One Year Later: Edmundo Orellana

One year after the Coup d'Etat many things have happened. Many evils, for certain.

The national problems have been accumulating dangerously as in a pressure cooker. If they have no escape, the country will be exposed to a convulsion without parallel in national history.

The government is alone. It is alone because no one serves it. Many of its functionaries have already begun to push their candidacies and with energy.

They work for themselves and not for the country. They fight even about the quantity of potholes they fill, with a publicity display whose cost is much higher than the repair of the pothole.

They work without coordination. Each one does what he wants and how he fancies. Meanwhile, they go around expounding a plan that no one puts in practice because if they were to execute it surely it would have already had positive results for the population.

Tired of such an administrative disaster. They decide to go on vacation. They all went to South Africa. The mayor of the capital went, despite the fact that the city remains in the middle of a chaos of grand proportions after the most recent tropical storm. The president of the national congress also went.

In the face of the indifference of his comrades and without caring about the threats of a Coup d'Etat, the head of government decided to accompany them in their vacations. The country remained adrift. And no one cared.

Meanwhile, civic insecurity is increasingly alarming and no one discusses the advance of organized crime. Legal insecurity has investors running. The lack of work is an increasingly and more dangerous destabilizing factor. The rise in costs of the family budget distresses households. The rise in taxes steals money from the pockets of the taxpayers, who do not see in exchange any compensation on the part of the central or local government. The middle class declines, poverty grows and extreme poverty becomes huge.

An army formed in the battle to obtain its daily bread is more dangerous than a regular army ready to shoot.

The range of health services has touched bottom. Hemorrhagic dengue is winning the battle against us because of the negligence of the health authorities. And there is another menace in the saturation of latrines in the hills, that the insalubrity that it generates only is compensated by the capacity of our organisms to generate antibodies, exposed every day to a dirty city full of trash.

Education seems no longer to be an option of progress in the country, because the children take classes on the bare ground, in schools with just one teacher, and that's when there are classes.

Recognition by the international community doesn't matter. What will come will be because God wants it so. This is what those who insist that this government should be a simple prolongation of the de facto regime are betting. Those responsible for foreign policy, when they express something in this respect, do so in response to the questions of reporters in a casual interview, where each phrase is a passionate reaction, and in each one can be divined as a challenge to the international community; as if it would not matter that Honduras, despite its fragility, remains on the margin of the international community.

One year after the Coup d'Etat and the problems are bad and worse. With a government, that is, yes, casual.

Translated from the original published June 28 in La Tribuna.