Call grows for immediate resignation of Honduran president

COMMUNIQUÉ! – December 4^th, 2017

PLATFORM OF GRASSROOTS SOCIAL MOVEMENTS OF HONDURAS

[Versión original en español AQUÍ]

The people, of their own initiative, organized in struggle and resistance in the cities and other territories have said ENOUGH to the corruption, impunity, killing and dictatorship of the oligarchy led by Juan Orlando Hernández and have raised the banners of dignity and rebellion throughout the whole country.

This rebellious dignity of our people has been able to hold back the repression in over 200 mobilizations and highway blockades nationally. Despite the bullets, the teargas, even assassinations and other aggressions, none of our actions of rebellion have been defeated, completely the contrary, they have strengthened as the days have gone on and today even more people have jointed the protests against tyranny.

Faced with the sharpening of the crisis and in the current context, we want to communicate the following to our people:

1. We demand the immediate resignation of the tyrant’s government, who have usurped the will of the people.  
2. We urge the immediate installation of a Provisional government to function until January 27^th, 2018, made up of members of the people’s movement and the democratic sectors of the country, until President Salvador Nasralla assumes the powers to which he was legitimately elected by the Honduran people.
3. We reject the intentions of the United States, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the national oligarchy to impose conditions of internal crisis in order to give way to a coup d’état that annuls and holds back the yearning for real and profound changes that our country needs. We
4. We call on the people and its organizations to keep up the mobilizations, takeovers, and grassroots blockades in the highways, the barrios, the neighborhoods, communities and villages throughout the country. Don’t let yourselves be deceived by the attempts by some sectors to demobilize the struggle in the territories in order to get a miserable fraction of power over a political and economic system that is falling to pieces.
5. The food crisis is sharpening in the main cities, villages, communities and our territories with each passing day. We call on the population and the organizations to create supply committees and organize distribution while we sustain the people’s resistance throughout the country. At the same time, we need to organized groups to defend and protect human rights. We need to guarantee the physical safety of people as well as the control and security over our neighborhoods and towns nationally.

Only the people will save the people!

Down with the dictatorship!

December 4^th, 2017

NATIONAL COORDINATION

Plataforma del Movimiento Social y Popular de Honduras

(Grassroots Social Movement Platform of Honduras)

COPINH calls on Juan Orlando Hernandez to step down immediately! ¡Pueblo Lenca exige la renuncia inmediata de JOH!

Lenca people demand Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH) step down immediately!
[Aquí en español]

For over a week, the people have defended in the streets the will that they expressed at the polls. The flagrant theft that they want to carry out through fraud is undeniable. The people know it and the international community should understand that the narrow interests of Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) and the elite powers that he represents alone are maintaining the crisis by refusing to accept defeat.

It has been clearly demonstrated how the leadership of the National Party, which includes the President of the Supreme Electoral Council David Matamoros, have committed fraud in the presidential elections in order to illegally keep themselves power. Therefore, results from this institution are not and will not be reliable nor in any way credible, and the people have shown as much in the streets.

COPINH is clear that the hundreds of mobilizations, highway blockades, peaceful protests and expressions of resistance go beyond this electoral process. They represent a cry of the people as a whole to move beyond the hatred, violence and submissiveness that have characterized the years of JOH’s government and his other coup-supporting predecessors, years inundated with corruption, impunity, assassinations, approval of spurious laws, handing over of territories, illegal concessions, and poverty and hunger for the majority.

The struggle in the territories and in the streets is the key action in these moments and must continue. The dignity and strength of the people’s struggle in the streets is what has led the National Police and the COBRA forces to set down the arms they were using against the people. We salute this dignified action and call on the armed forces and other repressive state bodies to understand their role as part of the people and respect the actions of that people.

It is clear that the call in the streets is not just about recognizing the obvious electoral victory of Salvador Nasralla, but is above all the cry of the Honduran people to say JOH MUST GO! It is no longer about him recognizing the victory, it is about him stepping down from the presidency and thereby ending the crisis to which our Honduras has been subjected.

COPINH calls on the international community to take all pertinent measures to ensure that JOH’s desperation to maintain power does not lead to more spilling of blood by the Honduran people.

