HONDURAS UPDATE OCTOBER 1 2009

By Emile Schepers

SPECIAL NOTE: This week, the PWW website is making a transition to a new consolidated website, about which you will be informed very soon via the existing site, pww.org. For this reason, there will be a hiatus in my blog until the new system is set up. The new consolidated webstie will be at http://www.peoplesworld.org.

Meanwhile, here is the latest, and it is important.

1. MICHELETTI IS NOT BACKING DOWN ON CIVIL LIBERTIES. In spite of dissention on the pro-coup side, de facto president Roberto Micheletti does not seem to be quite ready to take back his declaration of a suspension of constitutional rights of freedom of speech, assembly, press and due process. Peaceful demos continue to be repressed and the workers of Radio Globo and TV Channel 36 "Cholusat Sur" have not been allowed to go back to their facilities, nor have they been given their confiscated broadcasting equipment back. Radio Globo has managed to transmit via the internet through a clandestine safe house and according to the Christian Science Monitor has even picked up new listeners that way, but TV 36 is completely silenced.

SUGGESTED ACTION: What about the people in the Honduras solidarity movement worldwide getting together to help restore the functionality of the progressive media in Honduras?

2. MICHELETTI SPILLS THE BEANS AGAIN. Micheletti has repeated that what happened on June 28 was not a coup, but almost in the same breath he said that the reason that Zelaya was deposed was that he was associating with the left-wing governments of the Bolivarian Alternative for the People of Our America (ALBA). This undermines part of the cover story circulated to justify the coup, namely that Zelaya had violated the Constitution by planning to have himself re-elected, a physical impossibility in November, by the way.

4. BRAZILIAN LEGISLATORS VISIT HONDURAS. A delegation of Brazilian congresspersons visited their country's embassy in Tegucigalpa today. They have not reported their findings as of this writing, but evidently are supportive of Brazil's allowing Zelaya to be in the embassy.

5. REPUBLICANS RUSHING TO COUP REGIME'S RESCUE, LITERALLY. As the Micheletti regime can no longer come up to Washington to schmooze with US reactionaries, the reactionaries are having to go down to Tegucigalpa to lend support to their buddies there. U.S. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtenin has already gone down there, and now the Republicans in the Senate want to go down there also at US taxpayers' expense. The Washington Post tomorrow will cover a big fight between Democratic Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Republican Senator Jim DeMint (D-SC--yes, that deMint). Seems the egregious Mr. DeMint wanted the US military to provide an airplane to fly him and an all-GOP group of far right GOP House members to go to Tegucigalpa on a "fact finding mission". Kerry, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, nixed funding or use of military aircraft for this junket. But then the military said they would provide the airplane anyway, at the request of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (O.K. when's the court-martial?). Kerry pointed out that the GOP has been blocking the confirmation of Arturo Valenzuela as Asst. Secretary of State for Hemispheric Affairs and Tom Shannon as ambassador to Brazil, holding these appointments to their demands for a hard line on Cuba and support for the Honduras coup.

SUGGESTION ACTION: Write letters to Kerry encouraging him to hold fast, and to your own Senators and Reps plus the White House and State Dept., denouncing the actions by DeMint and McConnell, and asking why the Dept. of Defense provided the plane at McConnell's request instead of deny it, as Kerry had requested.

All for now