Demanding an end to violence and repression in Honduras

Rabble
Amy Goodman

President Manuel Zelaya returns.

While most in the United States were recognizing Memorial Day with a three-day weekend, the people of Honduras were engaged in a historic event: the return of President Manuel Zelaya, 23 months after he was forced into exile at gunpoint in the first coup in Central America in a quarter-century. While he is no longer president, his peaceful return marks a resounding success for the opponents of the coup. Despite this, the post-coup government in Honduras, under President Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo, is becoming increasingly repressive, and is the subject this week of a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, signed by 87 members of the U.S. Congress, calling for suspension of aid to the Honduran military and police.

As the only U.S. journalist on Zelaya's flight home, I asked him how he felt about his imminent return. "Full of hope and optimism," he said. "Political action is possible instead of armaments. No to violence. No to military coups. Coups never more."

When Zelaya landed in Honduras, he kneeled down and kissed the ground. He was greeted by tens of thousands of people cheering and waving the black-and-red flag of the movement born after the coup, the FNRP, or National Front of Popular Resistance, "the resistance" that Zelaya now leads. His first stop: a massive rally at the memorial for 19-year-old Isis Obed Murillo, who was killed one week after the 2009 coup when Zelaya first attempted to fly back into the country. Murillo was with tens of thousands awaiting Zelaya's return at the airport. The military blocked the runway and dispersed the crowd with live fire, killing the teenager.

Since then, violence and impunity have been constant. Farmers, journalists, students, teachers and anyone else in Honduras daring to dissent face intimidation, arrest and murder. At least 12 journalists have been killed there since the coup, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Scores of campesinos -- small farmers -- have been killed. High-school students protesting teacher layoffs and the privatization of education were violently attacked by police this week, with tear gas and live ammunition.

At the rally, Zelaya, memorializing Murillo, said, "Blood was not shed in vain, because we're still standing ... resistance is today the cry of victory."

The current Honduran government agreed to allow Zelaya's return to gain readmission into the Organization of American States in an attempt to shed Honduras' pariah status in Latin America for the coup.

Pariah to Latin America, but not the United States. Even though President Barack Obama early on called Zelaya's ouster "a coup," the U.S. government soon dropped the term. But there is no other word for it. On Sunday, I spoke with Zelaya in his home. He recounted what happened.

It was around 5 a.m. on June 28, 2009, when black-hooded Honduran soldiers stormed his house after shooting through the back door.


"They threatened me, that they were going to shoot," he said. "And I said to them: 'If you have orders to shoot, then shoot me. But know that you are shooting the president of the republic.' ... They forced me to go to their vehicles outside with my pyjamas on. We landed in the U.S. military base of Palmerola. ... And then to Costa Rica."

Ultimately, more important to Honduras is not just the return of Zelaya, but the return of democracy. Zelaya was gaining popular support for policies like a 60 per cent increase in the minimum wage, the plan to take over the U.S. Palmerola air base and use it as the civilian airport in place of the notoriously dangerous Toncontin International Airport, plans to distribute land to peasant farmers, and to join ALBA, the regional cooperative bloc developed to diminish the economic domination of the United States. On the day he was deposed, Zelaya was holding a nonbinding straw poll to assess if the population wanted to hold a national constituent assembly to evaluate possible changes to the constitution. That, he explains, is why he was deposed.

Secretary of State Clinton and close friend Lanny Davis, who is working as a powerful lobbyist for the coup regime, have pushed hard for the legitimization of the current Lobo government, despite Clinton's own State Department cable titled "Open and Shut: The Case of the Honduran Coup," released by Wikileaks, that the coup was clearly illegal.

As I headed to the airport to leave Honduras after this historic weekend, I passed a group of teachers, one month into their hunger strike outside the Honduran Congress. They, like a broad network of civil society groups in Honduras, while celebrating the return of their ousted president, are clear in their demand, now joined by 87 members of the U.S. Congress, for an end to violence and repression in Honduras.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

Honduran government accused of killing opposition members and using US money to fund corrupt police

Latin American News Dispatch via INN

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.

NEW YORK — While the Honduran government and former U.S. President Bill Clinton

claim that the Central American nation is protecting human rights and combating drug-trafficking, Honduras is actually killing opposition members and using U.S. money to fund corrupt police officials, according to a leader in the Honduran resistance movement.

Speaking at New York City’s Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square Tuesday, Gerardo Torres of Honduras’ National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP, in Spanish) said since the 2009 coup that ousted then-President Manuel Zelaya the Honduran government has violently cracked down on citizens critical of the new administration and failed to advance human rights in the nation.

“All the money is spent on weapons, propaganda and controlling the mass media,” Torres said. “There are no civil rights in Honduras.”