As such, the Lenca people, organized in COPINH demand that:

1. JOH’s government immediately hand over the presidency to a temporary government of national consensus until January 27^th, 2018, the day in which Salvador Nasralla will be seated as President.

2.  The resistance in favor of recognition of the people’s will as expressed at the polls strengthen and consolidate through territorial organization.

3. That the international community take a side and activate the pertinent mechanisms so that JOH’s desperation to maintain power does not lead to further spilling of blood by the Honduran people.

For the blood shed by Berta Cáceres and all of our ancestors, we demand justice! We demand that end of this killer regime!

With the ancestral strength of Berta, Iselaca, Etempica and Mota we raise our voices full of Life, Justice and Peace.

December 5^th, 2017.

Cura de Cacerolas / The Healing Power of Pots and Pans - Melissa Cardoza

The Healing Power of Pots and Pans

By Melissa Cardoza

Translated by Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle

[Español abajo]

They left us badly wounded that first night of the curfew.

Mourning once again for people we don’t know, people who are part of our dreams. We go to bed fearful, sleepless, enraged.

These are times where the day doesn’t last, the sun doesn’t warm, and the food tastes like powdered dish detergent.

People run around hurriedly, to get a pound of cheese or to catch a bus, from the terror provoked by this situation, so typical of fascism. The power of their gunpowder is hard to avoid, their sinister words echo from all of the newspapers and form a crust on the afternoon skin. It starts to get grey and cold. A light rain falls along with people’s spirits all over Tegucigalpa.

Prisoner to the dictatorship, you go around and around in the same old circles, with that sensation of death in the air. Your jaw tightens, a tear wells up, and that bitter flavor in your mouth won’t go away.

The moon’s night arrives and with her, that sensation of imprisonment and deceit with which they try to contain us eases just a bit.

That’s how the first night of the curfew goes, so evocative of the 2009 coup d’état. Impunity reigning down on the bodies of a people already so afflicted by coups and attacks, old or new.

Then, from the humblest corners of ordinary kitchens, amongst dishes washed and organized, left in their place by a woman, a lid, a pot for beans, a frying pan for pancakes, a humble comal for tortillas, they emerge. They rescue us from the shipwreck thrust upon us by a dictatorship that tightens its grip with that old emotion of defeat, trying to devastate us.

Ordinary dishes come out clanging, blowing on the embers that we have in these territories called Honduras, where the hot coals of hope don't go out, not even from the stomping of the military boot.

The cacerolazo, the banging of pots and pans, is timid at first, then celebratory and joyful as it extends beyond the time it was called for. A beautiful noise breaks through the rule of the tyrant, it fills the same city where just a night before blood was bursting, from bullets of a government gun, out of the body of a young woman from a poor barrio. Kimberly is her name, like that of many Hondurans nowadays. One of many deaths from this dictatorship, added on to those that have been accumulating from the ferocious neoliberalism of these years.

It was a needed and healing cacerolazo to tell each other that we are sharing in these hours of enclosure, but not in silence, that we are re-thinking ourselves, curing ourselves of the neoliberal curse, re-organizing ourselves to deepen the struggle.

To make politics public through the roaring voice of pots and pans as an answer to patriarchal brutality is a fabulous strategy that re-energizes. It carries much of the intimate domestic wisdom that we value, knowledge of the communal way, which it creates and feeds.

Melissa Cardoza, December 2017

CURA DE CACEROLAS

Nos dejaron malheridas con la primera noche del toque de queda.

De nuevo de luto por gente asesinada que no conocemos y es parte de nuestras ilusiones, nos acostamos atemorizadas, insomnes, enojadas.

Así no dura el día, no calienta el sol y la comida sabe a paste para lavar ollas.  Corriendo la gente hasta para comprar una libra de queso o tomar un bus por el puro terror que provoca esta situación tan típica de los fascismos.  El poder de su pólvora es difícil de evitar, sus malditas palabras repetidas en todos los periódicos  se van incrustando en la piel de la tarde.  Se fue poniendo gris y una llovizna fría caía sobre tegus acompañando el animo.

Presa de la dictadura, una da vueltas en círculo en los espacios de siempre,  con la  sensación a muerte en el viento se aprieta la mandíbula, la lágrima asoma y ese sabor amargo en la boca no se quita.

