Honduran dictatorship, day 68

Via Adrienne, a report sourced to Rights Action (not up on their web site) that the death squad leader Billy Joya is training a paramilitary group for running a false flag operation. Presumably, his forces will pretend to be a non-existent guerrilla movement in the Bajo Aguan area, against which police are being sent as sacrificial lambs: “disinformation is being published in the Honduran press stating that the MUCA families [squatters who may actually be the legal owners of the land] are an armed guerrilla movement tied to the national Resistance movement, financed by international drug traffickers, tied to the Colombian guerrilla movement the FARC and with the backing of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.” Shamefully, this narrative is being spread by US congressmen. Vos el Soberano has an alert, but sourced to the Bajo Aguan farmers association, MUCA. The call it Operation Trueno, run by the Fourth Infantry Battalion in Tocoa (town of Quebrada de Agua) in the Exporter Factory of Atlántico and by the Fifteenth Battalion in Trujillo, Colon (town of Río Claro). They will attack on April 6th, it is alleged. MUCA says they have booby-trapped the area as a defense.

Also, a farmer, Miguel Alonso Oliva, has been slain. A full description by Los Necios is here and COFADEH’s statement translated into English is here

The influential human rights organization FIAN has called for violence against the Bajo Aguan squatters (who may be the legal owners of the land) to cease.

Via Adrienne, David Segarra’s film Eramos Invisible has won the Santiago Álvarez Grand Prize. It’s an invaluable record of key events: the machine-gunning of the presidential palace, the cartoons that so-called news channels ran during the coup, the forged resignation letter, and so on. It runs 1 hour and 24 minutes in Spanish. I sure hope they subtitle it.

Adrienne translated a piece by Dr. Juan Almendares titled, “What are the roots of violence?”

RAJ, at Honduras Culture and Politics has an excellent review of the murders of journalists and how the US media has refused to see that these are directly related to the suppression of news by the US media. Tracy Wilkinson of the LA Times, for example, managed to trim the quote from law professor Leo Valladares, a coup opponent, to make it seem as if he was saying that he was saying that both left and right were committing the murders. It’s highly improbable that that’s what he said. Says RAJ: “Many of those [reporters] killed come from the north coast, where the conflict between the campesinos seeking land rights in the Bajo Aguan and private landowners, their security forces, and complicit media and police forces, continues to be heated.”

Reporters Without Borders, normally not exactly a vociferous defender of press freedoms (the left press says it is bought and paid for by the National Endowment for DemoCIAcracy), has laid the responsibility for the murders of journalists at the door of the coup: “The coup lives on in what continues to take place.”

RAJ cites El Heraldo that the austerity package is somewhat different than I mentioned that Tiempo said it would be: “a 10% tax on dividends, a tax on rental of luxury vehicles, a 15% tax on telecommunications, a 12% tax on monthly electricity consumption over 500 kilowatt hours, a 20% tax on vehicles, fees of 10,000 to 50,000 lempiras on slot machines, an “ecotax” of 5,000 lempiras on imported used vehicles, a 300 lempira tax per 1000 on cigarettes, annual indexing of cigarette and liquor taxes, a 200 lempira tax stamp required on most government paperwork, a tax of US $.03 for long distance calls, and more.”

Mario Alonso was beaten and threatened by his boss, sports boss Jorge Abudoj Fixione, for demanding labor rights.

The cops have opened 130 investigations against members of the resistance, according to Defensores en Linea. Members of the SITRAUNAH union apprehended two covert agents, with a list of 135 leaders of social movements, including Altagracia Fuentes, who was gunned down.

That’s it for today.