Honduras Coup, Act VI, Day 17

Update: Brother John has an editorial on why not to hope for a return to normalcy.

Nell has bravely returned to witnessing with a post documenting the many murders there have been recently.

According to Hibueras, the coordinator of the Lawyers Front against the Coup, Nectali Rodezno, was seized in broad daylight and menaced with a gun by Pedro Gomes, a National Party activist allied to Tegucigalpa Mayor Ricardo Alvarez. He was seized and suffered wounds around his mouth. Rodezno prevailed on some police to arrest Gomes, but Gomes was released due to pressure by Alvarez and congressman Blas Ramos.

(Photo of Maldonado from La Tribuna)

Also from Hibueras, Carlos Roberto Turcios Maldonado was kidnapped by masked men wearing DNIC (police) jackets. La Tribunareports that his decapitated and mutilated body has been recovered.

Time Magazine continues to publish completely unsubstantiated bulls–t.
__________________________________________________________
Channel 36: People are protesting, demanding their pay for working in the election. The jefe summons “five or six” to talk to him inside the building. It is getting very loud and nasty. Now they’re saying they’ll pay them tomorrow.

Edwin Canaca, 22 years old, and a taxi driver were killed by two men on a motorcycle at 1AM as he returned from the fast food restaurant where he worked. His wife Cinthia was injured. Canaca is the son of a journalist working for the Public Relations department of the Military Planning Institute. According to El Heraldo, the taxi driver, Enrique Flores Mejia had two criminal violations, for robbery and rape. The assailant was identified as an infamous criminal called El Violador (Rapist). A young man Ronald Donaldo Briceno Vallecillo was kidnapped and murdered by four men in Danli.

Sandra Cuffe reports at Dominion (via Narconews):

Two active members of the Aguan Farmworkers Unification Movement (MUCA) [Osman Alexis Ulloa Flores and Mario René Ayala ] were detained at approximately 11am yesterday, December 16th when they left a land recuperation in the department of Colon, in northeastern Honduras….

One week prior to the detentions, approximately one thousand families belonging to MUCA staged two simultaneous recuperations of contested lands in Colon. Claimed by Miguel Facussé, the La Confianza Cooperative in the municipality of Tocoa includes a producing African palm plantation. The San Esteban Cooperative in the municipality of Trujillo, meanwhile, is claimed by Nicaraguan landowner René Morales. Prior to the mid-1990s, a period commonly referred to as the ‘agrarian counter-reform’ of Honduras, the lands in question belonged to agricultural cooperatives co-owned by many of the very same farmworkers now involved in the MUCA actions.

Haiti’s sham elections

(Image from The British Comedy Guide on The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)

Zaphod Beeblebrox and the Heart of Gold must be in this galactic quadrant, because only the Improbability Generator could have placed a Kurzban and Concannon OpEd in the Miami Herald:

Late last month, Haiti’s government took the undemocratic and dangerous step of excluding 15 political parties, including Haiti’s most popular party, Fanmi Lavalas, from parliamentary elections scheduled for February and March 2010. The decision threatens not only Haiti’s democracy and stability, but billions in foreign investments financed by taxpayers in the United States and elsewhere….

the PEC [Provisional Electoral Council] called the international community’s bluff and kept the excluded parties out. The international community blinked by not only accepting the flawed elections, but paying for them, too: International donors supplied $12.5 million, 72 percent of the election’s cost….

The Obama administration can guarantee a better return by immediately cutting off all funding for the electoral charade and insisting that it will neither finance, nor recognize, elections that are not fair and inclusive.

It could happen… at odds of 2^187 to 1.