Click on this link for a must-read account of an SOA Watch delegation to Hondurus.
Change did arrive that June 28th. Only not in the anticipated form but in one that was all too familiar - at the barrel of a gun and on the orders of School of the Americas graduates. President Manuel Zelaya was picked up from the presidential palace in his pajamas and deposited on the runway of San Jose, Costa Rica. What followed was familiar script:a swell of resistance brutally repressed, media voices of truth silenced, and an "election" conveniently held to whitewash a coup (never mind that there were few electors and no observers). End of the story, according to the State Department, time to move on.
To what? To business as usual, albeit at a cost of some 80 deaths. As our delegation arrived in Honduras, so did 350 businesses from around the world, including some of the globe´s biggest billionaires. A conference convened by "President" Lobo called "Honduras is Open for Business" was taking place at the same time.
and ...
This dynamic duo of government leaders and business moguls is using murder and repression to try to hold a growing resistance movement at bay with fear. All this, however, would not be possible without a third player: the U.S. government. Funds from our government´s coffers continue to train many of their military and police and provide them with helicopters, tanks, guns, tear gas and more. This point was made graphicially at a meeting that our delegation held with families of victims since the coup. Mery Agurcia, a human rights activist with COFADEH, held up a tear gas canister, "made in the USA", collected at the same site of where teacher Ilse Velasquez died after a a similar one hit struck her violently in the head.
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