Golpe de estado – day one

Today there was supposed to be a national poll about whether to have a referendum in November about setting up a National Constituent Assembly to rewrite the Constitution. The president, Mel Zelaya, proposed this months ago and was opposed by all sorts of people – including congress, the attorney general, the supreme court, and the electoral commission. (Note that, as I understand it, congress chooses the other posts, with suggestions from the president. Don’t think this is like US politics – almost everything in politics is tainted with corruption!)

Early this Sunday morning military, under orders from the Supreme Court of Honduras, arrested Mel Zelaya, the president of Honduras. After a reportedly bloody confrontation he was whisked off to Costa Rica.

The Foreign Minister, Patricia Rodas, was also arrested and as of late Sunday afternoon it was unknown where she was. The Cuban and Venezuelan ambassadors were also arrested – supposedly while trying to prevent her arrest. The Cuban ambassador has been released but he is supposedly in a clinic recuperating from some injuries. Supposedly eight other cabinet members have been arrested.

This Sunday afternoon there suddenly surfaced in the Honduran Congress a letter from President Mel Zelaya, dated Friday, resigning from office. Sounds suspicious to me. Well, Congress accepted the resignation with a voice vote. Then it proceeded to choose the president of congress, Robert Micheletti, as the “president” of Honduras.

Micheletti has been in congress for many years (29 years, one person told me) and is the owner of a bus fleet around Progreso. Micheletti is, as I hear, one of the many corrupt legislators. Micheletti was a presidential candidate for the primaries last year, but did not attain his party’s nomination. He had been one of the most vocal opponents of the poll that President Zelaya wanted to hold today.

I fear we have gone from bad to worse. At least Zelaya seemed to speak out for the poor. As one priest said this morning, despite all his errors and his vanity, Zelaya was the first major leader in many years to offer people a little bit of openness to the needs of the poor. The priest said he is not supporting the person Zelaya, but the cause of the poor. Micheletti is closely tied with the economic powers to be. An indication of his position is his support of privatization of water in his own district.

In Tegucigalpa the situation is very tense. Opponents of the coup have surrounded the Presidential Palace.

Here in Santa Rosa things are calmer. The military confiscated the ballot boxes at about 8 am this morning. However, people were meeting in the central plaza - Liberty Park – and signing sheets in favor of the referendum – a sort of alternative poll. They have been there on and off all day. Some folks met to draft a position paper and there was supposed to be a march – or a gathering. I however left before it started since it was about to rain and I had a blanket on the line. (Domestic me!)

But what has been very interesting is the almost unanimous condemnation of the coup by the nations of the world. The European Union and many nations of Latin America reject the coup and still recognize Mel Zelaya as president. Even Hugo Llorens, the US ambassador to Honduras, following the comments of President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. has said that the US recognizes only Zelaya as president. The president of Argentina said, “I am deeply concerned about the situation in Honduras, that looks like a return to barbarism in our hemisphere.”

What this means I don’t know. Will this mean that these nations refuse to send aid to the Honduran government? That would be quite serious and would affect the poor.

The United Nations and the Organization of American States will hold emergency meetings on Honduras on Monday.

Tomorrow at Caritas I hope to learn more. It is very hard to get good information, partly because the means of communication are largely in the hands of the economic powers of the country. Also, rumors keep flying. But I’m searching out alternative sources and will try to keep this blog up to date.

In the mean time, pray for us – and do what you can so that the US government seeks to support real democracy here.

One last word, yesterday Father Efraín Romero, the director of Caritas, quipped about the situation, "The poor are not going to lose anything, because they've already lost everything."

Yet we were off to a village where, with the help of Caritas and the cooperation of the local mayor, the village had a new water tank for drinking water. We will continue to seek alternatives to help the Honduran people build a more just and equitable society.

---

Late breaking news. We are under a curfew tonight and tomorrow between 9 pm and 6 am, by the order of "president" Micheletti.