Reactions to the Cartagena Accord, Part 4: The UCD responds

The Union Civica Democratoica (UCD) has spoken, and they don't like the Cartagena Accord.

No surprise there.

Speaking for the UCD, Fernando Anduray said

"What we are not in agreement with is an accord that was signed to aid the initiatives of the government of Venezuela and the president of Colombia without consulting Honduras."

So, Porfirio Lobo Sosa clearly doesn't speak for Honduras in Anduray's universe.

The directorate of the UCD held a press conference on May 26 to denounce the accord. According to Rina Callejas de Guillen

"I regret that President Porfirio Lobo Sosa continues to humiliate and act behind the back of the Honduran people, officiating and sacrificing our dignity to the highest bidder..."

Callejas de Guillen was speaking as the new President of the UCD.

Their "constitutionalist", Irma de Acosta Fortin got right to the point, following the lead of Jimmy Dacaret and Fernando Anduray of a few days earlier.

"the pretense of the Cartagena Accord is to make possible the installation of a National Constituent Assembly, which is absolutely unconstitutional."

She sees no reason for constitutional reform anyway; she noted that after all, 98 percent of the constitutional clauses can be modified without resorting to a National Constituent Assembly.

I guess she missed the discussion over the last two years that made it clear there was a significant desire to reconsider all of the clauses of the 1982 constitution, which was crafted largely with US help and with an agenda that had more to do with ensuring governmental rigidity than allowing change.

Also at the press conference was a spokesperson for the Association of Reservists of Honduras, Aversio Navas, who suggested that the US might reject the actions called for in the Cartagena Accord, and cut off economic cooperation with Honduras.

In fact Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State, has already lauded Lobo Sosa for carrying out the negotiations, so Navas's profession of fear of US rejection was already without merit when pronounced.

(You will remember that it was the Association of Reservists who responded when the UCD issued its call for marches in support of Roberto Micheletti Bain, the so called "white shirts".)

So the UCD proves true to form.

They think the fix is in for a National Constituent Assembly. It's not.

The Frente could try to make a call for a National Constituent Assembly by means of a plebiscite or referendum thanks to the new set of laws passed by Congress, but in order for that to get on the ballot, it will require the approval of Congress.

It would surprise me if this conservative, Nationalist party dominated, neoliberal Congress would approve such a referendum.

The UCD is still fighting the ghosts of the 1980s, not "twenty-first century socialism", its professed enemy.

Everyone else has moved on; it's time they did too.

"The ancestral force of Lempira": COPINH responds

A pattern is emerging in responses from the more revolutionary forces within the FNRP: greet Mel, while making it clear his importance is due to his symbolic place as a most visible, but not unique, victim of the coup and institutionalized power; don't mention the Cartagena Accord by name; do denounce the government of Porfirio Lobo Sosa and repudiate any claim that "reconciliation" has happened.

Again courtesy of Adrienne Pine at quotha, we have a translation of one of the responses that we have been anticipating most anxiously: that of the Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras (COPINH).

The original statement in Spanish was issued May 27, in La Esperanza, Intibuca, the heart of the territory of the contemporary Lenca, and the core of the area where in the early sixteenth century Lempira led resistance to Spanish colonization.

COPINH, like the Artists in Resistance, addresses its statement to Mel, calling for "a warm welcome to you, who symbolize the struggle of the Honduran people to create a participatory and human democracy".

That is immediately followed by a call to

deepen all our efforts at denouncing the criminal dictatorship led by Porfirio Lobo Sosa, peon of the oligarchy and of North American imperialism.

COPINH then turns to address the OAS directly:

if you think you will wipe the board clean and start over, you are mistaken; you are mistaken in your cold economic calculations, in your political pragmatism, in your urgent desire to serve imperialism in its project of rearranging the continent; you are mistaken in your hypocrisy of recognizing a murderous regime that is the inheritor of a coup d'état and that has not complied with the conditions for return imposed by the OAS itself, for which it was expelled in the first place.

Indeed, the hypocrisy about human rights issues is glaring; to simply accept yet another assurance from Lobo Sosa, who has, after all, consistently assured the OAS and other international bodies that he is respecting human rights (while his Minister of Security tightens the noose, and journalists and activists continue to die in incidents that go uninvestigated), might be a pretty good definition of heartless pragmatism.

