Honduran Leader: US Weakened Anti-Coup Movement

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Honduran Leader: US Weakened Anti-Coup Movement
Ousted Honduran leader says US weakened anti-coup effort
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras November 23, 2009 (AP) The Associated Press

http://a.abcnews.com.nyud.net:8090/images/International/2d318478-254c-4663-8c2e-51a7fe269ca3_mn.jpg

Honduras' interim President Roberto Micheletti,
second left, looks at a homeless woman sitting
in the isle during mass in Tegucigalpa, Monday,
Nov. 23, 2009. Congress is scheduled to vote
on whether to instate ousted President Manuel
Zelaya on Dec. 2, days after general elections
on Nov. 29. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd) (AP)

Honduran President Manuel Zelaya said Monday the United States has weakened efforts to reverse the coup that ousted him, while a U.S. envoy says his country has clearly opposed the ouster and will examine upcoming elections closely for fairness.

Zelaya told the Radio Globo station that the Nov. 29 presidential elections are an attempt to legitimize his ouster, and said "whoever is elected will be as illegitimate as (Roberto) Micheletti," the interim president who replaced him.

In an open letter to the presidents of the region, Zelaya called on the region's leaders "not to adopt ambiguous or imprecise positions like the one shown now by the United States, whose final position has weakened the effort to reverse the coup, illustrating the division in the international community."

But the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Arturo Valenzuela, said Monday that the elections "are not something invented by the de-facto government as a way out or to clean up the coup."

Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=9160696

---

http://radiohrn.hn.nyud.net:8090/website/sites/default/files/imagecache/interna/arturo%20valenzuela.jpg

U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Arturo Valenzuela

[EFerrari]

1. That's a very generous way for Zelaya to put it.

This coup would have been impossible without us.

There are a lot of things I don't like about the Obama administration's domestic policy as it is playing out right now. But, it's early, they're digging out of the cesspool BushCo left and I can live with it.

But what is happening in Honduras is completely unneccessary. Some of the poorest, most disenfranchised people in the world are now poorer and more helpless because of US policy. That's just greed and thuggery.

[hondoharry]

3. How can that be Mr. Ferrari?

With US recognition of the elections and the new government the aid will come pouring back in for all the poor and disenfranchised.

[harmonicon]

6. not counting those shot in the head by the right-wing death squads, right?

Or those who will be shot in the head for continuing to protest against an illegitimate government - "aid" won't mean so much then. How would you like it if I gave you a million dollars but took away all of your rights against the threat of death if you tried to fight for them?

[Hell Hath No Fury]

7. That should really be phrased --

... the "aid" will come pouring back in for all the corrupt government officals and the ruling elite to keep them in our pockets. The poor and disenfranchised will remain so, which was one of the points of the coup in the first place.

[EFerrari]

11. "Aid" to Central America is mostly just code for "money laundering" afaik. n/t

[hondoharry]

12. True to some extent

Probably 50% goes to the aiding country with experts and consultants staying in fancy hotels taking 25%. The other 25% goes to materials and equipment bought from the aiding country. About 10% goes to corrupt politicians and administrators and the remaining 40% into the local economy providing jobs and food on the table for the poor and disenfranchised. It's that 40% that needs to be increased and I hope this crisis will result in those types of changes.

[bitchkitty]

13. With little bunnies and lambs cavorting around? n/t

[YouTakeTheSkyway]

5. Why do you say the coup would have been impossible without us?

[earcandle]

2. What is a paradox? It is when a thing is true and false at the same time. When this happens, the

brain wants to use logic and finds itself in a catch 22!  
Both things are true and false at the same time!

In a logical system (where the ability to demonstrate or
refute claims lives) 
one must choose sides or go insane, or suffer opportunity
costs.   

I think we amust leave this torment behind and evolve:

If we choose paradox, we can be empathetic and ponder, then
fully experience
what is so just for ourselves first to learn what has meaning
and substance,
.... and discover we must politely ask what is true for
another if we want to bond.

Then we can be Self and Other.  
Our civilization depends on it.

[Vidar]

4. While trumpeting our vaunted freedoms, it has been the US policy

to support corrupt right wing dictators abroad in the erroneous belief that we can control them. Micheletti is no different.

