Honduras says US personnel to help stem violence
Honduras says US personnel to help stem violence
The Associated Press
Created: 01/19/2012 11:04:21 AM PST
MEXICO CITY—Honduran President Porfirio Lobo says the United States is sending people to help Honduras battle the violent crime that led to the withdrawal of U.S. Peace Corps volunteers this week.
Lobo says the Americans will work on analyzing the problems.
Lobo told the HRN radio network Thursday that "soon there will be U.S. personnel here ... and that will contribute to the tranquility of the Honduran people."
He did not say if the Americans would come from some government agency or a private company.
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http://www.dailybulletin.com/news/ci_19775856
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Honduras: family killed in latest Aguán massacre
Submitted by Weekly News Update on Tue, 01/17/2012 - 12:32.
Eight people, including four children, were murdered in the village of Regaderos, in Sabá municipality in the northern Honduran department of Colón, on the evening of Jan. 9. Seven of the victims were members of the same campesino family; the eighth was a man running errands. The attackers took the victims from the family's home to a field and killed them there with machetes and firearms. The youngest of the children was one year old; the others were seven, 12 and 15 years old. The attackers cut a part of the ear off each of the eight bodies. (El Tiempo, San Pedro Sula, Jan. 10)
The massacre was one of three mass killings in northern Honduras since the beginning of the year. Six people were murdered on Jan. 3 in the village of El Palmar, Las Vegas municipality, Santa Bárbara, in northwestern Honduras, and four members of one family were killed on Jan. 10 in the Rivera Hernández section of the main northern city, San Pedro Sula. There were 6,723 homicides in Honduras from January 2011 to Dec. 15, according to researchers at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH). With a homicide rate of 82 per 100,000 inhabitants, Honduras is the most violent country in Central America and one of the five most violent countries in Latin America. (Proceso Digital, Honduras, Jan. 11)
Sabá municipality, where the campesino family was massacred the night of Jan. 9, is in the Lower Aguán Valley, the site of violent land disputes between campesinos and large landowners. Colón chief of police Osmín Bardales almost immediately ruled out any connection between these disputes and the murders.
But the Honduras Culture and Politics blog points out that it is typical for both police and media to play down possible political motives behind violence in Honduras. One example is the US media's tendency to blame Honduras' homicide rate on the increase in drug trafficking through the country. But a United Nations report released on Oct. 6, "Global Study on Homicide" (PDF), notes that there isn't always a connection: "Organized criminal groups involved in drug trafficking do not necessarily make themselves visible through violent and lethal crime…. Violence often escalates when an existing status quo is broken, as a result, for example, of changes in the structure of the drug market, the emergence of new protagonists or the ‘threat' posed by police repression." Meanwhile, the media rarely mention the increase in murders of women, campesinos and transsexuals since the June 2009 military coup that overthrew President José Manuel ("Mel"
Zelaya Rosales. (Honduras Culture and Politics blog, Jan. 12)
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http://ww4report.com/node/10731
Thu Jan 26, 2012 at 05:46 PM PST.
Action Alert: Death Threats to Honduran Journalist & Her Children
by Justina
As a result of the illegal coup to depose then Honduran President, Manual Zelaya, in 2009, in which the U.S. played an under-handed role, Hondurans have endured multiple assassinations, kidnapping, and brutal suppression of their basic human rights. The horrors continue in that poor, lawless country, in which unionists, journalists and ordinary citizens who have continued to fight for basic human rights, have been targeted for threats, arrests, kidnapping and outright assassination. Eighteen journalists have already been killed, 25 have received death threats, 4 have been kidnapped and tortured, and 37 other attacks on journalists recorded.
One such journalist, Gilda Silvestrucchi, who hosts a radio program, has, within the last twenty days, been personally threatened. She dared to interview two opponents of a pending new mining law. Not only have anonymous callers informed her, right after her interviews, that she was to be murdered, but they threatened to kill her children as well.
The Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared of Honduras (Cofadeh) has put out an international alert asking the world to demand that she receive protection from Honduran government officials. Their alert gives details:
On January 3, 2012 while on her way to work at the radio program Gilda was followed. On January 20, 2012, her mother received a phone call from a male voice requesting information regarding the routine of Gilda Carolina Silvestrucchi including what time she arrived home, where she was during the day and where he could find her. The unknown caller questioned the mother under the pretense of knowing the exact time when she could be found at home.
More:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/26/1058909/-Action-Alert:-Death-Threats-to-Honduran-Journalist-Her-Children?detail=hide&via=blog_603726
You may recall this radio station continued to try to broadcast, along with one independent tv station, Channel 36, so courageously, speaking out against the coup, getting threatened, the stations being shut down by coup government forces, the tv station having government troups coming in and pouring chemicals all over the equipment, at one time, and both of them getting serious abuse on a daily basis to keep them from airing the news as it was happening.
These threats, beatings, torture, and murders continue, so long after they overthrew the elected President. The people have been terrorized beyond endurance but they are continuing to hope. Our own government shouldn't have conceded to the filthy right wing of this country, right-wing Congressasses like Miami's Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and Senator Jim DeMint and his boys all showed up moments after they violently kidnapped the President of Honduras, Manual Zelaya, completely interfering with the US President and the State Department's right to negotiate whatever business needed to be handled with them. They opted to set their OWN foreign policy with the coup plotters FIRST, immediately after the coup.
[center]
"La Loba," she-wolf Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
made her way to the side of the coup President of Honduras.
Jim DeMint and his ham fisted retinue, there to congratulate the coup president,
Roberto Micheletti.[/center]
Thanks to Justina for providing a lot of missing information about this absolutely imperiled journalist. This is a critical time, right on the precipice, since the death merchants seem to know everything about her now, even her cell phone #, and information about her entire family.
Hope the hope and concern from people of conscience here can help, somehow.
Honduras: another Aguán campesino leader murdered
Submitted by Weekly News Update on Tue, 01/31/2012 - 10:25.
Two men on a motorcycle gunned down Honduran campesino activist Matías Valle Cárdenas on Jan. 20 as he was leaving his home in Quebradas de Arena, Tocoa municipality in the northern department of Colón. Valle was a leader in the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), one of several campesino groups fighting for land redistribution in the Lower Aguán Valley in northern Hondruas. More than 50 campesinos and private security guards have been killed in Aguán land conflicts over the past two years. Valle's murder came just three days after the killing of attorney José Ricardo Rosales in the northern city of Tela shortly after he reported abuses by local police [see Update #1114].
According to the French-based organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Honduran journalists Gilda Silvestrucci and Itsmania Pineda Platero both received threatening phone calls in January. The two women were among a group of journalists that organized a Dec. 13 march to the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to protest free speech violations; the march was violently dispersed by the police. Silvestrucci edits the online newspaper El Patriota and produces a program on Radio Globo; both media opposed the June 2009 military coup that overthrew President José Manuel ("Mel" Zelaya Rosales. Silvestrucci received an anonymous call on her cell phone on Jan. 23. "We know that you have three children," the caller said, "that the oldest is 15, that at this moment you are walking down the street with your seven-year-old son and that the oldest is at home looking after the one-year-old baby, and we are going to kill you." (Notimex, Jan. 20, via Univision; RSF, Jan. 24)
While US media coverage has tended to attribute violence in Honduras and the country's rising crime rate mostly to drug traffickers, a Jan. 22 article by Frances Robles in the Miami Herald focuses on the role of corruption in law enforcement, from low-ranking police agents to top officials. Honduran law enforcement is "rotten to the core," Gustavo Alfredo Landaverde, a former adviser to the government on drug trafficking, told Robles two weeks before his murder [see Update #1111]. "We are at the border of an abyss. These are criminal organizations inside and out." (MH, Jan. 22)
A Jan. 20 op-ed in the New York Times goes further, discussing the role of the 2009 coup in the growth of this corruption. "
T)he coup was what threw open the doors to a huge increase in drug trafficking and violence," University of California Santa Cruz history professor Dana Frank writes, "and it unleashed a continuing wave of state-sponsored repression." Frank notes that the US government was quick to recognize the questionable elections held by the de facto regime in November 2009. "This chain of events—a coup that the United States didn't stop, a fraudulent election that it accepted—has now allowed corruption to mushroom. The judicial system hardly functions. Impunity reigns." Honduras is descending into "a human rights and security abyss," Frank says. "That abyss is in good part the (US) State Department's making." (NYT, Jan. 20)
http://ww4report.com/node/10779