Banker's Global Dictatorship: A global network of fascism united by a banker's interest in activities, clandestine and above-board, which serves the purpose for a profit-driven global regime.
[worldfascism.blogspot.com/2012/12/bankers-global-dictatorship.html]
* "Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever", 2013-04-25 by Matt Tabibi [worldfascism.blogspot.com/2013/04/2013-04-25-everything-is-rigged-biggest.html]
Investment capitalists engaging in rivalry over food crops have consolidated land holdings across the world, a process which has destroyed food security for nearly a billion people, and has artificially created famine.
[worldfascism.blogspot.com/2012/10/2012-10-04-report-unbridled-rush-for.html]
92,000 individuals control assets monetized at 6.3 Trillion UK pounds
[worldfascism.blogspot.com/2012/07/92000-individuals-control-assets.html]
State subsidized illicit narcotic cartels [worldfascism.blogspot.com/2012/10/colombia-united-states-engage-in-narco.html]
Monday, April 29, 2013
USA's government in "Afghanistan" is a heroin cartel
2013-04-29 "Afghan Leader Confirms Cash Deliveries by C.I.A."
by MATTHEW ROSENBERG from "New York Times" [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/world/asia/karzai-acknowledges-cash-deliveries-by-cia.html]:
KABUL, Afghanistan — President Hamid Karzai acknowledged Monday that the Central Intelligence Agency has been dropping off bags of cash at his office for a decade, saying the money was used for “various purposes” and expressing gratitude to the United States for making the payments.
Mr. Karzai described the sums delivered by the C.I.A. as a “small amount,” though he offered few other details. But former and current advisers of the Afghan leader have said the C.I.A. cash deliveries have totaled tens of millions of dollars over the past decade and have been used to pay off warlords, lawmakers and others whose support the Afghan leader depends upon.
The payments are not universally supported in the United States government. American diplomats and soldiers expressed dismay on Monday about the C.I.A.’s cash deliveries, which some said fueled corruption. They spoke privately because the C.I.A. effort is classified.
Others were not so restrained. “We’ve all suspected it,” said Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah and a critic of the war effort in Afghanistan. “But for President Karzai to admit it out loud brings us into a bizarro world.”
Mr. Karzai’s comments, made at a news conference in Helsinki, Finland, where he is traveling, were not without precedent. When it emerged in 2010 that one of his top aides was taking bags of cash from Iran, Mr. Karzai readily confirmed those reports and expressed gratitude for the money. Iran cut off its payments last year after Afghanistan signed a strategic partnership deal with the United States over Iran’s objections.
The C.I.A. money continues to flow, Mr. Karzai said Monday. “Yes, the office of national security has been receiving support from the United States for the past 10 years,” he told reporters in response to a question. “Not a big amount. A small amount, which has been used for various purposes.” He said the money was paid monthly.
Afghan officials who described the payments before Monday’s comments from Mr. Karzai said the cash from the C.I.A. was basically used as a slush fund, similarly to the way the Iranian money was. Some went to pay supporters; some went to cover other expenses that officials would prefer to keep off the books, like secret diplomatic trips, officials have said.
After Mr. Karzai’s statement on Monday, the presidential palace in Kabul said in a statement that the C.I.A. cash “has been used for different purposes, such as in operations, assisting wounded Afghan soldiers and paying rent.” The statement continued, “The assistance has been very useful, and we are thankful to them for it.”
The C.I.A. payments open a window to an element of the war that has often gone unnoticed: the agency’s use of cash to clandestinely buy the loyalty of Afghans. The agency paid powerful warlords to fight against the Taliban during the 2001 invasion. It then continued paying Afghans to keep battling the Taliban and help track down the remnants of Al Qaeda. Mr. Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali, who was assassinated in 2011, was among those paid by the agency, for instance.
But the cash deliveries to Mr. Karzai’s office are of a different magnitude with a far wider impact, helping the palace finance the vast patronage networks that Mr. Karzai has used to build his power base. The payments appear to run directly counter to American efforts to clean up endemic corruption and encourage the Afghan government to be more responsive to the needs of its constituents.
“I thought we were trying to clean up waste, fraud and abuse in Afghanistan,” said Mr. Chaffetz, whose House subcommittee has investigated corruption in the country. “We have no credibility on this issue when we’re complicit ourselves. I’m sure it was more than a few hundred dollars.”
In Afghanistan, reaction to reports of the payments ranged from conspiratorial to bemused. A former adviser to Mr. Karzai said the palace was rife with speculation that the details of the payments had been leaked to settle a bureaucratic or diplomatic score, either by Afghans or by American officials.
Outside official circles, some Afghans offered a lighter take. “They make it sound as if it was a charity money dashed by a spy agency,” wrote Sayed Salahuddin, an Afghan journalist, on Twitter, referring to the palace statement that money had been used to help wounded soldiers. “They must have ‘treated’ many people.”
2013-04-28 "With Bags of Cash, C.I.A. Seeks Influence in Afghanistan"
by MATTHEW ROSENBERG and Mark Mazzetti from "New York Times" [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/world/asia/cia-delivers-cash-to-afghan-leaders-office.html]:
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction (April 29, 2013): An earlier version of this article misstated the job title that Khalil Roman held in Afghanistan from 2002 until 2005. He was President Hamid Karzai’s deputy chief of staff, not his chief of staff.
---
KABUL, Afghanistan — For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.
All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.
“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”
The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html] and close aides of Mr. Karzai [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/world/asia/26kabul.html]. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.
Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.
“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”
The United States was not alone in delivering cash to the president. Mr. Karzai acknowledged a few years ago that Iran regularly gave bags of cash to one of his top aides.
At the time, in 2010, American officials jumped on the payments as evidence of an aggressive Iranian campaign to buy influence and poison Afghanistan’s relations with the United States [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/asia/24afghan.html]. What they did not say was that the C.I.A. was also plying the presidential palace with cash — and unlike the Iranians, it still is.
American and Afghan officials familiar with the payments said the agency’s main goal in providing the cash has been to maintain access to Mr. Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the agency’s influence at the presidential palace, which wields tremendous power in Afghanistan’s highly centralized government. The officials spoke about the money only on the condition of anonymity.
It is not clear that the United States is getting what it pays for. Mr. Karzai’s willingness to defy the United States — and the Iranians, for that matter — on an array of issues seems to have only grown as the cash has piled up. Instead of securing his good graces, the payments may well illustrate the opposite: Mr. Karzai is seemingly unable to be bought.
Over Iran’s objections, he signed a strategic partnership deal with the United States last year, directly leading the Iranians to halt their payments, two senior Afghan officials said [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/world/asia/obama-lands-in-kabul-on-unannounced-visit.html]. Now, Mr. Karzai is seeking control over the Afghan militias raised by the C.I.A. to target operatives of Al Qaeda and insurgent commanders, potentially upending a critical part of the Obama administration’s plans for fighting militants as conventional military forces pull back this year.
But the C.I.A. has continued to pay, believing it needs Mr. Karzai’s ear to run its clandestine war against Al Qaeda and its allies, according to American and Afghan officials.
Like the Iranian cash, much of the C.I.A.’s money goes to paying off warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban. The result, American and Afghan officials said, is that the agency has greased the wheels of the same patronage networks that American diplomats and law enforcement agents have struggled unsuccessfully to dismantle, leaving the government in the grips of what are basically organized crime syndicates [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/weekinreview/05filkins.html].
The cash does not appear to be subject to the oversight and restrictions placed on official American aid to the country or even the C.I.A.’s formal assistance programs, like financing Afghan intelligence agencies. And while there is no evidence that Mr. Karzai has personally taken any of the money — Afghan officials say the cash is handled by his National Security Council — the payments do in some cases work directly at odds with the aims of other parts of the American government in Afghanistan, even if they do not appear to violate American law.
Handing out cash has been standard procedure for the C.I.A. in Afghanistan since the start of the war. During the 2001 invasion, agency cash bought the services of numerous warlords, including Muhammad Qasim Fahim, the current first vice president.
“We paid them to overthrow the Taliban,” the American official said.
The C.I.A. then kept paying the Afghans to keep fighting. For instance, Mr. Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was paid by the C.I.A. to run the Kandahar Strike Force, a militia used by the agency to combat militants, until his assassination in 2011 [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/world/asia/13afghanistan.html?ref=ahmedwalikarzai].
A number of senior officials on the Afghan National Security Council are also individually on the agency’s payroll, Afghan officials said.
While intelligence agencies often pay foreign officials to provide information, dropping off bags of cash at a foreign leader’s office to curry favor is a more unusual arrangement.
Afghan officials said the practice grew out of the unique circumstances in Afghanistan, where the United States built the government that Mr. Karzai runs. To accomplish that task, it had to bring to heel many of the warlords the C.I.A. had paid during and after the 2001 invasion.
By late 2002, Mr. Karzai and his aides were pressing for the payments to be routed through the president’s office, allowing him to buy the warlords’ loyalty, a former adviser to Mr. Karzai said.
Then, in December 2002, Iranians showed up at the palace in a sport utility vehicle packed with cash, the former adviser said.
The C.I.A. began dropping off cash at the palace the following month, and the sums grew from there, Afghan officials said.
Payments ordinarily range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, the officials said, though none could provide exact figures. The money is used to cover a slew of off-the-books expenses, like paying off lawmakers or underwriting delicate diplomatic trips or informal negotiations.
Much of it also still goes to keeping old warlords in line. One is Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek whose militia served as a C.I.A. proxy force in 2001. He receives nearly $100,000 a month from the palace, two Afghan officials said. Other officials said the amount was significantly lower.
Mr. Dostum, who declined requests for comment, had previously said he was given $80,000 a month to serve as Mr. Karzai’s emissary in northern Afghanistan. “I asked for a year up front in cash so that I could build my dream house,” he was quoted as saying in a 2009 interview with Time magazine [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1879167-1,00.html].
Some of the cash also probably ends up in the pockets of the Karzai aides who handle it, Afghan and Western officials said, though they would not identify any by name.
That is not a significant concern for the C.I.A., said American officials familiar with the agency’s operations. “They’ll work with criminals if they think they have to,” one American former official said.
Interestingly, the cash from Tehran appears to have been handled with greater transparency than the dollars from the C.I.A., Afghan officials said. The Iranian payments were routed through Mr. Karzai’s chief of staff. Some of the money was deposited in an account in the president’s name at a state-run bank, and some was kept at the palace. The sum delivered would then be announced at the next cabinet meeting. The Iranians gave $3 million to well over $10 million a year, Afghan officials said.
When word of the Iranian cash leaked out in October 2010, Mr. Karzai told reporters that he was grateful for it [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/26/world/asia/26afghan.html]. He then added: “The United States is doing the same thing. They are providing cash to some of our offices.”
At the time, Mr. Karzai’s aides said he was referring to the billions in formal aid the United States gives. But the former adviser said in a recent interview that the president was in fact referring to the C.I.A.’s bags of cash.
No one mentions the agency’s money at cabinet meetings. It is handled by a small clique at the National Security Council, including its administrative chief, Mohammed Zia Salehi, Afghan officials said.
Mr. Salehi, though, is better known for being arrested in 2010 in connection with a sprawling, American-led investigation that tied together Afghan cash smuggling, Taliban finances and the opium trade. Mr. Karzai had him released within hours, and the C.I.A. then helped persuade the Obama administration to back off its anticorruption push, American officials said.
After his release, Mr. Salehi jokingly came up with a motto that succinctly summed up America’s conflicting priorities. He was, he began telling colleagues, “an enemy of the F.B.I., and a hero to the C.I.A.”
Thursday, April 25, 2013
2013-04-25 "Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever: The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix"
by Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425]:
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."
That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.
It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.
The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia -
Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.
"It's a double conspiracy," says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. "It's the height of criminality."
The bad news didn't stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. "Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry," CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.
But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants' incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.
"A farce," was one antitrust lawyer's response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.
"Incredible," says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.
All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.
If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.
The banks found a loophole, a basic flaw in the machine. Across the financial system, there are places where prices or official indices are set based upon unverified data sent in by private banks and financial companies. In other words, we gave the players with incentives to game the system institutional roles in the economic infrastructure.
Libor, which measures the prices banks charge one another to borrow money, is a perfect example, not only of this basic flaw in the price-setting system but of the weakness in the regulatory framework supposedly policing it. Couple a voluntary reporting scheme with too-big-to-fail status and a revolving-door legal system, and what you get is unstoppable corruption.
Every morning, 18 of the world's biggest banks submit data to an office in London about how much they believe they would have to pay to borrow from other banks. The 18 banks together are called the "Libor panel," and when all of these data from all 18 panelist banks are collected, the numbers are averaged out. What emerges, every morning at 11:30 London time, are the daily Libor figures.
Banks submit numbers about borrowing in 10 different currencies across 15 different time periods, e.g., loans as short as one day and as long as one year. This mountain of bank-submitted data is used every day to create benchmark rates that affect the prices of everything from credit cards to mortgages to currencies to commercial loans (both short- and long-term) to swaps.
Gangster Bankers Broke Every Law in the Book -
Dating back perhaps as far as the early Nineties, traders and others inside these banks were sometimes calling up the company geeks responsible for submitting the daily Libor numbers (the "Libor submitters") and asking them to fudge the numbers. Usually, the gimmick was the trader had made a bet on something – a swap, currencies, something – and he wanted the Libor submitter to make the numbers look lower (or, occasionally, higher) to help his bet pay off.
Famously, one Barclays trader monkeyed with Libor submissions in exchange for a bottle of Bollinger champagne, but in some cases, it was even lamer than that. This is from an exchange between a trader and a Libor submitter at the Royal Bank of Scotland:
SWISS FRANC TRADER: can u put 6m swiss libor in low pls?...
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: Whats it worth
SWSISS FRANC TRADER: ive got some sushi rolls from yesterday?...
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: ok low 6m, just for u
SWISS FRANC TRADER: wooooooohooooooo. . . thatd be awesome
Screwing around with world interest rates that affect billions of people in exchange for day-old sushi – it's hard to imagine an image that better captures the moral insanity of the modern financial-services sector.
Hundreds of similar exchanges were uncovered when regulators like Britain's Financial Services Authority and the U.S. Justice Department started burrowing into the befouled entrails of Libor. The documentary evidence of anti-competitive manipulation they found was so overwhelming that, to read it, one almost becomes embarrassed for the banks. "It's just amazing how Libor fixing can make you that much money," chirped one yen trader. "Pure manipulation going on," wrote another.
Yet despite so many instances of at least attempted manipulation, the banks mostly skated. Barclays got off with a relatively minor fine in the $450 million range, UBS was stuck with $1.5 billion in penalties, and RBS was forced to give up $615 million. Apart from a few low-level flunkies overseas, no individual involved in this scam that impacted nearly everyone in the industrialized world was even threatened with criminal prosecution.
Two of America's top law-enforcement officials, Attorney General Eric Holder and former Justice Department Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer, confessed that it's dangerous to prosecute offending banks because they are simply too big. Making arrests, they say, might lead to "collateral consequences" in the economy.
The relatively small sums of money extracted in these settlements did not go toward reparations for the cities, towns and other victims who lost money due to Libor manipulation. Instead, it flowed mindlessly into government coffers. So it was left to towns and cities like Baltimore (which lost money due to fluctuations in their municipal investments caused by Libor movements), pensions like the New Britain, Connecticut, Firefighters' and Police Benefit Fund, and other foundations – and even individuals (billionaire real-estate developer Sheldon Solow, who filed his own suit in February, claims that his company lost $450 million because of Libor manipulation) – to sue the banks for damages.
One of the biggest Libor suits was proceeding on schedule when, early in March, an army of superstar lawyers working on behalf of the banks descended upon federal judge Naomi Buchwald in the Southern District of New York to argue an extraordinary motion to dismiss. The banks' legal dream team drew from heavyweight Beltway-connected firms like Boies Schiller (you remember David Boies represented Al Gore), Davis Polk (home of top ex-regulators like former SEC enforcement chief Linda Thomsen) and Covington & Burling, the onetime private-practice home of both Holder and Breuer.
The presence of Covington & Burling in the suit – representing, of all companies, Citigroup, the former employer of current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew – was particularly galling. Right as the Libor case was being dismissed, the firm had hired none other than Lanny Breuer, the same Lanny Breuer who, just a few months before, was the assistant attorney general who had balked at criminally prosecuting UBS over Libor because, he said, "Our goal here is not to destroy a major financial institution."
In any case, this all-star squad of white-shoe lawyers came before Buchwald and made the mother of all audacious arguments. Robert Wise of Davis Polk, representing Bank of America, told Buchwald that the banks could not possibly be guilty of anti- competitive collusion because nobody ever said that the creation of Libor was competitive. "It is essential to our argument that this is not a competitive process," he said. "The banks do not compete with one another in the submission of Libor."
If you squint incredibly hard and look at the issue through a mirror, maybe while standing on your head, you can sort of see what Wise is saying. In a very theoretical, technical sense, the actual process by which banks submit Libor data – 18 geeks sending numbers to the British Bankers' Association offices in London once every morning – is not competitive per se.
But these numbers are supposed to reflect interbank-loan prices derived in a real, competitive market. Saying the Libor submission process is not competitive is sort of like pointing out that bank robbers obeyed the speed limit on the way to the heist. It's the silliest kind of legal sophistry.
But Wise eventually outdid even that argument, essentially saying that while the banks may have lied to or cheated their customers, they weren't guilty of the particular crime of antitrust collusion. This is like the old joke about the lawyer who gets up in court and claims his client had to be innocent, because his client was committing a crime in a different state at the time of the offense.
"The plaintiffs, I believe, are confusing a claim of being perhaps deceived," he said, "with a claim for harm to competition."
Judge Buchwald swallowed this lunatic argument whole and dismissed most of the case. Libor, she said, was a "cooperative endeavor" that was "never intended to be competitive." Her decision "does not reflect the reality of this business, where all of these banks were acting as competitors throughout the process," said the antitrust lawyer Sokol. Buchwald made this ruling despite the fact that both the U.S. and British governments had already settled with three banks for billions of dollars for improper manipulation, manipulation that these companies admitted to in their settlements.
Michael Hausfeld of Hausfeld LLP, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs in this Libor suit, declined to comment specifically on the dismissal. But he did talk about the significance of the Libor case and other manipulation cases now in the pipeline.
"It's now evident that there is a ubiquitous culture among the banks to collude and cheat their customers as many times as they can in as many forms as they can conceive," he said. "And that's not just surmising. This is just based upon what they've been caught at."
Greenberger says the lack of serious consequences for the Libor scandal has only made other kinds of manipulation more inevitable. "There's no therapy like sending those who are used to wearing Gucci shoes to jail," he says. "But when the attorney general says, 'I don't want to indict people,' it's the Wild West. There's no law."
The problem is, a number of markets feature the same infrastructural weakness that failed in the Libor mess. In the case of interest-rate swaps and the ISDAfix benchmark, the system is very similar to Libor, although the investigation into these markets reportedly focuses on some different types of improprieties.
Though interest-rate swaps are not widely understood outside the finance world, the root concept actually isn't that hard. If you can imagine taking out a variable-rate mortgage and then paying a bank to make your loan payments fixed, you've got the basic idea of an interest-rate swap.
In practice, it might be a country like Greece or a regional government like Jefferson County, Alabama, that borrows money at a variable rate of interest, then later goes to a bank to "swap" that loan to a more predictable fixed rate. In its simplest form, the customer in a swap deal is usually paying a premium for the safety and security of fixed interest rates, while the firm selling the swap is usually betting that it knows more about future movements in interest rates than its customers.
Prices for interest-rate swaps are often based on ISDAfix, which, like Libor, is yet another of these privately calculated benchmarks. ISDAfix's U.S. dollar rates are published every day, at 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., after a gang of the same usual-suspect megabanks (Bank of America, RBS, Deutsche, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, etc.) submits information about bids and offers for swaps.
And here's what we know so far: The CFTC has sent subpoenas to ICAP and to as many as 15 of those member banks, and plans to interview about a dozen ICAP employees from the company's office in Jersey City, New Jersey. Moreover, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, or ISDA, which works together with ICAP (for U.S. dollar transactions) and Thomson Reuters to compute the ISDAfix benchmark, has hired the consulting firm Oliver Wyman to review the process by which ISDAfix is calculated. Oliver Wyman is the same company that the British Bankers' Association hired to review the Libor submission process after that scandal broke last year. The upshot of all of this is that it looks very much like ISDAfix could be Libor all over again.
"It's obviously reminiscent of the Libor manipulation issue," Darrell Duffie, a finance professor at Stanford University, told reporters. "People may have been naive that simply reporting these rates was enough to avoid manipulation."
And just like in Libor, the potential losers in an interest-rate-swap manipulation scandal would be the same sad-sack collection of cities, towns, companies and other nonbank entities that have no way of knowing if they're paying the real price for swaps or a price being manipulated by bank insiders for profit. Moreover, ISDAfix is not only used to calculate prices for interest-rate swaps, it's also used to set values for about $550 billion worth of bonds tied to commercial real estate, and also affects the payouts on some state-pension annuities.
So although it's not quite as widespread as Libor, ISDAfix is sufficiently power-jammed into the world financial infrastructure that any manipulation of the rate would be catastrophic – and a huge class of victims that could include everyone from state pensioners to big cities to wealthy investors in structured notes would have no idea they were being robbed.
"How is some municipality in Cleveland or wherever going to know if it's getting ripped off?" asks Michael Masters of Masters Capital Management, a fund manager who has long been an advocate of greater transparency in the derivatives world. "The answer is, they won't know."
Worse still, the CFTC investigation apparently isn't limited to possible manipulation of swap prices by monkeying around with ISDAfix. According to reports, the commission is also looking at whether or not employees at ICAP may have intentionally delayed publication of swap prices, which in theory could give someone (bankers, cough, cough) a chance to trade ahead of the information.
Swap prices are published when ICAP employees manually enter the data on a computer screen called "19901." Some 6,000 customers subscribe to a service that allows them to access the data appearing on the 19901 screen.
The key here is that unlike a more transparent, regulated market like the New York Stock Exchange, where the results of stock trades are computed more or less instantly and everyone in theory can immediately see the impact of trading on the prices of stocks, in the swap market the whole world is dependent upon a handful of brokers quickly and honestly entering data about trades by hand into a computer terminal.
Any delay in entering price data would provide the banks involved in the transactions with a rare opportunity to trade ahead of the information. One way to imagine it would be to picture a racetrack where a giant curtain is pulled over the track as the horses come down the stretch – and the gallery is only told two minutes later which horse actually won. Anyone on the right side of the curtain could make a lot of smart bets before the audience saw the results of the race.
At ICAP, the interest-rate swap desk, and the 19901 screen, were reportedly controlled by a small group of 20 or so brokers, some of whom were making millions of dollars. These brokers made so much money for themselves the unit was nicknamed "Treasure Island."
Already, there are some reports that brokers of Treasure Island did create such intentional delays. Bloomberg interviewed a former broker who claims that he watched ICAP brokers delay the reporting of swap prices. "That allows dealers to tell the brokers to delay putting trades into the system instead of in real time," Bloomberg wrote, noting the former broker had "witnessed such activity firsthand." An ICAP spokesman has no comment on the story, though the company has released a statement saying that it is "cooperating" with the CFTC's inquiry and that it "maintains policies that prohibit" the improper behavior alleged in news reports.
The idea that prices in a $379 trillion market could be dependent on a desk of about 20 guys in New Jersey should tell you a lot about the absurdity of our financial infrastructure. The whole thing, in fact, has a darkly comic element to it. "It's almost hilarious in the irony," says David Frenk, director of research for Better Markets, a financial-reform advocacy group, "that they called it ISDAfix."
After scandals involving libor and, perhaps, ISDAfix, the question that should have everyone freaked out is this: What other markets out there carry the same potential for manipulation? The answer to that question is far from reassuring, because the potential is almost everywhere. From gold to gas to swaps to interest rates, prices all over the world are dependent upon little private cabals of cigar-chomping insiders we're forced to trust.
"In all the over-the-counter markets, you don't really have pricing except by a bunch of guys getting together," Masters notes glumly.
That includes the markets for gold (where prices are set by five banks in a Libor-ish teleconferencing process that, ironically, was created in part by N M Rothschild & Sons) and silver (whose price is set by just three banks), as well as benchmark rates in numerous other commodities – jet fuel, diesel, electric power, coal, you name it. The problem in each of these markets is the same: We all have to rely upon the honesty of companies like Barclays (already caught and fined $453 million for rigging Libor) or JPMorgan Chase (paid a $228 million settlement for rigging municipal-bond auctions) or UBS (fined a collective $1.66 billion for both muni-bond rigging and Libor manipulation) to faithfully report the real prices of things like interest rates, swaps, currencies and commodities.
All of these benchmarks based on voluntary reporting are now being looked at by regulators around the world, and God knows what they'll find. The European Federation of Financial Services Users wrote in an official EU survey last summer that all of these systems are ripe targets for manipulation. "In general," it wrote, "those markets which are based on non-attested, voluntary submission of data from agents whose benefits depend on such benchmarks are especially vulnerable of market abuse and distortion."
Translation: When prices are set by companies that can profit by manipulating them, we're fucked.
"You name it," says Frenk. "Any of these benchmarks is a possibility for corruption."
The only reason this problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the scale of it is so enormous that ordinary people simply cannot see it. It's not just stealing by reaching a hand into your pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever's in your pocket worth less. This is corruption at the molecular level of the economy, Space Age stealing – and it's only just coming into view.
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."
That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.
It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.
The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia -
Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.
"It's a double conspiracy," says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. "It's the height of criminality."
The bad news didn't stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. "Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry," CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.
But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants' incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.
"A farce," was one antitrust lawyer's response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.
"Incredible," says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.
All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.
If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.
The banks found a loophole, a basic flaw in the machine. Across the financial system, there are places where prices or official indices are set based upon unverified data sent in by private banks and financial companies. In other words, we gave the players with incentives to game the system institutional roles in the economic infrastructure.
Libor, which measures the prices banks charge one another to borrow money, is a perfect example, not only of this basic flaw in the price-setting system but of the weakness in the regulatory framework supposedly policing it. Couple a voluntary reporting scheme with too-big-to-fail status and a revolving-door legal system, and what you get is unstoppable corruption.
Every morning, 18 of the world's biggest banks submit data to an office in London about how much they believe they would have to pay to borrow from other banks. The 18 banks together are called the "Libor panel," and when all of these data from all 18 panelist banks are collected, the numbers are averaged out. What emerges, every morning at 11:30 London time, are the daily Libor figures.
Banks submit numbers about borrowing in 10 different currencies across 15 different time periods, e.g., loans as short as one day and as long as one year. This mountain of bank-submitted data is used every day to create benchmark rates that affect the prices of everything from credit cards to mortgages to currencies to commercial loans (both short- and long-term) to swaps.
Gangster Bankers Broke Every Law in the Book -
Dating back perhaps as far as the early Nineties, traders and others inside these banks were sometimes calling up the company geeks responsible for submitting the daily Libor numbers (the "Libor submitters") and asking them to fudge the numbers. Usually, the gimmick was the trader had made a bet on something – a swap, currencies, something – and he wanted the Libor submitter to make the numbers look lower (or, occasionally, higher) to help his bet pay off.
Famously, one Barclays trader monkeyed with Libor submissions in exchange for a bottle of Bollinger champagne, but in some cases, it was even lamer than that. This is from an exchange between a trader and a Libor submitter at the Royal Bank of Scotland:
SWISS FRANC TRADER: can u put 6m swiss libor in low pls?...
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: Whats it worth
SWSISS FRANC TRADER: ive got some sushi rolls from yesterday?...
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: ok low 6m, just for u
SWISS FRANC TRADER: wooooooohooooooo. . . thatd be awesome
Screwing around with world interest rates that affect billions of people in exchange for day-old sushi – it's hard to imagine an image that better captures the moral insanity of the modern financial-services sector.
Hundreds of similar exchanges were uncovered when regulators like Britain's Financial Services Authority and the U.S. Justice Department started burrowing into the befouled entrails of Libor. The documentary evidence of anti-competitive manipulation they found was so overwhelming that, to read it, one almost becomes embarrassed for the banks. "It's just amazing how Libor fixing can make you that much money," chirped one yen trader. "Pure manipulation going on," wrote another.
Yet despite so many instances of at least attempted manipulation, the banks mostly skated. Barclays got off with a relatively minor fine in the $450 million range, UBS was stuck with $1.5 billion in penalties, and RBS was forced to give up $615 million. Apart from a few low-level flunkies overseas, no individual involved in this scam that impacted nearly everyone in the industrialized world was even threatened with criminal prosecution.
Two of America's top law-enforcement officials, Attorney General Eric Holder and former Justice Department Criminal Division chief Lanny Breuer, confessed that it's dangerous to prosecute offending banks because they are simply too big. Making arrests, they say, might lead to "collateral consequences" in the economy.
The relatively small sums of money extracted in these settlements did not go toward reparations for the cities, towns and other victims who lost money due to Libor manipulation. Instead, it flowed mindlessly into government coffers. So it was left to towns and cities like Baltimore (which lost money due to fluctuations in their municipal investments caused by Libor movements), pensions like the New Britain, Connecticut, Firefighters' and Police Benefit Fund, and other foundations – and even individuals (billionaire real-estate developer Sheldon Solow, who filed his own suit in February, claims that his company lost $450 million because of Libor manipulation) – to sue the banks for damages.
