Hondouras

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Honduras: ‘Caravan of Insurrection’ Protests Election Fraud


Protesters, led by ex-Honduras' President Zelaya and opposition presidential candidate Nasralla, hold a march against President Hernandez, in Tegucigalpa | Photo: Reuters

Published 24 February 2018

The leaders of the Opposition Alliance against Dictatorship said protests President Hernandez’s reelection would continue despite U.N. and OAS inaction.
Supporters of former Honduran presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla went back to the streets Friday as part of what they called "Caravan of insurrection", to continue their protests against fraud during the November elections which handed President Juan Orlando Hernandez a second term in office.

The caravan of hundreds of vehicles, organized by the Opposition Alliance against Dictatorship coalition, denounced the electoral fraud and demanded the resignation of Hernandez. "This is a protest against the murders, the abuses and the electoral fraud," said former Honduran President and coordinator for the coalition Manuel Zelaya.

The caravan started in Colonia El Sitio, in the east of the capital Tegucigalpa, before arriving at the front of the headquarters of the Organization of American States.

The tour took place under a persistent drizzle and was headed by Zelaya and Nasralla. "Fuera JOH,” read banners carried by demonstrators referring to President Hernandez.

"The Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro, said that new elections had to be held," Zelaya said referring to Almagro’s comments after an OAS observer mission concluded that the irregularities of the election process were so many that the winner could not be decided.

He added that the alliance awaits a response to a request made to the Permanent Council of the OAS to call a meeting to present a report "on the abuses that this dictatorship is committing."

But Nasralla further slammed both the United Nations and the OAS for their lack of action so far on the fraud allegations as well as the government-led violence against post-elections protest that left 30 people dead.

The UN turned its back on us, the OAS turned its backs on us, but that does not mean that the Honduran people are going to lower their arms. Throughout the country we are going to make demonstrations like this one," said Nasralla during the latest demonstration.

The protest caravan by the opposition comes days after a United Nations mission that visited Honduras last week issued a vague report on the post-elections crisis, supporting a dialogue between the government and the opposition factions but falling short of taking any concrete decisions.

Nasrallah slammed the U.N.’s report Thursday calling it “delaying tactics” and accused it of diverting attention from the real cause of the conflict, which according to him is that "practically nobody" accepts Hernandez as the country’s president.

The crisis erupted after the electoral authorities awarded the Nov. 26 presidential victory to Hernandez, who ran for a controversial reelection, after the first vote counts gave an advantage to the candidate of the Opposition Alliance Nasralla.

https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/ ... ign=buffer

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They arrest the intellectual author of the murder of Berta Cáceres


The Hondurans have demanded that the authorities do justice for the murder of the indigenous leader. | Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize
Published 2 March 2018

Honduran media indicated that David Castillo was about to leave the country when he was captured by security agents.

Honduran authorities arrested on Friday the president of the company Desarrollos Energéticos SA ( DESA ), David Castillo, accused of being the alleged mastermind of the murder of indigenous leader Berta Cáceres .

Two years after the crime, local media reported that the capture was made when Castillo tried to leave the country through the Ramón Villeda Morales airport in the city of San Pedro Sula, in the department of Cortés (northwest).

Cáceres was murdered on March 3, 2016 in the city of La Esperanza, department of Intibucá (west), when a group of strangers forced the entry of her home to execute the order.

According to the investigation that directs the Department of Crimes against the Life of the Technical Agency of Criminal Investigation (ATIC), the industralist provided the logistics and necessary resources to one of the material authors of the fact .

Likewise, the investigator Juan Carlos Cruz and the former Miguel Arcándel Rosales Izcano were already prosecuted for presenting false evidence to divert the investigation into the murder of the Honduran environmentalist.

So far, at least eight people have been detained, including the manager of DESA, Sergio Ramón Rodríguez Orellana; ex-military Douglas Geovanny Bustillo; Edilson Atilio Emerson, Eusebio Duarte Meza and Elvin Heriberto Rápalo Orellana, Henry Javier Hernández Rodríguez and Oscar Aroldo Torres Velásquez.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/detienen ... -0035.html

Google Translator

A pawn is sacrificed in an legitimization gambit.

[blindpig]

Colectivo Culturas Vivas, Senderos latinos / Latino paths, Honduras, 2019
I entered my country’s House of Justice and found a snake charmer’s temple

The Fifteenth Newsletter (2021)
Posted Apr 16, 2021 by Vijay Prashad

Originally published: The Tricontinental (April 15, 2021) |
Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

On Sunday night on 21 March 2021, a gunmen stopped Juan Carlos Cerros Escalante (age 41) as he walked from this mother’s home to his own in the village of Nueva Granada near San Antonio de Cortés (Honduras). The gunmen opened fire in front of a catholic church, killing this leader of United Communities in front of his children. Forty bullets were found at the scene.

Jorge Vásquez of the National Platform of Indigenous Peoples said that Juan Carlos Cerros had been threatened for his leadership of the Lenca peoples and their fight to protect their land. Carlos Cerros was killed, Vásquez said, ‘because of the work we do’. None of his killers have been arrested.

Two and a half weeks later, on 6 April, Roberto David Castillo Mejía entered the Supreme Court in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Castillo, the former president of Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima (DESA), the company behind the Agua Zarca dam project on the Gualcarque River, came to face charges that he was the mastermind in the 2016 assassination of Berta Cáceres, the leader of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisation of Honduras (COPINH). The next day, on a plea from the defence, the Court agreed to suspend the trial for the fourth time.

Before the suspension, the legal team representing Berta and her family presented new evidence that established a wider conspiracy that involved the Atala Zablah family. The lawyers filed paperwork that showed confirmation of a payment of $1,254,000 from DESA to Potencia y Energia de Mesoamerica S.A. (PEMSA). This money went from DESA’s chief financial officer, Daniel Atala Midence, to David Castillo, who then funnelled it to the military officer Douglas Bustillo, who coordinated the assassination of Berta.

In 2013, DESA had initiated the construction of a hydroelectric dam without consulting the Lenca community, who consider the river to be a sacred and common resource. Berta Cáceres opposed the Agua Zarca dam and defended the land of the Lenca people. As Vásquez said of the murder of Carlos Cerros, Berta too was killed for the work she did. She was killed, her family says, by a conspiracy that involved the Atala Zablah family, the main financial backers of the dam project. The Atala Zablah family’s company, Inversiones Las Jacaranda, raised their money–despite pleas from Berta–from FMO (a Dutch development bank), FinnFund (a Finnish development investor), and the Central American Bank of Economic Integration (a multilateral development institution).


Bertha and Laura Zúniga Cáceres at a mural made by el Colectivo Culturas Vivas, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 2021.

