All they are saying… Honduras
When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
Hélder Câmara (1909-1999)
In Honduras there is a risk of civil war, and if war breaks out, it will be the sole sole responsibility of the de facto government of Roberto Micheletti. One month ago today serious and daily violations of human rights began with the raid on the home, arrest, and subsequent expulsion from the country’s constitutional President Manuel Zelaya. Illegal curfews, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, curtailments of freedom of expression, restrictions on freedom of movement and a clear persecution — particularly against trade union leaders and defenders of the basic human rights, social leaders, journalists and foreigners — have followed. All perpertrated in that nation by the civil-miliary coup d’etat.
Rosa Elvira Vargas, Jornada (Mexico)
In the eastern part of the country, near the Nicaraguan border, the curfew which was from Friday noon to 6 am Sunday was extended from 6 am to 6 pm today and later extended until 6 am. This means that the area will have been virtually closed down for 66 hours straight. (I thought it was only from Saturday noon, but La Prensa, a pro-coup newspaper, said it was from Friday noon.) This curfew means that anyone on the street can be arrested. Thus some leaders of the opposition to the coup have been arrested. Also the first curfew starting at noon was, from what I’ve read, announced 20 minutes before it was supposed to start.
Is that the only way the Micheletti government thinks it can control the population?
(Hermano Juancito, Santa Rosa de Copán, Honduras)
A bomb exploded today at one of Honduras’s most combative unions, at the same time that three agents from the DNIC (National Office of Criminal Investigation) were captured by those attending the burial of the young brickmason Pedro Magdiel Muñoz Salvador.
Muñoz was killed sometime between Friday and Saturday in the most beastly manner, when he was in the town of Alauca, near the border with Nicaragua. He had gone there to join with thousands of Hondurans who went to receive President Manuel Zelaya Rosales who was going to enter Honduras on Friday. Pedro Magdiel was killed and President Zelaya returned to Nicaraguan territory when the army and the coup government refused to allow the First Lady to reunite with her husband.
Dick Emmanualson, ArgenPress.info (Buenos Aires), translation by Machetera
In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said Zelaya’s return to Honduras was “not prudent.”
Well, I guess from a safety point of view perhaps it is not prudent for Zelaya to go into Honduras. However, it seems to possible that in fact Zelaya is quite safe — would the coup members really want to hav his death on their hands? And if they did have his death on his hands, would it not make him a martyr? Do you have an inkling of what is going into the thinking of Hillary, et.al.?
I think that the US feels Zelaya’s return would be imprudent because it would vastly raise the chance of violence without offering any real solution to the crisis. Zelaya does not have the power to impose himself back into the presidency. Only very patient diplomacy – like the type being conducted by the US – can lay the groundwork for his non-violent return. It’s significant, for example, that US diplomacy has already driven a wedge between the Honduran military and the civilan golpistas, which is very clever.
This in contrast to Venezuela’s crude gunboat diplomacy, so reminiscent of the imperialism Chavez pretends to deplore, which has accomplished exactly nothing.
“Prudent”? What a joke. Was it prudent for the putschists to hustle him out of country in the dead of night, in his pajamas? That was illegal even in the current Honduran constitution!
BTW, US “diplomacy” is a joke, too. They secretly WANT that coup to succeed. That should automatically disqualify them. They are NOT honest brokers.