Reactions to the National Assembly of the FNRP: From Mel on down

There are so many statements now reflecting, from different perspectives, on the Tocoa Assembly that it would be overwhelming to translate them all.

But one deserves a full translation:

From the desk of the Constitutional President (2006-2010) Jose Manuel Zelaya.

People and Comrades:

I am verifying the contents of the communique and of the first resolutions of the Assembly of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular, that was carried out in Colón this weekend. On first impression it seems good to me that the force to advance was encountered in its own decisions. I have asked Xiomara, my wife, that she present herself tomorrow to the Directorship of the FNRP to speak with Carlos H. Reyes, Juan Barahona, Rafael Alegría and the rest of the comrades, to know the scope of the proposal and so tomorrow itself it will be possible to communicate my acceptance as Liberal-Pro Socialista to integrate in the General Coordination of the Executive Committee of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular.

MEL Z RD 11 de julio de 2010.

In this brief note, Manuel Zelaya effectively supports the actions of the FNRP and the leadership of the sectors that resisted pressure to seat a larger than agreed on number of Liberal Party delegates.

Statements like that of Ollantay Itzamna reiterate that this was a critical achievement in the quest to change the fundamental system, that confirmed "the extreme unction of the moribund 'dedocrátic' system of bipartisanship in Honduras".

The first image is of the administration of the Last Rites of Roman Catholicism, given here to the hand-picking of delegates misrepresented as "democratic" (dedo= finger, which substitutes for hand in the Spanish equivalent to the English figure of speech; so "dedocratic" is approximately "handpickedocrat").

Ollantay Itzamna adds that the naming of Manuel Zelaya Rosales as National Coordinator of the Frente is

also another strategic ratification of popular sentiment. In the Honduran conjuncture, Zelaya is an undeniable national/popular leader. But, this nomination is a sociopolitical strategy. The FNRP needs to articulate to all the cells of the resistance dispersed across the country, and so to construct a sociopolitical hegemony on a national level. And this difficult task, against time, only can be done with a strong and evident national leader. Here we have the strategic reason for the nomination of Compañero Zelaya, but this is not to say that the FNRP is completed in Manuel Zelaya Rosales.

In some ways, the statement by Zelaya negates a curious side comment in the report of the withdrawal of the Liberals in Resistance, when Carlos Reina said

before withdrawing, that in taking this decision he had the endorsement of the deposed Honduran president, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, who had been consulted by [the Liberals in Resistance] by telephone from the Dominican Republic, where he remains exiled since the past 27th of January.

In context, that seemed almost as a claim of patronage, a reclaiming of Mel from the Frente in general.

That some such claim was perceived is made explicit in the response to the assembly by Luis Mendez, described as a "poet in resistance". After rehearsing the details of the attempt to swell the ranks of the delegates with extra appointees recommended by Liberals in resistance, Mendez says that

It is lamentable but the thing is that Carlos Eduardo Reina and the rest that don't add up to ten have the economic resources to move bars, and money to bring a national commission of Liberals in Resistance to the Dominican Republic (as they proposed at the Assembly of Tocoa), and expound to our ex-president Manuel Zelaya Rosales the developments for which they withdrew from the national conduct of the FNRP... well, if they have the economic resources that would be very much their own affair, but we, we do not go to Santo Domingo, but, we go to the villages, to the hamlets, to form the collectives, to accompany to the town fronts, there is where the construction of popular power will be given.

And, without doubt, we expect comrade Manuel Zelaya will personally join the Executive Committee of the FNRP as one of the principal leaders of the movement and it is certain that we can invite the Apparition, there, to where Saint Thomas was the one to say to us: TODAY IS NOT AS BEFORE COMRADES, today we have new visions.

The religious nature of this imagery, again, is somewhat startling, but like the metaphor of extreme unction, it shifts the register from mere politics as usual to redemption, to revelation, and to fervor.

Zelaya, by accepting his appointed role in the FNRP, affirms the new movement as something more than the politics of the past.

Echos of the 1980s

Hey, La Prensa, the 1980s called and they want their rhetoric back!

I knew something was wrong when I read the story in Jorge Canahuati's La Prensa on March 1 entitled "Guerrilla cell arming itself in the Bajo Aguan". The article, which claims to be based on a military intelligence report in their possession, makes a series of unbelievable claims about the campesinos opposing Miguel Facussé's title to several farms of african oil palms in the Bajo Aguan.