‘We are in a lot of uncertainty’, Bertha Zúniga Cáceres, the daughter of Berta Cáceres, told me; ‘the justice system in Honduras has never cared about this’. The ‘this’ in her statement relates to the role of DESA and its executives. The authorities have been shielding the Atala Zablah family and the ruling party, which had itself tried to collude in the cover-up.

In 2009, the U.S. government actively participated in and egged on the oligarchy to undertake a coup d’état against the left-leaning government of Manuel Zelaya. Since then, Honduras has been governed by the far-right National Party, whose current leader and Honduran president is Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH). After Berta Cáceres was assassinated, President Hernández’s minister of security Julián Pacheco Tinoco wrote to Pedro Atala Zablah, one of the leaders of the Atala Zablah family and a board member of DESA. He wanted to assure Atala Zablah and his family that the government would not pursue the case with any seriousness; the case, he said, would be seen as a ‘crime of passion’. Zúniga Cáceres tells me that ‘neither did the army act alone nor did the company act alone either’. There is, she says, ‘coordination between the economic and military power centres, which is the essence of the dictatorship under which we live in Honduras’.

This week, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research published a dossier on the 2009 coup and on the regime of JOH. It looks at how these processes have created a climate of impunity for class violence by the elites–such as the Atala Zablahs–against leaders such as Berta Cáceres and Carlos Cerros, brave people who defend the dignity and land of all people in Honduras. We researched and wrote the dossier with COPINH and Peoples Dispatch (special thanks to Zoe Alexandra). The dossier, Pity the Nation: Honduras Is Being Eaten From within and without, comes in three parts:

Dossier 39 QuotesPart 1 details the fact of the 2009 coup, authorised by the United States government of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Part 2 unmasks the structure of extreme right terror sown by the coup regime, which has its tentacles deep in the world of narco-trafficking.
Part 3 provides three examples of the broad attack on the Honduran Left: the assassination of Berta, the attack on the trade unions, and the forced disappearance of Garifuna leaders in July 2020.



The third section ends with a quote from Miriam Miranda, a leader of the Black Fraternal Organisation of Honduras (OFRANEH): ‘We are tired of the lies from the government of Honduras. [Government reports] have no substance. They don’t say anything. They make a joke of us, the Garifuna people. We do not want lies. We want the truth. We want life to be worth more in our country. We have to build new paths. We will continue fighting so that this becomes a reality’.

Roberto SosaIn Yoro, Honduras, the people speak of the lluvia de peces, or the rain of fish, which they commemorate with a festival during the rainy season. Miracles such as this, it is hoped, will rescue people from the tribulations of hunger. Roberto Sosa (1930-2011), one of the great poets of Honduras, was born in Yoro, but he moved away from the miraculous toward the politics of the people and the Left. In 1968, he published his finest collection of poems, Los pobres (The Poor), which won the Adonáis Prize. The headline for this newsletter comes from one of the poems from this collection, La Casa de la Justicia. Here’s an extract:

I entered
the House of Justice
of my country
and found it to be
a temple
of snake charmers.

….

Grim judges
speak of purity
with words
that have acquired
the brightness
of a knife. The victims–in constrained space –
measure terror in a single blow.


Roberto Sosa’s line, ‘I entered the House of Justice of my country and found it to be a temple of snake charmers’, has been quoted often in the immediate aftermath of the 2009 coup and in the years that have followed. After the coup, Sosa said that Honduras had been turned ‘into a jail country’ (en un país cárcel). ‘Today, the entire country is militarised’, Sosa said, but he took refuge in the ‘massive and organised resistance that has not stopped demonstrating against the coup government, a resistance that does not retreat’.

There is no retreat even today. None for the people of Honduras.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://mronline.org/2021/04/16/i-enter ... rs-temple/

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Hydroelectric Company Executive & West Point Graduate Convicted for Murder of Berta Cáceres
July 8, 2021

Berta Cáceres defended the Lenca communities and territories of the Gualcarque River, where a private company intended to build a dam.

By unanimous vote, Honduras’ Sentencing Court found Roberto Castillo guilty as co-perpetrator of the murder of environmentalist Berta Cáceres.
On August 3 judges will announce the prison sentence for the former executive of the Desarrollos Energeticos (DESA) company.

Given that Castillo was convicted as an “intellectual co-author” of the murder of the Lenca Indigenous leader, he could spend between 20 and 25 years in prison.

On March 2, 2016, Cáceres was murdered in La Esperanza City in the Intibucá department. Her assassination occurred even after the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) ordered her to be granted protective measures due to the constant death threats she was receiving.



The Sentencing Court determined that the former DESA manager, Castillo, had communicated with Douglas Bustillo, who was one of the seven co-perpetrators convicted of the crime in December 2019.

“Castillo was involved in the organization and logistics of the murder of Berta Cáceres,” said the judicial spokesperson Lucia Villars.

Roberto Castillo attended the West Point Military Academy in West Point, New York, USA. Following his graduation in 2004, he served in the Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence Department of the Honduran Armed Forces. When Castillo began working for the Honduran National Electric Energy Company while still on active duty with the Honduran Armed Forces, in 2008, he was investigated for corruption for conflict of interest, as he was receiving salaries from two distinct federal entities at once. In 2011 Castillo became executive president of DESA.

During her struggle as a member of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), Cáceres defended the Lenca communities and territories located on the Gualcarque River, where DESA intended to build the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam.

In December 2019, a court sentenced four out of eight defendants to 34 years in prison for the murder of Cáceres. Three co-perpetrators of the crime were also sentenced to 30 years in prison.

https://orinocotribune.com/hydroelectri ... a-caceres/

Talk about the 'military-industrial complex'...

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Honduras: You Continue to Generate Rebelliousness, Comrade Berta Cáceres
March 6, 2021
By Carlos Aznárez – Mar 3, 2021

Five years without your voice but your legacy continues to spread among the women, girls, boys and men of your people. Precisely on this emblematic day, what better tribute, comrade Berta, than to promise you that all the seeds you sowed in your beloved Honduran land will continue to germinate together with your best ideas, which are already a model for the new generations of peasants to copy. They will always be in charge of rescuing your spirit as a passionate, courageous and direct woman when it comes to imagining new insurgencies.

We got to know you, several years ago, in the Bolivian land of Vallegrande, where another Latin American like you fell in combat for the same reasons to which you dedicated a large part of your life. Then, we guessed your steps together with those of so many women who, in the difficult but noisy days of the confrontation with police and military coup perpetrators, showed the world that “we are not afraid,” an epic phrase that became a battle hymn, between shouts of rage, lead bullets, the fields set ablaze, and all the courage of a people who arose once again.

