The never-ending document read yesterday by the Nobel Laureate Oscar Arias is much worse than the 7 points of the surrender paper he had proposed on July 18th.
He wasn’t communicating with international opinion in Morse Code. He was speaking in front of the TV cameras that were transmitting his image and all the details of the human face that tends to have as many variables as a person’s fingerprints. Any intent to lie can be easily discovered. I was observing him carefully.
Among those watching the television, the great majority knew that Honduras had had a coup d’état. That medium gave information about the speeches made at the OAS, the UN, the SICA (Central American Integration System), the NAM Summit and other forums; they had seen the violations, the assaults and the repression inflicted on the people engaged in activities that brought together hundreds of thousands of people protesting against the coup.
The strangest thing was that when Arias was laying out his new peace proposal, he wasn’t delusional; he believed what he was saying.
Even though very few in Honduras were able to see the images, in the rest of the world many did see them and they also saw when he proposed the famous 7 points on July 18th. They knew that the first of them said, verbatim: “The legitimate restitution of José Manuel Zelaya Rosales to the presidency of the Republic of Honduras until the end of the constitutional term for which he was elected…”
Everyone wanted to know what the mediator would be saying yesterday afternoon. The acknowledgement of the rights of the constitutional president of Honduras, with the powers reduced almost to zero in the first proposal, was relegated to sixth place in the second Arias plan, where the phrase “to legitimate the restitution” is not even being used.
Many honest people are amazed and they perhaps attribute what he said yesterday to some dark manoeuvres of his. Perhaps I am one of the few in the world that understands that there was an auto-suggestive element rather than a deliberate intent in the words of the Nobel Peace Laureate. I noticed that especially when Arias, using special emphasis and laboured phrasing on account of the emotion, spoke about the multitude of messages that presidents and world leaders, moved by his initiative, had sent him. It’s what was going through his mind; he doesn’t even realize that other Nobel Peace Laureates, honest and modest individuals such as Rigoberta Menchú and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, are outraged by what has happened in Honduras.
Without any shadow of a doubt, a large part of the civilian governments of Latin America, the ones who knew that Zelaya had approved the first Arias plan and were confident in the good sense of the perpetrators of the coup and their Yankee allies, breathed in relief; that lasted only 72 hours.
Seen from a different angle, and returning to the things that prevail in the real world, where the dominant empire exists and almost 200 sovereign states have to wrestle with all kinds of conflicts and political, economic, environmental, religious and other interests, the only thing missing is to award the brilliant Yankee way of thinking of Oscar Arias, trying to gain some time, strengthen the coup, and dishearten the international bodies that supported Zelaya.
On the 30th anniversary of the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution, Daniel Ortega, bitterly remembering Arias’ role in the first Esquipulas Treaty, declared before a huge crowd of Nicaraguan patriots: “The Yankees know him well, that’s why they chose him to be the mediator in Honduras”. At that same event, Rigoberta Menchú, of indigenous descent, condemned the coup.
If the measures agreed to at the foreign ministers meeting in Washington would be merely fulfilled, the coup d’état would not have been able to survive the non-violent resistance of the Honduran people.
Now the perpetrators of the coup are already moving around in the oligarchic spheres of Latin America, some of which, from high state positions, no longer blush when they speak of their sympathies for the coup and imperialism goes fishing in the choppy waters of the river that is Latin America. Exactly what the United States wanted with the peace initiative, while it accelerated negotiations to surround Bolivar’s homeland with military bases.
We must be fair, and while we await the last word of the people of Honduras, we should demand a Nobel Prize for Mrs. Clinton.
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