Features » April 27, 2010

Return of the Death Squads (cont’d)

Teaching resistance

“We have a very unified movement, a very representative movement,” says FNRP leader Rafael Alegria, who is also president of the powerful Honduran farmworkers union Via Campesina. “We demand an end to the violence and repression. We support the laborers, who continue to receive death threats. We support the unemployed, who have a right to work.” Alegria spoke after a Feb. 25, 2010, march in Tegucigalpa on the National Congress building by approximately 60,000 members of the FNRP, which has modeled itself on nonviolent social movements.

The FNRP also continues to push for a better public education system, a goal held by ousted President Manuel Zelaya. The country’s education and literacy levels are seriously compromised by endemic poverty, and the student-teacher ratio is on average 40-to-one. The day after soldiers kidnapped and exiled Zelaya in June 2009, tens of thousands of teachers went on strike.

‚”Zelaya had actualized free education for all Hondurans, as is stipulated in the constitution,” says Jamie Rodriguez, president of COPEMH, one of the country’s largest teachers unions. Although last year’s strike has now ended, Rodriguez says the teachers are still playing a vital role in the FNRP. In late April, they began conducting a nationwide poll to determine if there is democratic support for the creation of a constitutional assembly. (Zelaya was swept from office for his willingness to allow a similar referendum.) The goal is to collect signatures from at least half of the Honduran electorate.

“This is our chance to re-found our country,” Rodriguez says, adding that the new constitution would do away with “laws designed only to serve the rich.”

Zelaya had set up government programs to pay for lunches, travel to schools and tuition. Zelaya’s reforms allowed about 450,000 children to begin attending school, “but all of that was canceled after the coup,” Rodriguez says.

He had done more than just help students. The economy made significant strides while he was in office, according to a study published by the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research. The country’s GDP increased an average of seven percent annually during Zelaya’s first two years in office, and the percentage of Hondurans living in poverty dropped from about 66 to 61. But many experts say it was precisely this slight leveling of the economic playing field that angered the dozen or so wealthy families that have traditionally ruled Honduras and led to the military coup against the president.

Putschists in power

In the months following the coup, 155,000 jobs were lost and the poverty rate began to grow again as wary governments cut foreign aid. Tourism, the third-largest industry in Honduras, fell by 70 percent. The cost of mobilizing police and armed forces–estimated at about $50 million U.S. dollars per day during the weeks Honduras was under martial law after the coup–as well as the general economic slow-down, resulted in the second-poorest nation in Central America declaring bankruptcy in February.

Due to public concern about human-rights abuses and top-level corruption in the central government, just 49 percent of the Honduran electorate turned out for the ballot vote that brought Lobo to power last November. Many observers have claimed that elections under the military-imposed government were neither free nor fair.

The Lobo government has tried to fight the public’s perception of corruption. “Suddenly on the television here in Honduras, we’re hearing all about campaigns against corruption,” says Frank, referring to a series of advertisements produced by Lobo, who backed the putsch against Zelaya. “Well, who are the corrupt people? Who are the people who have been robbing the coffers of this country for decades? Who are the people that take humanitarian aid and line their pockets with it?”

“Now the new, illegitimate Lobo government says it wants reconciliation,” says teachers union leader Rodriguez. “They talk about wanting peace, but they are still killing people in the streets.” Some teachers particularly vocal in their opposition to the government have stopped receiving pay checks, Rodriguez says, and police recently gassed a “dissident” school while teachers and students were still inside. In all, according to COPEMH’s Rodriguez, five teachers have died in politically motivated assassinations since the coup, and one has disappeared.

Alegria says the Lobo government appears to be little more than an extension of the regime of Roberto Micheletti, who became de facto president after the coup. “The power structure is still intact. The same Congress that backed the coup. The same military junta–all the same putschists in power,” Alegria says.

Rep. Schakowsky is worried about these trends, as well as the cozy relationship the Lobo government has so far enjoyed with the U.S. State Department. “I hope the secretary [Clinton] will look into the reports of human rights abuses,” she wrote to In These Times. “Human rights considerations must be part of any process of aid resumption and diplomatic normalization.”

But for those who have lost loved ones at the hands of the military regime, normalization will be a long and painful process. “I want justice,” says Torrez, mother of slain union leader Zepeda. “Not just for Vanessa, but for all those who have lost their lives for the Resistance.”

This article is an updated version of the May 2010 cover story.