Friday, October 09, 2009

Schmeace Prize

This would make a sick joke of the Nobel Peace prize, if the committee hadn't already done so long ago by awarding one to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho (who at least had the decency to refuse it).

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Thursday, October 08, 2009

Honduras: farmworkers freed, Micheletti meltdown

Good news (if accurate; will post another source when I find it): The farmworkers imprisoned for their long occupation of the National Agrarian Institute have been released. The down side is that they'll supposedly be subject to house arrest. That sounds sinister, but how easy or likely is it to be enforced against several dozen farmworkers scattered around the country in remote rural locations?

What this account doesn't note is that the campesinos driven forcibly from the Institute a week ago had been held together in a single cell, and had launched a hunger strike. Their release is a small but real victory won by their own struggle.

Not good news, but not a real surprise: Micheletti continues to be intransigent. Speaking to the press last night after the "dialogue" had ended for the day, he went into a tirade against the OAS delegation [video, via Doug Zylstra in comments at RAJ's]. No one from this government seems inclined to say a word about the continuing illegal state of siege, or to do anything else that might provide a reality check for the coup crew.

Update: 3:50pm, 8 Oct - Over the weekend the body of a Lenca resistance leader, Antonio Leiva, was found in a village in Santa Barbara province, murdered and with signs of torture. He had disappeared earlier. Yesterday twelve men, women and children from the indigenous organization COPINH sought and were granted political asylum in the Guatemalan embassy. They denounced the wave of repression happening under the state of siege, directed especially at ethnic minorities who participate in the resistance. The Guatemalan foreign ministry put out a statement announcing that the group was being granted asylum and demanding that the coup government respect human rights and stop acts of repression against its citizens.
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Monday, August 24, 2009

Simple answers to simple questions

Glenn Greenwald: Looking back several decades or more from now, who will possibly be able to understand how that happened: the almost perfect inverse relationship between one's culpability and the price they paid for what they unleashed?

A: People who've been alive long enough to see the same thing happen again and again to the 'unleashers': Henry Kissinger, George H.W. Bush, all the Iran-Contra criminals who came right back into policy-making positions under Bush II...

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