By Al Giordano

On May 26 I wrote The Summer of Shove Begins, at a time when pundits and bloggers alike were gnashing teeth over whether US President Barack Obama was overreaching in his now successful agenda to have Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor confirmed by early August and to have a health care bill ready in September.

I suggested, as I pretty much always do, that readers ignore the chattering up above and watch the ground game down below and that will decide how the story goes: “the real history will be made, this summer - as during the last two - by the unsung heroes and heroines: the organizers.”

It was a reference to Organizing for America – Obama’s grassroots political arm – and its organizers (you know who you are) who would spend the summer setting up the battle to be waged in this month of September over the problem that has eluded solution for decades in the United States: the now 46 million Americans who don’t have access to health insurance.

Labor Day weekend is here, so let’s bring the patient in for a seasonal check up.

Two days ago, Organizing for America field marshal Mitch Stewart blasted out an email titled The Real Story of August, (a title that resonates with my own May declaration of where “the real history” of the summer would be made). He wrote:

At the beginning of August, President Obama wrote to the OFA community to challenge us to work hard, break through the noise and give the American people a voice in the fight for health insurance reform.

It wasn't easy: With Congress back home, special interests and partisan attack groups went into overdrive spreading lies, and the media seemed to broadcast any story of conflict or division they could find.

But you accepted the President's challenge -- and delivered.

See it for yourself: Check out the latest photos and stories from around the country.

Our strategy for the month was simple: engage the millions of individuals who know we need change to fight the lies and tell the truth, build support for reform, and ensure that support is highly visible while members of Congress are home gauging public opinion. We continued our methodical, battle-tested approach of volunteers reaching out online and offline in every part of the country. We offered the facts, answered questions and engaged those who were ready to get involved.

Stewart provided the following numbers, as any decent community organizer does: 350 town hall meetings were held over the summer across the country with 70,000 attendees. More than 5,000 group visits to local Congressional offices were organized, along with more than 100,000 phone calls to Congress members in support of the President’s health care proposals.

Mass meetings like those held in Missouri by Senator Claire McCaskill and in Ohio by Senator Sherrod Brown have drawn thousands of health care supporters, always with a screaming but small minority of health care opponents just to keep it lively. A similar dynamic was at play last Monday in Skokie, Illinois, when US Rep. Jan Shakowsky held such a session in a 1,300 seat auditorium. A Field Hand who was there reports there were still 500 left outside waiting in line, including a few screwballs chanting “No public health care!” Various shouting matches ensued. Sounds like democracy to me.

Stewart concluded:

Our strategy is working. We are going to win this thing. Americans will finally get the health insurance reform we all need.

And he added a link to On The Ground reports from mass pro-health care rallies in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico, all in the past week. These were mainly held, notably, in Electoral College “swing states” that were in play last November and will be again in the future. As such, they also contain many “swing districts” where members of Congress of either party are vulnerable to challenge and thus more susceptible to the kind of grassroots organizing and pressure from below that is targeted at them.

It’s a two-fer for the Obama organization, as it is impacting the effort to pass national health insurance while also flexing the muscles of its political organization to keep it in shape for the 2010 midterm and 2012 presidential elections.

On Wednesday night, the President will address a joint session of Congress, mainly about health care, and that will be nationally televised. It will be the official kick-off of the fall political season in the United States.

Meanwhile, the pundits and the blogosphere alike have been more obsessed with the game up above. Every utterance by every “unnamed White House source” in the media about what kind of bill might get voted on in Congress becomes the daily bread of commentary, with the usual doses of Chicken Little feathers flying and armchair quarterbacking.

And while the polls show that the American public strongly favors national health care with a “public option,” the media and Internet cacophony over the specifics of the plan have generated considerable confusion.

Democratic pollster Joel Benenson explains in a memo:

82% of Americans say that the U.S. health care system needs either fundamental changes (55%) or needs “to be rebuilt” (27%). (CBS, Aug. 31)

So far, so good, but:

Only 31% say they “understand the health care reforms under consideration in Congress, while 67% say they find them confusing. (CBS, Aug. 31)

…an NBC poll found that initially, only 36% said that the President’s health care plan is “a good idea” while 42% say it is a bad idea. (NBC, Aug. 17).

And he outlines three “talking points” that, when explained to the public, jump that weak support for a specific plan to a clear majority of 53 percent:

• Requirements on insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions;

• Requiring all but the smallest employers to provide health coverage or pay a percentage of their payroll to help fund coverage for the uninsured

• Tax credits to help families and individuals to help them afford coverage

The good news: If those three points are explained coherently to the public, support hardens for a specific plan. Since Congress responds to polling data, that’s important. Those three talking points are the road map to victory.

The bad news: Neither the corporate media nor the blogosphere are going to clarify any of those three points for the public. They're too obsessed with the sideshows up above to achieve any clarity or coherence on the matter.

And this leaves the whole ballgame in a different set of hands in the coming weeks: yours.

Organizing for America is, simply put, the best and only instrument through which regular everyday people can effectively inform and move public opinion to write the outcome of this battle.

What’s clear is that Organizing for America is healthy and strong as an organization. Every task that it said it would do at the beginning of the summer has been complied with. It is an organization that is walking its talk. And it exudes the same competence and trust in community organizing that characterized the Obama campaign of 2007 and 2008.

A lot of people have asked me recently what to do if they want national health care with a public option. I’ve answered that Organizing for America has the plan and specific instructions for what each individual can do. Some have responded, “but what else can I do?” Wake up. There is no “what else.” That is the path, the only one that leads to possible victory on this long elusive goal.

At this point, any health care proponent that isn’t signed up and carrying out the community organizing tasks charted by Organizing for America is self-marginalized from making history here. You can blog or post Facebook status updates until you are blue in the face and it won't change a thing.

You can argue about whether the US House Progressive Caucus and Speaker Pelosi will really vote against a plan that doesn’t include a full public option (knowing these Congressional progressives for many years, I would put very little faith in their ability to stand firm as a group when push comes to shove), or whether Senator Olympia Snow’s “trigger” option, or US Rep. James Clyburn’s watered-down “pilot program” option will or should be taken seriously, or whether the administration should be talking to one side or another about those proposals.

But none of that chatter about the political game up above means spit when it comes to determining what kind of plan can achieve passage.

It’s crystal clear to me that the White House wants a full public option, but that it is Congress that will determine whether it is attainable in September or October of 2009.

It is also evident that, through Organizing for America, the President has unleashed a gargantuan grassroots effort to push Congress and public opinion toward the best possible plan, preferably with a public option. In that, he's done more than the people shouting at him to "do more" have done.

Whether that public option can be achieved immediately (I disagree with those who opine that if it isn’t done now it will never happen, the arc of the universe bending slowly and such) depends entirely on whether enough members of Congress perceive it in their self interest to vote yea on it.

Thus, shouting at the President about what kind of plan he should discuss or not with Congress is the most futile task imaginable. If you’re for the public option, the President is already on your side to the extent that he has the votes in Congress.

And as ought to be obvious, Internet activism doesn’t move Congress. It never has. One has to go out onto the street, knock door to door, staff phone banks and such to bypass the media-fed confusion (and also to break out of your own demographic market niches), and explain those three talking points above to the people. That, and only that, has a chance of bolstering the poll numbers around a specific health care plan with a public option.

So don’t tell me - as some have - that I have to be blogging every day about this – serving only as an echo chamber for a hundred competent health care policy bloggers that are already doing it – when we all know (or should recognize) that blogging and online social networking doesn’t hold any key to victory here.

I’ll say it again, as it is the central message of this essay: If you want health care with a public option, go door to door with Organizing for America to get it. If you do not go door to door or phone bank or do data entry or other support work for such efforts, you’re not going to get it. Period. End of story: Then it will be your fault, not the president’s.

Those are the big, left, outside and from below observations of a correspondent who has just spent half the summer in Honduras doing the ground level reporting that is made necessary because the President’s Secretary of State has botched the US response to the coup d’etat there in ways that have bought time for the coup regime.

(In the event anyone thinks I’m just just shilling for Obama when I tell you that Organizing for America offers your only path to health care with a public option, I’m really not a happy camper when it comes to his administration’s behavior on my own beat of Latin America, but one must have the wisdom to be able to recognize two different policy fronts as two different battles. If the White House or anybody else would like me to spend more time writing or firing people up about health care, my only demand is that they pull Secretary Clinton’s havoc-wreaking incompetence off of this corner of a country called América. Until then, I’m too busy cleaning up after her mess down here, and doing the supervising job that her superior seems too distracted by the health care battle to conduct.)

