The Costs of Killing Democracy

 After Manuel Zelaya was elected President of Honduras and took office early in 2006, he began supporting some reformist policies such as raising the minimum wage, reversing deceptive land ownership practices, and aligning with the international group of countries known as ALBA.  Shortly after pursuing these policies he was overthrown by the Honduran political class through a 2009 military coup d’etat.  Shortly after the coup, the European Union, the United Nations, and the Organization of American States opposed the new leadership, but within months the United States changed its position to support the military leadership. The United States also supported the elections in the fall of 2010 to replace the overthrown civilian leadership when other countries globally refused to recognize the new government.  And the U.S. renewed full military aid by February 2010, even though in the case of other coups in Nicaragua, Mauritania, and Madagascar the U.S. terminated aid agreements.

What are the local and global costs of allowing a democratically elected government to fall to domestic military forces?

 

The day after the ousted President Zelaya returned (21 September) to Honduras from his forced exile, the Honduran military government suspended five of the Honduran constitutional rights: personal liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, habeus corpus, and freedom of assembly. While the suspension of these rights was lifted a month later, in time for the November elections to elect Zelaya’s successor, the damage had been done. The elections took place in a climate of fear and intimidation, so that the tenure in office of the new President, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, remains in question.

The damage at the national level to the possibility of democracy is felt in other ways as well. In the six months following the assumption of the presidency by Porfirio Lobo, Human Rights Watch has reported that at least eight journalists and ten members of an opposition political party have been killed, and the perpetrators have continued to operate in a climate of impunity. The Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America has documented 59 killings in 2011 alone, and a number of other disappearances across the country for political reasons.

The killings have further intimidated others to prevent them from participating in the democratic process. Human Rights Watch reported that, “A radio journalist told Human Rights Watch that a colleague left his job at their station in July after receiving repeated death threats for his political views. Similarly, a political opposition member interviewed by Human Rights Watch said she felt compelled to abandon her political activities after she and her daughters were accosted by armed men in March. A FNRP member who was shot in the leg during an assassination attempt told Human Rights Watch that he also stopped participating in political activities as a result of the attack.”

The climate of impunity has been explicitly extended to the forcible expulsion of the democratically elected President during the coup d’etat and other violent events of the coup period through a January 27, 2009 amnesty. This means that General Romeo Orlando Vásqez Velásquez, whose removal from his command of the military by President Zelaya was the event that seemed to be the catalyst for the coup d’etat, will not be prosecuted for the forcible removal of an elected civilian head of state from office. Instead, General Vásquez, like many other military leaders trained in the U.S. military’s School of theAmericas (recently renamed WHINSEC), is taking the path to head the government which he once overthrew, since he is now a leading political candidate for Honduran presidential elections scheduled for 2013.

What does this mean for democracy at the national level? As José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, noted, "When journalists stop reporting, citizens abandon political activities, and judges fear being fired for their rulings, the building blocks of democratic society are at grave risk."

Local organizations that have found themselves under siege outside of the capital of Tegucigalpa have responded in various ways to the destruction of the constitutional democratic infrastructure.  An international fact-finding mission by several human rights, church, labor, food justice, and farmers organizations found violations of a broad range of human rights in the Bajo Aguán region along the Caribbean coast.  Residents in the area have endured ongoing land-ownership disputes with wealthy investors since the mid-1990s as economic elites have worked to expand into the globalized food export industry.  Since the coup a number of violations have occurred in the areas of rights to assembly and association, personal security and movement, freedoms from intimidation and harassment, rights to food, education, health, and access to justice, as well as the right to life.  The investigation found that over 20 individuals were assassinated in 2010 in this valley after Lobo was installed as president for participating in political opposition to land disputes, and the killers have yet to be brought to justice.

The response of Hondurans to this calculated strategy of imposing a national climate of intimidation, silence, fear, and impunity under the law has been complex.  Some have responded by withdrawing from political participation, as described already, while others have continued to organize and pursue what political gains they can.  For example, Judge Guillermo López Lone formed an organization called Judges for Democracy, a group that eventually had many of its members dismissed from their positions. In the Bajo Aguán valley, local farmers responded to the post-coup assassination and intimidation campaign by armed security agents of large agribusinesses by convening an International Congress of Human Rights in Solidarity with Honduras in the town of Tocoa on February, 2012.  The local organizers were successful in mobilizing 46 organizations from 15 countries and every state in Honduras, including farmers, women’s, youth, indigenous, human rights, ecological, church, and labor groups from surrounding countries north and south. In establishing a major international network of human rights observers, solidarity, and information exchange and political mobilization to build a movement to oppose the attacks on constitutional and international rights, this congress suggests that democracy is not yet dead in Honduras.

What does the attempted killing of democracy in Honduras mean for global democracy?  The Haitian popular leader Camille Chalmers suggested on February 18, 2012 at the Bajo Aguán Congress that the increasingly overt violence of globalization forces is destroying nations like Haiti and Honduras.  By buying millions of acres of land transnational corporations are working to make farmers’ resistance impossible, taking away their economic support to transform them into laborers dependent on agribusiness for their livelihoods and survival. By making an example of Honduras, transnational corporations and their political and military allies among national elites attempt to threaten any political leaders who might consider mild reforms to serve their people. Chalmers argued that by joining forces with the indigenous, young people, and women, farmer organizations can work to leave the greed of market capitalism behind and build new spaces of democratic popular movements.

 

The costs of killing a democracy are high in terms of human life and dignity, human rights and the credibility of constitutional governance and the rule of law. The benefits of killing a democracy and replacing it with an oligarchy of economic and political and military elites are clear to those few who benefit from export economies in the global south and their allies in the global north.  Those who benefit from attempts to kill democracy in Honduras practice what Jacques Ranciére has called the Hatred of Democracy, an approach to governance that is widespread in the global north as well as the global south.

When a government attacks and attempts to kill its own democratic governance mechanisms and its own citizens, as Honduras has since September, 2009, those who believe in democracy as something larger than a single government respond by finding alternative platforms, modes, and spaces to practice democracy.  Based on democratic practices across the country, democracy is not dead in Honduras, but lives in spaces outside the state and in platforms that are other to the nation.