U.S.-Backed Dictator’s War on the People Drives Emigration
By Joseph Rosen
Hundreds of thousands of Hondurans are rising up against the corrupt and repressive U.S.-backed government of president Juan Orlando Hernández. The united effort continues daily despite the Honduran government ordering country-wide police and military attacks. Some of the worst repression has come from the U.S.-trained and supported Honduran special forces known as TIGRES.
The police state over which Juan Orlando Hernández rules came to power in 2017 through a rigged election that was met with widespread national protests and international condemnation. The demand to remove the president—”Fuera JOH”— is now heard daily across the country.
Hernández’s regime continues the legacy of the government that was installed in 2009 when the U.S. State Department under Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama used the CIA to orchestrate a coup that forced out the popular elected government of Manuel Zelaya. Under Zelaya the government was shifting funds to meet people’s needs. This is why the U.S. carried out the coup. In only one year after the coup, the national education budget was cut in half and public healthcare spending was cut by 20 percent. In the two years after the coup, more than 100 percent of all income gains went to the wealthiest 10 percent of Hondurans.
Thousands protest cuts to social programs, layoffs
The current surge of protests began after trade unions of health and education workers called for strikes and mobilizations to protest widespread layoffs and cuts to social programs. These attacks were forced on the people as a condition of loans that the government receives from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a consortium of banks dominated by the U.S. and its imperialist partners.
Hundreds of thousands of workers, Indigenous people, peasants and students heeded the unions’ call to action. Because of these massive mobilizations, the National Congress of Honduras was forced to nullify the law that would have enacted the cuts. The masses have been emboldened by this win; now they’re marching with even more determination to take down the illegitimate president.
Mobilizations will continue to swell as Honduras approaches the ten-year anniversary of the U.S.- orchestrated military coup. The Platform for the Defense of Health and Education, a driving force behind the protests, has demanded that the government withdraw its military forces and guarantee that healthcare and education workers not face retaliation for the strike.
New Orleanian and Honduran workers are in the same struggle
The struggles of workers in New Orleans and in Honduras are connected.
In 2010, Hernandez’s predecessor and U.S. puppet Porfirio Lobo Sosa made a visit to New Orleans to sign a memorandum of understanding with former mayor Mitch Landrieu to partner on healthcare and public education “reforms.” The post-coup Honduran government has modeled its attack on public education on the privatizations carried out in New Orleans after Katrina.
More Honduran-born people live in New Orleans than anywhere else in the United States; many of these refugees have migrated because of the difficult conditions forced on their country by U.S. imperialist intervention. Many of the same Honduran workers who helped to rebuild New Orleans after Katrina now face harassment, deportation and concentration camp detentions.
Workers can show their solidarity with our Honduran sisters and brothers by demanding an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. military and intelligence personnel from Honduras and by demanding an immediate end to all U.S. funding and support of the Honduran security forces and government, which are terrorizing the Honduran people.