La noche de luna llega y con ella la sensación de cárcel y trampa con la que nos intentan contener, aminora un poco.  

Así fue la primera noche de toque de queda, tan memoria del golpe del 2009. Esta impunidad sobre los cuerpos de un pueblo tan de por sí agobiado por  viejos o nuevos  golpes. 

Pero he ahí que del mas humilde rincón de una cocina cualquiera, entre los trastos lavados y ordenados que una mujer dejara en su lugar, una tapadera, una olla de frijoles, un sartén para panqueques, un humilde comal tortillero vinieron a salvarnos del naufragio al que nos avienta con intención una dictadura que aprieta la emoción antigua de la derrota hasta intentar devastarnos.

Trastes diarios vinieron con sus ruidos a soplar este rescoldo que tenemos en estos territorios llamados Honduras, donde la brasita de la esperanza no se apaga, aunque la machaque la bota militar.

El cacerolazo, tímido al comienzo, fiestero y alegrísimo a medida que pasaba el tiempo convocado. Hermoso ruido que rompe el mandato del tirano, que llena la ciudad donde sólo la noche anterior estallaba en sangre, con las balas de un fusil oficial,  sobre el cuerpo de una joven de barrio popular llamada  Kimberly, como se llaman ahora muchas hondureñas. Una entre los muchos muertos de esta dictadura que suma a los que ha venido acumulando con el neoliberalismo feroz de estos años.

Un cacerolazo necesario y sanador para  decirnos que estamos compartiendo estas horas de encierro, pero no en silencio, repensándonos, curándonos del mal neoliberal, reorganizándonos para arreciar la lucha.   

Hacer pública la política poniendo la ruidosa voz de los trastos como respuesta a la brutalidad patriarcal es una fabulosa estrategia que reanima porque tiene mucho de la intima sabiduría doméstica que valoramos y que sabe del orden comunitario,  pues es su voluntad  y lo alimenta.

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Melissa Cardoza, diciembre de 2017

Ground Zero: Wounded protesters and teargas flood Tegucigalpa’s Hospital Escuela

Wounded protesters and teargas flood Tegucigalpa’s Hospital Escuela

If there is one place you can see the military siege of Tegucigalpa playing out in real time, it is at the emergency room of the city’s main public hospital, the “Hospital Escuela.” Ambulance after ambulance come in through the gates, sometimes taxis or trucks, all carrying the wounded from the front lines of the struggle against the fraud being perpetrated by the Honduran dictatorship of Juan Orlando Hernández.

Outside the gates vendors hawk food, taxi drivers trade jokes and wait for people leaving the hospital, and across the street under a tent they sell caskets. The morgue is in the basement. Inside the gates, two guards peer out through small slits in the corrugated metal doors, waiting to see who will come next. Just beyond them, a nurse stands waiting to receive the next ambulance. Beyond him, along a wall under a small shelter dozens of family members of patients huddle together sitting on the ground, some on old school desks, others laying out pieces of cardboard.

 

It was into this area inside the gates of the Hospital Escuela that at about 3:45pm on December 1^st the police fired a tear gas canister. They were pursuing a group of anti-fraud protesters, and launching teargas indiscriminately according to numerous witnesses. The nurse, the guards, the patients were all affected. Another canister rolled underneath the car where a woman and her nine-year-old child were riding, and when the woman opened the door to try to get them both out, gas flooded in, causing the child to faint and knocking the woman fully unconscious from an asthma attack. The police and military rushed straight by, leaving her and another woman who had passed out on the ground. The protesters picked them up and pushed the gates to the hospital open to get them attention. So much gas was launched that patients all the way to at least the third floor of the hospital were affected when the gas came in through their windows.

La Voz de los de Abajo worked alongside Juventud por la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos spent a good portion of two evenings, November 30^th and December 1^st, documenting other cases in the hospital emergency room, including:

·      A 12 year old child was shot by military police in the Pedregal neighborhood in his side at approximately 7:45pm on 11/30. He was thought by many in the neighborhood to be dead but was rushed to the Hospital Escuela and operated on and survived.

