by Todd Gordon
CANADA ON HUMAN RIGHTS
The Canadian government’s efforts to support the Lobo government in the face of the violent reality of contemporary Honduras stems not from neglect or disinterest towards human rights; rather, it derives from the fact that the violence is accompanied by, and in some ways acts as a necessary foundation for, the sociopathic commitment to foreign capital exhibited by the Honduran regime. Just as in the case of Canada’s pragmatic commitment to democracy abroad, the Canadian state will support human rights only insofar as they do not run into contradiction with the interests of Canadian capital.
While Canadian officials, as we have seen, typically played down or ignored the severity of the human rights situation in Honduras, it became bad enough a year into Lobo’s presidency that Reeder felt compelled to offer at least a gesture of acknowledgement of the realities on the ground when testifying to the SCFAID on March 21, 2011. “Human rights abuses have continued and formal complaints have actually increased,” he acknowledged, and “we maintain an open channel to express our concerns to the Government of Honduras, both publicly and privately, regarding the human rights situation in that country” including undertaking “formal statements of concern during the United Nations universal periodic review of human rights in Honduras.”220 This acknowledgement is noteworthy coming from a representative of a department that is very calculating about when and where it raises human rights concerns, and in the case of Honduras Canada’s public declarations on the matter of human rights abuses against dissidents have been scarce.221
For this reason, Reeder’s statement should be seen as speaking more to the increasing degeneration of the human rights situation for anti-coup forces, noted by various Honduran and international human rights organizations, than it does to any principled commitment on Canada’s part. It is worth noting that the statement was issued almost immediately following the Harper government’s announcement that it was conducting bilateral free trade negotiations with Honduras. It was a proactive, but superficial response to potential criticism of deepening political and economic engagement with a country that has profound human rights problems. So Reeder acknowledges there are human rights problems in the country, but avoids addressing their severity. The violence against anti-coup activists in Tegucigalpa, and the repression and assassination of peasants in the Bajo Aguán region following the readmission of Honduras into the OAS, rated no public response from Canada. Nor does he draw attention to any of the obvious links that the Honduran victims of repression and human rights groups have made between the perpetrators and the government, particularly its security apparatuses.
During his state visit to Honduras in August 2011, in which he met with Lobo and signed the Canada-Honduras Free Trade Agreement, Harper also acknowledged that there may be some human rights problems in the country, but confidently concluded, “I am sure they are not committed by the government.”222 While we have discussed the involvement of the state’s security apparatus in the repression, human rights and anti-coup activists in Honduras argue the state is also implicated via the climate of impunity to which it has contributed, as rarely is anyone even charged in relation to assassinations, torture, or illegal detainment, much less convicted. In what seems an implicit acknowledgement of impunity for human rights abuses in Honduras, CIDA has funded a project whereby the Justice Education Society of Britsh Columbia was to provide expertise to the Attorney General’s office to improve criminal investigation, though—unremarked by Canadian officials—the program has had no demonstrable effect in matters of political persecution.223
If Canadian officials do not allow for a connection between human rights problems and the Honduran state, they are even more loathe to acknowledge the possible role of Canadian companies, with whom they have worked closely on the Honduras file. In his SCFAID testimony, Reeder downplays any connection between human rights violations and Canadian investment interests in mining (an issue we discuss in more detail below). In response to the earlier testimony of Honduran activist Pedro Landa regarding Canadian mining before the SCFAID, Reeder asserted that “I visited the Canadian mines, and I respect that industry. The mines provide good jobs and good opportunities to Hondurans.”224 It is a deliberately deceptive position the Canadian state is taking: yes, the human rights situation is not perfect, but it has nothing to do with the Honduran state, the Lobo government or Canadian investment.
