"Between them they've buried the bipartisan system": Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle

In an editorial today in El Tiempo, the Minister of Culture continues his commentary on the spectacle that is the post-coup reality in Honduran politics, endorsing an emerging coalition of progressives:

Pepe and Elvin: The Gravedigger Clowns of the Film

It comes to pass that now, no one took part in the coup, except the no-counts that don't know where to hide. Many businessmen say that they did not, as if their words haven't remained in print and their voices recorded and their handiwork and external lobbying betrayed.

The political leaders of the coup say that neither were they. Carlos Flores says that he was not, that "it was Teté". Pepe goes crazy and Elvin declares 35 days after that "he is not a golpista" and that he condemns "the form" although he condones the basis. A sector of PINU finally repudiates their golpista congress members. But it is obvious that formally speaking the Congress, which is also called "Congre-Zoo", carried out the coup and the congress members responded to their political leaders. That's why the people shout in the street, "golpista congresspeople, trash, out" and when they can they kick them in the street. Without a consensus of the political leaders there would be no coup, since Micheletti, who they are now leaving solo, neither invented the coup nor would have arrived at first base when sent to bat without them.

Paraphrasing Swift I once commented to President Reina that I raised horses because they seemed more noble and rational than politicians. He didn't contradict me and he didn't disagree with me. They should be better than us. And they are the worst breed. I mentioned previously (in "J'accuse") the principal political actors of the coup, and among the witches and alchemists, those generally known, Rafael Callejas and Carlos Flores Facussé, now old politicians, that have once sworn the Constitution that now they are smashing and, exercising their criterion of excellence, the presidency of the Republic that lies here, prostrate, but confronting the repressives with gallantry 45 days later.

Although he competes with Arturo Corrales, Flores is the most cynical. As he says he is writing a memoir I want to assist him. He got in as a congressmember with the blessing of rodismo[*] and intervened many times in the drafting of the constitution that now he broke saying that it was to preserve it. He achieved renown because he wanted to launch himself as a candidate when he was a cabinet minister in the presidency of Rosuco [Roberto Suazo Cordova], on whose orders he also went to the Congress, accompanying Mich [Micheletti] with a proposed law for the Congress to declare itself a constitutional assembly and reform the stony articles, that now he passionately defends.

So many things one could say about Carlos Flores, dangerous and irritable, who many people fear. And that he believes himself loved. Son of a golpista, father of a golpista. Godfather of the usurper and of the judges, attorneys, prosecutor and head of the coup bench.

Carlos has been trying to put this behind him since the day of the coup, when he saw what was coming, saying to anyone who would listen "it wasn't like that man and I told you, but you didn't heed me". Since the week now past he began to publish in his press the adverse opinion of the coup of my teacher Gautama B. Fonseca. But surely you conspired, Ingeniero. We all know what you said to the rest and your role of sponsor. The golpistas that you visited, the media barons, but also the joint command, the "capos" and their deputies, was public.

Your newspaper fabricated the golpista propaganda that prepared the work and set the stage. Your editorials and your little pills always have been golpista even when they wanted to seem unaware in their cynicism. You are a villain, Sir, there is no way to evade the infamy of history. Your father was more cautious. Your own writings condemn you. History will not pardon you, it takes apart propaganda.

The other politicians who conspired will have an identical destiny, although they also try to distance themselves from the coup, Elvin Santos and Pepe Lobo, no one is going to vote for you, Sirs. You are going to have to invent the votes when polls give each one of you one-third favorable in your own parties, versus negative opinions from half. It is now very late to go around repenting. And no one is going to pardon you. You were at the negotiating tables and we all know that you, as candidates of your parties, could have put the brakes on Congress. Pepe wants to pass as ready and lost his second opportunity, Santos lost the only one that he is going to have. Between the two they have buried the hundred-year-old bipartisan system.

No well-born liberal should vote for Elvin Santos, the gravedigger of the greatest party of the isthmus. I have known various bad candidates, but none so fatuous and so destructive as this incontinent Cantinflas, this wet clown.[**] No one should receive him in an honorable house, on pain of being marked. No one should listen to his pleas. No one should speak with him nor turn to see him nor buy a white t-shirt in his malls.

But we don't have to cry for this system that seems that it is going to endure forever, and that we are never going to have parties that will propose ideas, different proposals, real commitments to the people. It could be that there remains, in sight, above the mud with which they cover it, a tight fist, calcined and cracked from the sun, extended saluting those names. The golpistas opened the system so that this new alliance can be established of social organizations and the UD and the varicolored red-and-white progressives, committed to the people, that will win the next elections strikingly and will write glorious pages of our history and a new constituent.