COPINH raises another troubling issue that is side-stepped by taking the Cartagena Accord as sufficient ground to reintegrate Honduras in the OAS: the authors of the coup have not been sanctioned.

The amnesty law passed by a complicit Honduran congress continues to block resolution of the political crisis because it represents impunity, as the COPINH statement recognizes, affirming the group's

conviction to fight, alongside the nation, against impunity, and to do everything possible to ensure that there will be punishment for the authors and actors of the criminal coup.

COPINH particularly underlines the project for which it has been a leading advocate within the Frente, "refounding" Honduras, vowing to continue efforts toward

the creation of a new society, refounded from below, capable of achieving decolonization, emancipation, and a dignified life

In that same passage, COPINH reaffirms its commitment to struggles that began before the coup, and that are motivated as much by inequities in the fundamental governmental and economic system of the country as at those introduced or exacerbated by the disruption in constitutionality brought on by the coup, committing to

continuing with the historic struggle that we have been undertaking in our communities defending our natural resources, our sovereignty, our self-determination.

It is worth reminding readers that one of the reasons that COPINH is committed to a new constitution is that the current constitution lacks protections for indigenous sovereignty, and treats natural resources as national resources, denying these same communities mechanisms to defend themselves against the damages caused, for example, by mining projects. Tinkering at the edges of the current constitution cannot bring the protections these advocates want and need to protect their continuity as communities.

Lest anyone labor under the illusion that a process of "truth and reconciliation" has been begun, let alone been completed, COPINH ends with an exhortation calling on "the ancestral force of Lempira, Mota and Etempica", sixteenth century indigenous leaders:

We will not forget, We will not forgive, and WE WILL NOT reconcile!!

So the tally continues to run against the Cartagena Accord...

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.

Reactions to the Cartagena Accord, Part one: the FNRP

Signing agreements is easy; anyone out there forgotten the San Jose/Tegucigalpa Accords, and how they ended the coup d'etat in 2009 and restored constitutional order?

So, as we previously said, we think that there will need to be close scrutiny of the reactions of differently positioned parties to the Cartagena Accord.

Porfirio Lobo Sosa was strongly motivated to do whatever he could to allow Honduras back into OAS. Other hemispheric governments had the same motivation. José Manuel Zelaya Rosales could not be seen to stand in the way of some sort of step forward and retain any international credibility.

But neither Lobo Sosa, nor Zelaya, nor the governments of Colombia, Venezuela, the US or other OAS member states can compel the people of Honduras, far from reconciled, to follow through. The question then will be: how is this playing at home?

After surprising silences, responses are beginning to trickle in. We want to give each serious consideration, so this post treats just one: the official statement of the Comité Político of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular.

In this statement, the Political Committee of the Frente recognizes the advances made

With respect to the agenda proposed by the ex-President of the Republic of Honduras (2006-2010) and General Coordinator of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales.

Nuance matters in statements like these. The Political Committee is not disavowing Zelaya, but they are pointing out that the Cartagena Accord follows his agenda, not one outlined by the Frente.

To characterize what follows as supportive to the Cartagena Accord would be to miss more nuances. The Political Committee takes a point by point reaction to the four agenda items it recognizes in the new accord.

On the return from exile of Zelaya and others, such as Padre Tamayo, the Frente endorses the agreement but notes it will actually be fulfilled when they are back in the country. Caution may seem overdone, but remember the Tegucigalpa Accord: I guarantee you everyone in the Frente does, and the bitter disappointment.

That the Frente does not trust Lobo Sosa becomes clear in their reaction to the second agenda item, general human rights issues:

In the sphere of human rights there are no advances, because the regime of Lobo Sosa did not commit to, nor guarantee the application of justice to the violators of human rights, nor the guardianship of the human rights of the people in resistence, this is a challenge to achieve for the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular.

In other words: we see your lips moving but what don't see you doing anything.

The third agenda item, as described by the Political Committee of the Frente, reads

The recognition of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular as a political and belligerent force ("fuerza política y beligerante")

We are now at the heart of a question debated within the Frente: should it become (or give rise to) a political party? or should it remain a social movement with political aims? "Beligerante" in this context could be glossed as "militant", as in "a militant political movement". "Fuerza", literally force, is not to simply be reduced to "party" (partido).

