Four Paws for a Lame Table

Photos

Democracy Targeted

see larger image

uploaded by JAMP

As the paws of a lame table, Costa Rica, Colombia, Panama and Peru were the only governments recognizing the recent Honduran elections at the Ibero-American Summit held in Estoril, Portugal.

President Lula, from Brazil, was clear saying NO:  “it is necessary to be coherent: we cannot make a pact with a coupster,  as if anything happened", he said and also called not no make pacts with the political vandalism.”

In terms not less hard, the president from Argentina, Cristina Fernández, questioned the validity of the electoral process in Honduras and it regretted the existence of “a standard double” to qualify the leaders of the region according to his ideological posture. “The respect to the freedom is not of right neither of left”, she remembered, it stops then to whip the Honduran electoral process and to criticize, although without mentioning them, to the countries that defend like an intermediate road of solution the recognition of Wolf because “there is not a little, more or less democracy. “It is as being pregnant. Or it is pregnant or it is not pregnant”, he/she affirmed.

With the democracy “it is the same thing: or you is in democracy, and all the rights are respected and covenants of title, or you is not in democracy”, Fernández expressed who concluded remembering that “the respect to the democratic life in our region is a history of tragedy, so the defense of the democracy should be a defense without concessions.”

Nine countries from ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America reiterated in Estoril their rejection to the recognition of the “illegal and illegitimate” elections in Honduras.  Besides Honduras this group is formed by Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominique, Ecuador, Antigua and Barbuda and San Vicente and Grenadines. They also demand that “the moral authors of the military blow in Honduran are submitted to the international justice” in an ad-hoc court to judge their crimes.

Former Nicaraguan chancellor Miguel D Escoto who chaired the UN General Assembly to qualified  the coup against President Mel Zelaya in Honduras as a “disastrous precedent”, as well as “the illegitimate elections” last Sunday. “What happens now is that a small group of countries, unconditional allies and with a deep dependence of Washington, decided to begin a recognition of those elections, but they will face the immense majority of Iberoamérica”, he expressed the Catholic priest to IPS.

Regarding the role of Mr. Oscar Arias, former president from Costa Rica, the Nicaraguan diplomat accused him of being “the main instrument of United States to impede the return of full democracy to Honduras.” As prize Nobel of the Peace, “Arias is a fraud, because he is the main obstacle for the progress and the emancipation of the region regarding Washington”, it concluded.

On the other hand a strong member of the community, Spain, announced that it is against the legitimation of the elections, but that “it cannot ignore them”, a posture shared by Portugal.

The serious situation in Honduras almost took the whole time of the Estoril Summit. All over Honduras, youth in resistance, women in resistance, artists in resistance, lawyers in resistance, well-dressed and blackberried political party leaders in resistance, campesinos in resistance were saying NO to these elections.  An observer based in the Central American country  wrote for Democracy in Action that while many other Hondurans see the elections as a way out of the difficult situation they are in, the problems with this climate must be not be ignored.

How can these elections be fair when one of the few T.V. stations in Honduras broadcasting independent news has its signal blocked and when restrictions placed on freedom of assembly make campaigning difficult? How free can an election be when the same armed forces that backed the June 28th coup, and that have acted to repress protests, are delivering the ballots and safeguarding polling places? And how much choice can people have when a large number of candidates have withdrawn?

Those questions now have answers, and also a clear position of Ibero-American community.