One of the biggest Libor suits was proceeding on schedule when, early in March, an army of superstar lawyers working on behalf of the banks descended upon federal judge Naomi Buchwald in the Southern District of New York to argue an extraordinary motion to dismiss. The banks' legal dream team drew from heavyweight Beltway-connected firms like Boies Schiller (you remember David Boies represented Al Gore), Davis Polk (home of top ex-regulators like former SEC enforcement chief Linda Thomsen) and Covington & Burling, the onetime private-practice home of both Holder and Breuer.
The presence of Covington & Burling in the suit – representing, of all companies, Citigroup, the former employer of current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew – was particularly galling. Right as the Libor case was being dismissed, the firm had hired none other than Lanny Breuer, the same Lanny Breuer who, just a few months before, was the assistant attorney general who had balked at criminally prosecuting UBS over Libor because, he said, "Our goal here is not to destroy a major financial institution."
In any case, this all-star squad of white-shoe lawyers came before Buchwald and made the mother of all audacious arguments. Robert Wise of Davis Polk, representing Bank of America, told Buchwald that the banks could not possibly be guilty of anti- competitive collusion because nobody ever said that the creation of Libor was competitive. "It is essential to our argument that this is not a competitive process," he said. "The banks do not compete with one another in the submission of Libor."
If you squint incredibly hard and look at the issue through a mirror, maybe while standing on your head, you can sort of see what Wise is saying. In a very theoretical, technical sense, the actual process by which banks submit Libor data – 18 geeks sending numbers to the British Bankers' Association offices in London once every morning – is not competitive per se.
But these numbers are supposed to reflect interbank-loan prices derived in a real, competitive market. Saying the Libor submission process is not competitive is sort of like pointing out that bank robbers obeyed the speed limit on the way to the heist. It's the silliest kind of legal sophistry.
But Wise eventually outdid even that argument, essentially saying that while the banks may have lied to or cheated their customers, they weren't guilty of the particular crime of antitrust collusion. This is like the old joke about the lawyer who gets up in court and claims his client had to be innocent, because his client was committing a crime in a different state at the time of the offense.
"The plaintiffs, I believe, are confusing a claim of being perhaps deceived," he said, "with a claim for harm to competition."
Judge Buchwald swallowed this lunatic argument whole and dismissed most of the case. Libor, she said, was a "cooperative endeavor" that was "never intended to be competitive." Her decision "does not reflect the reality of this business, where all of these banks were acting as competitors throughout the process," said the antitrust lawyer Sokol. Buchwald made this ruling despite the fact that both the U.S. and British governments had already settled with three banks for billions of dollars for improper manipulation, manipulation that these companies admitted to in their settlements.
Michael Hausfeld of Hausfeld LLP, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs in this Libor suit, declined to comment specifically on the dismissal. But he did talk about the significance of the Libor case and other manipulation cases now in the pipeline.
"It's now evident that there is a ubiquitous culture among the banks to collude and cheat their customers as many times as they can in as many forms as they can conceive," he said. "And that's not just surmising. This is just based upon what they've been caught at."
Greenberger says the lack of serious consequences for the Libor scandal has only made other kinds of manipulation more inevitable. "There's no therapy like sending those who are used to wearing Gucci shoes to jail," he says. "But when the attorney general says, 'I don't want to indict people,' it's the Wild West. There's no law."
The problem is, a number of markets feature the same infrastructural weakness that failed in the Libor mess. In the case of interest-rate swaps and the ISDAfix benchmark, the system is very similar to Libor, although the investigation into these markets reportedly focuses on some different types of improprieties.
Though interest-rate swaps are not widely understood outside the finance world, the root concept actually isn't that hard. If you can imagine taking out a variable-rate mortgage and then paying a bank to make your loan payments fixed, you've got the basic idea of an interest-rate swap.
In practice, it might be a country like Greece or a regional government like Jefferson County, Alabama, that borrows money at a variable rate of interest, then later goes to a bank to "swap" that loan to a more predictable fixed rate. In its simplest form, the customer in a swap deal is usually paying a premium for the safety and security of fixed interest rates, while the firm selling the swap is usually betting that it knows more about future movements in interest rates than its customers.
Prices for interest-rate swaps are often based on ISDAfix, which, like Libor, is yet another of these privately calculated benchmarks. ISDAfix's U.S. dollar rates are published every day, at 11:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., after a gang of the same usual-suspect megabanks (Bank of America, RBS, Deutsche, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, etc.) submits information about bids and offers for swaps.
And here's what we know so far: The CFTC has sent subpoenas to ICAP and to as many as 15 of those member banks, and plans to interview about a dozen ICAP employees from the company's office in Jersey City, New Jersey. Moreover, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, or ISDA, which works together with ICAP (for U.S. dollar transactions) and Thomson Reuters to compute the ISDAfix benchmark, has hired the consulting firm Oliver Wyman to review the process by which ISDAfix is calculated. Oliver Wyman is the same company that the British Bankers' Association hired to review the Libor submission process after that scandal broke last year. The upshot of all of this is that it looks very much like ISDAfix could be Libor all over again.
"It's obviously reminiscent of the Libor manipulation issue," Darrell Duffie, a finance professor at Stanford University, told reporters. "People may have been naive that simply reporting these rates was enough to avoid manipulation."
And just like in Libor, the potential losers in an interest-rate-swap manipulation scandal would be the same sad-sack collection of cities, towns, companies and other nonbank entities that have no way of knowing if they're paying the real price for swaps or a price being manipulated by bank insiders for profit. Moreover, ISDAfix is not only used to calculate prices for interest-rate swaps, it's also used to set values for about $550 billion worth of bonds tied to commercial real estate, and also affects the payouts on some state-pension annuities.
So although it's not quite as widespread as Libor, ISDAfix is sufficiently power-jammed into the world financial infrastructure that any manipulation of the rate would be catastrophic – and a huge class of victims that could include everyone from state pensioners to big cities to wealthy investors in structured notes would have no idea they were being robbed.
"How is some municipality in Cleveland or wherever going to know if it's getting ripped off?" asks Michael Masters of Masters Capital Management, a fund manager who has long been an advocate of greater transparency in the derivatives world. "The answer is, they won't know."
Worse still, the CFTC investigation apparently isn't limited to possible manipulation of swap prices by monkeying around with ISDAfix. According to reports, the commission is also looking at whether or not employees at ICAP may have intentionally delayed publication of swap prices, which in theory could give someone (bankers, cough, cough) a chance to trade ahead of the information.
Swap prices are published when ICAP employees manually enter the data on a computer screen called "19901." Some 6,000 customers subscribe to a service that allows them to access the data appearing on the 19901 screen.
The key here is that unlike a more transparent, regulated market like the New York Stock Exchange, where the results of stock trades are computed more or less instantly and everyone in theory can immediately see the impact of trading on the prices of stocks, in the swap market the whole world is dependent upon a handful of brokers quickly and honestly entering data about trades by hand into a computer terminal.
Any delay in entering price data would provide the banks involved in the transactions with a rare opportunity to trade ahead of the information. One way to imagine it would be to picture a racetrack where a giant curtain is pulled over the track as the horses come down the stretch – and the gallery is only told two minutes later which horse actually won. Anyone on the right side of the curtain could make a lot of smart bets before the audience saw the results of the race.
At ICAP, the interest-rate swap desk, and the 19901 screen, were reportedly controlled by a small group of 20 or so brokers, some of whom were making millions of dollars. These brokers made so much money for themselves the unit was nicknamed "Treasure Island."
Already, there are some reports that brokers of Treasure Island did create such intentional delays. Bloomberg interviewed a former broker who claims that he watched ICAP brokers delay the reporting of swap prices. "That allows dealers to tell the brokers to delay putting trades into the system instead of in real time," Bloomberg wrote, noting the former broker had "witnessed such activity firsthand." An ICAP spokesman has no comment on the story, though the company has released a statement saying that it is "cooperating" with the CFTC's inquiry and that it "maintains policies that prohibit" the improper behavior alleged in news reports.
The idea that prices in a $379 trillion market could be dependent on a desk of about 20 guys in New Jersey should tell you a lot about the absurdity of our financial infrastructure. The whole thing, in fact, has a darkly comic element to it. "It's almost hilarious in the irony," says David Frenk, director of research for Better Markets, a financial-reform advocacy group, "that they called it ISDAfix."
After scandals involving libor and, perhaps, ISDAfix, the question that should have everyone freaked out is this: What other markets out there carry the same potential for manipulation? The answer to that question is far from reassuring, because the potential is almost everywhere. From gold to gas to swaps to interest rates, prices all over the world are dependent upon little private cabals of cigar-chomping insiders we're forced to trust.
"In all the over-the-counter markets, you don't really have pricing except by a bunch of guys getting together," Masters notes glumly.
That includes the markets for gold (where prices are set by five banks in a Libor-ish teleconferencing process that, ironically, was created in part by N M Rothschild & Sons) and silver (whose price is set by just three banks), as well as benchmark rates in numerous other commodities – jet fuel, diesel, electric power, coal, you name it. The problem in each of these markets is the same: We all have to rely upon the honesty of companies like Barclays (already caught and fined $453 million for rigging Libor) or JPMorgan Chase (paid a $228 million settlement for rigging municipal-bond auctions) or UBS (fined a collective $1.66 billion for both muni-bond rigging and Libor manipulation) to faithfully report the real prices of things like interest rates, swaps, currencies and commodities.
All of these benchmarks based on voluntary reporting are now being looked at by regulators around the world, and God knows what they'll find. The European Federation of Financial Services Users wrote in an official EU survey last summer that all of these systems are ripe targets for manipulation. "In general," it wrote, "those markets which are based on non-attested, voluntary submission of data from agents whose benefits depend on such benchmarks are especially vulnerable of market abuse and distortion."
Translation: When prices are set by companies that can profit by manipulating them, we're fucked.
"You name it," says Frenk. "Any of these benchmarks is a possibility for corruption."
The only reason this problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the scale of it is so enormous that ordinary people simply cannot see it. It's not just stealing by reaching a hand into your pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever's in your pocket worth less. This is corruption at the molecular level of the economy, Space Age stealing – and it's only just coming into view.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
USA installs dictatorship over Honduras, is killing advocates of democracy
Updates about the process of Fascism and Human-Rights abuse in Honduras:
* Honduras Accompaniment Project blog in English, including articles, news and urgent actions.[http://hondurasaccompanimentproject.wordpress.com/]
* Friendship Office of the Americas [http://www.friendshipamericas.org]
* Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) [http://movimientomuca.blogspot.com/]
* Adrienne Pine's research [http://quotha.net/node/1]
“Oligarchs beware: the Honduran people of struggle will continue to place our bet on the construction of a dignified life, until we achieve a new society and a new country that we will refound with equality, justice, peace and sovereignty” - statement by COPIHN, September 25, 2012
"We are not birds who live in the air, we are not fish who live in the sea, we are campesinos who must live on the land". - Unified Campesino Movement of Aguan (MUCA)
[http://www.soaw.org/about-us/equipo-sur/263-stories-from-honduras]
2013-04-23 "Two Leaders of Honduran Campesino Organizations Murdered in the Aguan"
message from "SOA Watch":
On April 13th, the body of Julián Hernández (president of campesino organization MARCA - Authentic Movement for the Re-vindication of Aguán Peasants) was found murdered in Trujillo [http://quotha.net/node/2474]. Following the murder of MARCA's lawyer Antonio Trejo last fall, this murder is interpreted as sign of more death squad terror to come.
Then, on April 21, the general secretary of the National Association of Campesinos of Honduras (ANACH), Alfonso Bonilla, was murdered by assassins in his home.
These assassinations and death squad activity continue to occur in the Aguan amidst the heavy militarization of the area by troops and police of Operation Xatruch III, led by SOA graduate Germán Alfaro Escalante. Over 80 campesinos have been killed in the Aguan since the SOA graduate-led coup in 2009.
Contrary to what is often suggested in the press, the violence is not just random or drug- or gang-related; some of the most vulnerable sectors in society are frequent targets — those whose rights the US Department of State tells us it considers to be a high priority — women, the LGBT community, journalists, opposition party politicians and Hondurans who opposed the coup.
---
2013-04-13 "President of MARCA murdered in Trujillo" report from "Associated Press"
[http://quotha.net/node/2474]:
Julián Hernández, president of MARCA (Authentic Movement for the Re-vindication of Aguán Peasants) was found murdered today in his home. The killers attempted to make it look like a suicide. Karen Spring notes: "At such a critical time for MARCA, the only Aguan campesino movement that has won their land cases in the Honduran courts despite the repression, terror and assassination of their amazing lawyer Antonio Trejo last year. All eyes on MARCA who in the coming months will face even more repression as the large land owners, private security guards and honduran military/police supported by the US military and World Bank, will continue the violence against them. Julian's death was well planned and strategic."
2013-04-23 "ANACH secretary murdered by assassins under the command of landowners, amid constant militarization"
from "Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Aguan (MUCA)":
(English translation)
ANACH secretary murdered by assassins under the command of landowners, amid constant militarization
On Sunday, April 21, at 3pm, assassins aboard a vehicle murdered National Association of Campesinos of Honduras (ANACH) General Secretary Alfonso Bonilla, 48, by means of multiple gunshot wounds in the community of dos Bocas in the municipality of Santa Rosa de Aguan, in the department of Colon, Honduras.
The deceased was inside his home in the community of dos Bocas when heavily armed men got out of a vehicle and began shooting him repeatedly, killing him instantly.
Bonilla was a hard-working campesino who got up every morning to plow the land to support his family. Today he leaves six children empty-handed because assassins operating under the command of landowners suddenly took his life, adding to the list of more than one hundred campesinos who have fallen in the struggle for access to land in the region.
Amid the permanent militarization known as Operation Xatruch III -- under the command of Coronel Germán Alfaro Escalante and under the Selective Disarmament Decree 117-2012 measure passed by the National Congress for the department of Colon -- assassins operating within the so-called security companies protecting the interests of landowners circulate freely with high caliber weapons without being detained by anyone.
We hold the Minister of the National Agrarian Institute (INA), Cesar Ham Peña, responsible for the lack of solutions for the agrarian problems faced by campesinos and campesinas on a daily basis that result in the constant murders in the region.
We hold the three branches of government and the landowners responsible for the wave of violence and for the constant murders of campesinos and campesinas who struggle for access to land.
We call on national and international human rights organizations to remain on alert in the face of constant human rights violations and murders of campesinos and campesinas in the Aguan.
We are not Birds who live in the Air, We are not Fish who live in the Water, we are campesinos and campesinas who live from the land.
2013-04-23 "US Funds Still Supporting Honduras Death Squads"
by Lauren Carasik [http://jurist.org/forum/2013/04/lauren-carasik-death-squads.php]:
Lauren Carasik is a Clinical Professor of Law at Western New England University School of Law, where she serves as Director of the International Human Rights Clinic and the Legal Services Clinic. Her areas of interest include poverty law, law and social change, and human rights.
---
Honduras is plagued by the world's highest homicide rate. This has been widely reported for the past two years, yet the number of deaths has continued to climb. The UN put the number of homicides in 2011 at 91 per 100,000. The rate has spiked since the illegal coup d'état that ousted the country's democratically elected president in 2009 and the subsequent breakdown of Honduras' institutions; in 2008 the homicide rate was 61 per 100,000. A climate of impunity solidified as the generals and others who carried out the coup were rewarded with appointments in the post-coup government rather than prosecuted for their role in the overthrow.
Contrary to what is often suggested in the press, the violence is not just random or drug- or gang-related; some of the most vulnerable sectors in society are frequent targets — those whose rights the US Department of State tells us it considers to be a high priority — women, the LGBT community, journalists, opposition party politicians and Hondurans who opposed the coup. Twenty-five journalists have been murdered in Honduras since the 2009 coup; all but one of them since the current post-coup president, Pepe Lobo, took office in January 2010 [http://en.rsf.org/honduras-another-journalist-slain-special-16-08-2012,43232.html]. At least 53 lawyers were killed between 2010 and 2012 [http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=712249&CategoryId=23558].
On my recent trip to the Lower Aguan region of northern Honduras, I visited with campesinos from the San Isidro collective that were occupying land to which they possessed legal title, the patina of legitimacy that has often been wrested away from the campesino collectives through fraud and coercion. This legal title emanated from a rare victory meted out by the notoriously ineffective judicial system that typically favors the agro-oligarchs engaging in brutal land grabs in the region. Those with whom we met spoke eloquently of their intrepid lawyer, Antonio Trejo. He was the only lawyer in the Aguan region that had successfully litigated land rights claims for the campesinos. Trejo was gunned down in September 2012, and his brother was murdered five months later [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-19695587]. While some are confident that Trejo's murder was related to political persecution, alternative apolitical motives for Trejo's murder have been floated. Irrespective of the motive, Trejo's untimely death eliminates the one lawyer who had achieved any relief for the beleaguered campesinos of the Lower Aguan. Each murder statistic rattled off is a real person with a real family that will be forever anguished by the loss of their loved ones.
This repression has been aided by US support for the alleged perpetrators of many of these crimes: the Honduran police and military. Concerned US citizens across the country have weighed in with our members of Congress, and Hondurans and other Latinos living in the US have also voiced their concerns about US support for Honduras' police and military while it continues to kill, kidnap, torture and commit other heinous crimes with impunity. Congress responded to these concerns. In March 2012, 94 members sent a letter [http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/sites/default/files/signed_honduras_letter.pdf] to the State Department urging it "to suspend US assistance to the Honduran military and police given the credible allegations of widespread, serious violations of human rights attributed to the security forces." Just this January, 58 members voiced concerns about repression of Honduras' Afro-indigenous Garifuna community [http://hankjohnson.house.gov/press-release/rep-johnson-57-colleagues-call-investigation-dea-related-killings-honduras], several of whom were "collateral damage" in a lethal DEA-related counter narcotics operation last May [http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/collateral-damage-of-a-drug-war].
The response from the State Department has been tepid at best. When asked about human rights in Honduras, State Department spokespersons speak of "protect[ing] the human rights of all Hondurans," as they did yet again last month [http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2013/03/206637.htm#HONDURAS], yet they fail to express concern regarding the many attacks targeting political opponents and other vulnerable groups. Meanwhile, the killings have continued while the perpetrators go free. Partly in response to the lack of urgency on the part of both the State Department and the Honduran government to halt the killings by the police and military, last year Congress halted tens of millions of dollars in aid money under the "Leahy Law" which bars US assistance to units believed responsible for gross human rights abuses.
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and his colleagues' concerns have focused on National Police Director General Juan Carlos "El Tigre" Bonilla, who has been accused of running death squads in the early 2000s. While it is true that Bonilla was acquitted of a murder charge, the head of police internal affairs at the time, Maria Luisa Borjas, claims that she was threatened and that high-level security officials obstructed investigations into serious allegations against Bonilla regarding murders and forced disappearances [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/10267975]. Other pending murder charges against Bonilla have not yet been fully investigated.
US funds for the Honduran police have continued, but State Department officials have said that these are for specially "vetted" units that are not under Bonilla's control. US Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs William Brownfield even committed to increasing security assistance to the tune of $16.3 million during a trip to Honduras over St. Patrick's Day weekend [http://justf.org/blog/2013/03/29/nl-assistant-secretary-brownfields-trip-honduras-and-costa-rica].
The same weekend, the Associated Press released a major investigative feature examining ongoing death squad activity in the Honduran police, [http://bigstory.ap.org/article/honduras-police-accused-death-squad-killings] profiling among others the case of a suspected gang member and his girlfriend who were taken into police custody and subsequently disappeared. The AP also noted that other recent incidents — including one caught on video showing the extrajudicial killings of suspected gang members by armed gun men on city streets — fit the modus operandi of police death squads, and that Honduran prosecutors have received over 200 complaints about "death squad style killings" in Honduras' two largest cities over the last three years.
It appears that the State Department has not been honest with Congress about whom it is funding. A follow-up AP report reveals that no special "vetted" units exist outside of Bonilla's control [http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-aids-honduran-police-despite-death-squad-fears]. All Honduran police — according to Honduran officials and legal experts cited in the article — report to the national police chief after all. It is inconceivable that the US State Department was not aware of this chain of command, nor that US funds could easily wind up in the hands of police death squads.
It is outrageous if the State Department is attempting an end run around Congress to fund shady, questionable security forces in Honduras. Such conduct disrespects Congress, and disrespects constituents who have worked hard to have our voices heard regarding what is done in our name, with our taxpayer dollars. Given US complicity in human rights abuses in Central America for decades, we should know better. History has demonstrated our willingness to disregard human rights abuses while advancing US geopolitical interests. In fact, these revelations come just as General Rios Montt finally faces trial for the genocide perpetrated by his scorched earth policies in Guatemala, and the US has apologized for its role in Guatemala's bloody history. We must not repeat past mistakes that contributed to unspeakable suffering.
There are simply too many concerns, too many red flags, for the US-Honduran relationship to continue on its current path. The State Department's response to ongoing questions over Bonilla's dark history should be to exercise the precautionary principle and cut off funding as long as the questions persist. But that cannot be all: more importantly, US support for Honduras' brutal police and military must cease as long as the rights violations continue and impunity reigns. John Kerry, the new US secretary of state, has signaled before that he is sympathetic to this common sense approach [http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2018912385_aplthondurashumanrights.html]. Let's hope he maintains that posture in his new capacity.
2013-04-03 "Campesino Organizations Condemn Media Campaign to Justify More Murders of Campesinos in the Aguan"
[http://www.soaw.org/about-us/equipo-sur/263-stories-from-honduras/4082-aguanapril3]:
The Regional Agrarian Platform of the Aguan Valley communicates the following to the Honduran people and the international community:
1- We condemn the systematic, dirty, and malicious campaign of the landowners in the Aguan, through the La Prensa newspaper and their spokesmen, including Colonel Germán Alfaro Escalante, Commander of the Xatruch III Operation, who was trained at the U.S. School of the Americas in 1984 to protect the interests of capital.
2- This campaign seeks to prepare the conditions to continue the murders of the organized campesinos in the Bajo Aguan with impunity and to pressure the judicial system to rule in favor of the landowners in the case of the La Trinidad, La Despertar and San Isidro cooperatives, which belong to MARCA. They were given legally given to the campesinos on June 29, 2012 by the judicial authorities when a Francisco Morazan court issued a final judgement about the land. So we are not land invaders.
3- We make clear that the farms La Confianza, La Aurora, La Lempira, La Concepción, Marañones, Isla I and Isla II, which add up to 3,962 hectares of land, were acquired by signed agreements between the government and MUCA on April 13, 2010. The agreements are for 11,000 hectares, of which the government still owes 7,038 hectares to MUCA. Similarly, MARCA signed agreements on May 24, 2011 for 1,600 hectares of land, of which only 667 hectares in the San Esteban farm have been handed over; the government still owes 933 hectares.
4- We reject the assertions, through fake videos and publications by the La Prensa newspaper, which seek to make us look like armed groups with high caliber weapons such as AK-47s, M-16s, and .223 guns. On April 26, 2011, we denounced armed groups under the command of paramilitary leaders, which clearly coincides with the photograph published in the La Prensa newspaper today (April 3, 2013).
5- We condemn the plan of Operation Xatruch, commanded by Col. Alfaro Escalante, which seeks to assassinate campesino leaders such as Juan Ramón Chinchilla, Yoni Rivas, Vitalino Álvarez, and Wilfredo Paz, the spokesperson for the Permanent Observatory of Human Rights in the Aguán in Tocoa, Colon.
6- We make clear that the problems of land tenure in the Bajo Aguan were provoked by former President Rafael Leonardo Callejas, when he approved the fatal and unconstitutional Agricultural Modernization and Development Act, which contradicts articles 344 to 350 of the Constitution.
7- We call on national and international human rights organizations to be attentive for any situation which could occur in the coming days against the humanity of the campesino leaders.
We are not birds to live in the air, we are not fish to live in the water, we are campesinos who need to live on the land.
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
April 3, 2013
(english translation of original spanish communique by the Regional Agrarian Platform of the Aguan)
"Stand with Peasants in Honduras"
petition from "Grassroots International" [http://act.grassrootsonline.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=7981]:
To: Mr. U.S. Ambassador Craig Kelly, Honduran President Porfirio Lobo Sosa,
CC: Maria Otero, U.S. Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs; Benjamin Gedan, Honduras Desk Officer, U.S. State Department; Stephen Moody, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. State Department; Jorge Alberto Rubi, President of the Supreme Court of Honduras; Ana Pineda, Minister for Human Rights in Honduras; Cesar Pena David Ham, Minister of the National Agrarian Institute; Oscar Alvarez, Minister of Security in Honduras;
I am writing to request that you help uphold economic, social and cultural rights in the Lower Aguan region of Honduras. In the past year, over 40 peasants from the Lower Aguan have died because they are refusing to give up the land they have lived on and farmed for decades to giant plantations that are growing mono-crops for the creation of agro-fuels.
These peasants play a crucial role in the food system of Honduras by growing approximately 76 percent of staple foods like beans, rice, corn and other vegetables. Loss of these vital communities will only lead to increased poverty and hunger in Honduras.
Peasants have been intimated, injured, and even killed by private security forces employed by the plantations and the situation has further deteriorated in recent months with the arrival of 600-1,000 military troops (who have received aid and training from the U.S. military). Since the arrival of the troops, two leaders have been murdered: Pedro Delgado, vice president of the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguan (MUCA), and his wife Reina Meija were killed a few days after the murder of Secundino Ruiz Vallecillo, president of the Authentic Vindicator Campesino Movement of Aguan (MARCA).
I ask that you:
1) Support and encourage the immediate passage of comprehensive agrarian reform that will end the suffering and persecution of peasants, create justice in access to land and other natural resources, and ensure that communities have control over what they grow and access to healthy, nutritious food;
2) Demand the immediate release of Jose Isabel Morales Lopez of the Peasant Movement of Aguan (MCA) and other peasants and activists being held in connection to the land struggle in the Lower Aguan;
3) Regulate private security forces and withdraw immediately all troops from the Lower Aguan;
4) Investigate and prosecute the murders of peasants and ensure the safety of those working to maintain control of their land; and
5) Support the creation of a permanent office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Honduras to monitor human rights violations.
Thank you for your time.
2012-12 "List of murders related to this coup"
from "Sydney Says No to Honduras Coup" [http://www.sydney-says-no2honduras-coup.net/list-of-murders-related-to-this-coup.php]:
List of farmers and their advocates killed between March - November 2012 in the Bajo Aguán region, as compiled in the monthly updates on this website
(MARCA, MUCA, MCA, MOCRA are different farmers movements in the Bajo Agúan region)
1. 3 nameless killed, in Paso Aguán, 5/11/12
2. ..
3. ..
4. José Cecilio Peréz Martínez disappeared 9/11/12 and found dead and tortured on 10/11/12, cooperative president of El Despertar, MARCA
5. Adelmo Leiva, killed in Trujillo 25/11/12, farmer of El Despertar
6. 3 nameless farm workers, killed at El Coco turnoff in Tocoa o n 25/11/12, reported by El Libertador
7. …
8. ..
9. Wesler Santos Avila, killed 29/11/12, farmer of Los Laureles, MOCRA, ex-MCA, Brisas de Edén, secretary of National Farmers Association
10. Óscar Daniel Sánchez Batis
11. José Olivera Nolasco
12. Marco Hernández, the three tortured and killed in Farallones on 6/10/12, by Dinant guards. They are Afrodescendent farmers
13. Antonio Trejo Cabrera, killed on 22/9/12, lawyer and human rights defender of MARCA
14. Hector Navarro, died at Laureles reoccupation on 9/9/12 during eviction carried out by a Xatruch(state)/Dinant (private) contingent
15. Santos Mejía, killed on 8/9/12 by Xatruche Operation, a farmer on security duties
16. Danery Tróchez
17. And 2 unnamed farmers (source: Red Cross) were killed at Paso Aguán on 9/8/12, by an unidentified armed group
18. ..
19. Isrrael Mejía, killed on 21/8/12, of Los Laureles, MOCRA
20. Gregorio Chávez Aranda, disappeared on 2/7/12 and was after found dead in Paso Aguán on property of Facussé (Dinant). An independent MUCA supporter.
21. Jacobo Erazo López, killed on 7/7/12. Of La Tranvío cooperative, La Confianza, MUCA.
22. José Luis Dubón Díaz, killed on 8/7/12, of La Lempira, MUCA
23. José Braulio Díaz Lopez, killed on 27/8/12. Secretary of Tranvío cooperative, La Confianza, MUCA.
24. Irrael García, killed on 26/7/12, while on security shift by Dinant guards. Of Gracias a Dios cooperative, Los Laureles, MOCRA.
