[The following letter was delivered to Obama by U.S. Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) upon her return from Honduras. The over 300 signatories of the letter, all candidates for public office in Honduras, have for now requested that their names not be published here due to the violent repercussions faced by candidates who have withdrawn their candidacy in protest, and of candidates and other citizens advocating a boycott of the illegitimate elections.]

Tegucigalpa, November 10, 2009

Barack Obama
President of the United States of America

Dear Mr. President,

We would like to extend warm regards from the mayoral and congressional candidates of the Honduran Liberal Party, Democratic Unification (UD) Party, and National Innovation and Social Democratic Unity (PINU) Party. 

We are troubled by the political situation here in Honduras generated by national coup on June 28th, 2009, during which a group of civilians and military soldiers illegally overthrew the constitutionally elected president Manuel Zelaya.

Those responsible for Zelaya’s overthrow have wanted to mask the illegitimacy and illegality of their actions in order to mislead the international community.  They have undertaken a costly public relations campaign in the United States, claiming that the process took place within the framework of our constitution and laws.

However, our constitution does not permit Congress to carry out an impeachment nor to carry out an “implicit interpretation” of the constitution, transforming the authority to “censure the administrative conduct of the executive power”—a type of action without legal consequences—into a process of impeachment, as is erroneously claimed in a study issued by the U.S Library of Congress.
The Supreme Court Justice of Honduras issued a verdict on May 7th, 2003 that Congress does not have the ability to interpret the constitution at will, and our Congress, until recently, has respected this judgment. 

And in the hypothetical case that Congress did have this power, any interpretation of the constitution should be explicit; nonetheless Decree 141-2009, which the National Congress approved to dismiss the president, does not state that the constitution is interpreted therein, that it is transforming a process of “censure of the administrative conduct of the executive power” to turn it into an impeachment process. Thus they broke with constitutional order by dissolving the power of the State and illegally substituting it with another, which amounts to a coup d’état.

If President Zelaya had committed a crime he should have been tried in a court of law with the guarantee of due process and the presumption of innocence, to which even the worst criminals of this country have a right. Nonetheless, military forces kidnapped and expelled Zelaya from Honduras on June 28th.

This action has provoked the worst political crisis since the reestablishment of democracy in 1982, a crisis that could be prolonged and intensified if the elections are carried out in a context of illegitimacy, that is, if President Zelaya is not reinstated as president.

Our participation as popular candidates in the national and regional elections this November is contingent upon the return of Manuel Zelaya to the presidency. 

The claim that the elections are an option for ending the political crisis, as the coup regime and its sympathizers so desperately wish them to be, is an irresponsible argument because the isolation that the country would face would only deepen Honduras’s current economic crisis.

Additionally, it would create a bad precedent in a region where democracy predominates, and could provoke a domino effect that would destabilize the entire hemisphere. The refusal of large sectors of Honduran society to recognize these elections—sectors that have made clear that they will not participate in them given the fact that they will be carried out under the supervision of an illegal and repressive regime—as well as the lack of independent monitoring put further in doubt any results that would be obtained. These factors would delegitimate whatever result occurred, and would establish restrictions on the principles of basic representation key to democracy.  

Worse still, there are reports that in some parts of the country candidates identified with the resistance are being impeded from campaigning in the months leading up to elections, opening up the possibility of electoral fraud.  This is apparent in the municipalities of Santa Bárbara, Colinas, Arada y Macuelizo, all in the state of Santa Bárbara.

Adding to all this, grave human rights violations have put into doubt the existence of individual rights that are indispensable to the transparency and legitimacy of the elections.  According to the report released on October 22, 2009 to the Committee of Detained and Disappeared Families in Honduras (COFADEH) between June 28th and October 10th, twenty-one Hondurans have been assassinated by military and police forces for political reasons; 3,033 Hondurans have been illegally detained for publicly speaking out against the coup; 114 people are being prosecuted for political reasons and many of these people are still in jail; 474 people have been injured during peaceful protests throughout the country; 133 have been subjected to torture and cruel and degrading treatment by the military and police forces; 108 people have received death threats and three have survived attempts on their lives.

If we were to proportionally compare these numbers to the population of the United States, the results would be as follows: 821 political murders of U.S. citizens; 118,528 detained; 4,455 prosecuted for the political reasons; 18,524 injured in the repression of peaceful marches; 5,198 tortured; 4,221 people receiving death threats and 117 people who had suffered attacks on their lives or physical integrity. Under such conditions, could you have an election in the United States?

In addition to this, the conditions for the free exercise of freedom of speech, indispensable for free and fair elections, are worse than they have been at any point in the past 28 years: at least 27 media stations have been prohibited from reporting freely, 2 have been temporarily closed—only reopened through international pressure—26 journalists have reported being attacked or threatened by the repressive forces, and the National Commission of Telecommunications (CONATEL) has introduced a policy that limits freedom of the press.

Just as the majority of citizens that have expressed their opinion against the illegal regime directed by Roberto Micheletti, many of us have also been victims of attacks, intimidation and persecution, which include the brutal beating of the independent presidential candidate Carlos Reyes, and the murder of Eliseo Hernández, who was the vice mayoral candidate for Micheletti and Zelaya’s Liberal Party in the municipality of Macuelizo in the state of Santa Bárbara, and one of the most prominent members of the resistance against the coup d’etat in his community.

Similar concerns have been expressed by the Carter Center during its representatives’ visit to Honduras when they asserted, “that the irregular situation in Honduras could diminish the full validity of the electoral rights of the candidates who are competing and of the citizen voters.”

Hence, we believe that holding elections amidst the repressive and illegal regime is not advisable for the country and it would be an historical irresponsibility on our part to participate in them, without first achieving the reestablishment of constitutional order, including the reinstatement of President Zelaya to power. We reject elections corrupted by illegality, as members of three different political parties representing the majority of the mayoral or congressional candidates in certain regions of the country.

Sincerely,
 
[over 300 candidates from the aforementioned parties]