New Culture Warriors, New Tactics

The culture war in Honduras is heating up-- and there's a new player involved.

Yesterday the Minister of  Culture, Tulio Mariano González, asked the director of the Casa Morazan (Morazan House) Museum to resign.  Gonzalez wrote:

"If you don't want to work in harmony with the authorities and criticize the government, please resign so that other people who have the will can take you're place."

Carlos Turcios, the Director of the museum, has told the press that his entire budget will be used up on July 31 so the museum will have to fire staff unless the government allocates more funds to pay the staff to keep it open. 

González told the press that the museum was not going to be allowed to close.  He said:

 "NASA also had its budget cut but that doesn't mean that NASA is closing.  What we need to do is improve our offering, improve the initiative, make more work and this is what we're doing in all parts."

Except that NASA would close if you cut its budget so that it could not pay the people it needs to carry out its mission.  A museum cannot stay open without staff to operate it.

According to Turcios, the museum has 8 employees, and enough money to pay half their salaries through July 31. After that, he has 74,000 lempiras ($3700) to pay people for the rest of the year.  He told Conexihon that

"After the 31 of July there is no budget for us but we will not close the Casa Morazan."

Meanwhile, González says the museum is only closing temporarily.  La Prensa says he told radio station HRN that

"The Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History is doing a restoration and decided to close it [the Casa Morazan] for two weeks while doing the work to provide better service."

(The Minister may be referring to the installation of 46 objects that the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History agreed to loan the Casa Morazan.)

So why did Gonzaléz call for Turcios to resign, when he is apparently volunteering to run the museum, for free?

Turcios thinks that González is operating under a misunderstanding.

The museum rented space for a week long community action seminar by the Confederación Unitaria de Trabajadores de Honduras (CUTH). A group called the Frente Amplio de Trabajadores de la Cultura y el Arte (Broad Coalition of Workers in Culture and Art) was included.

The Frente Amplio is a new player on the scene of culture, organized earlier this summer with an agenda prominently calling for the resignation of the current Minister of Culture. The original announcement of its formation indicted "the total disfunctionality of the Secretaría de Cultura, Artes y Deportes (SCAD) and the head of that same institution, Tulio Mariano Gonzales". Their conclusion was that the leaders of SCAD "are not interested at all in culture" and have put historic patrimony in danger "through governmental indolence".

The initial statements about the formation of the Frente Amplio say that "this is not a closed group, since all artists, intellectuals, and creators of art" are welcome. So unlike the unions of SCAD and other cultural entities like IHAH, which have either gone along with decisions of the ministry and its appointees, or suffered retaliation for efforts to correct mismanagement, the Frente Amplio is not subject to the same kinds of pressures that can be placed on employees.

On Monday the Frente Amplio denounced the virtual abandonment of local Casas de Cultura by the Ministry of Culture, and mismanagement of national museums. They singled out the Casa Morazan, noting that "the budget has been reduced to 800,000 lempiras (some 39,000 dollars), so that it will cease operations this coming [July] 31".

Turcios says some "political activists" in the Secretaria de Cultura, Artes, y Deportes, Minister González's organization, used this statement as a pretext to denounce him for supposedly allowing "political" activities to take place in the museum, resulting in the Minister asking for his resignation.

We think the Minister can't take criticism-- and is unwilling to admit that under his guidance, cultural organizations are falling apart in the country.

Between the Rock of the Law of Minimum Wage and the Hard Place of Honduran Business

While the ongoing soap opera "Pepe Lobo In Search of Recognition" continues to fascinate us, for most people in Honduras, the more critical issues are those that affect their everyday life. Assassinations of environmental activists and journalists continue. Multiple sectors in Honduras have protested the new economic measures introduced by Lobo Sosa. Unions are restive or in outright resistance.

Among the issues that will affect all Hondurans that are pending resolution: setting the minimum wage.

As the English-language news site Inside Costa Rica reported today, Jose Luis Baquedano, Secretary General of CUTH (the United Workers Confederation) and other union leaders are calling for demonstrations if the minimum wage is not settled this week by Lobo Sosa and his Minister of Labor, Felícito Ávila:

"We will just wait this week for him to decide once and for all, otherwise there is no other alternative but to take to the streets."

The same legal requirement led to then-President Zelaya setting a new minimum wage increase in fall 2008, alienating business owners, credited as one of the factors leading to the coup d'Etat of June 28, 2009. When negotiations between unions and employers fail, the government is required to set the minimum wage. According to Inside Costa Rica,

Although the three major labor unions eased their position lowering the demand for salary increase from 30 to 15 percent, the private sector proposed only 3.7 percent.