25. Evaristo López Cerrano, fatal hit and run by alleged Dinant truck on 29/7/12. Of San Isidro cooperative, MARCA.
26. Juan José Peralta, killed on 16/5/12 by Dinant guards. Of Marañones, MUCA.
27. José Efraín Del Cid, killed on 18/5/12. Of Nueva Panamá cooperative, Marañones, MUCA
28. Erick Federico Rivera Ochoa, killed on 31/5/12. Ex leader of Marañones MUCA.
29. Edilberto Flores, killed on 29/3/12. Of Nueva Marañones, Trujillo.
30. In the same incident on 29/3/12, El Jazeera reported a total of 4 farmers killed with reference to a Washington Post report.
31. …
32. …
33. Doninely López Alvarado, killed 11/4/12. Of Camarones cooperative, MUCA.
34. Fausto Evelio Hernández, killed on 10/3/12 in Colón, Sabá, Standar. A journalist who reported on agrarian conflicts in Bajo Aguán and on Comayagua prison fire.
35. 3 unnamed farmers reported disappeared with signs of torture on 10/3/12 at La Confianza, La Aurora, Tocoa, according to reports by/to Radio Globo, anonymous friends and families, and Radios 105.5 and Superior Stereo
36. …
37. …
38. Marvin José Andrade, found dead with signs of torture and burning near Cayo Campo, next to La Lempira settlement on 12/3/12. He received prior death threats from guards of large landholders.
2012-12-07 "Impunity in Honduras this in figures (translated from Spanish)"
by Itsmania Pineda Platero [itsmaniap@gmail.com] [504-96031998] [www.xibalbahonduras.blogspot.com] (ITSMANIA PINEDA PLATERO, PRESIDENTA DE XIBALBA, PROCURADORA DE DERECHOS HUMANOS, MIEMBRO DE LA RED MUNDIAL DE 1000 MUJERES DE PAZ):
* Murder of Alfredo Landaverde, founder of the Christian Democratic Party, adviser of State Security of Honduras, Honduran Founder Observatory on Drugs, analyst and critic of national reality. Committed to social work in the country.
* Matir of the Fatherland. A year after his assassination if this unpunished.
* Aristides Gonzales murder ... Director of Drug Trafficking DLCN killed her death go unpunished.
* 34 journalists, media workers and media owners ... murdered his death this
unpunished.
* 74 lawyers murdered his death this unpunished
* 7.896 children and young people killed ... his murder unpunished
* 489 women killed his murder unpunished
* 78 peasants killed in the dilute his death under such impunity
* 111 policemen killed in impunity if this
* 54 members of the gay and lesbian community. LGBT their crimes are on impunity
* 400 Human Rights Defenders threats their cases are unpunished
* 60 JOURNALIST S precautionary measures internal security threats their cases have gone unpunished.
To this add the death lack of teachers killed, workers and union leaders that their impunity prevalent cases
www.1000peacewomen.org<http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.1000peacewomen.org&h=cAQFZnZ8m&s=1>
Updated 2011-11-12 "(HONDURAS - LIST OF KILLINGS) ASSASSINATIONS IN HONDURAS UNDER MILITARY-BACKED REGIME HEADED BY "PEPE" LOBO"
published by "Rights Action", report assembled by Gary Cozette [gcozette@crln.org], the Program Director for "Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America (CRLN)" [4750 N. Sheridan Road #429, Chicago, IL 60640], [773.293.2964] [www.crln.org] [http://rightsaction.org/action-content/assassinations-honduras-under-military-backed-regime-headed-pepe-lobo]:
Dear Colleagues - I send you this updated comprehensive list of politically related assassinations in Honduras. The list also includes an incomplete list the names of disappeared and severely wounded. If you know of cases that are not included, please email me the information at gcozette@crln.org so I can further update the list. Special thanks to FIAN Honduras, whose reports have offered the most timely and comprehensive updates and analysis - and for the larger team of you that translates documents and urgent actions from Spanish into English.
---
2011: 59 Assassinations
05 November 2011 - José Luis Lemus Ramos, age 32 and the father of two children age 4 and 7, died at 2:00 a.m. en el Hospital Catarino Rivas, in San Pedro Sula, Cortés, from gunshot wounds fired by security guards of René Morales on 01 November 2011 in the Aguán. (FIAN)
01 November 2011 - A group of campesinos farmers and children belonging to the Authentic Struggle Organization of the Campesinos of Aguán (MARCA) were attacked by a patrol of heavily armed security guards of René Morales. The campesinos were returning from a cemetery having visited the graves of family members on the Day of the Dead. As the campesinos neared the palm oil processing plant owned by René Morales, guards began firing against the group of farmers who were traveling in a vehicle, assassinated Catalino Efrain Lopez, the father of six children who died instantly, while Jose Luis Lemus and Nilda Funez were wounded by bullets. Jose Luis Lemus is hovering between life and death. Nilda Funes was shot but her life is not at risk. Nilda Funez is liaison for the Human Rights Commission of the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP) in the municipality of Trujillo for the campesino sector. On one of the occasions in which the Honduran army violently evicted the settlement of La Despertar, they took Nilda's vest that identified her as a defender of human rights, tore it, stomped on it and burnt it. They told her that if she didn't disappear from the scene of the eviction the same thing that happened to her vest would happen to her; the same thing happened on that day to two other human rights defenders. (FIAN)
22 October 2011 - Alejandro Rafael Vargas Castellanos, age 22, the son of National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) president Julieta Castellanos, and his friend Carlos David Pineda Rodríguez, age 24, were found murdered in Tegucigalpa at kilometer 8 on the highway that leads from Tegucigalpa to southern Honduras. Rafael Vargas and Carlos Pineda left a friend's birthday party called their relatives to say they were heading home, the police spokesman told reporters. Relatives began to search for the young men when they failed to arrive home. AlejandroVargas was in his last year of law school. Carlos Pineda was finishing a degree in sociology. The motive for these murders remains unclear. However, since these murders have subsequently been shown by video to have been carried out by uniformed police, and one of the victims is the son of the national university rector who is a member of the government's own Truth & Reconciliation Commission, it is reasonable to conclude at this time that political motives may be behind these two murders. Photos: Alejandro Vargas - above; Carlos Pineda - below. (El Tiempo, Latin American Herald Tribune)
15 October 2011 - Segundo Mendoza, age 26, from the La Consentida farming community and an activist in the campesino movement of Rigores, was disappeared during an attack by armed guards working for Miguel Facussé, police and soldiers from the Xantruch command who arrived at the settlement of Paso Aguán and began firing on men, women and children. The previous day, October 14, members of Operation Zatruch and private guards of the big landowners surrounded the campesinos of this settlement. The campesinos complain that the operatives were charging them money to be allowed to pass. On Sunday, October 16, the body of Segundo Mendoza was found in the morgue of the City of La Ceiba in the Department of Atlántida, 60 kilometers from his settlement. His body shows various bullet wounds from the heavy caliber weapon which killed him. (FNRP-Colón)
11 October 2011 - Santos Sefeino Zelaya, age 35, from the La Aurora campesino settlement was murdered at about 8:00 am by private guards of Miguel Facussé as he and other members of the Aurora coop were working near the property line of Miguel Facussé's land. Witnesses say Santos Seferino was hit and died instantly as others ran to take cover. Seferino leaves two young children, ages 8 and 10. La Aurora is one of the settlements of Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) that was selected to be part of an agreement between the government and the landowners following intense negotiations. (FNRP-Colón)
02 October 2011 - Carlos Martinez, age 23, from the Cooperativa Lempira on the right bank of the Aguán was assassinated. A relative of Martinez claimed he was killed by a security guard from a nearby plantation belonging to Miguel Facussé, the wealthy and powerful Honduran landowner. (Rights Action, KairosPhotos)
29 September 2011- Miriam Emelda Fiallo was gunned down and died. Her husband Germán Castro was hospitalized with wounds. The attack as they were traveling by car occurred near Tocoa in the district of Prieto. Germán was the President of Prieta, one of the 15 or so co-operatives that make up the COAPALMA federation. Shooting began from the vehicle pursuing them before entering Prieta until the car of Germán crash in the curb. They shot him again. Miriam Emelda told Germán: "I was shot too. I love you. Take care of the children". She died immediately. Germán was taken to hospital in La Ceiba. Germán was elected president after then-president Rigoberto Funez was assassinated in February 2011. Germán's brother Fredy, then treasurer, was also killed in the attack. (Real News; Proyecto Hondureño, photo from profile at soncio.com)
15 September 2011 - Political and sporting leader Dennis Montoya was assassinated in front of his mother´s home in Choloma, Cortés Department. Dennis is father of Dennis Muñoz Bonilla of Agents of Change. (FIAN)
15 September 2011 - Juan de Jesús Figueroa, murdered in the community of Matarras, Arizona municipality, Department of Atlántida. Juan was the president of the community Patronato (community council) of Matarras, a faithful watchdog and monitor of the administrative conduct of various regional authorities and energetic environmental defender of the department's natural resources. (MADJ)
08 September 2011 - Medardo Flores, a 61-year-old journalist with Radio Uno was shot dead near his home in Puerto Cortés when he drove into an ambush and his car was sprayed with bullets. Flores was a supporter of ousted former president Manuel Zelaya and was a regional treasurer for a pro-Zelaya group. Irina Bokov, Director-General of UNESCO, condemned the murder: "The number of journalists killed in Honduras over the last two years is very worrying. These crimes must be investigated and their perpetrators must be brought to justice..." Arnulfo Aguilar, Radio Uno's founder and director, told the local press that Flores spent the 1980s in exile "to escape from persecution by the repressive forces of the state". Radio Uno has often been the target of harassment and raids by the police and army since the coup. Aguilar narrowly escaped an armed ambush outside his home on 27 April 2011. Sixteen journalists have been killed in Honduras since February 2010. (UNESCOPRESS, The Guardian)
10 September 2011 - In the evening, unknown persons assassinated student Ramón Antonio Cruz Lara, age 17, with gunshots. Ramón was a resistance activist and son of the teacher Héctor Cruz, member of Copemh and FNRP of La Lima, Cortés Department. The youth had no problems. (FIAN)
07 September 2011 - An unidentified man shot and killed Honduran activist Mahadeo "Emo" Sadloo at his small automobile tire shop in eastern Tegucigalpa. Sadloo had been active in the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) from the time when the grassroots coalition was founded to oppose the June 2009 military coup against former president José Manuel ("Mel") Zelaya. He was also a strong supporter of teacher and student demonstrations in defense of public education. Zelaya called Sadloo's death a "political assassination" and a "declaration of war" against him and his supporters; the FNPR said it was "a political crime intended to demobilize and demoralize the Popular Resistance." Sadloo, a naturalized Honduran citizen of Indian origin, immigrated to Honduras from Suriname more than 35 years ago. In August 2010 Lobo's government reportedly considered deporting Sadloo as a "foreigner who meddled in Honduran politics". (Weekly News Update on the Americas)
02 September 2011- Olvin David Gonzalez Godoy, 24 years old, married and a father of an 8-month-old girl was assassinated today. He was a member of the July 21st Cooperative affiliated to the MUCA -MI. He was found dead near the turn off to the MUCA cooperative Las Marañones at 5 am. (FIAN, El Tiempo)
01 September 2011 - A couple, both teachers of the school Instituto 18 de noviembre, - Juan de Dios Palencia Mejía, age 55, who is also a pastor, and Dunia Suyapa Sánchez Zapata were killed by gunshots in Catacamas, Olancho Department, by unknown persons while driving. They tried to escape and kept driving until they fainted. They were taken to emergency but died on the way. (FIAN)
22 August 2011 - Nahúm Alexander Guerra, age 17, in his second year of agronomy studies at the "Pompilio Ortega" Agricultural School in Macueliso, Santa Barbara, was assassinated at 7:00pm while on shift with other student colleagues at the front gate of his college on the international western highway. Nahum and his student colleagues had taken over the agricultural school with the purpose of defending public education. A vehicle was circulating along the highway, and upon seeing the students, its occupants shouted "Strikers, Strikers!" and opened fire on them. The bullets struck Nahum. (ResistenciaHonduras.net)
21 August 2011 - Pedro Salgado, vice-president of the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguán (MUCA), was shot then beheaded at about 8:00 pm at his home in the La Concepción empresa cooperative. His spouse, Reina Irene Mejía, was also shot to death at the same time. Pedro suffered a murder attempt in December 2010. Salgado, like the presidents of all the cooperatives claiming rights to land used by African palm oil businessmen in the Aguán, had been subject to constant death threats since the beginning of 2011. Salgado had recently met with the military commander of the Xatruch operation, asking for protection. (ResistenciaHonduras.net, Rights Action)
20 August 2011 - Arnoldo Portillo, member of the "5 de Enero Empresa" campesino cooperative, of the La Concepcion community in the Bajo Aguán, left his home, and did not return. His neighbors began a search early the morning of August 21, 2011. His badly brutalized body was found in the dump of the La Lempira campesino community; he had been killed by machete strikes and gunfire. (Rights Action)
20 August 2011 - Secundino Ruiz Vallecillo, president of the Cooperative San Isidro as well as president of the Authentic Peasant Protest Movement of Aguán (MARCA), was murdered in the style of a paid assassin at 10:30 am in Tocoa. MARCA is member organization of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP). Mr. Ruiz was shot as he and the treasurer of MARCA, Eliseo Pavón Ávila, were leaving a local bank where they had withdrawn $10,000 to pay workers in their organization. Mr. Pavón was also shot, but apparently suffered only a minor wound. The assailants were reportedly riding a black motorcycle and wearing ski masks. MARCA, along with the Unified Peasant Movement of Aguán (MUCA), is one of the main groups representing peasant farmers living in the Bajo Aguán Valley, struggling to obtain titles to lands they believe were stolen from their families. On 24 May, the Lobo government signed an agreement with MARCA granting it 2,151.4 manzanas, which equals 3,715 acres. (COFADEH, DefensoresEnLinea.com, Rights Action)
18 August 2011 - At 1:00 pm, Victor Manuel Mata Oliva, age 40, Sergio Magdiel Amaya, age 18, and a child Roldin Marel Villeda, age 15, were massacred in the area between El Bridge and the Panama Cooperative in the municipality of Trujillo, department of Colon. The assassination was an ambush from the side of the highway, it has been relayed that AK-47s were used and that the assassins are Miguel Faccusé's guards, who were driving a blue vehicle with a double cabin. (CODEH, FIAN, In These Times)
15 August 2011 - In Tocoa, Colón department, five more people were massacred in a pick-up truck that left the Honduran National Agrarian Institute (INA) headquarters, where hundreds of campesino farmers currently live in temporary huts, after being illegally evicted from their homes and lands. The August 15th shooting occurred in front of a palm plantation controlled by the Dinant Corporation, and security guards had been seen at the location moments before the massacre. (Rights Action)
14 August 2011 - Early in the morning, campesinos from the Movimiento Campesino Colonia Nueva Vida de Rigores (MCCNVR) occupied the Finca Panama, ten minutes from the community of Rigores in Trujillo, Colon. This peaceful action was part of their on-going efforts to claim lands they feel they have legal, legitimate claim to. According to local sources, the campesinos were quickly surrounded by approximately 120 soldiers from the 15th Army Battalion and approximately 40 security guards from the Orion Security Company employed by Dinant palm oil corporation. The security forces opened fire, killing 17-year-old campesino Javier Melgar - and also five security guards! Campesinos believe the soldiers confused the security guards and the campesinos, as some security guards were dressed as civilians and, also, the security guard uniform is difficult to distinguish from civilian clothing. Local informants report that all of the victims were killed by shots fired from military issued RPG-15 rifles. The same day in the nearby community of Guadalupe Carney, home to the Campesino Movement of the Aguán, 17-year-old
Lelis Lemus Martinez and 18-year-old Denis Israel Castro were beaten by police, arrested and charged with murder in what their neighbors claim are false, politically motivated charges. (Rights Action)
25 July 2011 - Carlos Maradiaga was entering the Revenue Department building in La Ceiba with other leaders of the farmers´ cooperative Coapalma-Ecara of which he was president, to do paperwork, when 2 individuals on a motorcycle approached him and one of them snatched a chain he carried and then immediately killing him with 2 gunshots. (Resistencia Honduras)
23 July 2011 - Julián Alvarenga García, the 45-year-old father of 7 children and president of cooperative Isla I of the Nueva Marañones settlement (MUCA), on the left bank of Aguán River, was assassinated at about 11 am by unidentified individuals on a yellow motorcycle. Another farmer, Santos Dubón, who was with Julián was gravely wounded with gunshots. Julián's relatives said Julián had received repeated death threats by phone telling him to leave the farmers organization or they will kill him. (Rights Action)
16 July 2011 - Luis Alonso Ortiz Borjas, age 52 (father of five, three of them minors) and Constantino Morales Enamorado, age 32 (father of two toddlers). They were both members of the Cooperative Nueva Marañones, affiliated to the Unified Farmer Movement of Bajo Aguán (MUCA). There bodies were riddled with 14 and 12 gun shots respectively. The peasants of the Bajo Aguán area denounce that masked men with AK-47 and R-15 rifles patrol the region with impunity. These people are troops dressed as civilians. (FIAN, Rights Action)
14 July 2011 - Radio journalist Nery Jeremías Orellana, age 26, was riding to the radio station Candelaria, Lempira Province near Honduras' border with El Salvador when unknown persons waiting for him shot him in the head. He was taken to emergency and died hours later. He was the director of Radio Joconguera (a anticoup commercial radio station), reporter for Radio Progreso, member of Honduras Community Radios Network, and was active in the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP) since the coup in June 2009. Minutes before he was murdered, he talked to Radio Progreso confirming he will go to the community radios meeting the next day. He was a member of the National Front of People's Resistance. The local priest, José Amílcar Lara, denounced through Radio Globo that he, Manuel Bonilla the town's mayor, and Hernán Castro, who also works in that Radio Station, have received death threats. (UNESCO, ABC News)
05 June 2011 - Campesinos José Recinos Aguilar, Joel Santamaría and Genaro Cuesta were murdered in the Aguán Valley by paramilitaries employed by landowners shot as they were driving a few meters from the San Esteban cooperative, of which they were members. The victims belonged to the Authentic Claimant Movement of Aguán Campesinos (MARCA), one of several campesino groups claiming land in the Aguán valley. The paramilitaries then went to the local offices of the government's National Agrarian Institute (INA) and shot at campesinos who had taken refuge there the year before. Five people were wounded, including the campesina Doris Pérez Vásquez, who was shot in the abdomen and had to be rushed to a hospital in the city of La Ceiba. (Adital (Brazil) 6/6/11, with information from FIAN, FNRP, Comuna Ataroa and Tiempo-San Pedro Sula)
24 May 2011 - Rock band musician Juan Angel Sorto, age 19 and a member of Artists in Resistance, was murdered at 9 pm in El Progreso, Yoro, by two men driving a motorcycle. Artists in Resistance attributed this murder to death squads. In 2010 COFADEH identified 34 political assassinations, 34 murders of campesinos in the context of land disputes, 28 murders from police abuse and 309 deaths of suspicious authorship. (Artists in Resistance, Western Sydney Peace Group/Westpeace)
18 May 2011 - Denis Moisés Lara Orellana, age 37 and Regional Secretary of the Asociación Nacional de Campesinos Hondureños (ANACH), was assassinated at 8:00 am as he left home in the Colonia Flor del Campo of Villanueva, Cortés. His body was riddled with bullets fired from an AK-47. His assassins drove a grey pick-up truck, which they abandoned. (La Tribuna, Westpeace)
18 May 2011 - Sixto Ramos, age 45, the Coordinator of the Aguán Popular Organizations (COPA) from of Nueva Suyapa Cooperative of the Campesino Movement the Aguán (MCA), was shot dead while driving when he was intercepted by unknown persons in another car. (Rights Action, Western Sydney Peace Group/Westpeace)
15 May 2011 - In the Aguán region, Francisco Pascual Lopez, a farmer from the MCA community of Rigores, was tending his cattle when, according to an eye witness, security guards working for Miguel Facussé shot Pascual in his land, and then dragged him alive into the Finca Panama. The witness ran for help, and even though community members found a trail of blood police refused to enter the Finca Panama to locate the injured man. The Finca Panama belongs to Honduran palm oil businessman Miguel Facussé who over the past twenty years has acquired enormous extensions of land in the Aguán often through fraudulent, illegal and violent means. Campesino organizations in the region had been immersed for decades in legal and political processes for the recognition of their land rights. Following the June 28,
10 May 2011 - TV Journalist Héctor Francisco Medina Polanco, age 35, was shot dead as he was leaving Channel 9 news, Omega Vision, where he was General Coordinator. At the end of the news broadcast at 7:00 pm, Medina was followed by two men on a motorcycle and was shot three times in the back in front of his house in the neighborhood of Buenos Aires, in the municipality of Morazán, Yoro Department. A fourth shot hit his arm. He had worked for Omega Visión television station for six years reporting on the political and social situation in the area and had implicated public officials in acts of corruption. According to other sources consulted by C-Libre, the DNIC knows the names of the alleged hit men that murdered Héctor Medina Polanco as well as the amount of money they were allegedly paid for carrying out the assassination. In August 2011, this assassinated journalist's brother, Carlos Alberto Medina Polanco, reported that he has been receiving death threats via messages on his mobile phone. In the messages he has been told to stop demanding an investigation into his brother's death or he will "meet the same fate." He also noted that he has been followed by individuals on a motorcycle when he leaves the radio station for which he works in the city of San Pedro Sula. As a result, he has taken a temporary leave of absence from his position at the station. In addition, he reported that, on 10 June 2011, his 16-year-old daughter was kidnapped, assaulted and questioned about his activities for three hours. He said the National Criminal Investigations Department (Dirección Nacional de Investigación Criminal, DNIC) is aware of the incident involving his daughter. (C-Libre/IFEX)
10 May 2011 - Campesino José Paulino Lemus Cruz, of the "Brisas de Aden" cooperative belonging to the Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MCA) was shot dead from a passing motorcycle as he was walking to sell fish to sell fish in Rio Claro. Other members of the group discounted robbery as a motive; none of the victim's belongings appeared to have been taken. Supporters of the campesino movements say the two latest deaths bring the number of activists killed in the valley over the last 15 months to 27. (defensoresenlinea.com, Rights Action, News Update on the Americas)
07 May 2011 - Honduran campesino Henry Roney Díaz was killed on when soldiers, police and private guards tried to remove campesinos occupying an estate in the Aguán River Valley in the northern department of Colón. Díaz was a member of the El Despertar cooperative, one of the groups forming the Authentic Claimant Movement of Aguán Campesinos (MARCA). Manuel Vásquez, another member of the cooperative, was wounded in the same clash. Security guards were working for the wealthy Nicaraguan René Morales, one of the largest landowners in the region. Morales' farms have been the target of several land occupations since April 30, when campesinos from MARCA and the larger Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) decided to take over the La Trinidad, El Despertar, San Esteban and Guanchías estates to protest what they consider the government's failure to comply with agreements signed in April 2010 [see Update #1029]. (Weekly News Update on the Americas, FIAN, Rights Action)
19 April 2011 - The bodies of Tarin Daniel Garcia Enamorado, age 26 years old and father of three children, was found decapitated, as was that of his father-in-law, Carlos Alberto Acosta Canales, father of five children, with his hands tied, were found in Ocotes Altos on the left bank of the Aguán River in the municipality of Trujillo. Both campesinos were members of the Movimiento Autentico Campesino del Aguan (MUCA). Tarin Daniel was a member of the cooperative, Productores de Colon, one of the four that make up the settlement "La Concepcion". According to the spouse of one of the victims, they had left to go fishing on Thursday, April 14th at 3 pm with the promise to return the next day. When they did not return, their families and friends communicated with the police in Tocoa, Trujillo and in La Ceiba to find information. Reports from neighbors in the locale say that the victims had been captured by security guards of Reynaldo Canales and Rene Morales at the place where the lands of these businessmen meet the Aguán River. (FIAN, Rights Action, hondurashumanrights.wordpress)
18 March 2011 - Ilse Ivania Velásquez Rodríguez, a 59-year old elementary school teacher and former principal in Tegucigalpa, was deliberately targeted with tear gas canister that directly hit her face at close range while participating in a massive teachers demonstration Tegucigalpa protesting the privatization plan for public education. She fell to the ground, unconscious, into an asphyxiating cloud of gas. The driver of a passing television truck, himself affected by the fumes, ran over her right side. She lay face down in a pool of blood seeping out from her body. Three hours later, she died in a hospital. She had rushed to the Presidential Palace to defend Zelaya the morning of the coup. She was one of hundreds of thousands of Hondurans who took to the streets for weeks to protest the new coup government of de facto President Roberto Micheletti -- who Honduras' oligarchs hoped would roll back Zelaya's mild leftward moves and resistance to further neoliberal privatization. Last summer she was one of thousands in the Honduran opposition who circulated petitions -- eventually signed by 1.25 million people, roughly one in three adults -- demanding a Constitutional Convention to re-found the country from below. (COFADEH)
19 February 2011 - Reina Elizabeth Veliz Varela, age 39 and FNRP leader living in the Colonia Las Pavas in Comayagüela, was killed at 9:30 pm by 2 gunmen after they invaded her home. According to an anonymous relative, Reina was at home fixing up her clothes when unidentified persons entered and fired shots at her without saying anything. She was killed in front of her 6-year-old daughter. (Sidney Says No to Honduras Coup)
11 February 2011 - Two influential campesino leaders in Honduras' Aguán valley were killed during a mid-afternoon attack on the region's principal highway. Freddy Gonzalez Castro, treasurer, and Rigoberto Fúnez, president, were leaders of the campesino Cooperative Prieta, which cultivates African palm for biofuel production. Both men died immediately after 15 heavy caliber bullets were fired into their truck.
Initial statements from the Honduran National Police say the men were returning from the bank with a large amount of money and the attack was a robbery. MCA leaders have told us that the Prieta co-operative is the model they wish to emulate due to its democratic decision-making model and the benefits which its members receive: health insurance, better salaries, university scholarships for all children, etc... (Real News)
31 January 2011 - At 6pm, Dr. Jose Maria Turcios was assassinated when he travelled from an organizing meeting of the Resistance, at Quimistan, Santa Barbara. They waited for him and riddled him with bullets. His body was found the next morning with a shot in the forehead. Dr Turcios is ex director of the IHSS hospital. (Sydney Says No to the Honduras Coup)
15 January 2011 - Resistance member Jose Ricardo Dominguez Hernandez, age 42, was assassinated with his body found with several stab wounds. It looked like he was killed with an ice-cutter, his hands were a different color to the rest of his body and would have been tied with hemp or rope. He was previously detained on February 2010 with other resistance members after a protest and was a court witness in a kidnapping and torture case for 2 Globo TV journalists. He applied to the IACHR for cautionary measures and IACHR requested the Supreme Court for information about his situation but never received a response. (COFADEH, Sydney Says No to Honduras Coup)
02 January 2011 - Ermin Nabarro, Cooperativa La Aurora (MUCA) murdered on highway close to La Aurora Cooperative. (Rights Action, FIAN)
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61 Assassinations in 2010
01 December 2011 - José Luis Sanabria, age 45 and a teacher from Copan who was active in the labor movement and resistance, was kidnapped and disappeared on 30 December 2010 when he was driving to Quimistan, Santa Barbara. He was found dead two days later with a shot in the head and a decomposed body in Florida Copán. He was director of Carlos Roberto Reina School of Youth Western Institute, an educator of the regional pedagogical university, and a resistance activist. Police claim it was a car robbery; they have been dubbing literally all killings against resistance members as common delinquency, without investigation. (Sydney Says No to Honduras Coup)
29 November 2010 - Adelson Díaz Estévez was fishing in a river with his brother-in-law, a boy, when they were attacked by the private security guards of Miguel Facussé, who fired on them killing the young Adelson Diaz and wounding the boy, a minor, who was later taken to the hospital. The family presented themselves personally at the offices of the DNIC and the police. (COFADEH)
15 November 2010 - Raul Castillo, age 48, of the Cooperative 14 de mayo, Jose Luis Sauceda, age 25, of the Cooperative 14 de mayo, Ciriaco Munoz, age 50, of the Cooperativa Nueva Esperanza, Teodoro Acosta, age 39, of the Cooperativa Nueva Esperanza, Ignacio Reyes Garcia, age 50, of the Three United Families Cooperative - shot to death by Dinant security guards on the Finca El Tumbador. All of the victims were members of the MCA. (Rights Action, FIAN)
30 October 2011 (unconfirmed) Luís Antonio Hernández, leader in the teachers movement and active member of the FNRP, was stabbed to death in Sinuapa, Ocotepeque.