But, according to Canadian foreign policy mantra, this political and economic engagment in Honduras is not merely permissible for these reasons, it is actually essential to improving human rights in the country. Here we have the Canadian state’s trickle down theory of human rights, deployed in other contexts, such as Colombia, to defend Canadian capital’s pursuit of profit and the state’s political alliances with reactionary regimes. Being political allies with the government, and opening up economic opportunities for Canadian business, is not crass and irresponsible opportunism; it is, rather, altruistic policy. The inevitable increase in living standards that attends Canadian investment will lead to improvements in the human rights situation, as, so the argument goes, a population with a higher living standard becomes more educated and will push more effectively for better human rights. Thus Reeder could argue to the SCFAID, expressing honestly the position of FAIT, that “continued isolation only hurts the most vulnerable people in the country,” and Canada should therefore “work with the government to improve the human rights situation” rather than “deny the people of Honduras the opportunity to benefit from a free trade agreement with us.”225 Implicit in Reeder’s formulation, it follows, is that the alternative position—prohibiting Canadian business to do as it pleases in the country and isolating the Lobo regime—will only make human rights worse. With a laissez-faire twist, Canada, as it has done in Colombia and elsewhere, turns on its head the notion that lending political support to, and encouraging capitalist expansion in, countries suffering from political persecution reinforces that persecution. In the process, Canada ignores the rich history of struggle, including against corporations from the Global North, by workers, peasants, women, and indigenous peoples that has been necessary to drive human rights forward in Latin America and around the world.
The absurdity of Reeder’s argument and Canada’s position is clear to many observers of Honduran politics. Honduras has been a special focus of Canadian foreign policy in the region since at least the coup, with Canadian maquila and tourist expansions announced before even the free trade agreement (FTA) was concluded. Any honest human rights assessment must acknowledge that the situation for social movement activists and opposition forces between the coup and Reeder’s testimony did not improve but deteriorated considerably, and that the Lobo government did little to reverse this trend. Assassinations also continued after Reeder’s pronouncement and after the FTA was announced, but Canada has said nothing publicly about them. It was likewise silent when the Honduran Supreme Court, criticized by human rights organizations for its support of the coup, predictably cleared six army generals accused of supporting the coup.226 The idea that Canadian investment and strong political cooperation will improve the situation is a fairy tale that even Reeder and the Harper government could not possibly believe in the case of Honduras, any more than they did in Colombia.
ETHNOGRAPHIES OF OPPOSITION
An unanticipated consequence of the coup plotters’ casual breach of liberal institutions has been the emergence of a powerful popular opposition, characterized by ideologies and practices much closer to the best revolutionary Left traditions elsewhere in Latin America than had been the case in most of the modern political history of the Honduran Left.227 The resistance erupted almost immediately. While Micheletti celebrated his triumphal seizure of the presidency, elsewhere in the capital, and throughout the country, an eruption of the popular classes—led by teachers, urban workers, students, indigenous communities, peasants, the urban poor, environmentalists, women’s organizations, and others—was taking sha
pe and braving waves of repression. Makeshift barricades were erected in Tegucigalpa, highways were blockaded, tires burned in the streets, clashes between protesters, police, and the military erupted, and graffiti labelling Micheletti a fascist, and, better, “Pinocheletti,” sprung up on walls throughout the cities.228 “They want to kick Zelaya out at whatever cost,” the peasant leader Rafael Alegría exclaimed, “but the only thing they have achieved is to present our country as savage, where the rules of democracy are not respected. Or do you know of another case in the world in which a poll has originated a coup d’état?”229 Between June 28 and November 29, when the national elections consolidating the coup were held, there were roughly 150 days of continuous resistance activities, with charged pinnacles on July 5—when Zelaya unsuccessfully attempted a return from exile by plane, and September 15—when the Frente Nacional de la Resistencia Popular (National Front of Popular Resistance, FNRP) organized a parallel march and demonstration of political defiance against the official state celebrations of National Independence Day.230
The institutional core of the FNRP consisted of different sectors of the labour movement—particularly teachers, banana workers, public sector workers, and bottling-plant workers. However, it also incorporated an array of social movement actors, including peasants, women, alternative media groups, indigenous and Afro-indigenous sectors, human rights organizations, and LGBT activists, among others.231 Delegates from these various social movement and trade unions bases were sent to participate in the central coordinating body of the front as representatives of their sectors. More than simply calling for the return of Zelaya, the FNRP almost immediately began calling for a Constituent Assembly to fundamentally refound the country on the basis of social justice and equality. In ideology, and through its reliance on direct, mass actions that built the capacities of popular sectors to organize themselves under dire conditions, the FNRP represented an increasingly radical social Left in the Honduran landscape.
