Honduras' very own war on terror

[Judi Lynn]

Honduras' very own war on terror
The state uses propaganda to justify eliminating civil rights because of the threat of 'terrorism'.
Belen Fernandez
Last Modified: 07 Jul 2011 11:40

http://english.aljazeera.net.nyud.net:8090/mritems/Images/2011/6/30/201163010313459734_20.jpg

John Negroponte was the US ambassador to Honduras, a country that was known as the 'USS Honduras' (GALLO/GETTY)

A few months after the 2009 coup d'etat against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, I was approached on the street in Tegucigalpa by a man who threatened to kill me unless I produced an economic incentive sufficient to halt my demise. I suggested that we walk to an ATM and postponed the issue of my lack of an ATM card to an indefinite future point.

Fortunately, by the time we reached the nearest gas station, my companion had finished a bottle of aguardiente and our conversation had taken an unexpected course. Thanking me for the stroll, he requested that I adopt his 18-month-old son in order to spare the child his girlfriend's crack cocaine habit.

The brief but tragic death of Popeye's

From the gas station I procured a ride back in the direction of my pension with a female university student in an SUV and designer sunglasses, whose analysis of what had just transpired was that 80 percent of Hondurans were thugs. By coincidence, her calculations also revealed that 80 percent of Hondurans were poor and that this was why the recently-expatriated Zelaya was so popular, which did not alter her view that Honduran democracy had in fact been upheld by his forcible expulsion from the country.

The expulsion was orchestrated once Zelaya had shown himself to be incompatible with everything from the regional neoliberal project to the elite Opus Dei sect's obsession with banning the morning-after pill. The president's transgressions had included raising the minimum wage in certain sectors and paying slightly more attention than previous leaders to the complaints of poor communities tired of the effects of international mining endeavors on their skin and reproductive abilities. The last straw was Zelaya's attempt to poll the citizenry as to whether the national constitution- which hails from the era in which the country was affectionately referred to as the "USS Honduras" and is skewed in the interest of approximately ten families who dominate the economy - should be revised.

More:
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/06/20116308238988474.html