The coup in Honduras took place on the morning of June 28, 2009 when about 100 soldiers stormed the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa, forcibly removed Zelaya from the premises and flew him to San José, Costa Rica. Citing a plot by Zelaya to eliminate presidential term limits and create a socialist state in the vein of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, the National Congress later that day voted to remove Zelaya from office and swore in Speaker of Congress Roberto Micheletti as president.

“Anyone who gets taken down by a coup so easily, he can not be a dictator,” Torres said.

In the next few months there were mass protests and violence between demonstrators and police. Many countries, including the United States, refused to recognize the interim government and the United Nations called for Zelaya’s reinstatement.

Among the turmoil, Zelaya snuck back into Honduras in September and holed himself up in the Brazilian Embassy. Under this atmosphere, Honduras held elections on November 29, 2009. Porfirio Lobo, of the conservative Partido Nacional, won the election and was installed as president two months later on January 27, 2010. That same day Zelaya flew into exile to the Dominican Republic, after a deal was worked out between Lobo and Dominican President Leonel Fernández that ensured Zelaya’s safe passage out of Honduras.

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR, in Spanish) was set up in April of 2010 to look into the events surrounding the coup and any human rights abuses that came out of it. However, Honduran and international human rights groups such as the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which sponsored Tuesday’s event, said that CVR did not comply with international standards.

“In contrast to international recommendations, the CVR was established by presidential decree allowing for the executive to reserve the ultimate authority to determine the structure of the CVR and the participants in the process,” according to the CCR.

The FNRP also claims that while many in the international community believe Honduras is a functioning democracy, it is not. Governmental violence, corruption and censorship of the media are all ubiquitous features in the country, according to Torres.

Since 2008 ten journalists, 60 lawyers, 155 women, and 59 gays, lesbians or transgender people have been killed in Honduras, according to The Miami Herald.

“Of the ten journalists killed, seven were known members of the resistance,” Torres said. “If this were any other country everybody would hear about this. When they kill ten journalists in Honduras, nobody knows.”

All of those cases have gone unprosecuted and the Obama administration is now sending FBI agents and prosecutors to Honduras to help investigate murders in several of the more prominent cases. The Honduran government claims that drug-traffickers and criminals are responsible for the majority of the murders, but Torres said that it is the government itself that is responsible for the deaths.

“[The Honduran government] does it, because they can do it,” Torres added.

The murder rate in Honduras has risen steadily in the last few years. The country had 4,473 in 2008, 5,265 in 2009 to 6,236 last year, a 39 percent increase and now has the highest homicide rate in the Western Hemisphere.

Hillary Clinton Pleads Case for Coup Leader in Honduras

New York Times

LIMA, Peru — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pleaded Monday with Latin American countries to welcome Honduras back into their circle, a year after the country’s left-leaning president was ousted in a coup that has left a residue of bitterness throughout the region.

Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua and other nations refuse to recognize the new Honduran leader, Porfirio Lobo, who was elected after lengthy wrangling between the United States and the coup leaders failed to restore President Manuel Zelaya to power. He had been bundled out of the country in his pajamas last June, and spent months trying to reclaim his job.

Addressing a meeting of the Organization of American States here, Mrs. Clinton noted that the United States had condemned Mr. Zelaya’s ouster. But she said, “We saw the free and fair election of President Lobo,” and she praised him for setting up a truth commission to investigate the coup.

“Now it’s time for the hemisphere as a whole to move forward and welcome Honduras back into the inter-American community,” Mrs. Clinton said, after several foreign ministers inveighed against Mr. Lobo’s government, which they said had violated human rights.

Honduras was expelled from the O.A.S. in the wake of the coup, with the support of the United States. Continued tensions over the coup suffused the discussions here, though Nicaragua failed to get Honduras added to the formal agenda of the meeting.

For her part, Mrs. Clinton was trying to avoid a replay of last year’s O.A.S. meeting, which fell into an even more acrimonious debate over whether to readmit Cuba. She was also trying to marshal support for the Obama administration’s push for sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.

“I fully expect Iran to pull some stunt in the next couple of days because they know sanctions are on the way,” she said Sunday. “I think we’ll see something coming up in the next 24 to 48 hours where Iran says, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, look what we’re going to do now.’ ”

In Lima, Mrs. Clinton briefly met with Brazil’s deputy foreign minister, Antônio de Aguiar Patriota, to discuss both Iran and Honduras. Brazil, which tried with Turkey to broker a deal with Iran over enrichment of its uranium, is expected to vote against an Iran resolution.

In a meeting on Monday morning with Peru’s president, Alan García, Mrs. Clinton praised the country’s support for nonproliferation, which she said sent “a message of unity to Iran and North Korea that their actions pose a threat to the peace and stability of the world community.”

Mrs. Clinton faced an awkward moment when Mr. García praised her for her advocacy of women’s rights, then abruptly walked out of the room, leaving her alone in front of a pair of microphones with a bemused smile on her face. Mrs. Clinton explained that the president was running late for his next meeting, and then quickly beat her own retreat from his palace.