Responding to the Honduran Coup

[Judi Lynn]

March 24, 2010

Fasting in Tegucigalpa
Responding to the Honduran Coup
By ROSIE WONG

As a 30-year-old Australian who had previously travelled to Guatemala and El Salvador, I decided to respond to an email listserv request for international observers in Honduras after the June 2009 coup.

I felt compelled to go to the country after reading about U.S.-backed repression and massacres in the region in the 1980s. There were clear parallels between that period and the current situation in Honduras. To date, Honduras has seen the assassination of around 150 members of the nonviolent resistance, thousands of illegal detentions, and hundreds of beatings and injuries, as well as violent illegal closures of alternative media, 10 reported cases of rape, and dozens of sedition charges against protesters. I thought that a larger international presence could only be positive and hoped that the accompaniment process would increase the safety of Honduran activists, even if only by a little.

Though I arrived in Honduras during a period of relative calm, there were constant signs that the situation could erupt at any moment.

My driver from the airport, a member of the resistance, pointed out that the helicopters overhead were deployed to frighten protesters. A friend called and told him that he received a death threat on Facebook. Ubiquitous anti-coup messages were being painted over on a daily basis. A journalist I met at the supermarket told me that Honduras was in “big trouble,” and needed an election to make things better.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/wong03242010.html

[maryf]

1. K&R nt

[Peace Patriot]

2. The disinformation about Honduras from the U.S. State Dept and our corpo-fascist press is appalling!

I have watched this one closely, and, frankly, despite my experience, and our communal experience, of the goddamned lies and disinformation by our government and the press, with regard to the Iraq War, massive U.S. government crime, stolen elections and so much else, I was shocked by the outright LIES that were told, and are still being told, about Honduras.

Over and over and over again, the corpo-fascist press repeated the baldfaced lie of the coup perpetrators that President Mel Zelaya was trying to extend his term of office. This is provably UNTRUE. But that is not all that they did--outright lying. They also committed journalistic crimes of omission--such as failing to investigate what the U.S. military commanders at the U.S. military base in Honduras were doing when the plain carrying the kidnapped president out of the country at gunpoint landed at their airport for refueling. They failed to report any of the facts on the utter illegitimacy of the so-called election that was held six months after the coup--hard facts, like the refusal of every legitimate election monitoring group on earth to participate in that farce; the use of U.S. taxpayer money to BUY compliant election monitors, including foaming-at-the mouth rightwingers from John McCain's U.S. taxpayer funded "International Republican Institute," and much more.

"Appalling" hardly describes my open-mouthed gape as these lies came down. Mindboggling describes it better. I am mindboggled at the lies and disinformation, and at the total collusion of the corpo-fascist press, across the board--the New York Slimes, the Associated Pukes, the Wall Street Urinal, the Washington Psst (CIA), Rotters, the BBCons, you name it. And THAT was downright scary--that they ALL told the same lies and ALL used the same disinformationist "frames" to cover up what was really occurring--including some 150 political murders, torture, rape, unjust imprisonment, massive repression and U.S. complicity in and funding of this criminal Honduran regime.