The difficulties of Lobo, Micheletti-ism without Micheletti

(This is a translation of a June 4 editorial on Radio Progreso, printed in the original Spanish on Vos el Soberano)

For a president who wanted to stay on the sidelines and neutral during the time that the coup lasted, it is complicating things and these months it signifies a heavy inheritance. This has been corroborated most recently in the gestures by President Porfirio Lobo Sosa for the return of Mel Zelaya and the the official firing from their jobs of the opposition judges by the Supreme Court. It gives the impression that Roberto Micheletti Bain continues in power, as both his approaches and the groups that made him "the de facto president" continue to dominate the political life of the country.

It is the case that in the exterior and interior Pepe Lobo is blocked. From the outside the pressure for international recognition hinges on the unconditional return of Mel Zelaya. And, from inside, the same forces and powers that were behind the coup, the businessmen and the Unión Cívica Democratica, among others, control and neutralize the national political life to the point that they impede our getting out of the "legalistic and constitutional" parameters which Roberto Micheletti pushed.

Its not a surprise that the president of the International Federation of Human Rights pressured that they maintain the political and diplomatic sanctions on Honduras; and this still has not reestablished democracy, the independence of the powers of state and respect for civil and political rights. It denounced the violations of human rights by those rendered immune, the military accused of participating in the coup, firing the opposition judges or the persecution of the press and citizens opposed to the new government.

According to the same institution, "with the arrival of Pepe Lobo, the promoters of the coup have incremented their power in the core of key institutions in addition to maintaining control of those which they had under Micheletti."

The businessmen, the organized civil society, the Unión Cívica Democratica and the Chamber of Commerce for Cortés by their declarations and paid advertisements have made their power felt to President Lobo Sosa, the judicial-democratic institutions of the country, and the National party. The message is very clear: it has the autonomy and independence of powers, adherence to the law, the Constitution....to prevent the return of Mel Zelaya to the country. "The ultra-right, as signaled by a national magazine, considers itself victorious with the expulsion of Mel Zelaya and control of public power; it also is afraid of a democracy which is not elections every four years under their proper rules and a public power exclusively at the service of big private business."

For all this, it is evident that the "difficulties of the president" signifies in this moment a paralysis of political life and on the first anniversary of the coup d'etat, we have, as a form of government, Micheletti-ism without Micheletti.

Violation of Inter-American Human Rights Convention

The community radio station, La Voz de Zacate Grande, 97.1 FM, was shut down on June 3 by 300 police and military, reports Reporters Without Borders. This is a community radio station, with a broadcast range of only 25 kilometers whose signal reaches 10 communities.

However, it had the temerity to be critical of the businessman Miguel Facussé.

Yes, the very same Miguel Facussé who is involved in the land dispute in the Bajo Aguan. Faccussé, and the Club de Coyolito claim title to 5,000 of the 8,000 manzanas of land on the Zacate Grande peninsula in the Gulf of Fonseca in southern Honduras, including the land occupied by the campesinos, on which the radio station has its studios, transmitter, and antenna.


The radio station was surrounded, and sealed with "crime scene" tape by over 300 military and police from the Naval base of Amapala and the 11th Infantry Batallion , serving arrest warrants for 5 campesinos on the orders of a judge in Amapala. The warrant justifies shutting down the station for somehow committing financial fraud. Nonetheless, Reporters Without Borders says the only reason for the raid was to silence the radio station, which has sided with the campesinos against Miguel Facussé.

This same kind of overwhelming force was used to silence opposition radio stations Radio Progreso, Radio Globo, Radio Coco, and TV station Cholusat Sur during the coup.

These actions are a violation of the Honduran telecommunications law, as well as, as Reporters Borders points out, a violation of the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights.

Honduras was, of course, expelled from the OAS in 2009 for violating the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, specifically, for committing a coup d'Etat.

Oops.

