GEORGETOWN – Presidents Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador announced here Friday the reestablishing of full diplomatic relations between their two countries that were broken off in March 2008.
“We have taken the decision to fully reestablish diplomatic relations between Ecuador and Colombia, and to that end we will name ambassadors who will be posted, with all certainty, before Christmas,” Santos said in a joint statement with Correa.
The two leaders talked to reporters after taking part in the summit of the 12-member Union of South American Nations, or Unasur.
In that meeting they decided to renew the diplomatic ties that Ecuador broke off in March 2008 after Colombia bombed a camp of the FARC guerrilla group on Ecuadorian territory.
Killed in the bombing raid were 26 people including the No. 2 of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Raul Reyes.
“We have decided to normalize diplomatic relations,” Correa told the press. Also present were Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño and Colombian counterpart Maria Angela Holguin.
The ministers have been negotiating the renewal of full diplomatic ties for several months and took a key step recently with Holguin’s visit to Quito, during which Colombia handed over to Ecuador all the information it had requested.
The Quito government received additional classified information about the bombing of the FARC base.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Honduran Military Forces to Expel Farmers
TEGUCIGALPA - Honduran armed forces begin a military campaign Saturday in the Bajo Aguan rural area to expel farmers from their lands, with the pretext of stopping alleged armed groups.
Deputy Security Minister Armando Calidonio made the announcement Friday in San Pedro Sula, and as a pretext for the operations he showed some photos of armed minors.
The El Aguan Farmers Movement (MCA) and the National People's Resistance Front (FNRP) have denied the existence of such groups and the occurrence of armed clashes. There have been murders, massacres, but farmers have been the only victims, the FNRP denounced on its website.
The military actions will continue in the area, and any person carrying a gun will be detained, Calidonio warned.
The actions are part of the second phase of a plan that includes the eviction of farms in dispute, said Rene Maradiaga Panchame, the second director of the National Police.
The World Rainforest Movement (WRM) yesterday joined the denunciation by the regional office of the International Union of Food Workers of the assassination of Honduran farmers.
The WRM asked all the mass media in Honduras and the rest of Latin America to publish the regional office's denunciation, in which it demands the end of the killings of farmers and that the murderers be punished.
Deputy Security Minister Armando Calidonio made the announcement Friday in San Pedro Sula, and as a pretext for the operations he showed some photos of armed minors.
The El Aguan Farmers Movement (MCA) and the National People's Resistance Front (FNRP) have denied the existence of such groups and the occurrence of armed clashes. There have been murders, massacres, but farmers have been the only victims, the FNRP denounced on its website.
The military actions will continue in the area, and any person carrying a gun will be detained, Calidonio warned.
The actions are part of the second phase of a plan that includes the eviction of farms in dispute, said Rene Maradiaga Panchame, the second director of the National Police.
The World Rainforest Movement (WRM) yesterday joined the denunciation by the regional office of the International Union of Food Workers of the assassination of Honduran farmers.
The WRM asked all the mass media in Honduras and the rest of Latin America to publish the regional office's denunciation, in which it demands the end of the killings of farmers and that the murderers be punished.
Venezuelan Parliament Holds Special Session
By James Suggett
The Venezuelan government held a special event in the National Assembly on Tuesday to express its opposition to a recent meeting held in the U.S. Congress between U.S. legislators and members of Latin America's right-wing elite.
The November 17th meeting in question was titled "Danger in the Andes: Threats to Democracy, Human Rights and Inter-American Security" and was held at the U.S. Congressional Visitors Center in Washington.
The agenda included a discussion of whether Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua "constitute a threat to U.S. interests and inter-American security," and whether the U.S. is "equipped to respond." Venezuela's "21st Century Socialism" and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), a fair trade bloc based on solidarity and social development, were highlighted as examples of the "erosion of democracy" in the region.
In Tuesday's event in Caracas, which was titled an "Act in Defense of National Sovereignty," President Hugo Chavez called the Washington meeting an act of imperialist aggression against Venezuela. "We are here to defend our homeland as humans. We are defending our right to follow our own path," Chavez told the National Assembly.
The president's Council of Ministers, the heads of all five branches of the government, legislators, the high military command, and several state and local officials, ambassadors, and community representatives attended Tuesday's event.
U.S.-Venezuelan lawyer and investigative journalist Eva Golinger also spoke about the U.S. government's funneling of millions of dollars to "psychological operations," or propaganda campaigns to slander governments with policies that are not in line with U.S. interests.
Golinger said these campaigns are designed primarily by the Pentagon and the State Department with the collaboration of local media outlets, journalists, and other parties. According to Golinger, in 2011 the Pentagon slotted U.S.$384.8 million for psychological operations through the U.S. Southern Command and the Congress approved U.S.$768.8 million for the State Department to create a special propaganda division. Funds are also channeled through the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Organization for International Development (USAID), reported Golinger.
President Chavez called on the National Assembly to pass a law to stop this money from reaching Venezuelan civil society groups. "It is beyond belief, even though we have our constitution, that we allow political parties, non-governmental organizations, and counter-revolutionary individuals to continue to be financed with millions from the [United States] empire and that they make use of it with full freedom to violate and destabilize," said Chavez.
"I am sure that the Venezuelan government I head -- under the constitution -- is not going to continue allowing this," he said. "A very severe law should be passed to impede Yankee financing."
Legislator Saúl Ortega, from the Foreign Relations Committee of the National Assembly, said on Tuesday that two law proposals are already in the works with the aim of "putting controls on these non-governmental organizations that receive financing for destabilizing actions," and for the "control of foreign agents."
Several Venezuelan opposition groups including Súmate, which has acknowledged receiving NED funding, are suspected of involvement in subversive actions, including demonstrations that culminated in the military coup d'état that temporarily ousted Chavez from power in April 2002.
Some domestic organizations that are not explicitly aligned with any political party or movement have expressed concern that if a new law bans all foreign funding without distinguishing the origin or the purpose of the funds, groups providing social services and engaging in human rights advocacy could have their efforts weakened.
Another point of discussion during Tuesday's special session was Guillermo Zuloaga, owner of opposition television station Globovision that aided the April 2002 coup d'état by broadcasting manipulated images and suppressing news before, during and after the coup events.
Zuloaga, who is wanted in Venezuela for money laundering and hoarding of marketable vehicles at his private residence, attended the Washington meeting. He told reporters outside the U.S. Congressional Visitors Center that Venezuela is a "threat to the United States."
Chavez referred to Zuloaga during Tuesday's event, saying, "Venezuela's bourgeoisie has to learn that it won't just get away with having one of its representatives go off to the U.S. Congress to attack Venezuela, while keeping a TV station here."
Also during the event, Chavez told the National Assembly that in order to "defeat the imperial threat," it must "radicalize the revolution" by embracing "extreme left" policies in order to counter the "extreme right" policies of legislators who were newly elected in September and will be sworn in early next year.
National Assembly President Cilia Flores called on Venezuelans to organize similar events around the country to express opposition to U.S. interference in Venezuelan affairs.
In a related event this week, President Chavez said he would welcome U.S. President Barack Obama to Caracas for a diplomatic visit. "We would sit, talk, and eat arepas [a Venezuelan staple food]; I would take you to the streets of Caracas," he said. "I would give you my hand one more time and suggest that you honor your promises to your people," said Chavez.
He also urged Obama to "ignore the stereotype. Don't pay attention to the lie-filled reports that say we are a threat."
In April 2009, during Obama's first trip to Latin America as president, Chavez gave him Eduardo Galeano's book, Open Veins of Latin America, and the two countries expressed their willingness to revamp previously severed diplomatic relations. But relations currently remain stalled, as Venezuela has rejected Washington's ambassador nominee Larry Palmer.
Palmer heads the U.S. government-funded Inter-American Foundation, which specializes in channeling money to non-governmental organizations. He also made controversial remarks in a Senate hearing earlier this year in which he alluded to Venezuela's alleged ties to armed insurgent groups that the U.S. deems "terrorists," prompting the nominee's rejection by Venezuelan authorities.
The Venezuelan government held a special event in the National Assembly on Tuesday to express its opposition to a recent meeting held in the U.S. Congress between U.S. legislators and members of Latin America's right-wing elite.
The November 17th meeting in question was titled "Danger in the Andes: Threats to Democracy, Human Rights and Inter-American Security" and was held at the U.S. Congressional Visitors Center in Washington.
The agenda included a discussion of whether Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua "constitute a threat to U.S. interests and inter-American security," and whether the U.S. is "equipped to respond." Venezuela's "21st Century Socialism" and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), a fair trade bloc based on solidarity and social development, were highlighted as examples of the "erosion of democracy" in the region.
In Tuesday's event in Caracas, which was titled an "Act in Defense of National Sovereignty," President Hugo Chavez called the Washington meeting an act of imperialist aggression against Venezuela. "We are here to defend our homeland as humans. We are defending our right to follow our own path," Chavez told the National Assembly.
The president's Council of Ministers, the heads of all five branches of the government, legislators, the high military command, and several state and local officials, ambassadors, and community representatives attended Tuesday's event.
U.S.-Venezuelan lawyer and investigative journalist Eva Golinger also spoke about the U.S. government's funneling of millions of dollars to "psychological operations," or propaganda campaigns to slander governments with policies that are not in line with U.S. interests.
Golinger said these campaigns are designed primarily by the Pentagon and the State Department with the collaboration of local media outlets, journalists, and other parties. According to Golinger, in 2011 the Pentagon slotted U.S.$384.8 million for psychological operations through the U.S. Southern Command and the Congress approved U.S.$768.8 million for the State Department to create a special propaganda division. Funds are also channeled through the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Organization for International Development (USAID), reported Golinger.
President Chavez called on the National Assembly to pass a law to stop this money from reaching Venezuelan civil society groups. "It is beyond belief, even though we have our constitution, that we allow political parties, non-governmental organizations, and counter-revolutionary individuals to continue to be financed with millions from the [United States] empire and that they make use of it with full freedom to violate and destabilize," said Chavez.
"I am sure that the Venezuelan government I head -- under the constitution -- is not going to continue allowing this," he said. "A very severe law should be passed to impede Yankee financing."
Legislator Saúl Ortega, from the Foreign Relations Committee of the National Assembly, said on Tuesday that two law proposals are already in the works with the aim of "putting controls on these non-governmental organizations that receive financing for destabilizing actions," and for the "control of foreign agents."
Several Venezuelan opposition groups including Súmate, which has acknowledged receiving NED funding, are suspected of involvement in subversive actions, including demonstrations that culminated in the military coup d'état that temporarily ousted Chavez from power in April 2002.
Some domestic organizations that are not explicitly aligned with any political party or movement have expressed concern that if a new law bans all foreign funding without distinguishing the origin or the purpose of the funds, groups providing social services and engaging in human rights advocacy could have their efforts weakened.
Another point of discussion during Tuesday's special session was Guillermo Zuloaga, owner of opposition television station Globovision that aided the April 2002 coup d'état by broadcasting manipulated images and suppressing news before, during and after the coup events.
Zuloaga, who is wanted in Venezuela for money laundering and hoarding of marketable vehicles at his private residence, attended the Washington meeting. He told reporters outside the U.S. Congressional Visitors Center that Venezuela is a "threat to the United States."
Chavez referred to Zuloaga during Tuesday's event, saying, "Venezuela's bourgeoisie has to learn that it won't just get away with having one of its representatives go off to the U.S. Congress to attack Venezuela, while keeping a TV station here."
Also during the event, Chavez told the National Assembly that in order to "defeat the imperial threat," it must "radicalize the revolution" by embracing "extreme left" policies in order to counter the "extreme right" policies of legislators who were newly elected in September and will be sworn in early next year.
National Assembly President Cilia Flores called on Venezuelans to organize similar events around the country to express opposition to U.S. interference in Venezuelan affairs.
In a related event this week, President Chavez said he would welcome U.S. President Barack Obama to Caracas for a diplomatic visit. "We would sit, talk, and eat arepas [a Venezuelan staple food]; I would take you to the streets of Caracas," he said. "I would give you my hand one more time and suggest that you honor your promises to your people," said Chavez.
He also urged Obama to "ignore the stereotype. Don't pay attention to the lie-filled reports that say we are a threat."
