Honduras's 'Bloodless Coup': What You're Not Seeing on TV By Avi Lewis

[Judi Lynn]

Honduras's 'Bloodless Coup': What You're Not Seeing on TV By Avi Lewis
October 26, 2009

I arrived in Honduras one week after ousted president Manuel Zelaya returned to begin his long spell of internal exile in the Brazilian embassy. With my crew from Fault Lines on Al Jazeera English TV, I went straight from the airport to a funeral. A week later, on our last night of filming, we attended another funeral. The first was for a 24-year-old woman, the second for a 50-year-old schoolteacher, and both active in the resistance to the coup. According to their families, both were killed for it.

The coup regime in Honduras is winning. Tepid pressure from the Obama administration is making it easy for the de facto government to run out the clock until the highly compromised elections in just five weeks. Whether or not international observers bless that vote, a new government will take power in Honduras and declare the stain of the coup removed, democracy restored. Absent the kind of meaningful sanctions Washington has so far been unwilling to impose, the status quo will triumph: the backers of the coup will go unpunished.

Unsurprisingly, the US mainstream media is not reporting the story of what is really going on in Honduras. The de facto government and its backers invested $400,000 (that we know of) in bipartisan lobbying, and succeeded in implanting a deeply distorted narrative of events--a nouveau cold war story starring Hugo Chávez as puppet master and Zelaya as marionette. Meanwhile, the voice of the social movement struggling to reform its country's constitution in the second poorest nation in the hemisphere has been all but ignored.

And the killing continues. Two more alleged political murders in the last two weeks while what scant reporting there was fixated on the negotiations between Micheletti and Zelaya, a surface story that serves the coup regime's strategy and is largely irrelevant to the deeper issues at play.

In Honduras, people are dying while the world looks the other way. Real international pressure--especially from the United States--is the only force that could stop that now. But time is running out.

More:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091109/lewis

[Judi Lynn]

1. Honduran newspaper discovers murder after 3 days

Honduran newspaper discovers murder after 3 days
By Belén Fernández
Pulse Media
Sunday, Feb 28, 2010

A headline in this morning’s edition of the Honduran daily La Tribuna, fervent defender of last year’s coup d’état against President Mel Zelaya, announces the search for the “gang member” that killed the daughter of veteran union organizer and anti-coup resistance figure Pedro Brizuela. The murder of Claudia Larisa Brizuela Rodríguez, which took place on February 24 in the Céleo González neighborhood in the northern city of San Pedro Sula, had not prompted any prior coverage in the mainstream Honduran press despite the papers’ usual predilection for homicide photographs.

Honduran journalistic traditions had also been disrupted in July 2009 by the murder during a demonstration at the Tegucigalpa airport of anti-coup teenager Isis Obed Murillo, whose picture appeared in the daily La Prensa only after his blood had been removed via the Photoshop program. La Tribuna refrains from erasing the pool of blood surrounding Brizuela Rodríguez’ body on her living room floor, or from explaining how it is that members of the National Criminal Investigation Directorate (DNIC) are “hot on the trail” of the alleged gang member when the only identifying information provided by witnesses is that he is short.

During a conversation in San Pedro Sula last August, Pedro Brizuela dismissed his daughter’s concern regarding his potential martyrdom on behalf of the resistance and reasoned that he was already old, anyway. As it turns out, Brizuela Rodríguez’ concern was only slightly misplaced, and she was shot at age 36 upon answering the door at her home—a scene witnessed by her two sons, ages 2 and 8. La Tribuna concludes:

The femicide has caused consternation among civil and trade union organizations, due to her father’s decades-long involvement in these sorts of activities.”

~link~

[Judi Lynn]

2. The Sham Elections in Honduras By Laura Carlsen

The Sham Elections in Honduras By Laura Carlsen
December 14, 2009

Angel Salgado lay brain-dead at the public teaching hospital the day I arrived in Tegucigalpa. On the eve of the November 29 elections, which the Honduran (and world) press later hailed as peaceful and fair, the army shot him in the head for accidentally passing one of the many military checkpoints set up around the city.

On December 2 Angel died, joining scores of other victims of the Honduran coup regime. That same day, the Honduran Congress--emboldened by its public relations victory in the elections--voted against reinstating the elected president, Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted from office on June 28 after serving for three and a half years. The vote confirmed Latin America's first successful twenty-first-century coup, and crowned the failure of US diplomacy to restore constitutional order in the impoverished Central American nation.

Honduran National Party candidate Porfirio Lobo won handily November 29 over the runner-up from the badly divided Liberal Party. Assistant Secretary of State Arturo Valenzuela immediately recognized Lobo as the elected president, hailing the elections as "a significant step in Honduras' return to the democratic and constitutional order after the 28 June coup." The country's coup-controlled press trumpeted the vote as proof that democracy was alive and well in Honduras. The international press endorsed the "generally peaceful" elections, with the New York Times calling them "clean and fair."

The Honduran elections were far from free, fair or peaceful. The coup regime rejected all diplomatic attempts to restore the nation's democracy before holding elections, keeping the constitutional president trapped behind barricades in the Brazilian Embassy. It then pretended that the elections themselves constituted a return to democratic order.

The coup's dictatorial decrees restricting freedom of assembly, freedom of speech and freedom of movement held the nation in a virtual state of siege in the weeks prior to the elections. Over forty registered candidates resigned in protest. Members of the resistance movement were harassed, beaten and detained. In San Pedro Sula, an election-day march was brutally repressed.

More:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091221/carlsen

[Bacchus39]

3. dated October before the election n/t

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[roody]

4. and still true and relevant.