Apr
International Meddling
60 Years After the General Strike in Honduras
‘May is the road to victory’
By Ramon Amaya Amador on April 15, 2014
This article was first published in Honduras in 1963 and was recently translated into English by Lucy Pagoada-Quesada. Amaya was a much-revered author and journalist whose novel “Prisión Verde” exposed the wretched conditions on the U.S.-owned banana plantations, where he worked as a young man.
What historical significance does May have for the people of Honduras? Is it transcendent just because of the festivities on International Workers’ Day, during which workers around the world lift their collective fists to greet their class brothers and sisters with the voices of proletarian internationalism?
Why do we get emotional at the sublime memory of the events that occurred in Honduras in 1954, when the workers on the North Coast organized and lifted themselves from their humiliating condition of slaves to their position of free and conscious men? What can we discover in the road that started in May and continues into our future?
Our objective is to answer these questions that arise on this new May First. There are dates in our young history that sometimes are overlooked because the ruling circles in our society drape a miraculous veil of silence over them. One of those is May, the seismic month in which the Honduran workers unleashed the strikes of 1954.
Why is such a proletarian epic minimized, when it should parallel other great patriotic events in our history?
May has imprinted into the future a shining blueprint for the great victory of the humble in Honduras. May is the road of struggle, with the perspective of great success for the Honduran people. May is already an ideal, a revolutionary program, a method of action for the masses, their class demands and national liberation.
Sociopolitical view of the times before the strikes.
Today, not one Honduran worker is ignorant of the fact that May is the month in which International Workers’ Day is commemorated all over the democratic and socialist world. In the capitalist sphere it is still a time for struggle and demands for emancipation, mostly under very difficult conditions of divisions and repression provoked by reactionary forces and imperialism. In the socialist sphere, on the contrary, May is already a month of great popular celebration in which millions of people march, marking the list of accomplishments in the construction of a just society which is a concrete and beautiful realization of the international workers’ movement.
For a long, long period of time, the struggle of International Workers’ Day was eliminated from the civic calendar of Honduras and the popular masses were not able to celebrate it, due to the ban imposed by the reactionary regimes, whose class hatred was reflected in a sharp despotism. There weren’t any rights for the workers, just the obligation to produce benefits for the North American monopolies and the local oligarchies and to starve in misery under the boots of the plantation foremen, executioners and hired guns. In Honduras, neocolonialism flourished with the increasingly putrefactive and submissive traitors’ groups and their daily shameful and anti-patriotic behavior.
