Honduras Political Update II

Over the last several days and even week things have settled down across Honduras. Many of the schools have returned to giving classes and others plan to start on Monday. Today there has been more peace talks in Costa Rica. As I understand there has not been an agreement but there is to me more talks tomorrow.

I find it interesting to see how the Internet news that I have seen has been focusing on the negative of this whole thing from the actual coup to the violence. The violence has been very contained and is not wide spread across the country like it would seem from the Internet videos and news. There have been some very large protest but just about everyone of them peaceful.

Where Tiffany and I live in San Luis everything is peaceful. The people are just kinda waiting to see what is going to happen to their country. From the ones I have talked to, many of them feel that the ex president was leading the country down a Communistic road but others who don't really understand what Communism is are only seeing the raise in minimum salary that was given as well as the cash hand outs that have come from the Zelaya government. One lady was quoted the other day as saying that she was paid around $50 to vote a certain way and as she put it "who cares how you vote when you are hungry". I spoke with another man who was fixing our telephone lines for our radio station and he was telling me that Hondutel, the main telephone company, has not paid him his salary for 4 months. He can not quit working now or he will loose all of his rights to back pay. He has 3 children at home with out food.

What most of these poor people say is that the ones running the government don't care what happens to them and that has really been the case most of the time but along came ex president Mel Zelaya and raised the minimum salary, started handing out food, cash and trying to win the people. So many of the people see him as the one who cared for them. The majority of the people who are out supporting the return of the ex president are either among the really poor people or the people who have been paid to protest.

Well, for now that is how it is. Tomorrow the peace talks continue.