We witnessed the spirit of the resistance most vividly in the streets of Tegucigalpa on Wednesday, January 27, 2010, the date of Lobo’s inauguration. It was clear that with the transfer of power from Micheletti to Lobo, business as usual would not go uncontested. Despite the black-suited sharp shooters visible on the tower edges of buildings running parallel to the resistance march, and the hundreds of military and police troops weighed down with automatic weapons, it was hardly obvious that the protesting masses had more to fear than Pepe Lobo. Indeed, as one popular resistance t-shirt proclaimed, “Nos tienen miedo porque no tenemos miedo” [“They fear us because we’re not afraid.”]
In a meeting in Tegucigalpa on the eve of Lobo’s inauguration, Radio Globo journalist Felix Molina suggested to us that Honduras was entering a fourth moment of the coup. The first phase involved its preparation and execution. The second saw the gathering of domestic elite and imperial forces around the San José Accord. The third carried out that accord. A week before Lobo’s inauguration, the forth moment began to congeal. Posters plastered the walls of the capital celebrating the commencement of the new government of “national unity.” “This fourth moment,” Molina argued, was “about constructing normality, ostensibly with peace and reconciliation. It’s about selling a supposed project of national integration. Essentially, the objective is to say that nothing happened here, that coups can be a democratic method to correct a democracy gone awry. The point of this fourth moment is to legalize the coup.” As quickly as the state’s posters of calm and consensus marked the avenues of Tegucigalpa, graffiti artists of the resistance offered their response — “Fuera golpistas asesinos!” [“Out with the Coupist Assassins!”] The corporate media cast Lobo as the “elected president,” whereas the FNRP repudiated him as the “son of a coup.” The corporate media celebrated a national unity government of integration, whereas the FNRP refused dialogue with Lobo’s regime, and denounced it as the latest incarnation of the original coup of June 2009.
This war of words found its material expression in the protesting cascades of hundreds of thousands marching from downtown toward the airport on January 27. The march paid homage to Zelaya—as he finally escaped four months of sequestration in the Brazilian embassy for exile in the Dominican Republic—and, at the same time, announced that the struggle against the coup regime would continue. We approached the first row of military police and the crowd rang out, urging folks to study and learn so they’ll never have to be on the other side of the barricades.
Estudiar, aprender, para chepo nunca ser! [Study, learn, so you’ll never be a cop!]
A group of energetic ten-year-olds danced amidst the marchers, chanting concordantly for the death of the golpista regime. Peasants, trade unionists, feminists, and different Left groupings walked arm-in-arm and cheered ecstatically as cars moved in the other direction honking in solidarity. Teenagers leaned out of the windows of a passing bus, their fists raised in the air.
El pueblo ¿dónde está? ¡El pueblo está en las calles exigiendo libertad! [Where are the People? The people are in the streets demanding liberty!]
¿Estás cansado? ¡No! ¿Tienes miedo? ¡No! ¿Entonces? ¡Adelante, Adelante, que la lucha es constante! [Are you tired? No! Are you afraid? No! So? Forward! Forward! In Constant Struggle!]
“The resistance has two principal pillars,” Rafael Alegría, a principal peasant leader in the resistance, informed us during the march. “A social pillar for the revindication of the people’s rights, in which the resistance accompanies people in their daily struggle, for agrarian reform, for just salaries, and opposition to the privatization of social services. This is the pillar of social mobilization.” The other pillar, Alegría emphasized, “is the political arm—to convert ourselves into a militant political force which will work towards taking political power in our country.”
