Zelaya ally says Honduras army fires at protesters

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Agence France-Presse

Zelaya ally says Honduras army fires at protesters
Tegucigalpa — Agence France-Presse
Last updated on Friday, Jul. 03, 2009 03:34AM EDT

.The army shot at protesters supporting ousted President Manuel Zelaya in a northern Honduras city yesterday, wounding at least two people, a leftist deputy and Zelaya ally said.

"We have video images which show the army's aggression against demonstrators," Silvia Ayala said from San Pedro Sula, the economic capital of the Central American country.

One youth suffering from gunshot wounds was transferred to hospital, and a Salvadoran photographer was also injured after taking blows to the head and arms, Mr. Ayala said.

He added that five people were also detained.


Read more: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/zelaya-ally-s... /

[Judi Lynn]

1. Honduran Coup Tries to Halt Advance of Latin America's Left

Honduran Coup Tries to Halt Advance of Latin America's Left

New America Media, Commentary, Roger Burbach, Posted: Jul 03, 2009

The coup against Manuel Zelaya of Honduras represents a last ditch effort by Honduras’ entrenched economic and political interests to stave off the advance of the new left governments that have taken hold in Latin America over the past decade. As Zelaya proclaimed after being forcibly dumped in Costa Rica: “This is a vicious plot planned by elites. The elites only want to keep the country isolated and in extreme poverty.”

Zelaya should know, since his roots are in the country’s large, land-owning class, having devoted most of his life to agriculture and forestry enterprises that he inherited. He ran for president as the head of the center-right Liberal Party on a fairly conservative platform, promising to be tough on crime and to cut the budget. Inaugurated in January, 2006, he supported the US-backed Central American Free Trade Agreement, which been signed two years earlier, and continued the economic policies of neo-liberalism, privatizing state held enterprises.

But about half way into his four year term, the winds of change blowing from the south caught his imagination, particularly those coming from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, the largest regional power fronting on the Caribbean. With no petroleum resources, Honduras signed a generous oil subsidy deal with Venezuela, and then last year joined the emergent regional trade bloc, ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. Inspired by Venezuela it now has Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Dominica and Ecuador as members. Simultaneously, Zelaya implemented domestic reform policies, significantly increasing the minimum wage of workers and teachers’ salaries, while stepping up spending in health care and education.

The upshot is that a reform-minded president supported by labor unions and social organizations is now pitted against a mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political elite that is accustomed to controlling the Supreme Court, as well as congress and the presidency. It is a story often repeated elsewhere in Latin America, with the United States almost always weighing in on the side of the established, entrenched interests.

The Honduran elites were outraged that a member of their class would carry out even modest reforms. They began to portray Zelaya as a demagogue, and demonized Hugo Chavez as trying to take over the country. When Zelaya announced that he would hold a plebiscite on June 28 to see if the country wanted to have the option in the upcoming November presidential elections to vote for the convening of a constituent assembly that would draft a new constitution, the political establishment would have none of it. They incorrectly claimed that Zelaya was trying to stand for re-election. In fact the possibility that a president might serve a second term could only emerge in a new constitution that would not be drafted until well after Zelaya left office in January, 2010. The elites did however have reason to fear a new magna carta, since this is the path that Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador have used to draft new constitutions to begin transforming their countries political, social and economic structures.

More:
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?...

[Peace Patriot]

13. Roger Burbach nails it better than any other commenter I've read...

"The coup against Manuel Zelaya of Honduras represents a last ditch effort by Honduras’ entrenched economic and political interests to stave off the advance of the new left governments that have taken hold in Latin America over the past decade." --Burbach

That's the whole situation in a brilliant nutshell.

Zelaya's modest reforms--some improvement in minimum wage and health care--and asking the people for an ADVISORY vote on starting a Constitutional re-write process (the current Constitution was inflicted on Honduras by Reagan and his "reign of terror henchmen")--a process that will take several years, and won't be finished until Zelaya is long out of office--is not cause for kidnapping the elected president, beating him up, flying him out of the country against his will, appointing a president to replace him, shutting down Constitutional rights, arresting, beating, harassing dozens of international reporters, shutting down news in Honduras, surrounding public buildings and TV stations with armed troops, and tear-gassing, shooting and killing people who are protesting peacefully against all this.