So what do I know about the health care debate? To look at events in the United States from outside of them, with the perspective that comes from being apart from the US media and Internet echo chambers, is what The Field has done since it began. That, and administering Chicken Little vaccine shots, which, alas, are not yet offered in any health care legislation. The booster shot I just gave some of you – I’ll repeat: Want health care? Go door to door or you’re not going to get it! – was with the small needle.

And I’ve got a big painful syringe waiting for some of the flock that just seem to be clucking for a smackdown. But for now, let’s see if the little needle works.

By Al Giordano

I’m old enough to have learned how to type on one of those museum-piece contraptions pictured above: a manual typewriter.

Over the years I learned how to use an IBM Selectric, later a word processor, later to put those texts on the fledgling Internet through a dial-up connection (before it had images or photos it was just a global village square for typed words). Later came cell phones, still later cameras and video through them, high speed broadband and wireless connection, Blackberry and iPhone, and today anyone with some of these tools – no longer just a company TV network or major daily newspaper or wire agency – can launch a viral video or a well-structured written narrative or image on a Monday and hurtle it around the world via Internet by Tuesday, recapturing a news story from its top-down distorters.

We’ve seen in recent months, from Iran to Honduras, how civil resistance movements are increasingly utilizing these peaceful weapons of speech to defend and advance the struggles for human rights, authentic democracy and, of course, a free press. More and more, major international news organizations are dependent on the authentic media from below to use as the basis for their reporting. We’ve got them where we want them, but what we need now is to construct a larger, better trained, army to fully seize this turning point moment in the history of media and the press.

Since 2003, this newspaper, Narco News, and its School of Authentic Journalism have been training journalists and communicators of talent and conscience throughout this hemisphere to be better, faster and more coherent at this work. This coming February of 2010, we’re going to do it again, offering scholarships to a couple dozen communicators to join an equal number of professors (many of whom are themselves graduates of the J-School) for ten days on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula for an intensive training and boot camp – in Spanish and English - in how we can all be better, faster and more coherent at doing the work of authentic journalism.

Beyond the training we give each other in the nuts and bolts of journalism and communications – so that a news reporter will know how to produce and upload video about a written story, and so that a documentary filmmaker will know how to craft a powerful journalistic narrative – perhaps the J-School’s more important impact has come from its creation of shared ethics and mutual solidarity among so many doing this vital work. That is the essence of what we do. We form and build ranks.

In the coming days and weeks I and other members of this international news team will be quite busy with the tasks of composing this year’s scholarship application, course descriptions, faculty biographies and other pedagogical materials so that we can announce the promote the scholarships by the middle of this month. And if that means that we do somewhat less news reporting and analysis, well, that just underscores the absolute necessity of forming and building the ranks of those pioneers that do the daily work of the Authentic Journalism renaissance.

Stay tuned for greater detail on how to apply for the scholarships, how you can support the school and its students from afar, and if you want to make sure that you don’t miss the opportunity of a lifetime to be part of it, make sure you are subscribed to our free email alert list in Spanish or in English.

By Al Giordano

75 young Afro-Honduran community organizers gathered this weekend in La Ceiba and issued a call for a November 2010 referendum for a new Constitution. D.R. 2009 Samuel Molina.

AUGUST 30, 2009, LA CEIBA, HONDURAS: Scratch the surface of the de facto Honduran coup regime and its architects can’t help but demonstrate, again and again, that one of its unspoken reasons to exist is their unbridled racism toward considerable sectors of the national and international community. The July comment by its make-believe “foreign minister” that referred to US President Barack Obama as “that little nigger” was not an isolated gaffe: Coup “president” Roberto Micheletti has additionally installed the country’s most infamously bigoted politician, Rafael Pineda Ponce, as his very own chief of staff.

As the de facto regime’s “minister of government,” Pineda Ponce has suddenly found new relevance in Honduran political life. Before the coup plotters rescued him from obscurity, Pineda Ponce was a disgraced and largely forgotten 2001 presidential candidate on the Liberal Party line who lost to President Ricardo Maduro largely due to the total rejection Pineda Ponce faced from the Afro-Honduran population after he referred to those citizens sneeringly as “monkeys” that hang from trees.

Rafael Pineda Ponce, “government minister” for the Honduran coup regime, has portrayed Afro-Hondurans as “monkeys” hanging from trees.

“We can’t spend our lives contemplating the sunsets and the palm trees with monkeys hanging from them,” he had complained in front of a reporter for a national daily newspaper in 1998, in reference to the Garifuna and Afro-Honduran communities that populate much of the northern coast. That was the region that Pineda Ponce sought to open to foreign investment and tourist mega-resorts. And although the Liberal Party has traditionally received healthy support from Afro-Hondurans, who are ten percent of the population, Pineda Ponce did not win in a single municipality with significant Afro-Honduran presence in the 2001 elections, a vote he lost by eight percentage points nationwide.

Pineda Ponce’s 1998 racist gaffe came in the context of his crusade then to change the Honduran Constitution to eliminate article 107, which says:

“State lands, communal farms or private property located in the border regions with neighboring states, or along the coasts of both seas, extending 40 kilometers inland, and those of the islands, keys, reefs and sand banks can only be acquired, possessed or deeded to Hondurans by birth, by companies governed entirely by Honduran partners or by State institutions, and any act or contract to the contrary will be declared null and void.”

Pineda Ponce’s point was that development by foreign companies of hotels and tourist attractions along Honduras Caribbean coast was, he felt, somehow inhibited because of the preponderance of black Hondurans who live and work near the beaches. (The apparent desire of some North American expats to enable or overlook the race hatred of top coup leaders may also have something to do with their own fixations on owning villas and manses near the beach while Article 107 remains inconveniently in place, as journalist Belén Fernández explores in her story today, The Parable of the Honduran Congresswoman and the Gringa Blogger.)

Community organizer Celeo Alvarez Casildo remembered this history while speaking to the 70 young adults who had been selected to represent their communities at the XVIII National Gathering of Afro-Honduran Youth held this past weekend in La Ceiba.

ODECO strategist Celeo Alvarez Casildo speaks to the National Gathering of Afro-Honduran Youth about the art of community organizing. D.R. 2009, Samuel Molina.

During a Friday morning plenary session, Alvarez had recounted the history of how the national Organization of Community and Ethnic Development (ODECO, in its Spanish initials) has influenced presidential candidates over the past three elections to sign detailed campaign promises. “In 2001, four of the five national candidates came to sign our pledges. But the Liberal Party candidate who is now government minister didn’t come. Why didn’t he come?”

A young man stood up to answer: “He made comments about how we have to remove the monkeys from the beaches. That’s something we could never stand.”

It’s a part of their history that the young Afro-Hondurans, most of whom were still children when it happened eleven years ago, remember very well, for the collective shock and polemic it generated at the time and for the gains won by ODECO when it organized around and against Pineda Ponce’s remarks. Not only was the candidate’s presidential campaign hung by his own words, but his proposed elimination of Article 107 – against which tens of thousands of Afro-Hondurans and others organized and mobilized, knowing that the proposal was principally aimed at taking away their coastal and communal lands – went crashing down to defeat with him.

Despite or perhaps because they must live daily with such prejudiced attitudes by the white and Ladino Hondurans that dominate the country’s institutions (paradoxically, the most powerful business magnates in the country are themselves part of ethnic minorities of Arab or Jewish descent), the Afro-Honduran population has made giant strides in the past two decades since ODECO formed in 1992 and applied a community organizing model to its anti-discrimination efforts.

“Our history is one of racial, political, economic, cultural and environmental racism and discrimination,” Alvarez told the assembled youths. “We had to organize ourselves. Nothing that we have today fell from the sky. All of it is the result of an organized struggle.”

The building where the gathering was held is living testimony to the fast growth of ODECO as a force in Honduran life. It indeed did not fall from the sky but was constructed, one floor at a time, from the ground up. The lot it stands upon cost $34,000 dollars, donated by a Norwegian human rights NGO. The foundation was laid in May 2004 and the first floor completed that October. The third floor assembly hall was inaugurated on September 30, 2006. The entire building, including dormitories with 64 beds, cost about $210,000 US dollars to build, much of that donated by human rights NGOs from Ireland. Construction contractors have estimated that the structure would have cost more than one million dollars to build commercially, but ODECO was able to do it on a relative shoestring thanks to the donated labor by hundreds of Hondurans during its construction.

