Since November last year protesters in Honduras clash with police and military on a daily basis. After a botched election, that is considered to be doctored by many, the country is in deep political crisis ever since. Despite a temporary curfew and already 31 killed protesters, past weekend protests reignited as new old President Juan Orlando Hernández is going to take office in three days.
It has been two months now since the elections that took place in November ‘16, still Honduras continues to be in turmoil. Considered having a lead in the early polls on election day, presidential candidate Nasralla in the end lost the elections to former president Hernández by a small margin, presumed by many through fraud. While Honduras electoral authority took their sweet time to announce their final result and was forced to recount some votes, both candidates considered themselves the winner of the election.
But the current protests are not principally about whether one or another candidate has won. While bourgeois and petty bourgeois media in Europe attempts to spin the protests as a story about “the dictatorial former president keeping down his ‘democratic’ counter-part, who has the people behind him”, it is neither the sole nor the main reason people risk their lives for.
Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Latin America and the whole western hemisphere. More then 60% of its population life in poverty, unemployment is high. Being kept in underdevelopment by the various imperialists, most notably US-Imperialism, the principal economic sector in Honduras is agriculture, with most of the products being exported. For the Honduran people the question of oppression and exploitation is hence not much about whether or not one or the other candidate has won. No elected president has ever and will ever end the semi-colonial character of their country. This can only be achieved through struggle.
The rage of the people is directed against the reaction, the police and military, that is murdering them for their just demands (e.g. the 60 year old man they shot dead on saturday), against the cutbacks of their rights (like the curfew from 6pm to 6am, that was established in December), against the steady increase of costs of daily living (for example the price hike of gasoline by 10% last year), against the government which with the electoral farce once again de-legitimized itself and especially against imperialist intervention in their country. Those are the reasons why people, fueled by the political crisis in the country, are willing to go out on the streets day by day to demonstrate, to strike, to building barikades and confront the police and military, curfew or not.
