Honduras Elections

 ~~ posted for and with introduction by dmorista ~~

Introduction:

The question of elections and just what opportunities and pitfalls they pose for the “Left”, both in the United States and in other places, is always looming over us; and has become even more important in recent years. Just a couple of weeks ago there were elections in Honduras for president, three vice-presidents, 298 mayors, 128 deputies to the national legislature, and 20 representatives who will be sent to the Central American Parliament.¹ The modestly center-left Libre Party (Freedom and Refoundation Party) saw their Presidential Candidate Xiomara Castro win the election with 53.3 percent of the vote, or 987,670 votes, this compares to the results for the widely hated reactionary National Party, that fielded Nasry Asfura, who garnered 34.2 percent, or 633,885 votes. Most of the rest of the Presidential votes went to the Salvador Party, of television personality and right-wing populist, Salvador Nasralla. Nasralla is now the Vice-President elect. Together Castro and Nasralla will control a majority of the votes in the Honduran Legislature.  Libre and its allies also won control of city halls in the capital Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula and other major cities.² The situation facing Castro in Honduras resembles the current situation in the U.S., in that the legislature and many other political and socio-economic institutions are still controlled by the right.

I am dividing the articles we are posting, that analyze the electoral outcomes and the ensuing political situation in Honduras, and their relationship with the U.S., into two categories. The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) published two articles, that we are posting here at The Class Struggle, that are very critical of the newly elected Honduran President Xiomara Castro and her Libre political party. These two articles (“Washington hails victory of Honduran opposition candidate”, Dec 1, 2021, Bill Van Auken, World Socialist Web Site, at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/02/hond-d02.html >: and “Honduran 'leftist' president-elect bows to Washington over Taiwan”, Dec 6, 2021, Bill Van Auken, World Socialist Web Site, at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/07/hond-d07.html >) essentially say that Castro's win will not result in any serious advances for the working people of Honduras. It is worth noting here that Castro is the wife of Manuel Zelaya, the center-left President; who was deposed by the 2009 coup, an operation that was closely coordinated with the various counter revolutionary / imperialist forces in the U.S., the covert operations agencies, the State Department, and the U.S. military. Zelaya and Castro are both members of the Honduran elite and ruling class. Zelaya was a major landowner, but became friendly with Hugo Chavez and invited him to visit Honduras. Chavez provided low-cost oil for Honduras, and Honduras joined the Bolivarian Organizations of left-leaning societies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Zelaya was in the process of enacting a number of social democratic reform measures when, in 2009, the hard-line forces of the Honduran ruling class and their allies in the military trundled Zelaya, wearing his pajamas, into an airplane and moved him out of the country. Figures like Manuel Zelaya and Xiomara Castro are roughly comparable to other elected center-left Latin American leaders that include Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala who was deposed by a blatant CIA supported Coup d'etat in 1954, Joao Goulart of Brazil deposed in the Coup there in 1964, and Salvador Allende killed by the putschist forces of the Chilean Military in 1973. All 3 of these deposed and/or murdered leaders (Arbenz was found scalded to death in the bathtub of his Mexico City apartment some 17 years later in January of 1971) were working on substantive, albeit modest social democratic types of reforms. All were replaced by horrific fascist regimes that rolled back any gains and ruled by terror and murder during the ensuing decades.

The WSWS takes a very dim view of the prospects for real change with the Castro / Nasralla alliance. The Death Squads are still busily killing off the politically active members of the Honduran working class and so far hundreds of thousands of Hondurans have fled the Capitalist Terror Campaign there; and come to take their chances with an uncertain fate and dubious prospects at the American Border. Militarized police and actual military units, along with criminal gangs, are attacking and killing these migrants all the way from Honduras, and through Guatemala and Mexico both countries that migrants moving overland must transit, and El Salvador that is an alternative route to Guatemala that some Honduran migrants are using. The Dec 6^th, WSWS article about Central America and the recognition of Taiwan vs China points out that: “As recently as 2015, the government of Taiwan re-gifted five US Blackhawk helicopters to the Honduran military so that they could be used in repressing opposition to the regime that came to power with the US-backed coup of 2009.”³ The WSWS articles by Van Auken point out the unbroken continuity of violent repression and social control in Honduras that extends largely unbroken for a century and that began with 5 invasions by the U.S. military during the 1920s and 1930s.

A couple of articles that are more optimistic, about the admittedly limited prospects for Castro and the Libre Party administration, will be posted in a day or two. And after that an article or two about the electoral politics landscape that we face in the U.S. The comparisons between the U.S. and Honduras and other Latin American and Caribbean societies are rather eye-opening.

1). “Hondurans Break the U.S.-imposed Narco Siege of their Government by Electing Xiomara Castro as New President”, Nov 29, 2021, Patricio Zamorano, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, at < https://www.coha.org/hondurans-break-the-u-s-imposed-narco-siege-of-their-government-by-electing-xiomara-castro-as-new-president/ >.

2). “Washington hails victory of Honduran opposition candidate”, Dec 1, 2021, Bill Van Auken, World Socialist Web Site, at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/02/hond-d02.html >

3). “Honduran 'leftist' president-elect bows to Washington over Taiwan”, Dec 6, 2021, Bill Van Auken, World Socialist Web Site, at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/07/hond-d07.html >