[Under this title, an editorial signed by the historian and author, Minister of Culture Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, appeared in Tiempo; partly translated here; subsequently, Tiempo published an interview with the Minister concerning the coup and its aftermath]
I don't know where you were, reader...at five in the morning last Sunday, when a squad of soldiers assaulted the home of Manuel Zelaya, with high-power rifles and assault weapons. I was preparing to supervise the poll in the Central Park in San Pedro and around La Lima... the people were angry, so we marched together to the Central Park to a meeting in which we explained the situation and we listened live, over a sound system, to the statement of the President, already in Costa Rica.
...All the parties, with the exception of the UD, have been irreversibly damaged by their evident complicity in the coup. Only 12 Liberal Party congressmembers, the most lucid, best educated, and most honest, have resisted in silence. None of the National Party members made a statement, in rebellion! Now we are all UD Party, I certainly have converted although I do not share much of their ideological position. ...we are going to elect a President from the new alliance. History says that it is possible that the damage done will never be repaired. ...
I would also like to know how they are going to get out of the mess now. They have invoked "Democracy" and "State of Law", "the Constitution" that we supposedly were schemed to violate, imputing to us the perverse intention to "subvert order", to destroy institutions and impose a dictatorial regime...They keep repeating it... They accuse us of violating public freedoms and the right of free expression without any evidence, and of being antidemocratic. But they come and carry out a coup, quash the people seated peacefully in the street, noting the ID of whoever, in voluntary form, tried to participate in a poll. They remove from the air the few media that oppose the coup government, on radio and TV, ordering the cable companies to suppress the transmission of Telesur, and they detain its correspondents, as well as cutting transmission of the BBC and CNN, because supposedly they "distort the facts", circulating images of the repression and, in the concrete case of Channel 11, they order that it transmit only sports and theater. Two days later they induce the media to cover their manipulated marches and they silence and hide the spontaneous marches of our people (who no one now can accuse of being paid) and the images of repression, and they censor what is published in the newspapers. Is this the liberty of expression that Flores Facusse and Micheletti Bain defend?
They have been claiming a legality that, in theory, we violated, contradicting a judgment by the judge who condemned the consultation of the people and "any later act that would seek the same end". But now they violate the residence of no less than the highest Magistrate, they handle him and they kidnap him to send him on a plane out of the country, by force. They invent a "resignation" that once disproved, they ignore, and proceed to fire the President post-facto, without a corresponding trial, no less listen to his defense, invoking the commission of a crime for which they never have formulated charges. (After all they could have asked us for an explanation and identified responsibilities.) They arrested and deported the ministers in hiding that they could surprise. They prescribed lead bullets, after the gas, for the demonstrators who protested. And now they declare a curfew and... a State of Siege so that, as I write this, they are discussing in the Congress the suspension of individual basic guarantees, to scare the marches and justify the illegal detention of their directors. To this illegality they add the firing of mayors who supported the poll, who no one can fire without an established procedure. This is the legality that the heroic Armed Forces of Honduras defend, Romeo?
They have been claiming that they want tranquility, that they would like to live in peace, a thing that, according to them, we hampered. And they have created the conditions, now, as Maduro says "for the first time" in Honduras, for a war of the classes, bloody, without a visible end. And this is the peace and democracy in whose defense soldiers have to shoot against the people in the street?
No government supports them...and all the international organizations (conscious of the consequences of tolerating a de facto, spurious, government aided by violence) have condemned them after rejecting the fairy-tale that "there was no coup". And they have decreed-- all of them-- sanctions that follow a crescendo that could cause collateral damage... But the authors of the coup declare that they are "misunderstood" and that "it doesn't matter what the world says". Because Honduras is "a cohesive nation" in respect to the government of Micheletti... but there are demonstrations in all the parks and seizures of the highways that could paralize the country and the courts and the Congress and Attorney General and the peanut-gallery newspapers are militarized. I would like to know, how are they going to sustain this circus? Because in addition every affront is documented and in dozens of blogs the information and images are uploaded to the internet, which circles the globe thousands of times. Your swinishness is seen everywhere! While you show off transparently in your invisible clothes in front of the world you should know that the blessings of Argeñal and of Romero will not buy you indulgence in hell. And the interest on the crime will not reach what is needed to buy oil, even though the oil companies help you, as they promised.
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