·      A 23 year old man was shot in the left side of his neck in the Pedregal neighborhood by military police at 8pm on 11/30. A friend saw him and got a car to agree to take them to the hospital. The police resisted letting them through a check-point between the neighborhood and the hospital and declined the request of the driver for the patrol car to finish driving the injured man to the hospital in order to arrive faster.

·      Another 23 year old man was shot in the leg in the Pedregal neighborhood on 11/30, also by military police, and was rushed to the hospital, making it by 9pm but had to wait an hour to be attended because of the number of injured coming in the doors.

·      Three young men had gone to have lunch in the central park of Tegucigalpa on 12/1 at and came upon an anti-fraud protest. At 5:10pm, the military police clashed with the protesters and in the commotion a private security guard at one of the businesses opened fire and shot one of the boys, age 15, severely wounding his abdomen and putting him in critical condition. As of 12/3, hospital staff is worried that he will not survive as his lungs were punctured.

·      An older man with cerebral palsy and a brain tumor was detained while trying to move a motorcycle that was tipped over in the street during one of the protests. He was taken to the CORE 7 detention center, where he informed police that he had a tumor on one side of his brain and was subject to seizures as a result. They responded “we’ll give you one on the other side” and hit him in the head, knocking him to the ground where they proceeded to kick him. He began to seize and they brought him in to the hospital.

·      21 people were brought into the Hospital Escuela with police or military-inflicted wounds between 9-10pm on December 1^st, and by morning the total was more than 40, according to hospital staff.

Military chases group, beats man, threatens human rights observer / Militares persiguen grupo, golpean a un hombre, amenazan a observador internacional de derechos humanos

Military chases group of mostly young women, beats man with them

[Español abajo]

Tegucigalpa, Honduras - At 6:20pm on November 30^th, 2017 along the Boulevard Centroamérica in Tegucigalpa three members of the La Voz de los de Abajo international human r

Protester just after being beat by military

ights observation delegation saw a group of seven soldiers from the Honduran armed forces running a full speed after a group of 6 young women and one man, yelling “we’re going to get you, you’re done once we do you sons of bitches!” We ran after them and caught up with them in from of a gate to a home on the side of the road where they were in the midst of beating the man while his wife was pleading for his life. After hearing the shouts of “international human rights observers, leave them alone,” the military stopped, but one soldier started to swing his baton towards one of the international human rights observers aggressively, stopping halfway and then cursing before heading back down the hill. The man’s head was left bloodied and he and his wife and the other young women were all traumatized. As we accompanied them back down the hill, three security guards at a business along the route informed us that one of the soldiers had demanded they give him their shotgun, and when he refused, had his life threatened. Luckily, the security guards were behind a locked gates and the military decided to continue back down the hill and rejoin their regiment rather than try to force entrance.

Militares persiguen a grupo de mujeres y golpean a hombre que las acompaña

Tegucigalpa, Honduras – A las 6:20pm el 30 de noviembre del 2017, por la Boulevard Centroamérica en Tegucigalpa tres personas de la delegación internacional de derechos humanos de La Voz de los de Abajo vieron un grupo de siete soldados de las fuerzas armadas de Honduras quienes corrían a toda velocidad detrás de un grupo de 6 mujeres jóvenes y un hombre, gritándoles “¡Les vamos a agarrar hijos de puta, y cuando los tenemos están hechos!” Los perseguimos y los alcanzamos frente el portón de una casa al lado de la calle donde estaban en pleno proceso de golpear al hombre mientras su esposa les rogaba que no lo mataran. Después de oír los gritos de “¡Derechos humanos internacional, déjelos!” los militares pararon, pero uno de ellos hizo un movimiento agresivo con su bate como si iba a golpear a uno de los observadores de derechos humanos, deteniéndose poco antes de hacerlo y luego diciéndole groserías antes de volver a bajar la cuesta. La cabeza del hombre quedó sangriento y él, su esposa y las otras mujeres jóvenes estuvieron todas traumatizadas. Mientras les acompañamos al bajar la cuesta, tres guardias privadas de seguridad en la ruta nos informaron que uno de los soldados les habían exigido que le prestaran uno de sus fusiles, y que cuando se les negaron dicho uso, le amenazaron la vida. Por suerte, las guardias se encontraban detrás de un portón cerrado con candado y los militares decidieron seguir bajando en vez de tratar de entrar por la fuerza.