Honduras Roundup II, Day 3
- Protesters clashed with the military in increasingly violent standoffs, and the Chinese news agency Xinhua reported 2 deaths and at least 60 people injured. Roberto Micheletti’s men shut down television and radio stations. Guatamela, El Salvador and Nicaragua closed their borders for 48 hours, and Grupo de Rio countries refused to recognize Roberto Micheletti as interim president.
- Alvaro Vargas Llosa in the NYTimes Op-Ed page says the military fell for Manuel Zelaya’s trap and managed to transform him from an unpopular president into an international cause célèbre. He highlights the newfound influence of Hugo Chavez, “the unlikely champion of Jeffersonian democracy in Latin Ameria,” whose repeated promises to overthrow Roberto Micheletti, the current president, have dominated the Spanish press and horrified the coup orchestrators. In response, Micheletti told local Honduras radio: “Nobody scares us.”
- The NYTimes quotes Obama saying he doesn’t want to return to a “dark past” and gossips about the Organization of American States meeting, where Zelaya reportedly “annoyed” Hillary Clinton by dragging her to his room late at night to shake hands with the family. (Inexplicably it says Clinton flew to Honduras for the meeting, which took place in Nicaragua.)
- Narco News is all over this story. Yesterday it dug into Honduran Twitter feeds and noticed shifting alliances: “Yesterday, the pro-coup defenders seemed to outnumber the critics of the coup on Twitter. But that’s old news now: most of the ‘tweets’ have turned against the coup.”
- The reason people have turned against the coup has a lot to do with the United States. Amy Goodman interviews an NYU professor here who explains why: the Honduran economy depends almost wholly on trade with the U.S. and remittances. Roberto Micheletti said as much to the WSJ. “If [the U.S.] does not recognize us, it would be condemning to failure the aspirations of Hondurans.”
Post Your Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment
T/S Members
Log in with your True/Slant account.
Previously logged in with Facebook?
Log in to True/Slant with Facebook
Thanks for adding clarity to what is going on in Honduras. I think things are about to get very exciting there.