Apparently, President Zelaya, after having entered Honduras this afternoon, was forced back to the Nicaraguan side of the border, after a Honduran Colonel from the armed forces approached him and informed him communication was in process with the high level army command and the coup regime to figure out what to do. The army has a large group of Zelaya supporters and coup regime protesters on lockdown a few miles from the border, preventing their reuniting with their constitutional president. Zelaya's wife and children are amongst those presently retained by the armed forces in El Paraiso, approximate 5 miles from the border with Nicaragua.
IT is unclear what is happening at this point or where things are heading.....
Personally, I think he needs to just continue inside Honduras, despite all risks, and fight to reunite with his family and his people, who have been risking their lives now for almost one month, struggling to defeat the coup regime.
9 comments:
As long as the golpistas control the army there doesn't seem to be anything that prevents them from grabbing Zelaya and depositing him back across the border.
As long as the "fight to reunite" remains a metaphor what other outcome can their be?
Mao spoke truly when he said that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
The State Department claims that Zelaya is going to Washington on Tuesday. It was General Augusto César Sandino who said, "La libertad de un pueblo no se mendiga, se defiende con las armas en la mano." He would have agreed that there is no liberty without sovereignty, so I would say today that "The sovereignty of a people must not be begged for, but defended weapons in hand."
I'm with Barahona here. The thing is to understand that -- since the Right is always itching to commit atrocities -- there is no need for our side to even be seen as being the first to use violence. In fact we can always count on the Right to "act first". It's what they always intend and plan to do.
But AFAIC our immediate problem is people mixing up "pacifist" mumbo jumbo with a strategy that involves matters such as general strikes, blockades, and other preliminaries which do not involve overt mass violence -- and which may even win the struggle in the face of an irresolute enemy -- such as very well may be the case here. Knock on wood.
Hello friends: what uh-huh said about Mao is true, it is based on political-realism of power. Words are beautiful but in the end of the day it is those who are well armed who win. In the book The Prince by Nicholas Machiavelli he claims that a Prince must always be armed. So we'll just have to wait to see what's going to happen. All I know is that the ALBA countries cannot be divided militarily. But the ALBA nations need a sort of NATO force. If capitalist countries already have NATO why can't social-democrat states cannot have their own NATO.
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Eva,
As one follows the current Honduran saga, one hopes to see a great leader inspire and elevate a confused and timid mass. We should not close ourselves to the possibility that a great mass will inspire and elevate a confused and timid leader. If the performance of Zelaya has, so far disappointed our expectations, hasn’t the behaviour of the Honduran resistance exceeded what we anticipated? Who would have thought, especially after the disappointment of the planned 5 July arrival at the airport of Tegucigalpa, that 5,000 people would march towards the Nicaraguan border and that several hundred would elude the armed forces and actually reach the border crossing? It is possible - no one knows with certainty - that future historians describing this event will barely mention names like Obama, Clinton, Arias, Izulsa, Micheletti, Vasquez and even Zelaya, but will focus on the actions of Honduran workers, campesinos and indigenous.
I do not think that the time is right to use the power of weapons.
Progressive people should always see, what consequences it could have for the people, if a armed conflict is started. This certainly could end in an disaster.
Apart from that the aims of the social movement could be easily discredited by its opponents, if a civil war broke out. This could also change the overwhelming backing of President Zelaya in the western world into a critical standpoint.
Even if armed struggle is morally adequate (principally I think, it rarely is), it doesn't mean it is politically clever and sensible at the same time.
For a post in German about the German Liberal Party backing the golpistas see:
http://www.kuechenkabinett.org/2009/07/freiheit-fur-honduras.html
I do not think that the time is right to use the power of weapons.
Apparently, the Honduran Army disagrees.
It's in situations like these that all the Nervous Nellies come out of the woodwork, sure as shootin'... So please: pay them no mind; they only confuse everything; which is not surprising, given the state of the U.S. Left today.
As for the honduran masses rising to the occasion: they were always going to. And anyone who didn't know that beforehand, does not know how to read the developing political-economic situation in the World, and in America Latina.
And of course -- there is no Fate. We do not know the immediate outcome of this drama. But we DO have a VERY good idea of the eventual outcome -- barring thermo-nuclear devastation.
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