Reactions to the Cartagena Accord, Part 3: Artists in Resistance

The Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular is not homogeneous. It does not speak with one voice, as we previously noted.

We have special affection for Artists in Resistance who made the phrase "culture and politics" in our title something other than a contradiction in terms. Performing artists, writers, poets, have been at the forefront of the resistance from its inception.

They have now issued a characteristically poetic response to the Cartagena Accord, in the form of a statement addresses at Mel Zelaya, never mentioning the words "Cartagena Accord", and explicitly denouncing the administration of the co-signatory of that document, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, for continued aggression against the people of Honduras at sites such as the Bajo Aguan.

It is worth visiting the original to get a sense of the poetics, even if you don't read Spanish. Luckily for the non-Spanish reader, Adrienne Pine has provided a translation at quotha. While she leaves the statement to speak for itself, I cannot resist pulling out some threads and noting where they lead.

The first thread is given by the addressee: this is a communication to Mel. But it places on record the fact that Mel's return is not just a personal success, and further, underscores that it does not make him the body of resistance even though he came to embody "the dignity of Honduras":

Your return to Honduras is only the first step for which we took to the streets....

We will go to welcome you as you deserve, compañero Manuel Zelaya, with the pride of knowing that we did everything within our reach to defend to dignity of Honduras that you embody...

The tone is restrained. While congratulating Mel on being able to return to Honduras, and promising to be part of the crowd greeting him, Artists in Resistance refrain from being part of a carnivalesque celebration:

We will be there, compañero Manuel Zelaya, but we will not provide the spectacle. Our song and our voice is political and not simply backup for a cathartic euphoria over a success that we have yet to achieve.

"Cathartic euphoria over a success that we have yet to achieve": nothing could be clearer. The Cartagena Accord has not, and will not solve the entire political situation; it does not even undertake to address many glaring issues.

The Artists in Resistance, like the Political Committee of the Frente, do not believe that Lobo Sosa can be trusted to safeguard human rights, as he promised in the accord:

we will not forget that the Lobo regime is murderous, that it continues murdering the campesinos of Aguán and Zacate Grande; that this very week it has ordered police to stomp on the necks of the students of Luis Bográn, that it ignores the martyrs and desperate hunger strike of the teachers, that it permits the targeted assassinations of artists like Renán Fajardo and Juan Ángel Sorto, that it carelessly ignores the deaths of poets of universal standing like Roberto Sosa and Amanda Castro, that it continues ordering protection for the murderous businessmen of the coup d'état and that it attacks and persecutes its people and has sold off our territory piece by piece, with the help of a police force and army converted by the empire into occupation forces within our country.

While much of this part of the statement could be generalized to others in resistance, the outrage by the Artists in Resistance about the failure of the Lobo Sosa government to recognize "the deaths of poets of universal standing" speaks volumes about the cultural divide opened up by the coup.

On one side stand those for whom culture, in the famous phrase of Myrna Castro, also includes fashion, but not the distribution of what she considered subversive books; and on the other, those who were, under the Zelaya government, seeing public recognition of poets and authors reflected in many aspects of policy, advances now lost.

(The Honduran literary blog mimalapalabra has an appreciation of Roberto Sosa for Spanish readers. Feministas en Resistencia produced a statement on the death of Amanda Castro, reproduced on voselsoberano.)

Nothing in the Cartagena Accord deals with the retrogression in Honduran cultural affairs that came about in the coup and has continued under Lobo Sosa.

Artists in Resistance reserve harsh language-- I would have said, the harshest, had their statements about Lobo Sosa not been so severe-- for others in the Frente de Resistencia:

we did everything within our reach to defend to dignity of Honduras that you embody, an extraordinary effort that has brought us, in the course of two years of painful struggle, to organize our understanding and watch it grow within the legitimate structures of the FNRP. Nonetheless, all of our enormous effort, from every corner of Honduras and from all of our people's artistic expressions, does not seem to be sufficient to ensure that the FNRP at all levels of its hierarchy also advances in terms of decisive dialectic understanding and of accepting internal criticism and its own diversity...

