if any Latin American country is fully owned by the United States, it’s Honduras. Its economy is wholly based on trade, foreign aid and remittances. So if the US is opposed to this coup going forward, it won’t go forward. Zelaya will return…”

The Regional Response

The Organization of American States, and the United Nations have condemned the coup. Outrage at the coup has been expressed by major leaders across the globe, and all over Latin America, as reported by Reuters: the Presidents of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Cuba have been outspoken in their protests against the coup. The French Foreign Ministry said, “France firmly condemns the coup that has just taken place in Honduras.” Argentine President Cristina Fernandez said, “I’m deeply worried about the situation in Honduras… it reminds us of the worst years in Latin America’s history.”

Even Augusto Ramírez Ocampo, a former foreign minister of Colombia told the NY Times, “It is a legal obligation to defend democracy in Honduras.”

Zelaya has announced a trip to the US to speak before the United Nations. He also stated that he will return to Honduras on Thursday, accompanied by Jose Miguel Insulza, the head of the Organization of American States. “I will fulfill my four year mandate [as President], whether you, the coup-plotters, like it or not,” Zelaya said.

Only time will tell what the international and national support for Zelaya means for Honduras. Regional support for Bolivian President Evo Morales during an attempted coup in 2008 empowered his fight against right wing destabilizing forces. Popular support in the streets proved vital during the attempted coup against Venezuelan President Chavez in 2002.

Meanwhile, Zelaya supporters continue to convene at the government palace, yelling at the armed soldiers while tanks roam the streets.

“We’re defending our president,” protester Umberto Guebara told a NY Times reporter. “I’m not afraid. I’d give my life for my country.”

***

Taking Action:

If you are interested in rallying in support for the Honduran people and against the coup, here is a list of Honduran Embassies and Consulates in the US.

People in the US could call political representatives to denounce the coup, and demand US cut off all aid to the rogue government until Zelaya is back in power. Click here to send a message to Barack Obama about the coup.

Also see: Take Action: Stand in Solidarity with the People of Honduras

Visit SOA Watch for more photos and suggested actions.

****

Benjamin Dangl is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press). He is the editor of TowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events, and UpsideDownWorld.org, a website covering activism and politics in Latin America. Contact: Bendangl(at)gmail(dot)com

Barack Obama, Honduras, Imperialism
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