United States
Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield succumbed to a fit of honesty earlier this month: "When the drug war turns bloody, he said, the strategy is working," journalist Martha Mendoza reported. By Brownfield's standards, the strategy has been an enormous success.
New book by Tanya M. Kerssen. Following the military coup that overthrew the Honduran government headed by president Manuel Zelaya in June 2009, a massive anti-coup resistance movement emerged, embodied by the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP). An important pillar of this broad-based movement for democratization is the peasant movement of the Aguán Valley, profiled in the new book Grabbing Power: The New Struggles for Land, Food and Democracy in Northern Honduras, published by Food First Books/Institute for Food and Development Policy (February 2013).
Listen to today's 27-minute CBC radio debate (on "The Current" programme) concerning Canadian support for the establishment of privatized "charter cities" in northern Honduras, along the Caribbean coast. The debate includes Grahame Russell and Karen Spring of Rights Action.
Over the past three years at minimum 89 members or associates of campesino movements have been killed in the Bajo Aguan Valley in a campaign of targeted killings.
No sooner was the blatantly colonial charter city project in Honduras declared unconstitutional by the Honduran Supreme Court last year than it found itself back on the agenda. The gist of the project is the creation of free-market enclaves on Honduran territory that are unaccountable to national laws and are instead governed by foreign corporate interests.
Killings of poor campesinos continue unabated in northern Honduras, as military-backed landowners use violence to get ever more land, to produce "green energy" agro-fuels for global markets.
"The cozy relationship between Ríos Montt and the Reagan administration needs to be dug up from the graveyards of history, much like the bodies that are still being dug up from mass graves in Guatemala." (Cyril Mychalejko)
At 4am on December 12, 2012, the Honduran congress removed four out of the five judges that comprise the Constitutional Court of the Honduran Supreme Court. Honduran legal experts call this a technical coup, a violation by the National Congress of the constitutional order, explaining that the Congress has no legal capacity to summarily dismiss judges.
ON-LINE PETITION: Tell the Government of Guatemala NOT to grant an extraction license to the Canadian/ American mining company Tahoe Resources (40% owned by Goldcorp Inc.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Rep. Hank Johnson (GA-04) and 57 colleagues sent a letter today to Secretary of State John Kerry and Attorney General Eric Holder calling for the investigation of alleged abuses by Honduran security forces and the possible role DEA agents played in a shooting incident that led to the tragic death of four indigenous villagers on the Patuca River in northeastern Honduras.
