Blood of Extraction
Page 8
Zelaya had been a Liberal congressperson for three consecutive terms between 1985 and 1999, and he headed up the World Bank-funded Fondo Hondureño de Inversión Social (Honduran Social Investment Fund) between 1994 and 1999. In the presidential campaign of late 2005, he faced off against National Party challenger Porfirio Lobo Sosa. The campaign pivoted almost exclusively around the issue of violent crime and youth gangs, with Lobo Sosa pledging to continue the mano dura approach and to reintroduce the death penalty, which had been abolished in 1937. Zelaya, by contrast, opposed the death penalty and the antigang legislation, arguing that this type of repressive framework in the past had actually exacerbated the country’s crime problem. Instead, he offered vague promises of new social programs to alleviate high levels of poverty and unemployment, which he believed to be central factors driving youth into the gangs.
Once in the presidency, Zelaya made some modest moves toward progressive social and economic reform. He introduced free school enrolment, raised the salaries of teachers, and made initial efforts to reduce rising fuel costs.172 He also increased the minimum wage by 60 percent, from US$6 to 9.60 per day, apologized for the executions of street children at the hands of security forces in the 1990s, advocated the legalization of some narcotics as opposed to escalating the “war on drugs,” and vetoed legislation that would have made the sale of the morning-after pill illegal.173 In the domain of natural resource extraction, Zelaya introduced mining legislation for approval by Congress that outlined stricter environmental regulations, including the prohibition of open-pit mines. A new Forest Law passed in September 2007 introduced measures to prevent further ecological collapse, designating 87.7 percent of Honduran national territory as protected area.174 In spite of pressure from business groups and right-wing factions of his own party, the president also refused to privatize the state-owned electricity company, Empresa Nacional de Energía Eléctrica (National Electric Energy Company of Honduras), and the telecommunications firm, Hondutel.175
At the same time, it is easy to exaggerate the leftist turn of the Liberals under Zelaya, which, at least in domestic policy, never escaped the parameters of modest reformism.176 Public spending on education remained at merely 3.8 percent of GDP. In April 2006 Honduras joined the Dominican Republic–Central American Free Trade Agreement with the United States, an accord meant to abolish tariffs and other trade barriers and establish an environment attractive to foreign direct investment, particularly export-oriented multinational firms with an interest in making Honduras their launching pad.177 Two years later, in April 2008, Zelaya’s government signed a standby agreement with the IMF that “commits the government to maintaining macroeconomic stability, lowering current spending (particularly the government’s wage bill), achieving a fiscal deficit of 1.5% of GDP, and focusing public expenditure on infrastructure and poverty reduction.”178 What is more, to the extent that Zelaya enacted social reforms, it was in no small part due to consistent and intense pressures exercised from below through increasingly militant trade unions, peasant organizations, and student groups influenced by revolutionary Left ideologies and liberation theology. There were no fewer than 722 officially recorded social conflicts over the first thirty-two months of his presidency, against privatization and free trade, and for salary increases and subsidies to control the price of the basic breadbasket.179
As noted, Honduras entered a steep economic downturn in 2008 associated with the spiraling global crisis, and particularly the deepening slump in the United States, Honduras’ main export market and source of tourists, remittances, and foreign direct investment. It was in this context that Zelaya pragmatically opted for joining ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) in September of that year. As part of the deal,
Venezuela…offered to buy Honduran bonds worth [US]$100m, whose proceeds will be spent on housing for the poor. Mr. Chávez also offered a [US]$30m credit line for farming, 100 tractors, and 4m low-energy light bulbs (Cuba will send technicians to help to install them, as well as more doctors and literacy teachers).180
The international financial press saw this move on the part of Zelaya not as “a matter of ideological association, but rather one driven by financial need.”181
Nonetheless, as history has indicated, it is hardly necessary for Latin American governments to adopt social revolutionary measures before the traditional elite and conservative military forces feel threatened and act violently in protection of their interests. Tensions sharpened in the lead-up to the Zelaya-supported nonbinding referendum to be held at the end of June 2009. This popular plebiscite was to ask Hondurans if they wanted to hold a second binding referendum during the national elections in November on whether or not to call a Constituent Assembly. Honduras’ current constitution was adopted during military rule in the 1980s. Zelaya called on the military to distribute the ballots for the referendum after the Supreme Court had ruled that the referendum was illegal.182 The head of the Honduran armed forces, General Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez, refused to comply. Zelaya dismissed Vásquez as head of the armed forces, and the general went on to play the leading military role in the coup against Zelaya.183 Once Vásquez had been fired, the Minister of Defence, Ángel Orellana, resigned and the Supreme Court ruled that Vásquez’s dismissal was illegal. The majority of Congress, including the right-wing faction of the Liberal party led by Micheletti, turned against the president.184 A medley of conservative social forces saw their opportunity and converged around the overthrow of Zelaya:
