Honduras: "Legitimacy" One Year After the Coup (Frank)

I always regretted that, because of demands on  our time and resources, we could not cover the 2009 political crisis in Honduras. The issues are far from resolved, as Dana Frank reports for The Nation:

A long, brutal year after the June 28, 2009, military coup that deposed President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya, official Honduras is collapsing under the weight of its own illegitimacy. On the anniversary of the coup, the opposition took over the nation’s highways and bridges in overt resistance to Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo’s new government, while his own appointees are openly defiant of the slightest concession. The Obama administration, meanwhile, remains insistent that Lobo is the only path forward.

The anniversary of the coup started early in Choloma, outside San Pedro Sula, where the maquiladoras loom and enormous trucks rumble through carrying boxes of T-shirts and jeans for export from Puerto Cortes. Protesters from the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (National Front of Popular Resistance, FNRP), the broad national coalition uniting women's groups, trade unions, campesinos, the gay movement, indigenous people's organizations and human rights groups, shut down the highway at 8 AM. The whole operation was surprisingly low-tech: 200 people in red shirts loosely arrayed along a four-block stretch of the highway, waving banners, chanting and erecting makeshift barriers out of burning branches and a few tires. By 9 over 150 police had arrived, many in riot gear, huddling closely like cattle in the shadow of two trees in the median strip. More ominously, a truck carrying a giant tank of water laced with chemicals and pepper spray pulled up in front of the blockade; a commander informed the protesters that they’d be forced from the road in forty-five minutes. A half an hour later, though, most of the police suddenly trotted back to their truck and followed the tank truck back to San Pedro Sula.

In a complicated dance of countervailing powers within Honduras and beyond, Lobo is desperately seeking legitimacy, and thus forced to both simultaneously show force and restrain it. He vowed in his first days in office not to tolerate any road blockages or occupations. But the anniversary protests were too widespread, international attention too vigilant, to give Lobo much space to maneuver. "There are too many road takeovers all over the country today and not enough police for them to repress us all," a wholesome-looking young man in a FNRP baseball cap explained. Indeed, that same morning over 200,000 marchers occupied the main boulevards of Tegucigalpa, the nation's capital, as well. In El Progreso and Santa Rita, Choluteca and Santa Barbara, La Ceiba and Tocoa, protesters successfully blocked all the country's main arteries.

Tutored closely by Washington, Lobo is trying desperately to present his administration as a "government of national reconciliation." A so-called Truth Commission, unveiled in February with much fanfare, is supposedly investigating the transgressions of the coup but lacks enforcement power, covers only abuses before Lobo's time, and has been largely discredited by the resistance—which has launched its own, alternative truth commission.

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