US continues squeeze on Honduras

The Latin Left and militant Marxists have placed a heavy premium on restoring Zelaya to the presidency in Honduras.

They are being helped by the Obama Administration. The Honduran economy has been hurt by the turmoil and the pressure being put on it by the left wing regimes in Latin America. The Left has an ally in Barack Obama.

Obama, suspended $31 million in aid this week. The left will not be satisfied until Honduras joins the ranks of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia. What follows is from an avowedly Marxist web site:

Marxist.com

...

The workers have the ability to completely paralyse the country's economic and social life. Without the kind permission of the working class in Honduras, the transportation system would grind to a halt, education and health service would not work, the maquiladoras would be paralysed, papers could not be printed, electricity would not be generated and telecommunications would be stopped. The Front has already made an appeal to “spread the peaceful actions to paralyse the normal functioning of the commercial operations of those companies which promote, finance and execute the political and military coup against the legitimated government of Manuel Zelaya Rosales and against the people of Honduras as a whole”. It is necessary that this appeal is put into practice in the form of a complete general strike which puts on the table the question of who rules the country.
{...}

The trade union organisations in the US also have an important responsibility in this, as most of Honduras’ foreign trade takes place with the US. The US longshoremen have a proud and militant tradition of international solidarity and should declare immediately a workers' boycott on all goods from and to Honduras.

Fourthly, it is important to understand that the coup regime will not fall unless the repressive apparatus of the state is broken. In the first days of the coup there were many isolated examples of rank and file elements within the Army and the police who were sympathetic to the people. There were even rumours of a possible rebellion of young officers. For the seven weeks of the resistance, the people, showing great instinct, have approached the soldiers once and again, telling them that they are also part of the people and that they should not attack their own people. This is correct, but it is not enough. The Front should organise a conscious and coordinated campaign towards the ranks of Army in order to break its morale. Leaflets specifically aimed at soldiers should be printed and distributed. They should be contacted through their families and neighbours. There should be an appeal for the formation of soldiers' committees (which at first would necessarily have to be clandestine), which should be coordinated with the Front.

The combination of a general strike which would paralyse the country's economic life, the mass mobilisation of workers, students and peasants on the streets, the international workers' boycott and a serious and bold appeal to the ranks of the Army, is the only strategy which can guarantee a victory against the coup. Above all, the resistance can only trust its own forces. It is useless to make appeals to the US to intervene. As a matter of fact, diplomatic pressure on Micheletti will be stronger the stronger the movement of the masses is, since what the US and the bourgeois governments of Latin America and the EU fear the most is precisely the overthrow of the coup through an insurrectionary uprising of the people.