Honduras Coup, Act V, Day 33

Update: Tamar Sharabi at Narconews has an update on the repression. Mostly more of the same, but Andres Pavon has been charged with “impeding the election” for daring to state that the coup planned to stage a mass murder and blame the resistance.

Brother John has a nice piece. Excerpts:

Last Wednesday friends came to visit from Gracias and told me that there were at least two armed military on every bridge between Gracias and Santa Rosa. … Sunday, returning from Dulce Nombre, as the bus passed the checkpoint I saw something I haven’t seen since El Salvador in the early 1990s – a machine gun on the top of a pick up truck….

But there was a very different message this Sunday in the village of Candelaria in the parish of Dulce Nombre. Over 1000 gathered on the lawn outside the church for the parish Mass for the feast of Christ the King. Their faith tells them something different. As they sang as a response to the prayers of petition, “May Jesus reign, may His heart rule – in our county, on our soil.”

[Padre Efraín Romero said]:

Many people have struggled, been provoked to take up arms, but these Hondurans have not done it . They are us….We will not take up arms – we must not do this. If any of you are thinking of this, you must not do it for any reason at all. We must make the battle as Mohandas Gandhi did, as Jesus Christ did – without weapons….We must ask the Lord that the combat not be against persons but against the forces of evil.

My prayer is that the Kingdom of God, the Reign of God, may begin to rule here – a Kingdom which is, in the words of the liturgy today, a Kingdom of justice, love, and peace.

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Channel 36 and Radio Globo are both down, leaving Radio Progreso as the only channel generally available for news. And they don’t have much.

On Radio Progreso, a morality play: The gringos think of us as worms with no rights. The gringo (Mr. John) says, “I have no work for you.” A man begs, “I swear I can do anything you say, just give me a chance.” Mr. John lets him build an outhouse, but only offers him $200/week. [added: I didn't get a chance to listen to the end of this. But I had the impression that the man didn't get paid at all. One of our commenters says that he'd gladly build outhouses for $200/week. In Honduras, it's true that this would be a very adequate wage-- perhaps $5/hour versus the $0.90 that the Honduran minimum wage theoretically guarantees. But in this country, $200/week is, of course, sub-minimum.]

TeleSur says that Spain will definitely not send election observers because conditions for elections don’t exist. The Chancellor of Ecuador agrees. But live news only has shots of a Pepe Lobos rally and political ads attacking Hugo Chavez. Nelson Avila is interviewed. Cesar Ham of the UD remains in the election.

A good OpEd in La Jornada. An excerpt:

Honduras: Now what? –Guillermo Almeyra

As might have been predicted, the involvement of the State Department and of the Pentagon in the preparation of the coup d’etat which removed President Manuel Zelaya from office was, logically, to gain time to arrive at an electoral farce organized and presided over by the coupistas to perpetuate themselves in power.

Barack Obama recognized Zelaya as the only president, as did the UN and the OAS, but the US establishment, Republicans and right-wing Democrats, Hillary Clinton and her clan, and the Pentagon protected and safeguarded the coupistas of Teguicigalpa and recognize now some “elections” which are the extension and culmination of the coup and hopes to legitimize it.