Women
have been at the forefront of struggle in Honduras throughout its
history, from fighting dictatorships to challenging political
corruption to seeking civil improvements such as gender parity in
politics and education. The recent presidential election of Xiomara
Castro Sarmiento Zelaya
of the Libertad and Refundación (Libre) party has exhilarated
women from various sectors and in the diaspora. In a country battered
by 12 years of impunity, corruption, and aggressive neoliberalism in
the wake of the 2009 U.S.-backed coup, Castro’s victory—and
her pledge to convene a National Constituent Assembly to rewrite the
constitution—is at once a vindication and ray of hope for
women’s rights and other hard-fought social struggles.
Speaking
with the women in my family about this momentous win, a flurry of
stories emerged. My grandmother, for instance, was a Liberal Party
activist who opposed the Nationalist Party and served as a poll
worker in 1954, a volunteer job that could have resulted in jail time
or even death. During this time, treatment of Liberal Party members
was akin to the persecution and harassment of members of Communist
parties.
For
a century, until the 2009
coup,
Honduras was ruled alternately by two oligarchic political parties,
the Nationalist Party and the Liberal Party. During the 1954
presidential elections, Liberal candidate Ramón Villeda
Morales, affectionately called Pajarito
Pechito Rojo
(little red-chested bird), was seen by supporters as the hope to end
the terrible reign of Tiburcio Carías Andino’s
Nationalist Party. Although the Communist Party had been founded the
same year, the real battle for the presidency was between the
Nationalists and Liberals.
Carías
Andino, a fierce ally of U.S. banana companies, had ruled as a
dictator for 16 years. He used military might to terrorize Liberal
Party leaders, crack down on activism or organizing, and threaten
workers and campesinos into voting for his party. In 1946, Liberal
Party members were gunned down at a rally in San Pedro Sula, sparking
much needed organizing and resistance against the regime. In the 1954
election, visibly rigged by the Nationalist Party apparatus,
activists had to circumvent the military, intimidation, and
corruption to vote. Pajarito won in an upset
Voting
was not easy under Nationalist Party rule, and women had an important
role. Less likely to be detained by the military than men, women like
my grandmother—with my mother in tow—were tasked with
retrieving blank ballots from departmental capitals and distributing
them to all the major towns (pueblos),
such as my mother’s hometown of San Nicolás de Copán.
The women, who did not yet have the right to vote, traveled by trucks
that resembled buses and then hiked to San Nicolás up a muddy
mountain inaccessible by car. On the way, they had to evade
soldiers—known to destroy blank ballots and intimidate or
coerce activists and voters—as well as the local priests who
sided with the military. En route to the elementary school that
served as San Nicolás’s polling station, located across
the town plaza from a Catholic Church, my grandmother and her
compañeras
looped through people’s yards to avoid the military patrols on
horseback. These were dangerous and unjust times when the military,
empowered by the Nationalist Party, unlawfully raided homes and
jailed, disappeared, and killed people.
Once
the ballots were safe, my grandmother, cousins, and the other young
women positioned themselves at strategic points in the town to wait
for villagers from nearby hamlets and help them get to the precinct
to vote without facing military coercion. After voting, villagers
were offered food in my grandfather’s house and other nearby
opposition homes. This irritated the military, and during the 1954
election, soldiers barged into the house and searched it. Later, in
the cover of night, my grandparents, their daughters, and children
fled the house to hide from the military as the results were
declared
Literate
women—a small portion of the population—won suffrage by
congressional decree on January 25, 1954, though they did not
officially vote in their first election until 1957. For decades
after, women have shared stories with younger generations of what
life was like under dictatorship, authoritarian regimes, and military
rule, when their rights were nonexistent.
The
sometimes-violent trading of power between Liberals and Nationalists
was the predictable convention until 2009, when Liberal Party
members, in collusion with elites and the U.S. State Department,
executed a coup against their own party. The putsch removed President
Manuel “Mel” Zelaya
in very similar fashion to the ousting of Villeda Morales in 1963
after a brief period of democratic rule.
The
resistance to the 2009 coup was led by women, who filled the ranks of
most social movements. Women have stood on the frontlines to defend
ancestral lands and rivers, their rights as educators and healthcare
workers, the right to live free of violence, and the right to make
choices about their bodies and identities. Women have also been
critical in shining light on the role of U.S. intervention in the
region and the Cold War-era politics of the internal enemy that
sought to disappear and torture students and activists perceived to
be communists. These are the memories grandmothers have shared with
granddaughters and are now being passed on to millennial
activists opposing
the regime of outgoing President
Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH).
Similar
to the determination to make the people’s voices heard at the
ballot box in 1954, it is no surprise that Hondurans—especially
young people and those most disenfranchised in the 12 years since the
coup—voted in unprecedented numbers in the 2021 election. This
could be a new Honduras. And as the first woman president, Castro is
one part of a larger legacy of women actors and their daughters who
made her victory possible.
