00:00Now, let's continue with the analysis of the Sunday's Electoral Day in Honduras.
00:04And for that, we are joined now by political scientist Rodolfo Pastor.
00:09Hello, Rodolfo. Welcome to From the South.
00:12Hello. Thank you so much for having me.
00:15First thing, voting day in Honduras, he's reaching its deadline in a context of harassment,
00:22in a context of interference attempts.
00:24In this scenario, how would you describe the role played by the people in defending the democratic institutions today?
00:33Well, fortunately, what we have seen this day is a very high turnout.
00:38Citizens of Honduras have gone out to vote, regardless of the threats and regardless of the confrontation
00:46and the polarization that we've been experiencing for the last couple of months.
00:53There has been a lot of confrontation within the institutions in charge of the electoral process.
01:00And that has resulted, of course, in a lack of credibility in these institutions.
01:08And, of course, we're also confronted as a government and a party that is proposing a very deep reform
01:17of the structural reality in our country, a very formidable obstacle by the opposition parties
01:26that represent the political and economic elites.
01:32And there has been an open attempt to impose the Monroe Doctrine in Honduras
01:37with the complexity of the extreme right wing of the country throughout this electoral process.
01:41From a Latin American perspective, what regional patterns do you identify in the way far-right movements
01:48challenge electoral results or democratic institutions?
01:53Well, they do so without any respect for sovereignty, without any respect for the right to self-determine
02:00our destiny as independent, autonomous peoples and countries.
02:05They do so beyond borders.
02:08And what we have experienced here in Honduras throughout this electoral process is almost surreal.
02:14A couple of days ago, there was a post by President Trump basically stating the candidate that he would support
02:21and that we should support and referring to the other two candidates in a very, very despicable way,
02:27a very hostile, aggressive statement, completely public interference, intervening in our own sovereign process.
02:38And not only that, but a day ago, just one day before the elections, he actually went so far as to promise
02:46that if the candidate that he preferred won the elections, that he would go ahead and he would grant a pardon
02:54to former President Juan Orlando Hernández, who is currently serving a 47-year sentence in the U.S. courts
03:03as he has been sentenced because of his links with organized crime and narco-trafficking.
03:09So he's clearly taking sides.
03:12He's doing so in a very bracing way.
03:15And he's doing so lacking completely any respect for the sovereignty and the independence of our own people.
03:22And this fact that you just mentioned, that is the stance that the U.S. President Donald Trump has taken
03:30in the context of this electoral process, granting a pardon to former convicted ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández,
03:41I want to ask you, how would you connect this stance with the current military deployment
03:49the U.S. has in Caribbean waters that is also putting at risk sovereignty in the region?
03:57How can we connect this scenario?
04:00Well, it's very much connected and it's very contradictory.
04:03And it exposes the hypocritical approach that the U.S. and specifically President Trump is taking
04:11against, you know, very different contexts within the region.
04:15On one side, he is justifying whatever he is doing to be very aggressive against Venezuela
04:24and anyone who is in solidarity with Venezuela, claiming that he has mobilized this massive movement
04:31of troops and war equipment to the Caribbean Sea in order to somehow stop drug traffic from happening.
04:41And yet he is willing to grant a pardon for a man who is convicted, not by Honduran courts,
04:48not by Venezuelan courts, but by American courts, has been convicted for drug dealing
04:53and for moving tons and tons of drugs up to the U.S.
04:57This is, you know, I think, self-evident hypocrisy and it exposes the kind of contradiction that Trump
05:09so commonly falls into.
05:13In this scenario, Honduras have been facing this attempt of interference from abroad,
05:22from the U.S. empire, and I wanted to mention that this is no news for the people of Honduras.
05:28And in this context, what role have Honduran social movements historically have played
05:34in defending democratic institutions?
05:37Well, we are the emblematic banana republic.
05:42Honduras was colonized in the modern times by huge U.S. corporations
05:48that planted and grew bananas for export, that ran the country for, you know, a very, very long time,
05:56that shaped the country's politics and democracy in many ways,
06:00and that still has a lot of traces in it within the institutional arrangements
06:06of our democracy and our political system.
06:09Against this imposition, the Honduran people have organized throughout its history,
06:16and they have suffered repression from military governments that have been boosted
06:21and sustained by the U.S. in many cases.
06:27In the most recent one of those, it was the coup back in 2009
06:31that was supported by the United States in many ways,
06:36and that was able to sustain a de facto regime for six months
06:40that eventually led to the consolidation of this corrupt and repressive regime
06:46led by Juan Orlando Hernández, who was later, like we were saying,
06:51convicted for his links to drug traffic and weapon trafficking.
06:55So, you know, we are used in Honduras, we are used to the influence,
07:02to the interference of the United States of America,
07:08and we are used to resisting that interference
07:10and to try to defend our democratic rights
07:14and our right to self-determine our destiny.
07:18And yet, it is no less shocking that President Trump would come out
07:24and, through his social media, state in such a brazen way
07:27that we should vote for the candidate that he prefers,
07:30because if not, there would be consequences.
07:34I think that the results, the outcome of the elections,
07:38will be eloquent about how much that impacted our own political process.
07:44Thank you very much, Rodolfo, for your time here from the South,
07:48for helping us getting deep into the relevance of today's elections in Honduras,
07:54for the people of Honduras and for the rest of the region.
07:57Thank you very much.
07:58Thank you very much.
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