17 September 2010 - Trade unionist Juana Bustillo, age 49, a nurse for 20 years and 11 year president of the social security workers union SITRAIHSS, was shot by unknown assailants after leaving a union meeting in the city of San Pedro Sula and shortly following her participation in a demonstration organized by the resistance movement. (COFADEH)
15 September 2010 - Efraín López, who for many years sold lottery tickets in the central park of San Pedro Sula, was killed by teargas fired by the police as they attacked a concert and non-violent rally of the National People's Resistance Front FNRP in the San Pedro Sula central park (Rights Action)
10 September 2010 - A group of six men shot and killed campesino Francisco Miranda Ortega, age 55, at the place known as Cacho Guey as he rode his bike headed on the road from the La Aurora encampment where he lived to the city of Tocoa in the northern department of Colón. Miranda was a leader in the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), which represents thousands of campesinos in a land dispute in the Aguán River Valley. He is reportedly the 12th campesino to be murdered since December 2009. (Weekly News Update on the Americas, Rights Action, FIAN)
10 September 2010 - Enrique Alfredo Larios Cruz, of the peasant association company "Unión Catracha" (MCA). Murdered alongside his companion Rodríguez Valdés, by firearm near the village Honduras Aguán, in the municipality of Trujillo. (FIAN)
28 August 2010 - Santos Remigio Ávila, age 45, General Secretary of the National Peasants Association of Honduras (ANACH) and a member of the National Popular Resistance Front, was murdered in Guaymaca, Francisco Morazán, at 10:00 pm as he arrived home from visiting his 5-year-old daughter at the Guaymaca hospital. He was murdered with a single shot to the head in front of his 14-year-old son as they were exiting their car. (Via Campesina, Friendship Office, defensoresenlinea.com)
24 August 2010 - Journalist Israel Zelaya Diaz, age 62 and host of a radio show which reported on national issues broadcast on Radio International, was found shot to death next to a sugarcane field near Villanueva along a rural road near the northern city of San Pedro Sula. Unidentified gunmen shot him twice in the head and once in the chest, leaving his money and personal belongings untouched. Rights Action reports that prior to being murdered, Zelaya Diaz had suffered threats for his opposition to the coup. (CPJ, Rights Action)
18 August 2010 - Victor Manuel Mata Oliva, age 40, Rodving Omar Villegas, age 15, Sergio Madiel Amaya, age 18, and a boy Roldin Marel Villeda, age 15 from the La Aurora Cooperative were assassinated the left bank of the Rio Aguán between El Bridge and the Panama Cooperative in the municipality of Trujillo, department of Colon as they drove to Tocoa for a meeting. According to witnesses, they were fired upon by security guards riding in blue double cabin pick up truck. AR-15 and AK-47 bullet shells were found at the crime scene. The assassinated men were members of the Campesino Corporation of San Esteban and of the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguán (MUCA). MUCA attributed these murders to security guards of wealthy landowner Miguel Facussé. (Rights Action, MUCA, FIAN)
09 August 2010 - Esteban García Cruz, age 45, from the Cooperativa 25 de Abril (MUCA) was murdered by unknown individuals driving a white SUV vehicle. (FIAN, Rights Action)
04 July 2010 - Roger Antonio Fúnez Flores was shot to death at about 6 am in El Progreso as he was bicycling to the agricultural market as he did each Sunday morning. Two men on a motorcycle fired at him, hitting him in the leg, and then killing him with 4 bullets to the head. Funes was a leader of the FNRP in El Progreso, and a regular commentator on Radio Progreso. Roger was president of the neighborhood council (patronato) of La Colonia 18 de Septiembre. He had two daughters. (Radio Progreso)
30 June 2010 (unconfirmed) - Jorge Alberto Castro Ramírez, age 41, a horchata vendor in the numerous FNRP marches of 2009, was assassinated. (Honduras Culture & Politics, COFADEH)
20 June 2010 - Oscar Yovani Ramírez, age 17, belonged to the San Esteban cooperative (MARCA). He was tortured and murdered in the midst of an assault on the Aurora MUCA land reform community carried out by National Police Cobra agents, the Preventative Police and the Orion company´s security guards of wealthy businessman Miguel Facussé. The attached photo of Mr. Ramírez' tortured, dead body was personally presented to CRLN by a leader of the six MUCA land reform communities. That same day, five others from the community were taken captive by the police, and at least some of them reportedly tortured before being released some time later after the Aguán communities amassed at the police station. (CRLN, FIAN, Rights Action)
20 June 2010 - Mauricio Nahún González Coello, son of labor leader Mauro Francisco González, was killed by unknown men as he went through a car wash. (May I Speak Freely)
15 June 2010 - Rolando Valenzuela, former minister of the National Program for Sustainable Rural Development under Manuel Zelaya and an active member of Liberals in Resistance, was shot and killed as he left a restaurant. The shooter was identified as Carlos Alberto Yacamán Meza, a businessman with whom Valenzuela allegedly had a dispute over money. The prosecutor's office eventually released an order of capture for Yacamán Meza on June 23. (May I Speak Freely)
10 June 2010 - Unknown gunmen shot and killed Oscar Molina, brother-in-law of Beverages Workers' Union (Stibys) Vice President Porfírio Ponce. Stibys is active in the FNRP Resistance leadership. Molina was in a car with Ponce's sister and father, neither of whom was gravely injured under the hail of bullets. Members of Stibys have been consistently harassed since the coup. (May I Speak Freely)
29 May 2010 - Agustín Bustillo, age 40, from the Cooperativa Camarones (MUCA). Disappeared on May 24 and found dead five days later on the banks of the Aguán River. (FIAN)
18 May 2010 - Olayo Hernandez Sorto, 38, a member of The Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) and comunal secretary of the Popular Resistance Front against the coup in the community of Pueblo Viejo, Colomoncagua Municipality, Department of Intibucá, was assassinated at about 6.00 pm in Llano Grande, Colomoncagua, Intibucáby, by hit men with three 3.80-caliber pistol shots. One struck him on the chest, the other on the knee and the other on the back. The body of Olayo found in Los Quebrachitos also showed a stab wound to the head probably perpetrated with a machete. It should be noted that he had been accused of being in the resistance and taken up arms because his job was repairing weapons for which he had the relevant permit. Olayo Hernandez Sorto leaves behind a wife and five children. (COPINH, hondurashumanrights.com, defensoresenlínea.com, COFADEH)
13 May 2010 - Gilberto Alexander Nuñez Ochoa, age 27, and José Andrés Oviedo, age 26, were shot dead inside a home in the Colonia Cruz Roja 2 at kilometer 11. Since June 28, 2009, Nuñez consistently participated in mobilizations of the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP), serving in the Security and Discipline Committee, where he helped identify military or police infiltrators whose goal was to 1) photograph protesters and 2) provoke the police commandos by attacking private and public facilities and establish chaos. Nuñez had also spent two months accompanying President Manuel Zelaya in the Embassy of Brazil, where Mr. Zelaya took refuge after he returned to the country on September 21, 2009 (IACHR, HRW)
08 May 2010 - Masked gunmen killed Adalberto Figueroa, an environmentalist and local resistance leader in the Olancho region, while he was collecting firewood a kilometer from his house. On May 03, Figueroa had filed a complaint with the National Institute on Conservation and Forestry Development against an illegal logging operation on protected lands as well as threats with illegal weapons made by logging companies against local community members. The Olancho Environmental Movement, of which Figueroa was a part, suspects that the logging companies affected by the complaint hired Figueroa's killers. (May I Speak Freely, Junta Directiva Movimiento Ambientalista de Olancho, SOA Watch)
29 April 2010 - Miriam Yaneth Romero Domínguez, age 44, a media education teacher living in the Colonia San Carlos de Sula de San Pedro Sula, was assassinated in front of her home as she was closing the outside door (el portón). The unknown assailant had hidden himself behind an electric post. He shot her twice before fleeing. (COFADEH)
26 May 2010 - Unknown gunmen shot and killed in Tegucigalpa Pedro Antonio Gomez and Oscar Tulio Martinez, respectively the brother and brother-in-law of Arcadia Gomez, minister of social affairs in the government of former president Jose Manuel "Mel" Zelaya. The NGO Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras (CODEH) reported that Antonio Gomez and Martinez were active in the
Resistance, and that gunmen had entered the house asking for Arcadia Gomez. CODEH attributed the murders to "death squads," saying it had information that there were groups within the state security agencies who were following opponents of the current government. (May I Speak Freely, US State Dept HR Report)
20 April 2010 - Television journalist Jorge Alberto Orellana, age 50, also known as "Georgino," was shot by an unidentified gunman as he was leaving Televisión de Honduras studios around 9:00 p.m in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Orellana hosted the program "En Vivo con Georgino" (Georgino Live), which focused on local news, mostly related to cultural events, José Peraza, a reporter with Radio Progreso in San Pedro Sula, told CPJ. Orellana did not report on sensitive stories such as organized crime, Tiempo Editor Rubén Escobar said. Before joining Televisión de Honduras, Orellana had worked for the newspaper La Prensa and the country's leading network Televicentro. After the coup in June 2009, Orellana left Televicentro because of discomfort with the station's editorial position in support of the coup government. Orellana was also a journalism professor at the National University of Honduras in San Pedro Sula. (CPJ)
13 April 2010 - W105 radio journalist Luis Antonio Chévez Hernández, age 22, was assassinated as he got out of his car in front of his home by unidentified gunmen in the city of San Pedro Sula. He was the sixth Honduran journalist killed this year. Robbery was ruled out as a motive. (UNESCO, Reporters w/o Borders)
07 April 2010 - José Leonel Guerra Alvarez, age 32, from La Confianza Cooperativa (MUCA) in the Aguán was shot to death by 5 bullets. Two individuals got off a motorcycle and shot him inside his house in front of his wife and children. (Rights Action, FIAN, CEJIL)
01 April 2010 - The body of Edy Gabriel Betancourt, age 23, was found in El Paraiso, and kidnapped in Comayaguela on 27/12/10. He was outside his home when a double-cabin pick-up with polarized windows and no number plates parked in front of him and 4 hooded men came out saying they are police and came to capture him. His family rushed out to stop them from taking him but they showed the family a capture order and took him to an unknown place. His family searched for him everywhere. Edy is a first year university student at UNAH. No further information is available because his family is afraid to denounce; his death is denounced by FNRP as political. (Sydney Says No to Honduran Coup)
01 April 2010 - Miguel Angel Alonso Oliva, age 22, from the Cooperativa Guanchias in Aguán was shot in the back at 6:00 am by a security guard of the oil palm plantations in the Aguán Valley, when a peasant group from the Unified Peasant Movement of Aguán (MUCA) was occupying land in the Boleros farm held by René Morales. The Aguán Valley is living under extreme tension caused by the mobilization of military, police, and security guards hired by businessmen involved in the land dispute with the MUCA. According to information obtained so far, farmers fear that the mobilization of military, police, and heavily armed guards plans to evict people from the land on the left bank of the Aguán River. The threatened settlements include: Suyapa del Aguán, Guanchías, Buenos Amigos, Remolino, Despertar, Trinidad, San Esteban, Quebrada Honda, Paso Aguán, El Plantel, Islas 1 and 2, Marañones, and Bolero. (Rights Action, FIAN, Honduras Human Rights Wordpress)
28 March 2010 - Dr. Yorleny Yadira Sánchez Rivas, age 33, who was wounded with hit men murdered journalist Nahún Palacios in Tocoa on 14 March, died at a clinic in San Pedro Sula which she had entered because of convulsions. (voselsoberano.com, COFADEH)
27 March 2010 - Journalists José Bayardo Mairena Ramírez and Manuel Juárez working on the news program "This is Olancho" on Channel 4, were shot by men in another vehicle on the highway while they were driving to work. The two reporters strongly questioned the coup d'etat carried out June 28, 2009 and also had systematically denounced the human rights violations carried out by the army and police against citizens in resistance on their Olancho radio program. (United Nations, Comité por la Libre Expresión/C-Libre)
23 March 2010 - Jose Manuel Flores, a prominent FNRP member and a Social Sciences teacher, was assassinated at the San Jose del Pedregal High School in front of his students by a death squad comprised of heavily armed men wearing ski masks and civilian clothes. This incident left behind key evidence for investigation, arrest and prosecution, since as the assassins fled, the ski mask of one of the attackers became entangled in the razor coil over the fence which they had cut open to look for their victim. (COFADEH)
17 March 2010 - Francisco Castillo, age 50, a member of the FNRP, and a friend and associate of priest Fr. Andres Tamayo, was assassinated in La Residencial Las Uvas de Comayagüela, Tegucigalpa. Fr. Tamayo was expelled from Honduras by the Michelleti coup government in 2009. Previously, Mr. Castillo and his spouse had been unlawfully detained in September 2009 and harassed again in December 2009. (COFADEH)
17 March 2010 - Jose Antonio Cardoza and Jose Concepcion Carias, both around age 50, were killed at noon by unidentified individuals who opened fire with a shotgun as the campesinos were driving home after a day's work in the Carbonal community, Bonito Oriental, Colon Department. The two farmers were leaders in the Brisas Cooperative of COHDEFOR, and had received death threats from the alleged land owner, Carlos Diaz, who is represented by a legal representative, said officials of the National Agrarian Institute (INA) in Tocoa, Colón department, on Friday, March 12. The INA presented a complaint before the Public Prosecutor's Office. About 25 families occupy and inhabit the past 4 years about 60 acres that were once property of the Honduran Forest Development Corporation, or COHDEFOR. (COFADEH)
14 March 2010 - Journalist Nahún Ely Palacios Arteaga, age 36, was killed instantly after assassins in two vehicles fired 47 bullets into his car - with 14 striking him. His partner, Yorleny Yadira Sánchez Rivas, was also seriously injured and died two weeks later as a consequence of the attack (see 28 Mar 11 above). Nahún Palacios was news director of Channel 5 in the Aguán Valley, and hosted a news program on Radio Tocoa. He covered drugs, politics, and an ongoing conflict between landowners and peasant farmers in the Aguán. In the weeks before the murder, Nahún Palacios, who had been granted precautionary measures by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR), reported on the agrarian conflict in Bajo Aguán from a balanced perspective, openly questioning several media outlets´ campaigns to stigmatize and defame the peasant movements. Palacios reportedly received threats from members of the Honduran military in June 2009 for critical coverage of the 2009 Honduran coup. (COFADEH)
12 March 2010 - Ramón Ulises Castellanos and Miguel Sauceda, field workers in the Naranjo neighborhood in the Department of Atlántida, were assassinated by death squads working for wealthy landowners trying to re-occupy lands that President Zelaya had redistributed to small farmers. (WFP)
11 March 11 2010 - Journalist David Enrique Meza Montesinos, age 51, a reporter on El Patio radio station for more than 30 years, was shot dead in his car by unidentified men who followed him in another vehicle. The journalist was chased by his murderers, reportedly in a double cab vehicle. When he tried to evade them, he was hit and shot a few yards from his home at about 5:20 pm. (Committee to Protect Journalists/CPJ)
01 March 2010 (date unconfirmed) - Bessy Pamela Cerrato Banegas, was murdered in Yucarán, El Paraíso. Her body bore machete wounds and signs of torture. She is the daughter of Arminda Banegas, member of the Eighth Section of the Bottling Workers Union, STIBYS, and member of the FNRP. COFADEH note on 01 Nov 2001: Six months have passed since this criminal act and the Public Prosecutor's Office has not prosecuted those responsible. (COFAHEH)
February 24, 2010 -Claudia Larissa Brizuela, age 36, responding to a knock on the door of her home in San Pedro Sula, was shot at point-blank range numerous times in the chest, killing her instantly. Her two sons, ages 2 and 8, witnessed the brutal assassination from inside the home. Claudia was a member of the FNPP, and the daughter of Pedro Brizuela, a prominent member of the resistance who had recently spoken out against the Lobo administration. The killing occurred on the eve of a large rally of in Tegucigalpa denouncing the coup and human rights abuses. (COFADEH)
17 February 2011 - Dara Gudiel, age 17, was found hanged in the city of Danlí, in the department of Paraíso. Dara Gudiel was the daughter of journalist Enrique Gudiel, who runs a radio program called "Siempre al Frente con el Frente" ("Always Upfront with the Front"), which broadcasts information about the resistance. Days before she was found hanged, Dara Gudiel had been released after having been kidnapped and held for two days, during which time she was alleged to have been physically mistreated. (IACHR, COFADEH)
15 February 2010 - Julio Fúnez Benítez, age 57, of the sanitation workers union (SANAA) was gunned down in the Brisas de Olancho neighborhood around 6:00 pm by two hit men who were wearing baseball hats on a motorcycle. Fúnez Benítez was always at the head of all the marches and activities with the National Front of Popular Resistance, FNRP. The previous weekend, he had participated in the first FNRP assembly, which took place in Siguatepeque. According friends and family, he had received several death threats where he was told that if he didn´t remove himself from the Front, they would kill him. (COFADEH, Defensores en Línea, Honduras Culture & Politics, The Nation)
14 February 2010 - Feliciano Santos, age 40, from the Cooperativa 21 de Julio died of 2 bullet wounds while walking towards the recovered lands occupied by René Morales, on the right bank of the Aguán River to lands in dispute. (Rights Action, FIAN)
04 February 2010 - Francisco Montes, age 45, and Isidro Cano, age 45, from the Cooperativa Buenos Amigos, died due to wounds suffered in a vehicle crash, in which they were trying to escape from armed men who were shooting at them from another vehicle. (CEJIL, FIAN, Rights Action)
04 February 2010 - Isidro Santos, from the Cooperativa Occidental, Died in car crash while fleeing from armed men shooting at them from another car. (Rights Action)
04 February 2010 - Vanesa Yaneth Zepeda Alonzo, age 29, a nurse still dressed in her scrubs, was killed by a bullet turning up dead in the Loarque neighborhood of Tegucigalpa. Zepeda had young children and was a leader of the SITRAIHSS labor union (Workers Union for the Honduran Social Security Institute). She had been abducted that afternoon while leaving a union meeting. (COFADEH)
31 January 2010 - Juan Ramon Mejia, age 60, from the Cooperativa Occidental (MUCA), died due to multiple contusions suffered when hit by a vehicle that was following him. (Rights Action, FIAN, CEJIL)
Mid-January 2010 - Blas Lopez, a teacher and leader of the Pech ethnic group, was murdered in the village of Carbonal. He was an active member of the resistance. (COFADEH, Honduras Human Rights)
DISAPPEARED IN 2011 & 2010:
30 August 2011 - José Reynaldo Cruz Palma, president of the Community Council (Patronato) of Planeta Neighbourhood in San Pedro Sula. According to his family members he was kidnapped by agents of the DNIC and Preventative Police when he was travelling by public transport along with his wife Nubia Carvajal between La Lima, Cortés and their home in the neighborhood of Planeta. The bus he was riding in was intercepted by various agents of both police forces who were driving in two vehicles, one was a grey Mazda double-cab pick-up truck with the partial license plate BP50 and the other was a patrol vehicle of the Preventative Police. The uniformed agents got on the bus, said to his wife that the problem was not with her but with her partner, and took him by force. (COFADEH)
21 August 2011 - Oscar Elías López Muñoz, age 49, was kidnapped by masked men around 5:00 AM on Sunday August 21st in the Suyapa neighborhood of Chamelecón in the North of Honduras. The men arrived in three cars and broke down the doors of his home, where López Muños was with his wife and ten year-old daughter. They said they were agents of the National Department of Criminal Investigation (DNIC). They were wearing hoods and ski masks. (COFADEH)
02 August 2011 - Mauricio Joel Urbino Castro, age 34, worked as a taxi driver of taxi number 248 in the city of Ceiba in the department of Atlántida. He was having a problem with the electrical system of the car. At approximately 4:30 pm, he arrived at a garage that specialized in electrical repairs in the San José neighborhood of Ceiba to repair the vehicle. At about the same time four men whose faces were covered with ski masks, of large and muscular build, who were carrying long and short-barreled weapons, identified themselves as police and immediately ordered all present inside the garage to get on the ground, shouting "we're the police - hit the floor!" while they kicked the garage owner. They then proceeded to beat Mauricio Joel Urbina Castro, fastened his hands behind him, and violently removed him from the garage, forcing him into a grey double-cab pick-up truck with heavily tinted windows and without license plate which was waiting in the street. He has not been seen since and his cell phone has never been answered since. (COFADEH)
11 June 2011 - Kelvin Omar Andrade Hernández, age 18, son of political exile Dagoberto Andrade, mysteriously disappeared on when he went out to ride his motorcycle in the neighborhood of Bella Vista in Catacamas, department of Olancho. He has not appeared since. (COFADEH)
21 May 2011 - Olvin Gallegos y Segundo Gómez were abducted in the Aguán valley in the afternoon by private security guards operating as paramilitaries while the two were traveling by bicycle from the "San Esteban" farm to the "El Despertar" farm when they were intercepted by paramilitaries as they were crossing the finca "El Mochito", a palm oil plantation. At about 3 pm, the community went to look for the missing men at the Empresa Impalma palm oil processing plant of landowner Reynaldo Canales located in the finca El Mochito. There, they found two police patrols numbering some 32 policemen and two Army command groups numbering about 100 soldiers who were caring for the plant. All were masked. They asked for the chief of security for the Empresa Impalma, who denied that the disappeared men were there. They remain disappeared. (Rights Action, Radio Progreso)
15 May 2011 - Francisco Pascual López of the Rigores agricultural cooperative in Tocoa, Colón, is disappeared since May 15, 2011. (COFADEH)
21 February 2011 - Today 350 teachers were cruelly repressed when they carried out a protest against the violation of their rights in the city of La Ceiba, Honduras. The first reports are that in addition to the usual pepper gas, the teachers have been viciously beaten and many have been detained. Among the detained is the union leader Franklin Padilla, whose current whereabouts are unknown. (USLEAP)
07 Februrary 2011 - Samuel Josué Pastrana Molina was kidnapped at 2:30 when armed men with ski masks entered the place he was in the department of El Paraíso, ordered those who were with him to place themselves on the ground and close there eyes, and they took him away. (COFADEH)
AT LEAST 10 PEOPLE HAVE BEEN DISAPPEARED BY POLICE FORCES UNDER PORFIRIO LOBO´S REGIME
20 July 2010 - Luís Alexander Torres Casaleno, detained by police agents while driving his motorcycle, after having passed a police checkpoint on the Corocito highway towards Tocoa, Colón. A few kilometers passed the checkpoint he was detained by four agents of the Preventative Police who were riding in a white unmarked double-cab pick-up truck and crossed in front of him on the highway. Two agents in uniform got out of the truck and put him into the vehicle, leaving his motorcycle behind. The motorcycle was retrieved by the Corocito police shortly afterwards. A habeas corpus was filed in his name and there has been no response to date. (COFADEH)
15 July 2010 - Vilmar Edmundo Talavera Avilez, a police officer, was detained by the Border Police (Policía de Frontera y Análisis) when he was riding a bus. He was detained after presenting his identification documents. Before his disappearance he was reportedly threatened by a police officer by the name of Tercero.
13 July 2010 - Denis Alexander Russel, age 19, was captured in an operation of the Special Anti-Kidnapping Taskforce (GEAS). The operation was commanded by Vice Minister of Security Armando Calidonio and police spokesperson Juan Rochez. His mother, Carlota Anariva, denounced that the day he was taken away he had been with her buying groceries, and when they returned to the house she left him to park the car and suddenly the neighbours came to tell her that her son had been taken away. He was a student in the Instituto de la Patria in La Lima, Department of Cortés. (COFADEH)
13 June 2010 - Osmin Obando Cáceres, age 22, son of Eliodoro Cáceres, Coordinator of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) in Tela, department of Atlántida, has been disappeared since Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 4:30 PM when he was driving his taxi and told his family that he couldn't speak to them by phone because he was surrounded by police. The taxi appeared abandoned that same day around 6:30PM in the community of Los Cedros, in the jurisdiction of Tela. After his disappearance, the family received false calls, one caller claiming that Osmin was in the hospital in Tela and another that claimed that he was dead in the community of Las Palmas. Relatives went to verify each of the calls and neither was true. (COFADEH)
CRITICALLY WOUNDED:
05 October 2011 - Two leaders of the La Aurora settlement, members of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), Pedro Alfredo Matamoros Bonilla and Heder Jael Sánchez Cruz, were shot at 10:30 am by unknown parties at the San Isidro, Sinaloa farm in the Bajo Aguán. According to a preliminary analysis of the actions, the shots fired at the two leaders of MUCA, who are currently hospitalized in serious condition, came from the African Palm plantations of the San Isidro farm, property of landholder and palm producer Miguel Facussé. MUCA leader Jonny Rivas noted that Pedro Alfredo Matamoros Bonilla was shot with three bullets, one of which entered his mouth and exited through his ear. Heder Jael Sánchez Cruz was shot twice in the groin. "They were driving by the San Isidro farm, which is under permanent vigilance by Miguel Facussé's security guards, who shot from there at the vehicle. There is no doubt which side of the highway they were attacked from; it was from the plantation. Pedro Matamoros is gravely wounded and his life is in danger," Rivas stated.
01 March 2011 - Two unidentified men pulled in front of union member Eduardo Argueta Santos' house in a taxi and asked him to hand them his cellular phone, at which point one took out a gun and shot him. Santos was critically injured and remains in the hospital. (USLEAP)
25 May 2010 - Two unidentified individuals shot into the STIBYS headquarters of San Pedro Sula, gravely injuring Douglas Ramón Gomez Torres. (USLEAP)
29 July 2011 - Nelson Eliberto Lopez Reyes, vicepresidente de la Seccional de Sabá, Colón, fue ultimado de varios disparos por tres hombres armados que actuaron con alevosía, premeditación y ventaja. (USLEAP reported Nelson as killed, but there is no confirmation of this by other sources.)
"Two Years too long"
from "Sydney Says No to Honduras Coup" [http://www.sydney-says-no2honduras-coup.net/list-of-murders-related-to-this-coup.php]:
The file attached below is of just 47 of many people killed - pictures and brief stories, in the first 2 years of this continuing and deepening military coup honduras - [http://www.sydney-says-no2honduras-coup.net/resources/honduras%20-%20Compressed.pdf]. Please note further reports will be posted here - meanwhile please refer to news summaries for killings after February 2010, the killings have not stopped and we need to keep pressuring for police, military and paramlitaries under this regime to stop killing people.
This is another list in July 2011, of assassinated journalists, in Spanish...
REGISTRY OF POLITICALLY MOTIVATED VIOLENT KILLINGS IN HONDURAS, JUNE 2009 – FEBRUARY 2010
SUMMARY by COFADEH (Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras)
(Translated by Quixote Center, www.quixote.org)]
1- 07/03/2009, GABRIEL FINO NORIEGA, 51, San Juan Pueblo, Tela, Atlántida
Journalist Gabriel Fino Noriega was murdered by men in a black vehicle who fired seven shots at him, on the afternoon of July 3rd, as he left a news program at Radio Estelar in San Juan Pueblo. At the time, he was reporting on the popular referendum promoted by the Office of the President, protests against the coup d’état, and denunciations of those supporting the coup.
2- 07/05/2009, ISIS OBED MURILLO MENCIAS, 19, Toncontín Airport, Comayagüela, Francisco Morazán
Isis, a young man from Santa Crúz de Guayape, Olancho, was murdered on Sunday, July 5th at a protest against the coup d’état at the Toncontín airport, which he attended with his family. Army officers opened machine gun fire against thousands of people who were concentrated near the tarmac. Isis Obed was shot in the head and died immediately.
3- 07/05/2009, ANASTASIO BARRERA, 55, Jardín Clonal of San Juan Pueblo, Tela, Atlántida
Anastasio, a campesino member of the Good Samaritan Cooperatives of Jardín Clonal of San Juan Pueblo, was kidnapped on July 5th by hooded men who broke into his home at 9pm. Six days later his decomposed body was found in a place called the Molera in the municipality of Tela. Anastasio had participated in protests against the coup in San Juan Pueblo.
4- 7/11/2009, ROGER BADOS, Colonia 6 de mayo, Rivera Hernández sector, San Pedro Sula, Cortés
Roger, a member of the Bloque Popular, collaborator with the School for Methodology of the National Resistance Front, and former SITRATEXHONSA union leader, was assassinated July 11 by an unknown person riding a bicycle, who came to his house in the May 6 neighborhood, Rivera Hernández sector in San Pedro Sula, claiming to be looking for one of his nephews. When Roger turned to enter his home, the unknown person shot him three times in the back and side. His sister and the wife of the nephew were also injured in the incident.
5- 7/25/2009, PEDRO MAGDIEL SALVADOR MUÑOZ, 24, Alauca, El Paraíso
Pedro was a member of the resistance movement against the coup. He was found dead at 6:30am near the Beneficio Agrícola at the turn-off from Paraíso to Alauca. Forensics said that his body showed signs of torture and had 42 bullet wounds.
6- 7/12/2009, MOISES GARCÍA GÓMEZ, 40, Callejones, Santa Bárbara
Moises was forced to get out of the collective transport vehicle in which he was traveling in the Callejones sector of the western department of Santa Bárbara. The information was confirmed by Union Democratica leader, Renán Valdés, who says that "he was forced off of the bus by unknown individuals".
7- 7/30/2009, ROGER ABRAHAM VALLEJO SORIANO, 38, Zona Belén, Comayagüela, Francisco Morazán
Roger, a secondary school teacher and member of Copemh, was shot in the face when he attempted to escape brutal repression that occurred in Durazno. He was transferred to the Hospital Escuela, and died on August 1st from the injury. Professor Vallejo worked at the San Martín Institute in Tegucigalpa. An eyewitness observed that a State agent, in the back of a preventative police pick-up patrol truck, fired in the direction of protestors as the driver made a u-turn at high velocity in front of the Belén market. At this moment, Vallejo was mortally wounded.
