LIBRE, hummingbirds and the archipelago

The logic of Honduras’ LIBRE party, which pulled nearly a million votes last year, has been no different than that of the traditional parties: hunker down, make yourself comfortable and play to the balcony. And the logic of many of the country’s social organizations is to fertilize and jealously tend to their own small islands, forming an unstable archipelago in the country’s sea of calamities. The logic of hummingbirds, on the other hand, is to feed life drop by drop and fly incessantly to try to beat death.

Ismael Moreno, SJ

Nearly a year after the general elections in which LIBRE beat out one of the two traditional parties to become the country’s second political force, its 35 legislative representatives have allowed themselves to become trapped in the traditional political morass.

Intrigues and internal power struggles have converted them into a bunch of politicians who in turn have made this new group into an extension of Honduras’ historical bipartite system. Instead of acting like a party that is channeling grassroots demands and striking out on a new path by truly representing the people, it seems to have accepted and resigned itself to being just one more party that has to play the game of the upper echelons.

In envío’s sporadic conversations with LIBRE representatives, all agree that they have failed to push any coherent party proposal since January. “Going to Congress is just a waste of time,” one legislative representative from the department of Colón admitted. “We spend more time fighting with each other than working on a common plan,” added another from the department of Yoro; “what’s more, we don’t even have a plan of struggle.” And another from the department of Francisco Morazán confided that “we’re very careful what we say and who we’re saying it in front of, because everybody’s trying to trip everyone else up for their own personal advantage.”

LIBRE is like a lot of little parties

Something similar is happening to the local LIBRE leaders who won a seat in the municipal elections, except that it’s worse because while some legislators at least make some noise, those who are now mayors or municipal councilors seem to have been reduced to near nonexistence on the political map. They are either roundly snubbed by the local dominant powers or to prevent that, have gotten used to simply legitimizing the decisions made by the traditional “caciques.”

Neither the elections nor the parties that emerged after the 2009 coup, nor even the once strong National Grassroots Resistance Front (FNRP), which was forged in response to that coup and ultimately organized around the LIBRE party, have become instruments that could provide a credible response to the crumbling of Honduras. There was a lot of political hubbub, especially round last year’s elections, but none of the competing parties managed to—or perhaps even wanted to—touch the threads actually generating Honduran society’s incessant deterioration. Despite its nearly million voters, LIBRE is acting in the National Congress and in the regions, departments and municipalities like a party that drew only 30,000 votes. As long as it doesn’t do anything, it seems big, but when it tries to take a step it acts as if it’s insignificant. The closer you get the more it looks like a sack full of tiny parties.

No change in traditional politics

It looks as though we won’t be able to expect much from Honduras’ political parties, at least for now. A traditional political party takes its cues from the people who live, work, struggle and survive in its territory, or at least in its own organization and the areas where it works.

The role of the activists is to link that population to the party and ensure that its loyalty has been sufficiently bought at election time, while the leaders, who feed off their backing from important sectors of the population, make an effort to maintain those links through demagogic actions or clientelist goodies. Those leaders are well aware that the party’s present and future depend on maintaining a healthy sector of clients. The party caters to them, supports them and offers them help and patronage, and these “clients” return the favors with their vote. That’s how Honduras’ two traditional parties have operated and perpetuated themselves for over a century, to the point that they are now well-heeled and powerful electoral machines.

LIBRE’s errors

Although many of LIBRE’s leaders come from the ranks of the two traditional parties, particularly the Liberal Party, they only seem to have learned half of this methodology. They have only hobnobbed with the elites, causing a break with the population that voted for them. It’s very doubtful that all those people who voted for LIBRE and its candidates are currently party clients. The essence of the error LIBRE leaders and legislators committed was taking for granted that theirs is a grassroots party and assuming that they can disregard the people who voted for them.

The electoral results that put LIBRE in second place and the Anti-corruption Party (PAC) in fourth shocked the owners of the two traditional parties and they reacted out of their fear. The National and Liberal leaders closed ranks within the National Congress to protect themselves from the new configuration of forces and possible pressures until they had the LIBRE representatives at a clear disadvantage and led them into a quagmire.

The 35 LIBRE legislators protested at the beginning, even battering the occasional microphone. They tried to break through the political line of defense constructed by the Liberal-National alliance, but it was impenetrable. They also endeavored to find allies among the 13-seat PAC bench, but any successes were very fragile and on the few occasions they all voted together on any issue they failed to outnumber the Liberal-National bloc’s votes.

The problem with attempting an alliance with the PAC is that its voters were a largely young population that isn’t as interested in political participation as in experiencing new things, particularly consumer innovations. Their biggest dream is to have the latest smart phone technology.