Community Organizer Celeo Alvarez Casildo at the Satuye Cultural Center that ODECO rose up from a vacant lot in the Isla barrio of La Ceiba. D.R. 2009 Samuel Molina.

Alvarez – who directs a staff of thirty from the complex, each of whom, in addition to their titled duties is required to also be a “promotor,” the word they use for community organizer – continued his talk on Friday morning: “In 1992 – raise your hand if you were already born then – everyone thought we wouldn’t go out into the streets because we were afraid. But we went door-to-door, neighborhood-to-neighborhood, community-to-community. We called it ‘ant’s work.’ I didn’t think more than a hundred people would come to our first demonstration. All I could promise is that I would show up with my family. When the day came, more than 5,000 marched down San Isidro Avenue. The street turned black.”

“Who led the march?” he asked, then answering: “The young people, and also children and senior citizens did. We went into the streets with our drums. Our drums have accompanied this process since the beginning. Last night at this event’s inauguration the energy was high because our culture was here with us, and with us the voices of the ancestors, as we go forward constructing the new nation, the new community. A better future for the community depends on each one of you.”

Alvarez frequently points out that his organization participates in only three marches a year: Each April 12 commemorating the arrival of Garifunas to Honduras after winning their freedom from slavery on the island of San Vicente; each May 1 when it marches with the country’s workers for Labor Day; and each October 12, together with indigenous peoples, on the anniversary of the arrival of Colombus to the New World. “The rest of the year we do the real work,” he noted: “that of organizing.”

“You have to keep on moving,” he urged the youths. “If you stand still, nothing happens. You have to move. The power to negotiate is born from mobilization.”

Advancing in Times of Retreat

During two decades when labor unions and other progressive forces in Honduras and elsewhere have suffered declining membership, and while the electoral left has won only a couple handfuls of congressional seats, the community organizing model of the Afro-Hondurans has brought them a unique power in Honduran society to obligate politicians and institutions to address their grievances.

A milestone of this emergent power came last March 19 when each of the presidential candidates nominated by the five national political parties signed a written list of thirty campaign pledges that ODECO had put before them. So well organized is the community that the politicians didn’t dare not sign.

Among the promises now unanimously made by the presidential candidates: To budget $12 million US dollars to complete the process of regularizing land titles in Afro-Honduran and indigenous communities, $2 million in economic development funds, $8 million for improvement of electricity, potable water and telecommunications systems in their communities, $10 million for development of tourism in Afro-Honduran communities (many of which are along the north coast beaches) and the construction of a Garifuna Tourism School with an annual budget of $1.5 million, $20 million for local municipalities to democratically plan community development, a $500,000 annual budget for the National Commission Against Racism, $265,000 to support Afro-Honduran History Month activities each July, $5 million for a new government department for Afro-Honduran and Indigenous Development, a $2 million annual budget to treat HIV-AIDS patients, $25 million to improve public schools in minority communities, $500,000 a year toward the creation of the International Afro-Descendent Institution (including the School of Formation of Afro-Descendent Leaders in Human Rights, Communications and Investigation, ODECO’s “School of Leaders”), $2.5 million for the collection and preservation of ancestral song, dance and arts, $1.2 million annually for learning institutions the preserve Garifuna tradition, a fifty percent increase in the budget of the Garinagu Cultural Center of Honduras, $2.5 million to construct an International Garifuna Museum in La Ceiba, $2 million for the Indigenous House of Culture, $10 million annually for environmental clean up and preservation in Afro-Honduran and indigenous communities.

That $104.9 million dollars in specific commitments was signed by National party candidate Pepe Lobo, Liberal party candidate Elvin Santos, Democratic Unity candidate Cesar Ham, Democratic Christian party candidate Felicito Avila Ordóñez, and Bernard Martínez Valerio of the Social Democratic party. (The sixth presidential candidate, Independent Carlos Reyes, had not yet qualified for the ballot last March when the pledge signing ceremony was held.)

And that’s not all. Beyond the $104 million US dollars in specific budgetary promises, the organization extracted the following additional pledges from the abovementioned presidential aspirants: Protections for indigenous and Afro-Honduran populations in the DR-CAFTA “free trade” agreement between Central America, the Dominican Republic and the United States, government supported advertising and communications campaigns against racism and intolerance, ratification by Honduras of the Inter American Convention Against Racism, Discrimination and Intolerance, stronger laws to guarantee proportional representation in national, state and local government, a commitment that Afro-Hondurans and indigenous will constitute at least thirty percent of the next president’s cabinet, diplomatic and other top positions, support for public safety and housing construction in minority communities, better use of the Census to accurately measure minority populations, 500 scholarships per year for Afro-Honduran and indigenous secondary education, 500 scholarships per year for the same in universities, reform of the laws establishing the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History for it to better recognize and preserve Afro-Honduran and indigenous culture, and adhesion by Honduras to international labor, environmental and anti-discrimination treaties that its governments have so far failed to sign.

D.R. 2009, Samuel Molina.

ODECO’s reach extends to judicial and military authorities, too. When some years back soldiers of the Armed Forces killed four Garifuna fishermen for allegedly floating their boats into a nature preserve, the organization made such a noise that military General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez – more infamous today as the executor of the June 28 coup d’etat – and his joint chiefs of staff had to head up to La Ceiba to try to calm the storm: ODECO organized hundreds of citizens to meet them in a public assembly and demand justice. The offending soldiers were prosecuted for their crime.

The June 28 coup and its aftermath have created a new set of challenges for ODECO. Prior to Thursday night’s inauguration of the national youth gathering, the de facto government’s vice minister of youth, Randy Garcia, who is Afro-Honduran, asked ODECO for an invitation to attend. The request was declined. “We won’t have anything to do with that government,” Alvarez told Narco News.

During the Friday morning session, Alvarez passed the wireless microphone to the youths, seated in a large circle in the third floor assembly hall, and asked them to take turns reading aloud the 30 numbered campaign pledges signed by the presidential candidates. When one young woman struggled with the pronunciation of some government agency titles in the text and some other youths laughed, Alvarez interrupted: “Companeros, ¿que pasa? We learn to swim by swimming and we learn to read by reading. Do not worry if you trip over the words. This is how we move forward, learning.”

He spoke to the youths of the importance of reading, citing historic leaders like Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Marcus Garvey, Nelson Mandela “and Malcolm X, who said ignorant people don’t win any battles. What did these leaders all have in common? They were studious people. You have to read. You have to form yourselves. He who claims to be a leader and doesn’t know anything just ends up tricking the community.”

School of Leaders

A show of hands revealed that about half of the 70 youth delegates are already graduates of ODECO’s School of Formation of Afrodescendent Leaders in Human Rights, popularly known as the “School of Leaders.”

Founded in July of 2006, the School of Leaders has graduated 360 Hondurans and another 40 or so Afrodescendents from neighboring Central American nations and Mexico. A slight majority of the graduates to date have been women. The program is offered in four courses that are held one week each month for four months, with 30 to 40 students in each session and professors from Honduras, Guatemala, Perú, the United States and elsewhere. Local community organizations choose the students – who range from ages 12 to 30, most of them around 19 or 20 years old - and graduates participate in raising the travel funds for new students from their communities to go to future sessions in La Ceiba where ODECO’s assembly hall and dormitories are host to the school.

The first week’s course, “Afrodescendent Presence in América,” includes history from slavery through abolition to the present. Labor leader and author Pedro Brizuela of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, wrote the teaching text, titled “Leadership,” that is the basis of the first lesson. The text cites quotations from such diverse commentators on the theme as Evangelical author John C. Maxwell, Conrad Hilton and Plato. Today we translate it to English and publish it in Spanish to make it available worldwide. (Many of its planks apply equally to journalists as to social leaders, and it will surely be incorporated into the curriculum of next February’s Narco News School of Authentic Journalism in Mexico.) It speaks of the difference between a “leader” and a mere “boss,” and lists 21 indispensable qualities of a leader: Character, charisma, commitment, communication, ability, bravery, discernment, focus, generosity, initiative, listening skills, passion, positive attitude, problem solving, relationship cultivating, responsibility, self confidence, self discipline, service, capacity to learn, and vision.

