How Honduras’s Military Coup Gave Birth to Feminist Resistance

[Judi Lynn]

How Honduras’s Military Coup Gave Birth to Feminist Resistance
By Adelay Carias
Saturday, July 24, 2010

I remember the coup d’état as if it were yesterday. I was at home, and a strange sound–like a knife scraping the sky–awoke me.

I was born in the time of dictators and coups (1975), but I don’t remember the stories they told me about those days, when the country woke up one morning to find itself occupied and the television and radio stations announced that the military had taken power (again). Even so, I felt an enormous, dull fear when I saw the warplanes circling above; doubtless, there is a historical, collective, subterranean memory that goes beyond what we have experienced as individuals.

Immediately, I turned on the television to see the news, to find out what was happening. I saw unbelievable images… the presidential palace taken by the army, the news that Mel Zelaya had been kidnapped and taken to Costa Rica, and that Roberto Micheletti, who was then president of the National Congress, had assumed the presidency. Fifteen minutes later the electricity went out and the broadcast of shocking events and images ended abruptly. At a loss for what to do, I called my feminist friends, asking: What do we do?

Mel Zelaya was not a hero for me, nor for many of us. The major newspapers in the country had fed us a steady stream of “information” about the corruption and political turmoil of his government. But they maliciously manipulated all the news about the advantages Honduras gained by joining ALBA (the Spanish acronym for the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) in 2008, which allowed financial resources into the country through loans and donations and a substantial reduction in fuel prices. They ignored the significance to workers of Zelaya’s 60% increase in the minimum wage—up till then, one of the lowest in Central America <1>, and said little about other actions on behalf of the impoverished majority of the country that pitted him against the great dinosaurs–the nation’s wealthy but powerful few.

When President Mel Zelaya formally introduced the referendum through the “fourth ballot box” (adding a box to the regularly scheduled elections to vote on whether or not to organize a constitutional assembly), some feminist and women’s organizations decided to support the proposal. Although initially the fourth ballot box referendum was viewed with much suspicion, Mel managed to garner increasing support from social movements, who saw in this project a historic opportunity for the recognition of their claims.

There was a precedent for the new alliance between a part of the feminist movement and the president on the fourth ballot box referendum: in April 2009 fundamentalist religious groups managed to get the Congress to pass a law forbidding the use and distribution of the Emergency Contraceptive Pills or ECP (the “morning-after pill”), which had been legal in the country since 1992. Feminists talked to the president and made a political pact and on May 19, Zelaya vetoed the bill to prohibit the ECP. One of the first things Congress did after the coup d’etat and ouster of the elected president was to pass a law to prohibit the use and distribution of the Emergency Contraceptive Pills.

More:
http://www.zcommunications.org/how-honduras-s-military-coup-gave-birth-to-feminist-resistance-by-adelay-carias