We embraced you again in Venezuela, pulsating with the crowds adorned in red, and then in Argentina, in exciting meetings, where you enlightened us with your vision of the difficulties that the Honduran Resistance was going through, of which you were a fundamental point of reference together with your COPINH comrades. You knew better than anyone that the elections, as they stood, were a trap to whitewash a brutal dictatorship that has been decimating your people for all these years. “I will continue with my people, be loyal to them, because they’re not willing to have their arms twisted,” you told us, cursing the “international agreements” that allowed the dictators to regain strength after being cornered. It was precisely at that last meeting, shortly before you gave your testimony to an audience eager to listen and to learn from your example, that we said to you: “take care, sister, we need you,” discovering in your eyes that your path of leadership had already been set.

Now that we are biting our lips with impotence, still angry at those who vilely assassinated you, we want to remember you as what you always were: a generous militant for life, a lover of rivers, trees, and mother earth, a fierce enemy of those who try to stain them, contaminating your land with their imperial poisons; the earth that you so often trod, barefoot, “so that you could feel the humidity of its soil.”

A declared feminist, not from the comfort of official offices but in the streets, side by side with your younger Lenca sisters and also with the older ones, those who exuded wisdom through their pores to you and the others. You were a consistent anti-capitalist, whom the most destructive transnationals learned to fear, because you never backed down when you were convinced that your cause and that of your beloved COPINH was in danger. There weren’t enough hours in the day, when it came to mobilizing for those who were ignored, beaten and expelled. Sometimes it was with the heroic peasant women of Bajo Aguan, sometimes in front of the mansions of the powerful in the urban areas. Your demand was heard all over the continent: “stop destroying our forests, stop poisoning our water!”

This coming March 8, you will march with us all. In Tegucigalpa, Buenos Aires, Chiapas or Caracas. In the narrow streets of the West Bank and Gaza, or in the slums of Beirut, your name and your smile will be on the flags and banners we carry, your words will be evoked in the slogans and speeches of those who, like you, do not need to have their memory institutionalized to evoke, this and every day of the year, the strength of women fighters. We will not speak of death but of life with dignity and justice, as the fundamental premises that you always carried in your peasant saddlebags. This will be the best way to show the assassins who shot you on that fateful night that they have not been able to break your spirit, or leave us without your voice and legacy, comrade Berta Cáceres.

https://orinocotribune.com/honduras-you ... a-caceres/

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Learn about the goals of the Government of Xiomara Castro in Honduras


The president promised to eradicate the existing corruption in the Central American nation. | Photo: Time
Published 26 January 2022

Empowering women and defending the Human Rights of all citizens will be among the government's priorities.

The democratically elected president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, will take office this Thursday, January 27, to govern the country for the four-year period 2022-2026, as successor to Juan Orlando Hernández.

The leader of the Libertad y Refundación (Libre) Party prevailed with a majority of 1,716,793 votes in the elections held on November 28 and made history by becoming the first woman elected as president of the Central Caribbean nation.

With her government program, the head of state intends to lay the foundations for a participatory democracy refounded on renewed criteria, and born from the general debate.


Social rights

The elected president has proposed the construction of a political system which provides citizens with the ability to associate and organize themselves to influence public decisions in a realistic, responsible and informed manner; through direct mechanisms or voting in plebiscites, referendums and citizen consultations.

In addition, it projects the defense and protection from the Executive of all citizen rights, as well as the independence and impartiality of justice, which must reach everyone equitably in order to guarantee a decent life, empowering communities for autonomous management. of their conflicts.

This government will implies that the greatest investment will be concentrated on public policies that respond to the main problems in education, health, housing, employment and security, youth and women.


Better health and more employment

An immediate expression in the health system will be the elimination of all charges in hospitals and public health centers; expand and carefully monitor purchases of medicines and laboratory reagents for the entire national public network.

It adds the modernization and maintenance of health infrastructure and equipment, and prioritizing the total immunization of the population.

Another priority will be the reduction of unemployment by generating an estimated 200,000 jobs in two years, which will also contribute to eradicating hunger, migration and exclusion.


For this, it plans to cancel monopolies and oligopolies, as well as eradicate the Organic Law of the Employment and Economic Development Zones (ZEDE); coupled with a substantial reduction in bank interest so that more Hondurans have access to credit.

It plans to renegotiate the foreign debt in order to clean up public finances and seek financing with better conditions for the country.

Another item on his agenda will focus on women and youth, for whom a fund will be allocated to promote entrepreneurship; incentive to the community economy, and the intention of the gradual increase in the minimum wage to improve the life of each family.


fight against corruption

The president-elect establishes as a necessity the installation, together with the United Nations Organization (UN), of the International Commission to Combat Impunity and Corruption in Honduras (CICIH), with the purpose of eradicating opacity in the Condition.

This commission intends to create a Penal Code to replace the Corruption Code, as well as to work together with the Community Police in all neighborhoods and villages, in coordination with the National Preventive Police.

Honduras has been going through a situation of multiple crisis for more than ten years, increased with the increase in inflationary levels, set at 5.32 percent at the end of 2021, and above the 4.01 registered in 2020.


Issue expressed in the increase in prices and food shortages, high costs of basic services, transportation and medicines.

Various organizations have denounced the lack of control in public management, impunity, tolerance of corruption and the damage caused by hurricanes Eta and Iota.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/principa ... -0034.html

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They warn that during 2021 they murdered 318 women in Honduras


In 2022, 19 femicides have already been reported so far this year, according to the Center for Women's Studies in Honduras. | Photo: EFE
Published 25 January 2022

According to the quantitative study, 68.9 percent of the victims died from a firearm.

The Observatory of Violence of the National Autonomous University of Honduras warned this Tuesday that during 2021 in the country 318 women were murdered, which is equivalent to a violent death or femicide every 27 hours and 33 minutes in the country.

The research that covers from January to October 2021 indicated that 68.9 percent of the victims died by firearm and 75 percent of the deaths arose on public roads, likewise, the study details that 41.2 percent of the murdered women were between 30 and 59 years old.

The study found that 10.7 percent of the murdered women are between the ages of zero and 17, while 18-29 years represent 30.8 percent. Likewise, 60 years and older covered 6.9 percent.

The investigation of the house of studies details that September was the month with the most femicides, with a total of 34, and among the cities in Honduras with the highest number of murders of women are San Pedro Sula with 28 homicides, Choloma with 14, Catacamas and La Ceiba, with ten each.

At the same time, the Honduran Center for Women's Studies asserts that at the beginning of 2022, the Central American country reports 19 femicides.


In another order, the elected president Xiomara Castro said this Tuesday that “together, we will begin to act for our rights from the Presidency of the Republic. This is our moment”, when commemorating Honduran Women's Day.

In this sense, the head of the Human Rights Commissioner (Conadeh), Blanca Izaguirre, specified that women deserve an egalitarian future without stigma, stereotypes, or violence; a future that is sustainable, peaceful, with equal rights and opportunities.


