Resonances in the cultural sphere of the 2009 coup d'état in Honduras

By Samuel Cortés Hamdan.

This November 28, Honduras will elect a new president in general elections organized by the National Electoral Council, 128 congressional legislators and 20 deputies for the Central American Parliament, as well as mayors, deputy mayors and councilors.

In this process will be elected the replacement of the current president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, considered a political heir of the 2009 coup d'état.¹ that hastily ended Manuel Zelaya's term in office. 

Roberto Micheletti, head of the National Congress when the coup was consummated, assumed the de facto presidency of the Central American country.

Zelaya, leader of the Liberty and Refoundation Party (Libre), tried to call a plebiscite to write a new constitution for Honduras, which led to a political crisis and his replacement from executive power through the factious intervention of the armed forces, who arrested him at the presidential residence on June 28, 2009 and expatriated him to Costa Rica, despite the fact that Article 102 of the Constitution prohibits it.

In addition to the rejection of the constituent project by the other powers, the Free Party attributes the coup against Zelaya to the integration of Honduras into the project of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America - Peoples' Trade Agreement (Alba-TCP), which represented a threat to the interests of the United States in the Latin American region. 

Never in the history of Honduras has a government based its domestic and foreign policy on the interests of the majorities. Honduras had represented, up to that moment, what the countries of the iron curtain represented in the post-war period; the most lackey and lowly allies of the entire continent," says the Libre Party in a statement.²

Twelve years after this episode, which is reminiscent of the Condor Plan in South America and other phenomena of political intervention against the sovereignty of Latin American countries in a complex process of definition since the colonial period that began in the 16th century, what consequences and resonances did the coup d'état have in the cultural sphere of Honduras and Central America?

A Central American Intelligence Response

Writers such as Claribel Alegría of Nicaragua and Rodrigo Rey Rosa of Guatemala, among several hundred signatories, signed a missive³ where they condemned the political maneuvering that ended Zelaya's mandate.

We, the writers and publishers of this region, gathered at the VI International Book Fair of Guatemala and the Meeting of Central American Writers, strongly condemn the repudiatory coup d'état perpetrated against the Republic of Honduras, and we call for the restoration of constitutional order as soon as possible and the reinstatement of the constitutional president, Manuel Zelaya Rosales, democratically elected by the people of Honduras," said the signatories in August 2009, just two months after the coup.

We consider unacceptable this type of actions that take us back to the history of reprehensible and shameful regimes for the democratic order recovered and built by our Latin American peoples?

National Front against the Coup d'Etat in Honduras

The critical resistance came together in the first hours after the coup against Zelaya in the Popular Resistance Front, later the National Front against the Coup d'Etat, which entrusted the poet Samuel Trigueros with the coordination of the artistic community.

It is false that President Manuel Zelaya Rosales and his cabinet have resigned from their posts, an argument infamously used by the National Congress to make official the removal of President Zelaya and install Roberto Micheletti Baín in his place," said the group, which emerged from spontaneity and rejection of the climate of authoritarianism, in its first statement.⁴

This civil resistance force also organized an international concert on Sunday, August 23, 2009, Concert Voices Against the Coup.⁵despite the resistance of the coup authorities. Musicians from Venezuela, Guatemala and Argentina participated, at least, along with Honduran artists.

Poetry to mock power

And, as is the tradition in Latin America and in the spheres where an emperor and the sensibility of an artist intersect, poetry took over the critique of the political situation in Honduras. 

Among others, Francesca Randazzo, Fabricio Estrada, Jorge Martínez Mejía, Délmer López Moreno, Waldina Mejía, Jessica Isla, Rigoberto Paredes, Mayra Oyuela, Diana Vallejo, Óscar Deigonet López, Luis Méndez and Trigueros himself used poetic writing to criticize the coup and the tradition of U.S. political interference in Central America. 

The Poetry Newspaper of the UNAM arranged for a small anthology⁶ of verses by these authors against the situation of instability unleashed in Honduras after the ousting of Zelaya. 

We still / plan to carry our flag, the jar with vinegar, / scarf, cap with star and burning slogans on our chest / on the day of the march / We still / read, write, make the banner, / conspire, / want to see the era of power in our hands / We - I tell you, brothers, / sisters, comrades - / are the lucky ones," ironizes Trigueros.

As one more cultural worker in Honduras, my presence in the Front, representing all artists, has the importance of channeling the points of view of the cultural sector, historically invisibilized by the politicians in office. It also establishes the need to include this sector of the population in the country's decision-making process. We strengthen the struggle because we have something to say and do at this juncture and in all processes of national life," said the poet in an interview with journalist Mario Cassasús, a text published by Círculo de Poesía.⁷ Mexican.

The tradition of resistance

It is up to each generation of writers, filmmakers, painters, sculptors, journalists and poets to take up critical resistance to the abuses of their time.

Experienced in breakdowns, counter-guerrillas, looting, authoritarianisms, dictatorships, executions, tortures, disappearances, Central America has generated a complex tradition of rebellious artists capable of imaginative, creative, ironic, painful criticism in the face of the violence that crosses them and stuns them.

In view of the general elections in Honduras in November 2021 and echoing the response of intellectuals and artists to the coup d'état of 2009, we recall Guatemalans Alaíde Foppa, Otto René Castillo, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Luis Cardoza y Aragón; Nicaraguans Gioconda Belli, Ernesto Cardenal⁸Leonel Rugama and Omar Cabezas; to Salvadorans Roque Dalton and Horacio Castellanos Moya⁹The Honduran Augusto Monterroso. 

From spirituality, humor, palimpsest, guerrilla malice, bitterness, surrealism, police anguish, autobiography, eroticism, political sarcasm, self-incarnation, magnanimity, epic, journalism, the body, denunciation, all these authors wrote the lucid complaint of their time and composed works that invite us to a profound conversation about our America.

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