by Fernanda Lopez (writing from Honduras),
Timothy Dwight, Yale College 2010
July 9, 2009
In Tegucigalpa, the cityscape is being whitewashed. The armed forces are whitewashing the demonstrations off the walls.
On June 28th, democratically- elected president Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales was kidnapped by the Honduran armed forces and transferred to Costa Rica. Through this act of coercive exile, and despite the violent measures exacted to conduct it, the coup-planners hoped to derive international recognition for their new regime. They called it a “constitutional succession,” and even only yesterday, perhaps the most prominent Honduran sociologist called it, a “lesson to the world in matters relating to constitutional law.” In political circles –that is to say, among aristocrats- it would be thought imprudent to utter the word “coup.” No journalist dares broadcast that utterance.
Yes, they are whitewashing the coup. First, they rationalized it: the President had been disrespecting a Supreme Court ruling which prohibited Zelaya’s plebiscite scheduled (and confirmed) for that Sunday. The question of impeachment was postulated in Congress, of course. But Congress shortly realized that you cannot plausibly impeach a president on grounds that he harbors dictatorial aspiration, if your sole evidence is that he plans to hold a non-binding poll. Worse still, if that non-binding poll asks voters one simple question: whether they would support the addition of a fourth ballot box during the regular November elections. But a proposition to impeach would be truly fatal if the ballot box in question restricted itself to questions concerning citizens’ contentment with the Constitution, their municipal governments and the state. It took one Congressional meeting, one threatening remark from the President – “go on, investigate me, but also investigate yourselves” – for the country’s legislators to overthrow the law, and pursue a more violent alternative. This they branded a “constitutional succession,” upon persuading the Supreme Court to order the ouster.
But Hondurans would not have it thus rationalized. So the coup-leaders falsified the proof. No, that is too kind – they forged it. On the afternoon succeeding the coup, all media stations stopped broadcasting cartoons and soccer-matches. Hondurans exhaled a sigh of relief; they had been kept incommunicado for hours, in a mind-numbing deluge of soap operas and week-old sports games being transmitted –the networks insisted- en vivo. It was rumored, anchormen said, that a letter of resignation had appeared, as if to miraculously to absolve the interim regime of all guilt. Congress “confessed” that President Zelaya had resigned; since he was no longer officially President at the moment of the coup, the Supreme Court suggested, Sunday’s events did not constitute an ouster. Moreover, since President Zelaya’s signature now graced a document, which decreed the creation of a constituent assembly, which would have replaced Congress, Zelaya’s conduct merited impeachment. (This begs the question, of course, of why he was not impeached.)
By then, free expression had been all but hijacked. Pro-Zelaya journalists went into self-imposed house arrest. Radio and TV stations –left and right (wing)- became heavily militarized. News networks opposing Micheletti’s interim government (such as Channel 36 and Radio Progreso 103.3) were invaded by soldiers who stormed in to disconnect their stations, taking them off the air. Fortunately for the Honduran oligarchs who control Congress their capital not only secured the backstage effectiveness of the coup, but also its undisputed acclamation in the morning papers. Their vast ownership of Congress was rivaled only by their control over most media stations and all of the major newspapers. As private spokespersons for the Honduran oligarchy, journalists broadcast condemnations of pro-Zelaya protests, and inflated the size of anti-Zelaya manifestations, dubbing the pro-coup movement the pro-“Democracy” movements, appropriating nominal constitutional ideals which they had mere hours ago overturned. Most networks and other news entities financed by these individuals had long violated their news anchors’ right to report independently. For years, they had whitewashed Zelaya reforms. They had minimized such critical reforms as Zelaya’s minimum wage increase or “Poder Ciudadano”: a Zelaya undertaking to instate pure democracy through public referendums (which were consistently overruled by the Supreme Court.) Yes, for years they had whitewashed even his crimes, distilling a long history of corruption and scandal, which they only now prosecute, in the midst of an expedient crisis.
Besides keeping citizens misinformed, the interim regime had practiced power cuts, which placed households within a world of perfect aloneness. In the days immediately following the coup, electricity was volatile, particularly whenever CNN en Español – which, like almost every other international media outlet, had not halted to declare the takeover a coup – reported on the Honduran crisis. With fighter jets flying overhead, in the midst of perfect quiet and total dark, Tegucigalpa, a city already versed in the terror tactics of the Cold War, drifted inexorably toward nostalgia. Then Congress announced that it had passed an emergency law that suspended the following articles:
Article 69: "A persons liberty is inviolable and can only be restricted or suspended temporarily through process of law."
Article 71: "No person can be arrested nor kept incommunicado for more than 24 hours without being placed before a competent authority to be judged. Judicial detention during an investigation must not exceed six consecutive days from the moment that the same is ordered."
Article 78: "Freedoms of association and meeting are always guaranteed when they are not contrary to public order and good customs.
Article 79: "All persons have the right to meet with others, peacefully and without weapons, in public demonstration or transitory assembly, in relation to their common interests of any type, without necessity of notice or special permission."