D.R. 2009 Samuel Molina.

The second weeklong course is titled “The Philosophical Conception of National and International Laws that Protect Human Rights.” The third is, “Struggle and Daily Life of Afrodesendents.” And the fourth is, “Defense of the Rights of Afrodescendent Communities.”

The School of Leaders’ 191-page textbook, its second print run published in 2008, provides texts and source documents on the abovementioned themes. With ODECO’s permission we make that textbook available today in its original Spanish for free downloading. It also contains the texts of national and international laws and treaties in the areas of human rights, racial equality, labor and land law, as well as detailed study of the Honduran Constitution. It teaches how to organize to influence municipal, state and national governments, as well as a focus on how organizers can address specific problems in communities: racism, xenophobia, discrimination, intolerance, violence against women, HIV-AIDS, substance abuse, child abuse, and the nuts and bolts of participatory democracy.

Grupo de Danza ODECO, at the Thursday inaugural session of the National Gathering of Afro-Honduran Youth in La Ceiba. D.R. 2009 Samuel Molina.

The seriousness and sense of purpose of the young leaders was evident all weekend at the national youth gathering: participants agreed to abstain from alcohol or drugs during the session, keep their cell phones on vibrate, and listen carefully whenever any of them speaks. Virtually every intervention by a participant is applauded, no matter how short or long the statement. The participants received three delicious meals a day from head chef Sonia and her kitchen staff. The students participate in trust building exercises and social events such as a presentation of dance and song in the Garifuna language on Thursday:

Añahei gurigia mafiñehaña luagu wanichigu

Wanichigu wedewese

Wanichigu wedewese

Higarugu, Higarugu, Higarugu, Higarugu

Higarugu niburetiñu garinago

The song – a call to the youth to believe in the knowledge of the ancestors and the power of the young; the chorus sings, “Come, Come, Come Garifuna Youth” - was not an ancient traditional ballad but, rather, an original composition by Guillermo Tómas, one of the youths at the gathering who works teaching Garifuna language classes for ODECO.

Subjects, Not Objects

Alvarez, in his Friday presentation, explained that the thirty campaign promises signed by the presidential candidates were themselves the result of a democratic process among Afro-Hondurans at the grassroots level.

“Did ODECO invent these demands?,” he asked aloud. “No. This was the result of a lot of work, meetings in the communities where the people put forward ideas. They were elaborated and put on paper.”

“These demands are not exclusive to afrodescendant communities. They also include the indigenous. We need to construct alliances with other sectors. The indigenous have similar problems to our own,” he stressed. “Nothing falls from the sky! You need to light the torch to continue with organized struggle to accomplish anything.”

Alvarez then explained that a big task will come to force the next president – product of the scheduled November 29 election that has been stained by the fall of constitutional order in the country – to comply with those promises. “Once elected, then comes the job of vigilance, of insistence, so that they keep these campaign promises. Someone once said that nothing is achieved without the people’s will. But nothing is maintained without a push from the institutions.”

He then outlined the kind of process that will be needed to force the government to comply with the presidential pledges, inventing the names of three Hondurans to tell the story. “It will look something like this: ‘Chepe Martinez’ and ‘Filomena Castro’ and ‘Candido Garcia’ form a commission to monitor and evaluate compliance with the promises. But to get to Tegucigalpa, Filomena, Candido and Chepe need transportation, lodging and food. They need to get from their communities to the capital and then must be able to move inside the capital. They’ll need to be able to pay the telephone bills. They need certain conditions. If they don’t have them they won’t be able to arrive, speak on telephone, or follow up on the promises. It takes an organization to make that happen.”

“What comes next?” he asks. “That depends on the responsibility and capability that we have. Are you subjects or objects? What are we?”

“Subjects!” chant the youths.

“You, what are you?”

“Subject!”

“We have voice. We think. We act. We feel. We want them to see us as subjects. Very few communities in Honduras have what we have. We already have this commitment. We are not the object of anyone.”

During the Saturday session of the national youth gathering, the assembled watched the second half of a Spanish language translation of the PBS documentary, A Force More Powerful, about nonviolent action, civil resistance and strategic planning. At the closing event, a group of youths offered a theater performance portraying a courtroom scene in which the HIV virus was put on trial – his defense waged by “Attorney Ignorance” – and the Grupo de Danza ODECO culminated the conference in red, gold and green vestments offering a traditional dance.

The trainings and lessons taught both inside and outside the Satuye Cultural Center are evidently relevant to the situation that all of Hondurans, not just its Afrodescendent population, are living today under the impositions of a coup regime.

In the past three years, Celeo Alvarez Casildo and ODECO have quietly risen up a peaceful army of almost 400 highly trained community organizers who go about their work with seriousness, dedication and also great joy and camaraderie. In a decade of reporting on the social movements throughout the hemisphere, we have seen no other Latin American community organizing training program as advanced as ODECO’s School of Leaders and, as word spreads about it and its resulting field organizing, it seems only than a matter of time until the art of community organizing that it teaches comes into popular demand throughout the rest of Honduran population, particularly among the youth.

When Leaders Lead

Not content to merely title themselves leaders with a diploma, the youths gathered for the conference to actually lead. They discussed their views of the current political crisis in Honduras and then delegated half a dozen from their ranks to draft a declaration based on their collective conclusions.

The declaration denounced the “violation of human rights” by the coup regime that stole power on June 28. It offered support to the Arias plan to restore President Manuel Zelaya to the post to which he was elected. But the youths’ interpretation of that plan may differ significantly from that of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: their most prominent demand was that on the last Sunday of November in 2010, the people of Honduras vote in a national plebiscite to create a process to write, democratically, a new Constitution for the nation. (The conditions of the Plan Arias that is backed by Washington prohibit President Manuel Zelaya from promoting a constitutional convention upon his negotiated return to the presidency. With this declaration, the Afro-Honduran youth – organized at an advanced level that surely ought to impress and prick the conscience of the community organizer that currently occupies the White House - have made it crystal clear that no such deal applies to them or their aspirations for a more democratic Honduras. With or without Zelaya’s return, they’re organizing for a new Constitution.)

Many groups and individuals make declarations, but this one comes from a network of highly trained organizers with the capacity and infrastructure to mobilize a lot of noise and light upon its demand. Higarugu niburetiñu garinago… The Garifuna youth is coming to make sure that the popular demand for a new Honduran Constitution shall not be lost in the maneuvers by the powers up above.

After the youths read aloud and unanimously approved of the declaration, Celeo Alvarez addressed the youths. “This declaration will surely go around the world,” he said, expressing pride in their “coherence” and passion for justice. Alvarez said he would take the declaration of the youths next month to Washington DC where he and other Afrodescendent leaders from throughout the hemisphere will meet from September 21-25 under the banner of ONECA, the Central American Black Organization, which has deep connections with US Civil Rights organizations, leaders, community organizers and the Congressional Black Caucus. Alvarez was ONECA’s president for its first 14 years, and is a member of its governing board. While in Washington, he will be available for interviews and meetings, and may be contacted via email at calvarez@caribe.hn

So that no one around the world, in Washington or anywhere else, will need his or her spectacles to read it, here’s the money ‘graph - the only part of it for which they wrote some words in ALL CAPS, for emphasis - of the youths’ declaration, when they call for:

“The convocation of a PLEBISCITE so that the citizenry can vote on the writing of a NEW CONSTITUTION, with clear guarantees for wider and more representative participation among all sectors of the Honduran people. This plebiscite should be held on the last Sunday of November of 2010.”

And that you are reading the youths’ declaration – here is the full text translated to English and here in Spanish, including the signatures of the 75 young community organizers that co-authored it – is evidence that their call for a November 2010 national referendum for new Constitution has already begun its journey across the planet and throughout the larger School of Leaders that is a country named Honduras.

By Al Giordano

AUGUST 25, 2009, LA CEIBA, HONDURAS: Over the entrance to the three story building that is headquarters to the Organization for Ethnic and Community Development (ODECO, in its Spanish initials) are these words: “Buscamos voces que acallen el silencio.”

“We Seek Voices that Hush the Silence.”

For seventeen years, ODECO and the man the organization calls its principal strategist, Celeo Alvarez Casildo, have built what is evidently the largest and most advanced project of community organizing anywhere in (and one that reaches across a wide geographical swathe of) Honduras.