Izaguirre added that Honduran women suffer from violence, forced disappearances, murders, rapes, migration and other forms of intimidation and repression, "they continue to prevail in the face of the indifference of the authorities," he said.

The Center for Women's Studies issued a statement to support Xiomara Castro in a context where "the Honduran people are facing economic elites linked to drug trafficking" and the recent events in the Honduran Congress.

"Women's and feminist organizations remain in a permanent fight to ensure that our president is sworn in on January 27, 2022," the statement said.

On the other hand, one of the demands of the feminist groups in Honduras, in addition to the fight against gender violence, is the right to abortion, where decriminalization is not even contemplated through the causes.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/honduras ... -0029.html

All above Google Translator

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Xiomara Castro to Be Sworn in Amid Political Turmoil in Honduras
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 27, 2022
Zoe Alexandra


Xiomara Castro addresses supporters who joined her to “keep watch” outside the National Congress. Photo: Xiomara Castro Twitter

Tensions have been growing ahead of Castro’s swearing in following signs of attempts by conservative sections to undermine her proposals for transformation

Xiomara Castro of the Liberty and Refoundation Party (Libre Party) will take office today as president of Honduras. She scored a historic victory in the general elections held on November 28, 2021, putting an end to 12 years of far-right rule in the country cemented through coups and fraud. However, over the past week, diverse maneuvers by conservative sectors, which resulted in the creation of a parallel congress, have put the very fragile Honduran democracy under pressure.

Betrayal in the Libre Party

On January 20, Xiomara Castro called a meeting of the Libre Party’s 50 elected representatives and their alternates to discuss the implementation of the Bicentenary Agreement made between the Libre Party and the Salvador Party for the elections. One key point of the agreement was regarding the election of the leadership of the legislature. Shortly after the meeting was set to begin, the Libre Party’s general coordinator, former president Manuel Zelaya, said on Twitter that 20 elected Libre deputies were absent from the meeting.

Among those absent was Jorge Cálix, one of the most voted deputies. Information circulated that the absence of the 20 deputies was due to their disagreement over the point of the Bicentenary Agreement which stated that a member of the Salvador Party would be elected as president of the Congress.

In a communique released later that night, the Libre Party called the absence of the deputies an “omen of counterrevolutionary betrayal to the party and the Honduran people that defeated the narco-dictatorship of the National Party.” They further highlighted that elected president Xiomara Castro will not tolerate the lack of respect of the vote of the Honduran people that elected the Alliance of the Libre Party and the Salvador Party, made official through the Bicentenary Agreement, nor the making of alliances with “representatives of organized crime, corruption, and drug trafficking.”

The statement also outlines that Xiomara Castro will not accept to be sworn in by a President of Congress that “came from betrayal” and will instead be sworn in on January 27 by a judge.

The same night, the defector deputies from Libre, in a meeting with deputies from the National Party, announced that they planned to elect Jorge Cálix and Yavhé Sabillón as president and vice-president of the Congress. In a poignant tweet immediately after the news broke, Xiomara wrote “the betrayal has come to fruition.”

The following day, Manuel Zelaya called for an extraordinary meeting of the party’s national coordination and elected deputies and announced the expulsion of 18 members of the party who “betrayed the blood of our martyrs and the project of refounding our homeland” (two of the original 20 retracted their position against Xiomara).

With the official session to vote on the leadership of the Congress set to take place on January 23, a day before, Xiomara called for supporters to join her to keep watch outside the National Congress building and called for an end to “the dealings of organized crime, corruption, and drug trafficking that represent [former president] JOH (Juan Orlando Hernández) within Libre to stop the transformation of Honduras.”

Thousands of people rallied in support of Xiomara and the Libre Party outside the Congress building on the night of January 22 and into January 23, preventing the conservative sections from taking over the buildings and interfering with the elections of congressional leadership.

‘Vamos a trabajar por la construcción de una democracia de verdad”, presidenta Xiomara Castro. pic.twitter.com/NCOCtsysXH

— Gilda Silvestrucci (@GildateleSUR) January 23, 2022

Acompañando a la compañera @XiomaraCastroZ #fueratraidores pic.twitter.com/1CEZCAAxWO

— Angie Avila (@Dorelresiste) January 23, 2022

Two congresses?

On Sunday January 23, while thousands of people continued to rally in the center of Tegucigalpa chanting “Out JOH”, two sessions of the National Congress were held in Honduras to elect the leadership of the legislature. One session was held in the official halls of Congress surrounded by crowds of supporters, and the other was held in a country club, Los Bosques de Zambrano, just outside the city.

Salen los diputados del Congreso Nacional. Luis Redondo fue juramentado como presidente del Legislativo. Un Congreso, dos directivas pic.twitter.com/LwMLCT5tWu

— Gilda Silvestrucci (@GildateleSUR) January 23, 2022

In Tegucigalpa, the legislators elected Luis Redondo, a deputy from the Salvador Party of Salvador Nasralla, as president of the Congress. At the country club, surrounded by members of the far-right National Party, Jorge Cálix was elected president of the Congress.

Since then, heavy tension has hung over Honduras, with the inauguration day set to be the climax of these developments as it will be the first time these deputies will come face to face after the division. The actions taken by the former Libre legislators, fueled and supported by the far-right sections, have already served their purpose of creating political instability, weakening Libre’s position in the Congress, and undermining the institutionality of the Honduran state even before Xiomara has taken office.

A central focus of Xiomara’s proposals is on withdrawing legislation passed by the National Party-dominated Congress which cemented the neoliberal, militarized project in the country and passing fresh legislation which guarantees access to basic rights such as healthcare, education, employment, and housing. These efforts depend on being able to forge unity within the Congress. If the obstacles for the Libre government to undertake the massive transformations needed to reform Honduras after 12 years of “narco-dictatorship” were already sizable, they are now even more complex.

However, hope continues to be found on the streets. Xiomara and the legitimate congressional leadership have received tremendous support from the Honduran people and people’s movements in the country. The historic mobilization on January 22 and 23 showed that the Honduran people support the path towards true transformation and reject the collaboration of former Libre party members with the National Party.

Social movements like the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) are traveling to the capital to attend the inauguration in the National Stadium and have reiterated their position of hope towards the incoming government.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/01/ ... -honduras/

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Xiomara Castro’s Inauguration: An analysis from Honduras
January 31, 2022


Photo: Diego Ruiz (@diegoooruizz on Twitter)

By Victoria Cervantes *1

January 27th was the day of emotion and also relief as the successful inauguration of Xiomara Castro in front of a well-filled stadium, in front of international governmental delegations and invited international and Honduran organizations, went off without anything impeding Xiomara’s assumption of office. Since then, the new government has been moving fast to take over the various ministries and public offices. Forty cabinet members and ministers, among others, have been appointed by Xiomara so far, with the challenge of dealing with public employees and ministry employees tied to the coup and narco-regime just getting started.

