Honduras: U.S. media fail

Tim Padgett's writing for Time on Honduras has been significantly better than that of many U.S. reporters. But that's faint praise, and his latest piece contains several seriously problematic passages.

1. Micheletti ... lifted many of his emergency decrees during a visit last week by U.S. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen... But human-rights groups like Amnesty International say police and soldiers are still blocking street protests.

The decree has not been lifted. A state of siege has been in effect since Sept. 26, when the decree suspending constitutional rights of assembly and free expression (issued on Sept. 22) was published in Honduras' federal register, La Gaceta Oficial. Decrees, and decrees repealing other decrees, take effect when published. The repeal has not been published. Update: 2:15pm, 19 Oct - Repeal published today. UN human rights team in for three-week investigative visit. End update.

No one should need Amnesty International reports to be able to tell that demonstrations continue to be broken up with force. Soldiers and police teargassed and beat demonstrators the day after the supposed "lifting" of the decree, the very day the OAS-mediated dialogue began, in full view of the international press, who reported it. The police gave as the reason for the repression that the demonstrators were "violating the decree" (which, among other things, forbids public gatherings of more than 20 people). They repeated the performance two days later, again widely reported: Riot police shoot tear gas to disperse supporters of ousted Honduras' President Manuel Zelaya during a demonstration outside the hotel where representatives of Zelaya and Honduras' interim government are meeting in Tegucigalpa, Friday, Oct. 9, 2009. [AP caption]

2. To their credit, the leading presidential candidates — Porfirio Lobo of the National Party and Elvin Santos of the Liberal Party — have contributed responsibly to resolving the crisis.

As the front-runner in the elections, Lobo has the most to lose from their being discredited, so he did push back strongly against Micheletti's constitution-suspending decree -- once the international response made clear how lethal a threat it posed to the elections' acceptance.

But I'm unaware of anything Santos has done to help resolve the crisis. Instead, on several occasions he's actively and violently intensified it: During his visit to the national university in August, when students jeered the candidate for his support of the coup, Santos' bodyguards fired their weapons and pistol-whipped one student; the charming episode was YouTubed. A month later, his goons responded to demonstrators heckling a Santos campaign appearance in Choluteca by attacking the protesters with machetes; this too was captured on video, broadcast on Ch. 36. As a result of his role in tearing apart the Liberal party, Santos was only polling a few points ahead of independent candidate Carlos Reyes in a late August national survey by COIMER&OP (solid polling with other newsworthy results that is still unreported by any English-language news outlet other than the site that first made it available).

3. [Acting U.S. Ambassador to the OAS] Amselem, a holdover from the George W. Bush Administration, called Zelaya's surprise reappearance in Tegucigalpa "irresponsible and foolish."

That he did, but he's not a 'holdover' in the sense of being a political appointee, and State Dept. spokesman Philip Crowley defended his comments as consistent with the administration's policy. While Amselem has throughout his career demonstrated the kind of energetic support of right-wing governments characteristic of Republican administrations, he's a career State functionary. He is serving as the acting OAS representative without Senate confirmation, at the pleasure of the Secretary of State. If Sec. Clinton wanted another State employee acting in that position until the new administration's pick is confirmed, it would happen. Speaking of that pick: Despite the declared intention to re-engage with the hemisphere, and despite the emergence in June of a crisis on which it was purportedly determined to work with and through the OAS, the Obama administration didn't even nominate its own OAS representative until September 15; I wouldn't bet on her being confirmed until sometime next year.

4. After setting up in the Brazilian embassy last month, [Zelaya] claimed Israeli mercenaries were trying to zap him and his entourage with high-frequency radiation.

The source of this assertion, Frances Robles' Sept. 24 Miami Herald article, was a hit piece intended to paint Zelaya as unhinged. The writer didn't repeat the president's actual words, just luridly characterized them -- and has yet to produce the quotes to back it up. But the damage is done; one commenter after another repeats her unsupported attribution as gospel.