Honduras is the new Cuba: Mario Canahuati

Mario Canahuati, Porfirio Lobo Sosa's Foreign Minister, is perhaps not very good at his job. His response to the fact that the reintegration of Honduras is not on the agenda of the OAS meeting in Lima, Peru, starting tomorrow, was to send a report to each of the 32 member countries demonstrating that Honduras has complied with all the international demands since June 28, 2009!

Canahauti's report lays out everything that has happened since the beginning of internal elections in 2008:

"It gives an account of where we've come to, everything we've done to get the international community to recognize us."

The report will be shared with the 32 current members of the OAS on Monday.

Canahuati told La Tribuna that the attitude of the UNASUR and ALBA countries was unacceptable, and he hoped that this report would change their mind.

Canahauti said that "today, after the document we sent, we expect a positive reaction."

If that doesn't result in what is hoped for,

"we will have to initiate a different attitude with respect to initiatives which are remote from the fundamentals and oriented towards damaging the country. We have to revise a little, our position and our strategy to continue."

Remarkably, his model is apparently that paragon of continued economic success: Cuba.

Cuba has been excluded from the OAS for 50 years, and its economy is still expanding, Canahauti told La Tribuna, and because of this the Honduran population should have confidence in the diplomatic gestures of the Chancellery.

Really? Cuba is the model? I don't think that's going to give the business community in Honduras more confidence in the government.

Canahuati is ignoring the uncomfortable truths that the international community has been telling him all along: that a coup is an interruption of democracy that requires corrective action.

He is selectively listening to the Lobo Sosa government's partners like Arturo Valenzuela, US Undersecretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, who says the return of Zelaya to Honduras is not important, instead of OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, who is telling him that for many of the OAS member nations, it is important.

Canahauti isn't listening to the public statements of the UNASUR governments, who are being very clear that this is their main condition for considering the reincorporation of Honduras in the OAS.

Mr. Canahauti should know it takes a positive vote from two-thirds of the 32 member countries for Honduras to be reincorporated into the OAS. By the Lobo Sosa government's own vote count in May, Honduras only has about half the votes it needs to be restored. UNASUR, with 12 countries, represents more than half of the remaining votes necessary to restore Honduras.

"There exist a few important obstacles for the return of Honduras" said Insulza, the biggest of which is the impossibility of the return of Zelaya:

"The construction of the present Honduran government is based on the idea of national reconcilliation. The truth is I don't see how you can produce this reconcilliation when the principal protagonist of the crisis is prevented from returning to his country."

Insulza noted that there are many countries that see restoring Honduras to the OAS without Zelaya's return as "legitimating the coup that continues to administer justice."

This is the official position of UNASUR.

The other obstacle that Insulza mentioned is the firing of the judges by the Supreme Court:

"Those judges were fired from the Judicial branch for having the opinion that in their country there had been a coup d'etat, and that is unacceptable."

It is Insulza, as Secretary General of the OAS, who will guide the OAS to restoring Honduras when the political will is there, not Arturo Valenzuela, who appears to be as out of touch as Mario Canahauti in this process. Restoring Honduras is a political process. To get the necessary consensus, and achieve his goal, Canahauti should listen to Insulza, not Valenzuela.

Rivera Avilez: "I'd rather resign...."

Supreme Court Chief Justice Jorge Rivera Avilez said yesterday that he'd rather resign than give in to political and economic pressures, international and national. Rivera Avilez spoke yesterday in response to Lobo Sosa's comments on Tuesday about the Supreme Court's reaffirmation of its decision to fire four judges and a magistrate for opposing the coup.

He said that the upper levels of the three branches meet regularly to discuss and analyze the political problems of the country, "but they have never pressured us to twist the law, in this way we keep applying [the law] in a straightforward manner." In referring to Lobo Sosa's comments on the Court's decision, he said "He looked at it from the point of view of politics, and possibly, for his politics, it affects it, but politics should never be above the regulations, and we have to respect the constitution and the laws." Rivera Avilez denied that Lobo Sosa had interfered with the Court, as some organizations such as the Unión Civica Democratica had alleged.