In April 2009, during Obama's first trip to Latin America as president, Chavez gave him Eduardo Galeano's book, Open Veins of Latin America, and the two countries expressed their willingness to revamp previously severed diplomatic relations. But relations currently remain stalled, as Venezuela has rejected Washington's ambassador nominee Larry Palmer.
Palmer heads the U.S. government-funded Inter-American Foundation, which specializes in channeling money to non-governmental organizations. He also made controversial remarks in a Senate hearing earlier this year in which he alluded to Venezuela's alleged ties to armed insurgent groups that the U.S. deems "terrorists," prompting the nominee's rejection by Venezuelan authorities.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Media Distortions Legitimize Honduras Regime
by: Michael Corcoran, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis
Honduras held elections on November 29, 2009, that were deemed illegitimate by most of the international community and resulted in the presidency of Porfirio Lobo, a conservative politician and agricultural landowner. [I] The election occurred just months after the illegal coup overthrowing President Manuel Zelaya and, as a result of a significant boycott, only included candidates who supported the coup. [II]
At the time of the elections, the US mainstream media had an atrocious record of reporting on the coup itself, as well as on the elections that followed, helping to legitimize a startling attack on Honduran democracy. [III]Despite the illegal nature of the coup and numerous accounts of human rights abuses against supporters of Manuel Zelaya - including violence against protesters, mass arrests and crackdowns on press freedom - the US media portrayed the events in a way that painted Zelaya as a villainous follower of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and legitimized those who ousted him, in part by ignoring their many crimes and abuses. [IV]
Unfortunately, in the year that has followed these two troubling events, little has changed: the Lobo regime has continued the human rights abuses that have plagued the country for more than a year, while the media has downplayed, distorted or ignored the crimes of his regime. The press also continues to amplify calls for the international acceptance of the new leadership, despite continuing reports of abuse. As a result, the US media remains an active participant in an attack on Honduran democracy that has continued for almost a year and a half.
Ignoring the Documentary Record
Since the June 2009 coup and throughout Lobo's tenure, widespread human rights abuses such as the targeted killings of journalists, the removal of opposition judges, mass arrests, beatings and torture have been thoroughly documented by human rights organizations. Amnesty International's finding indicated the extent and brutality of abuses against opposition forces in the country:
"Hundreds of people opposed to the coup were beaten and detained by the security forces as protests erupted during the following months [after the coup]. More than 10 people were reportedly killed during the unrest. The police and military also widely misused tear gas and other crowd control equipment. Human rights activists, opposition leaders and judges suffered threats and intimidation, media outlets closed and journalists were censored. There were also reports of security force personnel committing acts of sexual violence against women and girls. Judges viewed as critical of the coup suffered a series of arbitrary transferrals and unfair disciplinary proceedings. Members of the organization Judges for Democracy, which promotes principles of fairness and transparency, formed the vast majority of those targeted." [V]
"President Lobo has publicly committed to human rights, but has failed to take action to protect them, which is unacceptable. He needs to show he is serious about ending the climate of repression and insecurity in Honduras - otherwise the future stability of the country will remain in jeopardy," said Guadalupe Marengo, Amnesty International's Americas deputy director, in a statement released in June 2010. [VI]
These serious accusations have been largely ignored by the United States mainstream press, leaving the American public in the dark about the true color of a regime that now has the support of US diplomats. Amnesty International released three reports about various abuses to the public and to journalists between August 2009 and June 2010, yet none received any notable mainstream media attention in the United States. [VII] One such report, written by a delegation sent to the country, even gave chilling firsthand testimony from those who were abused; nonetheless, the US press still did not take notice. "We were demonstrating peacefully. Suddenly, the police came towards us, and I started running," said a 52-year-old teacher named "Fernando," who was quoted in an August 2009 report. "They grabbed me and shouted 'Why do you [all] support Zelaya's government? Whether it's by choice or by force, you have to be with this government.' They beat me. I have not yet been informed as to why I am here detained."[VIII]
Human Rights Watch, the largest human rights organization based in the United States, has released 20 publications — a variety of reports, press releases and statements — documenting a wide range of abuses in Honduras between the date of the coup and September 10, 2010. [IX]
Amazingly, elite national publications in the United States have paid no attention to these reports. The New York Times has published 53 articles about Honduras since the coup in mid-2009, and Human Rights Watch was only mentioned in one of them — a September 29, 2009 article about two media stations being closed down. In the entire year since Lobo was elected, the Times has not issued an article about a single one of the 20 Human Rights Watch publications about abuses by the regime.[X] Amnesty International, likewise, has only been written about once in the Times, where it was briefly mentioned in a September 3, 2009 article. [XI]
The reason for ignoring the reports cannot possibly be because the Times editors consider Human Rights Watch reports about Latin American leaders to lack news value. When Human Rights Watch issued a report about Venezuela president Hugo Chavez – who, unlike Lobo, is opposed to the favored neoliberal economic policies of the US government - the Times dutifully published a full article about the report, titled "Report Accuses Chavez of Abusing Rights." [XII]
But the Times, it seems, is rather selective when it comes to reporting on the alleged abuses of world leaders - ignoring them when they are done by allies who share the economic worldview of the United States, and amplifying accusations against those who oppose the Washington Consensus. In fact, even when the Times did manage to mention the accusations against Lobo, they did so in the softest possible terms. Since Lobo's presidency began, the Times has mentioned human rights abuses in Honduras twice on their news pages. Once was in a June 6 article titled, "Latin America Still Divided Over a Coup in Honduras."[XIII] The only direct mention of human rights abuses was buried 20 paragraphs deep into a 25-paragraph story and merely said, "Human rights groups complain of arbitrary arrests, beatings and killings of government opponents over the past year. And seven journalists have been killed in the country in recent months, although it has not yet been determined how many of those attacks have political links." It is interesting that the Times chose to emphasize how politically divided the nation is without mentioning the harrowing data about post-coup Honduras - such as the more than 600 cases of cruel and unusual punishment, at least 23 politically motivated killings and the removal of judges critical of the coup - all of which could help provide readers important context to political realities in the country. [XIV]
The other mention was on July 27, 2010, when the Times covered a report released by the Committee to Protect Journalists, which expressed concern over journalists' deaths. But this report also failed to document the extent of the ongoing troubles in Honduras.[XV] Tellingly, in the online version of the article, the term "human rights violations" was hyperlinked to a previous Times article. The link takes readers to a nine-month-old article about abuses following the coup that took place before Lobo's presidency, as if to underscore how little attention the Paper of Record has paid to Lobo's abuses in the last year. [XVI]
The Washington Post likewise painted the massive violence, not as an egregious abuse of power, but rather as an example of "how difficult it is to bridge regional divisions." [XVII]
The Times' editorial page has failed to publish any editorials or op-eds condemning the human rights abuses, (as they do when Iran or Venezuela are accused of abuses), though opponents of Zelaya were given ample space in op-ed pages when the political crisis first began. [XVIII]
Pushing for International Legitimacy
While critics of the Lobo regime have been largely ignored by the media, those who wish to see the regime granted international legitimacy have been given a considerable platform in the US press. The Washington Post, for example, quoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging the Organization of American States (OAS) to recognize the new regime in Honduras, citing "strong and consistent commitment to democratic governance and constitutional order," from President Lobo. [XIX] The Post article, amazingly, did not bother to mention Lobo's human rights record at all, and only acknowledged that within the OAS "a majority of ministers opposed even adding the question of Honduras to the agenda." Readers were left to figure out for themselves why there was opposition to accepting Honduras into the OAS.
In fact, when the Unites States publicly came out in favor of the return of Honduras to the OAS, the mainstream media gave the development a massive degree of coverage. In addition to the Post, Reuters, the Miami Herald, The New York Times and CNN all covered US expressions of support for the new Honduran government. [XX] Readers in the U.S. were able to read plenty of praise and support for Lobo's government, but almost no substantial critiques.
The push to recognize the fraudulent regime was not surprising to those who followed the US media coverage of the November 2009 elections, which, despite voting irregularities, reports of voter intimidation and a lack of any monitoring or recognition by the bulk of the international community, were portrayed as a triumph for democracy in the country.
Despite numerous reports of widespread abuses on election day, The Washington Post called the election "mostly peaceful." [XXI] Bloomberg reported that Lobo was "elected president in a peaceful vote," to "overcome a five-month political crisis" and quoted political analyst Heather Berkman: "Honduras is definitely getting toward the end of the crisis." [XXII]The New York Times said in an editorial that there was "wide agreement" that the election "was clean and fair," despite having declared weeks earlier that "an election run by the coup plotters won't be credible to Hondurans - and it shouldn't be to anyone else." [XXIII]
This glowing portrayal of events, propagated by virtually all mainstream US media outlets, conflicted dramatically with reality. Amnesty International released several reports of voter intimidation and other problems during the elections. Almost every foreign government and election-monitoring agency in the world refused to accept the results of the election.[XXIV] Many media also misreported the turnout figures, relying on the Honduran Supreme Electoral Tribunal's grossly exaggerated numbers of about 61 percent when in fact turnout was actually below 50 percent.[XXV] But by the time the truth came out, these false numbers had already been used to justify recognition of the sham elections by the United States and the US media. The "turnout appears to have exceeded that of the last presidential election," the US State Department said in a statement. "This shows that given the opportunity to express themselves, the Honduran people have viewed the election as an important part of the solution to the political crisis in their country."[XXVI]
In fact, US media coverage has served to help legitimize the plotters and beneficiaries of the 2009 coup from the very start. When Zelaya was forced out of office, the US media painted him as a "a leftist aligned with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela," who was ousted by the US-backed Honduran military, which was "acting to defend the law" after "months of tensions over [Zelaya's] efforts to lift presidential term limits" - efforts that "critics said [were] part of an illegal attempt by Mr. Zelaya to defy the constitution's limit of a single four-year term for the president."[XXVII] Opinion writers asked, "Who Cares About Zelaya?" who was merely a "a typical Honduran politician" with a "lust for power," whose "goal seemed to be a change from our democratic system into a kind of 21st-century socialism … a Hugo Chavez-type of government."[XXVIII]
Erasing the Coup
Since the toppling of Zelaya and now throughout Lobo's presidency, the US media has provided a narrative that has helped enable the democratic crisis in Honduras. An article in Reuters from earlier this year recently observed, quite accurately, that "Honduras is trying to erase memories of the coup," citing how "a Supreme Court judge cleared military leaders of any wrongdoing … after prosecutors accused them of abuse of power for rousting Zelaya from his bed at gunpoint." [XXIX]
Indeed, if the illegitimate Honduran government is trying to erase memories of the illegal coup and further tighten its control over the nation, it has no stronger ally than the US media.
REFERENCES:
[I] "Nations Divided on Recognizing Honduran Elections," CNN.com, November 30, 2009; "Carter Center Statement on the Honduran Elections" The Carter Center, November 25, 2009.
[II] "Obama says coup in Honduras is illegal," Reuters, June 29, 2009.
[III] Michael Corcoran. "A Tale of Two Elections: Iran and Honduras," NACLA Report on the Americas 43, no. 1 (March/April 2010).
[IV] Ibid
[V] "New Honduras President must order investigation into rights abuses," Amnesty International. January 26, 2010.
[VI] Ibid
[VII] Data is from a search on AmnestyInternational.org
[VIII] "Honduras: Photos and testimony of protestors shows extent of police violence," Amnesty International, August 19, 2010.
[IX] Data is from a search of HRW.org
[X] Data is from a Lexis-Nexis search
[XI] Ibid
[XII] Simon Romero. "Report Accuses Chavez of Abusing Rights," The New York Times, September 18, 2010.
[XIII] Marc Lacey. "Latin America Still Divided Over a Coup in Honduras," The New York Times, June 6 2010.
[XIV] Data on cruel and unusual punishment is from the Center for Prevention and Treatment of Torture, as cited by Adrienne Pine. "Honduras: 'Reconciliation' vs. Reality," NACLA Report on the Americas 43, no. 1 (March/April 2010).
[XV] Elizabeth Kaplan, "Honduras Faces Criticism Over Journalist Killings After a Coup," The New York Times, July 27, 2010.
[XVI] Article links to Elizabeth Kaplan, "Honduran Security Forces Accused of Abuse," The New York Times, October 5, 2010.
[XVII] Glenn Kessler. "Clinton Urges OAS to Let Honduras Rejoin," The Washington Post, June 7, 2010.
