The Long Honduran Night

Resistance , Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup

Dana Frank

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781608469611
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This powerful narrative recounts the tumultuous time in Honduras that witnessed then-President Manuel Zelaya deposed by a coup in June 2009, told through first-person experiences and layered with deeper political analysis. It weaves together two perspectives; first, the broad picture of Honduras since the coup, including the coup itself, its continuation in two repressive regimes, and secondly, the evolving Honduran resistance movement, and a new, broad solidarity movement in the United States.

Although it is full of terrible things, this not a horror story: this narrative directly counters mainstream media coverage that portrays Honduras as a pit of unrelenting awfulness, in which powerless sobbing mothers cry over bodies in the morgue. Rather, it's about sobering challenges and the inspiring collective strength with which people face them.

Dana Frank is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Baneras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America from Haymarket Books. Since the 2009 military coup her articles about human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras have appeared in The Nation, New York Times, Politico Magazine, Foreign Affairs.com, The Baffler, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and many other publications, and she has testified in both the US Congress and Canadian Parliament.

CHAPTER ONE

In Struggle:
Resistance and Repression

Learning Curves

At 5:30 a.m., on Sunday, June 28, 2009, I got a phone call telling me that the Honduran military had surrounded the home of the country’s president, Manuel Zelaya, and had flown him to Costa Rica in his pajamas at gunpoint.

I tried to call my loved ones in Honduras, but their phones didn’t work. Alternative radio in Honduras, which normally streamed in through my computer, was silent. I spent the whole day in a higher and higher state of helpless, horrified panic, watching the coup unfold on Spanish-language television.

Finally, late that night, I reached Stephen Coats, the Director of the US Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP) in Chicago. He was the one who had first pulled me into working in Honduras nine years before; he was my great mentor in solidarity work with the banana unions. He had decades of experience working in the human rights and policy world in Washington, D.C. “Tell me what to do!” I demanded. He asked me two or three quiet questions, then asked: “What’s your strategic plan?”

“Stop the coup,” I whimpered.

In fact, I had no idea what to do. I had no strategic plan. For the weeks, months, years that followed, I got up every morning, cried in the shower, braced myself for emails or calls notifying me a friend had been killed, and asked myself: what powers do I have to stop this? So did the Honduran people, who in the next days, months, and years, in the face of unprecedented terror, would rise up in spectacularly creative and courageous resistance to the coup.

None of us had expected that there really would be a coup. President Zelaya, a member of the Honduran elite himself, came from one of the two traditional conservative parties that had ruled the country for decades on behalf of a dozen oligarchic families who controlled the vast majority of the Honduran economy, along with US and other transnational corporations. Elected in 2006, Zelaya had begun to take more progressive positions by 2009, influenced by democratically-elected governments of the left and center-left that had come to power throughout Latin America during the 1990s and early 2000s in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Venezuela, Uruguay, and elsewhere. He brought Honduras into Petrocaribe and ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América, Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), regional economic blocs independent of US control. He supported a 50 percent increase in the minimum wage, opened the door to restoring the land rights of small farmers, and, most importantly, stopped multiple power grabs by the elites, who sought to privatize the publicly owned ports, education system, electrical system, and anything else they could get their hands on.¹

Facing tremendous pushback, his control slipping, Zelaya, in April 2009, legally announced he was asking voters to decide a non-binding survey question, known as the Cuarta Urna, or fourth ballot box, on June 28. Voters were to be asked whether they thought that the upcoming ballot in the November presidential election should also include the election of delegates to a constitutional convention, or Constituyente, to be held at some undetermined point in 2010 or 2011. Zelaya was trying to re-create recent constitutional conventions in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela that had approved new constitutions expanding democratic rights and the power of Indigenous people, women, small farmers, and others at the bottom. Grassroots social justice activists in Honduras, especially those united in Bloque Popular, a direct-action coalition that had originated the demand, picked up on the Cuarta Urna proposal and began to construct extensive networks to encourage voting in its favor, as a way of opening up a larger conversation about fundamental reforms.²

The Honduran elites seized on the Cuarta Urna ballot to claim, without any evidence, that Zelaya was using a constitutional convention to overthrow the extant constitution’s ban on presidential reelection and get himself a second term. Yet Zelaya would have been long out of office by the time any change might have been made—and he himself never mentioned reelection as a reason for the proposed convention. On the eve of the June 28 election, as tensions mounted, the military refused to distribute the actual ballots—though under the Honduran Constitution they were legally required to do so when directed by the president. Zelaya commanded them to obey. Then the entire Honduran Supreme Court and most of the Congress fell into line to endorse the armed ouster of Zelaya. Roberto Micheletti, the President of Congress, from Zelaya’s own party, announced that he was now president, and the full powers of the Honduran government were lined up against Zelaya—and against the great majority of the Honduran people.³

