Popular Resistance to the Coup Increases in Honduras

(June 30)

During a special television broadcast to provide information on the events related to the Central American country, the Round Table program –also aired by radio- analyzed the situation, and considered that the power usurpers will intensify their actions against demonstrators.

Radio Havana Cuba reporter Barbara Betancourt said that the Honduran people has reserves in its resistance and denounced the terror imposed by the military, which take young people out of their homes. There are people who have been kidnapped and no one knows where they are, expressed the journalist.

She said that the violence of people in favor of the coup will increase until the legitimate president of Honduras José Manuel Zelaya, kidnapped in the early hours of Sunday and forcibly taken to Costa Rica, returns to the country.

Zelaya said that he will return to Honduras on Thursday and that he will be accompanied by presidents from other countries and by OAS General Secretary José Miguel Insulza. It was known that the Argentinean head of state, Cristina Fernandez, will also be part of the international delegation.

The usurper of power in Honduras, Roberto Micheletti cynically declared to Colombia’s Radio Caracol radio station that if Zelaya returns to the nation he will be received with an arrest warrant for violating the country’s Constitution.

The Round Table informed about the support given by US congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, of Cuban origin, to the coup in Honduras.

The program also focused on the demonstrations carried out in Madrid and New York to condemn the coup, and offered the statements of social and political organizations from various parts of the world in support of the legitimate president of Honduras and of its people.

In a telephone conversation with the program’s director, Randy Alonso, Berta Caceres, from the Civic Council for Popular Organizations and Indigenous Populations in Honduras (COPINH), informed that popular demonstrations and army repression increase. She said that the population has taken to the main streets, and that there are people
wounded and arrested by the military, which have received orders of suppression.

She pointed out that denunciations by the committees for the detainees and the disappeared continue, as well as the strategies for mobilization, action and resistance. She described the day as a very tense, and called the Armed Forces to abandon, if it has any sense of shame, the de facto coup and join the struggle of the Honduran people.

Caceres also asked the people in favor of the coup not to harm the humanitarian missions of Cubans -doctors and educators- because the Honduran people only receive solidarity from its brothers and sisters in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The COPINH executive called the Honduran people to continue mobilizing along with the thousands of compatriots now advancing from faraway places to the capital, some of which have been arrested by the army, and recommended the use of collective initiatives to break repression.

The people in favor of the coup re-seized the National Telecommunications Enterprise, a building that was defended on Monday by workers, where a Honduran was assassinated during and attack of guards with vehicles against them.

She warned that repression will increase as the moment of the return of President Zelaya to the country approaches, since terror against communicators is already unleashing, especially against the journalists from Telesur television network. Radio broadcasts have been essential, because it’s heard on the entire northern coast, but the military cut the departmental and community transmitters so the population doesn’t know what’s going on.