Weekend Edition
January 29 - 31, 2010
Live From Honduras
Police Perform Halftime Show at Zelaya Airport Farewell
By BELÉN FERNÁNDEZ
The most common calculation heard yesterday at Tegucigalpa’s Toncontin Airport was that the crowd that had gathered to see off outgoing Honduran President Mel Zelaya was larger than the crowd that had gathered at the same airport on July 5, 2009, when the forcibly expatriated Zelaya had unsuccessfully attempted to repatriate himself by plane. The president had subsequently resorted to more modest means of transport such as the trunk of a car and had appeared on September 21 at the Brazilian embassy in the Honduran capital, where he had remained trapped until a guarantee of safe passage enabled him to travel yesterday to the Dominican Republic. That the airport turnout for Zelaya’s Dominican departure was even larger than the turnout in July indicates that the coup regime strategy of legitimizing the coup via elections has not had the intended sedative effect on the Honduran populace.
Aside from crowd dimensions, the two airport gatherings also differed in that Honduran soldiers and policemen refrained from using tear gas at the latter gathering, or from fatally shooting unarmed Honduran teenagers. A member of the anti-coup Resistance I spoke with at the airport attributed this restraint to the idea that it did not behoove newly-inaugurated President Pepe Lobo to acquire victims during his first hours in office; as for Radio Globo reports throughout the morning that there were more people at the airport than at Lobo’s inauguration ceremony at the national stadium, another Resistance member suggested that the ceremony was meant to be exclusive anyway and that Zelaya had been the only president to open the doors of the presidential palace to all Hondurans, including those of the barefoot indigenous variety.
The exclusivity of the event was naturally enhanced by the fact that most countries in the world failed to attend, although lack of foreign approval of governments elected under illegal circumstances has been partially counteracted by the “program of cooperation” promised to Honduras by Israeli ambassador to Central America Eliyahu López, who did attend the ceremony. In addition to the training of Latin American paramilitaries, previous examples of Israeli cooperation in the region have included the attendance of Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon at the meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Honduras prior to the coup despite Israel’s lack of geographical qualification as an American state. An additional cooperative opportunity made possible by Zelaya’s removal is the planned visit to Tegucigalpa by Colombian President Álvaro Uribe on Saturday.
At Toncontin Airport yesterday afternoon, entertainment options consisted of listening to music, listening to speeches, listening to people with megaphones in pickup trucks make fun of snipers in the airport’s air control tower, and looking for shade. Speeches were given by Resistance leaders Juan Barahona and Rafael Alegría, as well as by the “grandmother of the Resistance,” Dionisia Díaz, who lost her husband in the banana workers’ strike of 1954 and who with her own megaphone has been a fixture at Resistance activities since the coup; the victims of the coup regime were also commemorated various times throughout the day, once via the release of balloons into the air.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/fernandez01292010.html
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