The Demise of Resistance

... by calling on teachers to leave their classrooms rather than perform the work for which they were hired, the National Resistance Front is fueling a perception among Hondurans that it is willing to use Honduras' schoolchildren as pawns in its political movement.

By Marco Cáceres
I have been willing to give the National Resistance Front Against the Coup d'Etat in Honduras the benefit of the doubt these past months because I know that it consists of many good people who sincerely feel that the ousting of Manuel Zelaya was wrong, unconstitutional, and illegal, and have thus felt obliged to exercise their democratic right to organize and protest. While some of the demonstrations have turned violent, caused the destruction of property, and interfered with the rights of others to go about their normal lives, most of them have been peaceful and caused relatively few interruptions in Honduras as a whole.

The problem for the National Resistance Front is that the core reason for its birth has gradually faded and become largely irrelevant to the vast majority of people in Honduras who simply want to return to some semblance of normalcy and get back to work so they can feed their families and educate their children. The election and inauguration of Porfirio Lobo as president, the willingness of Mr. Zelaya to leave the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa for the Dominican Republic without too much fanfare, and the gradual re-establishing of diplomatic relations with the international community (... 29 countries thus far) have contributed to a grudging realization that the battle to overturn the overthrow has been lost.

In short, the National Resistance Front finds itself in the difficult situation of being a movement without a clear cause. It has tried to emphasize other causes such as the fight to establish a National Constituent Assembly -- the Constituyente -- to re-write the Constitution, but that has not gained much traction. It has also tried to adopt other causes such as fighting to keep Honduras within Hugo Chávez's ALBA alliance, but that was a short-lived, dismal effort that failed. As eventually happens with all popular social movements, the National Resistance Front has also started to experience division within its ranks, as some of its leading sympathizers such as César Ham have opted to join the new government to try and change the system from within.

Now, in another attempt to remain even a minimally viable force within Honduran politics, the National Resistance Front has decided to use the education of Honduras' children as a tool to keep the political crisis alive. The leaders of the National Resistance Front, which does not recognize the Lobo administration, have called for a national march on Thursday in support of a return to the constitutional order. Given Mr. Lobo's election and Mr. Zelaya's new life abroad, I'm not sure what that means in real life. A "return to the constitutional" sounds more like a campaign slogan than a serious action item.

In-and-of-itself, the march is fine. However, what the National Resistance Front -- which includes key organizers within the teachers unions -- has done is call on public school teachers in Honduras to join the march rather than remain in their classrooms teaching their students. It was only last week that the leaders of the teachers unions signed an agreement with the Lobo administration to provide at least 200 days of schooling for the children of Honduras. That agreement will quickly begin to fall apart should teachers follow en masse the call by their union organizers, who have slowly permitted themselves to identify more with the cloudy causes of the National Resistance Front than to the tangible cause of fair pay for teachers.

Ironically, the evolving marriage between the National Resistance Front and the teachers unions may end up contributing to the demise of both entities. Public school teachers in Honduras are not much different from other people in Honduras. They just want to be allowed to do their jobs and receive adequate compensation, consistently and on time. They have had to rely on and trust their union organizers and obey their calls to strike or protest in the hope of attaining more power to negotiate pay and benefits with the government. But this latest call to march by the National Resistance Front has more to do with its own political interests than the interests of the teachers, and so there is a growing sense on the part of teachers that this association between their unions and the National Resistance Front may not be such a good thing, thus eroding support for the association and perhaps even for the unions themselves.

Further, by calling on teachers to leave their classrooms rather than perform the work for which they were hired, the National Resistance Front is fueling a perception among Hondurans that it is willing to use Honduras' schoolchildren as pawns in its political movement. That perception cannot strengthen its cause, only weaken it. Whatever success the National Resistance Front has had in building popular support within certain segments of Honduran society is on the verge of being dismantled by a distasteful and poorly-conceived strategy of using children as bargaining chips. (2/25/10) (photo courtesy Proceso Digital)