:: Que magazine ::

On 28th June, the democratic Government of Honduras was dismissed after a military coup. President Manuel Zelaya was transferred, at gunpoint, from his bed up to an airbase on the outskirts of the capital, Tegucigalpa, and then deported to the capital of the neighbouring country, San José, Costa Rica. Since then, the Central American Republic has suffered military and police repression which has claimed nearly a hundred fatalities.

Manuel Zelaya, after a frustrated return to Honduras, by air, managed to enter the country by land, at the end of September, and take refuge in the Brazilian Embassy in the capital, where he remains today, trying to regain power.

In politics, the principles are sacrificed to serve the purposes: when the principles are not valid, we must change them for others, and that’s it.

If going through the overall change you get the principles wrong, you will not accomplish your goals.

Manuel Zelaya, President-elect of Honduras, a landowner that likes to tap his head with a cowboy hat and sport a Mexican musical heartthrob moustache, has been knocked down from his presidential saddle for changing the principles of the rich for those of the poor.

The reforms were about taking a little from the few rich, but not taking it too far, to redistribute it amongst the many poor.

Zelaya also happened to say that the problem in Honduras is that the rich do not want to yield a single crumb.

So, to legitimise future economic and political reforms, the President also happened to consult the people, namely the poor. The consultation was to ask them if they wanted to be asked.

And this is asking too much, because in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, in El Salvador, in too many constituencies in Latin America, it has become clear that the poor want to be asked, and what is worse, they are right in their own responses.

Although he dressed as a wild-west cowboy, the Yankees began to see Zelaya’s Indian feathers peaking from under a hat that had wings of freedom.

So the military forces, at the service of the oligarchy; the oligarchs at the service of the United States Government; the United Stated Government at the service of transnational companies with interests in the area, they cut the hair of the Indian disguised as a cowboy, the cowboy with a Robin Hood soul: Manuel Zelaya, the rich man with the heart of the poor.

What ends up killing off the politician are not his good or bad intentions, but expressing them.

Politics is the hunting ban of those who claim to be vegetarians, the battlefield of those who call themselves pacifists, the prison of those who assure us that they love freedom, the night of those who sing the glories of day, the Hiroshima of those who are already thinking about Nagasaki, cemeteries’ peace, the military coup of the incense-bearing Democrats.

It remains to be seen, after his return to the country and shelter in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa, if Manuel Zelaya would achieve getting murdered by his enemies or, returning to the fold as a misguided sheep, would he sign with them a commitment to return each to their own: to the rich the present and to the poor the future.