They played to the balcony

The LIBRE representatives seem to have forgotten that they were elected by tens of thousands of people in the departments and municipalities, so once they found the spaces in the National Congress closed to them they just decided to hunker down in their legislative seats or cozy up to some Liberal representative in hopes of some personal advantage or another. They played to the balcony, forgetting all about those down in the cheap seats.

Playing to their voters would have meant leaving those comfy congressional seats and the occasionally “lofty” speech, and instead decisively linking themselves with the people who voted for them, those they owe something to as legislators. It would have meant calling grassroots assemblies, reporting to people what was happening in the National Congress in hopes of getting the backing of their real “constituents” to take back up the legislative debate. They didn’t get that the fears of the extreme Right aren’t conquered with deals or adopting traditional positions.

Those fears, expressed as a bipartite retaining wall, can only be confronted by mobilizing the grassroots voters that put them in the National Congress. But they forgot that this was their strength and took refuge in the very heights that had rejected them. Wanting to look as much like a traditional congressional representative as possible, they played the traditional political game, and did so poorly, ignoring not only those who put them in their congressional seats, but also the proposals and initiatives they should have fought for even if losing was a foregone conclusion. In so doing, they’ve lost credibility with their voters.

LIBRE is becoming a gelatinous electoral springboard

The LIBRE representatives have been losing the power those nearly million voters delegated them last November. They are acting as if all those votes were LIBRE’s “hard vote.” They seem oblivious to the fact that a high percentage of them were from people who were disenchanted with the two traditional parties’ underhanded way of engaging in politics and gambled on a new alternative.

IF LIBRE’s 35 legislators and more than 30 municipal authorities keep assimilating the worst of the traditional parties’ practices and definitively blow the opportunity to link the social struggle with the political one in order to open spaces the traditional parties closed long ago, an important sector of those who voted for them are very likely to move on to other options, joining the PAC’s ranks or the already sizable ranks of the apathetic and indifferent.

What went on in the mind of the elected representatives upon discovering they were backed by such an unexpectedly large volume of votes? They believed they were suddenly endowed with the capacity to capitalize this strength in their personal favor. They fell so deeply into this error that they ultimately turned LIBRE into a labyrinth of internal currents, each fighting to control the entire party, and already thinking about the next elections, not until November 2017. They thus allowed LIBRE to become a gelatinous springboard for their own election.

LIBRE distorted the Resistance

If once they saw that they couldn’t break through the bipartite system’s parliamentary barrier the LIBRE legislators had gone to their departments and municipalities to meet with their base, explain the situation and push forward proposals and legislative initiatives, they may very well have been able to whip up grassroots mobilization, linking the social struggle to the political one.

It’s also possible, however, that the party leadership had already distorted the FNRP so much by that time that they no longer had any entity with which to establish alliances. The new party took its leaders into the political arena and demobilized the rest, leaving the elected parliamentarians with no counterpart other than their unconditional supporters. There were occasions in which LIBRE parliamentarians could pull together no more than a dozen activists for a meeting, without even knowing whether those attending were party backers, Front members or just their own personal friends. That was the consequence of the LIBRE leadership’s political error of appropriating for themselves what could have been a continuing force for struggle and then thinking they could do without with the force of the people who voted for that alternative.

After disarticulating the Resistance Front as an intermediating entity that pulled together local, territorial and associative struggles and filling it with LIBRE party activists, the LIBRE leadership then effectively expelled anyone who had voted for its candidates but wasn’t interested in belonging to a political party. The LIBRE leaders opted for a Front of militant members willing to toe the party line instead of a mass front of people with their own drive but also their own political agenda.

The FNRP could have been an entity that dialogued with the country’s diverse social sectors, gathered and represented their demands and pushed the State to respond, but that’s now history. The LIBRE leadership lost that perspective, and by distorting and weakening the Front’s nature and identity, they reduced it to a single entity, turning all its relations, negotiations and even its social organizations into party tools.

Any social, community, religious or territorial organization attracted to or that wants to continue belonging to a front that once had the capacity to be a magnet for a determined grassroots struggle now has to answer to the party. LIBRE’s capacity to promote alliances is severely limited by this condition, imposed by its top leaders because they’re also top LIBRE leaders. That situation has steadily worsened as various LIBRE legislative representatives are now concentrating on strengthening their own internal current inside the party so it will put forward their candidacies. In daily political practice, all activities conducted by the Front in the social struggle now respond to those electoral objectives, even though the race is still three years away.

The logic of the hummingbird

Any hopes for resistance and the building of grassroots proposals are hard to find and have to be looked for outside of official politics and its parties. There are some, but these organizational experiences are few in number and tiny in size. They amount to brief narratives that share the logic of the hummingbird, whose long pointy little beak and incessant flying from flower to flower feed life drop by drop.

