Julio Galindo, 65, is the National Party's candidate for Mayor of Roatan. Galindo has been Roatan Mayor in 1970s and served as the department's congressman. In 2005, he lost an election for Roatan Mayor to Dale Jackson and for the last four years sat as the Roatan Municipality's highest ranking city council member. The island changed tremendously in the past four years and Galindo is back again in quite a different electoral context. He is currently the president of Bay Islands Chamber of Tourism and sits on the board of ZOLITUR. Bay Islands Voice spoke to him only a couple weeks before the June 28 coup and some of the references in the interview reflect the old, rather then new government in Tegucigalpa.

Bay Islands VOICE: Four years ago you said you will not run for office again. Why did you change your mind?
Julio Galindo: I see things are worse than they were four years ago and it worries me. We need direction here and we are completely lost.
B.I.V.: You lost to Dale [Jackson] four years ago. What are you going to do differently this time to win?
J.G.: [I will] work harder and hope that the people get smarter. Try to work with young people, with migrating people. [In 2005 elections] we won West End, Sandy Bay, Coxen Hole, but lost Barrio Los Fuertes. We are going to ask them a question if they are better off now then they were four years ago. I am sure that they are not.
B.I.V.: The cruise ship companies stated that they would pull out if riots took place again after they happened in October and November 2008. If the riots took place again what would happen?
J.G.: Right now we don't know what the cruise ship industry is going to do. I think the [Zelaya] government is taking this very cool. I sat with the president [Zelaya], Minister of Tourism [Martinez], some of our local authorities and representatives of Royal Caribbean and Carnival. These [cruise ship] people want a plan about increasing police force on the island, building them [police] facilities, expand roads, building a hospital; And they have not received this yet. Sometime the only thing this [Zelaya] government wants to do is create instability, it doesn't want to see progress, but create chaos.
B.I.V.: You lost to Dale four years ago, what are you going to do differently this time to win?
J.G.: We're in a [slowdown] on the island. We have a lot of unemployment, [and] we are creating more. If you don't have investment you can't create labor, and you can't have investment if you are not stable. We still have a few cruise ships coming here, but we don't know for how long. We have lost one of the few labor generating factors that few look at: the real estate business, people who come to the island to buy and build property. Construction is where most cuts were made. [Next year] we are looking at 1 million [tourist] passengers if everything went right, but we could lose that in a flash.
B.I.V.: Beyond just the security issues, do you have a plan to reduce the polarization of different groups on the island: racial, cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious, that has build up here over time?
J.G.: I don't think anyone does [have a plan]. I believe there isn't a problem with people that live here. The people that you have seen on the streets have been financed to create that instability that we are living in. We had some of these guys in jail. There was a process against these people and we were ordered to turn them loose. Nobody respects anything and if we don't have the president [Zelaya] respect our decision, we have nothing.
B.I.V.: The island has grown rapidly over the last 10 years, do you think that people running for office today are competent enough to represent Bay Islands, and tackle issues that face them?
J.G.: I don't want to talk about these guys, but they've been around for almost four years and things have gotten worse. Everything is growing really fast, but not in any disorderly manner: the schools, the education, the public health, the traffic, the roads, it's all a big disaster. Carnival Cruise line will finish a dock able to handle two ships, and in Coxen Hole they are talking about doing a second phase and handling two ships. What are we going to do when we get four ships on Roatan on one day? We won't be able to move these people. The cruise ships constantly are asking us for ICU, intensive care unit. Local people are dying for the need of this. We are destroying the environment. There are around 100,000 people on the island, nobody knows exactly [how many], and we don't have a working sever system on the island. We are destroying what we have and destroying it fast.
B.I.V.: The people who should know how many people live on the island are ZOLITUR as they did the census.
J.G.: Zolitur has been begging people to register, but people haven't shown up to do that. The municipality had to do a census. The tighter things get on the mainland the worse things get for us.
B.I.V.: You are sitting on the board of ZOLITUR. What should ZOLITUR do to improve its image?
J.G.: One of the problems was that ZOLITUR wasn't registering people who came in. They were asking for too many requirements. We have to register everybody. I asked people personally: 'How does ZOLITUR offend you.' They would say: 'I pay one dollar to come here.' So I asked the board to eliminate that and we are in the process of doing that. Foreigners and real estate people have a problem with the 4% capital gains tax, but the law has improved because it was 10% [before], but no one used to pay it. (…) A lot of people don't have records for things they built years ago, so we have to appoint people that would go to give the true value of their improvements. I talked to Pepe [Lobo] about this and he likes the idea… We have to make Roatan a [tax] free zone. If we have a place for people to go shopping and have a law where they would have to stay at a hotel for two nights before they would go shop, we would have benefited a lot. People think that this is a [ZOLITUR] law [is] benefiting rich people only.
B.I.V.: The biggest projects funded by World Bank have not been used, not opened, or mismanaged: the dump in Santos Guardiola, sewage plant in Coxen Hole. Is it worth for these projects to be built if the local mayors won't incorporate them into their budget?
J.G.: What has happened is that we had not had a combined effort the way it should be. The central government, the local government, when these people come in they need to show the contract [explaining the projects]. This is the way it needs to be done. We have not had a combined effort and the only way to do that is with good leadership.