Rivera Avilez also denied that the judges had been fired for opposing the coup, and said that the court file lists the causes, but the Court has not made the reasons public. Congress has asked for a report into the reasoning behind the decision, and the Prosecutor for Human Rights, Sandra Ponce, has asked the court for its decision so she can open an investigation.

Meanwhile, Lobo Sosa said that if Rivera Avilez wants to give up his position because of political pressure, "Its his decision."

More semantic juggling by Eduardo Stein

Pity poor Eduardo Stein, former Guatemalan Vice President saddled with leadership of the "Truth" Commission that no one in Honduras really believes will arrive at any truth.

As we previously noted, in his efforts to bend over backwards to please right-wing forces in Honduras that know they have everything to lose if even a shred of light is cast on the events leading up to and following the coup, Stein decided not to use the word "coup". Which is absurd on the face of it, as it begs the question: what is the event that triggered the need for a Truth Commission?

Now, courtesy of another excellent article by Marc Lacey in the New York Times, we have Eduardo Stein's own answer:

“In our minds and in the evidence we’ve gathered, it is clear that it was a forced expulsion of a president who had been elected by popular vote,” he said by telephone from Tegucigalpa. “What do you call that?”

Well, obviously-- coup. Or if you prefer the original Spanish, golpe de estado.

And that can be translated back into English as: irrelevancy. Which is what the Truth Commission has accomplished by not adopting the forthright term for the events of June 28, 2009.

"Pressed pajamas for Pepe Lobo!"

An editorial by Juan Antonio Martinez in the June 1 edition of El Tiempo gives voice to what we have been hearing said quietly as well: there is a real possibility that the coup of 2009 will be followed by another coup in 2010.

As we have noted repeatedly, Lobo Sosa is not in a position of great power, as a president whose legitimacy continues to be questioned by many key international governments as well as a large part of the Honduran population, or as a president who was forced to compose a cabinet of "reconciliation" that appears to have led to a somewhat less than functional governance.

Not to mention that the institution of the presidency suffered a major loss of authority in the coup and its aftermath of a de facto regime. The reason so many South American governments are reluctant to pretend the coup never happened is precisely the bad precedent it sets for repetition, the weakness it signals in the structure of democratic government.

Which brings us to Martinez' editorial, headlined Pressed pajamas for Pepe Lobo!:

All the effort that, with dauntless constancy, president Porfirio Lobo Sosa dedicates to seeking recognition from the international community for his government is admirable and, in this way, the ability to reinsert our country in the distinct fora of regional integration such as SICA, OAS, and the global forum of the UN, from which it was excluded after the fateful coup d'Etat that ruptured our institutional democracy.

Despite this plodding work and having completed almost all the demands imposed for our fatherland to return to the community of democratic nations of the world, where the Rule of Law reigns and human rights are respected, these actions do not seem sufficient to open the lock that maintains us isolated without the enjoyment of the benefits of international relations and starved of the aid and loans of the credit institutions such as BID, IMF, and the World Bank.

And it is the case that the nations integrated in UNASUR, Mexico, and Nicaragua, whose influence is vital for the reincorporation of Honduras in the OAS and SICA, are convinced that the government of Pepe Lobo was elected under the patronage of a dictatorship that abridged public liberties, systematically violated human rights and brought about a disproportionate repression against the resistance to the coup d'Etat.

Now that president Lobo has delegitimated the so-called "presidential succession", by affirming categorically "Call it what you will what occurred was a coup d'Etat", it doesn't seem to improve his efforts to ingratiate himself with the international community much. Nor that he has expressed himself a proponent of a poll for a Constitutional assembly, nor even his offer to travel to the Dominican Republic to bring back ex-president Zelaya to our country with a guarantee that he will not be harassed by Honduran "justice".

In fact, president Porfirio Lobo has not heeded the national problematic for which as Chief of State it belongs to him to seek solutions, such as the case of the alarming delinquency rate, the economic crisis and the social needs of the Honduran people. Due to his absence extremely important decisions keep getting postponed such as the case of the minimum wage and other business that requires his personal attention, while his exhausting international peregrination in search of recognition for his government does not seem to produce the desired fruits.