*rodismo: A reference to the conservative movement in the liberal party named after Modesto Rodas Alvarado.


**"payaso mojado": I was tempted to translate this "crying clown", but chose the literal "wet clown" both because of its pairing with "incontinent Cantinflas" and in reference to a story by Daniel Alarcón, "City of Clowns", in which the image refers to a clown literally pelted with water balloons. The image is not uncommon in Spanish as that of a pathetic figure of ridicule.

"The soap opera of the coup...

that wasn't one, but rather a peaceful succession (to those who carried out the coup and their puppets)

[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.

"Fear the Dark": Suspension of Constitutional Rights

Thursday the Honduran daily paper, El Tiempo, published an unsigned editorial criticizing the de facto government's suspension of constitutional rights; as it notes, the latest actions contradict the claim by the de facto government that the change of regime has been accepted and public objections are limited:

State of siege

A state of siege has been decreed, for "grave disturbance of the peace", with which the regime recognizes that Honduras lives in a situation of abnormality, without doubt caused by the rupture of the constitutional order with the coup d'etat of the 28th of June, 2009.

Constitutional norms establish, in these conditions, that the suspension of the exercise of individual rights should be specifically noted, the decision should be justified, the territory affected and the time the restriction will last should be indicated.

Executive Decree No. 011-2009 enacted by the regime suspends the following individual rights: personal liberty; detention without communication for a maximum of 24 hours and judicial detention for inquiries without exceeding six days; the freedom of association and of assembly; and the right to circulate freely, leave, enter, and stay in the national territory.

This peculiar state of siege includes the entire country, although apparently, only is in force at night, from 9 PM to 6 AM. This arrangement, with its characteristics, cannot be modified as long as the restriction lasts, according to the law. Fear the dark.

In our country a state of siege has almost always been decreed when coups d'etat happen, it is worth saying, for political reasons. For natural calamities, in recent history this "legal dictatorship", as some call it, has only been used due to the catastrophe of Hurricane Mitch.

Governments, in general, do all possible to avoid the application of states of exception, since that signifies the existence in a country of a public disorder that the duly constituted-- or imposed-- authority does not feel capable of controlling with common legal means, and therefore, tends to have recourse to the denial of constitutional guarantees.

This is, as can be appreciated, what is happening due to the demonstrations of popular rejection of the breach of constitutional order, that are the object of hard repression and whose escalation seems uncontainable, even when this does not reach public knowledge in its true dimension due to the manipulations of the system of social communication of the country.

It is worth pointing out that in the decree of a state of siege freedom of expression has not been included, no doubt because it is considered unnecessary to do so. The freedom of expression is being violated in diverse forms, using methods of boycott, of persecution and intimidation, which is the object of strong denunciation with international organizations for the defense of human rights, although not in what corresponds to the national commission on human rights, for reasons known to everyone and that aren't worth the trouble to explain.

What Advocates Hoped to Change in the Honduran Constitution

There has been abundant repetition of the claim that the poll scheduled for last Sunday was intended by its advocates to allow the current President, Manual Zelaya, to remain in office after his term ends in January, 2010.

A correspondent in Honduras drew my attention to an editorial, published Saturday in El Tiempo de Honduras, in which the Minister of Culture, Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle, a historian and former university professor, gave his concrete views on what needs to change in the 1982 Honduran Constitution. Minister Pastor, whose current location and status is unknown, cannot be taken to represent the views of his entire government; but at the very least, he presents a different narrative from the one spread by those who illegally exiled the legally elected President of the country, and taken up by much English-language media for whom the story of a Latin American president who wants to hold power forever is a convenient, pre-existing storyline.

Ironically, as I go to post this, those who removed President Zelaya from the country to prevent any question about initiating constitutional reform, are suspending core rights guaranteed by the Honduran Constitution itself, including the right of assembly, the right to travel, the right to demonstrate, the right to a speedy hearing, and the requirement for court orders for searches.

Here, then, is my translation of the editorial, which cannot capture the fluidity of Minister Pastor's writing:

Why and for what do we need a new constitution?

There isn't a total consensus among us about "for what" we need a new constitution, nor about "what it needs to have", nor do we have a reason for why we have to have it because-- precisely-- this consensus is what has to crystallize, in the breast of a genuinely representative constituent assembly, after a debate, and which has to support a new social contract.

I disagree on various points, to give an example, with my leader, and it will be my job to defend my dissidence, some other time. For the rest, the problem has a juridical dimension and depth that I do not have the professional knowledge to exhaust, so I will speak above all of the administrative and political problem.

