I stand before this global forum at a historic moment for my country, not only because I am the first woman to have the honour of leading our Central American nation, but also because I represent its first democratically elected Government after 13 years of dictatorship; a 2009 coup d’etat fraught with cruel assassinations and death squads; two rounds of electoral fraud; a pandemic and two hurricanes.
It is impossible to understand the Honduran people and our huge caravans of migrants without acknowledging the cruel suffering that we have had to endure. But electoral democracy will not be enough to achieve full material and spiritual well-being for our people, after 13 years of dictatorship under the tutelage of the international community multiplied our country’s public debt sixfold and pushed our poverty rate to 74 per cent, the highest in the history of Honduras. Five out of 10 of my compatriots live in extreme poverty.
However, it is clear to me that none of those figures will shock anyone in today’s world, where we live under a monetary dictatorship, where the poorest are subjected to draconian fiscal discipline measures that increase the neglected majorities’ suffering and where speculative capital knows no limits. It is clear that for our country to survive today, we must reject the presumed austerity that rewards those who concentrate wealth in the hands of a few as inequality increases exponentially.
Since we took office, at the end of January, we have been relentless in seeking consensus and always firmly determined to reach agreements on our compromises without denying them in any way. But attempts to undermine the will of the people are coming at us from every direction, with conspiracies being fomented between the same sectors that plundered the country and their allies in the coup, emboldened by a blatant anti-democratic attitude often disguised as diplomacy. The public policies endorsed by the international financial community’s rentier model over the past 13 years dragged us into a world of violence and poverty characterized by failed and abandoned projects, corruption, looting and drug trafficking.
The international witnesses to the electoral fraud that took place in 2013 and 2017 were well aware of what they were condemning our people to, and yet they were complacent about the worst scourge ever to plague our country. The arrogance of capital and narrow self- interest led many to opt for deceit, while organized crime drove the country into darkness.
The poor nations of the world will no longer tolerate coups d’etat, the use of so-called lawfare or colour revolutions, which are usually aimed at plundering our wealth of natural resources. The industrialized nations of the world are responsible for the serious deterioration of the environment, yet we are the ones they are forcing to pay for their expensive lifestyles. They stop at nothing to drag us into their schemes and plunge us into an endless crisis, pretending that their hands are tied.
The Honduras that I lead is being built based on a vision of a humanist refoundation imbued with dignity and sovereignty. We will take the necessary legal steps to help our environment to recover and share the common good with our entire population. That is why we find the current arbitrary world order to be unacceptable. It perpetuates the existence of third- and fourth-class countries, while those who believe themselves to be civilized never tire of invasions, wars and financial speculation, crucifying us with their inflation time and again. I am here on this rostrum to demand that they respect us. We want to live in peace. Do not keep trying to destabilize Honduras, dictate measures to us or decide with whom we should or should not have relations.
The people are sovereign. They showed that on 28 November with their support for my victory, the biggest in the history of my country. On 15 September, our day of independence, the resistance that fought against the dictatorship imposed during the past 13 years supported me en masse in the streets, fighting off public threats and refusing to allow our national assets to continue being handed over to the highest bidder as if we were a no man’s land.
Never again will we be branded with the stereotype of banana republic. We will end the monopolies and oligopolies that only impoverish our economy. As a generous people who have shed their blood in defence of our forests and rivers, we will not forget that during the dictatorship hundreds of young people were murdered, including our comrade Berta Caceres. Nor
will we forget the forced disappearances of Hondurans for their attitudes and beliefs, including our five Garifuna comrades who have now been missing for two years. Every inch of the homeland that was usurped in the name of the sacrosanct free market, the Zones for Economic Development and Employment and other privileged regimes was watered with the blood of our indigenous peoples.
My social and democratic Government will restore a State of justice and the rule of law so that all of that will never happen again. We are working hard to prioritize incentives and eliminate tax abuses. We have already begun to promote laws on energy as a public good, ensuring workers’ rights and supporting our internal market by investing in agriculture for food security and subsidizing our country’s poorest, who will no longer pay for electric power. We have proposed the renegotiation of free trade agreements. We have taken a sovereign decision to invest in our own development by replacing imports while competing in international markets without subsidizing the excesses of developed nations.
We will recognize the importance of women, who have been denied inclusion in development for centuries, as an integral part of the backbone of society. We will provide them, as well as our children and young people, with health care, quality education, security and food sovereignty.
For Honduras, each wave of migrants that fled the dictatorship that was in place for more than a decade represented a painful loss for their families and for our country as a whole. The numbers tell us that the exodus provoked by neoliberal injustices only generates more unemployment and shackles us to a deplorable dependency. Paradoxically, those who emigrate from our country generate more foreign- currency income than many of our traditional exports. We express our solidarity with and support for those known as tepesianos.
In Honduras, we cannot continue to sustain the hypocrisy of a system that judges crimes linked to drug trafficking, a crime that it has nevertheless supported and facilitated for more than a decade, including through two rounds of electoral fraud and crimes against the nation and millions of Hondurans. For all of those reasons, we will establish an international commission to combat corruption and impunity with the support of the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Honduras will have a future only if it takes firm steps to dismantle the neoliberal economic dictatorship. That is why we have already initiated the refoundation of our country and education system with the ideals and values of our national hero, Jose Francisco Morazan Quezada. My Government has begun a process of refoundation and profound change based on four fundamental pillars — first, a revolutionary transformation of education, raising the human spirit and ending colonialism; secondly, building an alternative and profoundly sovereign economic model; thirdly, building a system with the promotion of humanism, solidarity, integration with our brother peoples, peace and respect for human rights at its core; and fourthly, the progressive nationalization of public services such as health care, drinking water, electricity and the Internet.
Today, as war is once again punishing the world’s poorest and our countries are invaded, we call for a return to respect for the self-determination of peoples and a rejection of the abominable and brutal blockade of the people of our sister republic of Cuba. It is time to seriously discuss the multipolarity of the world. President Barack Obama took the first steps towards ending that infamy. And as the President of Colombia, Mr. Gustavo Petro, has already stated, the aggression against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela must end.
As our comrade Berta Caceres said, the people of the world must wake up. We still have time.