Everything that president Lobo does to gain the recognition of the international community, including the composition of a Truth Commission and his actions in favor of human rights or his demonstrations of national reconciliation, would be very little while he maintains general Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, and other visible figures of the coup conspiracy, fixed in his bureaucratic apparatus.

Because to tell the truth, they are the same co-religionaries of the president, the businessmen, journalists, and golpista politicians that disapprove of his reconciliatory gesture so that ex president José Manuel Zelaya would return to the country. Just this possibility appalls them because they imagine he will return to take up leadership for the dream of a Constituyente that will lead, inevitably, to a new Constitution and the refounding of the Honduran nation.

What is certain is that the words of president Porfirio Lobo, offering to go to the Dominican Republic to bring back Zelaya, have caused tremendous controversy and disturbance. Although we are certain that the ex president will decline such an offer, because in this country, the golpista structure that produced the rupture of constitutional order and installed the dictatorship of Roberto Micheletti is still intact.

The same golpistas in the Supreme Court and the Public Prosecutor's office. The same armed forces, ready to repress the people, the same businessmen that financed the coup and the same paid-off journalists that defended the barbarity. All the coup structure is latent, attentive to whatever sign there might be of evidence of the return of Zelaya to the national territory and from that, they are insinuating through their designated spokesmen, in veiled ways and with manifest irony, that the present leader ought to have his pajamas ready, in case of any qualms.

Honduran Supreme Court Re-affirms dismissal of anti-coup justices

It was, after all, completely predictable. The Honduran Supreme Court has been rigid in defending itself from any hint of poor judgment, and insists that it is making entirely apolitical decisions when the politicized nature of its decisions are laughably evident.

The latest development provides clear evidence of the weakness of Porfirio Lobo Sosa and the strength of the far right in Honduras in opposing the president-- one product of the success of the right wing coup of 2009. As the AFP coverage of the latest decision put it,

a coalition of organizations of the ultra-right pressured the Supreme Court not to reinstate the judges and to reject the intentions of Lobo to aid Zelaya returning from his exile in the Dominican Republic.

Lobo Sosa is quoted as saying

"All decisions should be congruent with the interests of the nation... they should not generate more conflict. We are tired of this conflict by now".

But what the Supreme Court, and its right wing supporters, are demonstrating is that the claim that the Honduran people have put this conflict behind them is premature. And a large part of the responsibility for that goes to the international community, especially the US, which is so intent on fulfilling a pro-forma version of the San Jose/Tegucigalpa/Guaymas accords, that they are pushing forward with steps that Honduras is clearly not ready to undertake.

And that puts Lobo Sosa between the proverbial rock and hard place. Again quoting AFP,

According to the authority, on the international level they do not differentiate between the decisions of the powers of State, in this case the judicial branch. "They always say 'Honduras' so it is important that we all get in the same key".

But the Supreme Court is not interested in singing a duet with Lobo Sosa.

Meanwhile, the dismissed judges, whose only offense was to accept cases protesting the coup and to personally protest the coup, vowed to take their case to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Guillermo López, one of those who was on a hunger strike following the original Supreme Court ruling, is quoted as saying

"The hunger strike is suspended but we are going to initiate other actions at an international level, in the International Court, the OAS, and other instances to make known that it is impossible to reverse the coup d'Etat in Honduras...They are going to initiate actions in the International Court to judge the public prosecutor, Luis Rubí, the president of the Supreme Court, Jorge Avilés, and the other 14 magistrates [of the Supreme Court], because if not the coup d'Etat cannot be reversed."

A communique from the justices refused reinstatement said

That the Supreme Court of Justice has resolved to confirm the sanctions imposed the past May 5 does nothing more than make clear that this organ has decided to distance itself from legality and that it has surrendered to the pressures of the ultra-right sectors engaged in the rupture of constitutional order... this confirms the direct participation of the Judicial Power in the coup d'Etat of the 28th of June.