That first Sunday I was mostly paralyzed. On Monday I finally reached my two closest friends in Honduras, Iris Munguía, the Secretary for Women of the Coalition of Honduran Banana and Agroindustrial Unions (Coordinadora de Sindicatos Bananeros y Agroindustriales de Honduras, COSIBAH), and German Zepeda, the organization’s president. Iris said that they’d been driving back together from Nicaragua to San Pedro Sula, on the Honduran north coast, as the coup broke out, and had gotten stranded in Tegucigalpa, the capital, five hours away from home. She said there were no military checkpoints on the highways, but only because the police and military were busy occupying government buildings throughout the country.

By Wednesday morning the full reality of the coup was becoming clear. Tanks roamed the streets. CNN was blocked. Military planes roared through the skies. Phone service was disrupted. The army surrounded, invaded, and shut down Radio Progreso, a Jesuit-owned opposition radio on the north coast, and took over the transmitters of Cholusat SUR, an independent television station in the capital, silencing it for the next eight days.⁴

But to everyone’s surprise, an enormous resistance movement sprang up, too, seemingly out of nowhere. That first Sunday morning in the capital, people started streaming spontaneously into the streets in front of the Presidential Palace to back up Zelaya. One friend later told me that he’d gotten there early, as soon as the coup was announced, and there were only a few other people. We’re doomed, he thought. But within a couple of hours tens of thousands of people had arrived—soon to be attacked by the military and police with tear gas and batons.

On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, demonstrations against the coup and in support of constitutional order erupted all over the country. Micheletti’s new de facto government, in response, declared a state of siege, imposed a 6:00 p.m. curfew, and cracked down with ferocious repression. When demonstrators on Tuesday morning blocked the big “Bridge of Democracy” over the River Ulúa into El Progreso to demand the restoration of constitutional order, police and military tore into them brutally, sending ten to the hospital and arresting forty. Military checkpoints sprang up all over. The government shut off electricity to neighborhoods where protests were particularly strong. In Olancho, where Zelaya came from, the military reportedly began breaking into houses and capturing young people, forcing others to flee into the hills.⁵

On Thursday, July 2, hundreds of thousands marched in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, the country’s second-largest city. At 3:05 p.m., I called German to see how the march in San Pedro Sula was going. He told me that Iris had just been grabbed out of the march by the police and thrown into the back of a military truck on top of fifteen other people and was being detained. That next hour, panicked, I called everyone I could think of in the NGO and labor worlds. But I had no idea who else to call—do I contact Human Rights Watch? Amnesty International? I knew nothing about them. An hour later I got a call that she’d been released after a crowd of local human rights defenders had shown up at the detention center. Iris was fine, but I never ever want to go through an hour like that again, during which I could only imagine what the police and military were doing to her, or if she were even still alive. That afternoon and its potential horrors hung over me for years.

That first week, it wasn’t at all obvious that the coup would last. We knew that a coup attempt had been stopped in Bolivia the year before and that in 2002 a coup in Venezuela had been reversed after two days. We could feel how surprisingly strong the Honduran resistance was. We knew that the Organization of American States and dozens of countries throughout Latin America and all over the world had condemned the coup ferociously and called for Zelaya’s immediate restoration.⁶

But the Obama Administration waffled. The day of the coup, Obama merely expressed hopes that Hondurans would “respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter” and resolve their differences “peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference.”⁷ By Monday, Obama was willing to call it a coup, but by mid-week the State Department had backed off from demanding Zelaya’s immediate return.⁸

A week into the coup, on Sunday, June 5, deposed President Zelaya attempted to return to Honduras in a chartered plane, accompanied by his top ministers and Miguel D’Escoto, the President of the United Nations General Assembly. The presidents of Argentina, Ecuador, and Paraguay and the Secretary-General of the Organizations of American States followed in a second plane. Zelaya’s plane finally crossed into Honduran air space after two hours. Eventually, the plane circled twice above Toncontín airport in Tegucigalpa, then tried to land. But just as the plane was about to drop down a second time, two large troop transport trucks from the Honduran Army pulled out and blocked the runway sideways. Zelaya’s plane finally pulled up and away in defeat.⁹ On live Venezuelan television, I could see the military and police swoop in on two hundred protesters who had reached the last fence before the tarmac. Snipers on top of the airport shot at the protesters, while troops forced the demonstrators back, toward the hundreds of thousands of additional protesters who had poured into the streets around the airport to welcome Zelaya upon his return. Later, photographs appeared of protesters carrying the horizontal body of Isis Obed Murillo, age 19, who’d been shot and killed by one of the snipers, blood streaming out from his head onto the ground.¹⁰

