What does the first attempt at a coup d’état teach us since the co-optation of part of the parliamentary leadership of the Libre party was subdued by popular mobilization?
Statement of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, an international organization of communist workers
Honduras (2009), Libya (2011), Paraguay (2012), Ukraine (2014), Brazil (2016), Bolivia(2019)…? Coups d’état have returned with all their force to become fashionable among the mechanisms of the United States so as not to lose control of the planet before a bloc of enemy countries, such as China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba,… The old justifications are also back, the supposed fight against corruption, communism, the “war on drugs”. There is also the objective, to impose puppet governments against the will of the popular majority and continue to plunder the south of the continent as if it were its backyard.
Of the 35 countries on the continent, the ones that suffered the most coup attempts were Cuba and Venezuela.
In Cuba, imperialist coups have been rejected since 1961, with the repelled invasion of Playa Girón by counterrevolutionary gusanos (worms) armed by the CIA. This forced the 1959 revolution to go further, to socially and economically expropriate imperialism and local capitalists. Precisely because of these revolutionary measures, despite being a small island with a population slightly larger than that of Honduras, Cuba has overthrown each and every one of the coups of imperialism. The island they want to kill strangled by the blockades has exported health to the world.
In second place is Venezuela, which suffered the first coup d’état of this century, in 2002, defeated by popular mobilization, which brought Chavez back to government. Many coups d’état were attempted but the combination of arming the people, expanding popular representation, international solidarity and rapprochement with the enemy bloc of US imperialism dismantled political trials and mercenary invasions. It should be noted that, due to the greater deepening in the process of political, right-wing and economic expropriation of capital, Cuba suffers fewer internal coup attempts than Venezuela. Even so, in the last 30 years, as part of the defeats that were the counterrevolutionary processes of capitalist restoration initiated in Eastern Europe and the USSR, Cuba suffers, adapts and allows gusano action, as in the demonstrations of 2021 within the island itself.
It should be noted that the very first coup plot in Honduras has already begun before the beginning of the mandate itself with the co-optation of a part of the LIBRE party itself by the right and imperialism. The fracture of the Honduran parliament that can prepare an impeachment. It began with a faction of Xiomara Castro’s party LIBRE (Freedom and Refoundation) that already agreed with right-wing parties such as the national and liberal parties, proclaiming Jorge Calix, the leader of that fraction of LIBRE, as head of the legislature. https://www.ambito.com/mundo/honduras/xiomara-castro-inicia-su-gobierno-multiples-crisis-que-resolver-n5359451
Cálix, backed by the right-wing opponents, Liberal Party and National Party of outgoing President Juan Orlando Hernández, designated as a narco dictator, proclaimed himself head of the Legislature, with the support of more than 70 of the 128 members of Congress, including a score of Libre dissidents. That is, at a crucial moment, the former parliamentary leader of Libre joined the “stateless people who since the coup d’état of 2009 against the constitutional president Manuel Zelaya Rosales, those who suffocated and plundered the country” against the president-elect and against change,as correctly denounced by Lucy Pagoada Quesada, Coordinator D19 of USA-Canada and deputy coordinator of the Commission Politics of the Free Party, in the statement reproduced below.
The wing of US imperialism represented by Biden-Harris will seek to pressure the government of Xiomara Castro to weaken it first and co-opt or hit itlater. It is no coincidence that Kamala Harris herself is present at the inauguration of Xiomara Castro, as well as the King of Spain, agents of imperialism who cannot for a second be considered allies of a left-wing government and who will continue to try to weaken the mandate with pressures to the right, by anti-popular measures, for the payment of the debt with the IMF, … preparing a new coup. We must trust if in the people and only in the people who attended the convocation of Xiomara, approached the Parliament and overthrew the attempt of the traitor Calix and the coup right.
