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Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
Thu Jan 19, 2012, 04:24 PM Jan 2012

Honduras says US personnel to help stem violence

Honduras says US personnel to help stem violence
The Associated Press
Created: 01/19/2012 11:04:21 AM PST

MEXICO CITY—Honduran President Porfirio Lobo says the United States is sending people to help Honduras battle the violent crime that led to the withdrawal of U.S. Peace Corps volunteers this week.

Lobo says the Americans will work on analyzing the problems.

Lobo told the HRN radio network Thursday that "soon there will be U.S. personnel here ... and that will contribute to the tranquility of the Honduran people."

He did not say if the Americans would come from some government agency or a private company.

More:
http://www.dailybulletin.com/news/ci_19775856

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Honduras says US personnel to help stem violence (Original Post) Judi Lynn Jan 2012 OP
something smells of.. flamingdem Jan 2012 #1
Honduras newspaper source murdered Judi Lynn Jan 2012 #2
Honduras: family killed in latest Aguán massacre Judi Lynn Jan 2012 #3
That's an odd announcement... Peace Patriot Jan 2012 #4
The irony meter is on high. roody Jan 2012 #5

Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
2. Honduras newspaper source murdered
Fri Jan 20, 2012, 05:03 AM
Jan 2012

Honduras newspaper source murdered

A Honduras lawyer who revealed to a newspaper that police were torturing detainees was killed three days after the story was published.

José Ricardo Rosales was shot dead on 17 January after telling the newspaper El Tiempo of police mistreatment of prisoners in the coastal city of Tela, in northern Honduras.

According to the paper, 74 lawyers have been killed in Honduras in the last three years and 17 journalists have been killed since 2010.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/jan/20/press-freedom-honduras

Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
3. Honduras: family killed in latest Aguán massacre
Fri Jan 20, 2012, 05:30 AM
Jan 2012

Honduras: family killed in latest Aguán massacre
Submitted by Weekly News Update on Tue, 01/17/2012 - 12:32.

Eight people, including four children, were murdered in the village of Regaderos, in Sabá municipality in the northern Honduran department of Colón, on the evening of Jan. 9. Seven of the victims were members of the same campesino family; the eighth was a man running errands. The attackers took the victims from the family's home to a field and killed them there with machetes and firearms. The youngest of the children was one year old; the others were seven, 12 and 15 years old. The attackers cut a part of the ear off each of the eight bodies. (El Tiempo, San Pedro Sula, Jan. 10)

The massacre was one of three mass killings in northern Honduras since the beginning of the year. Six people were murdered on Jan. 3 in the village of El Palmar, Las Vegas municipality, Santa Bárbara, in northwestern Honduras, and four members of one family were killed on Jan. 10 in the Rivera Hernández section of the main northern city, San Pedro Sula. There were 6,723 homicides in Honduras from January 2011 to Dec. 15, according to researchers at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH). With a homicide rate of 82 per 100,000 inhabitants, Honduras is the most violent country in Central America and one of the five most violent countries in Latin America. (Proceso Digital, Honduras, Jan. 11)

Sabá municipality, where the campesino family was massacred the night of Jan. 9, is in the Lower Aguán Valley, the site of violent land disputes between campesinos and large landowners. Colón chief of police Osmín Bardales almost immediately ruled out any connection between these disputes and the murders.

But the Honduras Culture and Politics blog points out that it is typical for both police and media to play down possible political motives behind violence in Honduras. One example is the US media's tendency to blame Honduras' homicide rate on the increase in drug trafficking through the country. But a United Nations report released on Oct. 6, "Global Study on Homicide" (PDF), notes that there isn't always a connection: "Organized criminal groups involved in drug trafficking do not necessarily make themselves visible through violent and lethal crime…. Violence often escalates when an existing status quo is broken, as a result, for example, of changes in the structure of the drug market, the emergence of new protagonists or the ‘threat' posed by police repression." Meanwhile, the media rarely mention the increase in murders of women, campesinos and transsexuals since the June 2009 military coup that overthrew President José Manuel ("Mel&quot Zelaya Rosales. (Honduras Culture and Politics blog, Jan. 12)

More:
http://ww4report.com/node/10731

Peace Patriot

(24,010 posts)
4. That's an odd announcement...
Sat Jan 21, 2012, 12:08 PM
Jan 2012

The Pentagon is already building new bases and the CIA, USAID, DEA and other agencies, including U.S. private 'contractor' agencies, have been subverting democracy in Honduras since before the coup, no doubt with the object of aiding the coup and no doubt with "black ops" as well.

So, WHY is Lobo announcing that more "Americans" are on the way?

Suspicion: This is a preemptive announcement to counter imminent disclosures of some kind--by journalists or whistleblowers--perhaps regarding more loss of Honduran sovereignty to U.S. war profiteers. (This could be why so many journalists have been murdered by 'rightwing death squads' (in whose hire?)--some of them were on to stories involving U.S. corporate rulers/war profiteers or further U.S. government interference?)

Another possibility: The underlying scandal of the U.S. "war on drugs" during the Bush Junta is, in my opinion, that the Bush Junta was using the U.S. "war on drugs" to consolidate the cocaine trade out of Colombia and better direct its huge, trillion+ dollar, illicit revenue stream to the Bush Cartel, the CIA, U.S. banksters and other beneficiaries. Perhaps the illicit route through Honduras is not "consolidated" enough and more work needs to be done to eliminate the lesser or non-cooperating drug lords and to favor the "players." The "Americans" who are coming are perhaps tasked with further consolidation of this trade and/or with covering up Bush Junta crime (something there is plenty of evidence for, in the Obama administration, on this and related issues).

This reminds of that announcement by Alvaro Uribe in circa 2010 about the secret Colombia/U.S. military agreement--an agreement that would have furthered Pentagon plans to make Colombia into a launching pad for U.S. aggression across the "global south" and also contained a provision for total diplomatic immunity for all U.S. military personnel and all U.S. military 'contractors' in Colombia (among other things, likely a retrospective measure to try to cover Bush Junta crime prior to the agreement). The agreement was subsequently ruled unconstitutional by the Colombian supreme court but it caused huge scandal throughout Latin America and was seen as a grave threat to the sovereignty of Latin American countries.

Why did Uribe announce this secretly negotiated agreement when he did? Likely because somebody was on to it and it was going to be disclosed anyway.

This has the same smell. Somebody was on to something in Honduras and it was about to come out. Lobo is trying to "color" it as "help" for making blood-soaked Honduras "safer."

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