8- 08/02/2009, PEDRO PABLO HERNANDEZ, 54, Jutiapa, Jamastrán, El Paraiso
Pedro, a worker, died at 5:30 p.m. in the bypass to Jutiapa in the Jamastran valley, when an Army officer, First Sergeant Fredy Flores assigned to the Ninth Infantry Battalion, fired on the vehicle in which he was traveling as it crossed a military checkpoint.
9- 08/09/2009, JUAN GABRIEL FIGUEROA TOME, 30, La Platanera, Choloma, Cortés
Juan was a member of the resistance from the López Arellano neighborhood of Choloma Cortes. He was found dead in the sector known as La Platanera, with typical signs of summary execution on August 9, 2009. He had been shot in the neck and thorax.
10- O8/22/2009, JONATAN OSORIO, 16, Colonia Oscar A. Flores, Comayagüela, Francisco Morazán
Jonathan was a member of the Democratic Unification Party youth organization, secondary school student and member of the resistance against the coup. He was killed on the evening of August 22, 2009, when two subjects approached him in front of his home in the Oscar A. Flores neighborhood, fired shots into his head and fled into the darkness of night.
11- 09/17/2009, FELIX ORLANDO MURILLO LOPEZ, 37, Boulevard frente a Colonia San Ángel, Tegucigalpa, Francisco Morazán
Feliz was a middle school teacher. He was killed the night of September 17, 2009, when he was returning to his home in the Colonia Guaymuras. He was hit by an unidentified truck. Wounded, he was taken to the Hospital Escuela, where de died at 3:00am, September 18. His wife and brothers found his corpse in the Medicina Forense del Ministerio Publico morgue, on September 19.
12- 09/18/2009, Rubén Estrada, Comayagüela, Francisco Morazán
Ruben was a secondary school teacher at the Saúl Jiménez and San Martín Institute and was killled in a bar in Comayagüela. He lived in the La Cañada neighborhood.
13- 09/22/2009, ELVIS JACOBO PERDOMO EUCEDA, 18, Las Colinas, aldea El Carmen, San Pedro Sula, Cortés
Elvis worked selling firewood in his community. On the afternoon of Sept. 22, he was riding his bicycle on his way to play soccer when, according to eyewitnesses, he passed the parked police patrol M110- 6. As he passed the vehicle, the boy yelled “Golpista” at them. In response, a police officer got out of the patrol car with his official firearm, and fired two shots into the boy’s back and head. The youth was 70 meters from the patrol car and died immediately.
14- 09/22/2009, FRANCISCO ALVARADO, 65, Colonia Flor del Campo, Comayagüela, Francisco Morazán
Francisco died from a bullet wound inflicted by police agents. At 7pm he was on his way to a nearby store. Police and military were controlling the neighborhood after residents had protested, repressing people who were still in the streets. Police shot at him without warning. Police tried to impede his wake on September 23, at the Capilla Ardiente, arguing that there was a state of siege and threatening one of his brothers.
15- 09/22/2009, WENDY ELIZABETH AVILA, 24
Wendy died as a result of bronchial spasms in the Hospital Escuela in Tegucigalpa, on Sept. 26th after inhaling chemicals from tear gas bombs that were fired in front of the Embassy of Brazil, Tegucigalpa, Francisco Morazán, to disperse the crowd that had come to support the return of President Zelaya. Wendy was a member of the resistance – as is her husband.
16- 09/23/2009, JAIRO SANCHEZ, Colonia Vista Hermosa, Comayagüela, Francisco Morazán
Jairo was President of SITRAINFOP and coordinator of the Resistencia in the San Francisco neighborhood. At approximately 11.30am two police officers on motorcycle patrol opened fire on a group of protestors who had taken the main street connecting several neighborhoods in the north of Comayagüela at the intersection of the Vista Hermosa Centro neighborhood. Jairo was shot in the face.
17- September, unidentified man, Silin, Colón
18- 30/09/2009, OLGA OSIRIS UCLES, 35, Boulevard Morazán, Tegucigalpa, Francisco Morazán
Olga, a member of the Resistance against the coup, died three days after inhaling tear gas during police and military repression in front of Radio Globo. She died at 6:15pm on October 3rd from pulmonary congestion. She had been in respiratory crisis since Sept. 30.
19- 10/02/2009, MARIO FIDEL CONTRERAS MONCADA, 50, Colonia San Ángel, Tegucigalpa, Francisco Morazán
Professor Contreras was an active member of the Honduran College of Secondary School Teachers and member of the Resistance Front against the coup. He participated in protests organized by FOMH. On October 2, he was the victim of an attempt on his life and did not survive. At 8:30am, a young, thin person followed him and then fired on him. The assailant then ran towards the Boulevard of the Armed Forces where he was picked up by a second subject on a motorcycle.
20- 10/02/2009, MATEO ANTONIO LEIVA, 50, Aldea Los Conculuncos, Zacapa, Santa Bárbara
Mateo was a member of the Resistance against the coup in the western part of the country. He was murdered on October 2, by three masked men, dressed in black, who fired on him 16 times. He was with his wife, Basilia Álvarez, in the village of Conculuncos, municipality of Zacapa, Santa Bárbara at the time of the killing.
21- 10/19/2009, Marco Antonio Martínez Lezama, 47, La Libertad Park, Comayagüela, Francisco Morazán
Marco, a coordinator for the Resistencia in the Divanna neighborhood of Comayagüela, was found dead on a bench in the La Libertad Park.
22- 10/19/2009, SERGIO ELISEO JUAREZ HERNANDEZ, 44, Sabanetas and Macuelizo, Santa Bárbara
Sergio, an elementary School teacher and environmental advocate in the western part of the country, was assassinated on Monday, October 19th at 7am when he was driving between Sabanetas and Macuelizo, Santa Bárbara. An unknown person fired seven shots into his face and skull. Shells from 40mm and 9mm weapons were found at the murder site.
23- 11/18/2009, Félix Noel Hernández, 30, Juticalpa, Olancho
Felix was killed in an attempt on the life of the coordinator of the Resistance movement, Ulises Sarmiento Galindo, in Juticalpa, Olanchoo.
24- 11/18/20099, José Blas Romero Caballero, 25, Juticalpa, Olancho
Jose was killed in an attempt on the life of the coordinator de la Resistance movement, Ulises Sarmiento Galindo, in Juticalpa, Olancho.
25- 11/23/2009, Gradis Espinal, 56, Aldea La Felicidad, Tegucigalpa, Francisco Morazán
Gradis was kidnapped from the beltway and murdered, execution style, the same day in the village La Felicidad, in Tegucigalpa.
26- 11/28/2009, Ángel Salgado, 32, El Obelisco Park, Comayagüela, Francisco Morazán
Angel was killed by soldiers assigned to the Joint High Command in the Obelisco Park of Comayagüela.
27-31, 12/06/2009, Isaac Coello (24), Roger Reyes (22), Kenneth Rosa (23), Gabriel Parrales y Marcos Vinicio Matute (39), Colonia Villanueva, Tegucigalpa, Francisco Morazán
These 5 members of the Resistance were assassinated in Colonia Villanueva, as they gathered with other young people in front of a local food stand.
32- 12/11/2009, Santos Corrales García, Lepaterique, Francisco Morazán
Santos, an active member of the Resistance against the coup, who coordinated the food storage warehouse, was kidnapped on Dec. 5, 2009, from his home by five armed men in National Criminal Investigation Unit uniforms. The subjects were driving a blue Tacoma vehicle. Six days later his decapitated body appeared 50 kilometers outside of Tegucigalpa.
33- 12/13/2009, Walter Orlando Tróchez, 27, Center of Tegucigalpa, Francisco Morazán
Walter was killed in the center of Tegucigalpa near the Larach and Cía from a bullet wound to the thorax fired by unidentified individuals from a vehicle.
34- 12/14/2009, Carlos Alberto Valenzuela, Comayagua, Comayagua
Carlos’ was found hung and strangled in his home in Comayagua.
35- 12/15/2009, Carlos Roberto Turcios Maldonado, 26, Colonia López Arellano, Choloma, Cortés
Carlos was kidnapped from López Orellana neighborhood at 2:20pm by hooded men in a vehicle who took him in an unknown direction. On Dec. 18th a body was found without head or hands, which is presumed to be Carlos. DNA testing is being done to confirm his identify.
36- 12/17/2009, Karen Yessenia Hernández Mondragón, 29, Colonia Arturo Quezada, Comayagüela, Francisco Morazán
Karen was wounded by a firearm as she was taking her children to school in the Colonia San Francisco. She died on Dec. 18, 2009 in the Hospital Escuela of Tegucigalpa.
37- 12/22/2009, Edwin Renán Fajardo Argueta, 22, Barrio San Rafael, Tegucigalpa, Francisco Morazán
Edwin was an active member of the Artists in Resistance to the coup and was found strangled in the closet of the apartment where he lived in the San Rafael neighborhood of Tegucigalpa.
38- 01/10/2009, JANETH LOURDES MARROQUÍN, Comayagua, Comayagua
Janeth, a Medical Doctor and active member of the Resistance, and her husband (#39) were assassinated in their home by hooded men who entered by force.
39- 01/10/2009, HUGO NOÉ CONTRERAS, Comayagua, Comayagua
Hugo was a pharmacy owner and active member of the Resistance. He was assassinated with his wife (#38) by hooded men who forced entry into their home.
40- 01/30/2009, Blas López, Aldea El Carbonal, Olancho
Blas was a Secondary School Teacher, leader of the Pech ethnic group and active member of the Resistance. He was found dead from multiple gunshot wounds.
41- 02/02/2010, Vanessa Zepeda, 29, Tegucigalpa, Francisco Morazán
Vanessa was an active member of the Resistance against the coup and unión leader in the Social Security Workers Union. Her body was thrown out of a moving vehicle in the Loarque neighborhood in the south of Tegucigalpa.
42- 02/15/2010, Julio Fúnez Benítez, Colonia Brisas de Olancho, Comayagüela
Julio was a leader in the SANAA Union and member of the Resistance movement. He was gunned down by men wearing caps on a motorcycle at 6pm. He was shot three times. Previously he had received death threats.
43- 02/24/2010, Claudia Larisa Brizuela Rodriguez, 36, Colonia Céleo González, San Pedro Sula
Claudia was the daughter of a prominent Radio journalist and outspoken member of the Resistance. She was shot in the face and killed when she opened the door to her home. Her two young children witnessed their mother’s murder.
2013-02-21 "SOA Watch ¡PRESENTE! in Honduras"
report from "SOA Watch":
While much of Latin America has made significant strides in recent years towards guaranteeing citizen's rights and securing their natural resources, one nation is racing the opposite direction: Honduras. Since the 2009 coup orchestrated by SOA graduates, Honduras has plunged itself into an apparent nostalgia for the 1980's. Extrajudicial killings, repression, and impunity are once again the order of the day, and everything from land to minerals to entire cities are now fair game for the corporate auction block.
Within days of the coup, SOA Watch responded to requests from partners in Honduras to come and bear witness to the atrocities in order to more effectively galvanize solidarity. After numerous visits and delegations, SOAW placed an activante in Honduras with PROAH, a vital program that accompanies human rights activists in Honduras.
Now, SOAW is even more !Presente! in Honduras. Two SOAW activantes, Brigitte Gynther and Romeo Ramirez are immersed in the difficult realities of that country in order to share the Stories of Honduras with all of us. Above all, they will share ways in which we can all be ¡PRESENTE! in Honduras, by taking simple actions that can make enormous differences.
In this email we share their stories of Chavelo and Wilmer, two young Hondurans whose lives have been - figuratively and literally - shattered by the repression in Honduras. But first, the story of Brigitte and Romeo themselves is worth sharing.
Romeo came to the US as a migrant farm worker at age 15, where he became a leader in the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a Florida farmworker organization that is dramatically transforming the way tomato pickers are treated and paid. Many of you may have met Romeo as he traveled the country speaking about the CIW's campaigns. Romeo is a laureate of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for his work, including an undercover investigation of a modern-day slavery operation involving 700 workers in Florida's fields that was successfully prosecuted by the US Department of Justice.
Brigitte grew up in Connecticut and after graduating from Notre Dame worked for eight years with Interfaith Action of Southwest Florida, engaging faith communities in the CIW's Campaign for Fair Food. She is the recipient of the 2009 Cardinal Bernardin Award.
Brigitte and Romeo have come to Honduras "because of the people of Honduras who continue speaking out for justice in the face of intense repression and threats." We invite you to join them from afar in being ¡PRESENTE! in Honduras: Read the story of Chavelo below, and Wilmer here , watch a video of Chavelo. Above all, take action so that we may not have to add any other ¡PRESENTE! from Honduras to our litany at gates of Ft. Benning this fall.
Honduran human rights workers and international solidarity activists are under threat in Honduras, where a military commander has posted names and phone numbers of those who have spoken out about the rash of killings and detentions of campesinos who are defending their land rights in the Lower Aguan valley. SOA graduate Coronel German Alfaro [http://www.soaw.org/category-table/4028-the-15th-battalion-of-honduras], commander of the Xatruch III Joint Task Force published a statement condemning human rights defenders, including COFADEH journalist Marvin Palacios, after the human rights community deplored more killings and detentions in the past week [http://www.soawlatina.org/note_hn.htm]. The statement also published phone numbers of activists from the US-based Honduran Solidarity Network. Consider a donation to help SOAW continue to support an activante with the PROAH accompaniment program to defend the lives of human rights workers [https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/727/p/salsa/donation/common/public/?donate_page_KEY=9319].
Freedom for Honduran Political Prisoner Jose Isabel Morales -
“Last week, we had the opportunity to travel with Father Melo, who spoke at the SOA Watch Vigil this November, to the Penitentiary where Jose ‘Chavelo’ Isabel Morales is being held prisoner. He is a campesino from the Aguan region of Honduras, where over 80 campesinos have been murdered and many more repressed and criminalized in a “war on peasants” that has intensified since the 2009 SOA-graduate led coup.
As a result of Honduras’ dysfunctional legal system in which powerful interests can matter more than facts, Chavelo is in prison without any credible evidence that he committed a crime. In July, after being held for almost 4 years without a sentence – a violation of Honduran law -- Chavelo was sentenced to 20 more years during a hearing that neither he nor his lawyers were informed of.
Chavelo shared with us how hard it is to be away from his family and to know that his small children are going hungry because he is not there to provide for them. Watch a video of Chavelo here. He has lost sight in one eye and has had to sleep with the guards due to death threats and attempts on his life. His 1 ½ year old daughter and his father both died while he was being held without a sentence and he was not able to attend the funerals. Now, Chavelo’s only hope for freedom and returning to his family is that the Honduran Supreme Court take up his case.
On February 25, Honduran social movements will embark on a 10-day march calling for Chavelo´s freedom. You can help by signing this petition for Chavelo’s freedom that will be delivered to the Supreme Court.
We have also had the opportunity to spend time with some of the Indigenous Mosquitia victims of high-caliber artillery fire from US State Department helicopters in a counternarcotics operation involving US DEA agents that went extremely wrong. Read more about their stories and the US refusal to investigate or even help with the medical bills of defenseless Honduran villagers who were traveling along a river when they suddenly found themselves fired upon from above.”
Brigitte and Romeo will be regularly sharing stories from Honduras and action alerts of ways you can support the Honduran people's struggle for justice and self-determination. Click here to stay updated!
Sign the Petition to Demand Freedom for Honduran Political Prisoner Chavelo Morales!
[http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/727/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=12583]
José Isabel "Chavelo" Morales Lopez of the Campesino Movement of the Aguan has been in prison since October 17, 2008 with absolutely no evidence that he has committed a crime. On June 25, 2010 he was convicted of homicide based on hearsay evidence. Additionally, there were apparent irregularities and contradictions in witnesses’ stories and different versions from previous testimonies.
Nearly 4 years had passed between his arrest and his sentencing, a clear violation of the Honduran Penal Process Code which requires sentencing within 2 years. In a clear symbol of the lack of justice in the Honduran judicial system, the court denied a writ of habeas corpus despite the fact that the code was clearly being violated. Finally, on July 24, 2012, the sentencing was handed down without either he or his lawyers being notified of the hearing. Chavelo now faces 20 years in prison for a crime that he did not commit.
Chavelo's community of Guadalupe Carney has been struggling to reclaim land taken from them by rich landowners, including former Honduran National Police Commissioner Henry Osorto. Chavelo's imprisonment and the lack of fairness in his hearings are the result of the powerful landowners influencing the officials of a failed justice system.
Chavelo's lawyers have filed an appeal for the annulment of Chavelo's sentence with the Honduran Supreme Court. Please sign the petition to the Supreme Court of Justice of Honduras, as well as to Cesar Ham, Director of the National Agrarian Institute, and to Honduran President Pepe Lobo demanding justice and the freedom of Chavelo Morales.
We the undersigned demand the annulment of Jose Isabel Morales' sentence and his immediate freedom.
We the undersigned demand a retrial and that Chavelo be released during the appeal process.
Chavelo is a member of Guadalupe Carney, a community of campesinos that have struggled to reclaim land taken from them by rich landowners such as former Honduran National Police Commissioner Henry Osorto. It was during an action to recuperate their land that members of Osorto's family, armed to the teeth and firing on the campesinos with high caliber rifles, burned to death when the house they were in exploded into flames, a fire that was never properly investigated. In a clear act of intimidation, 300+ members of Guadalupe Carney were initially listed as suspects simply because they were residents of the community. 30 still have open arrest warrants against them and fear arrest at any time. Chavelo's imprisonment and the lack of fairness in his hearings along with the continuing acts of intimidation against the community are the result of the rich landowners and agro-oligarchs bribing and influencing the officials of a failed justice system.
"Victims of the US Drug War in Honduras"
by Brigitte Gynther [http://www.soaw.org/about-us/equipo-sur/263-stories-from-honduras/4042-firsthondurasstory]:
“They seemed like victims of war,” was how Bertha Olivia, the Coordinator of COFADEH, introduced a group of Hondurans who found themselves at a press conference about 4 emblematic cases of state violence and impunity in Honduras. Several of them had traveled for two days to reach the Honduran capital all the way from Ahuas, in the Mosquitia region of Honduras, where passengers in a small boat were fired upon from a US State Department helicopter around 2am on May 11, 2012. Four people were murdered, including two mothers, a father, and a 14-year old.
Among those injured was Hilda Lezema, whose legs were pierced by bullets. She has had operations to keep her thighs together and is in constant pain. Despite the fact that she was injured by high-caliber gunfire from a US helicopter in an operation that involved at least 10 US DEA agents as well as Honduran counter-narcotics agents, Hilda has had to pay for her medical treatment herself. She explained, “I have spent all the money I had and now I have nothing, not even to eat. I have bills at the hospitals. The government has given me nothing, not even medicine. My doctor wants to operate… but if I don’t have the money, they can’t do the operation.”
Photograph showing Hilda Lezma speaking at a community gathering
Lucio Nelson, a 22-year old who was shot in the back and the arm, also traveled to COFADEH with his father. His father, who has gone into debt to pay for Lucio’s medical bills, expla
Photograph showing Lucio Nelson and his father
ined that Lucio will never be the same again, as he still can’t bend over and has to live with the pain. He has had plates inserted in his body and had future medical appointments that his father isn’t sure how he will pay for.
Photograph showing Lucio Nelson's wounds
In the midst of the pain and sorrow, there was a reunion for one family. Wilmer Morgan Lucas Walter, who is now 15 years old, was shot in the hand when the boat was fired on. Thanks to COFADEH, he was able to have surgery to save his hand from amputation and has spent the past six months undergoing almost daily physical therapy. However, this requires him to be far home and far from his family, friends, and normal life. He was thrilled to be reunited with his mother, who traveled to Tegucigalpa for the press conference. However, his ordeal now continues as he faces many more months away from home in the hospital with the hope of one day being able to use his hand again.
Indigenous villagers simply traveling in a boat, as the rivers are a primary means of transportation in the Mosquitia region of Honduras, had their lives suddenly disrupted on May 11th by the sudden appearance of helicopters and gunfire. Both the emotional pain of losing family members and the physical pain of injuries that entails the loss of the ability to support one’s family have long-lasting effects and are part of the far-reaching consequences of the US drug war on innocent civilians.
To add insult to injury for those injured or murdered by the gunfire and their family members, the US government has yet to take responsibility for what occurred on May 11. On January 30th, 58 members of Congress sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Attorney General Eric Holder calling for a “thorough and credible investigation” of the May 11th killings [http://hankjohnson.house.gov/press-release/rep-johnson-57-colleagues-call-investigation-dea-related-killings-honduras]. Unfortunately, on February 12th, the Washington Times reported [http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/12/no-probe-of-dea-raid-in-honduras/?page=all] that despite the request “the State and Justice departments have no intention of investigating purported human-rights violations and misconduct by Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Honduras.”
The US strategy is to shirk responsibility by diminishing the role of US agents and relying on a “deeply flawed” investigation of the Honduran government -- which is notorious for corruption and a non-functioning justice system. An excellent report by Rights Action and the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) [http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/collateral-damage-of-a-drug-war] details the problems with the Honduran investigation, including autopsies carried out on top of an open grave long afterward and numerous contradictions between the official version of events and eye witness accounts. In fact, CEPR details how a second Honduran government report, that of the Honduras National Human Rights Ombudsman, suggests that US DEA agents led the operation and were responsible for the order for the helicopter to open fire on a passenger boat [http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/despite-evidence-dea-and-state-department-reject-demand-for-investigation-of-ahuas-killings] [http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/despite-evidence-dea-and-state-department-reject-demand-for-investigation-of-ahuas-killings]. Yet, the US continues to shirk responsibility for wrongdoing, refuses to even investigate the US role in the murder of defenseless Honduran villagers, and has completely abandoned the victims and their medical needs.
Bertha Oliva of COFADEH remarked that the victims of the Ahuas killings “seemed like victims of war” and indeed they are – victims of the $20 billion US drug war in Latin America [http://defensoresenlinea.com/cms/documentos/2012_INFORME_Casos_Mosquitia_ingles.pdf] [http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/us-military-expands-drug-war-latin-america-18390970]. As Hilda Lezema and Lucio Nelson live in pain and worry whether they will find the money for necessary medical treatment, the US continues to spend millions upon millions to further militarize Honduras under the guise of the drug war. Apparently those millions don’t include anything for the care of innocent victims of the gunfire from US helicopters much less accountability for murder.
2013-03-17 "Honduras police accused of death squad killings"
by ALBERTO ARCE, Luis Alonso Lugo in Washington and Katherine Corcoran from "Associated Press" [http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_HONDURAS_DEATH_SQUADS]:
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) -- The operation was quick and under the cover of night. Armed, masked men arrived in late-model SUVs, getting through the gate into the small neighborhood of humble homes. Without firing a shot, witnesses said, they took Kevin Samraid Carranza Padilla, 28, known in the gang world as "Teiker," and his girlfriend, Cindy Yadira Garcia, 19.
The next morning, Jan. 10, Honduras' major newspaper, El Heraldo, reported that police had captured Carranza, a leader of the 18th Street gang suspected in the shooting death of a police commander months earlier. It also published a photo of a shirtless, tattooed young man lying on the ground, his hands behind his back, his face partially wrapped in blue duct tape, the roll still attached. Carranza's mother, Blanca Alvarado, recognized him from his tattoos.
The photo was distributed to media by a police prosecutor, according to three sources who didn't want to be named for security reasons. Soon after, agents at the national criminal investigations office acknowledged that there was a detention order for Carranza, and he had been brought in.
More than two months later, Carranza and Yadira have disappeared, The Associated Press has found. They are not in police custody and there are no criminal proceedings against them. Police now say they know nothing about the case.
"At this point," said Carranza's mother, "one can only imagine that they are dead."
Police have long been accused of operating more like assassins than law enforcement officers in Honduras, but few cases ever have been investigated. In the past year, police were alleged to have been involved in the deaths of a prominent Honduran radio journalist and the son of a former police chief - but neither killing has been solved.
Despite millions of dollars in U.S. aid to Honduras aimed at professionalizing the country's police, accusations persist.
In the last three years, the AP has learned, Honduran prosecutors have received as many as 150 formal complaints about death squad-style killings in the capital of Tegucigalpa, and at least 50 more in the economic hub of San Pedro Sula. The country's National Autonomous University, citing police reports, has counted 149 civilians killed by police in the last two years, including 25 members of the 18th street gang.
Even the country's top police chief has been charged with being complicit.
In 2002, a police internal affairs report accused then police prison inspector Juan Carlos Bonilla of three extrajudicial killings - and linked him to 11 more deaths and disappearances that it said were part of a police policy of "social cleansing." He was tried and acquitted on one of the three charges. The head of internal affairs unit who produced the report, Maria Luisa Borjas, was expelled from the department, and the rest of the cases, like most crimes in Honduras, were not investigated.
Last year, Bonilla was chosen to lead the national police force despite unanswered questions about his past. The U.S. Congress decided to withhold State Department funding to the police while they investigated the 2002 internal affairs report. Roberta Jacobson, assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, said last week that the department is constantly reviewing information about people and institutions receiving support in Honduras, and so far, the state department can and will continue funding and training the Honduran police.
All but about $11 million has since been released based on a Congressional agreement with the State Department over how counterdrug operations involving the U.S. and investigations into civilian casualties are carried out.
"It has been made clear to the State Department that no units under General Bonilla's control should receive U.S. assistance without credible information refuting the serious allegations against him," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the State Department and Foreign Operations.
While U.S. aid is supposed to go only to vetted units, not the entire police force, Leahy said the Carranza case is still troubling. "There is a chronic pattern of human rights abuses, and impunity for those responsible," he said.
AP interviews with family, witnesses and law enforcement officials paint a picture of a case in which two people associated with gangs were taken into police custody and then never heard from again.
After witnesses told Alvarado, 50, that her son had been taken by police, she went to a series of police stations in search of him. At the National Criminal Investigations Office, she was met by 20 officers, some masked, who openly played with their guns as she asked after her son and his girlfriend.
"You can look for those dogs in the Tablon," Alvarado said they told her, referring to a lot outside of the city where bodies of the executed are regularly dumped, their faces taped and hands and feet tied. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world.
The modus operandi in death-squad style killings does not vary much: masked men in bulletproof vests, traveling in large vehicles with tinted windows and no plates, roam the city in groups of 10, said an official in the Carranza investigation, who also could not be named because of the sensitivity of the case.
A month after Carranza's disappearance, Honduran media released a surveillance video of a similar case: five young men walking a street at night were stopped and surrounded by masked gunmen with AK-47s who pulled up in a large SUV. The gunmen fired at three men who fled. The remaining two, their hands up in surrender, were made to lie face down on the pavement - and then shot several times in cold blood.
One died instantly. The other is seen still moving after three shots from an assault weapon. He later died at a hospital.
National Police spokesman Hector Ivan Mejia declined to comment on the videotape of the shootings because he said they are under investigation. He also said he knew nothing about Carranza's case, though he noted that Honduras is in the grip of gang warfare, marked by groups of assassins acting on behalf of organized crime.
"We've detected a group of people carrying out these types of operations and we're working to resolve them," Mejia said. "I have no information indicating the state is acting in this manner. If police were involved in these types of crimes, they would be detained. Authorities cannot and should not combat crime in this manner."
As far back as 1988, the Inter-American Court on Human Rights condemned Honduras for failing to document the fate of detainees and for allowing police to obstruct judges investigating cases, "including threatening them and denying the disappearances."
Bonilla was appointed police chief last May after his predecessor, Gen. Ricardo Ramirez del Cid, was ousted amid charges that police were involved in the kidnapping and the killing of one of Honduras' best-known journalists, Alfredo Villatoro.
Less than a year later Ramirez's own son was killed. Ramirez called Bonilla the prime suspect in the Feb. 17 assassination of Ramirez's 17-year-old son, Oscar, killed in a shootout between his bodyguards and 10 hooded gunmen who entered a restaurant where they were eating.
Ramirez said Bonilla was nearby when it happened, though Bonilla has denied any involvement. President Porfirio Lobo has called Ramirez's comments imprudent.
Honduras made a failed attempt to purge its National Police of corrupt officers after some were implicated in the 2011 murder of the son of Julieta Castellanos, rector of the National Autonomous University of Honduras.
Between May and November, hundreds of police officers underwent background checks and polygraphs. By the end of the year, 33 of them were removed, but the Constitutional Court stopped the purge, ruling that it violated officers' rights.
One problem in Honduras is that the prosecuting arm of government, the Public Ministry, relies on the criminal investigations department to investigate crimes. But the members of that agency are police officers, which means in the case of death squads, police would be investigating themselves.
The Honduran police force "appears to be an institution that is absolutely beyond reform," said Victor Meza, president of the Commission to Reform Public Security.
Critics say the Carranza case is evidence of that.
Carranza and his girlfriend had only lived in the modest complex a month when they disappeared.
A neighbor agreed to tell the AP what happened the night of Jan. 9 on condition that his identity would not be made public. The neighbor said he heard noises around 9:30 or 10 p.m.
"They shouted that they were police. There were several, judging from the footprints they left in the flowers. They opened the gate, there was noise for a few minutes, like kicking, and then they left," he said. Neighbors said someone must have let them through the locked gate.
