June, 30 2009, 03:06pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Lisa Sullivan at 011-251-935-0182 (from within USA) or at info@soaw.org
Denounce the Human Rights Abuses in Honduras
The situation in Honduras turned violent when over
10,000
people gathered in the streets to protest the coup Monday evening.
Using tear gas, high-powered water and guns (it is still not clear
whether soldiers were
armed with rubber bullets or otherwise) many people were wounded and
there has been one confirmed death in the capital, Tegucigalpa.
In the capital, pro-coup marches are occurring, defended by the police
and national guard. As of Tuesday morning, the resistance movement to
the coup is gathering in Tegucigalpa, to determine how and where to
take to the streets. Therefore
WASHINGTON
The situation in Honduras turned violent when over
10,000
people gathered in the streets to protest the coup Monday evening.
Using tear gas, high-powered water and guns (it is still not clear
whether soldiers were
armed with rubber bullets or otherwise) many people were wounded and
there has been one confirmed death in the capital, Tegucigalpa.
In the capital, pro-coup marches are occurring, defended by the police
and national guard. As of Tuesday morning, the resistance movement to
the coup is gathering in Tegucigalpa, to determine how and where to
take to the streets. Therefore, there is anticipation of violence
today, as soldiers are expected to react violently today to protesters
as they did yesterday.
Violence
has also broken out outside of Tegucigalpa. In the interior of the
country, especially in the state of Olancho, the military has been
conducting home invasions in order to capture and detain youth. Many
youth have fled to the mountains, and their whereabouts are unknown.
The military is violently disbursing pro-Zelaya marches, and many
protesters are missing. The local media is refusing to air any
comments about the violence and human rights abuses taking place in the
country, insisting that nothing is amiss. An international news crew
from TeleSur was detained and beaten while
broadcasting the oppression of protesters by the military.
Yesterday in a meeting of the Rio Group, President Zelaya reiterated
that he is the only president of Honduras, and that he has not stepped
down. He declared his plans to return to Honduras on Thursday, mostly
likely accompanied by the Secretary-General of the Organization of
American States (OAS), Jose Miguel Insulza. Argentine president
Cristina Fernandez also plans to accompany Zelaya on Thursday. The
coup in Honduras has been unanimously
condemned throughout the Western Hemisphere, and has also been
condemned by the United Nations and European Union. Zelaya spoke on
Tuesday in front of the United Nations.
Notably, two army battalions have refused orders from the coup government. They are the Fourth Infantry Battalion in
the city of Tela and the Tenth Infantry Battalion in La Ceiba (the
second largest city in Honduras), both located in the state of
Atlantida.
The
coup leaders include several well-known human rights abusers, such as
the retired Captain Billy Fernando Joya Amendola, who was a member of
the CIA-trained 3-16 batallion from 1984-91, one of the most notorious
battalions noted for human rights abuses during that time.. Bertha
Olivar, of COFADEH, calls the coup advisers a line-up of the "Galley of
Terror". Furthermore, two coup leaders, Air Force Commander General
Luis Javier Prince Suazo and Army General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, were
trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation
(WHINSEC, Formerly known as the School of the Americas--SOA), a US army
school located in Fort Benning, GA, whose graduates have been linked to
some of the largest human rights atrocities in Latin America's history.
COFADEH
(Comite de Familiares de Detenidos y Desaparecidos en Honduras or
the Honduran Committee of Families of the Disappeared or Detained), a
leading Human Rights group in Honduras, has gone hospital to hospital
attempting to document
the cases of violence and human rights abuses. They are conducting this
documentation work because the national Human
Rights Commission, headed by Ramon Custodio and the Fiscal
(Attorney General), Sandra Ponce, have thus far refused to document and
denounce human rights abuses since the coup began Monday morning and
are fully supporting the coup government.
One
of the first moves of the the army and de facto government was to cut
electricity and telephone lines throughout most of the country. Later
Monday two television channels were re-established, both of which
maintained that Zelaya had voluntary resigned, the change of power was
constitutionally legitimate and that the new President had the support
of the majority of the Honduran people. Through TeleSur, a
transnational South American television news station, the public in
South America has been able to see on the ground footage of protests in
Honduras as well as streamed footage from the Honduran pro-coup news
stations. Hondurans within their country are much less informed than
larger Latin America because the coup government has been able to stop
TeleSur from broadcasting. Information is arriving to Honduran people
about the whereabouts of President Manuel Zelaya and the vast
international support he has by way of people from outside Honduras
calling to cell phones of friends and family inside who are inside the
country. The biggest issue now are human rights abuses inside the
country.
COFADEH calls on the international human rights
community to denounce the blatant disregard of human rights abuses by
Ramon Custodio and Sandra Ponce.
Bertha Olivar, of COFADEH,
is available for interviews (in Spanish) by the media. She can be
reached in Honduras at 011-504-8991-0259 (cell) or 011-501-222-7144
(land line).