Telenovela 'Honduras'

On one level, it is Zelaya that has already won. He has managed to begin a radicalization, polarization process in the Honduran society. With him or without him the process will likely continue. The Marxist idea of awakening the consciousness of the working class, is a necessary element of creating any revolutionary movement and Mel Zelaya has managed to awake, even create the feeling of being 'exploited,' and 'abused' by the rich impresarios and the imperialists.
That radicalization and polarization process has begun and will take months and years do define itself and gather in definition and critical mass. A portion of the victimized, alienated from democratic process society is likely to embrace a violent struggle in years to come. The ground in Honduras is already fertile for this: there is presence of armed gangs, drug smuggling, the availability of arms, the phenomena of kidnappings of rich impresarios. The acts of violence and sabotage against military and government targets have begun by ministries being occupied.
The civil war, revolution that has crystallized and shaped the identity of Salvadorians, Guatemalans and Nicaraguans in 1970s and 1980s, has never come to Honduras and its arrival was overdue. Hondurans only four years ago were pretty conformist, content with having a job and electricity. Half of its population remained illiterate or semiliterate. They made hardly a receptive audience for leftist ideologues and agitators.
The timing of the coup is as much as anything else related to winning local and presidential elections. Many municipal and some congress candidates have involved themselves with the 'La Cuarta Urna' making them eligible for criminal prosecution and disqualifying from running in the November elections.
Instead of making an example of how an autocratic, disregarding the constitution president can be removed from his post, Honduras showed its incompetence to the entire world. The cost of this fumbling will take years to access.
I say if you want to impeach: follow the procedure. If you want to do a coup: do it right and neutralizes the target. Limit fallout from removing the top executive and don't wash your hands, and dump your responsibilities on a neighboring country. Just like any other country, Honduras is responsible for treating and prosecuting its criminals.
In the end, Hondurans deserve what they got. Despite loud lamentations and blame, they are not victims of Hugo Chavez, the USA or CNN. They are victims of themselves. They chose to elect Mel Zelaya as their president and they also chose to not remove him properly and, which is just as important, without the 'perception of following rule of law.'

Honduras never produced a Telenovela until the June 28 coup captivated the Latin audiences across the hemisphere. The only more watched drama at the time was the death of Michael Jackson.
This Honduran drama was entirely man made: no need for hurricanes, floods or earthquakes. Hondurans brought themselves to their needs. The slow moving 'Hurricane Mel' is likely to cause as much damage as Hurricane Mitch did and the event is likely to continue at least until the November 29 Honduran elections, and possibly untill the January 27, 2010 government transition.
As tempers fly, two separate issues have been fused in the minds of many. Whether President Zelaya was a good or bad president, or person, and whether his ousting was done correctly. Answering one question in one way, doesn't mean automatically answering the other in the same way.
All three branches of Honduran government failed to uphold a rule of law and steered the country towards another type of totalitarianism. The army with congress' approval shut down all national sources of media opposition and attempted to portray themselves as a saviors of western hemisphere from communism. In fact military and congress were disguising their own incompetence, and internal squabbles that prevented them from impeaching the president in a lawful manner, or even follow the order of arrest from the supreme court. To make matters even more interesting complicit in the coup and attempting a cover up is part of Honduran society itself.
For a long time Zelaya was useful and showed himself to be far from one dimensional. Just in the Bay Islands, he received wide praise and applause: for putting first Bay Islander (vice-minister of Tourism) ever in the cabinet, for supporting Bay Islands Freeport status, for giving permits for Carnival and Royal Caribbean docks, for bailing out RECO when the islander board ran it into the ground, etc, etc. Local politicians campaigned with him, used him and often got exactly what they wanted: political support, media exposure, permits and funds. All that is now forgotten and many of the same Bay Islanders have conclusively and unequivocally linked Zelaya for giving too much support to March rioters. Zelaya is now just a bad, bad communist.