Foreign Policy magazine ends with a whimper. Daniel Keating says that the world will accept the new imaginary government of Honduras, following wildly repressive sham elections.

Via Nell (in comments at HondurasCoup2009), Rights Action says that:

”It’s possible that when President Obama concentrates on the region’s problems relations between United States and South America will have deteriorated, let’s us hope it does not happen”, said Amorim in a Sunday interview with Folha de Sao Paulo.

When your close allies publicly warn you about deteriorating relations, relations have already deteriorated. The specific complaint by Amorim has to do with the Colombian bases, but having the US pal around with Honduran dictators can’t be helping.

On October 22, mayors and community leaders, in all municipalities in Honduras, received a letter from the Head of Human Resources, Chief of Communications, of the Honduran Armed Forces, asking for the names and phone numbers of community leaders that support the coup resistance movement and those that support the coup regime.

This means that the Honduran Army is asking that mayors, hugely important community leaders, become informants, or ‘orejas’ as they are known as, to hand over profiles of leaders that are organizing, resisting and speaking out against the illegal coup regime.

According to Mery Agurcia of COFADEH (Committee of the Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared) this information can be systemized by the military and “put in the hands of those that repress the population.”

The military writes:

By means of this request, I speak to a distinguished person, wishing that the Divine Creator of the Universe blesses you and your family and that you continue being successful as an authentic leader of your municipality.

As I said, it seems like everyone in Honduras has a touch of Jerusalem Syndrome.

In the same link, a link to this interesting story in Inside Costa Rica (which has magically disappeared from the original Mercopress location)

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All major Honduran broadcast media appear to have been silenced. Radio Globo and Channel 36 have been silent for days. Yesterday evening, I could not get Radio Progreso. Now, I cannot get either Radio Progreso or even Radio Liberada. Tiempo has no reporting on anything related to the resistance.

According to Tiempo, Grenades were thrown by unknown persons at a vehicle in front of Abundant Life church and in the Pedregal where Elvin Santos was closing his campaign. The one in the Pedregal was supposedly more like a large firecracker.

Charles notes a report by Narco News’ Tamar Sharabi that Andres Pavon, the head of CODEH, the Committee for Human Rights in Honduras and a key figure among those backing the lawfully-elected government and resisting the tyranny of the Micheletti coup, has been charged by the coup régime with “defamation of Romeo Vasquez Velasquez,” the general of the armed forces who is working for the golpistas, or coup leadership.

(Crossposted at The Seminal.)

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.

Luis Galdames at the Brazilian embassy, on Radio Globo: “Put on the bells.” They are hunting the leaders of the resistance and at ca. 8:40PM Eastern have captured two: Freddy Sanchez and Carlos Guzman in El Paraiso. Also Francisco Batres, a Spaniard of 20 years residence, has been expelled. Lisa Sarmiento was shot at. Inhuman treatment of Father Tamayo. Carlos Reina pleads with Cesar Ham to withdraw from the election. President Zelaya speaks about the many candidate withdrawals. He also talks about the huge amounts of money being poured in… 300 million lempiras ($15M) in Tegucigalpa alone. Will Cesar Ham staying in the race strengthen the coup? Zelaya evades the question, but says that in a state lacking the rule of law, no act of the actors is valid.

Bill Conroy, of Narconews:

The most recent scorecard for that Central American nation (the fiscal year 2010 report released on Nov. 9) shows that during the period covered, primarily 2008, when Zelaya was still in power, Honduras received passing grades on every measure of “economic freedom,” save one.

In fact, some of those grades were near the top of the class with respect to similarly situated nations. For example, Honduras in the most recent MCC scorecard, ranked in the the 89th percentile with respect to is regulatory quality and in the 98th percentile in terms of its trade policy

(The trade policy data is more current and does reflect conditions in 2009, including the first six months of the year when Zelaya was in power. Honduras’ score in 2008 for that indicator put it in the 83rd percentile, up from the 65th percentile in 2006 — the year Zelaya took office.)

In addition, under Zelaya, in the measure of how easy it is to start a business, Honduras showed continuous improvement since he took office in 2006 — raising that mark from a failing score in the 49th percentile in 2006 to a well-above passing grade in the 64th percentile in 2008 — and into the 68th percentile in 2009.

