Compañero Manuel Zelaya: we are back in the place where we last met. Your return to Honduras is only the first step for which we took to the streets.
In Honduras we still await justice and punishment for those responsible for the coup d’état and for the violations of human rights.
All of Latin America needs to know if the coup will be punished and reversed through processes which the Honduran nation in Resistance considers legitimate, taking the necessary time and actions, never subject to a calendar designed to comply with the expectations of outside processes and interests.
Our political and cultural organization, Artists in Resistance, will be there to receive you, yes, though swallowed in the enormous popular demonstration that will flood the streets.
We will go to welcome you as you deserve, Compañero Manuel Zelaya, with the pride of knowing that we did everything within our reach to defend to dignity of Honduras that you embody, an extraordinary effort that has brought us, in the course of two years of painful struggle, to organize our understanding and watch it grow within the legitimate structures of the FNRP. Nonetheless, all of our enormous effort, made in every corner of Honduras and in all of our people’s artistic expressions, does not seem to be sufficient to ensure that the FNRP at all levels of its hierarchy also advances in terms of decisive, dialectical understanding and of accepting internal criticism and its own diversity.
Artists in Resistance is part of an essential current that seeks to make power an instrument of the people, and along this road we have been witnesses to the growth of thousands of voices and faces of leadership, leaders of neighborhoods, municipalities, towns, collectives, and organizations — an immense demonstration of the strength and will accumulated over decades in the bowels of a humiliated Honduras.
We will be there to receive you, Compañero Manuel Zelaya, and we will not forget that the Lobo regime is murderous, that it continues murdering the campesinos of Aguán and Zacate Grande; that this very week it has ordered police to stomp on the necks of the students of Luis Bográn, that it ignores the desperate hunger strike of the teachers and its martyrs, that it permits the targeted assassinations of artists like Renán Fajardo and Juan Ángel Sorto, that it carelessly ignores the deaths of poets of universal standing like Roberto Sosa and Amanda Castro, that it continues ordering protection for the murderous businessmen of the coup d’état, and that it attacks and persecutes its people and has sold off our territory piece by piece, with the help of a police force and army converted by the empire into occupation forces within our country.
We will be there, compañero Manuel Zelaya, but we will not provide the spectacle. Our song and our voice is political and not simply backup for a cathartic euphoria over a success that we have yet to achieve. This is a fundamental stance for us that has not been understood by those who have been incubating orthodox hegemonies from within the FNRP leadership.
With your presence in Honduras, Compañero Manuel Zelaya, begins the enormous task of the consolidation of the revolutionary struggle and of our different banners. The enormous weight that now lies on your shoulders — and that we are willing to bear — can be summarized in the fact that, with each of your actions, the voice of our martyrs and exiles will remind you of the sacrifice that so many have made to give life to the National Front of Popular Resistance.
¡Welcome, Compañero Mel, and may also the joy of revolutionary action be always welcome!
¡Peace without justice is nothing!
¡To reconcile with the murderer is to forget his victim!
Hasta la victoria, ¡Siempre!
The original communiqués “Comunicado AenR ante la llegada de Manuel Zelaya” was published on the Web site of Artistas en Resistencia on 25 May 2011. Adapted from the translation by Adrienne Pine.
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