These experiences, while small, strengthen one’s faith in the liberating force of the poor. They are emerging outside of the dominant reality, based on local information and with neither NGO-style logical frameworks nor party lines. They contain the remains of the liberating faith religious officialdom has worked so hard to eradicate, as well as clues for building a new political and civic culture with new social and gender relations.

The mother-teachers’ experience

In the most conflictive areas of San Pedro Sula, which has earned the distinction of being the world’s most violent city, hundreds of women have seen their children die violent deaths or have had to pay a “war tax” to keep it from happening. These women are now organized in the “Mother Teachers” program. They are poor women, many of whom don’t know how to read and write, but they are organizing to make their neighborhoods a place of hope where their children can play and people can learn about art and culture. They have dedicated themselves to struggling for their children’s lives, convinced that neither the police nor the Ministry of Security nor for that matter anything that comes from the State will resolve their daily drama, which amounts to not knowing if their teenage kids will make it home from school or will ever shake off the threat that organized crime will force them to swell its ranks…

Life has been extremely hard for the majority of these mothers. Nonetheless, they have learned to survive the violence and pain of the cruel loss of their children and also how to sing while they learn. In a workshop organized by nuns immersed in the neighborhoods of this conflictive area of the city, the mother-teachers came to recognize that corruption is a central problem in Honduran society, one even more persistent and pervasive than the violence. It is expressed even in families’ acceptance of the criminal extortion, which is spreading to the schools and community boards, laying waste to the Municipal Councils and even ministries such as health and public works, and is also becoming incrusted in the Catholic and Evangelical Churches.

“They and I are engaging
in mutual healing”

Consuelo is one of the nuns who work with this program. As a counselor and accompanier, she confesses that her work is helping her reread the Gospel from the perspective of these women-mothers who, like Mary of Nazareth, open roads so their children can grow “in age, wisdom and grace” and whose struggle to remake themselves anticipates the “bringing down of the mighty from their thrones, and the lifting up of those of lowly position.” “My work is to walk with them,” she told me, “and they help me walk in a church experience that has nothing to do with the powerful and patriarchal Church I grew up in and was formed by. My role is to support them when they’re burdened with anguish, because they have to help form and attend to their children behind their husband’s back, knowing there’s a risk their husbands will beat them when they come home.” With gentle and humble joy, Sister Consuelo lowers her voice to say something almost as if to herself: “These women carry an enormous load and it’s my job to help make it a little lighter. I sense that they carry the weight of my burdens and wounds in their lives, too, so they and I are engaging in mutual healing.”

The “Step by Step” experience

“Step by Step” is a program headed up by Catholic Church base communities in the Rivera Hernández sector of San Pedro Sula, which is the most violent in this violent city. It started up on March 24, 2002, inspired by Monsignor Romero, and currently works daily with 300 boys and girls.
It is run by committees of mothers who share readings and handicrafts with their own children in the framework of the “Good Living” culture. Each year they go out into the streets in a “Pilgrimage for Life.” In the program’s venue, everything revolves around a beautiful tree they call the “Tree of Life,” which symbolizes the harmony
of these and other children with Mother Nature.

The unique aspect of both of these experiences that have sprung up in the marginal areas of the city is that while young people who belong to gangs, particularly the infamous maras, commit many criminal acts, they respect and protect the life and activities of the “mother-teachers” and Step by Step’s volunteers and children.

The archipelago logic

These two experiences and others like them are small but growing. They are organized by the victims themselves who believe in what they do, and are marked by the mystique of being charge-free and volunteer-based. But they’re like drops of water in the desert of demobilization caused by the proliferation of so many social organizations all over the country. The logic of the hummingbird contrasts with that of most of those organizations, which fertilize only their own small plot of land, thus forming a multitude of islands in this country’s immense sea of calamities. In the interminable archipelago that is formed, each island feeds off the sea’s calamities.
The majority of social, community, ethnic, human rights, ecological, environmental, feminist, youth, communication and religious organizations suffer from this archipelago syndrome. A huge number are scattered all over the country with minimal possibilities of growing, while the probabilities they will sink and disappear in our sea of calamities are enormous.

All these organizations, some more than others, work on similar issues that have to do with or affect everyone and society in general, but each has its own agenda, which it passionately defends against the others. Each promotes its own agenda of work or struggle, confident that it alone is enough and seeing the other organizations through that self-aggrandizing lens.

The majority of them have also succumbed to or established top-down relations with the donor agency or NGO that provides their support. Those international entities are the origin of more than a few of the issues in their work or struggle agenda, and the organizations report to them what they do, what they want to do and what they’ve stopped doing. These top-down lines are very well defined and are based on obedience and submission, even if the local organizations aren’t conscious of it.

