EQUIPO NIZKOR |
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29jun09
Coup d'etat against President Zelaya
The consequences of impunity in Honduras
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On the morning of Sunday 28th June, the peaceful sleep of the population was interrupted by the coup d'etat carried out by the Armed Forces together with the Judicial and Legislative Powers, the Public Ministry and the majority of the media.
During the afternoon, the deputies appointed Roberto Micheletti Baín as President of the National Congress in place of Manuel Zelaya Rosales. Despite not being recognised by the international community, Baín proceeded to name a new Government Cabinet.
President Zelaya was expelled to Costa Rica hours after having been threatened with death and taken by force from his home by a military unit that beat and subdued his Presidential Guard of Honour, which, according to the head of state, was loyal up to the last moment.
The soldiers did not even give Zelaya Rosales time to dress, and he had to arrive in San José in Costa Rica as a special visitor in his nightclothes, as he reported after his arrival in San José.
Zelaya was transferred to Air Base Hernán Acosta Mejía, where, on the previous Thursday the President had led a popular demonstration to recover voting materials for the opinion poll that was scheduled to take place on Sunday 28th June. Once in the Base, he was obliged to board the presidential airplane West Wing destined for San José, where they landed under conditions that have not yet been fully clarifed by the Costa Rican government, above all with respect to the soldiers who held the head of state in custody, and who entered the country carrying weapons of war.
This much is known from the story run by the newspaper "Tiempo de Tegucigalpa", in their edition of 29th June 2009, about the beginning of the military coup d'etat, the first against a constitutional president since that carried out on 3rd October 1963 against president Ramón Villeda Morales, led by Oswaldo López Arellano.
Without a doubt, this coup d'etat destabilises central American countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, who are witnessing the rebirth of the military national socialism introduced by the Argentinian Armed Forces between 1980 and 1984. Coincidentally, in the spring of 1981 the command centre of the "Grupo Exterior de Tareas", or "Andean Task Force" as it is called by the Argentinian generals , was moved from Guatemala to Honduras. This force aspired to imitate the infamous "Einsatzgruppen" that the National Socialist party used in Eastern Europe.
The then Colonel Gustavo Álvarez Martínez (who graduated from the Argentinian Military College in 1961) offered Willian Casey, director of the CIA at that time, a base from which to harass Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan Contras had begun their training in the Argentine III Army Corps, under the instruction of an officer called Seineldín, subsequently chief of the Argentine Carapintadas ("Painted Faces") and bodyguard to Manuel Noriega, the CIA's man in Panamá, until Noriega fell from favour. It was in this context that the tragedy in Honduras came about, along with the actions of Task Force 3-16 led by Billy Joya, the Argentinian military, and a viceroy called John Dimitri Negroponte.
Since those days -which, according to the Spanish military advisors and civil consultants who replaced the Argentinian troops after the debacle of the Falklands War, ended with an an apparently perfect model of impunity- these ghosts emerge, and they are no more than the successors of those National Socialist warriors responsible for over 250,000 victims of their extermination operations. Now they are coming to complete their reactionary political model, a mixture of oligarchy, National Socialism, and Spanish neofalangism.
[Source: By Gregorio Dionis, President of Equipo Nizkor, 29jun09]
 | This document has been published on 16Jul09 by the Equipo Nizkor and Derechos Human Rights. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. |