UN experts voice shock at killing of prominent rights defender in Honduras

[Judi Lynn]

Source: United Nations

UN experts voice shock at killing of prominent rights defender in Honduras

1 October 2012 – Three independent United Nations experts have expressed their dismay at the killing in Honduras of prominent human rights lawyer Antonio Trejo Cabrera, who was very active in the media denouncing alleged abuses by landowners and politicians.

The killing is “totally unacceptable,” said the UN Special Rapporteurs on the situation of human rights defenders, Margaret Sekaggya; extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns; and freedom of expression, Frank La Rue.

Mr. Trejo Cabrera was shot five times in the vicinity of Toncontín airport in Tegucigalpa on 2 September and died shortly after from his injuries, according to a news release issued by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

He was the lead lawyer for Movimiento Auténtico Reivindicador Campesino del Aguán Region and represented several agrarian cooperatives in the Lower Aguán Region in legal disputes with powerful landowners. Hours before his killing, he had participated in a televised debate in which he accused political leaders of using private city projects to raise campaign funds.

Read more: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=43155&Cr=Honduras&Cr1=

[DollarBillHines]

1. It's just talk, talk, talk...

Not a f***ing word on what is really going on.

Like the nuns getting killed in Brazil. All kinds of frothy outrage about the killing and nothing about the "why".

OK, I'll climb down off my soapbox and be - at least - a bit grateful that the assassination of Trejo is getting any UN attention at all.

Keep fighting the Good Fight, Judi Lynn.
DBH

[pscot]

2. That's sort of traditional down there

I thought.

[mojowork_n]

3. Highest murder rate on the planet.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/19/mr-president-you-are-abetting-murder-in-honduras/

The murder rate in Honduras now leads the world. Depending on how you count it, it is the second or third poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Over and over again, the stories we heard were very similar. The government doesn’t respect its own laws, the judges are bought and sold by the few who can afford them, and all this is done to increase the power and wealth of that country’s 1%. And your administration makes it worse by supporting this with guns and more guns.

Besides the many witnesses we interviewed, last Thursday afternoon we personally witnessed a small taste of what the Honduran people routinely endure.

While speaking with witnesses to a combined police/military/private security assault in the city of Tocoa on September 9th that killed an elderly man, Mr. Hector Navarro, we were threatened by five gunmen guarding property claimed by one Miguel Facusse, the country’s wealthiest person and largest landowner.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/14/central-americas-newest-death-squad-democracy/

we’d be remiss if we left the Honduran government’s mentor out of this. As Mariam Herrera, an Afro-Honduran woman told me yesterday, “The politics of this country are shitty. The laws are shitty, and everybody violates them. Half the Congress violates the laws.” Do you hold the United States responsible for part of that? “Yes, because the guns come from the United States. Honduras don’t manufacture guns, we have machetes. Guns – they come from the United States.”

Today we will attempt to visit the scene of a shooting of two campesinos by the employees of Miguel Facusse, the largest landowner and one of the wealthiest men in the Honduras. Herman Alejandro Maldonado was killed and Ivis Ortega was gravely wounded. They were working on the plantation (finca) of Panama, in the Aguan valley of northern Honduras. This brings the number of murdered compesinos in the Aguan Valley to 79 since the U.S.-supported coup in June 2009.

With the government and the rich deeply unpopular in most quarters and yet apparently committed to holding power regardless of human cost, all activists here fear that the violence will escalate in the run up to primary elections this November, and national elections in November 2013.