The Question is will Democracy be allowed to spread to North America? The Answer not if the U.S. and Canadian Governments can prevent it.

 

            The people of Venezuela and Bolivia have obtained democratic governments for the first time in history by rewriting their constitutions. The people of Honduras wanted to follow the same path but their elected president was kidnapped in the middle of the night of June 29^th 2009 and flown out of the country through a U.S. military base, deposed by what has since become a bloody coup with targeted assassinations of leaders, disappearances, mass arrests and beatings. Only two countries in the world refused to call it a coup, the U.S. and Canada.

            President Zelaya slipped back into the country nearly three months later and obtained refuge in the Brazilian embassy meting with his elected government while his supporters started mobilizing throughout the country to march to the capital in his support. Thousands of supporters in the capital immediately went to the Brazilian embassy to support him. The coup regime quickly reacted with a curfew throughout the country that was initially in effect for twenty-six hours. Zelaya’s supporters refused to obey the curfew and remained outside the embassy sleeping in the street; in the wee hours of the following morning the protestors were violently attacked by the military and police as they slept. "The Associated Press reported that Zelaya loyalists ignored the decree and surrounded the embassy dancing and cheering and using their cell phones to light up the streets after electricity was cut off on the block housing the embassy." The Honduran military and police also brutally attacked people already travelling on the roads and highways for being in violation of the hastily imposed curfew.

            Opposition to the coup government in Honduras had been going on non-stop, for nearly three months since their president had been abducted for attempting to conduct a national referendum on a constitution by and for the people. Capitalism has been in its’ death throes since before the Battle of Seattle and Quebec City demonstrations in North America that were also brutally suppressed.  The still controversial nine eleven event shortly afterward made protesting capitalism in the U.S. illegal and protesters subject to treatment as terrorists. The world condemned the coup regime but the U.S. and Canada alone continued to support it.

            Honduras like what most of the countries throughout the Americas and Europe have been subjected to has departed from the limited representative democracies during the 1980’s when multinational corporations had forty per cent of the power, the government had forty per cent, and the people had the remaining twenty per cent. Now people only have 5 per cent of the power, while the multinationals control seventy five per cent of the country. In North America Corporations now control more than ninety percent of the governments who are now totally hamstrung in doing anything to protect public social programs or even jobs and wages. Corporations in North America now own and control the media as well as our governments, and have also invaded our schools and universities.

            After decades of rule under corporate control will North Americans have the will or even the awareness necessary to fight for democracy?

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