[XVIII] For examples of anti-Zelaya op-eds see: Roger Marin Neda, "Who Cares About Zelaya?," The New York Times, July 7, 2009.
[XIX] As quoted in: Glenn Kessler. "Clinton Urges OAS to Let Honduras Rejoin," The Washington Post, June 7, 2010.
[XX] "U.S. says time for OAS to readmit Honduras," Reuters, May 6, 2010, Mark Landler; "Clinton pleads case for Honduras," The New York Times. June 7, 2010, Jim Wyss; "OAS inches toward readmitting Honduras," Miami Herald, June 9, 2010; "Latin leaders seek unity in regional summit," CNN World. February 22, 2010.
[XXI] Mary Beth Sheridan, "Hondurans Go to Polls, Hoping to End Crisis," The Washington Post, November 30, 2009.
[XXII] Helen Murphy and Eric Sabo, "Lobo Wins Honduran Presidency After Peaceful Vote," Bloomberg.com, November 30, 2009.
[XXIII] "The Honduran Conundrum," The New York Times (editorial), December 5, 2009; "Coup, Uninterrupted," The New York Times (editorial), November 7, 2009.
[XXIV] For abuses in election see: "Independent Investigation Needed Into Honduras Human Rights Abuses," Amnesty International, December 3, 2009; for lack of acceptance from international agencies see: Alyssa Figueroa "Honduras Down the Memory Hole," Extra!, August 2010.
[XXV] Mariano Castillo, "Honduran Election Turnout Lower Than First Estimated," CNN.com, December 22, 2009.
[XXVI] Ian Kelly, "Honduran Election," U.S. Department of State, November 29, 2009.
[XXVII] Elizabeth Malkin, "Honduran President Is Ousted in Coup," The New York Times, June 29, 2009.
[XXVIII] Roger Marin Neda, "Who Cares About Zelaya?" The New York Times, July 7, 2009.
[XXIX] Sean Mattson and Gustavo Palencia, "Honduran Zelaya flies into exile, ending crisis," Reuters. January 27, 2010.
Honduras held elections on November 29, 2009, that were deemed illegitimate by most of the international community and resulted in the presidency of Porfirio Lobo, a conservative politician and agricultural landowner. [I] The election occurred just months after the illegal coup overthrowing President Manuel Zelaya and, as a result of a significant boycott, only included candidates who supported the coup. [II]
At the time of the elections, the US mainstream media had an atrocious record of reporting on the coup itself, as well as on the elections that followed, helping to legitimize a startling attack on Honduran democracy. [III]Despite the illegal nature of the coup and numerous accounts of human rights abuses against supporters of Manuel Zelaya - including violence against protesters, mass arrests and crackdowns on press freedom - the US media portrayed the events in a way that painted Zelaya as a villainous follower of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and legitimized those who ousted him, in part by ignoring their many crimes and abuses. [IV]
Unfortunately, in the year that has followed these two troubling events, little has changed: the Lobo regime has continued the human rights abuses that have plagued the country for more than a year, while the media has downplayed, distorted or ignored the crimes of his regime. The press also continues to amplify calls for the international acceptance of the new leadership, despite continuing reports of abuse. As a result, the US media remains an active participant in an attack on Honduran democracy that has continued for almost a year and a half.
Ignoring the Documentary Record
Since the June 2009 coup and throughout Lobo's tenure, widespread human rights abuses such as the targeted killings of journalists, the removal of opposition judges, mass arrests, beatings and torture have been thoroughly documented by human rights organizations. Amnesty International's finding indicated the extent and brutality of abuses against opposition forces in the country:
"Hundreds of people opposed to the coup were beaten and detained by the security forces as protests erupted during the following months [after the coup]. More than 10 people were reportedly killed during the unrest. The police and military also widely misused tear gas and other crowd control equipment. Human rights activists, opposition leaders and judges suffered threats and intimidation, media outlets closed and journalists were censored. There were also reports of security force personnel committing acts of sexual violence against women and girls. Judges viewed as critical of the coup suffered a series of arbitrary transferrals and unfair disciplinary proceedings. Members of the organization Judges for Democracy, which promotes principles of fairness and transparency, formed the vast majority of those targeted." [V]
"President Lobo has publicly committed to human rights, but has failed to take action to protect them, which is unacceptable. He needs to show he is serious about ending the climate of repression and insecurity in Honduras - otherwise the future stability of the country will remain in jeopardy," said Guadalupe Marengo, Amnesty International's Americas deputy director, in a statement released in June 2010. [VI]
These serious accusations have been largely ignored by the United States mainstream press, leaving the American public in the dark about the true color of a regime that now has the support of US diplomats. Amnesty International released three reports about various abuses to the public and to journalists between August 2009 and June 2010, yet none received any notable mainstream media attention in the United States. [VII] One such report, written by a delegation sent to the country, even gave chilling firsthand testimony from those who were abused; nonetheless, the US press still did not take notice. "We were demonstrating peacefully. Suddenly, the police came towards us, and I started running," said a 52-year-old teacher named "Fernando," who was quoted in an August 2009 report. "They grabbed me and shouted 'Why do you [all] support Zelaya's government? Whether it's by choice or by force, you have to be with this government.' They beat me. I have not yet been informed as to why I am here detained."[VIII]
Human Rights Watch, the largest human rights organization based in the United States, has released 20 publications — a variety of reports, press releases and statements — documenting a wide range of abuses in Honduras between the date of the coup and September 10, 2010. [IX]
Amazingly, elite national publications in the United States have paid no attention to these reports. The New York Times has published 53 articles about Honduras since the coup in mid-2009, and Human Rights Watch was only mentioned in one of them — a September 29, 2009 article about two media stations being closed down. In the entire year since Lobo was elected, the Times has not issued an article about a single one of the 20 Human Rights Watch publications about abuses by the regime.[X] Amnesty International, likewise, has only been written about once in the Times, where it was briefly mentioned in a September 3, 2009 article. [XI]
The reason for ignoring the reports cannot possibly be because the Times editors consider Human Rights Watch reports about Latin American leaders to lack news value. When Human Rights Watch issued a report about Venezuela president Hugo Chavez – who, unlike Lobo, is opposed to the favored neoliberal economic policies of the US government - the Times dutifully published a full article about the report, titled "Report Accuses Chavez of Abusing Rights." [XII]
But the Times, it seems, is rather selective when it comes to reporting on the alleged abuses of world leaders - ignoring them when they are done by allies who share the economic worldview of the United States, and amplifying accusations against those who oppose the Washington Consensus. In fact, even when the Times did manage to mention the accusations against Lobo, they did so in the softest possible terms. Since Lobo's presidency began, the Times has mentioned human rights abuses in Honduras twice on their news pages. Once was in a June 6 article titled, "Latin America Still Divided Over a Coup in Honduras."[XIII] The only direct mention of human rights abuses was buried 20 paragraphs deep into a 25-paragraph story and merely said, "Human rights groups complain of arbitrary arrests, beatings and killings of government opponents over the past year. And seven journalists have been killed in the country in recent months, although it has not yet been determined how many of those attacks have political links." It is interesting that the Times chose to emphasize how politically divided the nation is without mentioning the harrowing data about post-coup Honduras - such as the more than 600 cases of cruel and unusual punishment, at least 23 politically motivated killings and the removal of judges critical of the coup - all of which could help provide readers important context to political realities in the country. [XIV]
The other mention was on July 27, 2010, when the Times covered a report released by the Committee to Protect Journalists, which expressed concern over journalists' deaths. But this report also failed to document the extent of the ongoing troubles in Honduras.[XV] Tellingly, in the online version of the article, the term "human rights violations" was hyperlinked to a previous Times article. The link takes readers to a nine-month-old article about abuses following the coup that took place before Lobo's presidency, as if to underscore how little attention the Paper of Record has paid to Lobo's abuses in the last year. [XVI]
The Washington Post likewise painted the massive violence, not as an egregious abuse of power, but rather as an example of "how difficult it is to bridge regional divisions." [XVII]
The Times' editorial page has failed to publish any editorials or op-eds condemning the human rights abuses, (as they do when Iran or Venezuela are accused of abuses), though opponents of Zelaya were given ample space in op-ed pages when the political crisis first began. [XVIII]
Pushing for International Legitimacy
While critics of the Lobo regime have been largely ignored by the media, those who wish to see the regime granted international legitimacy have been given a considerable platform in the US press. The Washington Post, for example, quoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging the Organization of American States (OAS) to recognize the new regime in Honduras, citing "strong and consistent commitment to democratic governance and constitutional order," from President Lobo. [XIX] The Post article, amazingly, did not bother to mention Lobo's human rights record at all, and only acknowledged that within the OAS "a majority of ministers opposed even adding the question of Honduras to the agenda." Readers were left to figure out for themselves why there was opposition to accepting Honduras into the OAS.
In fact, when the Unites States publicly came out in favor of the return of Honduras to the OAS, the mainstream media gave the development a massive degree of coverage. In addition to the Post, Reuters, the Miami Herald, The New York Times and CNN all covered US expressions of support for the new Honduran government. [XX] Readers in the U.S. were able to read plenty of praise and support for Lobo's government, but almost no substantial critiques.
The push to recognize the fraudulent regime was not surprising to those who followed the US media coverage of the November 2009 elections, which, despite voting irregularities, reports of voter intimidation and a lack of any monitoring or recognition by the bulk of the international community, were portrayed as a triumph for democracy in the country.
Despite numerous reports of widespread abuses on election day, The Washington Post called the election "mostly peaceful." [XXI] Bloomberg reported that Lobo was "elected president in a peaceful vote," to "overcome a five-month political crisis" and quoted political analyst Heather Berkman: "Honduras is definitely getting toward the end of the crisis." [XXII]The New York Times said in an editorial that there was "wide agreement" that the election "was clean and fair," despite having declared weeks earlier that "an election run by the coup plotters won't be credible to Hondurans - and it shouldn't be to anyone else." [XXIII]
This glowing portrayal of events, propagated by virtually all mainstream US media outlets, conflicted dramatically with reality. Amnesty International released several reports of voter intimidation and other problems during the elections. Almost every foreign government and election-monitoring agency in the world refused to accept the results of the election.[XXIV] Many media also misreported the turnout figures, relying on the Honduran Supreme Electoral Tribunal's grossly exaggerated numbers of about 61 percent when in fact turnout was actually below 50 percent.[XXV] But by the time the truth came out, these false numbers had already been used to justify recognition of the sham elections by the United States and the US media. The "turnout appears to have exceeded that of the last presidential election," the US State Department said in a statement. "This shows that given the opportunity to express themselves, the Honduran people have viewed the election as an important part of the solution to the political crisis in their country."[XXVI]
In fact, US media coverage has served to help legitimize the plotters and beneficiaries of the 2009 coup from the very start. When Zelaya was forced out of office, the US media painted him as a "a leftist aligned with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela," who was ousted by the US-backed Honduran military, which was "acting to defend the law" after "months of tensions over [Zelaya's] efforts to lift presidential term limits" - efforts that "critics said [were] part of an illegal attempt by Mr. Zelaya to defy the constitution's limit of a single four-year term for the president."[XXVII] Opinion writers asked, "Who Cares About Zelaya?" who was merely a "a typical Honduran politician" with a "lust for power," whose "goal seemed to be a change from our democratic system into a kind of 21st-century socialism … a Hugo Chavez-type of government."[XXVIII]
Erasing the Coup
Since the toppling of Zelaya and now throughout Lobo's presidency, the US media has provided a narrative that has helped enable the democratic crisis in Honduras. An article in Reuters from earlier this year recently observed, quite accurately, that "Honduras is trying to erase memories of the coup," citing how "a Supreme Court judge cleared military leaders of any wrongdoing … after prosecutors accused them of abuse of power for rousting Zelaya from his bed at gunpoint." [XXIX]
Indeed, if the illegitimate Honduran government is trying to erase memories of the illegal coup and further tighten its control over the nation, it has no stronger ally than the US media.
REFERENCES:
[I] "Nations Divided on Recognizing Honduran Elections," CNN.com, November 30, 2009; "Carter Center Statement on the Honduran Elections" The Carter Center, November 25, 2009.
[II] "Obama says coup in Honduras is illegal," Reuters, June 29, 2009.
[III] Michael Corcoran. "A Tale of Two Elections: Iran and Honduras," NACLA Report on the Americas 43, no. 1 (March/April 2010).