By that point, the opposition had consolidated into the National Front of Popular Resistance (Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular, FNRP), known popularly as the Resistance or the Frente, bringing together a spectacularly broad coalition of the Honduran labor, campesino, Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, and women’s movements; progressive Catholics; middle-class and even elite members of Zelaya’s Liberal Party; others across the political spectrum who were committed to constitutional order; and, most astonishingly amid a fiercely homophobic public culture, the LGBTI movement. The backbone was Bloque Popular, a direct-action coalition that had come together long before the coup to oppose privatizations, stop the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and define broad collective demands from the the state. Suddenly, everyone I knew, as they threw themselves into the Resistance, sounded like they were in France during World War II, and old-line Marxist trade unionists in their sixties were talking about their comrades in “el movimiento gay.”¹¹

The Frente, in turn, built on a coalition that had emerged in the previous year in solidarity with a thirty-eight-day hunger strike by seven federal prosecutors protesting corruption in the judicial system. The Indigenous Lenca people, Jesuits, and other allies had gradually joined the prosecutors’ encampment in the open plaza underneath the Honduran Congress’ building in Tegucigalpa. The alliances built during that campaign, including the new National Coordinating Committee of Popular Resistance (Coordinador Nacional de Resistencia Popular, CNRP), underlay the much broader progressive alliance that led resistance to the coup.¹²

That summer and fall of 2009, as the coup tore through Honduras and I tried to figure out what to do about it, I went nuts trying to explain my new life to others. It was like a huge wall rose up between me and other people I knew at home in Santa Cruz. “Don’t you get it? There’s been a coup!” I wanted to scream. “People are getting killed!” I couldn’t stand it that no one seemed to care. As the days stretched into weeks, I had to work through the fact that most people I talked to weren’t ever going to care—they were busy with their own problems, their own causes. I had to respect that. After a few weeks, when people asked what I was up to, I’d just tell them “I have a new life as a Honduran Freedom Fighter”—jokingly playing off President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 reference to the US-funded Contra forces as “Nicaraguan Freedom Fighters.”¹³

While the coup regime held on through the fall, the FNRP organized mass protests and got brutally attacked. The police and military launched into demonstrators with batons sporting new metal tips; they’d suddenly thrust the batons up into women protesters’ crotches. At close range they unleashed dense thickets of tear gas, the kinds the make you vomit or cry or feel like you can’t breathe, or all three at once. German joked to me that he was learning to distinguish the tastes of all the different brands of gas. By the end of September, when Micheletti suspended four articles of the Honduran Constitution— restricting freedom of transit, banning public meetings not authorized by security forces, and barring the media from criticizing the government—thirty-five hundred to four thousand people had been illegally detained for peacefully demonstrating, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.¹⁴

On August 14, the police grabbed Irma Melissa Villanueva, 25, from a demonstration in Choloma, outside San Pedro Sula, where she’d been marching alongside friends of mine, and took her away to a remote location, where four policemen gang-raped her for hours. “Now, bitch, now you’re gonna see what happens to you for being where you shouldn’t be,” they told her. Three days later, with incredible bravery, her mother and husband at her side, she testified over Radio Progreso about what had happened.¹⁵

The terror escalated: one by one, activists disappeared or were assassinated. On July 11, armed men broke into the home of Roger Bados, a local union president and leader of the Resistance in San Pedro Sula, and shot him to death. That same night in Santa Barbara, to the west, men boarded a bus, ordered off Ramón García, an opposition activist, and killed him.¹⁶ Incredibly, the Resistance nonetheless remained nonviolent, with the exception of rocks thrown at security forces on some occasions, after the forces had attacked first. In sharp contrast to the 1970s and 80s in Central America, no security forces were ever killed, and no armed struggle ever emerged, even after months of repression.

Despite the obviously criminal and illegitimate nature of the regime, the Obama Administration swiftly began treating de facto President Micheletti as Zelaya’s legitimate diplomatic equal. On July 7, ten days after the coup, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the United States had persuaded both sides to agree to negotiations in San José, Costa Rica, by so doing successfully transferring power over the situation onto US-controlled terrain and away from the Organization of American States (OAS). The OAS, by contrast, did not recognize the post-coup regime, and the great majority of its member governments were adamant that Zelaya had to be returned to full powers immediately.¹⁷

The Obama Administration thus tu...