As Afro-Hondurans they have self-organized to defend and expand their civil rights and those of indigenous peoples and other minorities, to win proportional representation in Congress and other governmental bodies, to overturn NAFTA-style initiatives that would have opened the door wider to foreign ownership of Honduran property and resources and, among other conquests, to legalize 32,000 hectares of communal lands.

“We had always been invisible,” Alvarez, fifty-years-young, explained to your reporters. A recent reminder of the unapologetic racism rampant in the mindset of the Honduran oligarchy came in the early days after the June 28 coup d’etat when the regime’s make-believe foreign minister, Enrique Ortez, expressed his views about US President Barack Obama: “Ese negrito no sabe nada de Honduras,” or “That little nigger doesn’t know anything about Honduras.” Alvarez and ODECO launched an all-out media offensive that forced the regime’s first defeat: Ortez’s resignation (the regime transferred him to a less visible sinecure in its bureaucracy).

Friday will mark two months of the coup regime’s illegitimate grasp upon the Honduran state, and today a majority of Hondurans of all hues feel that same curse of invisibility imposed upon them. They have been told again and again by the pro-coup media and its mynah birds of the elites that they don’t exist, that “everybody” favors the coup, even when the only public polling data available demonstrates the opposite to be fact. The paltry 30 percent that, according to Gallup, have a favorable view of coup dictator Roberto Micheletti - when coup defenders talk about “everybody” as if the only Hondurans that count are those among the owning class or its aspirants - reveal with their exaggerated and fantastic claims that they, too, are much like Ortez: so blinded by racism and class prejudice that it renders them incapable of rational action, much less democratic governance.

As the US Aid agency – no friend of authentic democracy in Honduras, historically – has noted:

“With a per capita income of US$800 per year, Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the region. Overall, 71.1 percent of Hondurans lives in poverty, and 77.7 percent of the rural population is poor. In urban areas, some 63.1 percent are poor. Income inequality is a critical issue. The richest 20 percent of households receive 54.3 percent of the total income of the country, while the poorest 20 percent receive only 3.2 percent. Of the country’s 7 million inhabitants, 41 percent are under age 14. Because the population is fairly young and economic conditions are harsh, a large number of marginalized youths struggle daily to subsist. Youths head 10 percent of Honduran households, and 68 percent of these households are below the poverty line.”

It is that lumpen majority that the elites never include when they make their wild claims about “what everybody thinks” in Honduras. And yet their fear of its democratic participation is so great that it provoked them to resort to a violent anti-democratic coup d'etat.

August 2009 in Honduras

In every corner of Honduras visited by Narco News in recent weeks – from the capital city of Tegucigalpa and its state of Francisco Morazan, through the states of Comayagua, Olancho, Colón, Atlantida, Yoro, Cortez and Copán (more than two thirds of Honduras’ population lives in those seven states) – we interviewed hundreds of voices, perhaps more than a thousand from every walk of life, most of whom told us the same thing: the primary goal for which they struggle is precisely that which provoked the power structure to impose a coup d’etat. They seek, above all other goals, a Constitutional Convention (known here as a Constituent Assembly, elected democratically) to rewrite the nation’s poorly-authored 1982 charter, a document which had enough holes in its flimsy and contradictory protections to allow a wealthy few to think they could ram an unconstitutional coup d’etat through it.

Elections in Honduras are conducted through “urnas,” or ballot boxes. The first urn is for paper ballots for president. The second is to select members of Congress. And the third is for municipal offices. It was the proposal for a “Cuarta Urna,” or fourth ballot box in the scheduled November 29 national election that caused panic among the ruling minority, because it would have - if approved by voters - convened such a Constitutional Convention.

Truth is, there are millions of Hondurans eligible to vote that simply do not. They don’t like the two-party system of the National and Liberal labels. They don’t generally trust the politicians from either of them. And the low voter turnout has allowed, time and time again, a minority of Hondurans to gain a plurality of votes for one or the other. What the oligarchy feared from a ballot question regarding a new constitution – even the nonbinding consultation that had been planned for June 28 – is that, yes they can, the great mass of normally nonparticipating Hondurans would flood the polls, creating a mandate for now-exiled President Manuel Zelaya to successfully push the national Congress to add the Cuarta Urna to the November ballot.

The consequence for those in power, if a plebiscite for a new Constitution were to share the November polling places with those for politicians, was evident to all: Historic voter turnout by sectors of the population that want to rebuild their nation along more authentically democratic lines. There was no question that a “yes” vote on the Cuarta Urna would have won overwhelmingly. Indeed, even in the case of the proposed June 28 nonbinding survey, the coup plotters felt they had to go to the extreme of kidnapping the president to put a stop to it in the hours before it was to happen.

The powerful forces that favor the status quo and offer abusive interpretation of its milquetoast Constitution of 1982 chose not to oppose the ballot question the democratic way – they didn’t organize a “vote no” campaign or anything like that – because they felt, indeed they knew, that it was a foregone conclusion that the people would overwhelmingly opt to convene a Constitutional Convention.

And for the bosses of the traditional parties – Liberal and National – the prospect for such radically increased voter turnout in November brought nightmares that the smaller but feisty Democratic Union Party (UD, in its Spanish initials), which promotes the Cuarta Urna, would become the overnight sensation – Obama style – as a flood of new voters washed the dead wood of the twin oligarch parties from the Congressional seas.

“One thing we never understood is how the Cuarta Urna, something so good, could become the pretext for a coup d’etat,” Celeo Alvarez told your reporters when we first visited him last week at the ODECO headquarters. “The coup was an abortion. It killed the most constructive and democratic hope available to the people.”

Meanwhile, the corporate media – and often too much of what bills itself as “alternative media,” too – has focused more obsessively on the circus up above: Will exiled President Mel Zelaya return to Honduras? If and when he does will he be imprisoned by the coup regime? How long will coup “president” Roberto Micheletti last in power? Will military General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez be scapegoated and prosecuted for the original sin of demonstrating the coup’s illegality by forcibly exiling the President to Costa Rica? Lost in all this mediatic star gazing is the central aspiration that remains down below where the people live and work: the Constituent Assembly and the new Constitution.

As political analyst Ricardo Arturo Salgado wrote last week:

“There are essentially two possible short-term scenarios for what may happen in the country: a) the president returns; and b) the president does not return to his post. No matter the scenario, the struggle will continue because the ultimate goal is the re-founding of our nation, not just the return of President Zelaya.”

Indeed, the two months that have already passed under coup dictatorship leave only five more possible months in Zelaya's tenure, even if he does return briefly to power (a scenario that looks increasingly unlikely), until the scheduled January 29, 2010 inauguration of a new president.

And although Zelaya himself has agreed to the twelve-point deal known as the Arias Plan – one in which he would return as president but with vastly reduced powers – this US-backed “solution,” because it fails to address the popular yearning for a new Constitution, leaves the more-organized-than-ever-before Honduran social movements without an attainable institutional path to accomplish their most coveted grail.

That’s why, increasingly, at the grassroots level, the people and their organizers express that they, too, quietly prefer that the coup regime of the gorilla Micheletti and his Simian Council continues to reject the Arias Plan. “I hope it doesn’t happen,” Padre Fausto Milla of Santa Rosa de Copán told us yesterday (see the related report by Belén Fernández from that outpost along the Guatemala border). A consensus is emerging down below that the more direct paths to revert this abortion of a coup will become clearer once the nonsense cooked up above, via San José and Washington, will be recognized by all as fundamentally flawed since its conception. Plan Arias is already stillborn.

This upcoming Friday, August 28, is therefore cooking up to be a very powerfully symbolic day: the two-month milestone will mark the psychological end of all attempts to resolve the matter institutionally. The various human rights delegations - from the OAS, the Inter American Human Rights Commission and Spanish Judge Balthazar Garzón's international criminal court - are on their way out of town as we type, and the failure of international diplomacy as imposed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will give way to the second stage of the struggle to remake the country more in the image of authentic Honduras and its dispossessed majority.

Three Paths: Electoral, Armed or Something Else

The social movements in Honduras find themselves in a dilemma with no ideal solution when it comes to the scheduled November 29 elections, devoid of any Cuarta Urna, and managed by a coup regime that has already demonstrated it cares not a whit for democratic process or such quaint concepts as the will of the people. Monsters that engage in coups d’etat won’t hesitate to utilize electoral fraud if they have to, and everybody knows it. No reasonable observer thinks that such “elections” can possibly be fair or free under a regime that establishes curfews, suspends basic constitutional liberties and pours acid on critical broadcast transmitters any time it feels the slightest bit threatened by nonviolent civil resistance from below.