Article 81: "All persons have the right to circulate freely, leave, enter, and remain in national territory. No one can be obligated to change home or residence except in special cases and with those requirements that the Law establishes."
Curfew was set to start at 10:00 PM, to end at 5:00 AM and to extend for only the first few days. When the first 48 hours had outgrown their term, they flowered into 240: as many hours as this interim government has seized power. To feel oneself paralyzed upon sundown is nothing; it is only the skeleton of this political beast. It is quite another to recognize that one is legally a non-person come dusk. If during the day I lack the most minimal rights - to protest and to freely associate – at nightfall, I have not even a guarantee of due process or habeas corpus while under arrest. That the interim regime has conceived of these measures as “democratic” is perhaps the most terrifying “whitewash” of all. For “they are the majority,” they assure the Honduran populace. Even though the economic elite has had to resort to coercive means to recruit supporters for the coup, threatening their workers – humble mothers at maquilas, gardeners at their households – to either protest against Zelaya or to endure the wintry hunger- pangs of unemployment, “they are the majority.” This is their “majority,” whose brazen exploitation they arrogantly tout, even in the midst of popular manifestations.
But to tolerate all manner of protest would be too much, especially when pro-Zelaya organizations such as the Bloque Popular number much higher than your fabricated “majority.” So the Honduran army has restricted the transit of pro-Zelaya protesters, at one point detaining 70 buses en route to protest Mr. Micheletti’s administration just outside the capital. Last Sunday’s 60,000-person manifestation near Toncontin Airport, which had assembled citizens from all corners of the country to welcome back President Zelaya, erupted in the ugliest confrontation yet. After the army granted Zelaya supported permission to cross over into the (militarized) southern zone of the airport, soldiers shot out into the protester’s barracks, injuring several and killing two: a teenager, Isis Obed Murillo, and another citizen whose name remains unknown (the government junta has yet to disclose the person’s identity). As if that repressive standoff had not sufficed, the government unexpectedly proceeded to announce –in a national broadcast – that Sunday’s toque de queda would no longer be 10 PM, but 6:30 PM, three hours and a half earlier than had been legislated. This announcement arrived a mere half- hour before the cited curfew time, licensing all military officials and police officers to detain the protesters. Since most had remained outside the airport in anticipation of Zelaya’s landing, this 10-minute warning sanctioned and, indeed required, the incarceration of all protesters remaining from the march. This peaceful demonstration, which still numbered in the tens of thousands, was thus broken up, and its leaders detained for an unspecified period of time. In total, only 800 were detained overnight, since the penitentiaries were already filled beyond capacity.
But the protesters had left their indelible mark upon the capital. If the coup’s regime had whitewashed citizens’ freedoms, Hondurans retaliated by overwriting them onto the city’s infrastructure and façade, on Sunday’s impassioned parade toward the airport. On Monday morning, Tegucigalpa’s pedestrians and drivers awoke to a city writ democratic in spray-paint: “SOY POETA Y SOY REVOLUCION: ARTE ES REVOLUCION” (I AM POETRY AND I AM REVOLUTION: ART EQUALS REVOLUTION) or “las dificultades se rompen con el pecho abierto” (“difficulties are broken with an open chest”). This was a tamer art, for there were inscriptions that condemned. There were inscriptions in the downtown Cathedral reading, “Cardinal, We Excommunicate You.” Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez, who has justified the interim regime’s repressive conduct, had just the day prior cautioned that President Zelaya’s return would cause bloodshed. There were inscriptions denouncing Honduras’ bloody coup regimes from the Cold War. “Billy Joya,” one read, “Your Days are Numbered.” Billy Joya was an officer at Battalion 316, a virtual laboratory for Cold War torture techniques, who was recently appointed by the interim regime to a coveted spot in Micheletti’s Cabinet. There were inscriptions accusing former presidents Carlos Flores Facusse and Ricardo Maduro of treason and noted oligarchs Rafael Ferrari and Chukry Kafie of conspiracy. There were inscriptions that ventured even further: “En Honduras Libramos la Guerra Contra el Fascismo Internacional” (“In Honduras We Wage the War Against Internatonal Fascism”), even deeper “Honduras, They Piss All Over You and the Papers Say It’s Raining.” There were inscriptions, but these have all since been whitewashed. Once discerned by the authorities, they faded away with all the censorship characteristic of this regime. Tegucigalpa’s proprietors leapt to wash away all prose. Or they merely hired the Honduran poor to paint over a moment’s glimpse of freedom –of freely thought prose – which they would have read and mobilized toward, if only our rights were not so hollow, so hypocritically upheld, and then so thoroughly usurped.
Now that negotiations between Micheletti’s coup regime and deposed President Zelaya descended into political stalemate Friday morning, there is a calm hovering over Tegucigalpa. This is the tranquility that terrifies most –not the calm before the storm- but the eye of the inexorable hurricane about to turn right.
