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'Honduras: The Country That Kills Its Prisoners'

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“It seems the most violent country in the world also has the most violent prisons in the world. Or at least the prisons in which some of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history have taken place,” reports In Sight Crime: Organized Crime in Americas this week.

 

“In the most recent massacre, in 2012, more than 300 people were burned to death; in the penultimate, more than 100; in the one prior to that, more than 60. And while these outbursts have shaken Honduras, the reality is that assassinations, sponsored or permitted by the state, occur every other day.”

 

What a barbaric country. Naturally, after reading the two paragraphs above, one would think the Honduras government is out-of-control, inhumane, to be shunned. And it is. The article continues to elaborate on human rights atrocities committed or permitted by Honduras officials against its people. In Sight Crime does not stand alone in painting such a one-sided picture of Honduras. It’s just that its news story, that appeared in El Faro and was translated and reprinted with permission, was the one that crossed this author’s desk today. 

 

No wonder many Americans’ comments and actions about their Honduran neighbors in Latin America, and Hondurans that managed to flee to the U.S. are less than compassionate, often blatantly racist. This is nothing new to Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of School of the Americas (SOA) Watch.

 

A native of Louisiana, Fr. Roy and other Americans who’ve dared to look behind mainstream media’s curtain, behind the US propaganda machine, and read the censored history of South American countries, have a completely different perspective about such places as Honduras, despite knowing daily occurring atrocities there.

 

Thousands of human rights advocates join Fr. Roy in working to stop such atrocities by going to the heart of the problem, one beating not in Honduras, but rather in the United States, specifically at Fort Benning, Georgia. There, US military officers professionally train Honduras leaders in torture and other terror tactics. 

 

Honduras SOA-trained Leaders Roll Call

 

Juan Orlando Hernandez, Honduras’ president and former head of Honduras’ National Congress, is regarded by many as having stolen the 2013 elections through numerous forms of fraud and control over the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the Justice Department, and the Supreme Court. As he prepared to take office on Jan. 27, his government had already begun forming. In Dec., new police and military leadership were sworn in, charged to conduct what was widely feared to be intensification of an already violent campaign against social movements under Hernandez’s rule. 

 

Ramón Antonio Sabillón: “Given the US Embassy’s support for Hernandez, with the US Ambassador publicly lauding the elections as ‘transparent’ hours after the polls closed – directly contradicting reports of vote buying, armed gunmen, and fraudulent vote tally sheets — it is no surprise the new Police Chief is Ramón Antonio Sabillón,” School of the Americas Watch wrote.

 

Honduras’ El Heraldo newspaper reported Sabillón to be “a person of confidence of the US Embassy.”  The same article reported Sabillón was “first commander of the Bortac border course that the US Embassy imparts.” SOA Watch says, “With Sabillón, the US has someone who will presumably do its bidding and further enforce the imposition of the extreme neoliberal and privatization agenda in the face of popular opposition.” 

 

In the same vein, Elder Madrid Guerra, was named new Director of Strategy for the Secretary of Security. Guerra was accused of torture, abuse of authority and illegal dentention of 24 people during protests against the August 2009 US-backed coup d’etat. According to testimony of one victim, when the people had been illegally detained, then Police Commisioner Elder Madrid appeared and taunted them.

 

Madrid asked, “How much does Chavez give you, communists?” and told them, “We’re going to gas you.” 

 

Victims that day suffered serious torture resulting in bone fractures. A tube was pierced into the hand of one victim until it bled. The accounts of tactics used on them were horrendous.

 

Fredy Santiago Díaz Zelaya: 

Two-time SOA graduate General Fredy Santiago Díaz Zelaya was named Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces. Zelaya previously was Commander of the Army. The army was deployed in many parts of the country. He’s been implicated in numerous human rights violations, violent repression of protest, violent evictions of small farmers, numerous murders, and more.  Despite all that, or perhaps due to it, at the ceremony where Zelaya received the baton to become the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he declared to Hondurans, “Not I nor the soldiers will violate your human rights, and if someone does they will be subject to a legal process.” 

 

“This lip service to human rights – regardless of the reality that the Army has embraced impunity for human rights abuses under Díaz Zelaya — is exactly what the US Embassy is looking for and fits right into the US Embassy’s message,” SOA Watch says. “Given General Zelaya’s year-long, high-level training on Military Command and Chiefs of Staff at the School of the Americas, one can imagine he is well schooled in exactly what the US wants and will be a willing partner in using the military to advance U.S. corporate interests in Honduras.”

