Friday 24 October 2008, San José, Costa
Rica
HONDURAS:
President Clashes
with Traditional Elites
By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA (IPS)
- Some sectors of
Honduras’s social and
leftist movement, labour
unions and other popular
organisations are caught
up in a revolutionary
reverie fruit of
President Manuel
Zelaya’s strong ties
with his Venezuelan
counterpart Hugo Chávez.
Although he comes from a
wealthy landowning
family involved in the
lumber industry and
heads the Liberal Party,
one of the two dominant
political parties of
Honduras, since taking
office Zelaya has
clashed with the
country’s traditional
political and economic
power structures.
Zelaya himself describes
the power structures as
being in the hands of
vested interests
controlled by the owners
of the media and leading
economic sectors,
including energy,
finance and maquiladoras,
the industrial free
trade zones that produce
goods for export.
According to political
analyst Matías Funes,
President Zelaya "has
always been a
conservative," but his
discourse is "such an
ideological jumble that
he’s managed to win over
a large part of the
social movement, who
believe Honduras is in
the midst of a
revolutionary process."
Funes, a university
professor, told IPS that
"revolutions cannot be
achieved by decree…and
to think that by joining
ALBA -- which I fully
support -- we
automatically become a
socialist country is the
worst possible fallacy
that Honduras’s popular
movement could fall
for."
ALBA (Bolivarian
Alternative for the
Americas), is a regional
trade group promoted by
the leftwing Chávez and
initially formed to
counteract the
U.S.-promoted Free Trade
Area of the Americas (FTAA,
or ALCA in Spanish).
"It seems that our
joining ALBA has stirred
up Honduras’s
eternally-incipient,
misshapen and
bad-tempered political
and social left," said
Jesuit priest Ismael
Moreno.
Moreno and Funes both
said the social movement
is currently under the
spell of a
"revolutionary mirage"
conjured by Zelaya and
Chávez.
Zelaya and the president
of Congress, his fellow
party member Roberto
Micheletti, signed on
Saturday Oct. 18 an
agreement for the
parliamentary
ratification of
Honduras’s accession to
ALBA, which the country
had signed back in
August, joining
Venezuela, Cuba,
Nicaragua, Bolivia and
Dominica in the
alternative bloc.
The agreement will
restart the debate on
the ratification
process, which was
brought to a standstill
by pressure from the
business community. It
was announced at a
political rally in which
Zelaya and Micheletti
ironed out their
differences, as part of
the Liberal Party’s
activities towards the
primaries to nominate a
presidential candidate
for the 2009 elections.
Micheletti, who aspires
to become Honduras’s
next president, signed
the agreement in
exchange for Zelaya’s
support for his
candidacy.
The president in turned
seized the opportunity
to obtain other
benefits, most notably
approval for
construction of a
coal-fired power plant,
which had been awarded
to a Guatemalan company
but was subsequently
challenged by the
Supreme Audit Court.
But Honduran activists
have turned a deaf ear
to such conditioned
party agreements,
excited as they are --
according to analysts --
by the possibility of
laying the foundations
of a revolutionary
process in the country,
following Zelaya’s
declaration that his
government was moving to
the left under a
"liberal socialist"
model.
Honduras decided to join
ALBA after Zelaya began
to forge closer ties to
Chávez a year ago, as
the government was being
pressured by
multilateral lending
agencies to adopt
transparency and
accountability measures,
in the face of
accusations of
irregularities in public
spending and two-digit
inflation.
Presidential advisors
who spoke to IPS on
condition of anonymity
said Zelaya had admitted
in private that the
lending institutions had
left him no choice but
to join ALBA, because he
"had to satisfy the
country’s demands, and
Chávez was willing to
supply funds with no
conditions or audits."
Membership in ALBA
provides access to
credit lines and energy
and food benefits.
Venezuelan aid will
include 30 million
dollars in loans for
small-scale farmers, 100
million dollars in
housing assistance, a
donation of 100
tractors, and support
for health, education
and technological
assistance programmes,
in addition to
preferential payment
terms for fuel purchases
through Petrocaribe.