Conservative evangelicals and Catholics—including Opus Dei, a formidable presence in Honduras—detested him because he refused to ban the “morning-after” pill. The mining, hydroelectric and biofuel sector didn’t like him because he didn’t put state funds and land at their disposal. The law-and-order crowd hated him because he apologized on behalf of the state for a program of “social cleansing” that took place in the 1990s, which included the execution of street children and gang members. And the generals didn’t like it when he tried to assert executive control over the military.185
According to the country’s leading human rights organization, Committee of Family Members of the Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), there were forty-three politically motivated assassinations of civilians associated with the resistance movement between the time of the coup and the end of February 2012. COFADEH acknowledges that this figure is a low estimate, as intimidation and fear of reprisal prevents communities and family members from reporting many such deaths. In November 2011, a report issued by Rights Action listed a higher figure of fifty-nine politically motivated assassinations. Belying official announcements of national reconciliation and a return to democracy following Lobo’s victory, repression intensified immediately after he took power. COFADEH reported 250 violations of human rights in Lobo’s first three months alone.186
According to the United Nations, Honduras continues to have the highest murder rate in the world. Reporters without Borders has signposted the country as one of the most dangerous in the world for journalists. The regime itself admits that its police and military apparatuses are saturated with drug traffickers, with police officers and soldiers enjoying the fruits of their links to organized crime.187 Assassinations and threats against journalists, lawyers, judges, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community, and anyone associated with the political or social-movement opposition are commonplace. Over the course of the Lobo administration alone, sixty-seven lawyers and twenty-nine journalists were murdered. Only in four cases were there convictions.188 Since the coup, as noted above, state and paramilitary terror, violence, and impunity have run rampant, while freedom of speech, assembly, and association have been tightly restricted, in practice if not always on paper.189
In November 2013, the Honduran Special Prosecutor for Human Rights told a delegation of electoral observers from the American National Lawyers’ Guild that she faced a backlog of 7,500 cases.190 COFADEH has received reports of 5,000 huma
n rights violations in the country’s northern region alone since 2009. A newly militarized police force has in recent years routinely targeted poor neighbourhoods for checkpoints and harassment. In May 2012, this new police force shot dead a fifteen-year-old boy who failed to stop at a checkpoint while on his motorcycle. Far from merely random acts of terror, however, most state violence has been expressly political. Tomás García was killed on July 15, 2013 as a consequence of his involvement in indigenous activism targeting the development of a hydroelectric dam in Intibuca. During the same summer, Bertha Cáceres, one of the most important figures in the Honduran indigenous movement and the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP), was charged along with others for blockading roads, also in opposition to dam development. Most infamously, in the Aguán Valley, almost one hundred peasants have been killed since the coup by a combination of private militias and the coercive apparatuses of the state as they have attempted to resist the usurpation of their land by giant palm-oil corporations.191
OTTAWA AND THE DEMOCRATIC COUP
While its response to the rapidly escalating tensions in the weeks leading to the coup was tepid, Canada inserted itself quickly into the volatile mix of Honduran coup politics.192 Over the next several months, Canada would expend considerable energies in trying to ensure a particular “resolution” to the coup. From the outset, the Harper administration sought to end the isolation of Honduras from the acceptable elements of the “international community”—the country’s membership in the OAS was revoked because the coup violated its Democratic Charter. At the same time Canada worked to secure its segregation from the orbit of Venezuelan influence and that of other Centre-Left governments in Latin America and the Caribbean with which Zelaya had been building ties and which were the most vocal critics of the coup. As Canada’s response unfolded to the coup and post-coup developments, it became clear that a repressive but strongly pro-free market regime, furbished with a hollow democratic shell, would be the ideal model for Honduras in the eyes of Canadian interests.
Preventing any return to meaningful democracy in Honduras was at the core of Canada’s aims in response to the coup, even if the Canadian government could not publicly support the intervention by the Honduran military, lest it explicitly betray its fairweather support for robust democracy abroad. But evidently, for the architects of Canadian foreign policy, if the Honduran coup provided an opening to reverse the moderate trend to the Left in Honduras and the nascent democratization of a country long ruled by a small consortium of economic and military elites, it should not be undone by any unnecessary reconstitution of even the narrow parameters of Honduran constitutional liberalism. Amongst other things, Canada’s role in undermining attempts to restore democracy in Honduras should be read as a warning signal to the rest of the isthmus, in which Canadian investment interests have been undermined by both perfidious government decisions and intransigent social movements.