If the Honduran social movements decide to participate in the November 29 simulation, they risk legitimizing a game that is already fixed against them. At the same time, because of the fracture in the Liberal Party between its golpistas and anti-golpistas, there would certainly be vast gains by the Democratic Union Party, gathering what the Liberals and their hapless standard bearer, former Vice President Elvin Santos, have spilled. And it would lead to a lot more of them in the national Congress, which is the body that can place a Cuarta Urna on the ballot, if not in 2009, then perhaps in 2010.

The opposition electoral forces are also plagued by tactical disagreements in their own ranks: While the UD Party nominated César Ham as its presidential candidate, another opposition personality, labor leader Carlos Reyes, is also on the ballot as the country’s first-ever Independent presidential candidate, one without a political party. UD leaders like Congresswoman Silvia Ayala tell Narco News that they’re suspicious that the country’s Electoral Tribunal put the Independent on the ballot – an unprecedented development in Honduran politics - to divide the opposition vote. Others, like labor movement veteran Pedro Brizuela in the San Pedro Sula region, express positive feelings about both Ham and Reyes but suggest that the somewhat older Reyes might be the stronger possible candidate to unite behind. And, finally, an important sector of the left simply will boycott any election called by the illegitimate coup regime, which makes victory virtually impossible even without the predicted electoral fraud due to suppressed voter turnout by an ambivalent population.

The eight nations that belong to ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas – Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Venezuela – have declared they will not recognize the winner of Honduran elections held under a coup regime, and its highly probable that neither will the Organization of American States (OAS).

And so the electoral path, if not fully closed, is littered with enough obstacles and landmines that those that haven’t disregarded it yet will likely come to that conclusion a day late and a dollar short, on November 30 of this year, once its tragedy is fully realized.

Upon collapse of the idea that fixed elections hold a path out of the coup, talk in some corners turns to armed struggle: of mounting a guerrilla war. There are always those of limited imagination who see only two paths possible: electoral or armed. Yet the most basic rule of guerrilla combat is one has to measure the “correlation of forces” before marching out on that highly exposed limb.

That correlation, if objectively analyzed, does not at present contain the successful ingredients that would be necessary to overturn the coup through the barrel of a gun. Unlike neighboring Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala – where well organized guerrilla movements have both won and lost against entrenched oligarchies and coups d’etat – Honduras has little experience in a field that, over recent decades, technology has made even more difficult. Unlike in the 1970s, when the Sandinistas in Nicaragua toppled the Somoza regime and when the FMLN in El Salvador came extremely close to doing the same for its nation, today there are telecommunications satellites orbiting above the earth that make clandestine insurgency, even in jungle terrain, virtually impossible. Ubiquitous cell phones, the Internet and the surveillance they bring with them over their own users add to the impediments.

Advocates for the armed path – they tend to speak in whispers, and certainly have not yet organized wide support for that scenario – accurately point out that there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of Hondurans at present so committed to winning back their country that an armed resistance could conceivably outnumber and even overpower the 9,000 members of the Honduran Armed Forces and the 14,000 National Police, perhaps, maybe if everything went right. True, but that measurement of the correlation of forces omits another powerful sector: that of organized crime.

That narco-traffickers and other crime organizations are heavily armed in Central America is no secret. In the upper echelons of this milieu are the international crime syndicates, including the ex-Cuban supporters of terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles as well as Mexican and Colombian traffickers displaced by the preference by governments in those lands for competing crime organizations. Honduras, under a coup regime that is now cut off from much legal international aid, has put up the “welcome” sign to these bandits in search of a new flag to provide them with safe haven for their activities along the cocaine route between Colombia and the United States in exchange for the vast resources they bring.

And then there are the retail level narcos. As the above-mentioned US AID report notes, “According to police statistics, at the end of 2003, there were 36,000 gang members in Honduras.” Whether that estimate is exaggerated or undercounted its number has surely grown since then, and these must also be measured in the correlation of forces. Confronted with a guerrilla insurgency, the coup regime and its police agencies would have it in their power to bring these notoriously brutal armed sectors of organized crime into the counter-insurgency, and to do so literally overnight. Simply with a promise of impunity for their commerce in contraband, the coup regime can enlist the full weight of such armed organizations, networks and gangs to bring a wave of terror not just against any armed insurgency, but also against all social players that remain peacefully in resistance, and - coup defenders should be careful what they wish for - the vast law abiding civilian population, including middle and upper class coup supporters, expats and tourists, too. The demons would be unleashed upon the entire population, not just those from one political camp.

An honest assessment of the correlation of forces has to conclude that, at present, both the electoral and armed paths that have changed history in other lands are closed, or about to shut, in Honduras.

Which brings us back to the slogan over that building in La Ceiba, Honduras’ third-largest city, that invites: “We Seek Voices that Hush the Silence.”

What Is “Something Else?”

The capital city of Tegucigalpa is the first place that foreign media, human rights observers and solidarity missions go when they visit Honduras, and that is understandable. It is the seat of state power, whether in times of legitimacy or in this hour of illegitimacy. It is also the central headquarters of the national unions and other organizations that have come together in civil resistance.

Yet few international media or observers have taken the time and attention to head beyond Tegucigalpa and out into the provinces to study the dynamics on the ground in the rest of the country. The conditions are not the same as they are in the capital. They are, in fact, better. The civil resistance at the local level in the rest of the country is generally not as tied up in the emergencies du jour that the cycle of marches, repression, more marches, more repression, and the media circus around both, that have characterized much of the resistance in the capital city.

Out in the field, there is simply more air and room to think, to observe calmly, to have lengthier conversations and listening sessions, to ignore the daily scandals and distractions put forward by the dishonest national and international media, and whether along the northern coast, the Olancho breadbasket or the Mayan mountain regions to the west, the outlying grassroots focal points of the resistance are characterized by more mid-to-long-term thinking about strategy and tactics than can occur under the state of siege situation in Tegucigalpa and its constant crises and interruptions. Set and setting will always influence how humans think and act, and among the more than 80 percent of the Honduran population that lives outside the capital’s metropolitan area the current set and setting are simply less bipolar.

“Here, we struggle to become the subjects of our own story and not mere objects of it,” Celeo Alvarez explains while providing a tour of the three-story building that ODECO inaugurated two years ago in La Ceiba as its new central command. Long term planning is the watchword here, where ODECO prepares one hundred and more youths each year, selected at the grassroots level by community organizations, through its Leadership Training Program in Human Rights. The headquarters includes dormitories with 64 beds, kitchen, assembly hall and other resources. It was constructed with funds from Nongovernmental Organizations, mainly from Europe, that support ODECO’s work.

Celeo Alvarez Casildo and his collaborators have some ideas for how Hondurans can replant their struggle and put it back on the path to a new Constitution. We’ve spent various days listening carefully to them, prodding, poking and testing them with questions and antitheses, as well as studying what he and his organization have already accomplished, and how they did so. Those ideas, and the stories behind them, will be the subject of the next chapter of this series on Toppling a Coup. Meanwhile, we invite our readers to think aloud about what “something else” might look and be like in this country of more than seven million Hondurans, where a majority now feel the weight of an imposed silence that they know, too, must be hushed.

Update: Perhaps because it, too, feels its Plan Arias "solution" slipping away, the US State Department today announced that beginning tomorrow, Wednesday, August 26, it is suspending the process for all travel visas not classified as "emergency" for Hondurans that wish to visit the United States. It is a move designed to put maximum pressure on the coup regime to go along with Plan Arias, since it affects the regime's political base: the oligarch class that can afford to travel to the Miami, Disney World, and such. The coming days will tell whether this last-gasp effort comes too little, too late to save the botched diplomacy efforts from Washington. (Here's the statement, in English, from State.)

Update II: Radio Globo reporter Eduardo Maldonado is reporting, live, his eye-witness account of members of the Honduran military brass and the top chiefs of the National Police who recently arrived a building near Morazan Boulevard in Tegucigalpa and are meeting inside "on the third floor." The radio is also reporting that the Catholic Church hierarchy and various Chambers of Commerce have determined to back the San José solution of reinstating Zelaya to the presidency "regardless of the stance of the Micheletti government." Looks like the visa suspension is peeling away some inner layers of the coup onion rather rapidly. Something's up. And we're here monitoring the situation. Developing...

