It's been a frustrating week - talks on, talks off, old and new deadlines (here's another worthwhile interview with Zelaya, this one by PBS), more smug stalling by the thugs,... Meanwhile, for the people of Honduras, the terror continues.
One light has been this report by Al Jazeera. Please, please watch both parts.
I come down on the side of this piece: "La amnistía a los golpistas, un punto que debemos rechazar categóricamente."
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Good on Al-Jazeera to finally send some people down there and do some real journalism instead of regurgitating press-releases.
ReplyDeleteNot surprised that it's Al-Jazeera, of all the MSM, to get it right first. Still, three months is waaay to long to finally start looking into the matter.
And on another note, I'm fucking sick of the fact that we call everything with regular elections "democracy". When the people aren't getting what they want, it's not a democracy, no matter how many elections there are.
We seem to accept form over content, once again.
Gosh, Jadehawk - do you know what you sound like?
ReplyDelete*wipes away tears* :)
It's always a difficult question when you're talking about practical actions. Kropotkin certainly realized that representative "democracy" was a vast improvement on dictatorship; it's closer to real democracy, but in practice it's easy to fall into seeing it as an end rather than a step. And this coup, as others, has shifted the Overton window - it becomes a question of restoring the elected president and stopping the violence against the people rather than one of moving towards real democracy.
I think the reporter is perhaps a bit too harsh on Zelaya, in that Zelaya has - in the interviews I've read - stressed that the struggle for a new constitution and everything surrounding that is the larger one and will continue whatever happens with regard to him, though his return to the presidency is fundamentally important in putting an end to coups and the thinking that underlies them, which is of fundamental importance.
It's interesting...Susan Jacoby discusses William Lloyd Garrison (who refused to vote despite his support for female suffrage) at one point: "His response [to ridicule regarding his alleged inconsistency] was that every American, regardless of color or sex, was entitled to equal rights under the law and 'whether one chose to exercise them on grounds of conscience was immaterial to the tyranny manifested by their denial'" (page 93 of Freethinkers).
I see a parallel here. There's a right to have one's vote realized in a representative democracy, even though this isn't the end-all of political participation.
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Does it seem to anyone else like Romeo Vásquez Velásquez and Adolfo Facussé are characters from some surrealist Latin American novel?