Moreover, the smear is repeated without even a nod to the context in which Zelaya spoke to Robles: a day after the coup regime had laid military siege to the Brazilian embassy. The regime cut the power, water, and phone service to the whole neighborhood. They filled the street with tear gas (some of which infiltrated the embassy). They set off the LRAD sonic cannon from the street outside, well within the 300 feet within which the manufacturer warns the device causes damage. The weapon is designed to flush out buildings and disperse crowds; use against people who are trapped in the path of the highly focused, 150-dB directed sound is torture. Soldiers ordered out the residents of houses on all sides of the embassy and occupied the buildings. The next day the regime inserted at least one phone-jamming device into the embassy and directed others at it from outside. Pro-coup Honduran media reported that the sonic cannon was supplied by the Israelis.

A day after the Robles hit piece appeared, the regime subjected the embassy to chemical attacks and renewed the sonic blasting with the LRAD. More than a third of the 60 people inside the embassy had serious symptoms ranging from nosebleeds to respiratory irritation to vomiting blood, while medical personnel were prevented from entering the embassy for hours. That Manuel Zelaya -- what a craaazy guy.

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The main point of Padgett's article is that the State Department is considering supporting and recognizing the November elections even if Zelaya is not restored to office. Evidence for this includes a revealing email from "a high-level official in the U.S. OAS delegation" who is not Amselem, as well as signals new and old in State briefings that the U.S. is counting on the elections as an escape route.

What puts Padgett on a slightly higher level than the run of U.S. reporters and commenters is that he does some actual reporting, treats anti-coup sources seriously, manages to write about Zelaya's presence in the Brazilian embassy without using the phrase 'holed up', and -- most significantly -- recognizes that the rest of the world isn't blind and that their opinion counts for something:

if Micheletti doesn't yield the presidency back to Zelaya by Nov. 29, whoever wins that day is likely to be a global pariah — a fact that perhaps the U.S. needs to come to terms with.

Perhaps.
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Media suppression: a human rights abuse

The coup regime in Honduras has just ordered the shutdown [Sp.] of Radio Globo, which has consistently provided the most complete coverage of the resistance to the coup. Honduran media that have managed to keep functioning have done so by extensively self-censoring.

This is an outrage, a crime, and a violation of human rights.

Venezuela's attorney general has recently proposed a new media law whose broad language would allow the government to shut down hostile broadcasters and publications; it's to be introduced to the Venezuelan legislature sometime this fall. Yesterday, a group of Chavez supporters attacked the offices of Globovision, a private television broadcast channel that is, like most of the private media there, anti-Chavez. This, too, is an outrage.

Media suppression is bad, mkay? It's bad when legislated by elected governments, bad when it's done by thugs purportedly acting on their own, and bad when done by military-installed, illegitimate regimes whose police are beating up and arresting peaceful protestors. It would be bad at any time, but it's particularly damaging at this moment. People inside and outside Honduras are working hard to make public the abuses on the part of the Honduran coup regime, including media suppression, and to get some acknowledgement and criticism of the repression by U.S. government spokespeople. The silence has been deafening so far.

Actions to intimidate and shut down media by leaders who've provided concrete support for Zelaya's restoration threaten both to overshadow the Honduran coup regime's actions and provide a ready distraction for right-wing U.S. coup supporters in Congress who already see Zelaya and coup opponents as Chavez pawns. A recent LA Times feature on Daniel Ortega's attacks on press enemies will come in handy for others who insist on framing this military coup as a regrettable but understandable defense of "democracy" against the spreading menace of "socialist strongmen" in Latin America.

The situtation in Honduras is not about Hugo Chavez or Daniel Ortega. It's about the attack on an already seriously weak democracy there in the face of popular demands for real participation. It's about the determination of a tiny stratum of rich business families and their military henchmen to maintain their traditional monopoly on power. They can't stop the protests, they can't stop the news from getting out to the world on the internet, but they will do whatever they can to keep Hondurans, most of whom do not have internet access, from hearing what's going on in their own country.

I have to go; will add links later, but wanted to post the urgent news about Radio Globo. Update: 8:30pm, 4 Aug - Edited and links added.

Update 2: 6:00pm, 5 August - Radio Globo is defying the order to shut down, which was produced by the military and executed by a military judge. Good for them, and good news for Hondurans. Al Giordano has the details along with another piece of good news: The mayor of San Pedro Sula, who was driven out by coup supporters on July 2, is safe in exile, and the municipal workers have since that day prevented the attempted usurper, Micheletti's nephew William Hall Micheletti, from taking office. National marches are planned for San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa early next week.