[speaking of their refusal to perform as part of a premature celebration]: This is a fundamental stance for us that has not been understood by those who have been incubating orthodox hegemonies from within the FNRP leadership.

Can the Frente survive the Cartagena Accord? In part, it seems to us, that will depend on whether those who thought they spoke for the entire heterogeneous group get back to work engaging internally.

The Artists in Resistance close with a call to recognize that they, and the rest of the heterogeneous resistance, can be the leaders in the continuing political struggle:

The enormous weight that now lies on your shoulders—and that we are willing to bear—can be summarized in the fact that, with each of your actions, the voice of our martyrs and exiles will remind you of the sacrifice that so many have made to give life to the National Front of Popular Resistance.

This is not quite the conventional view that sees the Cartagena Accord as bringing an end to the need for resistance, viewing Zelaya as the leader of the Frente. The resistance remembered by the Artists is something bigger:

we have been witnesses to the growth of thousands of voices and faces of leadership, leaders of neighborhoods, municipalities, towns, collectives and organizations—an immense demonstration of the strength and will accumulated over decades in the bowels of a humiliated Honduras.

Couched in poetry, what this statement does is make clear that José Manuel Zelaya Rosales matters as a symbol of what has been done to Honduran society generally; and perhaps even a warning to him not to mistake that for a mandate for leadership.

Commemorating the Coup d'Etat of June 2009: Opinions

Marking anniversaries is a basic human impulse. When the event was a positive one, we call this a celebration. When, as in the case of the coup d'Etat in Honduras, the event was violent, destructive, and disruptive, the word we use is "commemorate": to remember together.

So it is that in Honduras today, those in opposition to the coup, to the de facto regime it initiated, and to the administration of Porfirio Lobo Sosa, elected under the shadow of that regime, gathered in public, to share in marking the passage of a year since the legal order was broken in their country.

We would normally be in San Pedro Sula at this time of year, when the celebration of the founding of the city, the Feriana Juniana, takes place. In San Pedro yesterday and today the Artistas en Resistencia continued their practice of using the arts as a weapon of protest, organizing a sleepover Sunday night with cultural activities and fireworks, and promising a concert and screening of the film "Quien Dijo Miedo".

As it happens, El Tiempo, the only newspaper in Honduras that dared to print accurate stories during the coup and de facto regime (and as a result, saw its circulation increase), is published in San Pedro Sula. So it was the first place we went to see how the marking of this anniversary would be covered.

The first notable thing is that the front page includes a whole series of stories on the topic. This even includes reporting on the alternative truth commission sponsored by the Human Rights Platform.

But even more striking is the editorial stance of the paper. Of six signed editorials, four overtly condemn the coup d'Etat. There is only one that openly supports the coup. (*)

The lead (unsigned) editorial is striking: it calls attention to the connection between drug-trafficking and the coup, quoting Hugo Martinez, chancellor of El Salvador, for the punch line: "There are only two sectors that are interested in the governments in the region being weak: drug-traffickers and golpistas".

Luis Alexis Ramos writes of the "Anniversary of a betrayal" (or even, "Anniversary of an act of treason"

promoted by the oligarchic classes of the country, with the collaboration of unscrupulous and ambitious politicians and congress members, clerics and pastors that left the pulpit to meddle in politics, and with the backing of the most backward groups of the decision-makers of the Armed Forces of Honduras...The only positive thing that was obtained through this attack on the Constitution perpetrated by the Honduran oligarchy, is that the people became conscious of their role in defense of democracy, woke up from their stupor of decades; they illuminated their mind with the thoughts of liberty and rebellion in the face of injustices, and that their courage was an armor against all the affronts and the blows that the received defending their right to protest.

In "The Virus of golpismo", Eduardo David Ardon argues that due to the long history of coups in the country

we have not attained the development that the people long for, and we believe that it is only possible when a democratic process is initiated in which popular sovereignty is respected and a system of participation with justice and equity truly takes shape, because if not, if there is not justice for everyone, there will be peace for no one.