Honduras has dropped off the radar of Western news media. Channel 36 remains off the air now for over 24 hours (see here). Radio Globo is up.

Liberal Congresswoman and vice-presidential candidate Maria Margarita Zelaya Rivas has resigned. Congresswoman Elvia Valle too and six other Congressional candidates. Rafael Pineda Ponce announced that all weapons, licensed or not, will be seized.

Adrienne links to the National Democratic Institute, which she calls a CIA proxy. The NDI says:

In response to these challenges, the Institute is working to safeguard the integrity of the 2009 election process by helping nonpartisan, independent Honduran civic organizations to observe the 2008 primary elections, as well as the pre-electoral, voting and counting process in the 2009 general elections….

NDI is working with nonpartisan Honduran election observation groups to promote their capacity to monitor pre-election and election-day conditions in the areas of decision-making, division of labor, project planning and outreach strategies.

I’ve asked Adrienne for a source on thinking this is a CIA proxy, because there are things that aren’t congruent. For example, they get money from the OAS and the UN (as well as from State and NED). Walter Mondale was on their board, and Mario Cuomo is a senior advisor.

According to pro-coup El Heraldo, Nancy Pelosi has told Ramon Custodio (Pretend-Commissioner of Human Rights) that they will send a mission of observers.
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Update:
According to El Libertador, the son of Guillermo Perez-Cadalso (the guy behind the Library of Congress report justifying the coup), reportedly killed a pregnant woman and wounded three others. Eliseo Pérez Cadalso Paz engaged in the shootings last Saturday (presumably the 14th) on the highway between Santa Lucía to Tegucigalpa. Drunk and driving a state vehicle, he was nevertheless released immediately. His mother is a Supreme Court Justice, Rosa de Lourdes Paz de Pérez. Seventeen year old Navia Yasmín Romero Ortez died, and her sister was injured. This is barely reported by La Prensa, not reported that I could find by La Tribuna. El Heraldo has something resembling real journalism.

Just to prove that it’s full of manure, El Heraldo published a story alleging that two men in a vehicle had six hand grenades… for what El Heraldo called “a boycott” of the election. (Conveniently, the men eluded police). Boycotts do not involve hand grenades. They involve people exercising their right not to vote. So, there’s no evidence connecting the incident to the resistance, but hey, let’s just assume it was. Also, supposedly, a bomb was thrown at the National Party headquarters in El Progreso. No casualties. No idea who threw it or why. But let’s reiterate, you can get 4-6 years for boycotting the election.

While the far right disrupts America’s attempts to right itself by coming up with bizarre (and rather obviously fraudulent) attacks on Obama, the real story of America’s decline is more pedestrian: Via Paul Kedrosky, a scary piece by Paul Mason of the BBC on the role of rare earths such as lanthanum and neodymium in the economy of the future:

97% of the specialist metals that are crucial to green technology are currently mined in China.

China is already limiting exports and has plans to limit them some more. As a result much of the hi-tech metals industry is also moving to China….

For decades US foreign policy, and much of the Western world behind it, has focused on security of supply of oil from the Middle East.

Chinese policy – foreign, industrial and commercial – now centres on finding and securing supplies not just of oil but of all major natural resources needed by an economy developing at 9% for the rest of the century.

The old, oil-based policy shaped the world; the rise of freemarket capitalism after 1989 became possible because no rival powers existed that could fragment the world economy and challenge US dominance; the new, multi-resource based policy of China (together with Japan and South Korea) is what is reshaping the world.

Whoever controls key resources controls the large-scale manufacture of new technologies.

Even on oil, which we have long believed is the critical resource, Alan van Altendorf of Seeking Alpha, says we’re increasingly living in a fantasy world:

Old definition: Proved [oil] Reserves are those quantities which can be estimated with reasonable certainty to be commercially recoverable from known reservoirs under defined economic conditions. …

New definition: Industry is no longer constrained by the criterion of certainty. An operator can book incremental proved reserves from planned enhanced recovery projects (gas injection, acid fracturing) based on a pilot project. Coal seam gas, bitumen, oil shale and other unconventional resources can be booked as Proved Reserves. Estimated reservoir properties in the aggregate is a departure from the old rules. The new SEC definition does not require that an analogous reservoir has to be in the immediate area or in pressure communication. Seismic analysis and reservoir models are sufficient to book Proved Reserves.