[Judi Lynn]

8. For anyone who somehow has missed information on the part the US played

in Honduras' nightmarish history since the 1980's:

By Ginger Thompson and Gary Cohn
Sun Staff
June 13, 1995

TORONTO - Jose Barrera gulped down a double shot of Sambuca before he began to talk about his past as a torturer and murderer.

He recalled how he nearly suffocated people with rubber masks, how he attached wires to their genitals and shocked them with electricity, how he tore off a man's testicles with a rope.

"We let them stay in their own excrement," he said, his gold front tooth reflecting the dim lamplight. "When they were very weak, we would take them to disappear."

Images such as these cast a shadow over the lives of Barrera and other men who served in Battalion 316, a CIA-trained military unit that terrorized Honduras for much of the 1980s.

At a time when Honduras was crucial to the U.S. government's war on communism in Central America, the battalion was created and trained to collect intelligence. But it also stalked, kidnapped, tortured and murdered hundreds of Honduran men and women suspected of subversion.

At least 184 of the battalion's victims are missing and presumed dead. They are called "desaparecidos," Spanish for the "disappeared."

More:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-negroponte2,0,961357.story

~~~~~~~~~~~

~snip~
Negroponte was in charge of the U.S. Embassy when, according to a 1995 four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, hundreds of Hondurans were kidnapped, tortured and killed by Battalion 316, a secret army intelligence unit trained and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. As Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson wrote in the series, Battalion 316 used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." Members of Battalion 316 were trained in surveillance and interrogation at a secret location in the United States and by the CIA at bases in Honduras. Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, the chief of the Honduran armed forces who personally directed Battalion 316, also trained in the United States at the School of the Americas.

Negroponte tried to distance himself from the pattern of abuses, even after a flood of declassified documents exposed the extent of U.S. involvement with Battalion 316. In a segment of the 1998 CNN mini-series Cold War, Negroponte said that "some of the retrospective effort to try and suggest that we were supportive of, or condoned the actions of, human rights violators is really revisionistic."

By the time Negroponte was appointed ambassador by President Reagan in 1981, human rights activists in Honduras were vocally denouncing abuses. Former Honduran congressman Efrain Diaz Arrivillaga pleaded with Negroponte and other U.S. officials to stop the abuses committed by the U.S.-controlled military. "Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence," Diaz told the Sun. "They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed."

Negroponte ignored such protests, and annually filed State Department reports from Honduras that gave the impression that the Honduran military respected human rights. But in an interview with In These Times, Negroponte's predecessor as ambassador, Carter appointee Jack Binns, tells a different story: "Negroponte would have had to be deliberately blind not to know about human rights violations. ... One of the things a departing ambassador does is prepare a briefing book, and one of those issues we included was how to deal with the escalation of human rights issues."

Binns considered the U.S. support for Alvarez and Battalion 316 "counterproductive" to the declared objective of "establishing a rule of law." This lack of enthusiasm, Binns says, led to "my being cut out of the loop" by the Reagan administration, which he served for several months before Negroponte took over. In the summer of 1981, Binns recalls, "I was called unexpectedly to Washington by Tom Enders, the assistant secretary of state. He asked me to stop reporting human rights violations through official State Department channels and to use back channels because they were afraid of leaks."

As Binns explains, back-channel messages "don't officially exist. The message is translated over CIA channels, decrypted and hand-carried from Langley, one copy only. No record."

Binns did not agree to use back channels and when he returned to Honduras, he received no further reports of human rights violations from the CIA. "I was deliberately lied to," says Binns, who later found out that Reagan administration had been working behind his back.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/25/09/allen2509.html

~~~~~~~~~~~

The Miami Herald
April 16, 2001
Alleged death squad returns to spotlight

BY ALFONSO CHARDY

When the CIA trained Battalion 3-16 in the 1980s, the Honduran army unit's main mission was to gather intelligence to protect its national security as U.S. forces
deployed to support rebels fighting the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua.

But today, Battalion 3-16 is remembered as a veritable death squad -- blamed for the abduction and assassination of at least 184 leftist guerrillas, sympathizers and other
political foes.

Though long since disbanded, the group's legacy lives on in a West Palm Beach federal courtroom and in the stories of men such as Juan Angel Hernández Lara and
other Honduran officers believed to be hiding in South Florida and elsewhere in the nation.