[IV] Ibid
[V] "New Honduras President must order investigation into rights abuses," Amnesty International. January 26, 2010.
[VI] Ibid
[VII] Data is from a search on AmnestyInternational.org
[VIII] "Honduras: Photos and testimony of protestors shows extent of police violence," Amnesty International, August 19, 2010.
[IX] Data is from a search of HRW.org
[X] Data is from a Lexis-Nexis search
[XI] Ibid
[XII] Simon Romero. "Report Accuses Chavez of Abusing Rights," The New York Times, September 18, 2010.
[XIII] Marc Lacey. "Latin America Still Divided Over a Coup in Honduras," The New York Times, June 6 2010.
[XIV] Data on cruel and unusual punishment is from the Center for Prevention and Treatment of Torture, as cited by Adrienne Pine. "Honduras: 'Reconciliation' vs. Reality," NACLA Report on the Americas 43, no. 1 (March/April 2010).
[XV] Elizabeth Kaplan, "Honduras Faces Criticism Over Journalist Killings After a Coup," The New York Times, July 27, 2010.
[XVI] Article links to Elizabeth Kaplan, "Honduran Security Forces Accused of Abuse," The New York Times, October 5, 2010.
[XVII] Glenn Kessler. "Clinton Urges OAS to Let Honduras Rejoin," The Washington Post, June 7, 2010.
[XVIII] For examples of anti-Zelaya op-eds see: Roger Marin Neda, "Who Cares About Zelaya?," The New York Times, July 7, 2009.
[XIX] As quoted in: Glenn Kessler. "Clinton Urges OAS to Let Honduras Rejoin," The Washington Post, June 7, 2010.
[XX] "U.S. says time for OAS to readmit Honduras," Reuters, May 6, 2010, Mark Landler; "Clinton pleads case for Honduras," The New York Times. June 7, 2010, Jim Wyss; "OAS inches toward readmitting Honduras," Miami Herald, June 9, 2010; "Latin leaders seek unity in regional summit," CNN World. February 22, 2010.
[XXI] Mary Beth Sheridan, "Hondurans Go to Polls, Hoping to End Crisis," The Washington Post, November 30, 2009.
[XXII] Helen Murphy and Eric Sabo, "Lobo Wins Honduran Presidency After Peaceful Vote," Bloomberg.com, November 30, 2009.
[XXIII] "The Honduran Conundrum," The New York Times (editorial), December 5, 2009; "Coup, Uninterrupted," The New York Times (editorial), November 7, 2009.
[XXIV] For abuses in election see: "Independent Investigation Needed Into Honduras Human Rights Abuses," Amnesty International, December 3, 2009; for lack of acceptance from international agencies see: Alyssa Figueroa "Honduras Down the Memory Hole," Extra!, August 2010.
[XXV] Mariano Castillo, "Honduran Election Turnout Lower Than First Estimated," CNN.com, December 22, 2009.
[XXVI] Ian Kelly, "Honduran Election," U.S. Department of State, November 29, 2009.
[XXVII] Elizabeth Malkin, "Honduran President Is Ousted in Coup," The New York Times, June 29, 2009.
[XXVIII] Roger Marin Neda, "Who Cares About Zelaya?" The New York Times, July 7, 2009.
[XXIX] Sean Mattson and Gustavo Palencia, "Honduran Zelaya flies into exile, ending crisis," Reuters. January 27, 2010.
The Snakes Sleep: Attacks against the Media and Impunity in Honduras
Written by Sandra Cuffe
In Honduras, there is a particular quote by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano that has been adopted into the country's rich lexicon of idioms: “Justice is like snakes. They only bite the barefoot.”
Of the thousands of human rights violations committed in Honduras since the coup in June 2009, in most cases the only serious investigations have been carried out by the grassroots organizations involved with the Human Rights Platform and the resistance movement. Very few charges have been laid against the human rights violators who ordered and carried out illegal detentions, kidnappings, beatings, torture, rape, and extrajudicial executions.
At the international level, however, there have recently been positive signals that spark the hope that justice may one day be served. Last week, the International Criminal Court announced that preliminary investigations are underway to determine whether or not the Court has jurisdiction over a case related to Honduras. Essentially, the Court is investigating whether or not war crimes and/or crimes against humanity have been committed in Honduras since the coup on June 28, 2009.
Also earlier this month, Honduras faced its Universal Periodic Review at the United Nations, a process that each UN member State undergoes every four years. Tellingly, Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia did not attend because they do not recognize the government of Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who was elected President in November 2009 in highly controversial elections that many contend were simply the prolongation of the illegitimate rule of the civic and military authorities that coordinated the overthrow of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya Rosales. Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, El Salvador and Ecuador explicitly clarified that they do not recognize the government of Honduras, but intervened in the Review process nonetheless in order to support the human rights of the Honduran people.
At the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva, several concerns were voiced about the impunity surrounding human rights violations in general, and the murder of journalists in particular. Nine journalists have been murdered in Honduras in 2010 to date. According to the “Death Watch” compiled by the International Press Institute (IPI), Honduras is now the second most dangerous country for journalists, second only to Mexico. Prior to 2010, the countries with the most murders of journalists were mainly countries officially deemed to be in conflict, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Somalia. When the Honduran population of less than eight million is taken into account, the statistics are exponentially more serious.
According to the IPI's research, from 1997 when the Institute started the “Death Watch” until the coup, only seven journalists were killed. At the Universal Periodic Review, UN member States demanded investigations and justice in the cases of the nine journalists killed in 2010 alone. While the final report will not be adopted until the Human Rights Council meets again to discuss the case in March 2011, the Honduran government stated its acceptance of the 129 recommendations during the Review process earlier this month. In the case of the journalists, however, the promise to investigate and to prosecute those responsible did not come without a rebuttal.
“In none of the cases investigated have the victims or their families alleged political motivations, nor have the investigations turned up evidence that such a pattern exists,” said Honduran Vice President Maria Antoineta Guillen de Bogran during the Review.
Earlier this year, in an interview with the Tribuna newspaper on May 3rd, Honduran Minister of Security Oscar Alvarez went even further, stating: “I guarantee that in all of the cases [of the journalists' murders], there is no connection to indicate that it is due to their work as journalists. That is to say that there is no person or people trying to silence journalists; it is simply that, just as other people, after their work as reporters, journalists spend their time on their own personal situations.”
Of course, as murdered journalists themselves, Gabriel Fino Noriega, Joseph Hernandez Ochoa, David Meza Montesinos, Nahum Palacios, Jose Bayardo Mayrena, Manuel Juarez, Jorge Alberto Orellana, Luis Arturo Mondragon, and Israel Zelaya Diaz are not able to contest the statements by Vice President Guillen and Security Minister Alvarez. In most cases, however, journalists who have been threatened, kidnapped, beaten, and tortured have demonstrated the clear connection between their work as critical journalists supporting or reporting on the resistance movement and the human rights violations they have endured.
In the case of direct attacks against media outlets, the evidence is clear. Most of the violent assaults against radio stations and the confiscation of equipment took place either on June 28th, 2009, the morning of the coup, or three months later, on September 28th, 2009, after a specific executive decree including more curfews and martial law also addressed media outlets. The decree established a State of Emergency and restricted several basic rights and freedoms, including the freedom of expression, giving authorities the green light to “halt the coverage or discussion through any media, be it verbal or printed, of demonstrations that threaten peace and public order” or that compromised the “dignity” of government authorities or decisions.
“The decree [defined] the framework of a military dictatorship,” asserted well-known radio journalist Felix Molina.
"Honduras had not seen - not even during the dirty war of the 1980s, when the military governed with a civilian facade - something like what we saw the morning of June 28th 2009, which was repeated the morning of September 28th 2009, exactly three months later. The arrival in person of soldiers to a media outlet. Confiscation. Well, on June 28th, there was no confiscation of equipment, but in September, Channel 36's equipment was destroyed and confiscated and completely confiscated from Radio Globo," explained Molina after the military assault on Radio Globo and Cholusat Sur, the only radio and television stations, respectively, with nation-wide coverage to clearly identify with the resistance movement against the coup.
"In the 24 hours after the publication of the decree in the official newspaper, the army invoked it to take away equipment and take two media outlets off the air... And we could have expected anything to happen, but as a journalist, I would have never expected that a media outlet be physically dismantled by the army, and yet that is what we saw at dawn on September 28th," said Molina.
On June 28th, in the hours after the Honduran army sprayed the house of elected President Zelaya with bullets and forced him onto a flight to Costa Rica, several radio stations around the country reporting the urgent news were targeted by the armed forces and forced off the air. That same morning, a nation-wide consultation was to have taken place for people to express their support or opposition for a fourth ballot box in the 2010 elections concerning a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the Constitution. The initiative was supported and coordinated both by Zelaya and much of the Honduran social movement. Many of the media outlets that would later support the coup either simply did not report anything that morning, or reported the official version of events involving Zelaya's resignation and voluntary departure. Electrical power blackouts also occurred in much of the country.
One of the radio stations attacked and forced to stop broadcasting on June 28th 2009 was Radio Juticalpa, located in the state of Olancho, home to both ousted President Zelaya and current controversial President Lobo. When station director Martha Elena Rubi arrived before dawn, she found the windows and walls of the studio shot up from outside. The shells inside the studio were all from M-16s, the assault rifles assigned to the Honduran army. Witnesses also identified the armed forces as responsible for the violent attack, but Rubi went ahead and broadcast the news of the coup.
“We thought that this time, if we informed the people of what was really going on, we would help neutralize it. So, knowing that I was going to do this work, what they did was that when I got here, at about five thirty or five o'clock in the morning, [they thought that] I would realize that they had shot up the station and that I would be afraid and not even go on air,” said Rubi.
“I knew they were going to come,” added Rubi, “so I had little time to tell people the truth, and for the town to realize the way in which they were trying to silence what we were, in an impartial way, saying: the truth. So I knew that I was racing against the clock and I committed to getting people to wake up to reality. About two or three hours later, they came with orders for me to shut down the station.”
There was a power blackout in Juticalpa, but Radio Juticalpa had a solar plant and therefore became the only radio station on the air in the entire region. When the heavily armed soldiers were approaching, Rubi stopped her news coverage and switched to music. However, the station was forced off the air for the rest of the day. Luckily, Rubi and her colleague Andres Molina were able to prevent the army from confiscating their equipment.
Likely due in large part to the persistence of Honduran human rights organizations and mounting international pressure, Colonel Rene Javier Palao Torres and sub-official Juan Alfredo Acosta Acosta were charged with Abuse of Authority for the assault on Radio Juticalpa and sentenced to prison in Juticalpa, Olancho. The military officials appealed the verdict, however, and the sentence was overturned earlier this month by the Court of Appeals.
The number of cases in which charges have not even been laid is unfortunately far greater than those that have at least made it to court. Flying in the face of the statements by Vice President Guillen and Security Minister Alvarez, one such case is the kidnapping and torture of 29-year-old Delmer Membreno on September 28th 2009, the same day as the military attacks on Radio Globo and Cholusat Sur. A former photographer for the Tribuna newspaper and the Spanish News Agency, the resistance-supporting El Libertador newspaper photographer Membreno was forced into a vehicle by armed men in Tegucigalpa.
"They put a balaclava over my head, they handcuffed me, and they burned my body. They hit me, and they uttered threats against the newspaper I work for: El Libertador," said Membreno, with the bruises and burn marks still visible on his face and body.
"They beat me. They burned my body with cigarettes. Here [on my arm], my face, and my chest. They ripped my shirt and left me without shoes... 'Cry, cry! Why aren't you crying, you commie?' That's what they said... They said that the director better be careful, that they were following him, and that what they had done to me was nothing in comparison to what they were going to do to him," narrated the wounded photographer.
When the torture of Membreno took place, there had already been so many cases of human rights violations against journalists and media outlets that the Committee of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH) had petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) for precautionary measures specifically for a long list of journalists and media outlets that had been attacked. From July 2009 on, the IACHR granted precautionary measures to a long list of journalists and media outlets; however, during two separate IACHR hearings that took place one month ago in Washington DC, evidence began to pile up that Honduras had not been carrying out the measures.
