[News] 7 Million Hondurans Under House Arrest

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Seven Million Hondurans Under House Arrest as Micheletti Writes of "Democracy

September 22, 2009 at 1:52 pm
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/3444/seven-million-hondurans-under-house-arrest-micheletti-writes-democracy

By Al Giordano

[]


Hondurans in civil resistance surrounded the 
Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa yesterday to 
greet their returning president. This morning, 
coup regime troops attacked them violently, 
sending 24 wounded to hospitals. D.R. 2009 Mariachiloko, Chiapas Indymedia.

The Honduran coup regime’s 26-hour martial curfew 
upon the entire country effectively places 7.5 
million Honduran citizens – men, women, children 
and elders – under house arrest. They are 
prohibited from going to work, to the store, or 
to walk down the street to visit a neighbor. 
Anybody on the street is subject to arrest, for violation of the curfew.

If this happened to you, what would you call it?

The stated pretext for this heavy handed maneuver 
is nothing more or less than that the regime, its 
“president,” and its security forces have been 
embarrassed before their countrymen and the 
world. Yesterday morning’s claims by coup 
“president” Roberto Micheletti that news reports 
could not possibly be true that legitimate 
President Manuel Zelaya was back in town, that 
the regime’s intelligence forces had his every 
step followed and “knew” he was “in a hotel suite 
in Managua,” became egg on Micheletti’s face when 
Zelaya appeared from the rooftop of the Brazilian 
Embassy in Tegucigalpa yesterday to greet a 
multitude of citizens that want their elected president restored.

The military curfew has no practical reason. It 
will not bring the expulsion, anew, of Zelaya 
from national territory. It will not hasten his 
capture by the regime. And it does not make the 
regime any more legitimate. To the contrary, it 
demonstrates, again, its repressive, 
anti-democratic and usurper character. It is a 
desperate act meant to punish the entire Honduran 
people for, after 86 days, not “getting with the 
program” and backing the coup. It is a tantrum by 
the man-child Micheletti to lash out and insist, 
“I’m in charge, here,” but it only serves to 
underscore, again, that he is not in control of the country or its people.

Thousands violated the curfew blatantly last 
night keeping watch outside the Brazilian 
Embassy. In the morning, the coup’s security 
forces entered, shot tear gas canisters at the 
crowd (and over the Embassy wall) and violently 
attacked the peaceful protesters. Local hospitals 
report 24 wounded from the invasion. National 
Police, additionally, waged a separate attack on 
the human rights organization COFADEH (family 
members of the disappeared and detained) at 8 
a.m. this morning, launching tear gas missiles through its glass windows.

Radio Globo now reports that the same Supreme 
Court that contorted the Honduran Constitution to 
create a legaloid curtain around the June 28 coup 
d’etat is now meeting to cook up its latest 
kangaroo jump: a court order to invade the 
Embassy – under International Law, Brazilian 
territory – to capture (or assassinate) President 
Zelaya. So large and irrational is the regime’s 
obsession with the presence of one solitary man 
in the country that it confines every citizen to 
his and her home and tears up the Constitution, again.

In a whining attempt to claim victory out of what 
is the coup regime’s single most stunning defeat 
to date, Micheletti had his US handler Lanny 
Davis whip up an 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/21/AR2009092103111.html>op 
ed column published last night in the Washington 
Post. Here’s a quick translation from its hurried 
English to plain talk: “I did nothing wrong and 
why doesn’t anybody in the world understand me?” 
It is the speech of a child to mommy and daddy 
after he is caught stealing from the candy store 
again. From the first sentence, when he complains 
that, “Manuel Zelaya has surreptitiously returned 
to Honduras,” Micheletti seems to think that the 
world has forgotten that Zelaya very openly 
attempted to enter his own country twice this 
summer – announcing where and when in advance – 
and it was Micheletti who blocked an airport 
runway and sent troops to the border to keep the 
elected president out, even as he insisted that 
he wanted to place Zelaya under arrest.

“The international community has wrongfully 
condemned the events of June 28 and mistakenly 
labeled our country as undemocratic,” Micheletti 
lamented at the very hour he was ordering the 26 
hour curfew. How could anybody possibly think 
that a warden that orders 7.5 million people to 
remain locked in their homes could somehow be “undemocratic?”

“Coups do not allow freedom of assembly, either. 
They do not guarantee freedom of the press, much 
less a respect for human rights,” wrote 
Micheletti, as his troops readied this morning’s 
attack on a free assembly and a human rights 
office, and just hours after he accused 
independent TV and radio stations of “media 
terrorism” for having reported the truth that 
Zelaya had returned (see Belén Fernández’s 
related report from Tegucigalpa today: 
<http://narconews.com/Issue60/article3820.html>Radio 
Globo and Channel 36 Announce the Return of Zelaya).

Micheletti’s column is easily recognizable to 
readers in the United States as coming from the 
same script that his lobbyist Lanny Davis used 
last year to insist, long after Secretary Clinton 
had lost the Democratic presidential nomination, 
that she was, in fact, winning. And it comes off just as pathetically.

Meanwhile, in the regime he calls a “democracy,” 
seven and a half million people are confined to 
their homes. Micheletti isn’t a “president.” He’s 
a two bit warden, coming to grips with the 
painful reality that he is neither a head of state, nor ready for prime time.

Update 2:46 p.m. Tegucigalpa (4:46 p.m. ET): 
Further showing his grand commitment to 
"democracy" and law, Micheletti's security forces 
are presently reading the search and seizure 
order through a megaphone to the Brazilian 
Embassy. It could be a bluff, but if Zelaya 
doesn't fall for it (and The Field predicts he 
won't), and the coup troops invade the Embassy, 
all hell is going to break loose on an 
international level, just as the United Nations 
General Assembly begins its most important session of the year in New York.

Brazil's foreign minister, in New York, has 
called for an emergency meeting of the UN 
Security Council. The US State Department has 
called on the de facto regime to respect 
Brazilian territory, as President Obama has just 
appointed US Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-MA), leader in 
the US Congress against the Honduran coup, to the 
US delegation at the UN session, perhaps an 
indication of some plans afoot up there.

Is the coup regime that desperate and stupid to 
commit an act of war against Brazilian territory? 
(Two words to ponder: Blue helmets.) We'll 
shortly find out, and report it here.

3:18 p.m.: Micheletti 
<http://www.reuters.com/article/africaCrisis/idUSN22485448>blinks:

Honduras' de facto leader, Roberto Micheletti, 
said on Tuesday he has no intention of 
confronting Brazil or entering its embassy where 
ousted President Manuel Zelaya has taken refuge to avoid arrest.

"We will do absolutely nothing to confront 
another brotherly nation. We we want them to 
understand that they should give him political 
asylum (in Brazil) or turn him over to Honduran 
authorities to be tried," Micheletti told Reuters.

Meanwhile, at least two popular barrios in and 
around Tegucigalpa have defied, en masse, the 
curfew order and chased National Police out of 
their communities: El Pedregal and Colonia 
Kennedy. They've erected barricades and declared 
the coup regime and its security forces non grata.




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