Guardian: Honduras, one year after the coup

[Judi Lynn]

Honduras, one year after the coup
The US is pushing for normalisation with Honduras, but violence and repression are rising – and journalists are in the crosshairs
Joseph Huff-Hannon guardian.co.uk,
Monday 28 June 2010 19.00 BST

"Right now there are a bunch of military trucks driving around the city, full of soldiers, surrounding most of the important buildings downtown," Karla Lara tells me over the phone from the capital of Honduras, on the eve of the one-year anniversary of last year's coup d'etat. "It's pretty clear they're trying to scare people."

The renowned singer and human rights activist was speaking to me from her recording studio in Tegucigalpa, where she was rehearsing for a big public concert, organised by the National Front of Popular Resistance, to mark the anniversary. "The 28th isn't about commemorating the coup, it's about repudiating it. We want to celebrate the day as a year of being in resistance. I have the coverage of being a public person, but it's been very, very intense. You get physically exhausted, but also emotionally exhausted."

The National Front of Popular Resistance, a coalition of hundreds of diverse civil society groups, was born out of last year's coup d'etat – when the military kidnapped then president José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, and forcibly exiled him and his family from the country. The rupture of the constitutional order in Honduras, Latin America's first and only 21st century coup, unleashed a violent campaign of repression across the country under the coup government of Roberto Micheletti. That wave of violence and generalised impunity, largely directed against opponents of the coup regime, continues to this day under the government of president Porfirio Lobo, elected last November while the country was under a state of siege, in an election to which the UN and the OAS didn't even bother to send observers, and which a plurality of Latin American governments have refused to acknowledge.

"In Honduras right now there is a military-business regime, with a little bit of democratic makeup," Gerardo Torres, a Honduran activist visiting the United States Social Forum last week, told me. "But what people need to know is that more assassinations are happening now during the 'democratic' rule of President Lobo than during the era of Micheletti. When Micheletti ran the coup government, killings of students or resistance members were at least controversial, they made the international news. But the international news media has moved on – which is sad since now they're killing journalists."

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jun/28/honduras-coup-one-year

[Robert DAH Bruce]

1. Is it possible we could just leave that country be?

NAH! Of COURSE not!