An
Unprecedented Pro-Women, Pro-LGBTI Agenda
In
her campaign and platform,
Castro embraced gender rights and sought to address femicides and
structural violence against women and LGBTI communities—issues
ignored in previous campaigns. She promises to change the new penal
code, approved a few months ago by the Nationalists in Congress, to
rectify reduced sentences for crimes against women. She also proposes
to counter hate speech and the conservative crusade against so-called
“gender ideology,” advocates for sex education in schools
as tool to prevent teen pregnancy, and calls for gender parity in
politics, where women are underrepresented.
Results
in the 2021 presidential election, by department. Xiomara Castro won
with 51.1 percent over Nasry Asfura of the National Party's 36.9
percent. (CalciferJiji / CC BY-SA 4.0)
On
immigration, Castro calls for a “humanist migration policy”
to address forced migration and for a reduction of fees on
remittances. In this process, she promises to work both with the U.S.
government and the Departamento 19, or immigrants living outside of
Honduras. At the same time, she promises to guarantee the rights of
Hondurans—including immigrants, regardless of their status—to
pensions, social credits, and other benefits that will make it easier
for them to return if they choose.
But
the most far-reaching policy for women is Castro’s support of
the right to sexual and reproductive rights, including the right to
choose and access reproductive technologies and contraception methods
that respect women’s choice.
Castro’s
call for family planning and access to contraception, particularly
the “morning after pill” and contraceptive pill, as well
as her pledge to decriminalize abortion in cases of rape, threats to
the pregnant person’s life, and fetal abnormalities, and her
support for sex education represent a large leap from the positions
of any previous government. Further proposals promise the recognition
of women’s work, support for domestic violence shelters for
survivors, and the creation of centers for the reinsertion of
deported women into society.
Her
plan also features special attention to lesbian, gay, bisexual,
trans, and intersex communities, calling for protections against hate
crimes and violence, proper investigation of crimes, and introduction
of a gender identity law that would allow trans and gender
nonconforming people to change their names and genders on their
identity documents. These moves—unprecedented in Honduras—would
bring the country in line with the recommendations in a recent
Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling
that found the Honduran state culpable in the 2009 murder of trans
activist Vicky Hernández.
Castro
has committed to recognizing ILO Convention 169, which Honduras
ratified but never implemented. This would guarantee Garifuna and
Indigenous communities’ rights to free, prior and informed
consent, allowing them to weigh in and even oppose land development
projects on their territories. It would also create opportunities to
advance bilingual education and healthcare and other critical
demands.
The
Garifuna community, in particular, was deeply affected by the reign
of the Nationalist Party, which allowed rich landowners to steal
communal and ancestral land. Garifuna and Indigenous women have led
important land reclamation efforts to counter the displacement that
has forced their communities into an exodus. Importantly, in the
National Constituent Assembly process, Castro vows
to propose
the creation of a Congress of Afrodecendant and Indigenous
Communities that would have the power to administer autonomous zones.
This would be a stark reversal of the controversial ZEDEs
law—passed under JOH’s leadership in Congress and
expected to be overturned by Castro and the new Congress—that
sought to auction off public land to foreigners to create enclaves
tantamount to private cities. It would also deliver on a key demand
of the post-coup resistance: redrafting of the constitution to
refound Honduras while including those most disenfranchised
historically. In other words, including those who built the social
movements that brought Castro to power.
Castro
may confront the wrath of the right wing, conservative elites,
organized religion, and other patriarchal forces in Congress and in
sectors aligned with U.S. interests. The key challenge is how to go
from vision to actual policies that will materialize in people’s
lives. Castro will need to involve the Afrodecendant, Indigenous,
feminist, and LGBTI social movements in this process as a first step
to ensure its success and ample popular support.
Castro
may confront the wrath of the right wing, conservative elites,
organized religion, and other patriarchal forces in Congress and in
sectors aligned with U.S. interests. The key challenge is how to go
from vision to actual policies that will materialize in people’s
lives. Castro will need to involve the Afrodecendant, Indigenous,
feminist, and LGBTI social movements in this process as a first step
to ensure its success and ample popular support.
Many
who protect the land, rivers, and ancestral territories are women.
When their families are targeted, the entire community is affected.
The JOH administration relentlessly persecuted these community
members. In fact, during the bicentenary celebration of Honduran
Independence from Spain, he declared water and land defenders,
feminists, and LGBTI communities “enemies
of Independence.”
Of
course, it was JOH and his Nationalist Party that proved to be the
enemies of the people. Now, 67 years after women won the right to
vote, Xiomara Castro Sarmiento Zelaya is promising to be a president
of the people and to restore Honduras’s constitutionality and
rule of law. It promises to be a new era for women, of all races and
ethnicities, and LGBTI communities. I am excited and hopeful. So is
my mom. My grandmother would have been, too.
This
commentary was originally published by NACLA