The biggest challenge to the new government and its capacity to meet the expectations and demands of the people and social movements is the still unresolved crisis in Congress. There are still two parallel congresses after a group of 20 LIBRE Congress members led by Jorge Calix suddenly joined with the narco-politicos of the National Party and the narco faction of the Liberal Party. The reason: a disagreement about who would be the president of the Congress and in a Zoom session declared themselves the Congress with Jorge Calix as President of Congress. Meanwhile, most LIBRE members convened the official Congress in the Congressional chambers with Luis Redondo as President of Congress. People recognize the risk of a “soft” coup in Congress against Xiomara. Many hundreds of Hondurans have been in the streets around the Congress building at different times since this crisis developed to defend Xiomara’s Congress. Although it has not happened, there are frequent alerts of possible attempts by the rightist/ex-Libre alliance to take over the Congressional chambers.

Besides, Luis Redondo has filed charges of constitutional violations against Jorge Calix and vice versa; a National Party congressman has also filed a criminal complaint against Luis Redondo. The main concern with these conflicts ending in court is that these institutions and prosecutors are still those from the narco-dictatorship structures. Calix has lost some of his votes as some of his group have apologized and gone back to LIBRE. Even one young National Party congressman revoked his vote for the Calix grouping and went to the LIBRE Redondo congress. Xiomara, attempting to negotiate some resolution, met with Jorge Calix and offered him a position in the administration to give up the alliance with the National Party. Calix turned down Xiomara’s offer reportedly because of the opposition of the rest of his ex-Libre coalition. There are rumors that Xiomara’s proposal resulted from interventions by the “International Community,” which usually means the US and maybe the EU and OAS.

Sunday’s news was that Mel Zelaya (the former president deposed by the 2009 coup, coordinator of LIBRE) set up a meeting with the now expelled ex-LIBRE Calix faction to discuss the situation. That could be significant, but Zelaya postponed that meeting. *2

It seems pretty clear that the forces behind the congressional coup attempt -which worked out this strategy of splitting off part of LIBRE and strengthening the extreme right-wing- are not interested in negotiating a political settlement unless they can use it to cement their interests and impunity for their crimes over the past 12 years. Despite that, the US State Dept. Western Hemisphere person who was here for the inauguration, Brian Nichols, was tweeting on Saturday (@WHAAstSecty) about “all sides should engage in dialogue and refrain from acts of intimidation .” This statement is concerning because it misses the point deliberately.

These events remind me of the negotiations the US led after the coup in 2009 (the Costa Rican accord, the pre-election agreement of October 2009), where negotiations would lead to some terms to which Zelaya would agree. Still, then the coup government would violate the deal or ignore it. The US would pretend there was still an agreement or even blame Zelaya for being difficult, so the coup dictatorship consolidated itself.

Hondurans are anxious to see a resolution to the crisis. However, it is clear that even with the original complete LIBRE group and its allied members of Congress, a harrowing confrontation with the National Party and its allies in the Liberal Party was inevitable. It’s important to mention that the Liberal Party’s leader Yony Rosenthal was convicted of narco money laundering.

Many people (but not all) say that negotiations with the ex-LIBRE congress-people will have to happen, but not with the National Party. You hear from the Honduran movements that handing back any amount of power to the narco-oligarchs and their structures is not acceptable. Hondurans are in a life-and-death fight to take power and all of its structures away from the people who have caused so much damage for more than 12 years.

January 30th, 2022

Tegucigalpa, Honduras

https://afgj.org/report-back-from-the-i ... ara-castro

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FEARING CORRUPTION CHARGES, HONDURAN DEFENSE MINISTER REQUESTS ASYLUM FROM BIDEN

As the left resumes power with President Xiomara Castro’s inauguration, the official seeks shelter in the United States.
Ken Klippenstein
January 31 2022, 6:48 p.m.

HONDURAS’S DEFENSE MINISTER quietly requested asylum from the U.S. government after the country elected a new leader in November, The Intercept has learned.

The defense minister, Gen. Fredy Díaz, said that he fears being charged with corruption by the newly elected democratic socialist President Xiomara Castro, especially considering the role the Honduran military played in the coup that ousted her husband, former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, according to a source whose knowledge of the matter was verified by The Intercept. In light of Zelaya’s expulsion from the presidency — and the country — by the Honduran army in 2009, Castro’s landslide victory on November 28 of last year stunned many in the international community. During her campaign, Castro vowed to “pull Honduras out of the abyss we have been buried in by neoliberalism,” reflecting the stance taken by Zelaya, who was critical of the U.S. role in the region.


Díaz joined the administration of Juan Orlando Hernández, the two-term Honduran president who took office in 2013 and whom the U.S. Justice Department accused last year of drug trafficking and bribery. During his narrow reelection in 2017, protesters took to the streets to oppose Hernández and were met with violent force by the Honduran military police, which killed at least 21 demonstrators and earned the condemnation of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The election was clouded by allegations of fraud from the Organization of American States, which called for a do-over, but U.S. President Donald Trump quickly recognized the results, and Hernández served as president until Castro’s inauguration on January 27.

Now the Biden administration is faced with the decision of whether to grant Díaz asylum before possible corruption charges, given that in his role as defense minister, he was at the helm of the Honduran military. The question will serve as a test of how serious the current U.S. government is about respecting the autonomy of governments in the region. A senior Democratic congressional aide, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told The Intercept: “If the Biden administration wants to make good on its commitment to democracy and human rights, this should be an easy call.”

The U.S. State Department referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which declined to comment. “Asylum applications are confidential under immigration law,” a Homeland Security spokesperson told The Intercept. The Honduran Embassy did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In November’s high-turnout election, Castro defeated Nasry Asfura, the mayor of Tegucigalpa and a member of Hernández’s National Party, by a wide margin, becoming Honduras’s first female president. Since her inauguration last week, she has vowed to “uproot the corruption of the last 12 years of dictatorships,” making clear her view of the illegitimacy of the post-coup governments. Castro received a high-profile inauguration day visit from U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, whose office said it “welcomed President Castro’s focus on countering corruption and impunity.” The new administration faces no shortage of challenges, however, with the Honduran government presently mired in disagreement over whether a member of Castro’s party will run the Congress.

Castro’s husband, Zelaya, was born into an elite family in Honduras and gained political power as a pro-business centrist, but he embraced left-wing positions as president: His signature reforms included boosting the minimum wage by 60 percent, raising teacher salaries, and making school enrollment free. Under his leadership, Honduras in 2008 joined the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, or ALBA, a trade organization established by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez as a rival to the U.S.-sought Free Trade Area of the Americas, an attempt to extend NAFTA while excluding Cuba. (Honduras has since left ALBA, whose 10 member states include Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.)

