Playing out in Honduras is yet another chapter of the rise of Latin America’s indigenous population. A rise in the popularity of the left, in our southern continent, reflects the growing unwillingness to bow to economic domination while receiving minimal support in return for labor and their lands’ riches. Meanwhile, the middle class in this country is discovering that they are served poorly by the ownership society that has been tearing down laws to protect the economy from depredations here in the U.S.

Friday, the U.S. announced that it will cut off aid to Honduras as the illegal government there continues to keep its democratically elected president out of the country. The class warfare there reflects on the same here, as the banana republicans of the economically dominant right wing tries to shut down democracy that gives working people our share of the country’s power and wealth.

The coming contest over health care in the Senate provides an amusing fugue in wordplay, as the ‘filibuster’ the right wing has been using to fend off the public interest here is a variation on the title given to U.S. vagabonds who descended on Central America in the 1850′s, the ‘freebooters’ or ‘filibusteros‘ who tried to annex five independent nations there to join with our Southern States.

In one of history’s fascinating quirks, a member of the aristocracy in Costa Rica, Nobel Prize winner President Oscar Arias, is leading the effort to reinstate Honduran president Zelaya, who was removed by a coup. Arias came into prominence as a hero of the southern continent when he resisted, and ejected, the Contra occupation of Costa Rica which brought war while solving internal Nicaraguan battles. Arias refused to allow the U.S. privateers/freebooters who had set up an illegal encampment to make war from Costa Rica on the neighboring Nicaraguan Sandinistas. Now Arias is again working to reestablish democratic sovereignty, this time in Honduras, against the rule by his own aristocratic class.

In a recurring churning of the parties to the south of us, the economic establishment is fighting against the rise of the left, which enables native working people to get a handhold on the wealth the aristocracy considers its own. Elected Zelaya was on the verge of putting to a democratic vote a proposal for establishing a constituent assembly. In the dominant economic class, that evoked the fear of letting the left give more power to the native working classes.

A discussion on Thursday’s PBS Newshour provided the amazing spectacle of Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen insisting that President Zelaya was removed because he had violated the Constitution by the attempt to bring to a vote one proposal for increased representation. I do not find any instance of that particular right wing congresswoman ever remarking that for his violations of the Constitution, President Bush should have been run out of this country in his p.j.’s while financiers set up one of their own in the White House.

Our right wing provides some pretty colorful episodes these days. To our south – in countries whose people make polite coughing noises when we call our own country America, as if it were the entire continent – the rising native population sees our ‘filibusteros’ using here the tactics that are failing there. The working class is taking back its countries to our south, by election. The right wing there took it by freebooting and filibustering.

We can learn a lot from seeing what a third world country looks like, and what it feels like to have labor stolen from working people, by studying Latin American history. This country doesn’t need to become another banana republic.