Honduras Coup - Day 55 - August 21, 2009

• Zelaya: Obama against coup – but "not the chief of the empire"
  By ww4report.com : August 21, 2009
  Deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, speaking to reporters on a visit to Lima, Peru, asserted that "Barack Obama is the president of the United States, but not the chief of the empire... To be chief of the empire, Obama has to put in order the CIA and the Pentagon, which behind his back are undertaking processes of destabilization of our peoples."
  
  
• Honduras: Chronicle of a planned coup
  By Sam Holguin - pslweb.org : August 21, 2009
  The incorporation of Honduras into Petro Caribe in January 2007 was the first strike against U.S. imperialist interests. The then-U.S. ambassador to Honduras, Charles Ford, stated, "It's quite a serious action which we have to look at from the point of view of the investment climate and the rules of the game." At that time, U.S. companies Exxon and Chevron as well as Royal Dutch Shell were the exclusive distributors of oil in Honduras, all at inflated market prices. Petro-Caribe has saved the Honduran government tens of millions of dollars yearly in petrol imports. (Reuters, Jan. 15, 2007) / On August 26, 2008, Zelaya announced that Honduras would be joining ALBA to help the country overcome the decades of underdevelopment and poverty created by the neo-liberal policies of his predecessors.
  
  
• Harper has his Reagan moments
  By Rick Salutin - theglobeandmail.com : August 21, 2009
  Along comes an anti-democratic military coup in Honduras last June. Every country in the hemisphere, including the United States, denounces it, calls for the return of elected president Manuel Zelaya and pulls some aid funding – except us. We are laggard and mealy-mouthed, and maintain military aid. It's true Canada has sweatshop and mining operations there, which didn't much like Mr. Zelaya's 60-per-cent hike to the minimum wage, but that applied to U.S. interests too, and doesn't account for our uniquely regressive behaviour. Honduras, however, gets to be Stephen Harper's Reagan moment, his own private Nicaragua.
  
  
• CHAVEZ: "That day I had to swallow sand."
  On the 2002 Coup, Fidel and Yankee Military Bases
  By hondurasoye.wordpress.com : August 21, 2009
  "How can I forget that terrible August 14, 2002! When seven years ago the Supreme Court of Justice issued a ruling establishing that on April 11, 2002, there was no coup d'état, but a 'vacuum of power.' And, even worse, that the accused (the putschists) acted full of good intentions. That day, I have repeated several times, I had to swallow sand. That ruling was a real consecration of the impunity; which was the loyal reflection of an institution that was mostly with its back to the popular will. It was the bourgeois state stabbing the revolution."
  
  
• Over 90 Experts Call on Human Rights Watch
  to Speak Out on Honduras Abuses
  By Latin American Experts - commondreams.org : August 21, 2009
  93 scholars and Latin America experts from institutions such as Yale, Harvard, and New York University sent an open letter to Human Rights Watch today urging the organization to highlight various human rights violations in Honduras under the coup regime, and to conduct its own investigation. The signers, who include well-known experts on Latin America such as Eric Hershberg, John Womack, Jr., and Greg Grandin, Honduras experts such as Dana Frank and Adrienne Pine, and well-known authors including Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and Naomi Klein, note that Human Rights Watch could help force the Obama administration to denounce the abuses and put greater pressure on the regime.
  
  
• Out of the vortex- into the vacuum
  By Tom Loudon - alainet.org : August 21, 2009
  I returned on Saturday from an intense two weeks of accompanying International delegations in Honduras. I am just beginning to realize what an energy vortex we were in. It was painful to leave so many new and old friends who continue to live with their lives at risk every day. Knowing that we were not saying goodbye, only hasta pronto made it somewhat bearable. The near total news vacuum which had existed the proceeding two weeks was finally subsiding, if only temporarily, with some reporting on the damning Amnesty International report and the emergency visit of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.
  
  
• De facto regime illegally dismisses Director of
  Institute of Anthropology and History
  By hondurascoup2009.blogspot.com : August 21, 2009
  Now comes the latest sad volley: Ms. Myrna Castro has issued an illegal dismissal letter intending to remove the Director of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia, Dr. Darío Euraque.
  
