The deceptive trickery of the bourgeois governments sponsored by the United States has no limits. A few hours were enough for the candidate for presidential re-election in Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOA), to convert, a difference of 5% of the votes counted in favor of his opponent, Salvador Nasralla, into an advantage of for him that would proclaim him reelected President.
JOA had remained in an electoral campaign throughout his government. While locking up, banishing or burying his adversaries, he gave away balls, cardboard houses, bags of beans labeled with his photograph and the logo of his party and other sacramental gifts “blessed with the blood of Christ”. He distributed even 50 Lempiras (equivalent to 2.5 dollars) to all impoverished voters.
Depressing was the surprise for him and his cohort when, at the end of the November 26 vote, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) announced that the candidate of the Free Alliance-PINU, Salvador Nasralla, wasahead of him by 5 points.
A few minutes later, the TSE suspended the count due to “technical problems of the system” and shortly thereafter announced that, in a new calculation, JOA was ahead of Nasralla by 1 point.
Popular protests immediately broke out. Hondurans could not placidly accept the monstrous fraud, which came to fill the cup of humiliation that infringed the nation’s coup that ousted President Manuel Zelayain 2009.
Ollantay Itzamná, a Quechua nomad, son of Pachamama, activist and reflective defender of human rights and of Mother Earth, who also trained as a lawyer, anthropologist and theologian in Western science, has narrated, as a brilliant journalist, an understandable synthesis of the historical background of the phenomenon that is taking place in Honduras.
“The State of Honduras, in its almost 200 years, has been controlled and governed by an elite of landowners and self-designated conservative and liberal merchants. During the first 100 years, the leaders of Honduras were selected by means of bayonets and shotguns.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the conservatives, to make the pantomime appear democratic, created the so-called Liberal party and, from that, Honduras lived a whole century under National-Liberal bipartisanship.
With the politico-military coup d’état of 2009, the rich in power accelerated their own political destabilization. In fact, the emergence of the social movement that became the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP), demanded the return to power of the deposed President Manuel Zelaya. It proposed profound structural changes in impoverished and alienated Honduras.
Beginning in 2012, the FNRP gave birth to the current political party Freedom and Free Refoundation, made up mostly of former liberal politicians, who, in its first participation in elections, took second place in the general elections of 2013, with 37 deputies from the 128
that make up the Congress of the Republic.
But the government of JOA, co-author of the coup d’état, which had control of the legislative and judicial powers, and made political life almost impossible. Not only did it exclude them from parliamentary committees, it systematically blocked their legislative initiatives.
After the 2009 coup, Honduras experienced a systematic “democratic”dictatorship, where illegality, corruption and the dissolution of rights were constantly promoted.
The illegality of the JOA dictatorship reached its maximum expression when, contrary to the provisions of the country’s Political Constitution, the presidential candidate announced he was seeking re-election, under the slogan: “The best life for Honduras cannot stop”. Something unlikely in a country that has conquered the world record as “the country with the most violent war in the world,” and where the level of poverty worsened more than 10% after the 2009 coup.
Dissent or disseminating a critical thinking has been punished with harsh penalties and disrespect for human rights. It took on a murky look with massacres and selective killings, such as the murder of Berta Cáceres which was denounced worldwide.
“In these conditions, Honduras was forced to return to the ritual of the polls. The dictator, believing that his victims were defeated, tried to re-elect himself in the polls claiming to be ‘s anointed by God to continue governing Honduras for Christ."
But, the resistance was not dead. It returned to him to ashes and defeated the dictatorship of fear, the dictatorship of the media and the divine dictatorship in which the oligarchy enrolled even the Cardinal, bishops, priests, pastors and apostles, says Itzamna.
At the end of this article, and without knowing the final pronouncement of the TSE, everything seemed to indicate a new confrontation between the oligarchy at the service of US imperialism and the mocked people. It could now be more violent and bloody than in 2009, if the poor don’t win electoral vengeance.
Manuel Y. Yepe is a lawyer, economist and journalist. He was a professor at the Higher Institute of International Relations in Havana. He was Cuba’s ambassador to Romania, general director of the Prensa Latina agency;vice president of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television; founder and National Director of the Technological Information System (TIPS) of the United Program for Development in Cuba, and secretary of the Cuban Movement for the Peace and Sovereignty of the Peoples
A CubaNews translation
Edited by Walter Lippmann
www.englishmanuelyepe.wordpress.com
www.walterlipmann.com
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