Death squads again operate freely in Honduras
DickMcManus
Death squads again operate freely in Honduras and the right wing government is totally corrupt.
All this is because the US will not decriminalize recreational drugs.
The Obama Administration has so far ignored these pleas from US Congress and the international media has given them scant attention.
In fiscal 2011, the Pentagon increased its spending on military contracts in Honduras by 71 percent over the previous year, according to figures compiled by the pacifist Fellowship for Reconciliation, reaching nearly $54 million.
This escalating US military presence is bound up with the Obama administration’s indispensable role in propping up the regime that took power in June 2009 with the military overthrow of Honduras’s elected president Manuel Zelaya and his forced exile from the country. Washington brokered the deal that led to elections held under the auspices of the coup regime, bringing the right-wing president Porfirio Lobo to power. Those who staged the coup, subsequently carrying out killings, torture and thousands of illegal detentions, have enjoyed complete impunity, while wholesale attacks on democratic and social rights continue unabated.
Since Lobo took office, 23 Honduran journalists have been murdered,
New US Military Bases in Honduras
November 2011: Add to the bases listed above a multi-million dollar contract to build permanent base housing at Soto Cano airfield in Comayagua, and you have an increasingly permanent US military presence in Honduras, now extending across all of the territory.
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3331-new-us-military-bases-in-honduras-
May 22, 2012: The United States has, in fact, been quietly escalating its military presence in Honduras, pouring police and military funding into the regime of President Porfirio Lobo.
President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at first criticized the coup government, led initially by Roberto Micheletti, but then legitimated it. After almost all the opposition candidates (as well as international observers) boycotted the post-coup election that brought Lobo to power, heads of state throughout the region refused to recognize his presidency; but the United States hailed him for “restoring democracy” and promoting “national reconciliation.” The State Department and Clinton continue to repeat both fictions, as did President Obama when he welcomed Lobo to the White House in October.
Drug trafficking is now embedded in the state itself—from the cop in the neighborhood all the way up to the very top of the government, according to high-level sources. Prominent critics and even government officials. Alfredo Landaverde, a former congressman and police commissioner in charge of drug investigations, declared that one out of every ten members of Congress is a drug trafficker and that he had evidence proving “major national and political figures” were involved in drug trafficking. He was assassinated on December 7, 2011.
Former President Zelaya underscored in a conversation with me on May Day, “The police are the drug traffickers. If you fund the police, you’re funding the drug traffickers.”
For the rest of the story: http://www.thenation.com/article/167994/honduras-which-side-us#
U-tube videos of right wing death squad murders in Honduras.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/168012/end-all-us-police-and-military-aid-honduras
History:
Manuel Zelaya, a businessman born into a wealthy Honduran family was elected in 2005 as the candidate of the country's historically powerful Liberal Party.Since taking office, Zelaya's economic and social policies earned him praise from labor unions and civil society groups, but alienated him from parts of his own party. which were particularly upset by Zelaya's forging a regional alliance with the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), established by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and other leaders in Latin America as a counter to the trade and security policies sponsored by the United States. Zelaya also planned to convert the Soto Cano Air Base ("Palmerola"), where one of the three United States Southern Command Task Forces is located, into a civilian airport (it is already in use for many civilian flights because of safety concerns about Toncontín International Airport), partly using financing from ALBA and Petrocaribe. The New York Timesreports that much of Zelaya's support is derived from labor unions and the nation's poor, while the middle and upper class fear Zelaya is seeking to establish Hugo Chávez’s type of socialist populism with a powerful leader in the country.
The strange coup:
The Honduran Congress, the attorney general, and the top electoral tribunal declared Zelaya's proposed referendum to change the nation’s Constitution to be illegal. Congress began to discuss means to impeach Zelaya. On 27 June and again on 30 June 2009, thousands of protesters opposed to Zelaya's rule marched through the capital city. On 28 June 2009, the country's Supreme Court issued an order to detain President Zelaya.
On June 28, 2009 the military detain Zelaya, however, they illegally flew him to Costa Rica.