PMSPH Communique

Social and Popular Movements Platform of Honduras (PMSPH)

Communique

 The organizations that comprise the Social and Popular Movements Platform of Honduras, meeting in its 2nd National Assembly in the city of El Progreso,Yoro

Declare to the Honduran people and the peoples of the world the following: 

1. As the Platform, we recognize the historic importance of the social movement leaders, their ethics, their commitment, their struggle and their will to contribute to the changes that are required in the current structural crises of Honduran society. 

2. We have advanced in defining and ratifying our strategic political proposal with the objective of moving forward, in a unified manner, the construction of popular power within the framework of change and re-foundational transformation of Honduras. 

3. We have agreed to join in the diverse initiatives for national solidarity, unity, and mobilization that come from the Honduran people and from their diverse organizational expressions, and in unity against the corruption and impunity that are sustained by the political economic power groups in the country. 

4. We have been able to discuss and to demonstrate the close relationship between traditional political-economic power and clear manifestations of national financial criminality. This poses a challenge to us to take up, as fundamental actors, the task of constructing and configuring a new State in which social relations are based on respect for human dignity and not on exploitation, profit or private interests. 

Similarly We Demand:

1. The end of hostilities against the workers and trade union movement and respect for labor rights of Honduran workers. 

2. A stop to the extractive model and an end to the privatization of natural resources and respect for the right to self-determination, to culture, to autonomy and community sovereignty. 

3. Demilitarization and a end to the repression against the small farmer (campesino) communities and cooperatives in the region of the Aguan Valley and in the rest of the country. 

4. Answers in response to the demands and agreements between the government and the campesino movement, particularly in the Aguan Valley, Santa Barbara and the Sula Valley. 

5. Respect for the right to land and food sovereignty of the small campesino farmers, and therefore, passage of the campesino proposal for an integral and inclusive agrarian reform law. 

6. Justice for all the assassinated social movement activists whose assassins enjoy complete impunity which, in turn, motivates them to continue committing all kinds of crimes fostered by the economic power groups in complicity with the State authorities. 

7. An end to the repression and criminalization against the protests and legitimate struggles of the Honduran people. 

We are in Solidarity:

1. With the criminalized and prosecuted defenders of the right to public education, the right to land, common-good resources, freedom of expression and women’s rights. 

2. With the struggles for the territorial defense of our indigenous and black peoples; we take up as our own the struggle of the Garifuna people, who resist and confront a plan of extermination and displacement by the State and the national and transnational economic power groups. 

As one of expression of national unity for the social and peoples’ movement in Honduras we make a commitment : 

1.  To continue building popular power based on a citizens’ mobilization and a proposal to create the structural change that Honduran society wants. 

2. To continue building popular power with the people’s communication media, moving forward and giving strength to the struggle against the information blockade and against the domination by the communication media by the groups in power in Honduras. 

3. To continue working, in an ethical, honest, respectful and fraternal manner, to advance the unity of different organizations and social groupings, at both the national and international level.

Issued in El Progreso, Yoro,