Though his administration succeeded in decreasing poverty, his policies enraged Honduran business elites, culminating in a military coup in June 2009. While the Obama administration publicly condemned the coup as illegal, behind the scenes, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton soon sought back channel methods of communication with interim President Roberto Micheletti. Of her longtime contact Lanny Davis, then a consultant to a group of Honduran businesspeople, Clinton asked in an email: “Can he help me talk w Micheletti?”

Though the U.S. government’s official stance is that it had no involvement in the coup, subsequent reporting casts doubt on the claim. On the day of the coup, American military officers were at a party at the U.S. defense attaché’s house, along with their Honduran military counterparts, The Intercept reported in 2017. And many U.S. officials present in Honduras at the time had wanted Zelaya removed, said a retired senior Drug Enforcement Administration official who was stationed in Honduras during the coup, speaking anonymously to avoid retaliation. Martin Edwin Andersen, a former professor at the National Defense University and U.S. Naval Academy and an adviser to both the Senate and Justice Department on national security matters, called the claims plausible, noting that U.S. military officials “had myriad back channels to the coup plotters, some institutional and some personal.” Andersen added, “They were knee-jerk ‘anti-communists’ who were Army veterans tied to the School of the Americas.”

Since the coup, the Honduran government has been in the hands of the right. During his two terms, Hernández, a member of the right-wing National Party, hewed to a pro-business, pro-military agenda. In 2018, the administration touched off protests following an attempt to privatize health care and education.

Hernández’s brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, a former Honduran congressional representative, played a clandestine role in the administration, allegedly funneling millions of dollars in drug profits to both the presidential campaign and the party, on whose behalf he also accepted a million-dollar bribe from Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Tony Hernández was sentenced to life in prison for having trafficked at least 150 kilograms of cocaine into the U.S. — enough, as the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson notes, to provide five doses to every U.S. resident — in what prosecutors called “state-sponsored drug trafficking.” After the sentencing, which directly implicated Juan Orlando Hernández, Trump still praised the then-president for his help “stopping drugs at a level that has never happened,” even emphasizing that he was “working with the United States very closely.” (Former President Hernández has repeatedly denied links to drug traffickers.)

Another former senior DEA official knowledgeable about Honduras who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, while no fan of Zelaya, expressed contempt for Hernández, who he expects will be indicted for his alleged role in narcotics trafficking — a widely held belief.

As Honduras devolved into a virtual narco-state, the homicide rate soared. Its toll includes the ongoing repression of environmental and Indigenous rights activists who interfere with the development aims of the business elite, with hundreds of murders making Honduras one of the most dangerous countries on the planet to defend natural resources and land rights. Poverty skyrocketed along with the homicide rate, driving a migration crisis that U.S. Republicans would later use as campaign fodder. So-called migrant caravans — made up largely of fleeing Hondurans — became a central campaign theme that Trump exploited during the 2018 midterm elections. In Hernández, Trump had a loyal ally: The Honduran president was willing to have migrants who had arrived at the U.S.’s southern border transferred back to his country.

The Biden administration’s diplomatic overtures to the Castro administration appear to be rooted in an awareness of the role that political instability might play in undocumented immigration. In February of last year, President Joe Biden signed an executive order calling for the development of a strategy to address the root causes of migration to the U.S. from Central American countries, including Honduras. Harris has led a diplomatic effort to help shore up governments in the region so that people don’t need to flee to the U.S., pledging in a December 10 phone call with Castro to deepen the partnership with Honduras and work to address the root causes of migration. According to Anderson in the New Yorker, when briefed with evidence of the former Honduran president’s role in drug trafficking, Harris suggested, “Let’s go get him now.”

Even so, the U.S. and Honduran militaries maintain close relations. In February 2020, U.S. Adm. Craig Faller presented Díaz with a Legion of Merit award during a visit to U.S. Southern Command in Miami, according to a press release. In December, Southern Command’s new leader, Gen. Laura Richardson, reportedly said that while relations between U.S. and Latin American governments are not “what we would want … the military relationships are really strong.”

https://theintercept.com/2022/01/31/hon ... ra-castro/

Guilty as sin. This speaks well of Ms Castro but she better be careful, US minions are monsters in human form.

[blindpig]

The US asks Honduras for the extradition of former President Hernández


Washington revoked former deputy Juan Orlando Hernández's visa to enter that country from July 2021. | Photo: EFE
Published 15 February 2022

Police forces surround the house of former President Hernández while awaiting the decision of the CSJ on the extradition request.

The United States (USA) asked Honduras on Monday for the extradition of former President Juan Orlando Hernández for his alleged links to drug trafficking.

The information became known after the Honduran Foreign Ministry reported that it had sent the official communication from the US Embassy to the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ), formally requesting the provisional arrest of "a Honduran politician", not mentioned, with the purpose of extradition.

Hours later, Honduran media indicated that police forces surrounded the house of former President Hernández while awaiting the pronouncement of the magistrates of the highest court on the extradition request.


Late on Monday night, the full body of CSJ magistrates were meeting to decide whether to proceed with the extradition of the former president legally and through the appropriate security mechanisms.

TeleSUR correspondent Gilda Silvestrucci reported that the CSJ magistrates will meet this Tuesday to appoint the judge who will decide on the extradition of the former president to the United States.


The US request is the first since the new Government of Honduras took office, with Xiomara Castro as president of the Central American country, on January 27.

Washington revoked former president Hernández's visa to enter that country from July 2021.


On February 7, the US declassified Hernández's inclusion on its list of corrupt last July, when he was still in office, for his alleged links to drug trafficking.

The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, explained that Hernández's inclusion occurred in the face of multiple and credible journalistic information indicating that he was allegedly involved in acts of corruption and drug trafficking.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/eeuu-ped ... -0001.html

Google Translator

This is the guy that Hilary and Obama installed(via Honduran military, US dogs). The new president is the wife of the guy whom the US had deposed after he was seen 'making nice' with evil commies like Nicaragua and Venezuela.

If we check the 'scorecard' of the last few decades we see that despite it's military preponderance imperialism is failing. If there were a god I'd thank Her.

****************************************

...According to the US Embassy. in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, Hernández was a participant in an alleged conspiracy to import controlled substances into that country, 500,000 kilograms of cocaine since 2004, the diplomatic representation specifies in a public note.

The text adds that, among other charges, he must also answer for the alleged crimes of manufacturing, distribution and possession of a controlled substance, on board an aircraft registered in the US and for the use or possession of firearms and aiding and abetting the use, power and possession of machine guns and destructive devices.

Media outlets point out that Hernández is the first high-ranking official in that country to be extradited to the US for drug trafficking and that his surrender to that country must be verified within 60 days.