School of the Americas Watch, Latin American Office
Barquisimeto, Venezuela
SOA Watch is an independent organization that seeks to close the US Army School of the Americas, under whatever name it is called, through vigils and fasts, demonstrations and nonviolent protest, as well as media and legislative work.
LATEST NEWS
Manhattan DA: Trump's Intimidation Efforts Won't Be Tolerated
Alvin Bragg's comments came after Trump urged his supporters to "protest" and "take our nation back" ahead of his expected indictment.
Mar 19, 2023
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said Saturday that former President Donald Trump's efforts to undermine his prosecutorial authority won't be tolerated.
In a memo to colleagues, Bragg wrote that "we do not tolerate attempts to intimidate our office or threaten the rule of law in New York."
"Our law enforcement partners will ensure that any specific or credible threats against the office will be fully investigated and that the proper safeguards are in place so all 1,600 of us have a secure work environment," Bragg continued.
"As with all of our investigations, we will continue to apply the law evenly and fairly, and speak publicly only when appropriate," he added.
"We do not tolerate attempts to intimidate our office or threaten the rule of law in New York."
Bragg's email didn't specifically name Trump, referring only to the "public comments surrounding an ongoing investigation by this office."
But it came just hours after the former president and leading 2024 GOP candidate claimed on his social media platform that he "will be arrested" on Tuesday and called on his supporters to "protest" and "take our nation back."
Trump is expected to be indicted by a Manhattan grand jury in a criminal case involving hush money paid to women who alleged sexual encounters with the former president, but its timing remains uncertain.
In a follow-up post on Truth Social, Trump wrote: "It's time!!! We are a nation in steep decline... We just can't allow this anymore. They're killing our nation as we sit back and watch. We must save America! Protest, protest, protest!!!"
Trump's call to action echoed how, six weeks after losing the 2020 presidential election, he fired off a tweet encouraging his supporters to join a "big protest" in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. "Be there, will be wild!" he wrote. Hundreds of far-right extremists came and—after Trump told them to march from a rally near the White House to the Capitol—ransacked the halls of Congress in a bid to prevent lawmakers from certifying President Joe Biden's win. Several people died as a result of the insurrection, which was precipitated by Trump and his Republican allies' ceaseless lies about voter fraud.
Mother Jones' D.C. bureau chief David Corn noted that Trump has recently "excused or dismissed the violence of January 6."
"He is an authoritarian willing to (again) use violence for his own ends," Corn tweeted. "That is a threat to the nation."
Trump started priming his supporters for unrest more than a year ago. At a January 2022 rally in Texas, the ex-president promised to pardon January 6 rioters if he wins in 2024 and called for protests if prosecutors investigating his effort to subvert the 2020 election and other alleged crimes attempt to bring charges.
"If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had... in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta, and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt," Trump told a crowd of his supporters 14 months ago.
On Saturday, HuffPost's senior White House correspondent S.V. Dáte asked if high-ranking Republicans had anything to say about Trump's most recent threats.
"If a new round of political violence occurs, McCarthy should absolutely shoulder some of the blame."
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other right-wing lawmakers quickly made it clear that they're siding with Trump over the rule of law.
Trump is expected to be charged in connection with payments his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, made to buy the silence of adult film actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal—both of whom say they had affairs with Trump—at the height of the 2016 presidential election.
Cohen has testified that at Trump's direction, he organized payments totaling $280,000 to Daniels and McDougal. According to Cohen, the Trump Organization reimbursed him $420,000 and categorized it as a legal fee. Trump's former fixer pleaded guilty to federal campaign violations in 2018.
Trump has so far evaded charges but that could soon change, as Manhattan prosecutors are expected to accuse Trump of overseeing the false recording of expenses in his company's internal records.
McCarthy on Saturday described Bragg's probe as "an outrageous abuse of power by a radical D.A. who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump."
"I'm directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions," he tweeted.
According toMSNBC's Hayes Brown:
By the time he fired off his own tweet, McCarthy had presumably seen Trump calling his supporters into the streets, echoing the incitement of violence against Congress two years ago. The speaker lived through that experience and witnessed firsthand the effect of Trump's words. And yet he opted to pretend otherwise in the weeks and months after the January 6 attack as he flew to Mar-a-Lago in supplication. In handing over unvetted security footage from the attack to a far-right propagandist last month, McCarthy is once again complicit in trying to whitewash the assault. If a new round of political violence occurs, McCarthy should absolutely shoulder some of the blame.
McCarthy was far from alone. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), for example, baselessly declared: "If they can come for Trump, they will come for you. This type of stuff only occurs in third world authoritarian countries."
The GOP's current framing of ongoing investigations into Trump as political "witch hunts" is not new. McCarthy and others reacted in a similar manner when the FBI in early August searched Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort and removed boxes of documents as part of a federal probe into the ex-president's handling of classified materials.
In New York, meanwhile, law enforcement and security agencies at all levels are reportedly preparing for the possibility of a Trump indictment as early as this week.
