Translation mine.Great. Now all we need is for a couple of local, liberal-to-left-leaning gringo expats who write for alternative or indie media to turn up missing (and later dead), and the picture will truly be complete. And the State Dept. will truly have an embarrassment on its hands. Shit, it’s only been…what? 35 years?There’s a second part to this piece, which really deserves its own entry, as it shows just what dirty tricks are being used (and what the protestors are doing to foil them):The repressive forces of Honduras posted in the El Paraíso region are preparing a sports stadium 8 km away as a holding tank for arrested supporters of the legitimate president, Manuel Zelaya.The preparations were denounced on Saturday by demonstrator Eddy Guifarro, during a telephone call to Venezuela’s Bolivarian News Agency (ABN).“Very near here, there’s a stadium where the national soccer league holds tournaments, and it appears they’re preparing it to be used as a place to bring persons they’ve captured. A moment ago we were watching police agents carrying and distributing tear-gas grenades,” Guifarro said.
Again, translation mine.Let’s hope the democratic forces prevail against the coup, so that this nonsense comes to an end BEFORE we see the movie Missing enacted all over again.UPDATE #1: There are already a number of confirmed deaths being reported in the region. The first to fall is 22-year old Pedro Mandiel Martínez, dead of at least 10 stab wounds. Otto has an excerpt on him in English; for photos of the deceased, see Aporrea. Two close-up shots clearly show bruising on the victim’s wrist, consistent with the shape of handcuffs.UPDATE #2: Venezuelan filmmaker Angel Palacios, best known for his documentary Llaguno Bridge: Keys to a Massacre, reports that Mandiel Martínez’s body was “planted” near where demonstrators have gathered, probably in an attempt by police to frame the peaceful protesters as the killers. This sort of thing is very consistent with the Pinochetist strategy of framing leftists as killers and communists, the better to have excuses to round up, torture and massacre them.Guifarro is part of a disciplinary committee created by the demonstrators to detect infiltrators “who tried to bring weapons and suggest to others that they should provoke the police.”At this time, in El Paraíso, there are some 3,000 persons gathered to await the return of President Zelaya, while the police cordon was reinforced to prevent the demonstrators from reaching the Honduras/Nicaragua border.Yesterday, the constitutional president was on Honduran soil for a few hours, but he returned to Nicaragua due to threats from military putschists.Guifarro says that the situation was “very calm” during the night, when the mobilized demonstrators remained resistant while some people “tried to cross [the border] in various places, but were stopped in some of them by mountains and hills.”“The police cordon is no longer being reinforced. Five or six police trucks came,” Guifarro says.According to Guifarro, the security forces could be implementing “a joint movement” to hold detainees in military prisons in the zone.Asked what measures the demonstrators are taking, Guifarro says that “the word, up to the end, is to resist peacefully, because there have been no incidents, except those which they [the military and the police] have occasioned.”Describing the spirit of the people assembled in El Paraíso, Guifarro called it “the best, because there are people who haven’t eaten, who’ve suffered the cold all night, but the people are full of emotion, and more of them keep arriving. There are some who walked three days through the jungle just to get here.”Guifarro added that the “de facto” regime of Roberto Micheletti “is a complete farce”, and that he holds him responsible for all the persons taken prisoners, among them several minors.