In March 2021, the former president's brother, Juan Antonio, was convicted of drug trafficking in the US and received a life sentence. Precisely the former Honduran president is accused of conspiring with his brother. This gave rise to the New York prosecutors who put together the case to classify Honduras as a narco-state.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/expresid ... -0008.html

Google Translator

Gotta get this guy on ice before he spills all the beans.

[blindpig]

Long before US extradition request, the streets of Honduras cried, ‘Get out JOH narco-dictator’

Former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández is accused of drug trafficking-related crimes and the US has sought the extradition of its former ally. For the people of the country, his ‘narco-dictatorship’ was a well-known fact

February 17, 2022 by Peoples Dispatch


Honduran national police arrested former president Juan Orlando Hernández from his residence in the capital Tegucigalpa on February 15. (Photo: Reuters via Twitter)

On Wednesday, February 16, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) appeared in court in Tegucigalpa for the first time in connection with the extradition request from the United States to face trial on drug-trafficking charges.


On Tuesday, Honduran national police arrested JOH from his residence in the capital Tegucigalpa. It came a day after the US government requested JOH’s extradition by the Honduran Supreme Court of Justice for allegedly conspiring to traffic drugs in the US. On Tuesday morning, Supreme Court judge Edwin Ortez formally accepted the extradition request and issued an arrest warrant for Hernández. Hours later, Hernández was handcuffed by officials and moved to a high-security detention center.


On February 14, the Honduran Foreign Ministry reported that it had sent an official request from the US Embassy to the Supreme Court, requesting the provisional arrest of an unnamed Honduran politician for the purpose of extradition to the United States. Hours later, Honduran media reported that security forces had surrounded the house of former president Hernández, awaiting the court’s order for his arrest.

Upon learning of the police presence outside JOH’s residence, hundreds of citizens, members of social organizations and political parties took to the streets and gathered in the locality, celebrating the measure against Hernández and demanding his capture.

JOH: former president and drug trafficker

Hernández, of the conservative National Party, was president from January 27, 2014, to January 27, 2022. His party was in power continuously from 2009 following the US-backed coup that overthrew the progressive president Manuel Zelaya. JOH ‘won’ a second term following the extremely controversial election in 2017 which was marked by widespread fraud. During his tenure, he was a close ally of the US and enjoyed its support for his neoliberal policies and also served as a key advocate of US interests in the region.

During the trial of his younger brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States for cocaine trafficking in March 2021, JOH’s name and those of his associates were mentioned numerous times. New York Prosecutor Jason Richmon alleged that Tony Hernández used his brother’s administrative connections to smuggle large amounts of cocaine into the US for years in exchange for bribes, while JOH provided protection. The prosecutor labeled JOH as a co-conspirator of the case.

The evidence surfaced during Tony’s trial indicates that JOH accepted around 1.5 million USD in bribes from drug traffickers, and used the money to finance his election campaigns.

On February 7, the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, declassified Hernández’s inclusion in the list of people accused of corruption or undermining democracy in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Blinken stated that Hernández was included in the said list on July 1, 2021, on the basis of credible journalistic information indicating JOH’s involvement in acts of corruption and drug trafficking. The same day, the US government revoked Hernández’s visa and prohibited him from entering the country.

Movements had indicted JOH long ago

While the US has only recently demanded JOH’s extradition, the people of Honduras have been denouncing the former president’s crimes for years now. In 2019, the same year that Tony Hernández was convicted of drug trafficking, massive protests took Honduras by storm. Masses of people were in the streets, demanding JOH’s resignation for crimes of drug trafficking. The slogan, “Fuera JOH narcodictador!!” (Get out JOH narco-dictator), rent the air. Similarly, the ousting of the narco-dictator was a key plank of the the campaign of Xiomara Castro who was elected president of Honduras in 2021.

In response to JOH’s arrest, The Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), an Indigenous Lenca organization founded by Berta Cáceres, tweeted “The corporate banking mafia of #Honduras made up of #Atala and others have been the main beneficiaries and backers of #JuanOrlandoHernandez. We will not forget: the #Atala and #JOH are the most responsible for the murder of #BertaCáceres.” Bertha Zúñiga, daughter of Cáceres, posted on Facebook on the day of JOH’s arrest, “This is a national holiday! How this scumbag made us suffer!


The Honduran Secretary of Security, Ramón Sabillón, told local media that Hernández had been charged with four criminal offenses by a New York court, including drug trafficking, arms trafficking, illicit association with drug cartels, and corruption.

The spokesman for the Supreme Court, Melvin Duarte, stated that the Judicial Secretariat is open to receiving the documentation from Hernández’s defense, and that the procedure to hand over the former head of state to the US is in progress. The extradition process could take three months.

The newly inaugurated government of president Xiomara Castro seems prepared to hand over JOH for extradition. According to several Libre Party legislators, the Honduran justice system in its present state would not be able to carry out criminal proceedings against JOH, as the court system remains in the control of the former government’s allies.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/02/17/ ... -dictator/

"What, you people don't like your US appointed dictator? Get outta here! Haven't you seen what we do to Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Iran...."

[blindpig]

US-Backed Coup Regimes Trapped Honduras in Unpayable Odious Debt, Warns new President Xiomara Castro
February 3, 2022
By Bejamin Norton – Feb 1, 2022

At the time of the 2009 US-backed coup, Honduras had $2.48 billion in external debt. Now it has $9.25 billion. New leftist President Xiomara Castro says this odious debt is unpayable. It already eats up 50% of the government budget.

The new leftist administration in Honduras managed to win November 2021 elections in a landslide and defeat an authoritarian coup regime, but now it faces a huge problem that will make it difficult to govern: odious debt.

When a US-sponsored military coup overthrew Honduras’ democratically elected left-wing President Manuel Zelaya in 2009, the country had $2.48 billion in external debt.

By the end of 2021, after 12 years of rule by corrupt right-wing coup regimes, Honduras’ external debt had swelled to $9.25 billion – a 373% increase.

The Honduran state’s internal debt to private parties likewise skyrocketed from approximately $810 million in 2009 to roughly $7.3 billion today.

Honduras’ GDP is only $23.8 billion, yet the country is saddled with more than $16.5 billion in debt – meaning its debt is nearly 70% of the size of its entire economy.

The Central American nation’s new leftist President Xiomara Castro, Honduras’ first democratic leader since the coup, has said this burden on the government is a form of odious debt, and is simply unpayable.

Castro declared in a speech at her inauguration on January 27 that the previous coup regimes had “submerged” the state in debt, leaving it in “bankruptcy” in an “economic catastrophe.”

Debt payments now eat up a staggering 50% of the government’s budget, Castro stressed.

This graph from Honduran media outlet La Prensa shows how the debt skyrocketed after the US-backed coup.


A graph of Honduras’ external debt

This graph does not include Honduras’ massive internal debt.

