Father Melo: "From slogans to reality"

From Slogan to Reality
Father Ismael Moreno "Padre Melo"
Director of Radio Progreso

From March 12-14, the city of La Esperanza, Intibucá was the location of a gathering of hundreds of people from all over the country to participating in a conference organized by COPINH (Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras) and other organizations linked to the National Front of Popular Resistance, within the framework of the struggle for a constitutional assembly that would be an expression of the re-founding of Honduras, according to the declarations of its organizers.

The Conference was structured using a methodology that simulated a Popular Constitutional Assembly in which all the people participated as national delegates, working in 20 small assemblies to define the themes that must constitute the content of a constituent assembly that will be destined to write a new Constitution for the Republic.

The forests, water, land, racial discrimination, human rights, women, youth, health, housing, and education were some of the many contents reflected in the diverse workshops and which were debated in the broad and prolonged plenary in the exercise of the National Constitutional Assembly, the political and judicial expression of the re-founding of Honduras.

What prevailed in La Esperanza, more than these contents was the atmosphere of enthusiasm, euphoria and slogans and the common trend of resistance to the dynamics and powers of the coup d’etat that continue to be active and present in the current administration. No one who was not opposed to the coup had a place here.

Enthusiasm and slogans contribute to maintaining optimism in the struggle, above all when that struggle is burdened by growing adversity. Nevertheless, this euphoria, without a grounding in the crude reality of the country, could be a misleading factor and not always the best counsel. The Honduran reality is not only the enthusiasm of a thousand people meeting in resistance in La Esperanza.

The Honduran reality is also poverty stricken people trapped in apathy, fear and the false promises and diversions promoted by a system of media that channels the interests and lifestyle of the business and political elite that are interested in keeping Honduran society demobilized. Honduran reality is also that of the two-party system that still has the hearts of many poor people in its trap.

To go from enthusiasm and the simulation of peoples’ power, experienced in La Esperanza, to a daily commitment to walking in step with the reality of an important downhearted sector of the Honduran people, is without a doubt, the challenge facing the sectors organized in the social and political phenomena of the resistance. In the closing of this distance between the slogans of the activists who believe in the “re-founding of Honduras” and the “plain people, thick and provincial” whose maximum heroism is managing to survive from day to day, lies, without a doubt, the identity and strength; the present and future of a non-violent citizens’ resistance, and for a State and a country worthy of new change in luck.