The wing of US imperialism represented by Biden-Harris will seek to pressure the government of Xiomara Castro to weaken it first and co-opt or hit itlater. It is no coincidence that Kamala Harris herself is present at the inauguration of Xiomara Castro, as well as the King of Spain, agents of imperialism who cannot for a second be considered allies of a left-wing government and who will continue to try to weaken the mandate with pressures to the right, by anti-popular measures, for the payment of the debt with the IMF, … preparing a new coup. We must trust if in the people and only in the people who attended the convocation of Xiomara, approached the Parliament and overthrew the attempt of the traitor Calix and the coup right.
That was just one of the firsts attempts. Temporarily overthrown by the popular siege called by Xiomara to Congress against the coup attempt, ensuring the election of an ally of the government as head of the legislature and the expulsion of the coup plotters co-opted from the Libre. It is necessary to emphasize that the Libre comes from an evolution to the left of the liberal bourgeois party of Manuel Zelaya, thanks to the progressive reaction to the brutal hostile pressure of imperialism and the right. The current purge is progressive, but it does not meet the needs of the Honduran people to fight for the end of poverty, migration, drug trafficking and corruption,elements of colonial and capitalist society in the country. Then follows the struggle to build a proletarian, communist and revolutionary party to deepen the anti-coup process and completely overthrow the right and imperialism.
We don’t have a crystal ball, we don’t know where our neighbors can come from. It will be for lawfare “against corruption”, a new military coup, an external invasion, a speculative attack, an economic blockade.
From recent history, we can assume that there will be many new coup attempts to overthrow the legitimately elected president Xiomara Castro Zelaya. We also know that no government or party avoided the coup that threatened it through continuous concessions to the coup plotters. Xiomara will not be able to rely, for example, on this “cunning” maneuver that only confuses, demoralizes and isolates the popular governments from their voters, favoring the coup siege carried out by the allies of the bourgeois coalition front until then.
One should not be defensive when enemies accuse Xiomara of wanting to make Honduras a second Venezuela. From the point of view of social barbarism, Honduras fares much worse than Venezuela, despite the criminal blockade imposed on Venezuela.
Honduras is neither Cuba nor Venezuela, nor will it be. It will chart its own path to the conquest of sovereignty, but it will only do so if it learns from the experience of the mistakes made in the various international experiences. Governments such as Zelaya, Lugo, Dilma, Evo, were not able to stop the coup process. Avoiding other scams requires learning from mistakes.
All this has as its north to prevent the approach to the Russian-Chinese pole of a country like Honduras located in the area of immediate geostrategic influence of imperialism such as Americe Central and the Caribbean.
The most important thing is to understand that the threat of new coups is not the only problem facing the Honduran people. And that, like coups d’état, unemployment, poverty and criminality are instruments and consequences of Honduran colonial capitalism.
These instruments aim to expand the extraordinary multinational exploitation of workers, whether in Honduras, Mexico or the United States. Capital has a double standard on migration, as it does with drugs, it represses to maximize its profits and devalue labor. The worker without rights, in Honduras, Mexico or the United States, is a cheap commodity.
Another example of this is the creation of the ZEDE in Honduras, world model experiences of privatized city-states independent of the State, under the dictatorial orders of a radical neoliberalism that more closely resemble forced labor concentration camps, controlled by international consortia of large private capital… This fight also includes the dispute over the right to control our bodies and the right to abortion.
The popular mobilization itself at each attempted coup has its limits because it only represents a defensive measure that cannot always be victorious. It is necessary to democratize organically, permanently and in the proletarian sense, the political power, that is, that the Honduran workers are not only contributing to a popular power (that is, that tries to “serve all classes”, that is, still bourgeois), that this working population (largely unemployed by the barbarism póst-golpe) is effectively the one that governs the country through new organs of power, not by those who were complicit in the coup until now.
Without defeating capitalism, without cutting the claws of imperialism on Honduras, without advancing to a victorious social revolution, we will not be able to liquidate with the situation in which 71% of its almost 10 million inhabitants live in poverty,we will not be able to repatriate our citizens who were forced to flee en masse to sell their labor power abroad, far from the goals and dreams of a better life that the majority of the population nurtured by voting for Xiomara Castro. Until victory always!
