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Honduras defaults to old habits
KEEBLE MCFARLANE
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Democracy is something outsiders never associated with governance in Latin America until quite recently. The typical Latin country was one where the thin layer at the top of the demographic pile lived as well as the rich in the most developed countries, while the vast depressed masses lived in the most squalid conditions.
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| KEEBLE MCFARLANE |
Elections were held like clockwork, but no politician ever dared introduce policies that would benefit the majority. Those who did were quickly ejected by the military, which existed not to uphold the constitution or to defend the nation against external adversaries, but rather to protect the interests of the wealthy and provide bullet-proof careers for the officer corps. Looking over their shoulders was the giant from the north, Uncle Sam, who kept them all in line by economic coercion, political blackmail or failing that, actual military intervention.
One country, Panama, was practically a creation of the United States, which just over a century ago encouraged a dissident region of Colombia to secede and form a new country. The new nation ceded an important portion of its territory to the US to build a canal joining two oceans and dramatically reducing the time it takes a ship to travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The US occupied a strip of land bordering the canal and relinquished its hold only as the century came to a close.
"Banana republic" was one of the pejorative terms used to describe some of those countries, and the archetype was the central American country, Honduras. The term was the creation of the noted American author, O Henry, who spent a year in Honduras at the end of the 19th century. His stay produced a book of linked short stories in 1904 titled Cabbages and Kings using characters and situations he observed there.
Three American companies - United Fruit, Standard Fruit and Cuyamel - controlled the country's banana business. They owned the plantations, packaging operations, railways and ports. They also owned politicians, who arranged matters to smooth their operations regardless of how it affected the people.
The United Fruit Company, which older Jamaicans remember - not necessarily fondly - earned the nickname El Pulpo (The Octopus) because its tentacles extended into many aspects of Honduran politics, sometimes violently.
The owner of Cuyamel, Sam Zemurray, hired a bunch of armed bully-boys from New Orleans a century ago to help stage a coup in order to secure favourable treatment from the new rulers. A couple of decades later Zemurray succeeded in a hostile takeover of the notorious United Fruit, and in the 1930s he was the man from whom Norman Manley had to wrest concessions for banana workers. In the 1950s, United Fruit was among the organisations which persuaded the US presidents Truman and Eisenhower to overthrow the government of Jácobo Arbenz in Honduras's neighbour, Guatemala, because his policies proposed fairer treatment for workers.
Honduras fit the template with regular military coups to depose governments the generals or their friends in the oligarchy didn't like. But in 1982, the country produced a new constitution - backed by the US - to increase democratic activity. The quid pro quo for American support was to act as host for the so-called contra rebels from next-door Nicaragua.
The havoc they wreaked persists in the memories, as well as the bodies of Nicaraguans.
Political turbulence continued in the 1990s, as Honduras received loans from the World Bank and the IMF, whose priorities, as we know from painful experience, hardly ever coincide with those of national governments. And as they say, bad luck is worse than obeah - in the middle of all this, hurricane Mitch struck in 1998, adding to the misery. Yet the democratic trend continued, with regime after regime chosen freely through the ballot box.
But now, it appears, the country has defaulted to old ways. Honduras is in the midst of a military coup, which began early on Sunday when soldiers entered the home of President Manuel Zelaya and rousted him out of bed. They didn't even allow him to change out of his pyjamas and whisked him off to Costa Rica. The plotters produced a letter of resignation purportedly signed by Zelaya, and upon receiving it the Congress chose the Speaker, Roberto Micheletti, to succeed Zelaya. He immediately ordered a night-time curfew and blocked radio and television stations from carrying anything but the most innocuous programming. This hasn't prevented Zelaya's supporters from protesting in the streets. As is their custom, the security forces have responded in force, using tear gas and batons liberally.
Zelaya became president by a close margin at the end of 2005 and his term expires next January. According to the constitution, he is allowed only one term. The coup leaders accused him of undermining democracy because he had called for a plebiscite on whether to begin a process to rewrite the constitution. He was asking his fellow citizens to put a question on the ballot during the presidential vote in November with a view to establishing a constituent assembly to examine constitutional options. What could be more democratic than that?
Among the ideas he was floating was to abolish the one-term provision and let a president run again. It is true that this effort resembles similar successful exercises in other Latin American countries.
Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador recently re-wrote their constitutions, generally enshrining the rights of hitherto marginalised people and putting in measures to protect their economies from the effects of corporate freebooting and free trade.
Zelaya, a wealthy landowner, is not a natural fit for the club of left-leaning leaders who have taken power across Central and South America in recent years. But after he was installed in office, he began taking on the business community with its sweat-shop mentality.
He increased the minimum wage by 60 per cent, declaring that it would "force the business oligarchy to pay what is fair".
His politics have stirred up the ire and resistance of the political class, including those in his own Liberal party, at the same time garnering support among the underprivileged, popular movements and groups promoting a civil society. As his popularity increased in these sectors, the establishment worked to undermine him, leading to the coup.
Zelaya has been erratic, divisive and reckless, but it is those who oppose him who are undermining their country's fragile democracy. This is why their effort has attracted no serious support from abroad, and why the Organisation of American States, the United Nations, the European Union and even the old bad boy of the region, the United States, have condemned the plotters and are working behind the scenes to restore a normal state of affairs.
At bottom, the problem with Honduras is the same as many countries of the region: it is very poor, with 70 per cent of its seven and a half million people living below the poverty line. What the perpetrators of the coup fear is that a constitutional assembly would erode or eliminate their power and bring in radical changes to the political system, breaking up the comfortable old dolly-house they have controlled for generations.
Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa have managed to achieve considerable change in the power structures of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador through their understanding of the need for widespread participation and direct appeals to those who have been ignored and overlooked in the past. The questions that are unclear is whether Manuel Zelaya is that kind of leader and whether Honduras is ready for that kind of change.
OOPS! Last week a printer's gremlin moved Iran's oil nationalisation crisis 10 years later, and the week before that I transplanted the city of Alexandria across the Mediterranean from Egypt to Greece.
keeble.mack@sympatico.ca
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