Rafael Alegría, an
activist with the
international peasant
movement Vía Campesina,
told IPS that "behind
these attempts to
discredit the country’s
admission to ALBA and
President Zelaya’s
decisions are the most
outdated sectors of the
country who feel they
own Honduras and are not
willing to give anything
to the poor."
Alegría rejected the
allegations that in
exchange for accession
to ALBA, Honduras’s
popular movement "has
been bought out by
Zelaya."
"What we have are mutual
agreements or
understandings," he
said, after expressing
his satisfaction over
the "significant social
changes that are taking
place in Honduras."
However, his position
was recently shaken when
the local newspaper El
Heraldo published a
journalistic
investigation revealing
receipts for a total of
284,000 dollars
allegedly distributed by
the government to 38
social and political
leaders in exchange for
support for ALBA and
protests raised in
Congress prior to its
ratification.
The newspaper published
a list of people who
purportedly received the
payments, including Vía
Campesina activists,
leaders of the
Confederation of
Honduran Workers (CTH)
and other trade unions,
members of the leftwing
Democratic Union party,
and rural leaders.
Most of the trade unions
have refused to comment
on the accusations.
But Wendy Cruz of Vía
Campesina, whose name
and signature appears on
some of the receipts
featured in the
newspaper, emphatically
denies that her group
received 9,000 dollars
from the government
(part of the sum
mentioned) in exchange
for support for ALBA.
"We used our own funds
to mobilise," she told
IPS, adding that her
group "supports ALBA
because it is good for
the poor."
For his part, Hilario
Espinoza, of the CTH
labour confederation,
remarked to IPS that the
money had been granted
"as aid."
"I’ve just assumed my
post (in the union) and
I’ve been told that
there was a certain
amount of money provided
as aid, and I collected
it not for myself but on
behalf of the
organisation. I’m not
worried about an
investigation, because
we have evidence that
clears us" of any
wrongdoing, he said.
But Espinoza was upset
by the newspaper’s claim
that his union had
received 10,000 dollars,
saying it was only
granted 6,000 dollars.
The Attorney General’s
Office and the Supreme
Audit Court announced on
Tuesday Oct. 21 that
they had initiated an
investigation on their
own motion, and planned
to summon presidential
chief of staff Enrique
Flores Lanza, whose
budget provided the
funds.
Flores Lanza told IPS
that "if they summon me
I will appear; we
contributed those
resources in response to
a request from social
groups and for a good
cause that will bring
huge benefits for
Honduras."
Zelaya, in turn,
allegedly tried to offer
money to El Heraldo
journalist Alex Flores
to get him to stop
investigating.
Flores told IPS that
"when I asked (Zelaya)
to comment on our
investigation, he looked
at me and said: ‘I’ll
give you 500 lempiras
(19 dollars) for you to
stop talking.’ Then he
called his guards and
said to them, ‘pay this
guy,’ and took out a
100-lempira bill (five
dollars), at which point
I told him to show me
some respect."
For sociologist and
university professor
Pablo Carías, the
country "is immersed in
impunity and complicity.
All this commotion over
ALBA has only served to
harden Honduras’s most
conservative right, all
because of the social
movement’s erroneous
belief that revolutions
are paper constructs."
"A project as
interesting as ALBA is
being distorted by the
government itself, with
these handouts and
buying-off of
convictions, which far
from furthering social
causes merely undermine
us; and these payments
we’ve seen only prove
that what we’ve had are
revolutionaries
motivated by their
stomachs, and not by
principles, and that we
need to form leaders who
will counter the coming
years of conservatism,"
he added.
Transportation union
leader Erasmo Guerrero
told IPS that "this new
scandal should call the
social and popular
movement to reflection.
It’s not ethical but it
happened. This is an old
practice that has
existed under many
governments, and nobody
has done anything to put
a stop to such
irregularities because
there are a lot of
interests involved."
Zelaya, who in his 32
months in office has
faced 744 social
conflicts and protests
over a range of issues,
has opened a new front
with the scandal
involving ALBA, a
project that most
Hondurans supports and
view favourably, despite
the opposition of the
country’s most
influential business
operators and the
conservative sector. |
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