The logic of top-down relations

Not many of these organizations have horizontal relations with similar organizations, or if they do they’re tenuous threads or dotted rather than continuous lines. When they do attempt to establish solider lines it’s almost always to attract organizations or sectors to their own agenda rather than to learn about the others’ agendas, much less construct a common one. As each organization usually obeys those “from above” who define the issues, provide the money and require a logical framework, it also tends to establish top-down relations with the final targets of its agenda, becoming mere intermediaries of the contents and resources going from the donors down to the recipients. All these vertical lines are very well drawn, while the horizontal ones are diffuse or little more than formulations.

Neoliberal logic has also
infected the organizations

In a reading that may be risky and even a bit cheeky, it could be argued that such social organizations have become a sub-product of neoliberalism, even though they are all, without exception, fierce critics of the neoliberal model. In only a few years, that model pulled along the sickly Central American economies,
submerged in their obsolete feudal practices, and inserted them into globalization. At the same time, neoliberalism’s culture of individualism and unlimited competitiveness penetrated the social organizations rolling them back into a kind of ideological, political and even economic feudalism. Now each organization tends to be a fiefdom, with its own feudal lords or ladies, its fortified spaces, its own resources, and its own beneficiaries, new serfs at the service of the fiefdom. In other words, the national economies have leaped from their retrograde feudalism into the neoliberal market economy while the social and grassroots organizations have retreated into a feudal conception.
The violence, criminality and insecurity have also had their way with the social organizations. While the violent reality, seasoned by doses of morbidity from certain media, has helped generate a climate of fear and made people avoid public spaces, it has also made a big dent in the social organizations themselves, accentuating the isolationism and inward-looking tendency of their leaders, who occupy themselves only with their internal affairs.

Don’t worry about tomorrow

If these organizations and their leaders have something in common with the grassroots people, most of whom are under- or unemployed, it’s survival. They all live for the day, scraping together what they can to see if they’ll make it to the end of it. “Don’t worry about tomorrow, it’ll take care of itself” seems to be everyone’s motto.

The grassroots sectors are trying not just to assure the day’s food, but also to protect their lives from the menacing claws of criminal violence. The social organizations are dragged down by this daily situation in which they are trying to live and survive, and they can’t see past it. The cooperation funds are the injection they need to survive, jumping from one dynamic of the moment to the next.

At bottom, what still seems to be happening is that even though the old paradigms are broken or breaking up, the grassroots and social leaders keep clinging to them and falling apart in the process, unable to see the new realities and challenges when they bubble to the surface in today’s society. The stronger the paradigmatic crisis, the greater the danger that the traditional leaders—be they political, social or religious—will cling to what no longer exists or is at least on its way out.

The top-down style, the patriarchal vision, the traditional conception of family as the nucleus of society, the caudillo-based male leadership figures, the trade association conception, and the religious aspect seen as the social glue that keeps society on the right path are all paradigms that have been left in ruins, succeeded by the dynamics of so many organizations that are now trying to operate in a climate of irregularity, illegality, violence and crime.

How can we reinvent ourselves?

The challenges are multiple. The glitter of capital in all its manifestations is so blinding it prevents us from seeing the life that is resisting on the margins. Not letting ourselves be dazzled by the false glitter is thus the greatest countercultural challenge. The task is to shine lights from those margins, because capital’s glitter will irremediably lead to destruction and disaster. Only the lights we turn on outside of that powerful but false beam will survive and light the way of Good Living that must arise from the ashes of the destruction.
Building social organizations using new paradigms, new logics of power, new gender relations, new relations with Nature and its goods will lead us to a mystique that can configure and give new meaning to our resources and means, to a new intellectual and academic formation. The struggles must be underpinned by non-payment and volunteerism and not falsely swollen by people who wouldn’t even attend a workshop if their lunch and transport weren’t paid.

From there we must reinvent the self-image of grassroots and social organizations, respecting all their diversities, linking academia and research with new gender relations and politics with social and community concerns. We must reinvent the historical option for the poor from politics and ethics, from science and faith, from power understood as the capacity to produce significant changes in people’s lives and in the social surroundings. That’s what Good Living amounts to.

We must feed off the spontaneous and vital generosity and goodness of people on the margins of society who live and resist with the logic of hummingbirds. The majority of people who live there are doing good things. Their daily heroism is a spiritual, mystical and ethical reserve that must feed the social and grassroots struggles.

We have to bank on a new generation of social and grassroots organizational leaders to construct new transforming paradigms and proposals. But that new leadership can only be transforming if it stops being elitist and patriarchal and identifies with the struggle of the women and youths who live on the edges.

The values and mystique that exist on those margins must expand until they form an “organized community in movement” as a subject that can link together common issues, agendas, visions and struggles, as well as construct proposals and mobilize people around a common agenda.

Is it a dream? Of course it is, but we all know that to build the future, you first have to dream it.

Ismael Moreno, sj, is the envío correspondent in Honduras.

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