In a nutshell, it accuses the campesinos of allying themselves with drug traffickers for protection, organized by non-governmental organizations "of a socialist type" and by Jesuits "with communist ideologies". The alleged report claims to have studied 54 campesino cooperatives that through misadministration and corruption sold off their lands in 1993, but now want it back.

The Honduran government of the 1970s and 1980s had a single minded agrarian policy. If a group of campesinos wanted land, they were made to form agricultural cooperatives and the cooperative was then given land at the discretion of the state.

In the Bajo Aguan, the campesinos involved were largely from more highland departments of Santa Barbara, Lempira, Intibuca, and so on, forced to move into the tropical lowlands of Honduras to have access to land. The government of the 1980s failed to learn what the Spanish colonial government learned in building the eighteenth-century fort at Omoa: when you make highland people relocate to the lowlands, they die of malaria and other tropical diseases that only rarely occur in the highlands. Yet the government of Honduras continued to encourage people from the highlands to "emigrate" to the lowlands to gain access to land. The land campesinos were moved to in large numbers in the 1980s previously had been developed for agriculture in the 1920s and 1930s by banana companies, then abandoned as banana production became uneconomical.

In exchange for the land, cooperatives were directed, as part of national agricultural policy, to plant export crops like sugar cane, african palm, and to a lesser extent cacao, and were given low interest loans to buy the equipment and fertilizers necessary to plant and harvest these crops. They were not given guaranteed markets, or price guarantees on their crops, and had to compete with the oligarchy, who already controlled the markets for these raw agricultural goods and set the prices. Many cooperatives went badly into debt when market prices were low for their crop, and disbanded, though others managed to survive.

The supposed intelligence report alleges that Miguel Facussé and a Nicaraguan, Reynaldo Morales, bought up land as cooperatives failed and sold land to pay off their debts. The campesinos contest this, pointing to agrarian policy under Rafael Callejas in the early 1990s, under the Law for the Modernization and Development of the Agricultural Sector. Through this law, the government expropriated land it had previously given to campesino cooperatives, and turned it over to modern industrial farmers. The timing of this policy is not coincidentally linked to the paving of the road from La Ceiba into the Aguan valley, and back up to Olancho, which happened in the 1980s, giving this region decent access to the national market for the first time.

The alleged report, La Prensa tells us, singles out and analyzes the positions of a number of named organizations. The Movimiento Unido de Campesinos del Aguan (MUCA) is said to be more heavily armed than the National Police and supposedly is causing "thousands of dollars of losses daily to businesses" and scaring away international investment. Here's the most ludicrous part: La Prensa tells us that a named campesino leader affiliated with MUCA, and a named campesino leader affiliated with the resistance, are purchasing arms and waiting for FARC, the Colombian guerrilla movement, to come and train them in how to use them! Even more ludicrous is the allegation that these resistence leaders also head a band of kidnappers. The report claims there are orders out for their arrest. Both of these named individuals would be easy to find and arrest, since neither is in hiding, were there actually any such arrest warrants.

The report goes on like this, a fantasy with no anchor in reality, laughable if things like this didn't kill people. It talks about school teachers, assuring us that in the end, they won't support the campesinos. It talks about the Comité de Organizaciones Populares del Aguán (COPA), which sided with the resistance during the coup. It describes the Catholic Church "trying to fortify its political party, the Christian Democrats", and that the priests in the region are Jesuits, and are marxist advocates of liberation theology.

Rafael Alegria, head of Via Campesina and a leader in the resistance, rightly denounced this fantastic story. He reports he talked with the military spokesperson, Ramiro Archiaga, who denied the existence of any such military report and said he would ask La Prensa for a written explanation. Alegria attributed this bit of disinformation to the security minister, Oscar Alvarez.

A pseudonymous source, published and translated yesterday by Adrienne Pine at quotha.net, attributed this campaign of disinformation directly to La Prensa's owner, Jorge Canahuati Larach, along with Maria Antonia de Fuentes, Ana Morales, and Nelson Garcia.

Whatever the source of this disinformation, it is dangerous. It is meant to provoke bloodshed. It is a reminder that "newspapers" such as Canahuati's La Prensa and El Heraldo have not changed since they served as media to churn up enough controversy to incite and then justify a military coup d'etat. Maybe the rhetoric is from the fight against communism of the 1980s; but the tactic is that of yellow journalism of the 19th century.