So it is interesting that in analyzing this third agenda item and what was achieved in the Cartagena Accord, the Political Committee of the Frente does not use the word "partido" at all:

En cuanto al reconocimiento del Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular como una fuerza política y beligerante, se logra un avance en el sentido que el régimen se compromete, a cumplir las garantías para la inscripción del F.N.R.P. ante el Tribunal Supremo Electoral a la luz de las leyes para la participación democrática en los procesos políticos electorales de Honduras y para que pueda integrar los organismos oficiales de carácter político electoral en igualdad de condiciones.

[In regard to the recognition of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular as a political and militant force, an advance was achieved in the sense that the regime committed itself to comply with guarantees for the registration of the FNRP before the Tribunal Supremo Electoral in light of the laws for democratic participation in the electoral political processes of Honduras and so that it can be integrated in the official organizations of a political electoral character in equality of conditions.]

What the laws alluded to here govern is not just political parties, but broader advocacy groups. Returning to the language of the Accord, we note that the rapid translation we posted here interpolated the words "political party" because that is how this part of the agreement was parsed by those negotiating it. But it does not seem to us that the response by the Political Committee of the Frente endorses a full conversion to a political party.

Finally, the Political Committee pronounces on the fourth of Zelaya's agenda items in negotiating the Cartagena Accord and again, comes down in a more mixed way than simple outright endorsement of the language of the accord itself:

En el tema de la constituyente que es uno de los grandes objetivos del Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular, se logra el derecho a la consulta para la Asamblea Nacional Constituyente; de esta forma se ratifica que con la fuerza de los principios y las ideas del soberano se vence a los intereses mezquinos de los grupos de poder que le han negado el derecho a la democracia participativa.

[In regard to the constituyente which is one of the major objectives of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular, there was achieved the right to a consulta (poll or referendum) for the Asamblea Nacional Constituyente; in this form was ratified that with the force of principles and the ideas of sovereignty the avaricious interests of groups in power that have denied the right to participatory democracy are defeated.]

In other words: we showed that if you document broad public desire for constitutional change and more direct political participation, the other side eventually has to give in. But notice: no ringing endorsement of the mechanism, characterized with such self-congratulation in the Cartagena Agreement itself, by which the kind of popular consultation that Zelaya wanted to undertake is now possible.

So we would score this as 1 overt endorsement (of return from exile); 2 muted recuperation of their own agenda from that embodied in the Cartagena Accord, with a pause to remind people that these achievements came from the Frente's actions; and 1 outright rejection, of the human rights items, based on lack of trust for Lobo Sosa.

In a related post, political scientist Greg Weeks makes an interesting set of comments about the potential role of the Frente. He notes that the literature on how resistance movements become political parties probably does not apply here, as the Frente never was a guerrilla movement, and thus has none of the obstacles to overcome when a militarized opposition becomes a political one.

He then adds that there is a literature on how ethnic movements become political parties, suggesting this also does not apply here.

We agree, although for slightly different reasons than he gives: there is a pan-ethnic movement at the heart of the Frente, represented among other things by the prominence of Bertha Oliva, and the symbolic location of Frente assemblies in the heart of traditional Lenca territory.

But the Frente does not speak solely or uniformly with this voice; we pay attention to when COPINH issues statements in order to understand how at least the indigenous faction within the Frente understands things. But there are other voices, including those that represent reform tendencies within the Liberal Party, and those that are mobilized primarily out of belief in Zelaya himself.

Where we think Greg may slightly miss a nuance is when he suggests that the challenge for the Frente is moving from taking positions against the government to taking positions for certain policies.

The Frente has a robust and clear agenda. It is just an agenda that is either not reported in mainstream media, especially in the US, or not taken seriously by them. It starts with constitutional reform. Constitutional reform, through the direct convocation of a popular assembly, is a position for a policy: it is a position for changing a political system that has demonstrated its incapacity to protect the weak from the powerful.

So, we will be interested to hear what broader segments of the Frente say, especially about the modest steps toward popular consultation in the Accord; and we await some specific statement from COPINH or its leadership on this point in particular.

Gamechanger?

This morning Jose Manuel Zelaya and Porfirio Lobo Sosa signed the Cartagena Accord.

Our first reading: human rights issues still may receive more lip service than real response; the agreement to conduct a plebiscite on the constituyente vindicates the Zelaya government and probably recognizes the Frente's signature drive; the agreement to register the Frente as a political movement raises questions about internal Frente goals and means.

More later: literally on a runway.