On July 24th, 2009, the IACHR granted precautionary measures to television journalist Nahun Palacios, the news director of Aguan Television on channel 5 in Tocoa, Colon, in the Aguan Valley. Palacios had immediately and publicly voiced his opposition to the coup and reported on the mobilizations against the coup and in support of the fourth ballot box and the Constituent Assembly. Only two days after the coup, on June 30th, soldiers raided Palacios' home, intimidated his family, held his children at gunpoint, and seized his vehicle and some work-related equipment.
Despite the IACHR precautionary measures granted the following month, Palacios never received any communication from the State, let alone any effective protection. Eight months later, on March 14th, 2010, 34-year-old Nahun Palacios was traveling home when his vehicle was intercepted and gunned down with AK47s, automatic weapons that are illegal but easily acquired in Honduras. Two unknown men fled the scene, leaving Palacios dead in the street, his body and vehicle riddled with dozens of bullets. Another passenger in the car was seriously injured and died later in the hospital.
As in many of the other murders of journalists this year, all of which remain unsolved, police did not carry out a proper investigation at the scene of Palacios' murder. After failing to gather sufficient evidence from the body back in March, the police exhumed Palacios' body in August, further upsetting his distraught relatives who still wait for justice eight months later, despite the State's international assurances that they are carrying out investigations and precautionary measures.
Nahun Palacios' murder in March 2010 was only one of five journalists killed that month. Due to the overwhelming impunity in the country, others have been forced to flee into exile. Many have also remained in Honduras, carrying out their vital work despite the ongoing threats and attacks.
"They can intimidate. You know, yes, of course there is fear, but I don't think that it will stop us from informing the people of the truth," said Delmer Membreno after his kidnapping and torture.
The announcement of the International Criminal Court about its preliminary investigations into possible war crimes or crimes against humanity in Honduras, as well as the ongoing pressure within the United Nations and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, would not be possible without the work of the innumerable committed Honduran journalists, media outlets, and human rights organizations from day one.
For now, back in Honduras, however, the snakes of justice are far from trying their fangs out on the high-ranking military, police and political leaders behind both the coup and outrageous human rights violations. Justice may simply be sleeping like so many court cases in the country. Or perhaps Zelaya and democracy were not the only ones forced into exile at gunpoint on June 28th, 2009.
Sandra Cuffe is a writer and activist of no fixed address. After living and working in Honduras for four years from 2003 to 2007, she returned five days after the coup, and stayed through April 2010, collaborating with COFADEH and other local organizations.
In Honduras, there is a particular quote by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano that has been adopted into the country's rich lexicon of idioms: “Justice is like snakes. They only bite the barefoot.”
Of the thousands of human rights violations committed in Honduras since the coup in June 2009, in most cases the only serious investigations have been carried out by the grassroots organizations involved with the Human Rights Platform and the resistance movement. Very few charges have been laid against the human rights violators who ordered and carried out illegal detentions, kidnappings, beatings, torture, rape, and extrajudicial executions.
At the international level, however, there have recently been positive signals that spark the hope that justice may one day be served. Last week, the International Criminal Court announced that preliminary investigations are underway to determine whether or not the Court has jurisdiction over a case related to Honduras. Essentially, the Court is investigating whether or not war crimes and/or crimes against humanity have been committed in Honduras since the coup on June 28, 2009.
Also earlier this month, Honduras faced its Universal Periodic Review at the United Nations, a process that each UN member State undergoes every four years. Tellingly, Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia did not attend because they do not recognize the government of Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who was elected President in November 2009 in highly controversial elections that many contend were simply the prolongation of the illegitimate rule of the civic and military authorities that coordinated the overthrow of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya Rosales. Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, El Salvador and Ecuador explicitly clarified that they do not recognize the government of Honduras, but intervened in the Review process nonetheless in order to support the human rights of the Honduran people.
At the Universal Periodic Review in Geneva, several concerns were voiced about the impunity surrounding human rights violations in general, and the murder of journalists in particular. Nine journalists have been murdered in Honduras in 2010 to date. According to the “Death Watch” compiled by the International Press Institute (IPI), Honduras is now the second most dangerous country for journalists, second only to Mexico. Prior to 2010, the countries with the most murders of journalists were mainly countries officially deemed to be in conflict, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Somalia. When the Honduran population of less than eight million is taken into account, the statistics are exponentially more serious.
According to the IPI's research, from 1997 when the Institute started the “Death Watch” until the coup, only seven journalists were killed. At the Universal Periodic Review, UN member States demanded investigations and justice in the cases of the nine journalists killed in 2010 alone. While the final report will not be adopted until the Human Rights Council meets again to discuss the case in March 2011, the Honduran government stated its acceptance of the 129 recommendations during the Review process earlier this month. In the case of the journalists, however, the promise to investigate and to prosecute those responsible did not come without a rebuttal.
“In none of the cases investigated have the victims or their families alleged political motivations, nor have the investigations turned up evidence that such a pattern exists,” said Honduran Vice President Maria Antoineta Guillen de Bogran during the Review.
Earlier this year, in an interview with the Tribuna newspaper on May 3rd, Honduran Minister of Security Oscar Alvarez went even further, stating: “I guarantee that in all of the cases [of the journalists' murders], there is no connection to indicate that it is due to their work as journalists. That is to say that there is no person or people trying to silence journalists; it is simply that, just as other people, after their work as reporters, journalists spend their time on their own personal situations.”
Of course, as murdered journalists themselves, Gabriel Fino Noriega, Joseph Hernandez Ochoa, David Meza Montesinos, Nahum Palacios, Jose Bayardo Mayrena, Manuel Juarez, Jorge Alberto Orellana, Luis Arturo Mondragon, and Israel Zelaya Diaz are not able to contest the statements by Vice President Guillen and Security Minister Alvarez. In most cases, however, journalists who have been threatened, kidnapped, beaten, and tortured have demonstrated the clear connection between their work as critical journalists supporting or reporting on the resistance movement and the human rights violations they have endured.
In the case of direct attacks against media outlets, the evidence is clear. Most of the violent assaults against radio stations and the confiscation of equipment took place either on June 28th, 2009, the morning of the coup, or three months later, on September 28th, 2009, after a specific executive decree including more curfews and martial law also addressed media outlets. The decree established a State of Emergency and restricted several basic rights and freedoms, including the freedom of expression, giving authorities the green light to “halt the coverage or discussion through any media, be it verbal or printed, of demonstrations that threaten peace and public order” or that compromised the “dignity” of government authorities or decisions.
“The decree [defined] the framework of a military dictatorship,” asserted well-known radio journalist Felix Molina.
"Honduras had not seen - not even during the dirty war of the 1980s, when the military governed with a civilian facade - something like what we saw the morning of June 28th 2009, which was repeated the morning of September 28th 2009, exactly three months later. The arrival in person of soldiers to a media outlet. Confiscation. Well, on June 28th, there was no confiscation of equipment, but in September, Channel 36's equipment was destroyed and confiscated and completely confiscated from Radio Globo," explained Molina after the military assault on Radio Globo and Cholusat Sur, the only radio and television stations, respectively, with nation-wide coverage to clearly identify with the resistance movement against the coup.
"In the 24 hours after the publication of the decree in the official newspaper, the army invoked it to take away equipment and take two media outlets off the air... And we could have expected anything to happen, but as a journalist, I would have never expected that a media outlet be physically dismantled by the army, and yet that is what we saw at dawn on September 28th," said Molina.
On June 28th, in the hours after the Honduran army sprayed the house of elected President Zelaya with bullets and forced him onto a flight to Costa Rica, several radio stations around the country reporting the urgent news were targeted by the armed forces and forced off the air. That same morning, a nation-wide consultation was to have taken place for people to express their support or opposition for a fourth ballot box in the 2010 elections concerning a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the Constitution. The initiative was supported and coordinated both by Zelaya and much of the Honduran social movement. Many of the media outlets that would later support the coup either simply did not report anything that morning, or reported the official version of events involving Zelaya's resignation and voluntary departure. Electrical power blackouts also occurred in much of the country.
One of the radio stations attacked and forced to stop broadcasting on June 28th 2009 was Radio Juticalpa, located in the state of Olancho, home to both ousted President Zelaya and current controversial President Lobo. When station director Martha Elena Rubi arrived before dawn, she found the windows and walls of the studio shot up from outside. The shells inside the studio were all from M-16s, the assault rifles assigned to the Honduran army. Witnesses also identified the armed forces as responsible for the violent attack, but Rubi went ahead and broadcast the news of the coup.
“We thought that this time, if we informed the people of what was really going on, we would help neutralize it. So, knowing that I was going to do this work, what they did was that when I got here, at about five thirty or five o'clock in the morning, [they thought that] I would realize that they had shot up the station and that I would be afraid and not even go on air,” said Rubi.
“I knew they were going to come,” added Rubi, “so I had little time to tell people the truth, and for the town to realize the way in which they were trying to silence what we were, in an impartial way, saying: the truth. So I knew that I was racing against the clock and I committed to getting people to wake up to reality. About two or three hours later, they came with orders for me to shut down the station.”
There was a power blackout in Juticalpa, but Radio Juticalpa had a solar plant and therefore became the only radio station on the air in the entire region. When the heavily armed soldiers were approaching, Rubi stopped her news coverage and switched to music. However, the station was forced off the air for the rest of the day. Luckily, Rubi and her colleague Andres Molina were able to prevent the army from confiscating their equipment.
Likely due in large part to the persistence of Honduran human rights organizations and mounting international pressure, Colonel Rene Javier Palao Torres and sub-official Juan Alfredo Acosta Acosta were charged with Abuse of Authority for the assault on Radio Juticalpa and sentenced to prison in Juticalpa, Olancho. The military officials appealed the verdict, however, and the sentence was overturned earlier this month by the Court of Appeals.
The number of cases in which charges have not even been laid is unfortunately far greater than those that have at least made it to court. Flying in the face of the statements by Vice President Guillen and Security Minister Alvarez, one such case is the kidnapping and torture of 29-year-old Delmer Membreno on September 28th 2009, the same day as the military attacks on Radio Globo and Cholusat Sur. A former photographer for the Tribuna newspaper and the Spanish News Agency, the resistance-supporting El Libertador newspaper photographer Membreno was forced into a vehicle by armed men in Tegucigalpa.
"They put a balaclava over my head, they handcuffed me, and they burned my body. They hit me, and they uttered threats against the newspaper I work for: El Libertador," said Membreno, with the bruises and burn marks still visible on his face and body.
"They beat me. They burned my body with cigarettes. Here [on my arm], my face, and my chest. They ripped my shirt and left me without shoes... 'Cry, cry! Why aren't you crying, you commie?' That's what they said... They said that the director better be careful, that they were following him, and that what they had done to me was nothing in comparison to what they were going to do to him," narrated the wounded photographer.
When the torture of Membreno took place, there had already been so many cases of human rights violations against journalists and media outlets that the Committee of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH) had petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) for precautionary measures specifically for a long list of journalists and media outlets that had been attacked. From July 2009 on, the IACHR granted precautionary measures to a long list of journalists and media outlets; however, during two separate IACHR hearings that took place one month ago in Washington DC, evidence began to pile up that Honduras had not been carrying out the measures.
On July 24th, 2009, the IACHR granted precautionary measures to television journalist Nahun Palacios, the news director of Aguan Television on channel 5 in Tocoa, Colon, in the Aguan Valley. Palacios had immediately and publicly voiced his opposition to the coup and reported on the mobilizations against the coup and in support of the fourth ballot box and the Constituent Assembly. Only two days after the coup, on June 30th, soldiers raided Palacios' home, intimidated his family, held his children at gunpoint, and seized his vehicle and some work-related equipment.
Despite the IACHR precautionary measures granted the following month, Palacios never received any communication from the State, let alone any effective protection. Eight months later, on March 14th, 2010, 34-year-old Nahun Palacios was traveling home when his vehicle was intercepted and gunned down with AK47s, automatic weapons that are illegal but easily acquired in Honduras. Two unknown men fled the scene, leaving Palacios dead in the street, his body and vehicle riddled with dozens of bullets. Another passenger in the car was seriously injured and died later in the hospital.
As in many of the other murders of journalists this year, all of which remain unsolved, police did not carry out a proper investigation at the scene of Palacios' murder. After failing to gather sufficient evidence from the body back in March, the police exhumed Palacios' body in August, further upsetting his distraught relatives who still wait for justice eight months later, despite the State's international assurances that they are carrying out investigations and precautionary measures.
