By Ingrid Sánchez. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P].
The general elections to be held next November are an opportunity to restore democracy in Honduras in the context of the people's struggle for the defense of their natural resources, said Gustavo Iriras, director of the Center for the Study of Democracy (CESPAD) and Dunia Sanchez, leader of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH).
CESPAD sees the elections in Honduras as an opportunity to put an end to this terrible regime of 12 years, to establish democracy, to recover the rule of law, to restore the great democratic setbacks we have had and to advance in a series of basic and substantive reforms that the country requires," said Gustavo Iriras in a discussion organized by Global Exchange.
According to the director of the CESPAD The 2009 coup d'état perpetrated by the Honduran military was supported by the United States, which viewed with suspicion the rapprochement of then President Manuel Zelaya to the policy led by Hugo Chávez, of criticism of the U.S. and defense of national sovereignty.
The trigger for the 2009 coup d'état was Zelaya's initiative to promote a consultation with the population to convene a Constituent Assembly that could create a new Constitution to replace the current one dating from 1982.
The coup d?etat has meant the re-militarization of the Central American country, the privatization of natural resources, the dismemberment of the state into micro states and the implementation of a deeply extractivist policy for which the government has increased the levels of repression and criminalization of social protest, says Iriras.
For her part, Dunia Sanchez emphasizes that despite the political assassinations that the current movement in defense of the territory has suffered, the indigenous and popular movements that defend the territory continue.
The young activist and leader of COPINH stressed that the participation of Berta Cáceres in the movement in defense of the territory was fundamental to shape the current organization of the communities, which suffer the arrival of megaprojects.
The assassination of Cáceres, which occurred on March 3, 2016, was a reaction by the companies to try to stop the struggle against the privatization of the territory, against the hydroelectric projects of the Rio Blanco that have been affected as demonstrated by social organizations in the region.
According to Sánchez, David Castillo, executive president of Empresa de Desarrollos Energéticos S.A. (DESA), is a key player in the crime against Cáceres. (DESA) is the key player as a co-actor and operator of the crime against Cáceres. His involvement in the murder is part of the demonstration that this was not an act related to the environmental activist's personal life or to the criminality that has flourished in the country in recent decades.
For us as communities we were not going to ignore or say that it was a murder of passion. It was a crime against our compañera Berta Cáceres and we knew where it came from, because they thought that if they assassinated our compañera, they would continue to operate in our area, in our river, but they were wrong because until today we have been in this process, in this investigation," explains Sánchez.
In this context, the November elections in Honduras could be a possibility for the country to begin to reconfigure itself in a more democratic context although, according to Gustavo Iriras, the difficulties are many because the rules of the electoral game are still precarious and there are problems that the population will have to overcome such as the lack of autonomy of the electoral body in charge of organizing them.
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