Gang lookouts alerted a fellow 18th Street gang member, who calls himself Jonathan Flores, a driver for Carranza. Flores said he was the first to arrive after the couple was taken. The door to Carranza's house was left open.
"The house was ransacked and the dog was alone," Flores said. "The neighbors told me it was quick, with no shouts or shots fired."
As he left he saw two Nissan SUVs without license plates, and six or seven masked men in civilian clothes with bullet-proof vests and large guns chatting with the neighbors. Carranza's mother said they came back to rob the house, taking a 50-inch plasma television, a home theater screen and speakers, cellphones, Carranza's collection of tennis shoes and about $500 in cash that gang members typically have on hand.
Flores said the police are the only explanation for Carranza's disappearance. He and others would know if Carranza had been taken by a rival gang.
"Look at the detention photo," he said. It shows the feet of the people surrounding the prone suspect. "A gang member doesn't work in officials' shoes."
Nor does Flores believe that Carranza fled.
"He didn't have a motive. Things were working well here," Flores said. "And he would have told his mom."
His mother, Alvarado, filed a complaint with the prosecutor's Office on Human Rights, using the newspaper photo as proof. The unidentified official close to the investigation said the duct tape over the face and marks on the body, including what appears to be a dislocated elbow, would constitute torture.
The human rights prosecutor waited the 48 hours required by law and visited the morgue in an unsuccessful search for a corpse. After that, he made a habeas corpus request with the Supreme Court. The law requires verification of a detention within 24 hours if the person hasn't appeared before a prosecutor or a judge, the official said.
The Supreme Court has yet to respond. But the official close to the investigation says police acknowledged the day after the disappearance that there was a detention order for Carranza and said he would be processed quickly. Police later denied any knowledge about Carranza.
"A police officer cannot do this on his own," the official said. "You need a network of information and collaboration to carry out the arrest and disappearance of people."
Response from the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH) to statements by the SOA-trained Commander of Xatruch III in Honduras
[http://www.soawlatina.org/note_hn.htm]:
Xatruch III, Get off the streets ... Get out of the Aguán ... and give us back our tranquility...!
It is unconscionable for us that we could return to the old ways and the old methods of the 1980s. We were surprised when, during a press conference on Monday, February 18, the Commander of the Xatruch III Task Force, Infantry DEM Colonel German Antonio Alfaro Escalante (based in the Aguán) made accusations against digital media, including defensoresenlinea.com, the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH)’s online newspaper specializing in human rights.
In the 1980s, they did the same thing in the department of Olancho, in the community of El Aguacate, where a military base was installed to run counterinsurgency operations. Today, we remember it as a clandestine cemetery from the days of the National Security Doctrine.
During this era, the men in olive green uniforms became personalities of social welfare, attracting rural communities with medical brigades, giving them hoes, machetes, grains and picks, to first gain their confidence and then, install terror and death. Community by community was militarized, their leaders persecuted, tortured, killed and disappeared, as were the cases of Father Guadalupe Carney and Dr. José María Reyes Mata among others who were disappeared. Even today we look for their bodies, and we demand justice.
We have no doubt that the militarization of our country is a strategy to annihilate the demands of the citizenry, and, therefore, the army should not be in the streets, in any part of our territory, nor should they be in control of state institutions or public safety in Honduras. It has been shown that they are not the solution; they are the problem. So they should stop inventing enemies where none exist, and wars where we do not want them.
They must return to their military units, to their battalions. We do not want them even fighting fires, nor as medical brigades, nor guarding the ballot boxes under the pretext of ensuring democracy in this country.
As for the threats the Commander of the Xatruch III says he has received from the United States and Europe, in reality, those are communications in solidarity with the farmers of the Aguán. Be not afraid of this, Colonel...!
The presence of Xatruch III in the Aguan IS a real threat. We said that yesterday and we repeat it again today. An army that settles a critical situation by way of weapons, tear gas, torture, detentions, the criminalization of the peasant struggle, and attacks on the press, is an army condemned to never overcome its primitive state. (Stone Age)
From defensoresenlinea.com we tell you that we do not receive orders from anyone nor do we orchestrate CAMPAIGNS against anybody, we do what we have to do in favor of the victims. When they stop making attempts against human life, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, the right of youth to dress and wear their hair as they want, only then will the voices be silent and the writers stop writing.
We inform you that neither the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), nor our media team, nor Marvin Palacios are intimidated by this…. Away with your efforts to scare us!….
Drop the attitude of death and terrorism, withdraw from the Aguan, return to your barracks, and then we’ll advance. With your attitude you are creating and inventing enemies where there are none. There is no communism here, what is here are people who have risen up to demand justice, who have had enough of impunity.
To Infantry Colonel German Antonio Alfaro Escalante, we order you to not impose your stars, uniform, nor weapons to silence the media. Don’t hide the reality, Colonel! Don’t be afraid of your actions, be brave, don’t forget that at COFADEH we are the surviving victims of your practices of war and we know your methods.
The crimes and criminals
Will neither be forgiven nor forgotten!
Tegucigalpa, February 19, 2013
"The 15th Battalion of Honduras"
report by Dominique Diaddigo [http://www.soaw.org/category-table/4028-the-15th-battalion-of-honduras]:
The following report was compiled using information from the forthcoming Rights Action report on the 15th Battalion by Annie Bird. For Right's Actions Executive Summary and full report, see below.
The Honduran Army's 15th Infantry Battalion has been widely accused of leading operations that have resulted in human rights abuses, which include the notorious attack against campesino protestors in a land dispute in August 2010 that resulted in the murder of a seventeen year-old boy, as well as the death of five security guards. Raynel Funes Ponce, who graduated from the Basic Infantry Officials program at the SOA in 1984, was said to be commander of the 15th Battalion in a 2011 newspaper article. In 2012 it was revealed on the Honduras armed forces website that Ponce had assumed command of the Special Forces 1st Battalion. A squad representing the 1st Battalion, led by Josue Sierra, who took a Cadet Arms orientation at the SOA in 2011, murdered 15 year-old Ebed Yanes with a bullet in the back of his head. Sierra was the first to fire of the squad. Funes Ponce ordered a cover-up of the murder.
In January 2012, as Funes Ponce was moved to command of the First Batallion, Col. Selman D. Arriaga Orellana took over his post as head of the Fifteenth. Orellana attended the SOA in 1984, completing Basic Training for Infantry Officials. Orellana has been implicated in the command of operations known as Xatruch, which are joint task forces comprised of police and military personnel, and, typically, employ members of private security firms. Another SOA grad, Rafael Coello Moreno, was appointed to command a unit dispatched in a Xatruch operation. Moreno completed a Tactics and Arms orientation at the School of Americas in 1979. The ties between Xatruch operations and the 15th Battalion are difficult to discern, though the fact that a link exists is indisputable, from eyewitness accounts, to testimony by the soldiers themselves. The units that comprise Xatruch task forces operate out of the 15th Battalion headquarters, making the unity between these forces difficult to ignore. Another SOA grad tied to Xatruch operations is German Alfaro Escalante, who graduated from Infantry Officials’ Basic Training in 1984. Escalante is reported to have replaced Rafael Moreno as commander of a Xatruch operation, Xatruch III.
At the head of many of these operations is Pompeyo Bonilla, current Minister of Security in Honduras, having moved into the position after the resignation of former Security Minister Oscar Alvarez. Bonilla graduated from the Jungle Warfare Training program at the SOA in May of 1968, and later in the year he completed Cadet Course C-2. He began his military career as a soldier, eventually becoming aide to General Oswaldo Lopez Arellano, who became Honduran head of state during two military interventions, from 1963 to 1971, and from 1972 to 1975. Bonilla has been a major player in recent military-government joint operations. As a National Party Congressman, he was one of a group of high-ranking individuals who voted to remove President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. After moving into office after the 2009 constitutional crisis, which was condemned as a coup d’etat by the international community, de facto President Porfirio Lobo appointed Bonilla to head the Instituto de Propiedad, the government department that issues land titles. This was in March of 2010, at the crest of a wave of well-known armed land grabs, in which Honduran military allied with wealthy landowners and private security firms to remove campesinos from land which the campesinos had been granted and held title to after fighting for the right to work their land, and through various agrarian reform programs. In 2011, Lobo re-appointed Bonilla to CONATEL, the National Commission of Telecommunications. Under his command, CONATEL helped to pass a federal resolution which halted the issuing of low-power FM broadcast licenses to community radio stations, under the notion that there was too much saturation, weakening the overwhelming authority of major broadcasters. With the help of this resolution, and legislation like this, the campaign of silence was driven down upon the Honduran people, with restrictions on voice, assembly, and right to life. While under the command of Bonilla, CONATEL also supported successful legislation that authorized federal wiretapping.
As all of this information about the 15th Batallion comes to light in which SOA graduates are implicated, one alumnus in particular, General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, has been chosen by the Honduran Patriotic Alliance as standard-bearer in this November’s presidential election. General Velasquez was the commander of the small military unit who removed President Zelaya back in 2009. He completed a Basic Combat Arms course in 1976, and returned eight years later to take an Instructors’ course at the SOA. Prior to involvement in his new political party, Velasquez, like Pompeyo Bonilla, was head of CONATEL, the National Commission of Telecommunications, which has become known as a stopover of military professionals and overarching agent of state repression. The Honduran Patriotic Alliance is up against the likes of the National Party, The Liberal Party, and the new Liberty and Refoundation Party which was founded in 2011 by the National Popular Resistance Front, a leftist coalition of organizers and popular leaders who oppose the 2009 coup. The Liberty and Refoundation Party have chosen as their candidate Manuel Zelaya’s wife, former first lady Xiomara Castro de Zelaya.
HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS BY U.S.-BACKED HONDURAN SPECIAL FORCES UNIT
By Annie Bird, Rights Action
FULL REPORT: http://rightsaction.org/sites/default/files//Rpt_130220_Aguan_Final.pdf
CONTACT: Annie Bird, annie@rightsaction.org, (202) 680-3002
Over the past three years, soldiers from Honduras' 15th Battalion, based in the Bajo Aguan region of Honduras, have been directly implicated in a series of human rights violations targeting land rights movements, according to a report released today by the Washington, DC / Toronto based human rights organization Rights Action.
The report documents 34 of those violations which on-the-ground reports link directly to the 15th Battalion. These violations include extrajudicial executions, force disappearance, torture, excessive use of force, abuse of authority and threats. There are indications that many other human rights violations have been committed by the soldiers of the 15th Battalion, and have yet to be documented.
The U.S. military has been training soldiers from the 15th Battalion and providing the unit with various forms of material assistance since 2008. "At the same time the 15th Battalion was implicated in kidnappings, killings, threats, torture and abuse of authority, it received assistance and training from the Special Operations Command South (SOCSOUTH) of the United States Armed Forces," explains the report's author Annie Bird, Co-Director of Rights Action.
The report also provides details regarding 88 killings of campesinos, small farmers, and their supporters, as well as 5 bystanders apparently mistaken for campesinos, which have taken place since January 2010. Most of the killings appear to be targeted assassinations, suggesting the presence of an active death squad in the region. Two of these assassinations occurred this past Saturday, February 16, 2013.
On February 16, 2013, land rights activist Santos Jacobo Cartagena was gunned down while waiting for a bus, and Jose Trejo was shot while driving. Jose Trejo's brother, Antonio Trejo, was a lawyer for the land rights movement who was killed last September, less than three months after winning in courts the return to campesinos of three farms in dispute. Jose Trejo had been very active in demanding an investigation into the assassination of his brother.
The vast majority of the killings and other violations that have been perpetrated in Bajo Aguán since 2010 have not been investigated, generating a level of impunity that suggests complicity between state and local authorities and those responsible for the killings and other abuses.
FULL REPORT: http://rightsaction.org/sites/default/files//Rpt_130220_Aguan_Final.pdf
CONTACT: Annie Bird, annie@rightsaction.org, (202) 680-3002
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2013-02-05 "Modeling Capitalist Dystopia: Honduras OKs Plan for Private Cities" by Kari Lydersen from "In These Times"
[https://www.inthesetimes.com/uprising/entry/14539/modeling_capitalist_dystopia_honduras_renews_push_for_privately_run_cities/]:
Santos Cruz is a national campesino leader in Honduras who has spent practically his entire life fighting for land and human rights. He struggles for the ability of families like his own to simply make a living from small-scale subsistence farming in the impoverished and violence-plagued Central American country. Over the years he has seen plenty of repression and atrocities, including a steady drumbeat of murders of campesino activists. But in the past year things have gotten worse than ever, Cruz told In These Times during a recent interview. He and other campesino, labor and indigenous leaders receive death threats on a regular basis. In Honduras, political assassinations in broad daylight are common and rarely investigated. “Since the coup it is a broken state,” Cruz says. “The powerful make their own laws.”
The powerful are also fighting among each other: In December President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa fired four Supreme Court justices who had ruled unconstitutional a police reform law that Lobo favored. The conservative president also has been speculating that the same far-right forces who ousted populist president Manuel Zelaya Rosales in a 2009 coup now want to overthrow him.
The presidential election scheduled for this November likely means the chaos, repression and violence will get even worse. Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro, is leading in polls. She represents the LIBRE party, which has become the more progressive alternative to Zelaya’s Liberal Party.
Castro is backed by the multi-faceted National Front of Popular Resistance. The Resistance movement has sprung up since the coup, uniting groups that never worked together in such a way before: union members, campesino organizations, indigenous people, the African-descended Garifuna communities on the Caribbean coast, students, and gay and lesbian groups, who have never had such a high profile in Honduras before.
“If it is a clean election [Castro] will win,” Cruz says. “But we are afraid of fraud. We need international observers.” (The Chicago-based group La Voz de los de Abajo is hosting a delegation to to Honduras to observe the November elections [http://lavozchicago.blogspot.com/].)
Model Cities Back on the Table -
The Resistance movement is ardently opposed to the government’s plan to build “Model Cities” along the Caribbean coast, enclaves free from Honduran laws that would be planned and run by private entities and meant to stimulate business and foreign investment. On January 24, the Honduran Congress again passed legislation enabling the Model Cities plan to move forward, with a vote of 110-13 with 5 abstentions.
The Honduran Congress originally set the plan in motion in early 2011 by passing constitutional amendments permitting the cities. Human rights leaders and others filed challenges, and in September one of the lead attorneys in opposition, Antonio Trejo Cabrera, was shot dead in Tegucigalpa. In October, four out of five Supreme Court justices on the constitutional commission ruled the measure unconstitutional, leading to its consideration by the full Supreme Court, which agreed 13-2. But by January, four of the justices had been fired, and legislators said they had tweaked the Model Cities law to make it constitutional.
Critics in Honduras and abroad describe the Model Cities concept as violating labor rights, civil rights and the Constitution. The plan would essentially allow private entities—likely foreign interests—to create and their own enforce laws, ignoring labor, environmental and other protections enshrined in Honduran law (even if those laws are regularly violated by the ruling government). Cruz notes that Model Cities would also violate Honduran laws that prevent foreign ownership of land within 40 kilometers of the coast—a hot topic given the potential monetary value of the lovely beaches and coastal land currently claimed by the Garifuna and other indigenous and campesino groups.
Foreign Interests Pulling the Strings -
All along the Model Cities program has been driven and crafted by foreign actors. One of the original architects of the idea was U.S. economist and New York University professor Paul Romer, an advocate of “charter cities” that were supposed to offer a “clean slate” free from corruption, bureaucracy and economic and social problems in developing countries.
Romer was part of a transparency commission that resigned en masse in September because they said the Honduran government was shutting them out and dealing primarily with a UK-based outfit called Grupo MGK. Grupo MGK is part of Grupo de Desarrollos Especiales LLC, a business incorporated in Nevada in Sept. 2012 by businessman Kevin Lyons. Lyons had previously registered another business in Nevada aimed at establishing model cities, but its license was pulled by the state. Another leader of Grupo MGK was Michael Strong, an American founder of charter schools and head of a touchy-feely, save-the-world-through-entrepreneurship outfit called FLOW (Freedom Lights Our World). The Economist [http://www.economist.com/node/21541391] described the Honduras model cities movement as the playground of seemingly fringe American libertarians with “links to prominent libertarians with deep pockets,” including Whole Foods co-founder and CEO John Mackey.
As reported by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Strong was quoted on Fox News saying, “Our goal is to be the most economically free entity on Earth.”
Another of the major investors in the Model Cities plan appears to be a developer known as the “porno king of Canada.” [http://blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopment/2012/09/charter-cities-canadas-porn-king-and-garifuna-land-rights.php] Randy Jorgensen has been pushing tourist-related projects in the area around the city of Trujillo, which is targeted for Model City development. That region is also home to the Garifuna people and to the Guadalupe Carney campesino community that has been a locus of resistance and land reclamation efforts. (It is named after a Chicago priest who was killed—possibly with cooperation from U.S. forces—during the Central American conflicts of the 1980s.)
The Guardian described how haphazard and half-baked the Model Cities plan seems to be [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/06/honduras-new-city-laws-investors]:
"Details of the arrangement remain sketchy. Three possible locations were mentioned—Sula valley, Agalta valley and the southern region of Honduras – and the initial investments seemed small compared to the scale of the ambition. The plan appears to have been thrown together in the space of less than a year, partly to boost the economy and partly to make Honduras more attractive to foreign investors who fear crime (Honduras has the world's highest murder rate) and political instability."
Resistance and Repression in Election Lead-up -
Journalist and priest Ismael Moreno described how the Model Cities plan is another manifestation of an ongoing violent push toward privatization and exploitation of Honduran resources and labor, a trend enforced through massive repression in a country where a small number of oligarchs have long held most of the wealth and land. Campesinos fighting for small slices of land to make a subsistence living have long been slaughtered, imprisoned and intimidated, even under Zelaya’s rule. Since the coup, rampant murders, false arrests and human rights violations have skyrocketed, with an especially intense conflict erupting in the region of Aguan, where landowner Miguel Facusse has displaced hundreds of campesinos from land where he grows African palm. (Read Jeremy Kryt’s dispatch for In These Times about the Aguan conflict here.)
Lobo’s government and the right-wing Congress have passed laws and instituted policies furthering privatization and exploitation of natural resources. The government has increasingly granted concessions for mining gold and iron ore, for harvesting sand from rivers and for installing hydropower dams that flood communities, displace people and interfere with local economies. Before the coup Zelaya had instituted a moratorium on mining concessions.
Cruz also notes that a recent “temporary employment” law has gutted wages and labor rights and sidelined unions by making it easier for factories known as maquilas to hire workers on temporary contracts for low wages and no benefits. Zelaya had raised the minimum wage almost 50 percent (to 5,000 lempiras a month from 3,500), but advocates say the law has been violated with impunity since the coup, including by maquila employers.
Meanwhile, health care for the masses has gotten worse as the government has starved public hospitals of resources while favoring private institutions that the poor cannot afford. Cruz says the government has also cut off relations with Cuban medical programs that used to be crucial to meeting Honduras’ health needs. He says the government has turned away and kicked out Cuban doctors working in Honduras while also barring Hondurans from receiving medical training in Cuba.
The government has also confiscated millions of hectares of land from narcotraffickers, and Cruz says this land should become the property of the people. If the land is made subject to the country’s agrarian reform laws, which are relatively progressive but often-violated doctrines, campesinos who worked the land would be granted legal possession of it.
“They’ve criminalized the struggle” for land, Cruz says. “What’s happening in Aguan is meant to silence the campesino movement. With no space for campesinos to take land, what are we going to do? People have nothing, no land, no way to sustain themselves. That’s why we are organizing. This is something the golpistas (coup perpetrators) never thought could happen; they thought we would go away after three days. But people are united.”
2012-01-26 "In Honduras, a Mess Made in the U.S."
opinion piece by DANA FRANK published by "New York Times" [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/opinion/in-honduras-a-mess-helped-by-the-us.html]:
Dana Frank, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is at work on a book about the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s cold-war intervention in the Honduran labor movement.
---
IT’S time to acknowledge the foreign policy disaster that American support for the Porfirio Lobo administration in Honduras has become. Ever since the June 28, 2009, coup that deposed Honduras’s democratically elected president, José Manuel Zelaya, the country has been descending deeper into a human rights and security abyss. That abyss is in good part the State Department’s making.
The headlines have been full of horror stories about Honduras. According to the United Nations, it now has the world’s highest murder rate, and San Pedro Sula, its second city, is more dangerous than Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a center for drug cartel violence.
Much of the press in the United States has attributed this violence solely to drug trafficking and gangs. But the coup was what threw open the doors to a huge increase in drug trafficking and violence, and it unleashed a continuing wave of state-sponsored repression.
The current government of President Lobo won power in a November 2009 election managed by the same figures who had initiated the coup. Most opposition candidates withdrew in protest, and all major international observers boycotted the election, except for the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which are financed by the United States.
President Obama quickly recognized Mr. Lobo’s victory, even when most of Latin America would not. Mr. Lobo’s government is, in fact, a child of the coup. It retains most of the military figures who perpetrated the coup, and no one has gone to jail for starting it.
This chain of events — a coup that the United States didn’t stop, a fraudulent election that it accepted — has now allowed corruption to mushroom. The judicial system hardly functions. Impunity reigns. At least 34 members of the opposition have disappeared or been killed, and more than 300 people have been killed by state security forces since the coup, according to the leading human rights organization Cofadeh. At least 13 journalists have been killed since Mr. Lobo took office, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The police in Tegucigalpa, the capital, are believed to have killed the son of Julieta Castellanos, the rector of the country’s biggest university, along with a friend of his, on Oct. 22, 2011. Top police officials quickly admitted their suspects were police officers, but failed to immediately detain them. When prominent figures came forward to charge that the police are riddled with death squads and drug traffickers, the most famous accuser was a former police commissioner, Alfredo Landaverde. He was assassinated on Dec. 7. Only now has the government begun to make significant arrests of police officers.
State-sponsored repression continues. According to Cofadeh, at least 43 campesino activists participating in land struggles in the Aguán Valley have been killed in the past two and a half years at the hands of the police, the military and the private security army of Miguel Facussé. Mr. Facussé is mentioned in United States Embassy cables made public by WikiLeaks as the richest man in the country, a big supporter of the post-coup regime and owner of land used to transfer cocaine.
And yet, in early October, Mr. Obama praised Mr. Lobo at the White House for leadership in a “restoration of democratic practices.” Since the coup the United States has maintained and in some areas increased military and police financing for Honduras and has been enlarging its military bases there, according to an analysis by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Congress, though, has finally begun to push back. Last May, 87 members signed a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calling for a suspension of military and police aid to Honduras. Representative Howard L. Berman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote to her on Nov. 28, asking whether the United States was arming a dangerous regime. And in December, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and others obtained conditions on a small portion of the 2012 police and military aid appropriated for Honduras.
Why has the State Department thrown itself behind the Lobo administration despite brutal evidence of the regime’s corruption? In part because it has caved in to the Cuban-American constituency of Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and her allies. They have been ferocious about Honduras as a first domino with which to push back against the line of center-left and leftist governments that have won elections in Latin America in the past 15 years. With its American air base, Honduras is also crucial to the United States’ military strategy in Latin America.
As Honduras plunges into a tragic abyss, it’s time to finally cut off all police and military aid. “Stop feeding the beast” is the way Ms. Castellanos, the academician whose son was killed, puts it. She, like other human rights advocates, insists that the Lobo government cannot reform itself.
The State Department is beginning to help address the situation behind the scenes. But Honduran human-rights activists, along with many of us in the United States who care about Honduras, do not believe that this administration can, or should, manage a cleanup of the very cesspool it helped to create by supporting a government that owes its power to a coup.
Instead, we need to respect proposals for alternative approaches that Honduran human-rights advocates and the opposition are beginning to formulate. These come from people who are still fighting against the coup and who continue to risk paying the price of being shot dead by state security forces.
They, not the State Department, have the right to lead their country forward.
2013-01-13 "Honduras: Two More Campesinos Murdered in Aguán"
from "Weekly News Update on the Americas" [http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/2013/01/wnu-1159-new-violence-in-chiles-mapuche.html]:
Two campesinos were shot dead on Jan. 11 in the Lower Aguán Valley in the northern Honduran department of Colón as they were walking out of an estate which they and other campesinos had been occupying for two months. A long-standing conflict between campesino groups and large landowners in the area has resulted in the deaths of some 80 campesinos since the groups began occupying estates in December 2009 to dramatize their demands for land (see Update #1154 [http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/2012/12/wnu-1154-anti-mining-activists.html]). According to Wilfredo Paz Zúniga, spokesperson for the Permanent Human Rights Monitoring Center for the Aguán, the victims were José Luis Reyes and Antonio Manuel Pérez. He said unidentified people shot them at close range from a moving automobile.
The Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), one of the main campesino groups in the region, identified the campesinos as Luis Antonio Ramos Reyes, originally from the Tepusteca de Olanchito Yoro community, and Manuel Antonio Pérez, originally from Remolino on the Aguán river’s left bank. MUCA said the two men were members of another group, the Campesino Movement for the Recovery of the Aguán (MOCRA), whose 600 families began occupying estates on July 20, 2012. According to Paz, the campesinos had been occupying land claimed by the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH); MUCA said the land was owned by UNAH’s Atlantic Coast Regional University Center (CURLA), which had abandoned it. (AFP 1/12/13 via Terra.com [http://noticias.terra.com.co/internacional/latinoamerica/dos-campesinos-asesinados-en-region-de-honduras-que-vive-conflicto-por-la-tierra,f60d62744ea2c310VgnCLD2000000ec6eb0aRCRD.html]; Anncol (Colombia) 1/13/13 via Rebelión (Spain) [http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=162179])
2012-12-13 "Relatives of victims of military operations demand justice"
from "Friendship Office of the Americas" [http://www.friendshipamericas.org/relatives-victims-military-operations-demand-justice]:
Tegucigalpa -
Relatives of people who have died at the hands of military personnel, as well as surviving victims, demanded justice at a press conference held today at the headquarters of COFADEH (Committee of the Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras). Decree 223-2011, using the second and last paragraphs of Article 274 of the Constitution as its basis, allowed the Armed Forces to perform police functions when there is a 'state of emergency in public security' and has been renewed 4 times through executive decrees. It has resulted in the involvement of military personnel in the violent deaths of civilians, including children.
In other cases, there has been the evident involvement of US agents in murders and in the interference in criminal proceedings, as in the case of the attack from helicopters by DEA agents on a boat carrying 16 defenseless Miskito indigenous people, as a result of which 4 died from shots from high caliber weapons (including two pregnant women).
COFADEH announced that it will submit these cases before the universal justice system. They include that of the young soldier Alex Josué Banoff who died in violent circumstances at the barracks of the 15th Special Forces Battalion at Rio Claro, Colón department. The family does not accept the official explanation for his death.
The third case relates to an incident which happened on May 27th in the capital, Tegucigalpa, when soldiers from the 1st Special Forces Battalion, trained by the United States, and acting without legal nor police supervision, with legal powers granted by the President and Congress, murdered Ebed Jassiel Yánez Cácerez (15), a block away from the police station at Villa Vieja, a district on the edge of the capital, on the road to Danli. The officers in charge ordered their subordinates (a patrol of 7 soldiers) to destroy the evidence of the crime and then, during the judicial proceedings, they tried to hide further evidence.
The fourth case reported occurred on March 30th, 2011, in the community of Planes, Sonaguera, Colón, during which soldiers and riot police used tear gas and live bullets to violently break up a peaceful demonstration by hundreds of campesinos in support of the teachers' dispute. During this brutal crackdown, Neptaly Esquivel, a campesino, was wounded by a gunshot which shattered the bone in his left leg, leaving him disabled.
What is the situation now for the relatives and survivors? The on-line newspaper defensoresenlinea.com gathered the testimony of several families affected by the remilitarization of Honduran society.
The families and the victims speak out:
Carmen Antonia Antúnez who lost her son, Alex Josué Banoff, a soldier, when he was shot in the trachea at the barracks of the 15th Infantry Battalion, said that she asked him whether he had shot himself, and he answered no, and that what had happened was that a trap had been set for him. While he was in hospital, Alex Josué asked his mother not to leave him because he was afraid.
43 days after the incident, Alex Josué died. The Public Prosecutors Office in Trujillo questioned several officers of the 15th Battalion stationed in Río Claro, Colón, but weaknesses in the investigations has meant that no charges have been brought against those responsible for the death of Alex Josué Banoff. It is known, for example, that the murder weapon is not in the possession of the Prosecutors Office.
Neptaly Esquivel's case arose because of brutal repression by soldiers and police while they were breaking up a campesino demonstration in Planes, Sonaguera, Colón. The armed forces used tear gas and live ammunition against the demonstrators.
Neptaly Esquivel was seriously wounded during this brutal crackdown, and stated that the soldier who shot him at point-blank range was determined to finish him off. As a result of the gunshot which lodged in his left leg, Esquivel can no longer walk.
“The bullet broke the bone and shattered it. At that moment I was holding on to a post and I said to the soldier, 'Don't treat me like this'. The soldier responded by kicking me and I fell in a stream of sewage. Other soldiers grabbed me and beat me. A man tried to help me and he said that there were 8 men hitting me”, stated Esquivel.
