DECLARATION: ALERT LA VIA CAMPESINA

THE RESISTANCE DOES NOT STOP AND PRESIDENT ZELAYA ARRIVES IN HONDURAS!
IN SPITE OF THE REPRESSION, THE END IS NEAR FOR THE COUP REGIME!

After 86 days of struggle and resistence from the heroic people of Honduras against the military coup, this day started the fall of the coup regime with the arrival of the deposed president Manuel Zelaya to Tegucigalpa. An enormous mobilization of masses, from all corners of the country, started to arrive to the capital city to receive president Zelaya, to demand his restitution and put an end to the coup regime led by Roberto Micheletti.

Since the early morning, once the news of the return of the president got out, thousands of hondurans arrived first at the offices of the United Nations and then marched toward the Brazilian Embassy to receive Zelaya. There, president Zelaya met with a commission of the National Front of Resistance Against the Coup. Immediately the coupsters mobilized thousands of soldiers and officials of the National Police to intimidate and try to control the uncontainable wave of Hondurans who were yelling Yes we could! Yes we could!  The aggressions and intimidations of military forces of the regime, throughout the day, did not manage to intimidate or unmotivate the pacific but militant and willing to resist, demonstration.  Thus, the regime decreed a curfew starting at 4 o’clock in the afternoon and Micheletti issued a public warning of heightened enforcement against the people.

But no one can detain these heroic people.

Despite the machinery of repression of Micheletti’s coup regime, with deaths, injured, imprisoned and disappeared, the people, gathered in the National Front of Resistence Against the Coup, the marches, the blockades, the cultural activities of prostest and the concentration of masses have not ceased, on the contrary, they have spread across the entire country in opposition to the coup. Since the beginning, the resistence identified very clearly their objectives:

1. The restoration of the legitimate presidency of Zelaya.

2. The celebration of a Constitutional Assembly.

3. Reform the Constitution to construct a true popular and sovereign democracy.

Now is the beginning of the construction of popular democracy which mobilized thousands of workers, peasants, women, indigenous, afrodecendents, teachers, students, human rights activists and the general population, since Sunday the 28 of June, when the military captured president Zelaya, deported him to Costa Rica, and installed a usurper as president.

But also the most difficult phase of the struggle is to come, as the coup regime, cornered by the popular struggle, is capable of committing bloody repressions in an attempt to seize power. The following days will be the most difficult for the resistance struggle.

Therefore, La Via Campesina makes an urgent call to its member organizations, to allied social movements and all people of the world to be on red alert and dispatch international solidarity as widely as possible to detain attempts of tragic repression against the Honduran people and its leadership, and to ensure the immediate fall of the coup.   We are making a call to send international missions to accompany the Honduran people in these next days, and to demand that your goverments acts now to put an end to the coup regime and to collect funds to economically support the struggle.

¡GLOBALIZE THE STRUGGLE, GLOBALIZE HOPE!

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