in Honduras, right-wing President Juan Orlando Hernández was sworn into office despite claims of election fraud by the opposition. Hernández has pushed for militarizing Honduras as part of the fight against drug cartels, raising concerns about potential human rights abuses. Thousands of people protested outside his swearing-in, including members of Parliament, while soldiers stood by in close proximity. The protest was led by former President Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted in a coup in 2009 and whose wife, Xiomara Castro, ran against Hernández with the LIBRE party.
Greg Grandin talking:
what’s interesting is that the LIBRE party, the new social movements, what’s constituted a party, have really broken and rendered asunder the old—I mean, Honduras was basically governed by rotating power between liberals and the nationalists, and they traded power back and forth. And that’s what Zelaya represented a threat to back in 2009. Even though he came out of the Liberal Party, he represented a kind of social wing, a progressive wing of the Liberal Party that was returning to some kind of agrarian roots and social democratic roots. And that split now has completely happened. So, there was, I believe, a lot of—quite a bit of fraud and manipulation and intimidation in the last round of elections. Only 51 percent of the electorate voted. So, I mean, we can talk about whether the new government has a mandate or not, but I think it’s fairly clear that the LIBRE party has driven a wedge in the old.
And what’s happening is they have a good chunk in Congress. I can’t remember the numbers, but it’s something like 39 seats. And Manuel Zelaya himself is in it. And what you’re seeing is the old Congress—I mean, Trotsky talked about a permanent revolution. I mean, they have a permanent coup going on in Honduras. They’ve issued a barrage of laws privatizing whatever there was left to privatize and passing laws that made dissent and mobilization and protest that much more difficult and punitive. So, we’re going to see, I think, a new cycle, with Zelaya now in Congress, and institutionally this opposition having power and having a voice.
El Salvador, a former rebel commander in El Salvador has finished first in the country’s presidential election, setting up a runoff vote for next month. Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the FMLN took 48.9 percent of the vote, just shy of the 50 percent needed that would have avoided a second round. He’ll square off against the right-wing candidate, Norman Quijano, who placed second with just under 39 percent. Before Sunday’s vote, Sánchez Cerén attended mass at the chapel where Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated by U.S.-backed death squads, March 24th, 1980.
the most remarkable thing is that it’s a transfer of power from the FMLN to the FMLN. Funes was a FMLN candidate, but he didn’t really come out of the rank and file of the FMLN, where Salvador Sánchez does. He is of the FMLN. It’s a remarkable victory. But in some ways, the same thing is going on. Politics happens on a certain level, and it shows the endurance of the left and a certain social democratic vision of politics in Latin America and Central America. But then there’s what goes on institutionally. And Congress, with enormous U.S. pressure, is passing a number of law—pushing privatization, what they call public-private partnership, P3. And again, it’s just more of the neoliberal Washington Consensus being institutionalized. So, how much room Sánchez will have to maneuver will be—might even be even less than Funes had in the last four years.
what I like to do is contrast this social democratic culture in Latin America, this notion that democracy entails some form of economic justice, which is deep and can’t be rooted out and can’t be expunged, no matter how much Washington and local elites have tried in Latin America, and what is a much more narrower vision of democracy, a kind of cult of individual supremacy that still reigns supreme in the United States. And I think it’s related to the different forms—we don’t have time to go into it, but the different forms slavery took in the U.S. and in Latin America, and the ways that it ended. I think Melville had his pulse on something in his portrayal of Amasa Delano. He represented a new kind of Republican racism that was rooted in chattel slavery but outlived chattel slavery. It wasn’t justified by philosophy or religion, but almost in the psychic need to reaffirm one’s absolute freedom in relationship to another’s slavishness. And this cult of supremacy that galvanizes the right has its roots in slavery.
— source democracynow.org
Greg Grandin, teaches Latin American history at New York University. His book Fordlandia was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. He is the author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. His most recent work is titled The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World.