More than a year after the vicious attack, Neptaly Esquivel still cannot work and has asked the authorities of Atlántida Regional Hospital to transfer his case notes to Tocoa, so that he can start his rehabilitation. Esquivel is married and has four children.
Soliders killed a boy -
Another case raised was that of Ebed Jassiel Yánez Cáceres, a minor, murdered by members of an army patrol, who in the early hours of May 27th were stationed at the turn-off for Los Pinos district, on the road to the east of the country. Seven soldiers from this road-block pursued Ebed Jassiel in a Ford 350 donated by the United States. Ebed Jassiel was on a motorbike and had not stopped when ordered to do so by the soldiers. The soldiers shot at Ebed Jassiel and killed him.
Wilfredo Yánez, the father of the minor, said that he was not afraid and would continue to demand justice, because the Public Prosecutors Office only charged three of the soldiers. On July 14th this year, its Human Rights Unit lodged formal charges before Tegucigalpa's Criminal Court, accusing
Sergeant Eleázar Abimael Rodríguez Martínez, Corporal Felipe de Jesús Rodríguez Hernández and Second Lieutenant Josué Antonio Sierra of responsibility for the violent death of Ebed Haziel Yánez Cáceres.
When the court hearing began, the Public Prosecutors Office was only accusing Sergeant Eleázar Abimael Rodríguez Martínez of murder. The other two soldiers were accused of perverting the course of justice and failing in their duty as public servants. Rodríguez Martínez was given a prison sentence and is in jail in Támara, Francisco Morazán, while Rodríguez Hernández and Sierra were given non-custodial sentences, and are under the supervision of the Commander of the First Infantry Battalion. They cannot leave the country, they must go to register with the court every Friday and they cannot have contact with the relatives of the victim nor the witnesses in the case.
COFADEH, in its capacity as private complainant, presented an appeal, requesting that the charge of homicide be extended to Corporal Felipe de Jesús Rodríguez and Second Lieutenant Josué Antonio Sierra. They were in charge of the patrol of seven soldiers which, in the early hours of May 27th, pursued Ebed Jassiel in a Ford 350 when he failed to stop at a road-block in Villa Vieja district, while on a motor-bike.
COFADEH's request was turned down by the Appellate Court and the oral and public trial is expected to happen in the next few months. The Public Prosecutors Office conducted investigations into 29 soldiers involved in Operación Relámpago (Operation Lightning) at the road-block in Villa Vieja district, to the east of Tegucigalpa on the date of the crime. It appears that the soldiers involved in the murder belong to the Special Forces Battalion at La Venta, Francisco Morazán.
On June 29th, 2012, Wilfredo Yánez, with COFADEH's support, submitted a legal challenge to the Supreme Court, arguing that the decree which allows the armed forces to carry out police functions was unconstitutional.
Wilfredo Yánez stated that high-ranking officers had protected their subordinates, to the extent of switching the guns which had been demanded by the Prosecutors Office as evidence. “What you have are favors that politicians and high-ranking soldiers do for officers involved in situations like this – it is impunity and it is corruption”.
Yánez revealed that the soldiers' defense lawyer will request a change to the conditions of the non-custodial sentences “and you have an officer (Second Lieutenant Josué Antonio Sierra) who shot a 15-year-old in the back and has a non-custodial sentence, so what are they going to try and do with the corporal who also has a non-custodial sentence,” wondered the victim's father.
The survivors of Ahuas -
Lucio Nelson, survivor of the attack in Ahuas, told how, while he was travelling in the boat from Barra Patuca, on nearing Ahuas, he was seriously injured by shots fired from a helicopter by DEA agents.
The shots from high-caliber weapon hit him in the left arm and in the lower back. His life changed completely as a result of such a traumatic experience. “I was asleep and I never thought this was going to happen. When I heard the shot, I jumped in the water, but when I began to swim, my arm was already broken, and when I got out of the water I saw them shooting from above. I continued swimming and I was hit again. I grabbed a branch and I felt dizzy because I had lost a lot of blood. Then I fainted, and when I awoke I was in the Moravian Hospital in Ahuas.”
“We always travelled by day and night – I never thought that something like that would happen”, Lucio said. His father, Edgardo Nelson Escoto, said that he was very sad “because nobody helps us, nobody supports us and my son used to help me at work, but I thank God that he is still alive. The only people who give us support are those from COFADEH.”
Hilda Lezama, who was shot in the legs, said that it took her 6 months to recover and that now she can walk. “I can walk well but I'm always in pain and I have to take pain-killers every day”.
Asked about the work she did together with her husband, taking divers to the Bay Islands and Barra Patuca in the boat which was attacked in the early hours of May 11th, Lezama answered that “now I have nothing – no money – all the money I had has gone on hospital bills. In fact, I still owe the hospital money and I haven't received a penny from the government. It's because of this that I'm seeking justice, so that I can recover the money I have spent”.
Sabina Walter, mother of 15-year-old Wilmer Walter, said that her son is much better. Although she knows that the hand injured in the attack will never be the same again, she believes that her son will be able to move forward, with the help of God and COFADEH.
With COFADEH's support, Wilmer Walter has received physiotherapy for his left hand over the past 6 months in San Felipe Hospital. He had been wounded by a shot from a high-caliber weapon in the horrific attack in Ahuas. He has even managed to successfully complete sixth grade.
Bertha Oliva, COFADEH's General Coordinator, said that the four cases are emblematic and paradigmatic, and when we talk about victims' relatives and survivors it is as if we are talking about war survivors.
“In Honduras, even though we're not at war we have wounded young people, with their futures in jeopardy. I'd like to say that, in the light of the facts and findings in these four cases, we have no other option other than publicizing them. We know that here in Honduras, it is going to be very difficult to get justice and we're not willing to keep silent and go along with the whitewashing that the Public Prosecutors Office is engaged in. What is happening is that cases are being brought to trial, but none of the direct perpetrators or senior officers are being punished”.
Oliva stated that there were very strong similarities between the cases; first because it was soldiers who had committed the crimes against the victims, and also because of the level of impunity. Another finding was that the Public Prosecutors Office, particularly the Office of Forensic Medicine, tries to conceal evidence to ensure that high-ranking soldiers are not implicated in crimes. The cases are practically all doomed to remain in absolute impunity.
In the case of Ahuas, COFADEH's Coordinator stated that the Public Prosecutors Office has refused to allow them to see the case file under any circumstances and thus is denying the victims their right to present their case. “The Public Prosecutors Office can't refuse access to the case file to the legal representatives to the Ahuas victims' relatives (in this case COFADEH), still less copies to see the pleas. In the case of Ahuas these have been given in secret.”
2012-09-26 "Two human rights lawyers assassinated in Honduras: take action!" message from "SOA Watch":
This past Sunday and Monday, two human rights lawyers, Antonio Trejo and Eduardo Diaz, were brutally murdered in Honduras, bringing to over 60 the number of victims caught in the struggle for life and land in the Bajo Aguan in Honduras. The debate over the production of food for families versus bio-fuels for corporations has reached a high note
After the 2009 coup that was led by SOA graduates, massive privatization has become the order of the day for Honduras, with almost everything, from land to entire cities, on the docket for privatization.
Lawyer Antonio Trejo had the valor to take a stand against this. He was defending the right of the MARCA peasant collective to the restoration of their lands in the Lower Aguan valley. These lands were seized 18 years earlier by Honduras’ wealthiest man: Miguel Facussé. Facusse’s Dinant Corporation was using this land to produce African palms, a source of bio fuel .
Trejo’s efforts led to initial success, with a June court decision calling for the return the land to the campesinos, However, pressure from the private corporation led to an overthrow of the court order, as well as the arrest of Trejo and other campesinos protesting the reversal.
Saturday night unknown assailants riddled Trejo's body and car with bullets as he left a wedding. On several occasions, Trejo denounced the threats he had received to the media and had publicly said that if he were killed, Facusse would be responsible.
Trejo had also taken a stand on the controversial proposal by the Honduran government, in conjunction with a US company, MGK Group, to build three privately run cities with their own police, laws and tax systems. Just hours before his murder, Trejo had participated in a televised debate in which he accused congressional leaders of using the private city projects to raise campaign funds.
Only hours after Trejo’s assassination, another human rights lawyer, Eduardo Diaz Madariaga was killed in Choluteca, 84 miles (135 kilometers) south of the capital.
Lawyers Antonio Trejo and Eduardo Diaz lost gave their lives to the struggle for dignity.
The National Popular Resistance Front formed a political party, LIBRE, to compete in next years national elections, and primary elections for LIBRE and Honduras’ traditional parties will be held this November. Four LIBRE primary candidates have been killed to date and violence against FNRP activists and members is committed daily.
Illustration of one of three cities designed that would be built in Honduras in the Atlantic coast by international investors, and which project was already approved by the government.
2012-09-06 "Honduras Sets Stage for 3 Privately Run Cities" by "cryptogon.com"
[http://cryptogon.com/?p=31166]:
The link on this update mentions Decree #123-2011 [http://coredhn.squarespace.com/storage/documents/ConstitutionalStatuteREDUnofficialTranslation.pdf], which is just 15 pages long, but will have you wondering, “Is this real?”
I’m asking everyone out there: Is this real?
Let’s assume it is, for a few minutes anyway.
I took one semester of International Law, so I’m far from being an expert on these matters, but this thing is far and away the most breathtaking voluntary forfeiture of sovereignty by a state that I’ve ever encountered.
Look at Articles 15 and 69:
* "Article 15.- Other domestic and foreign authorities cannot interfere in matters within the exclusive jurisdiction of the RED’s."
* "Article 69.- The government of the REDs may apply immigration controls on the entry, stay and departure of people from other States to the RED’s."
These REDs will have governments that are independent of the Honduran Government, borders that they control and their own police forces (Article 8). They are able to lease out and otherwise encumber the land, but they don’t own it. Because they don’t own the land, I suppose they wouldn’t pass the sovereignty test, but this is getting pretty damn close. The REDs, for example, are free to enter into foreign relations with other states independently of the Honduran Government.
The political structure is a mix of oligarchical and democratic.
A “Transparency Commission” appoints governors.
The initial members of the Transparency Commission, arbitrarily appointed by the President of Honduras are:
* George Akerlof – Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, Senior Resident Scholar at the International Monetary Fund, and Nobel Prize Winner.
* Harry Strachan – Former President of INCAE Business School, Director Emeritus at Bain & Co., and Managing Partner at Mesoamerica Partners and Foundation in Cost Rica.
* Ong Boon Hwee – Former Chief Operating Officer of Singapore Power and Former Brigadier General in the Singapore Armed Forces
* Nancy Birdsall – President and Co-Founder of the Center for Global Development , former Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and former Executive Vice President at the Inter-American Development Bank.
* Paul Romer (Commission Chair) – Professor of Economics at the New York University Stern School of Business.
Really, Bain & Co.? Really.
Ok, so the core of the unelected regime that will pick the governors of the REDs is made up of a couple of economics professors, a Bain & Co. executive, a bank executive and a former Singaporean general. This thing is like a board of directors and the governors are like division heads in a corporation.
The Normative Councils have legislative and advisory roles.
Members of the Normative Councils will be elected.
I’ll definitely be following developments with this story, but I have to move on right now. I’ll pay a US$10 bounty to anyone who can tell me the names of the people who are putting up the initial $15 million.
I have not been able to find that information after 30 minutes of searching, which I find interesting.
Via: Honduras News [http://www.hondurasnews.com/honduras-approves-private-cities-project/]:
[begin excerpt]
Honduras signed a deal for an initial investment of 15 million dollars to create the first “Private City” in the country. (Also referred to as “Free Cities”, “Charter Cities”, “Model Cities”, or in Spanish, “RED – Regiones Especiales de Desarollo”, and “Ciudades Modelo”.) The city will be built in Trujillo, in the Department of Colón, where it does not have the full support of the Garifuna people, as they fear that the loss of their land may be on the agenda.
Carlos Pineda, the president of Coalinza, stated that this was not just an agreement, but the most important project for the development of the country in 50 years.
Michael Strong, an executive with the MKG Group that was granted this project, stated that the objective is to create a secure and prosperous community for Hondurans.
The development of the physical infrastructure laid out in phase one of the project will result in 5,000 new jobs, as well as 15,000 indirect new jobs.
Juan Hernández, the President of the Honduran National Congress, stated that this is a giant step forward for the country. Last July, the Honduras Congress passed Decree #123-2011, which in a nutshell, takes care of all constitutional issues related to the creation of these RED zones, or model cities, as we refer to them in Honduras.
[end excerpt]
I have found that Michael Strong has a site: "The Purpose of Education" [http://thepurposeofeducation.wordpress.com/].
He is a libertarian. This is from his About page [http://thepurposeofeducation.wordpress.com/about/]:
[begin excerpt]
In order to create an educational system capable of improving the happiness and well-being of humanity, we need to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, government involvement in education at all levels, as well as government restrictions on the free pursuit of whatever occupation one desires. Government financing and regulation of education at all levels prevents the emergence of the more authentic, humane, and effective forms of education that we need. Thus around the world we need to move towards a principled separation of school and state, occupation and state, and research and state.
[end excerpt]
Sometimes, “libertarian,” means, libertarian, and other times, it means, corporate fascist. It’s a spectrum that seems to be determined by the scale of one’s endeavors.
Which is the case here?
I’m not sure yet. I have to go out and collect eggs, feed the chickens and help Becky get the kids fed, bathed and into bed. I’ll return to this later tonight. In any event, this is clearly the most interesting story that isn’t getting much play in the regular media at the moment.
More on Michael Strong from "Conscious Capitalism" [http://consciouscapitalism.org/ambassadors/ambassador/strong/]:
[begin excerpt]
Michael Strong is an Author and Thought Leader. He is lead author of Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World’s Problems, co-authored with John Mackey, Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Hernando de Soto, Co-Chair of the U.N. Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor, and others. Michael’s work is featured in academic journals (The Journal of Business Ethics, Economic Affairs, Critical Review, etc.), specialty publications (Microfinance Insights, Policy Innovations, Carnegie Ethics, etc.) and in media reaching popular audiences (The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Huffington Post, RealClearPolitics, Barron’s, etc.). He serves on the board of Conscious Capitalism, Inc., The Free Cities Institute, The Seasteading Institute, and the Advisory Boards of The Lifeboat Foundation, Trilinc Global, The Moorfield Storey Institute, and is a mentor for developing world entrepreneurs for the MIT Legatum Center for Entrepreneurship and Development.
[end excerpt]
Via: ABC News / AP [http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/honduras-sets-stage-privately-run-cities-17166954]:
[begin excerpt]
Investors can begin construction in six months on three privately run cities in Honduras that will have their own police, laws, government and tax systems now that the government has signed a memorandum of agreement approving the project.
An international group of investors and government representatives signed the memorandum Tuesday for the project that some say will bring badly needed economic growth to this small Central American country and that at least one detractor describes as “a catastrophe.”
The project’s aim is to strengthen Honduras’ weak government and failing infrastructure, overwhelmed by corruption, drug-related crime and lingering political instability after a 2009 coup.
The project “has the potential to turn Honduras into an engine of wealth,” said Carlos Pineda, president of the Commission for the Promotion of Public-Private Partnerships. It can be “a development instrument typical of first world countries.”
The “model cities” will have their own judiciary, laws, governments and police forces. They also will be empowered to sign international agreements on trade and investment and set their own immigration policy.
Congress president Juan Hernandez said the investment group MGK will invest $15 million to begin building basic infrastructure for the first model city near Puerto Castilla on the Caribbean coast. That first city would create 5,000 jobs over the next six months and up to 200,000 jobs in the future, Hernandez said.
South Korea has given Honduras $4 million to conduct a feasibility study, he said.
“The future will remember this day as that day that Honduras began developing,” said Michael Strong, CEO of the MKG Group. “We believe this will be one of the most important transformations in the world, through which Honduras will end poverty by creating thousands of jobs.”
[end excerpt]
2012-08-08 "In Honduras: Peasants vs. the 10 ruling families" by Orsetta Bellani from "El Reportero de San Francisco" newspaper [http://www.elreporterosf.com/editions/?q=node/6689]:
Every day, twenty people are killed in Honduras. It’s the most violent country in the world and the causes for this can be found in its history.
In the 70s, while in the neighboring countries (Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua) left-wing guerrillas were consolidating, Honduras was a US fiefdom. The country was used as the basis for the operations of the Contra, the guerrilla force used by the U.S. to combat the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
Honduras has been the “Republic of Bananas” par excellence. Here for 10 years banana companies like Chiquita and Dole, whose trucks are forming endless processions in the streets, have replaced the state. In the city of Tela, who hosted the eponymous banana company in the last century, the corporation brought electricity, school and work. Today, more than a Banana Republic, Honduras has the appearance of a Republic of the African Palm.
As a result, as revealed by the Honduran Foreign Minister, the country currently imports half its supply of maize and rice, with an obvious loss of food autonomy.
According to Rel-Uita, Honduras today produces over 300 thousand metric tons of palm oil and 70 percent is sold in foreign markets.
The estates of palm oil, whose oil is destined for the food industry and the production of agrofuels, are grown by farmers who - according to the data provided by organizations member of the campaign “Vamos al Grano” – around 75 percent live on a dollar per day.
They work with chemicals that contaminate soil and poison the aquifers layers of the third poorest country in Latin America. This creates intolerance among the peasants and generates income for the Facusses, one of the most powerful in the country and throughout Central America.
“In Honduras there are ten families who make the decisions. They control industries, banks, media, police, the Supreme Court, the Public Ministry, the National Assembly and the Government,” says Miriam Miranda, Chair of OFRANEH (Honduran Black Fraternal Organization). The Honduran oligarchy began to be structured in the midtwentieth century, when a handful of Jewish and Palestinian families migrated to Central America, attracted by the foreign capital investment of the multinational mining and banana companies. These families have been able to put aside the historical tensions between the two peoples and now control 40 percent of national production. The State is its largest customer in a context in which, as emphasized by the president of COPINH (Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras) Berta Caceres, “the State does not exist, but rather strengthens the institutions who hold effective control.” Almost all Honduran oligarchs contribute financially to the two parties, and several members of these families have been ministers of the government in power.
In 2009, former President Zelaya blocked the same oligarchy he belonged to. He announced minimum wage increase of 66 percent, accession to ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, an alliance between progressive Latin American countries promoted by Chavez) and promised agrarian reform.
It was never approved: on June 28th, 2009, the day that Zelaya had called the people to vote for a consultation to decide whether to convene a constituent assembly, the country’s oligarchs staged a coup. Zelaya was overthrown and a government in line with the interests of the oligarchy put in place, so intertwined with drug-trafficking that according to Wikileaks, it uses Facusse’s properties as a landing strip for aircraft. An example of the arrogance of the Honduran oligarchy is the Lower Aguan issue. In the 90’s the government privatized the land, following the advice of the International Monetary Fund.
“Because of the threats, here in Lower Aguan everybody started to sell, especially to Facusse. Those who refused were killed,” denounces Vitalino Alvarez, from the organization MUCA (Aguan Unified Peasant Movement). Then, when the peasants rebelled, the government promised the restitution of much of the land. Not only the terms of the agreement have not been met, but also by early June Miguel Facusse threatened to evict seven farms - about 4,000 hectares - negotiated with the government, where they settled thousands of peasant families affiliated to MUCA.
However, by late June the peasant organization MARK (Authentic Vindicator Movement from Aguan) won an important victory: Tegucigalpa court of first instance ruled the restitution of 1,800 hectares of land to the families of the same organization who were dispossessed of their land in 1994, acknowledging the illegality of its acquisition by Facusse and Rene Morales Carazo. However, according to the MARK, the corrupt Honduran judges admitted protection measures filed by the two landowners, thereby reversing the ruling.
That decision sets the stage for further violence in the Lower Aguan where from the beginning of 2010 until today, Facusse’s guards have killed 51 people involved with farmers’ organizations and one journalist and his partner.
“The decrees of the government legitimate impunity since the coup: when it is so widely it is applicable to a plan,” said former President Zelaya during the inauguration of the International Meeting for Human Rights in Solidarity with Honduras, which took place in February in Lower Aguan.
---
Rural relatives show the photos of their loved ones murdered or disappeared in their struggle for land in Honduras.
USA Drug War invades Honduras
How the USA imposes the process of fascism across "Latin" America:
Spike the population with drugs that are considered illegal, use this as a pretext to destabilize the people's culture (which is the foundation of nationalism), militarize the police who then target remaining political dissenters, look the other way when the investment capitalists of the USA use drugs and profit from the trade… another fact is that the USA subsidizes the protection of cocaine fields in Colombia and Honduras, just like the Opium fields of Afghanistan since 2001.
How the USA imposes the process of fascism across "Latin" America:
Spike the population with drugs that are considered illegal, use this as a pretext to destabilize the people's culture (which is the foundation of nationalism), militarize the police who then target remaining political dissenters, look the other way when the investment capitalists of the USA use drugs and profit from the trade… another fact is that the USA subsidizes the protection of cocaine fields in Colombia and Honduras, just like the Opium fields of Afghanistan since 2001.
2012-06-24 "DEA Honduras drug killing part of new, aggressive strategy against illicit flights" by "Associated Press" newswire
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who killed a suspected drug trafficker during a raid in a remote region of Honduras was part of an aggressive new enforcement strategy that has sharply increased the interception of illegal drug flights.
The mission, called Operation Anvil, is run with six U.S. State Department helicopters, as well as a special team of DEA agents who work with Honduran police to move more quickly and pursue suspicious flights, according to a U.S. official in Honduras who couldn’t be named for security reasons.
In little more than two months since the operation started, it has intercepted four flights. That compares to only seven from mid-2010 to the end of 2011 — less than one every two months.
The U.S. official said about 100 flights of suspicious origin come into Honduras every year.
With the new operation, Honduran and U.S. drug agents follow every flight they detect of unknown origin and work with non-U.S. contract pilots who don’t have the restrictive rules of engagement that the U.S. military do.
The area of Brus Laguna, where the DEA says an agent shot a drug suspect as he was reaching for his gun Saturday, is part of the remote Mosquitia region that is dotted with clandestine airstrips and a vast network of rivers for carrying drugs to the coast.
Saturday’s incident marked the first time that a DEA agent has killed someone in Central America since the agency began deploying specially trained agents several years ago to accompany local law enforcement personnel on all types of drug raids throughout the region, said DEA spokeswoman Dawn Dearden.
A May 11 raid by Honduran police with DEA advisers, also under Operation Anvil, killed four people and wounded four others, whom locals said were innocent civilians traveling the river at night. Honduran and DEA officials have said people on the boat fired first and the lawmen were acting in self-defense. The DEA said none of its agents fired their guns in that incident.
Operation Anvil also netted cocaine shipments on May 6 in the Mosquitia and June 13 in Olancho state, totaling more three quarters of a ton of cocaine in about two months.
The weekend raid was a “great example of positive U.S.-Honduran cooperation,” said U.S. Embassy spokesman Stephen Posivak in Tegucigalpa.
But the aggressive tactics have come under fire from human rights groups and some political interests in Washington, especially since the May 11 attack.
The Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras filed a complaint in May with the regional prosecutor in the Gracias a Dios region where the attack occurred, claiming human rights violations by Honduran and U.S. authorities. The group’s investigation concluded that the dead and wounded were innocent civilians.
American University anthropology professor Adrienne Pine sent a letter signed by 40 Honduran scholars and former government officials, and supported by 300 academics in 29 countries, to President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earlier this month, demanding the U.S. cease support for the Honduran military and police.
“It’s really troubling,” Pine said Sunday. “It’s absolutely not appropriate for U.S. law enforcement to be killing other people in other countries.”
Operation Anvil is part of an overall increase in U.S. efforts in Honduras, where drug trafficking and murder rates have spiked in the last year or so. With 82 murders per 100,000 people, the U.N. lists Honduras as the most dangerous country in the world. Its national police force is rife with corruption, with some calling it one of country’s main organized crime operations.
International crackdowns in Mexico and the Caribbean have pushed drug trafficking to Central America, which is now the crossing point for 84 percent of all U.S.-bound cocaine, according to Joint Task Force-Bravo, a U.S. military installation in Comayagua, Honduras.
It says Honduras is now main landing point for such drug flights from South America.
The U.S. is increasing its DEA personnel in Tegucigalpa from four to seven, the U.S. official said. Another eight to 10 agents are stationed in the north as part of the Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Teams, known as FAST, to train Hondurans and work on the State Department helicopters, all Huey II aircraft based in the coastal city of La Ceiba, according to a state department report. They are rotated among three so-called Forward Operating Bases in Puerto Castilla, El Aguacate and Mocoron bases near remote drug-running regions.
The U.S. also recently established a full Narcotics Affairs Section in the embassy for the first time and is seeking its first extradition of an accused Honduran drug lord, Carlos Arnold Lobo, under a constitutional amendment passed by Honduras in January allowing its nationals to be extradited to the U.S.
The U.S. Embassy could not immediately say how much more is being spent in Honduras because much of the funding comes from the Central America Regional Security Initiative, about $100 million a year for efforts across the region. The State helicopters, for example, are officially allocated to Guatemala even though they’re now working in Honduras.
U.S. officials, including with the DEA, have done background checks and have trained 42 Honduran national police to work on drug-trafficking cases alongside DEA agents and U.S. military at Joint Task Force-Bravo.
Until April, the DEA and Hondurans had relied mainly on Joint Task Force-Bravo helicopters to chase illicit flights. But because of the rules of engagement for the U.S. military in Honduras, they could only fire back to protect themselves and their equipment, and not to protect the DEA or Honduran police who can come under fire in the field.
“These helicopters are different in that they’re not U.S. pilots and they have the ability to fire in self-defense and in the protection of ground elements, where JTF Bravo, they’re limited in rules of engagement,” the U.S. official said.
The weekend’s operation occurred around 12:30 a.m., when a U.S. agent and Honduran National Police arrested four suspects and seized 792 pounds (360 kilograms) of cocaine, Posivak said. He said six other people were arrested later on suspicion of aiding the smuggling operation.
The incident took place about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from Ahuas, the site of the May 11 shooting, according to Ahuas mayor Lucia Baquedano. No one from the town was involved, Baquedano said, adding that at least 11 clandestine airstrips sit between Ahuas and Brus Laguna.
The operation was similar to the May 11 raid, according to another U.S. official who wasn’t authorized to speak on the record. The previous operation involved four helicopters, two in the air and two that landed, and included Guatemalan contract pilots and Honduran police and military, with the DEA working as advisers.
People in the helicopters tracking the flight early Saturday saw about 40 people transporting drugs from the plane, the official said. They were intercepted by law enforcement about a half mile from the landing strip, where the seizure, arrests and shooting took place. Most of the 40 people scattered.
The DEA said it would not release the name of the agent who killed the suspect.
“During the operation, a fifth suspect attempted to engage the police team with a firearm and was shot by a DEA agent in self-defense,” Posivak said. “The suspect subsequently died at the scene. There were no other injuries or fatalities.”
Ministry of Security spokesman Ivan Mejia said Sunday that that the Honduran government has sent police, a judge, a prosecutor and medical examiners to the scene to investigate.
Investigations also continue into the May 11 Ahuas shooting, with confusion remaining about what actually happened.
2012-04-25 "In the Fields of America’s Green Prison"
by DEAN GALARO [http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/25/in-the-fields-of-americas-green-prison/]:
In Honduras there is almost no middle class. Either you are wealthy and politically connected, or you make ends meet with agricultural work, probably on a banana plantation or coffee finca. You work, your children work, and the lack of social mobility means you will probably do so the rest of your life.
It should be no surprise that Honduran farm workers have many times become dissatisfied and taken action. On April 17, 3,500 families began a squatting campaign to regain control of disputed farmland. While the workers argue that they have been waiting over a decade for land titles for the use of public lands, the landowners respond that the lands were legally purchased from the government. Almost 30,000 acres nationwide are in dispute [http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2012/04/201241915516662950.html].
But this is only the latest issue in a long lineage of struggle for land use and worker’s rights. One of the nation’s most famous literary works, Prision Verde (Green Prison), recalls Máximo Lujan, a banana plantation worker who instigates and leads a workers’ uprising against the oppressive American company that is consuming all of the arable land and mistreating the Honduran workers. While it is a work of fiction, Prision’s author, Ramón Amaya Amador, wrote the book to represent the all-too-real conditions of Honduran campesinos (poor workers).
Amador worked for a time on a banana plantation in northern Honduras before he was able to get an education and begin a long career in journalism. His writings and political activism focused on the large economic rift between rich and poor in Honduras. Eventually, however, because of his connections with the communist party, Amador faced political persecution and fled to Guatemala in 1944. Shortly thereafter, he published Prision Verde.
Due to the worldwide economic downturn of the Great Depression the 1930s were a tough time for Honduran agriculture. Banana exports shrank and many found themselves out of work. Then-president Tiburcio Carías Andino found himself needing to strengthen ties with U.S. corporate landowners to grow his domestic power. Courting Americans to run plantations in Honduras was one way to bring business to the country, but it necessitated economic incentives and strikebreaking. Andino kept himself in office for an unprecedented 16 years through this combination of economic and military control.