Hold on to your shorts, it gets worse.

Under the new SEC rules you don’t have to drill a well and actually produce oil. An operator can establish levels of lowest known hydrocarbons and highest known oil through “reliable technology” other than well penetrations. It doesn’t have to be 90% reliable or widely accepted by industry peers. It can be AVO bright spots, or a fuzzy patch of seismic that could conceivably be a mud volcano, or the ridiculous Russian hokum of “passive” hydrocarbon indicators. You don’t even have to explain exactly what your technology does, if it’s proprietary and trade secret.

If you hadn’t guessed, more light blogging.

According to EFE, quoting Esdras Amado Lopez, Channel 36 is off the air (via RNS at HondurasCoup2009). Lopez says the regime is jamming them by broadcasting porn and cowboy flicks over their signal.

The State Department redefines that technical term in statecraft, “stupid;”

QUESTION: Yes, on Honduras, you want to bring us up to date on the latest developments and whether or not you think Mr. Zelaya might return to the – any kind of power before the election?

MR. WOOD: Well, as I think many of you are aware, there was a statement made last night by Mr. Micheletti about taking a leave of absence. And we welcome that he is going to take a leave of absence and expect its prompt implementation. This will allow some breathing space for the process in Honduras to go forward. And so the announcement will also allow for the people of Honduras to focus on the elections. And so that’s really where we are.

QUESTION: When you say you welcome, what do you mean by you welcome? Means that you are happy or – that he’s taking a leave of absence?

MR. WOOD: I mean we welcome.

Yes.

QUESTION: (Inaudible), right?

MR. WOOD: Anything else on Honduras?

QUESTION: Yeah.

MR. WOOD: Dave –

QUESTION: I mean, as far as you’re concerned, this is – is this a good solution now? I mean, no longer does the United States expect Zelaya to come back or —

MR. WOOD: Well, I think what would be a good solution for the situation, the crisis in Honduras, is for the implementation of the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accords. That, I think, is what needs to happen now. And the sooner that we can get that implementation, the sooner we will get to what we hope will be a resolution to this crisis.

Jill, you had –

QUESTION: And who runs the country while Mr. Micheletti is on vacation?

MR. WOOD: That’s a good question. I don’t really know the answer to that. I’m sure there is one and I’ll try and get one.

QUESTION: Zelaya said that he wants to delay the elections. He says that in this situation, the elections cannot be take – cannot be done.

MR. WOOD: Well, there is an accord that President Zelaya and his team and Mr. Micheletti and his team agreed to. And we think if we are going to address the issues of restoring democracy, if we’re going to deal with the the question of reconciliation, that the best way to do this is to move forward with the implementation of the accord. It’s in the best interests of the Honduran people. The Honduran people want to end this crisis. And as we’ve said, one of the most important things that needs to happen first is the formation of this national unity government. And we want to see that happen as soon as possible.

And now, after due consideration, weighing each factor appropriately, and reflecting with conscientious deliberation on each per stirpes, the State Department has emerged with the following consensus:

Question: Who is in charge when Micheletti steps down?

Answer: We refer you to Mr. Micheletti and the de facto leadership. We reiterate that steady steps to implement the Accord will enhance prospects for transparent, fair, and free elections that will contribute significantly to ultimately resolving Honduras’ political crisis. The formation of a government of national unity is critical to implementation of the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord.

So, there you have it, folks. If you want to know what the State Department thinks, ask Roberto Micheletti.

Elizabeth Warren says she prefers Coors Light to iced tea.

Iced tea will get you drunk quicker.

The linked article is worth reading. Warren is the one person of the Obama team I outright like.

Free and Fair Elections, State Department Style

From Quotha.

Light posting today.

Channel 36: Micheletti takes a vacation from Nov. 25-Dec. 2 in the hope that this will legitimize the election.

It’s doing what it was designed to do –cut carbon emissions rather dramatically:

Your good news dose for the day.