By Al Giordano

AUGUST 23, 2009, SABA, HONDURAS: The classrooms were empty but the assembly hall was full. Last Thursday afternoon, more than two hundred striking schoolteachers and other members of the civil resistance from the northeastern state of Colón gathered at the city high school to chart their next steps.

“Compañeros, are you tired?” a speaker called out.

“No!”

“Are you going to go home?”

“NO!”

“Are we going to win?”

“Sííííííííííííí!”

They marched out of the assembly hall, clapping, cheering, and started their engines. More than eighty vehicles were counted as they noisily entered the street – honking horns, waving anti-coup placards out the windows - for the first of two afternoons, Thursday and Friday, of vehicular caravans against the coup regime. Up and down the main streets of Sabá they paraded while resistance coordinator Wilfredo Paz sat down with members of the Narco News team to talk shop.

“Today we evaluated our progress to date,” he shared. “We consider the seven-day march to San Pedro Sula last week a grand success, for the quantity of people who participated, for the solidarity we found in every town along the road where people brought food, drink, shoes and medicines for the marchers, and for the 30,000 participants in the final day of the march in that city. We also notice a deepening of our level of organization that has united us with those in other states.”

Periodically during the interview the noisy caravan would pass by to remind all ears that the resistance to the unpopular coup regime simply does not stop.

“As we speak, campesino organizations have had the government agricultural bureau offices in Tocoa occupied for nearly 25 days,” said Paz. “And beginning today every town and city is sending delegations to the capital, Tegucigalpa, to provide information to Judge Balthazar Garzón of Spain, who prosecuted Pinochet for his war crimes in the Chilean coup, and also the Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States. This is a little difficult because the regime has ordered the bus companies not to rent us transportation so we have to organize other means to get there.”

Sabá, at 400 kilometers and nine hours drive from Tegucigalpa (a trip that used to be a about an hour shorter until an earthquake last year toppled a highway bridge that allowed a shortcut through the state of Yoro), is almost as far as one can get from the capital and still be in a city. Three other cities in the state of Colón – Tocoa, Trujillo and Bonito Oriental – are yet a little bit farther out, all toward the northeast corner of Honduras. To travel farther east than that – into what is known as the Mosquitia region and the state of Gracias a Dios (the name of the state means “Thank God”) – one needs a four-wheel drive truck to navigate the mud and dirt roadways, or a boat to reach its outposts via the Caribbean sea.

In this tropical banana producing region, the highway blockades of July were of longer duration – some for as long as 60 or 70 consecutive hours – than in other parts of the country (see also Belén Fernández’s related report from the region, Honduras Reports Lack of Towns Named for Oliver North) and faced less interference from repressive forces. “There is more respect here from the police and the Army,” Paz explained, and by respect it’s clear that he means a healthy fear of provoking this population.

Colón – like Olancho to the south, and much of eastern Honduras – has a farming and ranching populace many of whom possess weapons for hunting and protection. And while the resistance here, too, is nonviolent, the locals do have a nationwide reputation for self-defense. One of the first and biggest stores one sees upon entering Tocoa, population 53,000, is called “La Armería” – “The Gunshop” - and displays large hand painted images of the weapons and bullets on sale inside. As in the rural regions of the United States, sportsmen are a big part of the culture, as are omnipresent cowboy hats men wear. That this region’s civil resistance has remained pacific is evidence of the self-discipline maintained so far by its movement’s most important sectors.

Helping to lead the resistance in this region are the mayors of its four largest cities: Mayor Adán Fuentes of Tocoa’s 53,000 citizens, Mayor Adelmo Rivera of Sonaguera (population 34,000), Mayor Luis López of Trujillo (43,000) and Mayor Clemente Cardona of Bonito Oriental (22,000). In the days after the June 28 coup d’etat, the Armed Forces raided the home of Tocoa Mayor Fuentes, who had been the regional coordinator of the nonbinding referendum campaign for a Constitutional Convention that the coup was designed to prevent coming to a vote that same day.

Luis Agurcia, a coordinator of civil resistance efforts in Trujillo, a public schoolteacher, told us that the Armed Forces had “militarized” the schools of that city from July 13 to to August 13. Uniformed troops had been sent to each of the schools daily to keep watch on teachers, who have been on strike an average of two or three days per week in protest of the coup. On the days that there were studies, students literally had to navigate around the heavily armed uniformados to walk to and from class. The militarization included the “Escuela Normal” in Trujillo that prepares 1,300 youths to become schoolteachers and also includes a grade school for 300 younger students whom the teachers-in-training educate as part of their own education.

“We brought two attorneys here on Monday, August 10. The Colonel accused me of ‘indoctrinating children.’ But the lawyers explained to them the law and they backed down.” The schools have thus been freed at last of a military presence that itself served, if not as a uniformed indoctrination of schoolchildren, certainly, at minimum, a heavy handed attempt at intimidation.

Schoolteachers throughout Honduras are a backbone of the resistance and, through the national teachers unions and their 57,000 members, a key communications conduit between the local resistances across the country. President Manuel Zelaya – forcibly exiled at gunpoint by the coup regime – had raised schoolteacher salaries by eight Lempira per hour (about 45 cents). The average schoolteacher works 27 hours a week in the classroom. The sixteen percent pay hike raised an average $71-per-week salary by an extra $12 dollars. By Honduran standards that’s an important gain that the teachers consider worth fighting to maintain. They believe the coup regime wants to roll back the gains they and other workers won before Zelaya was kidnapped 56 days ago.

Since the June 28 coup d’etat, the golpista media has waged a daily smear campaign against the movement with constant accusations – undocumented, supported only by rumor and innuendo - that those who march in the streets do so because they are supposedly being paid cash to protest. The source of such funds is inevitably claimed, without a shred of evidence offered, to be the government of Venezuela, and even the embargo-stricken isle of Cuba, the coup regime’s sources of much paranoia and obsession. For the schoolteachers, though – and indeed among all Honduran workers who saw the minimum wage raised by 60 percent under Zelaya – they do have financial interest in defending the elected government from the coup regime. That interest does not come in some shadowy bag of cash, but, rather, is fully and transparently disclosed: the pay raises that they and other sectors of workers won fair and square the democratic way through government action. That also explains why they continue to demonstrate, day after day, that the coup regime is not in control of the country's population.

The gossipmongers that spread those malicious and unproved accusations of a cash-directed movement only demonstrate their own inability to grasp that the self-organization of workers for better pay is not a corruption but, rather, a basic building block of any free society. The pay raises are fully disclosed, and a struggle to defend them is recognized as wholly legitimate by all societies that aspire to be authentically democratic.

The struggle by schoolteachers – now agglutinated in six unions and united under the banner of the Honduran Federation of Teachers Organizations (FOMH, in its Spanish initials) – has been long. It has survived previous military coups in 1954 and 1973 and won important gains mainly through the tactics of strikes, marches and road blockades: Among them the 1968 passage of obligatory public education for grade and middle school students.

“Many compañeros don’t know the history of the country, of the union movement or that of the teachers,” Jeremías López, a union organizer in Catacamas, Olancho since the 1970s. He believes the emphasis on strikes, marches and blockades against the coup has been too narrow: “We agree that we have to change tactics. We mus t avoid taking up arms, and I say that as a former guerrilla fighter. What we need to do is educate and mobilize the general public.”

López and two other organizers, out of their own pockets, recently launched a weekly program titled “The Best of the Resistance” on the Super 10 radio network that broadcasts in the geographically large states of Olancho, El Paraiso and Gracias a Dios. It costs them 2000 Lempira (about $104 US dollars) a month to rent that airwaves space. In recent days the local resistance brought a radical theater troupe to Catacamas from San Pedro Sula, and subsequently the topical musical group Café Guancasco to that same city square.

“Often, when we schoolteachers print a flyer or communiqué for the public, it is written in a fine Castilian Spanish that common people don’t relate to,” says López. “You have to speak in the language of the people.” The increasing emphasis on theater, song and live radio is aimed to expand the movement beyond its union and organizational bases.

López notes that in his region the resistance has also – like those in the state of Colón and elsewhere – adopted the tactic of car caravans in recent days. “Last night we had 800 vehicles parade and make noise throughout Catacamas and Santa María Real throughout the evening against the coup.” Similar caravans are underway in the cities of Tela and San Pedro Sula, reports Radio Progreso.