Nahun Palacios' murder in March 2010 was only one of five journalists killed that month. Due to the overwhelming impunity in the country, others have been forced to flee into exile. Many have also remained in Honduras, carrying out their vital work despite the ongoing threats and attacks.
"They can intimidate. You know, yes, of course there is fear, but I don't think that it will stop us from informing the people of the truth," said Delmer Membreno after his kidnapping and torture.
The announcement of the International Criminal Court about its preliminary investigations into possible war crimes or crimes against humanity in Honduras, as well as the ongoing pressure within the United Nations and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, would not be possible without the work of the innumerable committed Honduran journalists, media outlets, and human rights organizations from day one.
For now, back in Honduras, however, the snakes of justice are far from trying their fangs out on the high-ranking military, police and political leaders behind both the coup and outrageous human rights violations. Justice may simply be sleeping like so many court cases in the country. Or perhaps Zelaya and democracy were not the only ones forced into exile at gunpoint on June 28th, 2009.
Sandra Cuffe is a writer and activist of no fixed address. After living and working in Honduras for four years from 2003 to 2007, she returned five days after the coup, and stayed through April 2010, collaborating with COFADEH and other local organizations.
Monday, November 22, 2010
World Bank-Funded Biofuel Corporation Massacres Six Honduran Campesinos
By Annie Bird
Approximately six months ago, campesino farmers in Trujillo, Colon organized in the Campesino Movement of the Aguan, the MCA, were awarded provisional title to a farm which neighbors their community, as part of a long standing negotiation with Dinant Corporation, a biofuel company, whose land claims are illegitimate.
Since that time, the small farmers worked the land. In recent weeks they had noticed incursions into their land by armed security forces employed by the biofuel company, Dinant.
On Monday, November 15, the farmers went to their fields but were then attacked by Dinant security. Six were killed in the massacre and two more are in critical condition.
The massacre occurred the same day that the de facto Honduran president Pepe Lobo had planned to meet with the director of the US government development fund, the Millennium Challenge, in Denver to ask for funding for so called "renewable energy" - in Honduras, principally biofuels and dams.
World Bank And Other "Development" Groups Share Responsibility for the Massacre
The "renewable energy" plan Lobo is shopping around may be the result of an Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) funded technical support grant (T-1101) to the de facto government ushered in after the June 28 military coup. In November 2009, under a coup government and amidst grave human rights violations, the World Bank's (WB) International Finance Corporation gave Dinant Corporation a $30 million loan for biofuel production, and now shares responsibility in the massacre.
Policies supposedly intended to stop climate change are in reality fueling climate change. The world must invest in a renewable way of life, not destructive "renewable energy". Scientists have analyzed that biofuel industry together with the climate change prevention mechanisms currently promoted could actually result in the destruction of half of the planets forests.
In the same way that massacres cannot be stopped when justice systems are destroyed by military coups, the destruction of our planet cannot be stopped when the systems of governance have been hijacked by corporations who can buy off, or that failing, militarily intervene in nations attempting to build just forms of governance. Human rights and the environment cannot be separated.
US Military Base Bought for Agrarian Reform And Stolen for Agribusiness
During the past decade, campesinos in Honduras have challenged a series of illegitimate land titles obtained by agro-businessmen in a massive former US military training center known as the CREM.
On this land, over 5,000 hectares, the US military trained military forces from across Central America, particularly the Contra paramilitary forces attacking the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Once the CREM center's operations ended, the Honduran government bought the land from a US citizen through the Honduran land reform program.
However, instead of being sold to small farmers, as the government was obligated by law to do, the land was illegally divided up between several large landholders as a result of corruption and fraudulent titling processes. A coalition of land rights organizations in Honduras organized in the Campesino Movement of the Aguan, the MCA, to challenge the illegal titles. Little by little the land titles were awarded to groups of campesinos organized in the MCA.
The titling process has been slow and marked by violent attacks by the large landholders who have influence in the government, police and military forces. Among the last of the CREM lands to remain in the hands of agribusiness interests is the farm called El Tumbador, approximately 700 hectares controlled by the Dinant Corporation, property of Honduras' most powerful agro-businessman, Miguel Facusse.
A biofuel businessman with interests in several corporations, Miguel Facusse is infamous for the use of fraudulent methods, including intimidation and violence, to obtain lands throughout the country.
The World Bank Backs The Corrupt And Violent Dinant Corporation
Since the military coup in June 2009, Honduras has been ruled by illegitimate, repressive regimes.
In November 2009, the WB extended a loan of $30 million to Dinant for its biofuel production in that region, despite a widely documented history of violence and corruption by the biofuel company. The WB failed in its human rights obligations in this case and shares responsibility for this massacre.
Given the conditions in Honduras, the WB must suspend both private and public sector funding to Honduras, and freeze funding of biofuels in the region. The biofuel industry in Central and South America violently displaces small farmers and contributes to global warming.
Another multinational public fund that finances international private investment, the Interamerican Investment Corporation, has also recently funded Dinant.
"Greenwashing" And Corporate Welfare - the Hijacking of Climate Change Funds
Biofuels are one of the fastest growing industries, a sector that sees high levels of investment from venture capitalists. This massive growth has been stimulated by taxpayer dollars pouring into renewable energy through many funding agencies, but particularly the IADB, the WB, and carbon emissions trading markets.
The trade in carbon credits was created as an element of the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997. It attempts to implement a market based system to curb global warming by levying penalties against heavy polluting industries that produce high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon burning energy generation plants. But those penalties can be paid off, or offset, by the purchase of carbon credits.
Carbon credits are given to industries that undertake activities that reduce emission of gases that generate climate change, and those can then be sold on the market to companies that generate global warming.
The system is riddled with problems, beginning with the fact that the big money to be made in "green" industry creates a big incentive to greenwash, to disguise polluting activities as activities that do not pollute in order to cash in on climate change funds.
This is the case with biofuels.
Biofuels Could Destroy Half the World's Forests
Even as governments pour taxpayer money into biofuels, it is being demonstrated that biofuel production contributes significantly to global warming, through the destruction of wetlands, displacement of small farmers and food production, often to cut forests, direct clear cutting of forests for biofuel production, and even cutting forests to generate wood pellets that make ethanol.
One study published in Science magazine in October 2009 analyzed regulation set up in the Kyoto Accords which promotes the use of biofuels, but finds that these measures could result in the loss of up to half of the world's forests.
As the negative impacts were beginning to be felt, though the extent is only beginning to be understood, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and others committed to market incentives for polluters, set up the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil.
This body certifies palm oil as having been 'sustainably' produced. In May 2010, WWF signed an agreement with Miguel Facusse's Dinant Corporation to begin the process of certifying Dinant palm oil. The WB, in November 2009, shortly after disbursing Dinant's loan, froze palm oil funding while it created its palm oil strategy, expected to be completed in March 2011.
US Corporations Could Make $27 Trillion Off "Lesser Developed Countries" Conversion to Biofuels
By the time these impacts were being seen, big corporations, with their lobbies, were drooling over the potential profits. The WWF is strongly committed to paying off big business to reduce emissions. A recent WWF study urges taxpayer money be poured into renewable energy in "lesser developed countries" (LDCs) in order to stimulate job growth in the United States.
Governments are committing to insuring that a certain percentage of fuel consumption be converted to biofuel consumption around the world but especially in "LDCs." This will generate a huge market for technology to convert engines and other existing infrastructure, which according to WWF could represent a $27 trillion dollar market for US corporations.
Faced with the powerful corporate lobby corrupting and pressuring governments around the globe, and sometimes promoting military interventions to back their interests, changing policies to really fight climate change as opposed to subsidizing corporations seems a quixotic dream, as was seen in the failed summit on climate change in Copenhagen last year.
At the 16th international summit on climate change in Copenhagan, nations agreed to set up an, as yet, unclear mechanism called the REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), which would focus on curbing deforestation. Paradoxically, incentives for forest preservation are still banned, and the potential for biofuel stimulated deforestation of half of the world's forests is still not addressed.
It is important to remember that the WWF and others who believe in and promote environmental market economics have promoted a system of biosphere privatization which allows degrading activities to be carried out by private companies that subsidize non-governmental organizations that manage the biospheres, while ignoring the rights of campesino communities and indigenous peoples.
Governments Should Invest in the Poor, Not in the Super Rich
The international community's failure to substantively address climate change is a result the unwillingness to acknowledge and name the economic and political policies and actors that are responsible for climate harm.
The "free" market cannot correct the damage it has done, further investing in the same actors and under the same policy framework that generated climate change cannot reverse it.
To reverse climate change, the wealthiest nations and people of the world must change how they live. Indigenous and campesino communities have more sustainable ways of life, have learned to live in a sustainable way with the resources they produce. But they are being displaced and massacred to usher in the concentration of land and wealth, the genocide of a sustainable way of life.
Rather than subsidizing corporate mass destruction, the nations of the world must invest in a different way of life, and hold accountable those that destroy human life and destroy our only and irreplaceable, planet.
*************
(Annie Bird is co-director of Rights Action, annie@rightsaction.org, www.rightsaction.org. Feel free to re-publish this article, citing author & source)
Approximately six months ago, campesino farmers in Trujillo, Colon organized in the Campesino Movement of the Aguan, the MCA, were awarded provisional title to a farm which neighbors their community, as part of a long standing negotiation with Dinant Corporation, a biofuel company, whose land claims are illegitimate.
Since that time, the small farmers worked the land. In recent weeks they had noticed incursions into their land by armed security forces employed by the biofuel company, Dinant.
On Monday, November 15, the farmers went to their fields but were then attacked by Dinant security. Six were killed in the massacre and two more are in critical condition.
The massacre occurred the same day that the de facto Honduran president Pepe Lobo had planned to meet with the director of the US government development fund, the Millennium Challenge, in Denver to ask for funding for so called "renewable energy" - in Honduras, principally biofuels and dams.
World Bank And Other "Development" Groups Share Responsibility for the Massacre
The "renewable energy" plan Lobo is shopping around may be the result of an Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) funded technical support grant (T-1101) to the de facto government ushered in after the June 28 military coup. In November 2009, under a coup government and amidst grave human rights violations, the World Bank's (WB) International Finance Corporation gave Dinant Corporation a $30 million loan for biofuel production, and now shares responsibility in the massacre.
Policies supposedly intended to stop climate change are in reality fueling climate change. The world must invest in a renewable way of life, not destructive "renewable energy". Scientists have analyzed that biofuel industry together with the climate change prevention mechanisms currently promoted could actually result in the destruction of half of the planets forests.
In the same way that massacres cannot be stopped when justice systems are destroyed by military coups, the destruction of our planet cannot be stopped when the systems of governance have been hijacked by corporations who can buy off, or that failing, militarily intervene in nations attempting to build just forms of governance. Human rights and the environment cannot be separated.
US Military Base Bought for Agrarian Reform And Stolen for Agribusiness
During the past decade, campesinos in Honduras have challenged a series of illegitimate land titles obtained by agro-businessmen in a massive former US military training center known as the CREM.
On this land, over 5,000 hectares, the US military trained military forces from across Central America, particularly the Contra paramilitary forces attacking the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Once the CREM center's operations ended, the Honduran government bought the land from a US citizen through the Honduran land reform program.
However, instead of being sold to small farmers, as the government was obligated by law to do, the land was illegally divided up between several large landholders as a result of corruption and fraudulent titling processes. A coalition of land rights organizations in Honduras organized in the Campesino Movement of the Aguan, the MCA, to challenge the illegal titles. Little by little the land titles were awarded to groups of campesinos organized in the MCA.
The titling process has been slow and marked by violent attacks by the large landholders who have influence in the government, police and military forces. Among the last of the CREM lands to remain in the hands of agribusiness interests is the farm called El Tumbador, approximately 700 hectares controlled by the Dinant Corporation, property of Honduras' most powerful agro-businessman, Miguel Facusse.
A biofuel businessman with interests in several corporations, Miguel Facusse is infamous for the use of fraudulent methods, including intimidation and violence, to obtain lands throughout the country.
The World Bank Backs The Corrupt And Violent Dinant Corporation
Since the military coup in June 2009, Honduras has been ruled by illegitimate, repressive regimes.
In November 2009, the WB extended a loan of $30 million to Dinant for its biofuel production in that region, despite a widely documented history of violence and corruption by the biofuel company. The WB failed in its human rights obligations in this case and shares responsibility for this massacre.