 

School of the Americas is a U.S. military torture and terror training facility at Fort Benning, Georgia. It trains most of Latin America’s most violent leaders. It’s the training facility Father Roy has dedicated his adult life to close, due to criminals the facility manufactures by training and graduating them to return to Latin America to conduct the Pentagon’s dirty work there. 

 

The SOA training is transferrable: anyone trained can return to their countries and train others. Thus, terror multiplies exponentially. 

Espinoza Posadas: The new second in command of the Honduran Armed Forces is another SOA grad, Vice Admiral Rigoberto Espinoza Posadas, former Commander of the Honduran Navy, also troublesome

 

Héctor Orlando Caballero Espinoza: Posadas’ former post of Navy Commander was filled by his SOA classmate, Héctor Orlando Caballero Espinoza. 

 

Coronel Francisco Isaías Álvarez Urbina: “To round it out, Coronel Francisco Isaías Álvarez Urbina, a 1983 SOA grad, replaces Díaz Zelaya as Commander of the Army,” SOA Watch says.

 

General Julián Pacheco: Two-time SOA-graduate General Julián Pacheco was ratified to continue as head of the Bureau of Investigation and State Intelligence. 

 

The Bureau was created in 2012 independently from other agencies and institutions, to be the advisory arm of the president regarding decisions about preventing and repressing crime. It was to be responsible for providing confidential investigation and intelligence to the government. Hondurans thus had a man professionally trained in torture and other terror tactics by the US military, advising the president about crime.

 

Publicly, this Bureau is said to be fighting organized crime, extortion, kidnapping and coordinating security and defense. An IPS article reported about its creation, however, it’s a key agency in the security structure that’s apparently neither accountable to any other body nor under any democratic civilian control.

 

“We are back again with old national security concepts dating from the Cold War era in Central America,” Mirna Flores told IPS, “[T]he danger is that the former anti-communist rhetoric may be used against the ‘new threats’, such as allegedly criminal youth, dissidents against the regime, social protests or for the imposition of absolute powers.” 

 

SOA Watch says, “Notably, Gen. Pacheco is well-prepared for this position by a ‘Psychological Operations’ course at the US Army School of the Americas.”

Regardless of the dangers of suffering assaults, rapes, kidnappings and even death, the migration of Hondurans will continue. (Photo Credit: Border Issues)

 

These appointments and ratification of General Pacheco were just part of the preparation for Juan Orlando Hernandez’s presidency. As head of Congress, Pacheco pushed through legislation, including a law called “Measures to make the public administration more efficient, Improve services to citizens, and strengthen transparency in government.”

 

The name Bureau of Investigation and State Intelligence “obscures the reality that this law consolidates power for the President, including giving Hernandez the power to restructure the whole state administrative apparatus or enable private enterprises to carry out government functions,” reports SOA Watch. The new laws give new powers, such as cutting public services, to the President’s Council of Ministers, that now holds meetings in secret.

 

Under the U.S.-backed Honduras government brutality, among other victims, journalists and their families are continually targeted-killing subjects. This helps maintain U.S.-Honduras secrecy about high-level abuses and the source of the professionally trained perpetrators of the atrocities.

 

The Hernandez administration’s Honduras agenda and its widespread popular resistance, make it even more important to hold the U.S. government accountable for validating the Hernandez regime, for training and funding the Honduras military and police leaders in brutality, for repressing social movements and thus, oppressing the people. 

 

Until Americans hold their country accountable for Honduras atrocities, and similar ones in other Latin American countries where leaders were trained at the School of the Americas, more Hondurans and other Latinos will continue fleeing to the U.S. to escape violence, repression and oppression that the US government embedded in their homelands. 

 

Smearing Honduras in articles, such as the one In Sight News published this week, appears to be U.S. government propaganda, rather than insightful.

 

Persecuting Hondurans for immigrating to the U.S. is short-sighted to the point of legally blind.

 

Sources: In Sight CrimeSchool of the Americas Watch, IPS

 

 

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    • paul brown

      Right-wing groups that vilify Latin American people’s struggle for freedom are clearly parroting the lies of the US government. We should turn over their rocks so people can see how vile they are.

    • No time

      Its not a very nice place to raise a family, which begs the question, why do they? If every body stops having children, then pretty soon they won’t have any one to kill. That will drive them crazy, with no one to kill, they will go out of their minds.

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