Honduras Entr’acte

A day of mourning, says Telesur. They are carrying a body, wrapped in a bloody sheet, around the streets, chanting “murderers!” Another body was wrapped in the bloodied Honduran flag, a very disturbing image. There are four dead? There are evidently no firm numbers of casualties.

Telesur is making an untranslatable joke: InjerenCIA… Injerencia is interference or meddling and the CIA, well, that’s what does it.

Laura Carlsen warns that the coup is gaining an important foothold as the tendency toward diplomatic inertia sets in. Zelaya said “If they decide to live with the coup, then democracy in the Americas is over…” If you care about what happens in Honduras, it’s time to contact the White House and the US Dept. of State.

One of the march leaders, a Sr. Andres Pavon of the Comite Defensa DD. HH. tells Telesur that there are 7 wounded from the airport. He thinks that because of the angle these were from the snipers at elevation (the control tower, maybe?), not from the soldiers on the field. The police are trying to blame “foreigners.” Micheletti is offering a bribe to the parents of the murdered child. Maria Villanueva Reyes is coordinating the coup responses to the demonstrations. He thinks there’s a Chilean also involved, possibly involved in the bombs placed at Channel 11 (which caused massive damage, if I recall) and at Channel 36.

Journalist Dick Emanuelsson says they tricked the foreign journalists into coming onto the runway where they couldn’t see properly.

According to a commenter at DK, Al Jazeera reported that the firing lasted 10 minutes. From what I saw on Telesur, that sounds like an overestimate… I would have said three minutes. But it was a very, very long time. Bzr has a summary that corrects some errors/amplifies points in my commentary: According to AFP, the crowd at the airport was 30,000. Now, it’s possible that more people were blocked from arriving at the airport. Telesur was certain that numbers were above 100,000 and they could have had a broader view of how many people were in the streets. The batallion at La Ceiba has not joined the coup. Bzr also says that the popularity polls show Zelaya as far more popular than the 30% that is claimed by the right and our right-wing media.

Important article on Mexico

Charles Bowden of Mother Jones did an important article on Mexico. We get wound up about events in Iran, which barely affect us, but events in our southern neighbor, one of our top trading partners and the land of birth of a large fraction of our population go unreported in our media– even though they already degrade life in this country and have the potential to deeply damage us. Here are excerpts:

The military has again flooded northern Mexico, ever since President Felipe Calderón assumed office in December 2006 with a margin so razor thin that many Mexicans think he is an illegitimate president. One of his first acts was to declare a war on the nation’s thriving drug industry, and his favorite tool was to be the Mexican Army, portrayed as less corrupt than the local or national police. Now some 45,000 soldiers, nearly 25 percent of the Army, are marauding all over the country, escalating the mayhem that consumes Mexico. In 2008, more than 6,000 Mexicans died in the drug violence, a larger loss than the United States has endured during the entire Iraq War. …

There are two Mexicos.

There is the one reported by the US press, a place where the Mexican president is fighting a valiant war on drugs, aided by the Mexican Army and the Mérida Initiative, the $1.4 billion in aid the United States has committed to the cause. This Mexico has newspapers, courts, laws, and is seen by the United States government as a sister republic.

It does not exist.

There is a second Mexico where the war is for drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share of drug profits, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between the government and the drug world has never existed….

The United States is feeding this brutality not only by failing to provide adequate drug treatment and rehabilitation, not only by helping to drive down wages in Mexico so that the middle class cannot perform its function as guardian of social mores, but by supplying weapons and money to men who murder reporters, terrorize the citizenry, and grease the skids for drug trafficking.

Honduras, July 6: Fracture Lines

The coup ringleaders are already starting to squabble among themselves. From Globo Radio (via Rebelion.org and translated into English at The Field):

“Businessmen Ricardo Maduro, Rafael Ferrari and Carlos Flores Facussé had a meeting this Sunday at dawn with the de facto government and withdrew their support. Ex-president Carlos Flores left Honduras with his family, headed toward Washington.”

Al Giordano explains why this is important:

Hold on. Flores, Honduran president from 1998 to 2002, was a key architect of this coup. Until last night, he was more hands-on directing the steps of the Honduran military than Micheletti himself. If true that he’s deserted the sinking ship – and gone to Washington nonetheless – he must have something in the form of “actionable information” to offer to the US Witness Protection Program (yes, some of my friends on the left are nipping at my heels over this kind of analysis about the US role in all this; I will surely dispatch with them on a later day, when we’re not reporting real-time on a crisis – but they should beware because I’m going to hit back real hard at those whiners of academia, with the facts that they don’t have enough respect for, and events are going to demonstrate this analysis here as more accurate and even more prescient. But time will sort out all of that…)

Meanwhile, the oligarch dailies in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, after today’s events, began to backpedal. For the first time since the coup, tonight, the pro-coup daily La Prensa referred to Micheletti not as “president,” but as “president designate.”
And the daily El Tiempo, from the same pro-coup camp, described President Zelaya as “recognized still by the international community as the Constitutional President of Honduras.”

Of course, the US TradMed, as represented by the AP, depicts the weakening of the anti-democratic and anti-constitutional coup, and the strengthening of those wishing to restore Manuel Zelaya as president, as a Bad Thing:

Honduras slides toward greater instability

Remember the TradMed headlines in the wake of the 2000 elections? Any efforts Al Gore made to pursue justice and democracy were attacked as leading to “chaos”. Oh, that icky chaos! We mustn’t have chaos! Now sit down, shut up like a good German and let that nice man Bush be selected, OK?

Grrrrrrr.

WAAAAH! Obama Won’t Let Us Have Our Religio-Racist Traitor Party!

When reading this Daily Kos diary on President Obama upholding the separation of church and state with regard to a planned B-2 flyover and Christian ceremony, this passage leapt out at me:

Concerns had been raised about one event in particular — an annual event held at Stone Mountain in Georgia.

Those of you who’ve been reading Mercury Rising for a while now have seen me use the term “religio-racist right” to describe the Neo-Confederate dominance within the conservative wing of American Protestant Christianity, and how the forces of bigotry have mastered the use of evangelical religion as a cloak to disguise their true aims. Just look at the self-styled leaders of the movement: Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and several dozen other lesser lights. All of these men owe more than a smattering of their style — and their following — to a conflation of evangelicalism and racism. (Remember, the whole reason there is a “Southern Baptist Convention” in the first place is because they split from the main Baptist church in the 1840s rather than tolerate the main church’s antislavery stance. And while other Protestant denominations saw their Southern branches split off before the Civil War and then reunite with their main branches afterwards, the SBC never did so.)

Now, what’s this have to do with Stone Mountain? Oh, nothing much — it’s just that Stone Mountain happens to be a shrine to the KKK.

Oh, and one of the other flyovers? In Nampa, Idaho. While Nampa is itself a decent town, the state of Idaho is notorious for being a longtime haven for white supremacists, especially the Hayden Lake area. James von Grunn, the guy who shot the guard at the Holocaust Museum, lived in Hayden Lake from 2004 to 2005.

This boil has needed lancing for some time.