14 July 2009

Honduras update

The coup regime has expelled all journalists not loyal to them which means there’s still some Reuters reporters there. As there are no more journalists left to kill, they have turned their attention to killing opposition leaders, with the assassinations reported this week of Roger Bados and Ramon Garcia. The coup is doing everything in the area of threats, detentions, and communications sabotage to keep all inconvenient information from getting out of the country, and Reuters has not reported any of the assassinations this month.

In fact, Reuters is changing the results of published polls to bolster the coup. A CID-Gallup poll conducted in Honduras showed the public opposing the coup 46-41. The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and Reuters didn’t like that result, so they all changed the 46 opposed to 28. None of those newspapers retracted their figures. Gee, it would be a shame if people stopped reading those papers.

Eva Golinger reported yesterday that after the coup regime hired old Clinton friends Lanny Davis and Bennett Ratcliff to lobby on their behalf, Secretary of State Clinton has approved a set of mediation demands on behalf of the coup regime including amnesty for what’s happened this month and shared governance. In the end, Obama is the Commander-in-Chief and has to be held responsible for rewarding political killings and suspensions of civil rights and constitutional democracy, as well as being held responsible for selecting a Secretary of State with a well-deserved bad reputation in the hemisphere and a foreign policy resume which was falsified from start to finish.

As Clinton’s support of the coup raises larger questions of the extent and nature of the effort to reverse the left turn of Latin American democracy by covert action, Hugo Chavez caused a stir by saying he has information that there are coups being planned in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. The Guatemalan president has denied any knowledge of such a threat to his governance, but he has been the subject of what seems to be a frame-up for the murder of attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg. As John Ross says:

Perhaps the most likely proscenium for a Honduras-like "golpe" remains coup-prone Guatemala where military gorillas thrive, right-wing death squads enjoy unbridled impunity, and the civil society is weak. History, in fact, points in this direction - Alvaro Colum is the first president to be elected from a left-wing party since Jacobo Arbenz who, 55 years ago, was forced to flee Guatemala in his underwear.

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