So while Canada positioned itself as a helpful mediator, it did so while refusing to publicly call for Zelaya’s return from exile and criticizing any attempt by him to return as president on his terms before a resolution had been negotiated with the oversight of the U.S. and Canada.193 It took this position despite knowing that Zelaya had, in the words of a report from the embassy, “considerable support among labour and campesino groups and some of the populist organizations that have emerged and flourished during his presidency.”194 Following Zelaya’s initial effort to return, which was met with a mass mobilization of his supporters in the face of fierce repression, Peter Kent, Minister of State for the Americas, told CBC radio that the deposed president’s “attempts to re-enter the country…[are]…very unhelpful to the situation.”195 Kent was silent on the crackdown on freedom of expression and assembly. Zelaya was—it bears repeating given Canada’s stance—the constitutionally-elected president of the country who by right of Honduran law and the OAS Democratic Charter should have been able to immediately return home and resume the presidency. Canadian officials, such as Kent and his advisors in Foreign Affairs and International Trade (FAIT), would have understood this well (the Charter is, after all, much vaunted by Canada when it proves functional to Canadian interests). Zelaya did manage to return from exile in September 2009 despite Micheletti’s efforts to keep him out of the country, although he ended up under military seige in the Brazilian embassy. Canada failed to condemn his treatment by Honduran authorities or to call for his freedom from de facto confinement and his return to the presidency.
The silence regarding Micheletti’s propensity to deploy security forces against his enemies was quite characteristic of Canada’s general orientation to the post-coup scenario in Honduras. The Harper government publicly said little about the wave of repression that hit anti-coup forces immediately following the coup. Not one press release explicitly identified or criticized the repressive measures by the coup dictatorship following Zelaya’s ouster. Instead, Kent misleadingly called “on all parties to show restraint,”196 knowing full well that Honduras was undergoing an extremely one-sided and violent battle pitting well-armed police, military forces, and death squads against an unarmed pro-democracy movement.197 This was not simply bad policy due to lack of information; it was a calculated position—based on ignoring the documented repression endured by those fighting the coup.198 It was an official position designed to suggest that both pro-coup and pro-Zelaya forces were equally reponsible for the conflict and violence, without acknowledging the extent of violence used by the former, and thus to construct a narrative in which Zelaya’s return to power under any condition would exacerbate instability. The prudent postion for Canada, following this logic, was to push Zelaya toward a negotiated resolution—negotiations, though, designed to keep him from regaining meaningful political power.
Indeed, as part of this strategy the Harper government, while offering an initial perfunctory criticism of the coup, also remarkably argued that Zelaya bore responsibility for his forceful removal from the presidency by the military. Kent stated at an OAS meeting, where the regional body was discussing an effort to push the Micheletti dictatorship to allow Zelaya to return, that the international community has been too one-sided in its approach to the coup, suggesting that “the coup was certainly an affront to the region, but there is a context in which these events happened.…There has to be an appreciation of the events that led up to the coup.”199 Zelaya’s loss of power, in other words, is not the unequivocal problem we are led to believe in the statements from the officials of various Latin American states.
Conservative MP, Dave Van Kesteren, speaking to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development (SCFAID) after Canada had made public its trade negotiations with Honduras, cuts to the chase and lays the blame squarely on Zelaya and Venezuela, in the process summarizing well his government’s views on political developments in Latin America. “We really need to set the record straight,” Van Kesteren insists.
The very fact that the coup took place was because the country was drifting toward Hugo Chávez, that type of regime, and the influence that he’s exerting on a lot of southern [sic].…Let’s make no mistake about it. A real power struggle is taking place, and it’s what we believe in as a free society; that’s to have freedom of goods, what we call the unguided [sic] hand, as opposed to total government control or freedom versus totalitarianism, prosperity versus poverty.200
While Van Kesteren takes the Conservative Honduran position a step further than Kent (publicly, at least), the underlying Canadian position here is clear: whatever one thinks of the coup plotters, they had genuine reasons for wanting Zelaya’s ouster. Pushing reforms that exceeded the political and economic limits acceptable to the imperial powers, Zelaya brought the coup upon himself and his return to the presidency without any checks upon his authority could not be countenanced—especially, moreover, if Honduras is a domino in the grand plans of what the Conservatives (and Liberals) repeatedly suggest was Chávez’s anti-free mar
ket authoritarianism.
THE TEGUCIGALPA-SAN JOSÉ ACCORD
Canada’s opposition to the return of genuine democracy in Honduras also fuelled its promotion of a negotiated solution to the crisis, which quickly became the focal point of Canadian energies immediately following the coup, and indeed through to the election on November 29, 2010. Canada lent its unconditional support to the Tegucigalpa-San José Accord, which was signed by Zelaya under considerable duress from within the isolation of the Brazilian embassy, perhaps with the hope that any agreement, however compromised, would weaken the regime’s forces in the lead-up to the planned elections of November 2009. The opposite turned out to be true. The Tegucigalpa-San José Accord reinforced the power of the regime, and provided a veneer of constitutional order under which the Canadian and American governments could support without qualms the November elections. The Accord referred the issue of Zelaya’s reinstatement to the presidency back to Congress rather than establishing it as the non-negotiable core of any further step forward in a resolution of the conflict. It also imposed a “national unity” concept through its call for a power-sharing government involving Zelaya’s forces alongside representatives of the dictatorship. The notion of proceeding with a Constituent Assembly of any type was ruled out of court. Zelaya remained under siege in the Brazilian embassy, repression continued against civilian supporters of the resistance, and pro-coup candidates campaigned for the November elections without any opposition party representing opponents of the coup of June 2009. In this context, Zelaya withdrew from the accord.