“After 12 years of dictatorship the amount of internal debt increased from 20 billion lempiras (USD $810 million) to 179 billion lempiras (USD $7.3 billion),” Castro said in her inauguration speech.

“With these figures it is clear that the state does not have the capacity to sustain the outrageous and shameful debt that we are inheriting,” the new Honduran president added. “It is practically impossible to meet the debt requirements.”

Castro said the only way to manage the debt is to renegotiate it with the creditors.

“My government will not continue the vortex of plunder that has condemned generations of youth to pay the debt they took on behind their backs,” she declared.

“The country should know what they did with the money and where are the $20 billion that they took out in loans.”

The new Honduran president warned that this “plunder” caused poverty to increase by 74%, “turning us into the poorest country in Latin America.”

“This statistic itself explains the [migrant] caravan of thousands of people looking for opportunities,” she said.

Debt traps ensnare Argentina, Puerto Rico, Greece

Other countries in Latin America have been caught in these same kinds of debt traps.

In 2018, Argentina’s right-wing President Mauricio Macri took the largest loan in the history of the International Monetary Fund (IMF): $57.1 billion.

This enormous debt incurred by Macri pushed the subsequent center-left government of President Alberto Fernández into a debt spiral that has made it very difficult to spend on social programs.

The IMF, which is dominated by the United States, and is used as an economic weapon to advance Washington’s foreign-policy agenda, has often trapped Global South nations in unpayable debt.

The IMF uses this debt as leverage to force countries to sell off their natural resources, privatize state-owned enterprises, slash social spending, and cut labor protections that challenge the interests of foreign corporations.

Puerto Rico, a US colony, also suffers from painful odious debt. The US government used this debt burden to impose an unelected Financial Oversight and Management Board that controls Puerto Rico’s spending, and has imposed devastating austerity measures on the Puerto Rican people.

Even Greece, a member of the European Union, has similarly been crushed under the weight of odious debt. While Greeks work the most hours in Europe, economics experts have said the country’s debt is impossible to pay off.

https://orinocotribune.com/us-backed-co ... ra-castro/

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Leftist President of Honduras Blocks Indigenous Community’s Eviction
February 14, 2022
Andrea Germanos – Feb 10, 2022

The Human Rights Ministry called the evictions a “clear violation of the human rights of over 100 families who live in the sector in an ancestral Lenca territory that dates from the year 1739.”

Honduras’ new leftist president on Wednesday intervened to halt a court-ordered eviction of an Indigenous community from their ancestral lands following violent scenes of the attempted forced removal by police earlier in the day.

Human Rights Minister Natalie Roque shared on social media that, with orders from President Xiomara Castro, lawyers and officials from her office went to the Tierras del Padre community, located just south of the capital of Tegucigalpa, to stop the evictions, saying the suspension was in accordance with the law and authorized by the state.

“We are not going to tolerate any aggression or blow against a pregnant woman or against a citizen or against a child,” presidential adviser Pedro Amador said on the scene, according to a video circulated on social media

In a tweet, Roque accused judicial officials who’d approved the evictions of continuing “in the power of the dictatorship.” As Agence France-Presse reported last month, “four of the five judges in the court’s constitutional chamber were named to their posts by the previous Congress, which was dominated by the right-wing National Party of former president Juan Orlando Hernandez

A statement from the country’s human rights ministry called the proposed expulsions—performed at the behest of a businessman and land developer who claims ownership of the area—a “clear violation of the human rights of over 100 families who live in the sector in an ancestral Lenca territory that dates from the year 1739.”


Before the federal officials arrived to intervene, community members faced riot police who, according to local reports and photos, intimidated and hit several community members.

The planned evictions sparked concern from the Honduras office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Of particular concern, the office said in a Wednesday Twitter thread, was that a constitutional appeal of the evictions filed by the community had not yet been processed. The UN office further urged the state to halt the eviction order, noting threats to “the effective protection of the rights of the community, particularly its right to housing and food.”

Castro, sworn in January 27 following a dozen years of the country being run by the right-wing National Party, is the country’s first female president.

She is also the wife of Manuel Zelaya, Honduras’s former progressive president who was in power from 2006 until 2009 when he was ousted in a Washington-backed coup.


Featured image: Residents face riot police during an attempted eviction at Tierras del Padre, a Lenca Indigenous community between the municipalities of Ojojona and San Buenaventura, Francisco Morazan department, Honduras, on February 9, 2022. Photo: Orlando Sierra/AFP via Getty Images.

https://orinocotribune.com/leftist-pres ... -eviction/

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Marco Rubio Threatens Honduras’ President (+Venezuela)
February 17, 2022

During a US Senate hearing regarding the nomination of Laura Farnsworth as new US ambassador to Honduras, US extreme-right Republican Senator Marco Rubio said he hoped the President of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, would not follow the example of her husband, former President Manuel Zelaya, and align Honduras with Cuba and Venezuela.

“I hope that the new president Xiomara Castro follows that path, and not the example that her husband provided when he was president and sympathized with Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Raúl Castro in Cuba,” said the anti-communist senator. Analysts surmise that Zelaya’s drift to the left was the cause of the US-backed military coup d’état that overthrew the president in 2009.

During the hearing, Farnsworth stated that one of the most important issues on her agenda is that Honduras continues to be an ally of Taiwan. This seems highly improbable, due to the weakening of the US economy and the strengthening of China as an international economic and geopolitical powerhouse, particularly in Latin America. Taiwan’s nationhood is not recognized by the United Nations (UN) because is a province of China. Only 13 countries, including Honduras, currently recognize Taiwan and maintain diplomatic relations with the entity. This prevents Honduras from enjoying relations with China.

Taiwan is a model of what the US desires for Asia, added Rubio. He encouraged Farnsworth, should she be chosen for the post, to apply her diplomatic expertise to the issue.

Finally, Marco Rubio said that he trusts that Honduras, under the government of Xiomara Castro, will implement common sense reforms that are receptive to foreign investment—a euphemism for Honduran subservience to Washington.

“If more things are manufactured in nations like Honduras, closer to our country, we will have a more secure supply chain that will depend less on interruptions from other regions of the world,” said Rubio, demonstrating his ignorance regarding the current fragility of the capitalist system.

To date, no response from the president of Honduras or the Honduran Foreign Ministry has been reported.


Featured image: Extreme-right US senator Marco Rubio, with Xiomara Castro and Mel Zelaya in a corner of the photo. Photo: RedRadioVE.

(RedRadioVE) by Patricia Ferrer with Orinoco Tribune

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

https://orinocotribune.com/marco-rubio- ... venezuela/

If I may be so bold as to speak on behalf of Xiomara Castro I have a few words for Senator Rubio: "Go fuck yourself."
(She is proly not as crude as I but I'm sure the sentiment is there.)