Do your part to support them: If you're in Boston or Chicago, attend and/or promote the events of the Honduran speaking tour. Wherever you are, call on Sec. Clinton and Pres. Obama to do more to increase the pressure on the coup regime: freeze U.S.-held assets of coup backers and participants, revoke more diplomatic visas, start withdrawing U.S. military from the base at Soto Cano (Palmerola), denounce the regime's media suppression and the beatings and arrests of peaceful protestors, and make clear that the U.S. will not recognize a government resulting from elections held under the coup regime. Get your representative to sign the Congressional letter to Pres. Obama with the same message.

Soldiers today attacked students and administrators at the National Autonomous University of Honduras, in the capital, using batons, tear gas, and live bullets. Hundreds may be wounded. [Update 3: 4:00pm, 13 August - Dozens, in the event, but the rector of UNAH, who had been keeping the university neutral on the coup, is suing the police over the invasion of the campus, where she was one of those beaten.]

Update 4: 4:50pm, 13 August - The Venezuelan legislature will not be taking up the legislation proposed by the Attorney General anytime soon. This news is at the end of a hostile item on the legislature by AP reporter Christopher Toothaker. The people who wreaked havoc in the Globovision offices were arrested (via bloggingsbyboz.com, no link). The people who ordered the shutdown of Radio Globo in Honduras continue to severely beat [Sp.] members of Congress and others peacefully demonstrating against the coup, and no one in the U.S. executive branch seems to be a bit bothered. Huh.

[Image: Eduardo Maldonado, director of Radio Globo.]
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Honduras: waiting game is no game

It's sickening enough that there are members of Congress who openly support the coup in Honduras. But Ginger Thompson of the New York Times' Mexico bureau wants you to believe that the squawking of a little splinter group of Republican rightists represents "tiny cracks emerging in the solidarity of the coalition of countries demanding the return of the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya."

How else to intepret this passage, as she presents no other evidence for the assertion?

There were also signs of discord in the coalition of countries demanding Mr. Zelaya’s return. At a subcommittee hearing in Washington on Friday, several members of Congress criticized the Organization of American States for suspending Honduras not long after it lifted the suspension against Cuba.

Representative Connie Mack, Republican of Florida, urged the United States to cut its support for the O.A.S., which gets 60 percent of its financing from Washington. He said the organization’s response to the crisis in Honduras proved it was a “dangerous organization,” because it had sided with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, a stern ally of the ousted Honduran president, in undermining democracy in the region.

"What has happened in Honduras was not a military coup,” Mr. Mack said. “If anyone is guilty here it is Mr. Zelaya himself for having turned his back on his people and his own Constitution." [my emphasis]

The only way this would represent disunity among the countries pushing for Zelaya's return to office is if Miami were a separate country. Which, well... never mind.

The article as a whole is actually better than the run of recent big-media accounts of the coup and its aftermath. It reports the strikes and roadblocks by the popular movement supporting Zelaya's return to office, and reports the actual results of the CID-Gallup poll in Honduras showing a plurality of opposition to the coup (as compared with Reuters and Juan Forero of the Washington Post, who simply repeated the results as reported by La Prensa. Wild that "journalists" would take their cue from a coup-supporting paper that photoshopped the blood from the now-iconic photo of Isis Murillo (taken by Eduardo Verdugo for AP), shot dead by the military at the airport while waiting for Zelaya's attempted return.

Murillo's father, an anti-logging activist, spoke to the press recently recounting [Spanish] the shootings at the airport last Sunday and holding responsible Billy Joya, a retired Battalion 316 commander who's evaded every effort to bring him to justice for tortures and murders in the 1980s and who was named a ministerial advisor by the coup government. Yesterday Sr. Murillo was taken away by men in plain clothes. He is at serious risk.

Murillo's is one of the many lives at stake if the U.S. government does simply fold its hands and wait for magical results from the Costa Rica "negotiations". It may be that this administration, which is clearly eager to demonstrate that it opposes Zelaya, the Honduran popular movement, and Hugo Chavez, is backing away from its support for Zelaya's restoration. But Miami Republicans spreading pro-coup nonsense in a House hearing is not evidence for that. (For an interesting account of the hearing, see Adrienne Pine's anthropological field notes.)