We asked Alegría about the Constituent Assembly, as the crowd around us thundered:
¿Qué somos? ¡Resistencia popular! ¿Qué queremos? ¡Constituyente! [What are we? Popular Resistance! What do we want? Constituent Assembly!]
“The power of the people,” he told us,
is going to result in massive transformations in this country. We are demanding a Constituent Assembly that is going to transform this country into a participatory democracy. It will be a new Honduras—a country with social justice, with equality, with a new model of development in which everyone is included, and, as the Bolivians say, so that our entire country can live well.
Alegría contrasts this vision with the “current situation, in which there is a privileged oligarchy, which owns and controls everything, while on the other hand there is an immense mass of impoverished people. This can’t continue.”
Two days earlier, in a gathering of the resistance outside the Brazilian embassy to celebrate National Women’s Day in Honduras, we met with Brenda Villacorta, of Feminists in Resistance, who expressed many of the same sentiments. “Lobo’s possession of office doesn’t represent anything. It is the continuation, the perpetuation of the coup d’état that took place in this country on June 28, 2009. The protagonists have changed but the scenario is exactly the same.” The marchers of January 27 agreed:
!No existe Presidente! !Si a la constituyente! [There is no President! We demand a Constituent Assembly!]
“The resistance will take to the streets again and again,” Villacorta said. “This is the only way we can apply pressure, or at least the most effective way of doing so.…The process to create the Constituent Assembly will be a long one,” she estimated, but worth the struggle. “The old constitution was established under a military dictatorship, and it does not benefit the Honduran people, the authentic Honduran people. Instead, it works in the interests of the business class and the big power groups.”
For the Honduran Resistance, Lobo did not signify an end of the coup but rather its consolidation under the veneer of democratic legitimacy. One day into his Presidency, Lobo had already declared a financial emergency
, and called for new fiscal austerity measures. Together with the amnesty law for protagonists of the coup and the opening up of mining concessions, all signals pointed to the consolidation of a hard-Right shift in domestic and economic policy, designed to roll back the modest reforms introduced by Zelaya. The coming socio-economic assault on the popular classes, in the midst of a deep recession exacerbated by the coup plotters, alongside continuing repression and political intimidation, presented formidable challenges to the Resistance looking forward. If January 27 revealed anything, however, it was that there were two sides to Honduras. The pole of Pepe Lobo and the imperialists, on the one hand, and a multi-headed hydra of exploited and oppressed, on the other. If the masses had not yet gathered sufficient power to toss Lobo into the dustbin of history, they had demonstrated that they would not easily be cowered by a tiny minority, even one armed to the teeth.
Despite the heroic opposition of the resistance, however, the balance of forces domestically and internationally continued to favour the coup’s consolidation. In order to better understand the underlying motivations of Canadian capitalists, diplomats, and politicians within this complex scenario in post-coup Honduras, it makes sense in the following sections to turn to the material bases of their interests—mining, maquilas, and tourism—as well as to the most important recent economic developments in which Canadian actors have been central, such as the recently solidified bilateral free trade agreement between Canada and Honduras.
CANADIAN CAPITAL IN HONDURAS
As noted, Zelaya’s term in office introduced a modest break with the economics of neoliberal orthodoxy, but post-coup Honduras has witnessed its vengeful return, first under Micheletti, and then under Lobo. There has been perhaps no clearer indication of Lobo’s commitment in this regard than the investment conference held in Trujillo in May 2011, Honduras is Open for Business, the motto of which was “a moment of change, a horizon of opportunities.” The conference, attended by a number of Canadian investors, was accompanied by the publication of a government document, Honduras: A Country Open for Investment.232 As the government report explains, legislation is rapidly being introduced to facilitate the implementation of the various facets of two overarching development plans, Country Vision (2010–2038), and The Nation Plan (2010–2022). The preeminent objective of both is to attract foreign direct investment into six areas in which the Lobo government believes Honduras enjoys a competitive advantage: infrastructure, renewable energy, tourism, agribusiness, forestry and textiles, and electronic and business services.233
