Courtesy of YVKE Mundial, an anniversary that could have gone a whole lot better:
On the 190th anniversary of the independence of Honduras, former president and now co-ordinator of the Broad Front for Popular Resistance (FARP, in Spanish), Manuel Zelaya, called on Hondurans to fight for the true emancipation of the Central American country.
“We are not afraid, and we fight for the true independence of Honduras,” said the former leader, who was deposed in a coup d’état in June 2009.
Honduran independence was commemorated in two acts: one headed by current president Porfirio Lobo, and the other, in which groups forming part of the FARP, an organization born upon the return of Zelaya, gathered.
The former head of state said that in Honduras, there exist “oligarchic, bloodthirsty groups, who are governing outside of the authorities of the State”, such that they “are discomposing the situation, and attacking the stability of Honduras”.
Zelaya said that those sectors want to destroy the resistance, which sprang up after the coup d’état.
The leader pointed out that the oligarchy rejects democracy and seeks more “persecution, violence and disappearances, as in the decade of the 1980s”, when Honduras lived through a profound internal confllict.
For that reason, Zelaya called on Hondurans to “denounce and fight them in every battlefield where can, because we are all at risk”.
The FARP demands an end to the assassinations of its followers, and that the authors of those crimes be brought to justice, along with a Constituent Assembly, respect for human rights, and punishment for all the material and intellectual authors of the coup d’état.
Ever since the civilian-military dictatorship, headed by businessman Roberto Micheletti, took power in June 2009, internal repression has been growing in Honduras.
Following the campaign that brought Lobo to the presidency in 2010, the situation has not changed, and dozens of members of the FARP, along with campesinos, have been killed, but no guilty persons have been caught.
For his part, the current president led independence-day ceremonies in the presidential palace, where he stated that the solutions to “common problems” of the Central American peoples, “must be common” as well.
Translation mine.
I wonder: Just what does Pepe Lobo consider a “common solution” to the “common problem” of history repeating itself in Central America? The reason I ask, you see, is that there’s an elephant in the living room of the Honduran presidential palace:
That elephant has been there many times before, and under many names. But it has always been the same elephant.
And if you think I’m joking (or nuts), this elephant is well documented. The coup could not have taken place without help from Washington, and high up in Washington at that. As high as the State Department, and that’s no joke.
What IS a joke, and a dirty one, is the notion that Honduras is “free” now. Or that it ever has been.