On Friday, Hernández Lara, 38, pleaded not guilty in West Palm Beach to charges he returned illegally to the United States after being deported Jan. 17 over allegations
he participated in the torture of some of the battalion's victims.

His trial later this year may shed more light on the activities of 3-16 and refocus attention on a legacy from the Cold War: the role the Reagan Administration might have
played in training the unit's operatives, as well as their subsequent alleged involvement in abductions and assassinations.

The questions have assumed new relevance as the Senate considers President Bush's nomination of John D. Negroponte as ambassador to the United Nations.
Negroponte was ambassador in Honduras at the time Battalion 3-16 operated.

He has denied condoning human rights violations, insisting he worked in favor of improving respect for human rights in Honduras.

The now infamous Battalion 3-16 was formed in 1981 by Gen. Gustavo Alvarez, a former chief of Honduran armed forces. Alvarez first recruited Argentine intelligence
experts to train Battalion members.

But as the Reagan administration built up an anti-Sandinista rebel force in Honduras, it became interested in 3-16.

Richard Stolz, then CIA deputy director for operations, told Congress in 1988 the agency trained battalion members in the use of psychological pressure in interrogation
techniques -- not physical abuse. The testimony was reported in The (Baltimore) Sun, which in 1995 published a series of articles on Battalion 3-16 based on declassified
documents.

In 1984, Alvarez was ousted in a barracks coup. After his departure, Battalion 3-16 began to disband and its members left for the United States and Canada.

Alvarez himself spent time in Miami, but he returned to Honduras in 1988. On Jan. 25, 1989, gunmen shot and killed him in Tegucigalpa.

Hernández Lara fled Honduras in 1988. He told the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service before his Jan. 17, 2001, deportation that he had personally tortured at
least four people who were ultimately murdered.

``He provided details of his actions, which involved kicking, punching, placing pins under the fingernails and plastic bags on the heads of four victims who were later killed,''
said an INS statement.

More:
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/honduras/3-16.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~
How ANYONE could have missed the fact Honduran citizens have been protesting in the streets in great numbers EVERY DAY SINCE THE COUP, at grave risk to their own lives, with Honduran security forces led by former death squad Battalion 3-16 commander, Billy Joya, brought to active duty by Micheletti, knowing it's very possible they may follow their brothers and sisters, in being beaten profoundly, raped, tortured, and murdered at any point.

Honduran people DO NOT WANT THIS COUP and they do not want it covered up by a bogus "election."

~~~~~~~~~~~
http://1.bp.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8090/_mg7D3kYysfw/SgEd6wjWANI/AAAAAAAAM00/JcEZVO3zbsk/s400/bat316.gif http://mediafilter.org.nyud.net:8090/CAQ/images/caq61manual01i.jpg

http://i.dailymail.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/i/pix/2009/07/06/article-1197765-059B3E2B000005DC-172_468x318.jpg

http://salsa.wiredforchange.com.nyud.net:8090/o/1488/images/n%20honduras%20coup%20protester%20pushing%20away%20gun.jpg



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http://hondurasemb.files.wordpress.com.nyud.net:8090/2009/10/casualties-in-honduras.jpg
~~~~~~~~~~~

The Hired Gun of Roberto Micheletti: History of the Torturer Joya Améndola
Written by Gennaro Carotenuto, Giornalismo Partecipativo. Translation by Adrienne Pine
Wednesday, 15 July 2009

~snip~
In the 80s Billy Joya Améndola was one of the principal leaders of the Intelligence Battalion 316, in charge of the kidnapping and disappearance of political opponents and founder of the "Lince" and "Cobra" death squads. In this capacity he became one of the principal perpetrators of kidnappings, tortures and assassinations in Honduras, and he has been accused with certainty of at least eleven extrajudicial executions under the pseudonym "Doctor Arranzola."

Furthermore, he is accused of the kidnapping and torture of six students, four of which continue to be disappeared. The students were kidnapped the 27th of April of 1982 from the house of the assistant of the Attorney General of the country, Rafael Rivera, violating the immunity of the second most powerful judge in the country, using methods from the Argentinian dictatorship.