Perhaps I have to note why theoretically we did not need the ballot question of the "cuarta urna" and a constitutional assembly up till now. There have been many supposed reforms that could have conceivably been arranged among the parties, as a hundred other amendments have been arranged, the most important of which, nonetheless, ended in the trash because they were declared "unconstitutional" in the Supreme Court of Injustice, paradoxically at the request of the same reformer, as in the case of the prohibition on the President of Congress running for the Presidency of the Republic. Therefore, well-qualified jurists have declared that almost all the Constitution is petrified, is politically shielded against change. From time to time we get reforms that the politicians immediately find a way to circumvent. And it is clear that there has been bad faith, that they have given us "atole with a finger" [strung us along], that they concede reforms to us and then they ameliorate them, and are already thinking about how to take them apart from the same moment they promulgate them.

Personally, I have declared myself against re-election; I do not believe that a democratic society needs it. Electoral position would be more representative when everyone has the most opportunity, than when those who occupy and have benefitted from exposure are privileged. Better to propose to remove from congressional representatives the right to successive re-election. (It is those who carry out public policy, and civil service administrators, who require expertise and continuity in their jobs, and not those who deliberate-- advised-- about policy, and here we have the reverse, we dismiss the specialists to accommodate the clients of the political class of the moment.) I also believe it is inexpedient to raise the restrictions that weigh on sectors such as the military in active service and those in religious orders, in order to allow them to participate in elections and political life, because those guilds have their own missions and are obligated to a type of obedience that takes away from subordinates the independence of the full citizen.

But, although its beneficiaries do not wish to see it, the present political system, petrified in the Constitution, is broken, more than the treasury. It is a system of corruption and privileges frozen by constitutionalization of corporatist pretensions and by groups of incontravertible economic power. It does not assure the fulfillment of the duties of citizenship and the payment of its obligations (no one in any country in the world has to be exempt from paying income tax) nor does it guarantee the enjoyment of minimum rights. And, as a consequence, all the institutionality of the State suffers from weakness: it cannot function adequately, it does not have what it needs to do so. And the lack of capacity to respond generates a failure of institutional credibility. And this situation generates ungovernability and requires changes that-- daily-- the sovereign people, who the powers of State owe obedience, demand in the street; since all democratic authority derives from their will. To change the system supposes a constitutional assembly; there is no other way.

There are other rights that this society of ours needs to restrict. Public servants, and specifically, the military and police, should not invoke constitutional rights to preserve themselves unpunished and in their posts despite well-founded suspicions wth respect to their failures or involvement in activities at odds with the mission of their role. Their strategic position requires that they renounce the right to protection, as public figures should, for their part, renounce the right to privacy in the face of liberty of expression.

Instead of this, it is necessary to open up, amplify, and make operative other rights, specifically that of direct consultation, that which the reactionary right is precisely committed to frustrate today, intimidating the people with threats and fantasies. But there are other universal rights today denied, including individual ones. It is unacceptable that the Public Prosecutor can monopolize the accusatorial function in society. This provokes defenselessness of the citizenry when they cannot obtain the consent of the public prosecutor of the moment to charge those who abuse us. We should all have the right to bring charges when the Prosecution does not act and without need of an intermediary, as long as our charge conforms to the law. Likewise, we have to broaden the rights of ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities to bring ourselves into line with our international commitments in these areas. Because even today the rights indigenous people derive from their condition are not recognized, and despite theoretical secularism, fundamentalism wishes to impose its dogma as law.

The traditional parties have arranged to cooperate to promulgate, at full gallop, rules for popular consultation instituted five years ago and blocked for lack of these rules and of the political will to implement them. We congratulate them for that because this will facilitate the installation of the "Cuarta Urna" [ballot measure], although it does not resolve all the formal problems. And we ask if they would ever have made the rules for this law that was dead without the pressure of this exercise in consultation. We shall have to see that these instruments will not be left tied up and controlled.

If we dream of a democratic country, we also have to assure ourselves that the people we elect to public positions respond to the public interest when they take up their charges. Not to the private interest of their friends and family, nor to that of their business clients, but to the interest of the citizenry in general. The present Constitution does not establish operative mechanisms to render an accounting nor to revoke mandates. The referendum should be approved as well so that the new constitution is submitted for the approval of the citizenry. These are a few things. That not all of us can understand. But fundamental. This country cannot govern itself in peace as long as we do not refound ourselves with a social contract in which there is respect for the rights of everyone.