An Inconvenient Truth in Honduras
By Rodolfo Pastor Campos, April 7, 2011
At the same time that the police and the Honduran army were brutally repressing popular protests of teachers, students, and resistance members for the sixth day in a row, Julissa Reynoso was greeting Honduran President Porfirio Lobo at the presidential palace. According to the press release issued by the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Reynoso was there to recognize President Lobo’s achievements regarding national reconciliation, human rights, and the return to democracy in Honduras.
That same day, in Washington DC, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States held a series of three hearings regarding the ongoing crisis in Honduras. National and international human rights organizations, renowned human rights activists, and the direct victims of the repression and political persecution presented the cases one after the other. Representatives of the Honduran government were also present to receive the reports and answer the accusations.
Documents, pictures, videos, and statistics of the beaten, the arbitrarily detained, the tortured, and the executed were all presented to the commission. The commissioners then listened to the Honduran government’s presentation before reaching their initial conclusions. By the end of each of the three sessions, the commission clearly and severely condemned the government’s violent abuse of human rights activists, peasants, teachers, students, journalists, and other members and supporters of the popular resistance movement.
President Lobo’s representatives provided no credible response or convincing argument backed up by facts for any of the evidence presented to the commissioners. As they scrambled to justify a state policy of repression and persecution, the government representatives ended up contradicting themselves. When the commissioners inquired about the total number of police officers charged with human rights abuses since the coup, the Honduran government representatives could not provide one. When the commission asked about the number of public prosecutors appointed to defend human rights, the government claimed "around 18," but the commission subsequently determined on a visit to the country that only two had been appointed. The commissioners contrasted the explanations given by the Honduran government’s officials with the results of the commission’s own recent findings while in Honduras, making it obvious that the official presentation was at best deceiving if not outright fictitious.
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