Inside the Honduran Elections
December 12, 2013
Outsiders Converge to Abuse the Democratic Process
Inside the Honduran Elections
by GREG MCCAIN
On November 24th, Hondurans went to the polls in record numbers to support new viable alternatives to the duopoly of the National Party and the Liberal Party. These two old political parties have enjoyed a century of rule and both are beholden to the US State Department, the ruling elite, and multinational companies all looking to buy up the natural resources and the sovereignty of this Central American country.
Libre, the party of the resistance movement that grew out of the protests following the 2009 coup d’état, had mass popular support. Xiomara Castro Anaya, presidential candidate for Libre, and the wife of ex-President Mel Zalaya who was ousted in the coup, drew much larger crowds at every one of her political events leading up to the elections than any of her opponents at theirs. All the pre-election polls except the ones paid for by the National Party had her clearly in the lead. In the face of this popular support, the regime of Pepe Lobo, defacto President who was elected in fraudulent elections following the coup, and Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH), ex-President of the National Congress and Presidential candidate for the National Party, staged an electoral coup d’état that exhibited massive fraud and voting irregularities.
You would not know how massive these irregularities were if you only relied on the mainstream press. News outlets such as The Washington Post and the AP’s man in Honduras , Alberto Arce, both declared JOH the winner before the counting process was complete and the fraud investigated thus promoting the neo-liberal agenda that has devastated this country. Arce bases his opinion on what he calls the lack of concrete evidence of fraud and puts his full faith and confidence behind the words of Lisa Kubieski, US Ambassador to Honduras, Ulricke Lunacek, the head of the European Union Election Observation Mission (EU-EOM), and the Organization of American States (OAS) all of which declared the elections transparent and free of fraud while many were calling for an investigation.
The OAS is notorious for its compliance with US policy toward the subjugation of Latin America and the Caribbean. As Mark Weisbrot points out in the Guardian:
“The OAS has similarly abandoned its duty of neutrality in elections in Haiti: it changed its 2000 report on presidential elections to support US efforts at “regime change”, and in 2011, took the unprecedented step ofreversing an actual election result, without so much as even a recount – again in line with Washington’s electoral choices.”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/12/inside-the-honduran-elections/