The current minimum wage, even after the unprecedented increase by the Zelaya administration to 5500 lempiras ($291) per month for urban labor and 4035 lempiras ($214) for rural labor, is still below the level of funding necessary for purchase of basic household food needs, estimated at $324. The cost of the basic household food needs is "considered the most expensive in the region".

The positions of the two parties are far apart. According to La Tribuna, the unions have lowered their request for raises to 15%, and have indicated openness to 10%; but the business community has limited their offer to 3.7%. In US dollars, the union position requests just over $45 a month more (825 lempiras), while that of business would be an increase of about $11 (203 lempiras) a month.

La Tribuna's coverage says that Lobo Sosa will be meeting on Monday May 17 with the business sector to set the minimum wage, having succeeded this week in calling labor back to the negotiation. The paper says that

By tradition, if there does not exist an accord between the parties, the President on duty will proceed to announce the fixing of the wage by means of an Executive Decree on the International Day of the Worker [May 1], a thing that did not happen this year.

Workers groups reportedly are also threatening that if Lobo Sosa does not comply with his duties under the Ley del Salario Mínimo (Law of Minimum Wage) they will pursue a legal complaint against the Honduran government with the World Trade Organization.

So both by law and tradition, it seems, Lobo Sosa needs to set the terms of employment. There is no doubt that he does so between a rock and a hard place: with unions threatening to take to the streets and mount barricades, and with the specter of what happened to the last president to raise the minimum wage more than the business sector wanted hanging over the decision. So in one sense his hesitation is not surprising. Meanwhile, it is the minimum-wage laborers who are left with too little income to cover the basic cost of living.

May Day: a Constitutional Assembly is "the final objective"

May first, traditional date throughout the world for demonstrations by organized labor, this year presented a particular opportunity in Honduras for the Frente de Resistencia to make visible popular support in the face of a Honduran government and international community determined to ignore the existence of an organized popular opposition.

Reports and photography by participants in the marches leave no doubt that anti-coup, pro-constitutional assembly messages were critical to the marches that took place in the major cities of Honduras.

What is harder to know is the scale of the marches. Pro-coup newspapers chose to portray the presence of Resistence participants as usurping the events, displacing "authentic" laborers. El Heraldo continued to equate the Frente de Resistencia with the Liberal Party, taking advantage of slogans by some Resistence marchers calling for the government to allow José Manuel Zelaya Rosales to return to Honduras, to portray this as the main demand of the marchers. The newspaper also claimed, without any evidence, that marchers displayed "more Cuban and Venzuelan flags than Honduran", although the photograph captioned with this provocative claim actually showed Doña Xiomara Castro de Zelaya giving a speech in a crowd holding a poster entirely occupied by Honduran imagery-- including the Honduran flag.

El Heraldo gave no overall estimate of the crowd in Tegucigalpa, only claiming that the speeches given by people it condemned as "political" were heard by 5,000 people, while the speeches of union leaders were heard by only 3,000, as part of its argument that the Resistance illegitimately took over a workers' march, ignoring the substantial overlap between the Resistance and unionized labor and campesino groups.

However, even the pro-coup newspaper, La Tribuna, was forced to acknowledge a strong turnout, reporting that the march in Tegucigalpa

did not bring together the 150,000 people that the organizers hoped for, but it was sufficiently massive to paralyze the city with the closing of nearby commercial centers and to alter vehicular traffic in the perimeter that the route embraced. A caravan of motorcycles headed the protest, followed by dozens of union members and campesino organizations, with large placards on which could be read messages like "We want a Constitutional Assembly", "Neither forget nor forgive the authors of the coup d'Etat".

In another story in La Tribuna, the number of marchers is estimated at "more than 100,000".

Meanwhile, El Heraldo reported that in the southern city of Choluteca, marchers-- again described as the "liberal resistance" and portrayed as "inserting" themselves inauthentically into the occasion-- took over the Panamerican Highway for an hour and a half.

While again no estimate of the size of the crowd was provided, the effective ability to block the main highway for that long suggests a substantial body of demonstrators. In its coverage of this demonstration, El Heraldo described the demand for a Constitutional Assembly, oddly, as having been a defeated campaign point of the UD party in November 2009, rather than admit that the call for the Constitutional Assembly is not merely the policy of a particular political party.

Separate reporting on marches in San Pedro Sula, again lacking any estimate of crowd size, noted the presence of marchers representing the Frente de Resistencia. But it also makes clear what other stories tried to confuse: that the Frente and the unions worked together to advance a shared set of themes, including calls for greater economic justice but also the demand for a Constitutional Assembly.

Israel Salinas, president of the Confederación Unitaria de Trabajadores de Honduras (CUTH), is quoted as saying that workers will join in demonstrations called for June 28:

“the people are and will continue to be in the streets until there is a national Constitutional Assembly, because this is the final objective"...