Given the conditions in Honduras, the WB must suspend both private and public sector funding to Honduras, and freeze funding of biofuels in the region. The biofuel industry in Central and South America violently displaces small farmers and contributes to global warming.
Another multinational public fund that finances international private investment, the Interamerican Investment Corporation, has also recently funded Dinant.
"Greenwashing" And Corporate Welfare - the Hijacking of Climate Change Funds
Biofuels are one of the fastest growing industries, a sector that sees high levels of investment from venture capitalists. This massive growth has been stimulated by taxpayer dollars pouring into renewable energy through many funding agencies, but particularly the IADB, the WB, and carbon emissions trading markets.
The trade in carbon credits was created as an element of the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997. It attempts to implement a market based system to curb global warming by levying penalties against heavy polluting industries that produce high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon burning energy generation plants. But those penalties can be paid off, or offset, by the purchase of carbon credits.
Carbon credits are given to industries that undertake activities that reduce emission of gases that generate climate change, and those can then be sold on the market to companies that generate global warming.
The system is riddled with problems, beginning with the fact that the big money to be made in "green" industry creates a big incentive to greenwash, to disguise polluting activities as activities that do not pollute in order to cash in on climate change funds.
This is the case with biofuels.
Biofuels Could Destroy Half the World's Forests
Even as governments pour taxpayer money into biofuels, it is being demonstrated that biofuel production contributes significantly to global warming, through the destruction of wetlands, displacement of small farmers and food production, often to cut forests, direct clear cutting of forests for biofuel production, and even cutting forests to generate wood pellets that make ethanol.
One study published in Science magazine in October 2009 analyzed regulation set up in the Kyoto Accords which promotes the use of biofuels, but finds that these measures could result in the loss of up to half of the world's forests.
As the negative impacts were beginning to be felt, though the extent is only beginning to be understood, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and others committed to market incentives for polluters, set up the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil.
This body certifies palm oil as having been 'sustainably' produced. In May 2010, WWF signed an agreement with Miguel Facusse's Dinant Corporation to begin the process of certifying Dinant palm oil. The WB, in November 2009, shortly after disbursing Dinant's loan, froze palm oil funding while it created its palm oil strategy, expected to be completed in March 2011.
US Corporations Could Make $27 Trillion Off "Lesser Developed Countries" Conversion to Biofuels
By the time these impacts were being seen, big corporations, with their lobbies, were drooling over the potential profits. The WWF is strongly committed to paying off big business to reduce emissions. A recent WWF study urges taxpayer money be poured into renewable energy in "lesser developed countries" (LDCs) in order to stimulate job growth in the United States.
Governments are committing to insuring that a certain percentage of fuel consumption be converted to biofuel consumption around the world but especially in "LDCs." This will generate a huge market for technology to convert engines and other existing infrastructure, which according to WWF could represent a $27 trillion dollar market for US corporations.
Faced with the powerful corporate lobby corrupting and pressuring governments around the globe, and sometimes promoting military interventions to back their interests, changing policies to really fight climate change as opposed to subsidizing corporations seems a quixotic dream, as was seen in the failed summit on climate change in Copenhagen last year.
At the 16th international summit on climate change in Copenhagan, nations agreed to set up an, as yet, unclear mechanism called the REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), which would focus on curbing deforestation. Paradoxically, incentives for forest preservation are still banned, and the potential for biofuel stimulated deforestation of half of the world's forests is still not addressed.
It is important to remember that the WWF and others who believe in and promote environmental market economics have promoted a system of biosphere privatization which allows degrading activities to be carried out by private companies that subsidize non-governmental organizations that manage the biospheres, while ignoring the rights of campesino communities and indigenous peoples.
Governments Should Invest in the Poor, Not in the Super Rich
The international community's failure to substantively address climate change is a result the unwillingness to acknowledge and name the economic and political policies and actors that are responsible for climate harm.
The "free" market cannot correct the damage it has done, further investing in the same actors and under the same policy framework that generated climate change cannot reverse it.
To reverse climate change, the wealthiest nations and people of the world must change how they live. Indigenous and campesino communities have more sustainable ways of life, have learned to live in a sustainable way with the resources they produce. But they are being displaced and massacred to usher in the concentration of land and wealth, the genocide of a sustainable way of life.
Rather than subsidizing corporate mass destruction, the nations of the world must invest in a different way of life, and hold accountable those that destroy human life and destroy our only and irreplaceable, planet.
*************
(Annie Bird is co-director of Rights Action, annie@rightsaction.org, www.rightsaction.org. Feel free to re-publish this article, citing author & source)
UN Worries Its Troops Caused Cholera in Haiti
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Nov. 19, 2010
It began as a rumor that farmers saw waste from a U.N. peacekeeping base flow into a
river.
Within days of the talk, hundreds downstream had died from cholera. The mounting
circumstantial evidence that U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal brought cholera to Haiti was
largely dismissed by U.N. officials.
Haitians who asked about it were called political or paranoid.
Foreigners were accused of playing "the blame game." The World Health
Organization said the question was simply "not a priority." But this week,
after anti-U.N. riots and inquiries from health experts, the top U.N. representative in
Haiti said he is taking the allegations very seriously.
Haiti: The Road to Recovery
"It is very important to know if it came from (the Nepalese base) or not, and
someday I hope we will find out," U.N. envoy Edmond Mulet told The Associated Press.
The answer would have implications for U.N. peacekeeping missions around the world, he
said. It would affect the relationship between the U.N. and Haiti: If its peacekeepers
misled, it could lose credibility for tasks such as helping oversee next week's election.
It could affect the job of U.N. humanitarian workers, who work separately from the
peacekeepers. It would help answer scientific questions: Is the source still out there?
How does this cholera strain spread? Does it pose a threat to the region, including the
southern United States? When riots broke out across northern Haiti this week, the U.N.
blamed them on politicians trying to disrupt the upcoming vote.
But observers say the U.N.'s early stance fanned the flames. "If the U.N. had said
from the beginning, 'We're going to look into this' ... I think that, in fact, would have
been the best way in reducing public anger," said Brian Concannon, director of the
Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti. "The way to contribute to public anger
is to lie."
Before last month, there had never been a confirmed case of cholera in Haiti, and now
there are more than 1,100 dead and experts say hundreds of thousands will ultimately fall
ill as the disease haunts Haiti for years. In March, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention said cholera was "extremely unlikely to occur" in Haiti.
There were no cholera bacteria there. Most foreigners were relief workers with good
sanitation who come from countries where cholera is not an issue.
Then it did happen. Even more surprisingly, it did not first appear in a major port, an
earthquake tent camp or an area where foreigners are concentrated, but instead along the
rural Artibonite River. Speculation keeps returning to that river and a base home to 454
U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal. They are perched on a babbling waterway called the Boukan
Kanni, part of the Meille River that feeds into the Artibonite.
People living nearby have long complained about the stink in the back of the base and
sewage in the river. Before the outbreak began they had stopped drinking from that
section of the river, depending instead on a source farther up the mountain. The latest
Nepalese deployment came in October, after a summer of cholera outbreaks in Nepal.
The changeover at the base, which guards the area south of the central plateau town of
Mirebalais, was done in three shifts on Oct. 9, 12 and 16.
The U.N. says none of the peacekeepers showed symptoms of the disease. But 75 percent of
people infected with cholera never show symptoms but can still pass on the disease for
two weeks - especially in countries like Nepal where people have developed immunity. The
CDC has said the strain of cholera in Haiti matches one found most prevalently in South
Asia. "It very much likely did come either with peacekeepers or other relief
personnel," said John Mekalanos, Harvard University microbiology chair. "I
don't see there is any way to avoid the conclusion that an unfortunate and presumably
accidental introduction of the organism occurred."
Haiti runs on rumors, like a 10 million-player game of broken telephone.
Last year it was the local woman said to have given birth to a fish. This year it was
cholera - all too true, even if the news came from the same places: in a group taxi, from
a cousin, from the guy on the next farm over.
On Oct. 20, the news crackled over Haitian radio: 19 people had died after fever,
vomiting and severe diarrhea at a hospital in St. Marc near the mouth of the Artibonite
River. Most were children.
A day later, the disease was confirmed to be cholera. Tele-djol - "the mouth
channel" - lit up. Some said helicopters had dropped a black powder in the river, or
that they heard poison was poured into a dam in the Dominican Republic. Others said the
epidemic was linked to the Nepalese base. The rumors were easy to ignore. Mulet said the
U.N. did not address them right away because it did not know the situation would turn
into a crisis. "It was such a minor thing, like we have every day," Mulet said.
"We didn't know this was going to be an epidemic." But the rumors got stronger
in the mouths of politicians.
Even the health minister, whose government depends on the U.N. for protection, told the
nation it was suffering from an "imported disease." On Oct. 26, U.N. spokesman
Vincenzo Pugliese put out a short statement saying that the base's septic tanks are built
to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards, that the waste is dumped 820 feet (250
meters) from the river, and that the U.N. unit for environmental compliance periodically
checks waste management.
Sanitation at the base is handled by a private company, Sanco Enterprises SA, which won
the contract over the summer by underbidding a rival.
The U.N. said the septic tanks were to be emptied once a week. But when the AP visited on
Oct. 27, a tank was clearly overflowing. The back of the base smelled like a toilet had
exploded. Reeking, dark liquid flowed out of a broken pipe, toward the river, from next
to what the soldiers said were latrines.
U.N. military police were taking samples in clear jars with sky-blue U.N. lids, clearly
horrified.
At the shovel-dug waste pits across the street sat yellow-brown pools of feces where
ducks and pigs swam in the overflow. The path to the river ran straight downhill.
The U.N. acknowledged the black fluid was overflow from the base, but said it contained
kitchen and shower waste, not excrement.
The U.N. said it is up to the private contractor and local mayor to ensure its dump sites
are safe.
Sanco Vice President Marguerite Jean-Louis said it is up to the mayor and the U.N.
Mirebalais Mayor Laguerre Lochard,
who is running for Senate on Sunday, said he complained several times to the U.N. that
the site was not safe but never received a response.
Jean-Louis said her company emptied the septic tanks
on Oct. 11, after the first shift of Nepalese troops arrived, and did not return again
until after the outbreak began.
At some point in mid-October, neighbors said a new Sanco driver they did not recognize
came one day and dumped outside of the usual pits.
Sanco returned to the base after the AP had been there for hours. There was more waste
than usual, Jean-Louis said, possibly because the soldiers overlapped during their
rotations.
Following protests at the base days later, the U.N. opened the compound to the AP. The
Nepalese soldiers acknowledged, after repeated questions and revised statements, that the
base had undergone an extensive clean-up and that they had replaced the broken pipe.
Aboveground pipes from uphill latrines ran over a drainage canal to the river. The U.N.
spokesman acknowledged what looked like human waste at the bottom. The U.N. is now
reviewing all sanitation systems at its military, police and civilian installations,
officials told the AP this week. The U.N. said none of the Nepalese soldiers had shown
signs of cholera, which some news outlets misreported as saying the soldiers had
specifically tested negative for it. Pugliese confirmed on Oct. 30 that they had not been
tested for the disease. The U.N. also tested environmental samples the soldiers took from
the base. It says they came out negative at an independent laboratory in Santo Domingo.
But the Santo Domingo lab, Cedimat, has been under contract to MINUSTAH, the U.N.
mission's name in French, since 2004, said Dr. Maximo Rodriguez, the doctor whose name
appears on the tests.
Rodriguez is a general medicine doctor whose specialty is treating obesity. Cedimat is a
patient-treatment facility.
In fact, the test results were written on forms meant for people: The results provided to
the AP by the U.N. had the "patient's" name listed as "Minustha Minustha
(sic)" - age 40, male.
Rodriguez said "any well-equipped laboratory" can do tests for cholera.
But epidemiologists say examining environmental samples for cholera takes extra
expertise, because the disease can be hard to isolate.
"A positive test is informative, a negative test doesn't really prove
anything," said Dr. Arthur Reingold, chairman of Global Public Health and Infectious
Diseases at the University of California-Berkeley School of Public Health.
He is an adviser to the World Health Organization and a former CDC epidemiologist.
The idea that cholera was imported to Haiti by the U.N. carries unique implications.