Ardon identifies golpismo as a virus in the bloodstream of some politicians because their ancestors carried out previous coups. He traces an intricate web linking many of the authors and supporters of the latest coup to relatives involved in previous disruptions of constitutional government. He continues

The golpistas of yesterday, today, and always, are the same and the people knows them already, so that it fights against them in every circumstance.

The causes of those coups and attacks on the Constitution, also are the same, since at every moment it has been the defense of their economic and political class interests, that do not compromise with the ideas of liberty and progress of the Honduran people.

Efraín Bu Figueroa labels the coup of 2009 an "Historic Rupture",

with which constitutional order was broken in Honduras. A ferocious repression was begun against the people and the independent press was silenced by bayonets. Old death squads were reactivated, that human rights institutions have denounced as dedicated to the selective elimination of the opposition, actions that persist to the present, many of them disguised as crimes by common delinquents.

The coup was fostered by powerful groups, affected in their economic interests by the diverse popular measures taken by the government of citizen power....

The political crisis of 2009 is the eruption of a political-social volcano, whose destructive energeies have been building up for many decades.... When the people began to receive timid responses to their vital needs, the controlling elite saw its special interests menaced, and its hegemonic power in danger....

One year later, Honduras is no longer the same nor will it go back to being so. The coup d'Etat, was a consequence of the distortions and weaknesses of the system, placing in evidence its failure; but at the same time opening the door, in a moment of inflection, to advance without fears, with hope and under new paradigms to a State of justice, and equity, and of confidence under new leadership and renewed ideas.

Finally, Efren D. Falcon writes in "First things First" that the answer to the question "what do Hondurans want?" is complex, beginning with what he identifies as a lack of understanding about the political-economic situation of the country on the part of the small middle class, in which he places himself. His critique of the political-economic elite is harsh:

the political leadership confuses itself and merges with a coarse business class that has not learned how to measure the consequences of its actions. It manipulates with hypocrisy and cynicism poverty and need; it makes a party of an unwanted social conscience-- that is quoted with discretion and without dignity-- but that it keeps in its Prada handbag or Armani wallet when it isn't speaking in public, citing measures of inequality that they themselves sponsor.

To this, he contrasts

the growth of a social movement whose extension has no equal in national history. We call this phenomenon the Resistance: resistance to the coup d'Etat, and against an infinity of irregularities that today are perfectly unmasked. What is moving through the country today is a resistance against the present social and political-economic order, ever stronger winds of change.

These editorial opinions contrast vividly with the failure in much of the English language press to understand that the coup of 2009 was a response by a threatened political-economic elite to the possibility of broader effective participation on the part of the Honduran people, to relatively small steps toward economic equity and participation in governance by that people.

The repeated recognition that there is no going back, and that the resistance movement mobilized by the coup may well be the real lasting legacy of that attempt to hold back change, is and should be the story, one year after what history will look back on as the grossest miscalculation by a group in power thinking they could hold back change by force and will.


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*The sixth signed editorial in Tiempo, by Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramirez, is ambiguous. It presents an argument against people who rely on "one book". If we take this as a call for tolerance of pluralism, mark it in the category of opposed to the coup. Ramirez, a former revolutionary during the anti-Somoza fight in Nicaragua, wrote in negative terms about the coup in Honduras last year, calling the international press to task for not identifying it clearly as a military coup, calling attention to the dangerous political involvement of the military, to cite just two examples.

But he also is engaged in fighting against what he sees as the danger of continuismo in Nicaragua. So the framework for his editorial is not that of the Honduran editorialists, and he makes no mention of the anniversary. Yet it is interesting to read in the context of that anniversary. He asks explicitly whether we should hold against Marx "the socialism of the 21st century". References to 21st century socialism in Honduras usually come from those who see danger in the kinds of participatory democracy promoted under Manuel Zelaya. We would not be surprised if this editorial is read by those people as support for their position, regardless of Ramirez' own intentions.