December 19 —Presidential elections were held in Honduras on November 27, 2017. Thousands of Hondurans—men and women—throughout the country turned out to protest against what appeared to be blatant fraud. They took over streets, roads, communities and called for a national strike that the vast majority participated in.
The government ordered a nationwide curfew. On the first night, police assassinated a youth who was looking for his brother to warn him about the curfew. They have now killed at least 21 more. But the protests continue.
Elections are one of the most sophisticated ways the bosses use to fool the men and women workers into thinking that they govern the country. But the electoral parties can’t solve the problems that the working class confronts anywhere in the world. We need a communist revolution to eliminate money and capitalist social relations of production. The masses must fight for this and nothing else.
This election pitted the ALIANZA movement, led by the LIBRE party and its candidate Salvador Nasralla, against Juan Orlando Hernandez, current president of Honduras, and the National Party. This process, full of irregularities, unleashed a political and social crisis that continues in the shadow of the 2009 coup.
The LIBRE Party is led by the former President Mel Zelaya, who was overthrown in the coup in 2009 (with the support of the US). This movement creates illusions in a large part of the Honduran population, since it presents itself as an alternative to the problems of corruption, drug trafficking and violence that have grown during the last two National Party governments.
During the protest, a youth took the opportunity to stand in front of the cameras and send a message to the leaders of the LIBRE party: “We are here in the streets now, tell us what to do and we will do it.”
LIBRE called for fighting against the fraud in a peaceful way. As the days pass, the Honduran government is trying to control the situation. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal has declared Hernandez the winner.
These events oblige us to study in depth the Honduran process and see the great opportunity there is to struggle with the Honduran working class to organize for communist revolution. We comrades in El Salvador can help plan communist work with the comrades in Honduras.
The members of ICWP have learned from the experiences of national liberation struggles and elections in the countries where we are, especially in El Salvador and South Africa. These experiences and the commitment to mobilize the masses for communism should help motivate us to reactivate Party work in Honduras.
The masses in Honduras are open to communist ideas. They want a different world that only communism can create. Organizing them under the flag of our party is a slow process. The masses shouldn’t show up every five years to an election under the rules of the bourgeois game of electoral democracy. . The times demand that we be bolder and more determined. Comrades elsewhere in Central America must build and consolidate lines of communication with our comrades in Honduras and help them build a stronger ICWP structure there.