Honduras: The Deep Roots of Resistance

[Disir]

“Today a new political force of transformation is born!” As former president Manuel “Mel” Zelaya’s speech on June 26, 2011 reached its crescendo, hundreds of delegates from every corner of Honduras roared. After a short but heated debate that day, the 1,500-member assembly of the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP) approved resolutions paving the way for a new political party: Libertad y Refundación (Liberty and Refoundation), or LIBRE (“FREE” in Spanish). Those supporting the resolutions wanted the party to serve as an instrument of systemic change. With it they’d win the 2013 general elections and, once in power, convene a constituyente, a constituent assembly tasked with drafting a new constitution for Honduras.

The decision to create LIBRE came nearly two years after the June 28, 2009 coup d’état that forced Zelaya into exile and sparked a mass movement of civil resistance throughout Honduras. In the days, weeks, and months that followed the coup, hundreds of thousands of Hondurans, many entirely new to activism, took to the streets nearly every day to demand the immediate restoration of Zelaya’s presidency and democracy. Their peaceful demonstrations were met with brutal repression, and the few media outlets that relayed their demands were frequently shut down by state security forces.

The FNRP emerged out of the opposition to the coup and quickly developed into the largest social movement in Honduran history. Loosely organized into collectives at the local and regional level, the resistance includes a rainbow of movements: union activists, teachers, lawyers, artists, indigenous and Afro-indigenous villagers, small farmers, LGBT activists, and human rights defenders, with ideological tendencies ranging from the center left to the far left. United in their opposition to the coup, resistance members also oppose Honduras’s corrupt and deeply conservative political system, which is tightly controlled by the country’s wealthiest families in tandem with the leadership of the nearly indistinguishable Liberal and National parties.

Elections were not initially on the FNRP’s agenda. Many grassroots leaders felt that the movement should maintain autonomy from party politics and refrain from participating in elections widely seen as rigged. Instead, they favored broadening the resistance and intensifying peaceful mobilizations against the coup government’s most retrograde policies and in support of a constituyente. But when Zelaya began playing a more direct leadership role in the resistance after he returned from exile in May 2011, he pushed it toward electoral politics. By the time the FNRP’s June national assembly took place, the membership favored creating a new party that would compete in the 2013 presidential, legislative, and municipal elections.

Honduras: The Deep Roots of Resistance | Dissent Magazine

This is an excellent little article that came out recently.