Citizen Coup

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – My mornings here always start with a walk through downtown to a local café or restaurant where I get breakfast. I buy two or three newspapers on the way and spend most of the morning reading them so I have a thorough grasp of the local take on everything affecting the country.

After a few days of repeating this process, I realized how hard the media down here make it for anyone to have a firm grasp of the situation. Reading these newspapers is painful. They’re wishy washy, they’re biased and there’s no reason to believe a single one of them is presenting the truth, since they rarely use attribution anyway.

The two big papers that support the coup, El Heraldo and La Tribuna, each about 60 pages usually, both dedicate about 20 pages a day to election coverage. With all that copy, you’d expect the average reader to take away a firm interpretation of the previous day’s events, the issues at hand, and how feasible the candidates’ plans for accomplishing their goals would be.

Not in Honduras. What these papers want is for people to go vote, to make a point to the international community and to give yet another victory to the oligarchy that overthrew President Manuel Zelaya (who now resides in the Brazilian Embassy 10 blocks away from my hotel) and pays them to openly refer to his supporters as terrorists. In fact, relatively few of these articles focus on health, education, poverty, crime or any other part of the myriad of domestic issues facing Honduras.

As we get closer to Sunday’s elections, they way their coverage leans becomes more obvious. They preach about threats of a Zelayista boycott from unknown sources, a boycott they present as being well-organized and violent, intent on disrupting the vote in anyway possible to, in La Tribuna and El Heraldo’s words, “prevent our democratic celebration.”

And why would they say that, I wonder, when yesterday in an interview I did with Juan Barahona, the leader of the entire Resistance Front Against the Coup, he said leaders are specifically telling all Zelaya supporters to not vote and stay at home?

“We’ve told people to stay at home and not to vote,” Barahona said. “We won’t be protesting on election day.”

The mainstream media have not once reported that this is what the Resistance is telling people. Instead they’re trying to justify the army calling up 5,000 reservists for election week by fabricating a plot by the Resistance to turn out in large numbers to keep people from voting. The military could use support in the press, considering Andres Pavon, director of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras, recently came out saying the military is planning a “massacre” against Zelaya’s supporters. Pavon was also the first to predict back in the summer that a coup was being plotted against Zelaya.

On Wednesday, La Tribuna ran a full-page story glorifying Liberal Party candidate Elvin Santos – who resigned as Zelaya’s vice president to run for the presidency – for walking through a Tegucigalpa neighborhood and ripping down posters that called on people not to vote Nov. 29. The posters said “No to the elections! Yes to a constitutional assembly,” the issue Zelaya was ousted from power over, “In the face of this electoral farce, we promise not to vote!” But the headline read “Elvin destroys propaganda that incites apprehension and fear.”

What? In America, the headline would have been “Cute publicity stunt, Elvin.” And even though voting is not mandatory in Honduras, today La Tribuna reported that government prosecutors are trying to find the people who made the boycott posters and press charges of “electoral misconduct” against them.

Last time I thought about it, voting wasn’t as important to democracy as simply doing what you think is best for the common good and not persecuting people who see differently from you. Democracy is defined in Honduras by those who support the coup as more a policy of “doing what our masters tell us.” And to them there’s nothing more undemocratic than letting a giant segment of the population make a peaceful political statement on the day of elections by refusing to vote for candidates they don’t believe in.

Over the last 10 years voter abstention has gone from 25 percent (in 1997) to 44 percent (in 2005), even before the country’s leaders oversaw the region’s biggest political crisis in decades. With most of the international community still undecided on whether to recognize the election results, the pro-coup media know very well that a lot of political leverage is at stake with voter turnout. And if voter turnout is lower than ever, who wants to place bets that the Zelayistas get blamed for scaring people away? The possibility that people think the two main candidates are opportunistic snakes in the grass (which they are) or that people expected the results to be fraudulent won’t even get mentioned.

There is potential for a terrorist attack come election day. One could even argue that Barahona knows it and that’s why he’s telling his people to stay away from the polls. There have been reported attacks with small explosives against various political parties’ offices around the country, but they’ve caused very little damage or gone off when no one was at the building. Also interesting is that not one of these stories has been accompanied by a photo of the reported damage. Every story about these incidents links them to the Resistance without ever once getting comment from a Resistance leader, including stories on the arrests of four men believed to be planning an attack against interim President Roberto Micheletti in El Progreso this week.

There’s a lot of uncertainty here, and the Honduran media have only fuelled it. I expect there will be some arrests on election day, but ultimately enough people will come out to vote, the losers will concede defeat, the Resistance will be painted as weaker than ever for not showing up (and all it took was the threat of a massacre, wimps), and eventually the Honduran elections will be recognized worldwide. On Dec. 2 the congress will probably vote against returning Zelaya to power, he’ll probably be tried for various crimes, the coup leaders will get away Scott free, and a dangerous precedent will be set for future left-leaning leaders. No matter who is elected, the true driving force of democracy here will remain in the hands of the privileged few and they’ll spend the rest of their lives patting themselves on the back for how they handled that one close call.