On Friday afternoon, back in the Northeast corner of the country, the Trujillo teachers union invited two of your reporters to the Escuela Normal for a meeting of sixty of its union leaders. As the reporters sought to interview the locals, the locals were more eager to interview the reporters. They wanted to know: In our reporting from other countries and civil resistance movements, what strategies and tactics had we learned about that might be useful to them?

One of the union leaders shared his concern aloud – one that we’ve heard echoed throughout the country from resistance organizers - that that the Honduran civil resistance’s emphasis on protest marches over the past 56 days risks its falling into a predictable pattern: The movement convenes a march or a blockade, the action is attacked violently by police and the Army, with a toll of wounded and arrested participants, and to denounce the violations of human rights the movement then takes to the streets with another march, which is similarly beaten by the repressive forces, so on and so forth, in a vicious circle that can lead to frustration, fatigue and diminishing returns.

From that a conversation ensued about, among other examples, the African National Congress – the movement that toppled the apartheid regime in South Africa – that spent the 1960s and 70s as an armed guerrilla insurgency but had then transformed into a victorious nonviolent campaign when it had shifted its emphasis to community organizing techniques of house-to-house persuasion and education. From 1994 to the present, the ANC has led the elected government of that country. The big change in the ANC’s tactics came based on the advice the ANC, during its guerrilla stage, had received in the late 1970s from the leaders of Vietnam’s successful armed resistance to US colonial invasion.

The South Africans had arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) hoping to impress the Vietnamese with how many insurgent troops it had trained and armed, and to gain their strategic and tactical support. One ANC delegate who was present at those meetings told Narco News earlier this year that it was the Vietnamese – possibly the most successful armed guerrilla movement in world history - who convinced the South Africans that they weren’t at all ready to wage a successful armed insurgency because they had not engaged in sufficient public education and community organizing to build civilian support for it. (The late Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh was legendary for his attention to the details and minutia of community organizing and educating the citizenry.) The South African shift to strategies and tactics of community organizing, in the end, eliminated the need for armed struggle and brought victory through nonviolent methods. From that emerged a discussion about the public communications and relations needs of the Honduras anti-coup movement, which includes large sectors of labor and farmer organizations – like the teachers union – whose members are already highly politicized but that do not always expand their public education or organizing efforts to the rest of the population.

Other historical examples similarly informed the discussion, from Serbia’s ten-year struggle that toppled the dictator Milosevic to the organizing techniques of the Zapatista and indigenous movements in Mexico, to the blockades by the coca growers of Bolivia, among others.

Reflective of that growing desire to expand the strategic and tactical moves by the civil resistance, the Trujillo schoolteachers then headed out of the meeting, started their engines, and paraded through the city, as their counterparts in Sabá and other cities had done the previous day and repeated again on Friday. They then joined with anti-coup car caravans from Bonito Oriental, from Sabá, from Sonaguera, and from the small towns in the region, converging Friday night on the state’s largest city of Tocoa for a mega-caravan of voluminous protest.

Police agencies and the Armed Forces have not as yet figured out a method by which to stop the sudden epidemic horn-honking protest caravans, which move too fast for the usual repressive weapons of teargas and nightsticks. The cacophonous caravans likewise do not stay in one place long enough to allow the actions of provocateurs, infiltrators or the misguided machos that often leech upon large protests to engage in actions that the pro-coup media then predictably uses as fodder to paint the entire resistance as somehow threatening to the general public.

The caravan rides day and night like a pony express – east, west, north and south – from its decentralized focal points throughout Honduras, heralding the news to the populace that the coup regime lacks the people’s consent. It is also evidence that important movement sectors, like the teachers unions, have decided to reach out beyond their own members to the larger and less organized public. Which only goes to show that they may be teachers, but in Honduras, they are also learning.

By Al Giordano

We've previously noted that some key members of the coup regime power structure – notably business magnate Adolfo Facusse and Liberal Party presidential nominee Elvin Santos – had begun waxing aloud to find a scapegoat for the illegality of the June 28 coup d’etat. They had both settled on the Armed Forces, and the “original sin” of all that has gone awry since, according to them, was that the military shipped elected President Manuel Zelaya out of the country instead of arraigning him to face prosecution.

Coup regime “president” Roberto Micheletti has just added his voice to the cacophony, Bloomberg reports:

“There was an error by a certain sector,” Micheletti said today in an interview in Tegucigalpa. “It wasn’t correct. We have to punish whoever allowed that to happen. The rest was framed within what the constitution requires.”

…A mistake was made when Zelaya, still wearing pajamas, was put on a plane to Costa Rica instead of being held for trial, Micheletti said.

That is indeed rich coming from Micheletti who has fumbled two opportunities since the coup to walk his talk and arrest Zelaya as he keeps claiming he wants to do. The first came on July 5 when Zelaya attempted to fly into the Toncontin International Airport in Tegucigalpa but Micheletti ordered the same Armed Forces to litter the runway with trucks and soldiers to prevent the plane from landing. The second came on July 19 when Zelaya briefly stepped into Honduran territory from the Nicaraguan side of the border and again the military and police had orders not to arrest him.

Micheletti is in fact declaring the military a scapegoat for doing just once what Micheletti himself has ordered them to do a second and third time. He doesn’t really want Zelaya to stand trial because, first, the so-called evidence against the President is flimsy and falsified, and, second, because the regime fears that the very people of Honduras might assemble to break down any wall that might hold their elected president.

In that context, Micheletti’s words constitute an admission that the coup has been legally flawed from the start.

Meanwhile, Liberal Party candidate Santos – under criticism for the multi-million dollar highway construction contracts his company has from US taxpayers, thanks to the Millennium Challenge Corporation chaired by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – has determined that the best defense is to go on offense. Yesterday, he accused exiled Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, elected in 2005 on the Liberal Party line, of a “political alliance” with National Party presidential candidate Pepe Lobo to sabotage his chances in the planned November “election.”

And adding to the clown show was the coup regime’s make believe “foreign minister,” Simian Council member Martha Lorena Alvarado, who yesterday charged that the delegation currently in Honduras from the Inter American Human Rights Council, affiliated with the Organization of American States (OAS), is “infiltrated by Latin American leftist movements.” (The delegation is made up of human rights officials from elected governments throughout the hemisphere.) She insisted that “the first violation of human rights” in Honduras is that caused by striking schoolteachers whom, she accused, are violating the rights of the children to go to school in the summer months. As she spoke those words, out in the streets of the capital National Police were busy beating up a reporter for Channel 36 television who had the temerity to try and film what are now daily violent attacks against peaceful demonstrators.

This business of “working the refs” – the regime daily makes statements aimed at discrediting an OAS delegation of foreign ministers that will arrive next in Honduras to try and broker the return of the elected president - is clearly intended to deflect from the continued heavy-handed violation of the most basic democratic rights by an unelected regime.

And in Washington DC yesterday, a member of the coup regime’s own delegation to the US admitted to the Argentina news agency TELAM that the coup was illegal. Delegation member Arturo Corrales (speaking, in the photo above) of the Christian Democratic Party, is contradicting not just the Armed Forces but also the man who sent him to Washington: Micheletti himself:

“In Honduras, we are clearly convinced that the military participation in this process is zero. Its participation is limited to guard the electoral process,” said Corrales who added that President Zelaya’s rights “were violated… Every Honduran citizen has the right to live in Honduras and the State is obligated to do everything it can to guarantee that.”

“It’s true that Mr. Roberto Micheletti nominated us to represent the executive branch (in Washington) but we all represent a longing for a resolution in Honduras.”

The layers of the onion around the Honduran coup regime continue to peel and flake away from its core. The statements and actions of its own key players contradict the regime’s daily insistence that there is normality in the country.

“We (the members of the Micheletti appointed delegation) are convinced that the San José accord (to reinstate Zelaya to the presidency) is worthwhile and continues being the focus of an agreement to come before the (November 29) elections, “said Corrales. “This has come to the point of maturity. I believe that the visit by the (OAS) foreign ministers (to Honduras) is going to provoke the final stage of this dialogue and the implementation stage will begin.”

It remains to be seen whether the coup that can’t shoot straight will be able to come to agreement among its own conspirators, much less with the rest of Honduras and the hemisphere named América. But there is a sense that in this game of musical chairs the tune is drawing to a close and the coup plotters are nervously eyeing the seats in the hopes on not being left the last ones standing alone and abandoned.