This overreaction to the mere suggestion that fundamental reform is needed is a clue to the motives of the coupsters. They are not willing to talk about it with their fellow and sister Hondurans. They are not about to let the people vote on it, even in an advisory vote. They have reacted hysterically and violently to any suggestion of reform in their own country--one of the poorest, with one of the biggest rich vs poor discrepancies, in Latin America--and to the reform that is occurring on the other side of their borders, in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and throughout South America, in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile. They are afraid of loss of privilege, advantages and riches, after having been coddled and funded by U.S. taxpayers for decades as a bastion of brutal fascist power. Elites like this one have come close to utterly destroying countries like Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia, with gross mismanagement and greed, and treason (selling their people out to the World Bank/IMF and global corporate predators), and then get like this--hysterical, wild in their accusations, and unreasonable, when social justice ideas arise. They have been used and manipulated by corporate predators and military interests for so long, they have nothing to say--no program to offer, other than "the rich get richer." They have no coherent thought process. They are so corrupt that you cannot believe anything they say. Burbach sums it up so well: a "last ditch" stand against the social justice tide that has swept the region.

[EFerrari]

2. That can't be right. It must be that the people attacked those bullets

in an overflow of joy, being relieved of their burdensome media and their civil rights!

[Alamuti Lotus]

3. Most likely, they were celebrating being saved from "Chavismo" by the army and it was a big accident

so it's all just a misunderstanding, nothing to see here. Possibly Zelayev is to blame. Yet another crime to add to his growing litany of frankly dubious offenses against humanity.

[EFerrari]

4. Zelaya's crime is that he is a traitor to his class. Upped minimum wage,

teacher's pay, invested a little in health care and ed. Not even in your face reform but modest. He turned on the oligarchy. They'll never forgive that.

[Vidar]

12. LOL

[excess_3]

5. stop Mugabe's thugs

stop Amadeenijads thugs

oops
stop Mugabe's '''war veterans'''
oops
stop Mr Z's patriotic citizens

......................
yea right

[Flaneur]

8. ???? Are you trying to say something? If so, what?

[Warpy]

6. Pictures of that were out a couple of days ago

Newspapers all over Mexico carried them. Crowds were throwing rocks and got bullets in return.

Honduras is a mess, thanks to the interference of the right wing State Department under Reagan forcing an unworkable constitution on them when they needed a rock stable staging area for supplying the Contras. What people need to know is that Zelaya did act inappropriately in trying to overturn that constitution and firing a right wing general who tried to stand up to him and that the military acted constitutionally in removing him from office.

The problem is that horrible constitution, not Zelaya or the military. There is no mechanism to modify it or amend it. They're stuck with it, written in stone, no reforms possible.

Eventually even a right winger will find it too confining and a process to rewrite it might be started. For now, they're reverting to the hey days in the 1980s when men were men and the population was there to be crushed.

This post is the result of reading everything I could from both sides since the mess started.

[EFerrari]

7. The military's own lawyer admits they broke the law.

Good grief. There is nothing in the constitution about kidnapping sitting presidents at gunpoint.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

[Judi Lynn]

9. Once they can rationalize that, you know they don't think anyone can do anything about it.

They imagine they have successfully seized control and it just won't finally matter how many people think they are criminals. Like true fascists, they think what they WANT is what's going to prevail, not what's right for their country.

[EFerrari]

10. On top of everything else, these idiots put the whole populace

in harms' way. These things aren't only bad because the are unseemly and undemocratic but because they're deadly, too.

But to tell you the truth, the more days go by, the less sanguine I feel that this will turn out very well. We know the two people from State have bad records, the military is in the Pentagon's pocket, and Insulza seems to be spinning out the time.

[Judi Lynn]

11. The longer they can postpone handing BACK the government, the firmer their chokehold will be

on the military, and police, their enforcers.

It doen't look good for democracy, and it clearly is NOT what the people want, or they would have elected these fools already, when they ran for office earlier, and lost.