God Tells Jokes on The Way to President Xiomara Castro's Inauguration

I was sitting in Juan Miguel’s living room in Denton, Texas when the news came on the television.  I was in graduate school pursuing studies in ecofeminism at Texas Woman’s University at the time.  A few weeks prior I had received an invitation from Sacramento Labor Council Secretary Bill Camp to join him in Honduras.  I couldn’t go because of school, and I wish I could have been there to lend my voice in protest.

Reports meandered in that the Honduran military had kidnapped then President Manuel Zelaya from his home in his pajamas in the middle of the night in an illegal coup d’état.  The Republic of Honduras had in that moment rejoined the ranks of military juntas running nations left developing by the world’s superrich.  Things could have been different over the last twelve years, but in that moment, when Honduras needed the United States to call foul play, then President Obama did not.  Instead of standing up for democracy, Obama neglected to call the military takeover a coup.  Had Obama used the term “coup” then the United States would not have been able to continue business as usual in the original “banana republic.”  I was not able to be in Tegucigalpa in 2009 to protest “el golpe del estado,” but I made it in time to celebrate the end of it.

The Obama Administration under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton allowed the coup to take place and then elections to be held by the coup government so that democracy appeared to have taken place.  It didn’t.  Pepe Lobo (I do not use the term “President” with the illegal government.) gained power as Honduras had become the murder capital of the world.  Almost overnight, Honduras became a lawless den for corruption and crime to fester like a wound left unclean.  Environmentalists who stood in the way of mines and power plants were murdered.  The journalists who tried to tell the story were left for dead.  Police who tried to do the right thing were removed from power and their families threatened.  The land of small farmers and indigenous groups was stolen.  Men, women, and children faced consequences unknown at the prospect of not being able to pay gang members for the right to walk down the street.  Every aspect of life became more difficult due to the corruption.  People’s close friends got rich finding the price at which they were willing to sell their morals while the rest of the country either tried to survive in the worst of times or fled for the U.S. border.  Obama and Clinton didn’t sit by and do nothing.  The Honduran people would have been better off if they had.  The United States not only supported the overthrow of the Honduran government in 2009, they have been arming its illegitimate government ever since!

That was even before the Juan Orlando Hernandez regime began.  Hernandez, held by many as the political force behind the coup, was president of the Honduran National Congress before being named president.  Midway into his first term, JOH (yes, like the pejorative term for a prostitute) made a secret arrangement with the Congress and Supreme Court of Honduras to allow him to run for a second term.  It was previously illegal for the president of Honduras to serve more than one term and the justification for removing Zelaya from office (for attempting to take a poll on the matter).  Thus began the chant “Fuera, JOH!” or “Get out of here, JOH!”  He would serve four more years.  Ironically, by avoiding the use of the term “coup,” the United States gave Honduras a dictator.  More ironic indeed was the fact that this dictator was so deep in the pockets of narcotraffickers and even facilitated the movement of cocaine from Central America to Europe all from his desk as president.  Obama and Clinton enabled JOH to seize power, and Trump kept it going.  JOH was the first international guest for U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.

So when I heard, when we all heard, that Xiomara Zelaya Castro, the former First Lady of Honduras whose husband Mel Zelaya was removed from power twelve years earlier, had won the election and was soon to be the first woman president of Honduras, a collective sigh of relief blew across the picturesque Honduran landscape.  When I arrived to San Pedro Sula on January 25^th, I could feel people breathing again.  Streets were packed but not hostile.  Things seemed cleaner than usual.  People appeared happy with upward facing smiles eager to speak about the days ahead.  Previously, it might seem like the 2/3 world was a bad place to talk politics, but everyone we encountered was happy to talk about Castro’s victory.  We encountered people on the street who were excited our international delegation had come to celebrate the end of the coup.  Many were confused that there were U.S. citizens who cared enough about Honduran politics to be informed.  Fellow patrons at Power Chicken made jokes about what the names of inauguration day specials on the menu would be.  Even security guards opened up ever so slightly to conversation about life with the LIBRE party in power.  Mostly though, everyone was talking about what was next for them personally.  It wasn’t that people were finally free to openly talk about the failed coup government, it was that Honduran families finally felt free to talk about something else.

Before departing, Sister Larraine of Water With Blessings asked me to consider saying the prayer of Michael the Archangel for “the Honduran government wasn’t so great before the coup either.”  The last words my step-dad, Tom, said to me before I left for Honduras were “Watch, but do not be seen.  Listen, but don’t speak.”  They didn’t have to explain.  I knew what they meant.  The fact that the United States sent a group from the Department of State to deliver an ultimatum to the Honduran military before the election – there will be free and fair elections this time, or we will cut off the money immediately.” – reminds me that additional forces are at work.  With JOH’s brother sitting in jail for trafficking cocaine in the United States, the U.S. may have needed to control the narrative that their long game on the coup worked where stepping in in 2009 may not have.  The pending extradition of JOH certainly favors taking steps to help Hondurans heal, but the country is not healed yet.  Larraine and Tom did not have to explain their message to me because it was right there on the consent form to attend the inauguration.  After name and address and a few more identifying details, the application, as plain as day, asked me to list my blood type.  There was only one reason my blood type would need to be on file during the events of the inauguration … in case something went wrong..

These are the events which ran across my mind in the early morning of January 26^th in the back of a van travelling from San Pedro Sula to Tegucigalpa as Pink Floyd’s “We don’t need no education” began to play on the radio.