For decades, and especially since the Jan. 12 earthquake, Haiti has depended on foreign
governments,
aid groups and the U.N. for everything from rebuilding to basic services. The U.N. has
had five peacekeeping missions in Haiti since 1993, the current one arriving six years
ago. Some Haitians see the peacekeepers as the only hope for security in a nation where
towns are ruled by drug lords and coups d'etat are more common than elections. Others
resent heavily armed foreign armies on their soil and see the soldiers as a threat to
national sovereignty and pride. The peacekeepers have saved lives in floods and defeated
kidnapping gangs.
They have also killed people in protests and accidents and had an entire unit dismissed
for paying for sex, many with underage Haitian girls.
Earlier this month, Dr. Paul Farmer, who founded the medical aid group Partners in Health
and is U.N. deputy special envoy for Haiti, called for an aggressive investigation into
the source of the cholera, saying the refusal to look into the matter publicly was
"politics to me, not science."
The CDC acknowledges politics played a role in how the investigation unfolded.
"We're going to be really cautious about the Nepal thing because it's a politically
sensitive issue for our partners in Haiti," said CDC commander Dr. Scott Dowell. The
CDC agrees that the movement of pathogens from one part of the world to another is an
important public health issue. Its scientists are working on samples of bacteria from 13
infected Haitians to sequence the cholera strain's genome, the results of which will be
posted on a public database.
But the U.S. government agency has several caveats. First, it has not taken environmental
samples or tested the Nepalese soldiers. Second, it will not go public with its analysis
until all its studies are complete. And third, it may not get enough information to say
exactly how cholera got into the country. "The bottom line is we may never
know," Dowell said. The WHO has repeatedly said the same. "At some time we will
do further investigation, but it's not a priority right now," WHO spokeswoman Fadela
Chaib said this week. But Mulet now says Farmer was right all along, and that he is
consulting with experts, including a French epidemiologist who met with him this week to
discuss how to investigate the Nepalese base. "We agree with him there has to be a
thorough investigation of how it came, how it happened and how it spread. ... There's no
differences there with Dr. Paul Farmer at all." As recently as Nov. 10, the
mission's spokesman told Haitian reporters that the U.N. was not undertaking any other
investigations because the concerns were not "well-founded." The head of the
mission said that is not the case today. "One thing I can assure you: There has been
no cover up - there has been no cover up from our side - and we have done everything we
can to investigate," Mulet said. "Eventually we will find out what happened and
how it happened."
It began as a rumor that farmers saw waste from a U.N. peacekeeping base flow into a
river.
Within days of the talk, hundreds downstream had died from cholera. The mounting
circumstantial evidence that U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal brought cholera to Haiti was
largely dismissed by U.N. officials.
Haitians who asked about it were called political or paranoid.
Foreigners were accused of playing "the blame game." The World Health
Organization said the question was simply "not a priority." But this week,
after anti-U.N. riots and inquiries from health experts, the top U.N. representative in
Haiti said he is taking the allegations very seriously.
Haiti: The Road to Recovery
"It is very important to know if it came from (the Nepalese base) or not, and
someday I hope we will find out," U.N. envoy Edmond Mulet told The Associated Press.
The answer would have implications for U.N. peacekeeping missions around the world, he
said. It would affect the relationship between the U.N. and Haiti: If its peacekeepers
misled, it could lose credibility for tasks such as helping oversee next week's election.
It could affect the job of U.N. humanitarian workers, who work separately from the
peacekeepers. It would help answer scientific questions: Is the source still out there?
How does this cholera strain spread? Does it pose a threat to the region, including the
southern United States? When riots broke out across northern Haiti this week, the U.N.
blamed them on politicians trying to disrupt the upcoming vote.
But observers say the U.N.'s early stance fanned the flames. "If the U.N. had said
from the beginning, 'We're going to look into this' ... I think that, in fact, would have
been the best way in reducing public anger," said Brian Concannon, director of the
Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti. "The way to contribute to public anger
is to lie."
Before last month, there had never been a confirmed case of cholera in Haiti, and now
there are more than 1,100 dead and experts say hundreds of thousands will ultimately fall
ill as the disease haunts Haiti for years. In March, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention said cholera was "extremely unlikely to occur" in Haiti.
There were no cholera bacteria there. Most foreigners were relief workers with good
sanitation who come from countries where cholera is not an issue.
Then it did happen. Even more surprisingly, it did not first appear in a major port, an
earthquake tent camp or an area where foreigners are concentrated, but instead along the
rural Artibonite River. Speculation keeps returning to that river and a base home to 454
U.N. peacekeepers from Nepal. They are perched on a babbling waterway called the Boukan
Kanni, part of the Meille River that feeds into the Artibonite.
People living nearby have long complained about the stink in the back of the base and
sewage in the river. Before the outbreak began they had stopped drinking from that
section of the river, depending instead on a source farther up the mountain. The latest
Nepalese deployment came in October, after a summer of cholera outbreaks in Nepal.
The changeover at the base, which guards the area south of the central plateau town of
Mirebalais, was done in three shifts on Oct. 9, 12 and 16.
The U.N. says none of the peacekeepers showed symptoms of the disease. But 75 percent of
people infected with cholera never show symptoms but can still pass on the disease for
two weeks - especially in countries like Nepal where people have developed immunity. The
CDC has said the strain of cholera in Haiti matches one found most prevalently in South
Asia. "It very much likely did come either with peacekeepers or other relief
personnel," said John Mekalanos, Harvard University microbiology chair. "I
don't see there is any way to avoid the conclusion that an unfortunate and presumably
accidental introduction of the organism occurred."
Haiti runs on rumors, like a 10 million-player game of broken telephone.
Last year it was the local woman said to have given birth to a fish. This year it was
cholera - all too true, even if the news came from the same places: in a group taxi, from
a cousin, from the guy on the next farm over.
On Oct. 20, the news crackled over Haitian radio: 19 people had died after fever,
vomiting and severe diarrhea at a hospital in St. Marc near the mouth of the Artibonite
River. Most were children.
A day later, the disease was confirmed to be cholera. Tele-djol - "the mouth
channel" - lit up. Some said helicopters had dropped a black powder in the river, or
that they heard poison was poured into a dam in the Dominican Republic. Others said the
epidemic was linked to the Nepalese base. The rumors were easy to ignore. Mulet said the
U.N. did not address them right away because it did not know the situation would turn
into a crisis. "It was such a minor thing, like we have every day," Mulet said.
"We didn't know this was going to be an epidemic." But the rumors got stronger
in the mouths of politicians.
Even the health minister, whose government depends on the U.N. for protection, told the
nation it was suffering from an "imported disease." On Oct. 26, U.N. spokesman
Vincenzo Pugliese put out a short statement saying that the base's septic tanks are built
to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards, that the waste is dumped 820 feet (250
meters) from the river, and that the U.N. unit for environmental compliance periodically
checks waste management.
Sanitation at the base is handled by a private company, Sanco Enterprises SA, which won
the contract over the summer by underbidding a rival.
The U.N. said the septic tanks were to be emptied once a week. But when the AP visited on
Oct. 27, a tank was clearly overflowing. The back of the base smelled like a toilet had
exploded. Reeking, dark liquid flowed out of a broken pipe, toward the river, from next
to what the soldiers said were latrines.
U.N. military police were taking samples in clear jars with sky-blue U.N. lids, clearly
horrified.
At the shovel-dug waste pits across the street sat yellow-brown pools of feces where
ducks and pigs swam in the overflow. The path to the river ran straight downhill.
The U.N. acknowledged the black fluid was overflow from the base, but said it contained
kitchen and shower waste, not excrement.
The U.N. said it is up to the private contractor and local mayor to ensure its dump sites
are safe.
Sanco Vice President Marguerite Jean-Louis said it is up to the mayor and the U.N.
Mirebalais Mayor Laguerre Lochard,
who is running for Senate on Sunday, said he complained several times to the U.N. that
the site was not safe but never received a response.
Jean-Louis said her company emptied the septic tanks
on Oct. 11, after the first shift of Nepalese troops arrived, and did not return again
until after the outbreak began.
At some point in mid-October, neighbors said a new Sanco driver they did not recognize
came one day and dumped outside of the usual pits.
Sanco returned to the base after the AP had been there for hours. There was more waste
than usual, Jean-Louis said, possibly because the soldiers overlapped during their
rotations.
Following protests at the base days later, the U.N. opened the compound to the AP. The
Nepalese soldiers acknowledged, after repeated questions and revised statements, that the
base had undergone an extensive clean-up and that they had replaced the broken pipe.
Aboveground pipes from uphill latrines ran over a drainage canal to the river. The U.N.
spokesman acknowledged what looked like human waste at the bottom. The U.N. is now
reviewing all sanitation systems at its military, police and civilian installations,
officials told the AP this week. The U.N. said none of the Nepalese soldiers had shown
signs of cholera, which some news outlets misreported as saying the soldiers had
specifically tested negative for it. Pugliese confirmed on Oct. 30 that they had not been
tested for the disease. The U.N. also tested environmental samples the soldiers took from
the base. It says they came out negative at an independent laboratory in Santo Domingo.
But the Santo Domingo lab, Cedimat, has been under contract to MINUSTAH, the U.N.
mission's name in French, since 2004, said Dr. Maximo Rodriguez, the doctor whose name
appears on the tests.
Rodriguez is a general medicine doctor whose specialty is treating obesity. Cedimat is a
patient-treatment facility.
In fact, the test results were written on forms meant for people: The results provided to
the AP by the U.N. had the "patient's" name listed as "Minustha Minustha
(sic)" - age 40, male.
Rodriguez said "any well-equipped laboratory" can do tests for cholera.
But epidemiologists say examining environmental samples for cholera takes extra
expertise, because the disease can be hard to isolate.
"A positive test is informative, a negative test doesn't really prove
anything," said Dr. Arthur Reingold, chairman of Global Public Health and Infectious
Diseases at the University of California-Berkeley School of Public Health.
He is an adviser to the World Health Organization and a former CDC epidemiologist.
The idea that cholera was imported to Haiti by the U.N. carries unique implications.
For decades, and especially since the Jan. 12 earthquake, Haiti has depended on foreign
governments,
aid groups and the U.N. for everything from rebuilding to basic services. The U.N. has
had five peacekeeping missions in Haiti since 1993, the current one arriving six years
ago. Some Haitians see the peacekeepers as the only hope for security in a nation where
towns are ruled by drug lords and coups d'etat are more common than elections. Others
resent heavily armed foreign armies on their soil and see the soldiers as a threat to
national sovereignty and pride. The peacekeepers have saved lives in floods and defeated
kidnapping gangs.
They have also killed people in protests and accidents and had an entire unit dismissed
for paying for sex, many with underage Haitian girls.
Earlier this month, Dr. Paul Farmer, who founded the medical aid group Partners in Health
and is U.N. deputy special envoy for Haiti, called for an aggressive investigation into
the source of the cholera, saying the refusal to look into the matter publicly was
"politics to me, not science."
The CDC acknowledges politics played a role in how the investigation unfolded.
"We're going to be really cautious about the Nepal thing because it's a politically
sensitive issue for our partners in Haiti," said CDC commander Dr. Scott Dowell. The
CDC agrees that the movement of pathogens from one part of the world to another is an
important public health issue. Its scientists are working on samples of bacteria from 13
infected Haitians to sequence the cholera strain's genome, the results of which will be
posted on a public database.
But the U.S. government agency has several caveats. First, it has not taken environmental
samples or tested the Nepalese soldiers. Second, it will not go public with its analysis
until all its studies are complete. And third, it may not get enough information to say
exactly how cholera got into the country. "The bottom line is we may never
know," Dowell said. The WHO has repeatedly said the same. "At some time we will
do further investigation, but it's not a priority right now," WHO spokeswoman Fadela
Chaib said this week. But Mulet now says Farmer was right all along, and that he is
consulting with experts, including a French epidemiologist who met with him this week to
discuss how to investigate the Nepalese base. "We agree with him there has to be a
thorough investigation of how it came, how it happened and how it spread. ... There's no
differences there with Dr. Paul Farmer at all." As recently as Nov. 10, the
mission's spokesman told Haitian reporters that the U.N. was not undertaking any other
investigations because the concerns were not "well-founded." The head of the
mission said that is not the case today. "One thing I can assure you: There has been
no cover up - there has been no cover up from our side - and we have done everything we
can to investigate," Mulet said. "Eventually we will find out what happened and
how it happened."
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