Update: 12:30 pm, 13 July - All you'll hear about in the U.S. media is that the coup government lifted the curfew, but the repression is actually ratcheting up: Two leaders in the popular movement were assassinated [Spanish] over the weekend, and seven TeleSUR reporters and crew are in the process of being expelled [Sp.]. What will it take to get the U.S. government to cut off the rest of the aid and exert the many other forms of pressure it can bring to bear on the coup-makers?

The victims: Roger Ivan Bados, a labor leader and activist in the Democratic Unification party, killed on Saturday evening by three shots fired by a man on a bicycle near his house in San Pedro Sula. Ramon Garcia, from the province of Santa Barbara in easternwestern Honduras, was forced under off a bus by soldiers and shot; his sister and his nephew's wife were also wounded in the incident. [Updated to correct 11:45am 14 July.]

[Image: Anti-coup demonstration at U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa July 2; Eduardo Verdugo, AP]
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An injury to all

Many of our inalienable rights as expressed in the first ten amendments to the U.S. constitution are under attack here, but at least they're still in place as aspirational standards. And in practice, the First Amendment seems to be widely exercised and honored.

The citizens of the U.K. aren't quite so fortunate. They operate under libel laws that give those rich enough to bring court cases the tools to silence the less powerful. That happened early this month to two prominent British bloggers:

Craig Murray's website, Tim Ireland's website Bloggerheads, and that of Councillor Bob Piper, have been pulled by their service provider, Fasthosts Internet Ltd of Gloucester. The reason? Allegations made about Arsenal shareholder Alisher Usmanov. (... a number of websites, including Bob Piper's..., were removed even though they said nothing about this topic, simply because they shared a server with Craig Murray and Tim Ireland. Fasthosts' conduct is predictable, but also a disgrace).
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[Usmanov] has employed the libel lawyers, Schillings, who have applied pressure to service providers to pull the websites in question - before a single thing has been tested in court.

The good news is that the incident has generated a large show of support from across the ideological spectrum of Brit blogs, and the beginnings of an effort to change the libel law at long last. Follow the developments at Tim Ireland's new site.

I'm a little surprised to have heard nothing about this controversy over here; I ran across it completely by accident while following a search link to Lenin's Tomb. Pointers to U.S. blog coverage welcomed; so far the only one I know of is here.

Spread the word.

History repeats itself

And the process seems to go faster all the time. Will the next version of this book have to be written only ten years from now?

On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency
Mark Hertsgaard, June 1988

During the Reagan years, the White House Press Corps has "functioned less as an independent than as a palace court press," according to Hertsgaard. Basing his arguments on hundreds of interviews with important administration leaders and reporters, Hertsgaard convincingly portrays the White House press as noncritical and sycophantic. As members of the same power elite that they write about, White House reporters more often than not agree with the President's policies. In addition, they have been reluctant to strongly criticize Reagan for fear of being cut off from the flow of information and of losing their privileged status.

Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush
Eric Boehlert, May 2006

Lapdogs is the first book to demonstrate that, for the entire George W. Bush presidency, the news media have utterly failed in their duty as watchdog for the public. ... Throughout both presidential campaigns and the entire Iraq war to date, the media acted as a virtual mouthpiece for the White House, giving watered-down coverage of major policy decisions, wartime abuses of power, and egregious mistakes -- and sometimes these events never made it into the news at all. Finally, in Lapdogs, the press is being held accountable by one of its own.

Boehlert homes in on the reasons the press did not do its job: a personal affinity for Bush that journalists rarely displayed toward his predecessor, Bill Clinton; a Republican White House that threatened to deny access to members of the media who asked challenging questions or voiced criticism; and a press that feared being tainted by accusations of liberal bias. Moreover, journalists — who may have wanted to report accurately on the important stories — often found themselves at cross-purposes with media executives, many of whom were increasingly driven by economic concerns. Cowed by all of these factors, the media abandoned their traditional role of stirring up meaningful public debate.