Even if there isn't definitive proof that Joya Améndola received instruction in the United States, there is proof that he worked in Argentina under the orders of one of the principal repressors, Guillermo Suárez Mason, known among other things for being the principal organizer of child-kidnappings during the last dictatorship. Furthermore he obtained a scholarship from the Honduran army to study in Augusto Pinochet's Chile.

Afterwards, from 1984 to 1991 he served as a go-between for the Honduran army, the Argentinian repressors and the United Statesians during the dirty war.

The Spanish government has sought the extradition of Joya Améndola various times since 1985 through Interpol, but nonetheless the Honduran judicial system (the same one that has filed 18 legal complaints against Mel Zelaya) never once responded. Despite this, when a judge in Tegucigalpa accused him of kidnapping and torture in 1994 and issued an arrest order for him in 1995, it was in Spain where he took refuge and remained as an asylum applicant until he was expelled in 1998. During those years he worked as a catechizer in a school in Seville.

Today he is the right arm of Roberto Micheletti.

More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1993/68/

~~~~~~~~~~~

Honduras Coup: the U.S. Connection
- Nil Nikandrov (excerpt) -

The topic most widely debated in Latin America at the moment is what Obama's administration has got to do with the recent coup in Honduras.

The answer is straightforward -- everything. The coup is aligned with U.S. strategic objectives and is going to be used by Washington to regain positions in the region which it lost during George Bush's presidency.

More:
http://www.cpcml.ca/Tmld2009/D39149.htm

[hondoharry]

14. Come on Miss Lynn, are you on something?

"How ANYONE could have missed the fact Honduran citizens have been protesting in the streets in great numbers EVERY DAY SINCE THE COUP,"

I live here and that is an outright lie and if you live here you know it too. Do you consider a few hundred or even a few thousand to be 'great numbers'. I haven't seen any protesters in weeks and I'm all over San Pedro every day. You're credibility is lost forever with those kind of statements. Who would ever believe anything you say after that?

Harry

[Judi Lynn]

15. Oddly, San Pedro Sulans who honor us with their magnificent opinions

seem to see San Pedro Sula as the center of the universe.

The daily demonstrations we've been hearing about, reading about, seeing in videos and photos have been in Tegucigalpa.

[Judi Lynn]

9. Honduras: Minister seeks 'legitimacy' for coup govt

Honduras: Minister seeks 'legitimacy' for coup govt

Rome, 24 Nov. (AKI) - Honduras' acting foreign minister Dr. Carlos Lopez Contreras has arrived in Rome in a bid to seek greater legitimacy for his government which assumed power in a military coup in June. Contreras was visiting the Italian capital ahead of presidential elections to be held in the Central American country on Sunday.

"We are here in an attempt to break the isolation to which Honduras has been subjected during the past five months," Contreras (photo) told Adnkronos International (AKI) in an exclusive interview.

"We want to make our presence felt in the countries where we have diplomatic relations with both governments and cultural organisations."

President Manuel Zelaya was deposed in the bloodless coup that took place in the country's capital, Tegucigalpa, on 28 June and his party colleague and former head of the congress, Roberto Micheletti, was installed as leader.

Contreras said that the people of Honduras saw the coup d'etat as a positive thing, but it had been "misunderstood" outside the country.

He said relations between Honduras and Italy had been suspended and he accused foreign countries of persecuting Honduras.

"It is a type of 'persecution' in the sense that it attempts to identify the government of Honduras as the product of a repressive military coup," Contreras told AKI.

"In the first place, it is not a military coup and it is by no means repressive. It happened as a precautionary measure."

More:
http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Politics/?id=3.0.4032046790

[EFerrari]

10. Precautionry measure? Zelaya committed a thought crime, then. n/t

[hondoharry]

16. Thought Crime?

I wouldn't call stealing millions in cash out of the Central Bank in a wheelbarrow caught on tape a thought crime. Nor spending millions more on personal expenses (jewelry, horses, vacations) with the poor people's tax dollars. You ought to do a little fact checking here before you mouth off your garbage, Mr. Ferrari. There are 18 charges with arrest warrants on him for crimes all supported by hard evidence. He knows that very well. Why do you think he's holed up in the Brazilian embassy? He could walk out any time he wants.