A youth uprising took place in 2013 in Tegucigalpa immediately following the announcement that the election would go to Juan Orlando Hernandez. This banner reads: You are not my president, and NO MORE VIOLENCE, NOR MORE MISERY, Juan Robando Out!!! (photo: The Nation Report)
THE COUNTRY IS WOUNDED
RE-ELECTION WILL KILL IT.
There are three cynicisms that produce repudiation, confrontation, violence and instability: the cynicism of the most powerful elite that shamelessly proclaims that its investments and infinite accumulation of capital are successes and achievements for the entire country; the cynicism of those who sustain the corruption and who give themselves the luxury of organizing anti-corruption campaigns and invent laws and decrees to pursue the corrupt and impugn; the cynicism of a ruler who has violated the Constitution and proselytizes with the hunger and desperation of the people, generating the false image that everything is legal and that his tyrannical project is the guarantee for a “better life.”
At this moment, Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) is the greatest destabilizing influence in Honduras, fanning the fire of insecurity, violence, confrontation and societal instability. His obsession to retain the Presidency of the Republic drives him to pervert public institutions to constitute a servile state that serves the business interests of the most powerful and whose state powers currently serve for their benefit, so that the ambitions of this conservative clique are fulfilled and to assure that the ill-gotten gains are divvied up between his family and associates.
The re-election (of JOH) is not the problem. Reelection is, in this case, an occasion to commit crimes under the protection of the State. Reelection is an opportunity to appropriate the public entity and establish himself as dictator. Reelection is the instrument to abuse this power to vitiate with impunity the democratic system and to abuse the vote of the people to justify transgressions.
Re-election is rather the trigger of the crisis. A crisis triggered by the extreme abuse of power of an individual who uses the noblest positions of the republic – initially as president of the National Congress and then as head of the Executive – to violate the Constitution of the Republic to achieve his shameful personal yearnings.
The cry of his campaigns, the ones in which he promised to do what he had to do to plunder the republic, is being played out. In order to do this he has used all possible legal and illegal resources and has reserved for himself the control of official decisions, the surreptitious control of the media and the invention of a campaign made to appear as social welfare that dissimulates the worst model of inefficiency, extravagant waste and corruption known to Hondurans. Say it if not for the invisible radars and corvettes and the gift of a presidential plane that no one gave away; the espionage and movement towards a fascist society; with secrecy as the mode of conduct and the lie as a way of action.
The pretentious reelection of Juan Orlando Hernández has nothing to do with the law and with the opportunity that is given to whomever rules to perfect his political agenda, as with advanced nations of the earth. What this reelection is all about is a desperate yearning for continuity and with the desperate drive to perpetuate a project formulated without the people and even more obviously works against the interests of the people.
It is not only the reelection of an ambitious being, but the pursuit of a model that has multiplied the opulence of a few families and radicalized the misery and unemployment of millions of other families. It is the infertile repetition of programs of assistentialism where partisanship supplants the correct public policies and prevents an agrarian reorganization aimed at stopping migration and peasant impoverishment. Instead of investing for decent and permanent employment, instead of a fiscal modernization based on income and property, concerned with health, housing, education and culture, there is an abundance of banal expenditures on arms, military and police. Repression is currently the most sacred neoliberal noun.
The purpose of reelection is to perpetuate the corruption and impunity of a small political mafia that is embedded in the government and able to use the state as a platform for business. It is the extension of a governmental structure based on public-private alliances that subordinates the economy to the profits of transnational companies interested in the extractive industry.
Mining, water, rivers, forests, the entire wealth of our biodiversity, electrical power, highways and all public and common resources will fall into the hands of that oligarchic caste that is barely a minority partner of multinational capital. What the continuity of Juan Orlando Hernández really represents is an elitist model based on the relinquishment of national sovereignty to the extreme.
Is this course of action inevitable? Is the reelection of Hernandez written in stone? At no time! No political conjuncture is indelible, and the more unjust and cynical it may be, the more right and responsibility we have to repudiate it and to resist it as a civic responsibility.
We are obliged to combine all efforts, to leave aside the differences and mistrusts, so that our synergies and consensus, our citizenship and democratic identity will shine, in order to build the widest convocation for the various initiatives already articulated and to achieve a unanimous and civic coordination capable of toppling this spectacle of dictatorship.
The moment to rescue national sovereignty and rebuild the rule of law does not admit delays or discussions because the motherland is injured: allowing such a wicked re-election would kill her.
Country of the Indignant
ISMAEL MORENO, sj
RODOLFO PASTOR FASQUELLE
EDUARDO BÄHR
WILFREDO MÉNDEZ
HELEN UMAÑA
MAURICIO TORRES MOLINERO
LETICIA SALOMÓN
JULIO ESCOTO
DARÍO EURAQUE
VÍCTOR MEZA
PATRICIA MURILLO
HUGO NOÉ PINO
EFRAÍN DÍAZ ARRIVILLAGA
RAMÓN ENRIQUE BARRIOS
MARVIN BARAHONA