  
• Cuban connection
  By Miguel Angel Ferrer - thenews.com.mx : August 21, 2009
  It's well known that one of the largest supporters of the coup against Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, was a Cuban multi-millionaire named Rafael Hernández Nodarse; more commonly know by his alias "Ralph H. Nodarse." He is the owner of San Pedro Sula's most popular TV station, Channel 6, which has played a decisive role in the justification of the coup and in the campaign to support Micheleti and the other insurrectionists.
  
  
• Obama's deafening silence on Honduras
  By Mark Weisbrot - guardian.co.uk : August 21, 2009
  Seven weeks after the Honduran military overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras, the divide between the United States and Latin America continues to grow. / The strategy of the coup regime is obviously to run out the clock on President Manuel Zelaya's remaining months in office. A presidential election, in which Zelaya is not eligible to run because of Honduras' one-term limit, is scheduled for 29 November.
  
  
• Honduras: Military Coup Engineered By Two US Companies?
  By John Perkins - globalresearch.ca : August 21, 2009
  Memories are short in the US, but not in Central America. I kept hearing people who claimed that it was a matter of record that Chiquita (United Fruit) and the CIA had toppled Guatemala's democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and that International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), Henry Kissinger, and the CIA had brought down Chile's Salvador Allende in 1973. These people were certain that Haiti's president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been ousted by the CIA in 2004 because he proposed a minimum wage increase, like Zelaya's.
  
  
• Honduras: Asking the right questions to reach better answers
  By Ricardo Arturo Salgado - links.org.au : August 21, 2009
  A few weeks ago I publicly exposed a potential collapse of the health system in Honduras; today public hospitals have only four basic medicines. They are being told to make emergency purchases from pharmaceutical firms owned by golpistas [coup makers]... This collapse also forces the coup government to plea for private bank loans at commercial interest rates. Collateral for these loans is the obligatory bank financial reserve, that is the guarantors are bank saver-depositors. Basically we are confronting a process of mortgaging the state, and eventually a catastrophic version of the "corralito." / If we stop awhile to think about it, the pillage the golpistas are literally carrying out not only shows their brazen ambition and likely their premonition of being close to their time, but also it will leave President Manuel Zelaya with a desolate country.
  
  
• 'What Is Minister Kent Waiting for?'
  By Jennifer Moore - thetyee.ca : August 21, 2009
  As beatings and killings mount in Honduras, President Zelaya's wife joins critics of Canada's approach.
  First Lady Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, during an interview with The Tyee last week, showed the back door of her Tegucigalpa home that was shot at sixty times on the morning of June 28 when military officers hauled President Zelaya away in his pyjamas to Costa Rica. She also spoke with dismay about repression against protesters and the lack of medicine in hospitals for people who have been beaten or shot by police.
  
  
• Honduran Anti-Coup Protests on Day 55
  By PL - periodico26.cu : August 21, 2009
  Honduras rallies against the June 28 military coup are marking Friday the 55th consecutive day of peaceful resistance, when its leaders have asserted that the democratic demand will be mantained for the necessary time.
  
  
• Protests continue in Honduras
  By bigpondnews.com : August 21, 2009
  "We're protesting in the streets because we're condemning the brutal coup on the Honduran people. We're asking for the restitution of our president who was elected by the majority of the Honduran people. The only way that we will stop this resistance is for (ousted President) Jose Manuel Zelaya to once again return to power in our country," protester Augusto Jimenez said.
  
  
• OAS mission travels to Honduras-Nicaragua border
  By Xinhua - xinhuanet.com : August 21, 2009
  An Organisation of American States (OAS) mission visited the Honduras-Nicaragua border zone on Thursday as part of efforts to resolve the political crisis in Honduras. The mission of the Inter American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) visited the zone, which has been a focal point of opposition to the ousting of president Manuel Zelaya last month.
  
  
• Diplomats on front line as Honduran crisis deepens
  By AFP - news.yahoo.com : August 21, 2009
  Defiant Argentine diplomats bunkered down in their Tegucigalpa compound on Friday, ignoring a deadline from the country's military-backed government to leave Honduras. / Diplomatic sources said Argentine charge d'affaires Alejandro Amura was holed up at his residence on orders from Buenos Aires, which has refused to recognize the interim Honduran government that gained power in a June 28 coup.
  
  

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