Since April protests have taken place across Honduras, first against privatisation reforms and now more widely against the neoliberal government of President Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH). A fresh wave of protests in June was met with brutal repression by the government. Ria Aibhilín reports.
JOH was elected for an unprecedented second term in the November 2017 elections, which were widely reported to have been accompanied by fraud, manipulation, vote-buying and intimidation. The backlash to his election win was so great that the government imposed a ten-day 6pm-6am curfew and by January 2018 at least 33 people had been killed by the police and army during protests, actions branded by the Honduran National Roundtable for Human Rights as state terrorism. In April 2019 students, teachers, nurses and doctors took to the streets in response to legislative decrees which would allow ministers to impose privatisation reforms on public healthcare and education services.
Widespread corruption has included the 2015 scandal in which at least $350m was stolen by politicians from the state-run healthcare insurance system, some of which found its way into funding JOH’s Presidential campaign. This has pushed public healthcare services to crisis with acute staff, beds and medicine shortages. The education sector has been similarly run down: vice president of the Honduras Teaching Professional Association, Ovenir Flores, claims 75% of schools are in total disorder. 68% of Hondurans live in poverty.
The privatisation decrees were passed by Congress on 26 April. They were greeted almost instantaneously by mass opposition, organised under the Platform for the Defence of Health and Education, with many expecting the privatisation to be accompanied by mass lay-offs. Demonstrators were undeterred by the assault of police using teargas, keeping up street action with roadblocks, marches and demonstrations as well as the launch of an indefinite strike which saw hundreds of thousands of workers take industrial action.
On 2 June the President was forced to withdraw the legislation, but demonstrations continued, now demanding his resignation. Taxi drivers rallied on 11 June, calling for strike action against increased fuel and petrol costs.
When a fresh round of protests erupted on 17 June, the Ministry of Security launched its ‘zero tolerance’ policy, authorising violent repression from the Honduran National Police who are being trained by over 1,000 Israeli soldiers and personnel. As the situation intensified on 20 June, sections of the riot police refused government orders to disperse crowds in a dispute over pay and benefits. That day three civilians were murdered by police and a further 21 injured. Students have also become a target of state brutality.
The Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras has denounced the militarised attacks on protests, while members of the Platform for the Defence of Health and Education maintain that ‘repression is reaching levels like those observed in the 1980s, when death squads murdered leaders selectively’.
2009-2019: A decade of repression
26 June 2019 marked ten years since the democratically elected Honduran President, Manuel Zelaya, was kidnapped and removed from office through a military coup (see FRFI 210). Inspired by ALBA (the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America) social programmes, Honduras had brought 500,000 out of poverty, was aiming to eradicate illiteracy by 2010 and had begun a reforestation campaign.
Zelaya’s removal in June 2009 was followed by a 26.3% increase in extreme poverty over the next three years as unemployment more than doubled. Since the coup, hundreds of activists and journalists have been murdered, including prominent environmentalist Berta Caceres. Caceres was shot dead in her home in 2016, with at least one of her murderers a high-ranking executive at a hydroelectric plant, bringing international attention to the persistent human rights abuses in Honduras. Organised crime has taken control of swathes of the country.
Since Zelaya’s removal, Honduras-US relations have grown cosier. Much to the delight of the US, the military dictatorship that replaced Zelaya stopped the country entering ALBA and was rewarded with the provision of some $200m in military and police aid from the US between 2009 and 2016. Hillary Clinton, in her role as Secretary of State, backed the coup. Evidence was provided by the New York Times proving the US was aware of the plan days before it was executed but decided not to act on the information or pass it on to the Zelaya government, while President Obama provided political cover by refusing to call it a coup. Two of the coup organisers were graduates of the School of America, the same establishment which produced the leaders of Venezuela’s 2002 coup and 2019 coup attempt. Hillary Clinton then worked to ensure Zelaya was kept from resuming his role as President by supporting fresh elections.
JOH has been providing military assistance in support of US attempts to provoke an all-out war in Nicaragua. With 46% of Honduran exports going to the US, JOH is friendly to the US business interests that dominate the economy. Amid the current protests, the Honduran President and First Lady headed to the US to meet acting US Homeland Security Secretary, Kevin K McAleenan, while US SOUTHCOM leaders arrived in Honduras with 300 troops under the guise of trying to ‘improve response to natural disasters’. The US does not want to lose its Central American ally.
Meanwhile, the racist attacks on migrants to the US, especially those from ‘the violent Northern Triangle’ of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, continue as a prominent feature of the Trump administration’s rhetoric.
For centuries the US has worked to create extreme poverty in what is now one of the poorest and most oppressed nations on Earth, with rampant destruction of natural resources and forests by multinationals. This is behind the migrant caravans that try to reach the US.
Dr Suyapa Figueroa, spokesperson for the Platform for the Defence of Health and Education, observed that people are on the streets ‘because the crisis is extreme, and they have been betrayed too many times by this government, which is no longer recognised as credible or legitimate’. She correctly notes that the Honduran political class ‘holds power for its own benefit but forgets that true power rests in the people’.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 271, June/July 2019
