Democra-Phobia: Fear of Citizen Power in Honduras

[Joanne98]

Strip away all the sensationalism, distortion, simulation, ideological axe-grinding, flotsam and jetsam of media coverage of events in Honduras over the past month and it still boils down to one central conflict:

The coup regime fears, and was imposed as a last line of defense against, “Citizen Power.”

Citizen Power – “Poder Ciudadano,” in Spanish, which was the credo on the posters and ads of Manuel Zelaya’s victorious 2005 presidential campaign – manifested itself this year in popular demands for a referendum on whether to write a new Honduran Constitution via democratically elected representatives to a constitutional convention.

It’s that simple, and the coup regime’s fear of authentic democracy is exactly why the failed “talks” in Costa Rica between the two sides have now ended without agreement on anything at all, as foreseen here and elsewhere.

That’s why the violent kidnapping of the president - accompanied by the military occupation of TV, radio and other independent media - took place on the dawn of an election day, Sunday, June 28, when the people of Honduras were going to vote in a nonbinding referendum on whether to have a vote in November over said constitutional convention, known as a constituent assembly in Honduras.

The hasty timing of the coup was intended to prevent the people from voting, and it speaks volumes of what the coupmongers believed the results of that referendum would have been, had the vote been allowed to happen. Their informed belief was that the referendum would have been approved and, even though it would be non-binding, that would have put to rest, once and for all, their claims to somehow speak for a majority of Honduran citizens.

After all, a much less risky strategy would have been to go out, the democratic way, and defeat the referendum at the polls. Lord knows they had the money to mount such a campaign. That the coup plotters did not even attempt to defeat it at the polls reveals the weak hand they are playing.

The question that was to be poised to voters – it bears repeating - was this one:

"Do you think that the November 2009 general elections should include a fourth ballot box in order to make a decision about the creation of a National Constitutional Assembly that would approve a new Constitution?"

And the coup plotters’ justification for the military putsch included the repeated claims that can be summed up as, “we had to do it this way because the constitution didn’t give us a clear enough path to remove the president legally.”

Got that? It translates as: “Yes, our Constitution is flawed, so flawed that we had to burn it, but any attempt to change it by democratic means is a threat that requires us to violate it in order to save it.”

The subsequent debates over the interpretation of many of the Honduran Constitution’s 375 articles and how they may or not may not apply to the situation – a loud discussion that has not, after 23 days, convinced a single nation of the world to recognize the coup regime as a somehow legitimate government, because the pro-coup arguments are that specious – have been intended to obscure the central point: that the entire reason for the timing of the coup was to prevent the Honduran people from speaking as a nation.

The popular demand for a new constitution has not gone away. Indeed, it remains a central requirement from the highly informed and increasingly politicized working and poor majority in Honduras.

Twenty-four-year-old Hortensia “Pichu” Zelaya, daughter of the legitimate President Manuel Zelaya, repeated that demand on Saturday at this anti-coup demonstration in Tegucigalpa:


http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/democra-phobia-fear-citizen-power-honduras