The article linked in the quote above starts off with the news from yesterday that high school teacher Roger Abraham Vallejo Soriano died of gunshot wounds he received while participating in what has recently become the major tactic of the coup resisters movement: road blocks stifling traffic all over the country. Last Thursday, the coup leaders decided to respond by using violence to disrupt the protesters, and Roger was a victim of that violence. But as Giordano notes:
That Roger Abraham Vallejo Soriano was a schoolteacher at the San Martin high school, and a member of the teachers' union, will have an immediate impact on the civil resistance, as schoolteachers are a nationwide organized force with members in every city, town and hamlet throughout the country. One of their own has been been slain in the struggle.
One of the reasons that this ongoing confrontation is likely to be historical is that the people of the movement have clearly decided to adopt the principles of non-violent resistance. As Giordano goes on to report in that post, yesterday the people of Tegucigalpa were invited to attend a viewing of the film Bringing Down A Dictator, which chronicles the student-led movement in Serbia Otpor!. You might recognize their symbol:
Here is how the film is described:
Bringing Down A Dictator documents the spectacular defeat of Slobodan Milosevic in October, 2000, not by force of arms, as many had predicted, but by an ingenious nonviolent strategy of honest elections and massive civil disobedience.
Milosevic was strengthened by patriotic fervor when NATO bombed Yugoslavia in early 1999, but a few months later, a student movement named Otpor! (“Resistance” in Serbian) launched a surprising offensive. Audaciously demanding the removal of Milosevic, they recruited where discontent was strongest, in the Serbian heartland.
Their weapons were rock concerts and ridicule, the internet and email, spray-painted slogans and a willingness to be arrested. Otpor students became the shock troops in an army of human rights, pro-democracy, anti-war, women’s groups, and opposition political parties. Their slogan: "He’s Finished!"
And here is what the poster publicizing the event in Honduras says:
The story of the nonviolent Serbian organization OTPUR (Resistance) and the fall of the de facto regime of Milosevic with the presence of one of the protagonists of the film.
The OTPUR (Resistance) movement succeeded in organizing peaceful resistance to end the dictatorship of Slobovan Milosevic in Serbia with a nonviolent struggle. The tyrant Milosevic was defeated in 2000, not by force of weapons, but massive, active and nonviolent civil disobedience.
If you'd like to watch the film, it is available in six installments on YouTube starting here.
I know I'll be reading Giordano and watching as history develops in Honduras.
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