Eighty years later, many poor Hondurans still find themselves trapped in a Green Prison. Amador used to term to describe the banana plantations because even though the campesinos worked in terrible conditions for almost no pay, they felt trapped and, in a sense, compelled. The workers were either cognitively dissonant or simply ignorant of their own exploitation, and so continued to be attracted to available plantation work.
In Honduras, then as it is still today, it’s not so much an issue of trust, but rather an issue of inevitability. Many workers might feel as though there is nothing to be done about exploitation or harmful government policies. I teach at a bilingual school in the small town of Gracias, in the department of Lempira. When posed with the question of failed or harmful government policies, many of my high school students responded the same way:
“Sure, it’s bad, but we need the government.”
“Even if there’s corruption and poverty?”
“We don’t have another option.”
Regardless of the success of the government (success being economic or otherwise) there is a sense here that the government needs to be here. Without it, there would be no one around to make decisions. It seems for many that the need to be led has been ingrained into the national conscience. Even those who don’t live in the green prison still share some of the ideological weaknesses.
Many in the United States might look at the problems of plantation exploitation and see it as a foreign problem. In the banana republics of Latin America, this kind of system has grown to appear to be the norm. But surely, those same problems have not crept north into the United States.
Unfortunately, they have.
There are almost 1.4 million crop farmworkers in the United States today. 80% of them are Hispanic, and up to 90% could be illegal. It’s a vocation that many undocumented workers flock to: no special skills required and no questions asked, just a couple of dollars an hour.
People need to work to support their families, but depending on your immigration status, the options may be very limited. Very quickly, many become trapped in their job, stuck between the law and their own poverty. An article in the Economist from late 2010 [http://www.economist.com/node/17722932] told the not-uncommon story of the Vega family’s struggles to come to America and work. Felix Vega worked picking strawberries in California and described his situation like this: “The hardest part is not being free, not being able to go out…It’s like being in a jail.” What a telling remark.
Americans don’t think about farm workers in the States in terms of exploitation. Since the workers come voluntarily they accept the terms of the deal. They want to work, so why stop them?
Americans used to know what it was like to be migrant farmworkers. The plight of the tenant farmer of the Great Depression was immortalized in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. There used to be a deep-rooted sympathy for the family pulling themselves up by their all-America bootstraps. But not anymore, at least not when the family illegally came from Mexico.
A March 2012 whitepaper from the United Farm Workers (UFW) [http://www.ufw.org/pdf/farmworkerinventory_0401_2011.pdf] set out to inventory the issues most affecting American farmworkers. Some of the headlining issues include the fact that most farmworkers are exempt from wage and hour guarantees in the Fair Labor Standards Act, or exclusion from collective bargaining protection under the National Labor Relations Act. Add to this the fact that deportation is a constant threat used as leverage over workers, and the picture starts to look eerily similar to what many would call exploitation in a Latin American or East Asian context.
Those who come over the border in droves and rush straight into the pitiful dregs of farm labor want two things: money and citizenship. The former being easier to get than the latter, it is the main concern. There are, however, great lengths that some will and years some will wait for a chance at a green card.
In the pursuit of becoming a real “American” millions set themselves up for cultural and economic humiliation. What are the alternatives? At the moment, there is no reprieve.
These immigrants find themselves trapped in a modern American trap: a new green prison. Those picking strawberries might not be so different from those harvesting bunches of bananas. Both are in dire need. Both have no positive option to pursue. Both are stuck.
Yet they continue to come and settle for what they are given. This phenomenon can’t be surprising though, since undocumented workers live in a world constantly telling them that they do not belong, that they are doing something wrong. Under the thumb of the grandiose United States, there are no options but to settle. Modern farmworkers know they are sending themselves to prison, but that sentence is (hopefully) better than the national and domestic troubles at home.
Honduras has suffered a great deal in the last hundred years because of economic turmoil, especially for the poorest parts of the country. Workers here, however, have always held onto an internal drive that has kept the fight for awareness and rights alive. Banana workers were vital to the 1955 coup that led to provincial elections in 1957. This same demographic is striking en masse today, in some of the same places. What else can they achieve this time around?
We will have to wait and see. In the meantime, it would be wise for the United States to consider what might be boiling under the surface of the exploited class so close to home. Honduras and many other Latin American countries serve as examples of what can happen when exploitation persists to a fault, so to speak. To refer back again to Steinbeck: “[T]he great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”
2012-02-29 "U.S. foreign policy backs abusive Honduran state"
by Adrienne Pine from "San Francisco Chronicle" [http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openforum/article/U-S-foreign-policy-backs-abusive-Honduran-state-3368568.php]
Honduran prisons are overcrowded, but not because there are too many criminals, one of the explanations that has been given for the Valentine's Day prison fire in the city of Comayagua that killed 360 people- the worst prison fire in a century. They are overcrowded because a majority of prisoners have languished for years in prison without having gone to trial, and because of so-called "antigang" and "antiterrorist" laws passed by President Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo that criminalize poverty and dissent.
In an attempt to bring a tidy end to the 2009 military coup that ousted President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya, Lobo was brought to power in a U.S.-funded election marred by military and police violence and deemed by all international election monitoring bodies to lack the conditions necessary to be free and fair. Lacking a mandate and derided by the left and right, Lobo has few friends outside the U.S. embassy in Honduras. Other than commending Lobo for his public statements following the fire, the embassy has remained relatively quiet about the Comayagua tragedy.
Honduran prisons are also unsafe, but not because they lack the latest fireproofing technology that Israel's ambassador to Honduras offered to sell the country in the wake of the inferno. They are unsafe because a culture of impunity encourages the police serving as prison guards to shoot at prisoners who try to escape flames, as occurred in Comayagua, rather than unlock their cells. Police were found to be involved in planning and executing the 2003 and 2004 massacres that killed nearly 200 inmates.
The Comayagua prison fire may have been started by accident, as the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives forensics team insists. But it was neither accident nor oversight that the Lobo administration did not implement changes ordered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to prevent more prison deaths. And it is no accident that the United States continues to send military and police aid to a government that violates inmates' human rights.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Defense spent more than $50 million in Honduras. Most of that went to the Soto Cano Air Base, the U.S. military base within spitting distance of the Comayagua prison. Additional hundreds of millions of dollars are being channeled through the Central American Regional Security Initiative to support initiatives like Lobo's "Operation Lightning," which deputizes soldiers to act as police officers. In the two months they have been on the streets, these military police have already been accused of numerous human rights violations.
In a Jan. 26 New York Times op-ed, Dana Frank argued that "the coup was what threw open the doors to a huge increase in drug trafficking and violence, and it unleashed a continuing wave of state-sponsored repression." Because of the coup - which Lobo supported and inherited - the homicide rate has shot up to 82 per 100,000, making Honduras the most dangerous country in the world. The solution, Frank concluded, lies not in funding repressive institutions, but in respecting proposals coming from Honduran human rights defenders who daily risk their lives in their fight for justice, dignity and life.
Honduran human rights workers assert that justice requires accountability at the highest levels for the Comayagua fire and all other human rights violations. They demand the implementation of due process for prisoners and a reworking of the penal code by a publicly accountable judiciary.
And they call on the United States to withdraw military and police aid to the Honduran government.
Days after the fire, relatives of the prison fire victims were teargassed en masse for the second time, making Frank's arguments are all the more urgent. Hondurans do not need more militarization; they need justice.
2012-01-30 "The War Against Peasant Farmers Heats Up in Honduras"
by Aryeh Shell from "Climate Connections" [http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3433-the-war-against-peasant-farmers-heats-up-in-honduras]:
Aryeh Shell is a cultural activist and a Rotary World Peace Fellow, currently studying International Relations in Argentina. She is researching the vibrant Honduran movement of resistance to neoliberal development projects.
If you are interested in joining an International Gathering for Human Rights in Solidarity with Honduras, February 17-20th, 2012, supportong the Human Rights Observatory with urgently needed resources, or would like to participate in a Solidarity Brigade, please contact: [mioaguan2012@gmail.com] or [brigada.solidaridad.aguan@gmail.com], For further information [http://www.mioaguan.blogspot.com]
---“There is a war here in the Aguán,” says Juan, surveying the distant fields of African palm from the vantage point of his recently planted field of beans and corn. A young Honduran farmer, wearing a beaten cowboy hat and a bandana bearing the name “National Front for Popular Resistance,” Juan lives in an encampment of 60 families, dedicated to growing basic grains and reclaiming their food sovereignty. “But the war is not against the drug traffickers, other countries or even organized crime,” he says. “It is a war against the campesinos.”
In the Lower Aguán River Valley in northern Honduras, more than 3,000 families have claimed their right to the basic necessities of a dignified life: land, food, health, education. Living in make-shift tarps and temporary thatch-roofed huts, with nothing but machetes to clear the land, they daily face off against the goliath forces of the Honduran oligarchy, their private guards, and 1,000 Honduran military and police forces deployed by the coup regime to militarize the region – the local security apparatus of big business and the State.
The second major military here, “Operation Xatruch II,” was launched in August, 2011 with financing and training by the United States government. Honduran Security Minister, Oscar Alvarez justified the militarization of the region by describing the campesinos as “so-called farmers and possibly drug dealers who are wanting to settle in that area”.
But these “so-called farmers” are not just arriving. They were recruited by the State into this backwater rainforest region in the 60s and 70s through agrarian land reforms that granted collective titles to peasant cooperatives. The reformist program used campesino labor to cultivate the land and grow African Palm for export. The land was inalienable, designated solely for small-holder production.
The aggressive neoliberal policies of the 90s and the country’s Agriculture Modernization Act of 1992 definitively ended land reform in Honduras and opened up collectively-held land to the market. Vulnerable to global economic forces, cheap imports from the North, massive debt, and a campaign of intimidation, many farmers were forced to sell their land for a mere 1,000lempiras per manzana (about $52 US dollars for 1.7 acres). Forty peasant cooperatives disappeared. The land was rapidly concentrated into the hands of three powerful landowners, Miguel Facussé, Rene Morales and Reynaldo Carnales.
Realizing they had been swindled, the movement began to occupy and reclaim their lands. Before the coup took place on June 28,2009, President Zelaya, affectionately known as Mel by his campesino supporters, sat down with the Aguán farmers to redistribute disputed land and resolve the conflicts. Decree 18-2008 would grant titles for land that had been peacefully occupied for 10 years. The farmers were within days of receiving their titles when the coup took place. But the decree was abolished as one of the first acts undertaken by de facto President Roberto Micheletti and the coup regime. In December 2009, the United Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), decided to reestablish its nonviolent land occupations.
While public officials and the Honduran press have used allegations of armed guerrilla activity or drug trafficking to criminalize the peasant farmers, they have failed to report on the 55campesino leaders selectively assassinated, or the countless others who have been disappeared, captured, tortured and intimidated since January 2010.
They also have neglected to expose the narco-trafficking activities of the region’s largest landowner, Miguel Facussé, whose cocaine import business is well-known by the US Embassy, as revealed by Wikileaks cables last year.
Facussé and his company, Grupo Dinant, have received millions of dollars in loans by international financial institutions to promote African palm oil biofuel production. While being promoted as a green energy solution, the profits of Grupo Dinant are being used to pay armed paramilitaries and private guards to terrorize peasant farmers in order to drive them from their land, resulting in grave human rights violations – not to mention the severe ecological damage through mono-cultivation, water depletion and contamination from heavy toxic chemical inputs.
According to Dana Frank, a history professor at UC Santa Cruz and a regular contributor to The Nation, “The U.S. is funding and training Honduran military and police that are conducting joint operations with the security guards of a known drug trafficker to violently repress a campesino movement on behalf of Miguel Facussé’s dubious claims to vast swaths of the Aguán Valley, in order to support his African palm biofuels empire.”
Human Rights Delegation -
On January 6-15, I joined a dozen other US and Canadian citizens on a delegation to the Aguán organized by Rights Action, Alliance for Global Justice, and Food First, to accompany campesino communities defending their rights to land, and to hear their testimonies.
Our hotel was filled with camouflaged soldiers carrying military rifles, ignoring signs on the restaurant doors prohibiting weapons. Day and night, the streets were patrolled by large green pickup trucks with tinted windows and without license plates – known locally as the kind used by paramilitaries in drive-by shootings and political kidnappings. I did not feel more secure by their presence.
After driving down long dirt roads, through oceans of dust-covered palm trees, and passing several military checkpoints along the way, we arrived in the small village of Rigores, a farming community of 135 families who were violently forced off their land by security forces last June. The police destroyed their crops and set fire to their homes, schools, and church. They are slowly rebuilding their community under the constant threat that the police will evict them again.
Norma, a shy woman cradling a newborn baby in her arms, showed us her newly rebuilt home of dry cracked mud. Norma doesn’t sleep much, she told us, because she is fearful for the day the police will return.
She described the day when they attacked the community and burned their homes to the ground: “When they came to capture the men, I begged them to leave us alone. I told them, we are not guerrillas, we don’t have any weapons. We are women. We are farmers. They pointed their guns at me and told me to shut up or they would kill me. My baby was only 40 days old. She was screaming. I ran into the palm trees to escape.”
In a cramped room we gathered to hear other testimonies. Children lined up along the windows, peering in at the strange group of gringos in bright blue International Human Rights Observer T-shirts. At first, people were shy to share the trauma of the police attack. But before long, the stories poured out.
Rodolfo, a leader in the Campesino Movement of the Aguán, began, “Our community has been heavily persecuted. Many people have been kidnapped. Some have been beaten, and injured, including my 16-year-old son who was captured. They doused him with gasoline and threatened to set him on fire.”
A boisterous woman named Maria stood up. “It was a terrifying experience. Everyone had to leave their homes running. They burned our houses and killed our animals. It left us with a psychological trauma. My son is still really scared. Whenever he hears a noise, he says, ‘the police are coming, the police are coming’.
Despite the trauma of the eviction and ongoing repression, most of the families have returned, even more determined to claim their right to plant corn, beans, and yucca.
Rodolfo concluded, “They haven’t succeeded in breaking us. We continue to resist.”
As we walked through the rubble of the village that once was Rigores, small green cornstalks were poking through patches of earth.
True Security -
The campesino cooperatives are working to redefine the very notion of security - not through increased militarization, but through integral agrarian reform and food sovereignty. This includes not only land titles, but also technical support, native seeds, favorable credit, dignified permanent housing, schools, healthcare and the autonomy to decide what they will produce. It includes securing the rights and participation of women and youth. The first point on their security agenda, however, is to unite.
When asked what it would take to create true security in the region, Wilfredo Paz, the coordinator of the new Permanent Human Rights Observatory in the Aguán, responded, “There is one fundamental requirement, and that is the solidarity and love that we have for our brothers and sisters. Here in the Aguán, there is no guarantee of life. There is no respect for human rights. Here the only law that is respected is that of the military, of the powerful landowners and their hired assassins. Neoliberalism and the oligarchy want us to be divided. If we don’t create a collective strategy, we won’t survive.”
We attended a Campesino Congress that brought together nearly seventy leaders to discuss their strategy. The meeting started with a full minute of applause – a collective ritual to recognize the martyrs of the movement. During the long minute, my hands burned and my eyes filled with tears for all the blood that has been spilt in the struggle, in defense of our mother earth.
The first agreement of the meeting was to unify thecampesino organizations. The peasant farmer movement in the Aguán is striking at the core of capitalism, and solidarity is at the heart of their movement. As Odelfo, a 79-year-old campesino, puts it, “Todos para uno y uno para todos. Para que todos de una tortilla la compartamos, y que comamos de una misma tortilla todos” – All for one and one for all, because we all share the same tortilla.
A Climate Connections Exclusive Report -
The Bajo Aguán Region of Honduras competes with the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of Colombia for the site with the most egregious violations of human rights, land rights, and ecological justice that often accompany biofuel plantations in the tropics. This article I wrote for Alternet last year documents the relation of these abuses to the UN-backed Clean Development Mechanism [http://www.alternet.org/story/149778/?page=entire]. Since that time, the rate of assassinations, disappearances, and outright attacks on peasant farmers has increased dramatically. Climate Connections is pleased to offer the following original article reporting from the ground on the current state of affairs in the Bajo Aguan.
[signed] Jeff Conant, for Global Justice Ecology Project.
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Welcome to Liberated Territory; Photo Credit: Greg McCain
Odelfo, Bajo Aguan, January 2012; Photo credit: Greg McCain
Young girl in Bajo Aguan; Photo credit: Greg McCain
Norma and her rebuilt home, Bajo Aguan, January 2012; Photo credit: Aryeh Shell
2011-10-21 "WikiLeaks Honduras: US Linked to Brutal Businessman"
by Dana Frank from "The Nation" [http://www.thenation.com/article/164120/wikileaks-honduras-us-linked-brutal-businessman#]:
Since 2009, beneath the radar of the international media, the coup government ruling Honduras has been collaborating with wealthy landowners in a violent crackdown on small farmers struggling for land rights in the Aguán Valley in the northeastern region of the country. More than forty-six campesinos have been killed or disappeared. Human rights groups charge that many of the killings have been perpetrated by the private army of security guards employed by Miguel Facussé, a biofuels magnate. Facussé’s guards work closely with the Honduran military and police, which receive generous funding from the United States to fight the war on drugs in the region.
New Wikileaks cables now reveal that the US embassy in Honduras—and therefore the State Department—has known since 2004 that Miguel Facussé is a cocaine importer. US “drug war” funds and training, in other words, are being used to support a known drug trafficker’s war against campesinos.
Miguel Facussé Barjum, in the embassy’s words, is “the wealthiest, most powerful businessman in the country,” one of the country’s “political heavyweights.” The New York Times recently described him as “the octogenarian patriarch of one of the handful of families controlling much of Honduras’ economy.” Facussé’s nephew, Carlos Flores Facussé, served as president of Honduras from 1998 to 2002. Miguel Facussé’s Dinant corporation is a major producer of palm oil, snack foods, and other agricultural products. He was one of the key supporters of the military coup that deposed democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009.
Miguel Facussé’s power base lies in the lower Aguán Valley, where campesinos originally settled in the 1970s as part of an agrarian reform strategy by the Honduran government, which encouraged hundreds of successful campesino cooperatives and collectives in the region. Beginning in 1992, though, new neoliberal governments began promoting the transfer of their lands to wealthy elites, who were quick to take advantage of state support to intimidate and coerce campesinos into selling, and in some cases to acquire land through outright fraud. Facussé, the biggest beneficiary by far of these state policies, now claims at least 22,000 acres in the lower Aguán, at least one-fifth of the entire area, much of which he has planted in African palms for an expanding biofuel empire.
Campesino living standards in the region, meanwhile, have eroded dramatically. In December 2009 thousands of organized campesinos began staging collective recuperations of lands in the lower Aguán that they argue were stolen from them, or else legally promised to them by the government through previous agreements or edicts.
The campesinos’ efforts have been met with swift and brutal retaliation. According to Committee of Families of the Detained and Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), the independent, highly respected human rights group, at least forty-four have been killed, at least sixteen this past summer alone. The victims include leaders of groups such as the Movimiento Unificado de Campesinos de Aguán (MUCA), which is involved in land occupations, but also members of stable communities that have been in place for decades, such as Guadalupe Carney, Rigores or Prieta, whose residents believed they had secure title to their holdings. According to a recent statement by Human Rights Watch calling for investigation, no one has been arrested or prosecuted for any of these murders.
Many of these killings and related attacks have been attributed to Miguel Facussé’s private security guards, as well those of his associates. Known locally as sicarios or hired assassins, they wear either plainclothes or Grupo Dinant uniforms and are reported to number between 200 and 300. Facussé himself admits that on November 15, 2010, his guards shot and killed five campesinos from the MUCA at the El Tumbador community. A July 2011 report from a joint fact-finding mission from the World Council of Churches, Foodfirst Information and Action Network (FIAN) International, and other international groups on the killings of campesinos in the Aguán, states: “In all cases, according to witnesses and members of the peasant movements, the security guards working for Miguel Facussé and René Morales are seen to be the primary actors,” including in the deaths of three MUCA members on August 17, 2010.
Alleged assassinations and armed attacks by Facussé’s guards continue. On October 5, Facussé’s security guards allegedly shot at and gravely injured two MUCA members at the San Isidro campesino community, according to FIAN. On October 11 at La Aurora, FIAN and other human rights groups report, at least six security guards on lands claimed by Facussé’s Dinant Corporation, together with police and military forces, shot and killed Santos Serfino Zelaya Ruiz, 33, and opened fire on fifteen women spreading salt, who hid for hours afterwards in the palm trees.
On January 8, 2011, opposition activist and journalist Juan Chinchilla was kidnapped in the Aguán Valley, tortured and interrogated. He escaped after two days and reported in an interview that his captors “almost all wore uniforms of the military, police and private guards of Miguel Facussé.”
Human rights groups worldwide have denounced Facussé’s attacks on Honduran campesinos. On April 8, the German development bank DEG (Deutsche Investitions und Entwicklungselleschaft mbH), cancelled a $20 million loan to Dinant after investigating the situation. A week later EDF, a major French energy corporation, announced it was canceling plans to buy carbon credits from Dinant.
Facussé has lashed back aggressively with full-page advertisements in his defense. He also recently sued both Honduras’ Bishop Luis Alfonso Santos and Andres Pavon, President of the Comité para la Defensa del Los Derechos Humanos (CODEH), a well-known human rights group, for defamation.
In tandem with the killings and disappearances of individual activists, in the past year and a half, the Honduran police and military have launched successive waves of repression against entire campesino communities, both newly occupied sites and stable ones with long-term legal status. On December 15, 2010, between 500 and 1,000 police and military surrounded the small campesino town of Guadalupe Carney with snipers and helicopters, and staged a house-by-house search for alleged arms—which they never found. Troops have remained encamped in the middle of the town ever since. In April 2010, 2,000 Honduran police and military occupied the entire lower Aguán valley, controlling access and intimidating its residents.
The situation has worsened since May, and continues to escalate. Five security guards, a policeman, and five others, in addition to over sixteen campesinos, have died. The region is once again occupied by 1,000 troops in a military operation known as Xatruch II—which is aimed at combating armed guerrillas, of whose existence there is no evidence. Nor has any evidence been produced linking campesinos to the other deaths.
Overall, the occupation and repression of the lower Aguán have assumed terrifying proportions. “With the militarization of Xatruch II they are trying to convert our zone into Iraq,” COFADEH and the MUCA charge. “Our settlements are being submitted to a permanent state of siege.”
On June 24, with one hour’s notice, police burned down almost the entire ten-year-old community of Rigores of over 100 houses and bulldozed down its three churches and seven-room schoolhouse. The residents began to rebuild their homes with tarps and sticks, but on September 16–18, in response to the death of a policeman nearby, police rampaged through the town, randomly grabbing and detaining people, including children. One of them was a 16-year-old boy who has testified that police put a bag over his head, sprayed him with gasoline and threatened to kill him. On September 20 police and military successfully ejected all those who remained in the community .
Multiple eyewitnesses and human rights groups report Facussé’s private guards, police, and military all working together in these violent evictions and associated deaths— at El Tumbador on November 15, 2010; in Guadalupe Carney on December 15, 2010; in Rigores on June 24, 2011; and at La Aurora on October 11, where the women hid in the trees—as well as during Chinchilla’s kidnapping. This past August 15, COFADEH reports, Facussé’s guards along with police and members of the military brutally attacked campesinos on the African palm plantation known as Finca Panamá.
According to Rights Action, the Washington, DC, and Toronto–based human rights group, “Military, police and private security forces are reported to exchange uniforms depending on the context, to mobilize jointly both in police patrol cars and automobiles that belong to private security companies employed by the African palm planters.” COFADEH concludes: “The relationship between the military and the private security guards demonstrates clearly that the security guards are acting as paramilitary forces.”
In the past two years since the coup US funding for the Honduran military and police has escalated dramatically. The US has allocated $45 million in new funds for military construction, including expansion and improvement of the jointly operated Soto Cano Air Force Base at Palmerola (supplied now with US drones) and has opened three new military bases. Police and military funding, almost $10 million for 2011, rose dramatically in June with $40 million more under the new $200 million Central American Regional Security Initiative, supposedly to combat drug trafficking in Central America—which is, indeed, rampant, dangerous and growing in Honduras under Lobo’s post-coup government, especially in the Aguán.
Honduran military operations in the lower Aguán valley, including joint operations with Facussé’s guards, benefit from these funds, as well as special training. This summer seventy members of Honduras’ Fifteenth Batallion received a special thirty-three-day training course from the US Rangers. According to the Honduras Solidarity Network, members of the Xatruch Special Forces group in the Aguán Valley, in a September meeting, “confirmed that they had received training from the United States military in special operations, which include sniper and anti-terrorism training.” Eyewitnesses informed Rights Action they saw US Rangers also training Facussé’s security guards.
Most recently, on October 6 members of Operation Xatruch II captured, detained without charges, and tortured Walter Nelin Sabillón Yanos, a MUCA member, FIAN reports. Sabillón testified to FIAN that while he was in detention at the Tocoa police station, authorities beat him, repeatedly placed a hood on his head, and three times applied electric shock to his hands, abdomen and mouth while interrogating him about the campesino movement.
On September 17 I called the Tocoa police station to inquire about the condition of more than thirty campesinos that had been rounded up and were being detained. “Tell her they’ve killed all the campesinos,” the official laughed, and then hung up. A colleague who called immediately afterward was told the detainees were being treated “like dogs.” “Are they being tortured?” she asked. “I hope so,” the official replied.
Now cables released by Wikileaks on September 30 suddenly shed light on the US military and State Department’s role in the Aguán Valley conflict and in Honduras more broadly. A March 19, 2004, cable from the US embassy in Tegucigalpa, entitled “Drug Plane Burned on Prominent Honduran’s Property,” reports that “a known drug trafficking flight with a 1,000 kilo cocaine shipment from Colombia…successfully landed March 14 on the private property of Miguel Facusse.” According to the cable’s author, Ambassador Larry Palmer, sources informed police that “its cargo was off-loaded onto a convoy of vehicles that was guarded by about 30 heavily armed men.” The plane was seen burned and its wreckage then buried by a “bulldozer/front-end loader.” Palmer writes that “Facusse’s property is heavily guarded and the prospect that individuals were able to access the property and, without authorization, use the airstrip is questionable.” One source “claimed that Facusse was present on the property at the time of the incident.”
Ambassador Palmer also reported that “this incident marks the third time in the last fifteen months that drug traffickers have been linked to this property owned by Mr. Facusse.” In a subsequent cable on March 31, 2004, Palmer noted the confiscation by Honduran authorities of “approximately 700 kilos of cocaine” and conveyed the belief that the drugs may have come from the burned plane on Facussé’s property.
On February 22, 2009—four months before the coup—El Heraldo, a right-wing Tegucigalpa newspaper, reported that, according an official of the Honduran government’s anti-narcotics office, a Cessna aircraft with 1,400 kilos of cocaine had been found in Farallones, east of the Aguán Valley in the department of Colon, “on a landing strip that according to our information belongs to Miguel Facussé.” It seems safe to presume that the US embassy reads El Heraldo daily and carefully.
Other cables released by Wikileaks establish that embassy officials met with Miguel Facussé in June 2006 and on September 7, 2009, ten weeks into the coup, when the embassy had lunch with Facussé and Rafael Callejas, another of the coup government’s powerful backers.
A new US ambassador, Lisa Kubiske, arrived in Honduras this August. She is an expert on biofuels—the center of Miguel Facussé’s African palm empire.
How does this all add up, then? First, the US embassy met at least twice with a known, prominent drug trafficker. Second, it was aware that he was a backer of the coup and met with him as it was playing out, as if he were merely a “prominent businessman.”
Third, most importantly, the United States is funding and training Honduran military and police that are conducting joint operations with the security guards of a known drug trafficker, to violently repress a campesino movement on behalf of Facusse’s dubious claims to vast swathes of the Aguán Valley, in order to support his African palm biofuels empire.
Current Honduran President Porfirio Lobo was in Washington, DC, the first week in October, trumpeting his commitment to defending human rights and fighting drug wars—with President Obama’s full blessing. In reality, both are providing cover and support for a war against impoverished campesinos, to promote the economic interests of Honduras’ richest and most powerful man.
USA Department of State allowed Honduras to be taken over by open-Fascists [Racist Hispanics who are rich and who believe that God blesses people who are rich and hates the poor], and the USA's client cocaine cartels are allowed freedom to use Honduras as a landing strip for cocaine shipments from Colombia...
2011-08-15 "Surge in cocaine trafficking through Honduras; Mexican gangs suspected of managing the increased smuggling of tonnes of cocaine through country" by Monica Villamizar from "Al Jazeera" newswire
[http://english.aljazeera.net/video/americas/2011/08/20118156513236220.html]
Central America is the bridge through which the biggest cocaine producers, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, send the drug into Mexico.
Hundreds of tonnes of cocaine travel through Honduras, where a coup in 2009 is thought to have provided a window of opportunity for traffickers.
Communities are the effects, with suspected drug flights into the country having sharply increased from a handful in 2006 to more than 80 last year.
Most traffickers there are Honduran, but analysts say there is increasing evidence that they are managed by Mexican gangs.
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