Honduran government hires fiction writer to hawk coup regime

[Joanne98]

Micheletti junta shelling out $292,000 for D.C. flack attack


The recent decision by the rogue government of Honduras to spend more than a quarter of a million dollars to hire a PR firm to spread its newspeak is marked by a twist of irony that even George Orwell would appreciate.

That PR agency, Washington, D.C.-based Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter & Associates (CLSA), claims among its founding partners Peter Schechter, who also is a published fiction writer. His first book, “Point of Entry” is fashioned around a plot pulled right out of low-budget B-movie script.

Here’s how the Washington Post described it in a 2006 review:
The Syrian terrorists, facing the challenge of smuggling 30 pounds of uranium into the United States at a time of heightened border security, devise a fiendish scheme: They will call on Colombian drug lords who smuggle huge amounts of contraband in every day. Deftly, the author shows the nuclear plot unfolding as U.S. intelligence officials slowly piece it together. As the story gallops to a climax, all sorts of urgent questions confront us: Will millions of Americans be killed in a nuclear blast? If so, will it muck up President Stockman's romance with the brainy bombshell in Bogota?

So given Schechter’s apparent knack for crafting hackneyed fiction, it seems only appropriate that he, and some eight of his associates at CLSA, are now charged with selling a bad fiction about the Honduran coup government to the international community.

And that fiction, based on a reading of CLSA’s Foreign Agents Registration filing with the Department of Justice, is to promote Honduran “de facto” President and Usurper Roberto Micheletti’s dictatorship as a democracy “through the use of media outreach, policy maker contacts and events, and public dissemination of information to government staff of government officials, news media and non-government groups” all with the goal of advancing “the level of communication, awareness and attention about the political situation in Honduras.”

That political situation (which of course must now be whitewashed via fiction techniques to be employed by the PR firm) continues to deteriorate, as Narco News’ Al Giordano reports today:

On the morning of June 28, coup regime soldiers stomped into the offices of Radio Globo and Channel 36 in Tegucigalpa and silenced their transmitters. The two networks filed court orders to be able to get back on the air. And for the past three months they’ve each been subject to written orders from the Honduras regime to cease broadcasting (the journalists, in turn, refused to be censored) and to paramilitary attacks that poured acid on their transmitters, and yet they and their journalists heroically got themselves back on the air rapidly.

On this morning, three months later, it was déjà vu all over again, as those same military troops reenacted the battle of June 28, busting down the doors of both broadcasters and this time removing their transmitters and equipment. And soldiers have surrounded both houses of media to prevent the people from retaking them.

The coup regime is now clinging to power illegitimately, threatened on every front by truth and justice, which means it must create an illusion of democratic sanction, and so, it has inked a $292,000 contract with CLSA, calling on the PR firm to “diseñar una campaña de persuasión” .
And the chief illusionist for CLSA, Schechter, knows how to sell political fiction, and has done so in the past, as part of election consulting work, for the likes of former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardosa — the latter a useful contact given that the democratically elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, is now holed up in the Brazilian embassy in Teguciagalpa, Honduras.

The Golpista Class now in control of Honduras earlier this summer retained as lobbyists to hawk for their cause a consummate Bill and Hillary Clinton shill, Lanny Davis, as well as Bush-era diplomat and Iran/Contra figure Roger Noriega — both hardcore free-traders. Likewise, Schechter is on the neo-liberal bandwagon and argues unabashedly in a blog entry that the free trade agreement with Colombia “needs to be passed” because that nation’s “police, politicians and journalists are the first to be killed in the battle to clear America’s streets of narcotics.” Again, remember, this man is a master of B-movie fiction.

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http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2009/09/honduran-government-hires-fiction-writer-hawk-coup-regime