In the 47 days since the kidnapping of our democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, and Roberto Micheletti’s regime seizing power in a coup, Hondurans have been witness to detestable attacks on our people. Human rights organisations have documented thousands of human rights violations, including illegal detentions, disappearances, torture, assassinations, excessive use of force, and death threats. On Wednesday hundreds of people were wounded and more than 40 detained after protesters from all parts of the country converged on the capital to demand the return of President Zelaya and his democratically elected government.

As well as this generalised violence, social movement leaders and activists, including groups like our own – Friends of the Earth Honduras and Via Campesina Honduras – are increasingly being targeted because of our role supporting the resistance to the coup regime and trying to protect ordinary Hondurans fighting for their democratic rights. On Wednesday night in our capital Tegucigalpa bullets were fired at the offices of Via Campesina, an alliance of peasant farmers – a clear attempt to silence one of the leading social organisations in the National Front Against the Coup d’etat. Our trade union colleagues and others have also been targeted with bombs and kidnapping.

So far the coup has taken more than 10 innocent lives, but this number will be dwarfed by the suffering ordinary Hondurans will face if the international community stands idly by and allows Micheletti’s regime to remain in office. Many in Honduran political movements, including ourselves, were fighting for our political rights in the 1980s when the United States backed the Honduran army as it engaged in massive human rights violations against political activists. We still carry the scars of this oppression, and work on a daily basis to support ordinary and poor Hondurans making incremental gains to the basic rights that have been denied them since those days. These include the right to a clean and healthy environment, to food and to the political freedoms which will help them secure these and other rights.

The wave of progressive politics through Latin America had begun to bring some significant improvements for poor people and the environment in Honduras as elsewhere. The ordinary citizens of Honduras, like rural and urban communities across Latin America, bear the brunt of the realities of the globalised world we now live in on a daily basis. From our indigenous peasant communities who have been displaced by mining or have had their land snatched to feed the west’s insatiable demand for coffee, bananas, wood and other raw materials, to the repeated destruction of the lives and livelihoods of poor coastal Afro-Caribbean communities by the increasingly destructive weather phenomena linked to climate change, the people of Honduras know only too well that we are all part of an interlinked, interdependent international system. But whether others in that system know about us is a different question.

It is the “special interests” behind the ousting of Zelaya who are now propagating misinformation about the coup, like the claim that Zelaya’s removal was legal under the constitution of Honduras. These falsehoods are diluting the already weak-will of global powers like the US and EU to support a return to democracy in our country. The response of the international community to our plight has been nothing short of pitiful. Early action by the EU to suspend budgetary aid to Micheletti was followed by silence, echoed even more strongly across the Atlantic where Obama has surprised many Americans by failing to take even a weak stance in relation to the coup.

Hondurans are used to having to defend our rights, but we need the support of people around the world to help bring an end to this latest injustice and new wave of violence against our people. Citizens in the US and Europe must put pressure on their governments to act. The EU’s initial efforts must be followed by much stiffer sanctions such as freezing bank accounts, cancelling visas, introducing travel bans. There are many tools your countries have available. We need everyone to demand that their governments use them.