The voice of the resistance against the 2009 Honduran coup

In June 2009, Honduras exploded and the people took to the streets after the president was overthrown in a coup. And one radio show followed them and reported from the protests. Became the voice of the resistance—Radio Resistencia.

On the eve of June 28, 2009, Hondurans went to sleep expecting to awake the next morning and vote in a non-binding nationwide poll asking them if they’d like to hold a referendum on whether or not to convene a Constituent Assembly.

They never got the chance.

Before sunrise, the Honduran military raided the country’s presidential palace. They kidnapped the country’s democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, and they flew him, in his pajamas, out of the country.

The coup plotters said Zelaya was trying to change the constitution to allow his reelection—something prohibited. It was just an excuse… it wasn’t going to happen. And definitely not from a non-binding referendum. But it was justification enough. Congress had conspired with the Supreme Court and the military to oust the president.

The president of the National Assembly, Roberto Micheletti, took power. He ordered the military to enforce a curfew. Meanwhile, the country awoke to the news. 

People hit the streets. They demanded Zelaya be reinstated. It was the beginning of months of widespread protests. Organizing, actions, rallies, marches, day in and day out. The coup government and the police responded with repression and violence.

The resistance founded a movement: the National Front Against the Coup. 

Later it would become the National Front of Popular Resistance. 

It was in these early days, with a media blackout across the local press, that journalist Felix Molina decided to found a daily radio show that would showcase the voices on the front lines. 

That’s a clip from one of his shows a few years into the coup. 

He called his show “Resistance,” and later “Resistances,” Resistencias, to underscore the diverse forms of organizing and street protest across the country. Resistance was available online, but also over the airwaves via the radio station Radio Globo. When the military moved to block the signal, people in the communities played the show online, and began to connect loudspeakers so their neighbors could also listen in.

“The elites control the telephone lines and they can cut the signals. They control the national telecommunications commission and they can cut radio and TV frequencies. But they can’t cut the connections between people,” says Felix Molina. “The capacity to meet together and to invent. The people will react, as they have before. Like how they created a type of loudspeaker radio. They are creative.”

Felix Molina’s show highlighted the diverse forms of resistance across the country. 

Felix says that in Tegucigalpa, it was a largely urban resistance with a big youth presence. University students. People from the poor communities, who are not necessary organized. Informal workers. Street vendors. With a large presence of women teachers.  

“But in the Indigenous Lenca departments, it was another type of resistance. Much more determined to fight. Body to body. People with conviction,” he says. “Which was very different from the resistance on the Atlantic coast with a Garifuna component. Caribbean. With a huge presence of spiritual Garifuna symbology. There was always smoke. Incense. Drumming.” 

He says their methods were different, but they were all united in their one goal of, quote, “reclaiming the dignity of the nation, rebuilding the rule of law.” The return of Manuel Zelaya. The return of democracy. 

The police cracked down. Human rights violations. Torture. Just in the first six months after the coup there were dozens of politically motivated killings. And still the people resisted. Still Felix reported on their struggle over the airwaves. 

Felix says that at the radio they intentionally focused less on the things that caused collective fear and more on what he calls “the pro-positive discourse against fear,” like raising people’s awareness and getting them active in the growing social movement. At the time, it was common to hear that people say that Hondurans “woke up” because of the coup—they became politicized. 

“As people said, the blindfolds were taken off,” says Felix. “The blindfolds that stopped them from seeing how power works in the country.”

And, Felix says, the radio played a key role.

“The radio was central to both the mobilizations of political consciousness and the mobilizations of people into the streets,” he says. “With all modesty, that was my greatest achievement as one of the directors of the program,” he says. The coup would deepen, with the support of the United States. Felix Molina would continue to report until an attack on his life in 2016 forced him to flee the country.

It would take more than a decade from that first morning in June 2009, when the president Manuel Zelaya was detained and flown out of the country, but finally Xiomara Castro, the wife of former president Zelaya, won the November 2021 elections, defeating the subsequent coup governments and steering Honduras back toward a true democracy. 

Resistance. Action. Change. Victory at the polls. A return to the presidency. And one radio show made a tremendous difference. Resistencia.