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The New York Times reported that if "Trump is arraigned, he will almost certainly be released without spending any time behind bars because the indictment is likely to contain only nonviolent felony charges."
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As The Associated Pressobserved, it's not clear when the other investigations into Trump "will end or whether they might result in criminal charges."
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Italy legalized same-sex civil unions in 2016, but it stopped short of granting gay and lesbian couples the right to adopt amid opposition from the Catholic Church. Since then, courts have made decisions on a case-by-case basis in response to lawsuits from prospective adoptive parents.
Some municipalities, however, "decided to act unilaterally," Agence France-Pressereported Saturday. "Milan had been registering children of same-sex couples conceived overseas through surrogacy—which is illegal in Italy—or medically assisted reproduction, which is only available for heterosexual couples."
"But its center-left mayor Beppe Sala revealed this week that this had stopped after the interior ministry sent a letter insisting that the courts must decide," the news agency noted.
In a podcast, Sala said that "it is an obvious step backwards from a political and social point of view."
"I put myself in the shoes of those parents who thought they could count on this possibility in Milan," he added, vowing to fight back.
"This government is the maximum expression of homophobia."
AFP reported that "about 20 children are waiting to be registered in Milan," citing leading LGBTQ+ rights campaigner Fabrizio Marrazzo. "A mother or father who is not legally recognized as their child's parent can face huge bureaucratic problems, with the risk of losing the child if the registered parent dies or the couple's relationship breaks down."
Earlier this week, Marrazzo said that "when a law is unjust and discriminatory those who engage in politics must have the courage to disobey it."
In the words of Gabriele Piazzoni, secretary-general of Arcigay, "The ban is one of the most concrete manifestations of the fury that the right-wing majority is unleashing against LGBTI people."
Last year, before she was elected to lead Italy's far-right coalition government, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of the fascist Brothers of Italy Party said in a speech, "Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby!"
Earlier this week, The Associated Pressreported, "a Senate commission blocked an attempt to recognize birth certificates of the children of same-sex couples issued by other E.U. states."
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Surrounded by students, teachers, and advocates, Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Friday afternoon signed into law a bill to provide breakfast and lunch at no cost to all of the state's roughly 820,000 K-12 pupils regardless of their household income.
The move to make Minnesota the fourth U.S. state to guarantee universal free school meals—joining California, Maine, and Colorado—elicited praise from progressives.
"Beautiful," tweeted Stephanie Kelton, a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University.
"No child should go hungry for any reason, period."
UC-Berkeley professor and former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich wrote on social media: "Let this serve as a reminder that poverty is a policy choice. In the richest country in the world, it is absolutely inexcusable that millions of our children go to school hungry because they are living in poverty."
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"As a former teacher, I know that providing free breakfast and lunch for our students is one of the best investments we can make to lower costs, support Minnesota's working families, and care for our young learners and the future of our state," Walz said. "This bill puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up, and I am grateful to all of the legislators and advocates for making it happen."
The Minnesota House—led by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party, the state's Democratic affiliate—first passed the bill in February in a 70-58 party-line vote. The state Senate—where the DFL holds just a single-seat advantage—approved it on Tuesday by a 38-26 margin. The state House rubber-stamped an amended version of the bill on Thursday.
In a now-viral clip from the state Senate's debate over the bill earlier this week. Sen. Steve Drazkowski (R-20) questioned whether hunger is really a problem in Minnesota—even as the state's food banks reported a record surge in visits last year, months before federal lawmakers slashed pandemic-era Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
"I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that is hungry," Drazkowski said before voting against the bill. "I have yet to meet a person in Minnesota that says they don't have access to enough food to eat."
During Friday's signing ceremony, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan (DFL) said, "To our decision-makers who believe they have never met someone who is experiencing or has experienced hunger: Hi, my name is Peggy Flanagan, and I was 1 in 6 of those Minnesota children who experienced hunger."
"By providing free breakfast and lunch to all of our students, we are removing barriers and removing stigma from the lunch room," said Flanagan. "We are helping family pocketbooks, especially for those 1 in 4 who don't qualify for financial assistance with school meals. We are leading with our values that no child should go hungry for any reason, period."
"This is an investment in the well-being of our children, as well as an investment in their academic success," Flanagan added, calling the "generation-changing" bill "the most important thing" she's ever worked on in her life.
"By providing free breakfast and lunch to all of our students, we are removing barriers and removing stigma from the lunch room... This is an investment in the well-being of our children, as well as an investment in their academic success."
As Minnesota Reformerreported: "The majority of Minnesota schools receive federal funding from the National School Lunch Program, which reimburses schools for each meal served, though it doesn't cover the cost of the entire meal. Under the new law, schools are prohibited from charging students for the remaining cost, and the state will foot the rest of the bill—about $200 million annually."
MPR noted that "the legislation is similar to a program that was introduced during the pandemic to provide meals for all students, but was discontinued at the end of last year."
Last month, The Star Tribune editorial board opined that providing free breakfast and lunch to all of Minnesota's students, including affluent ones, is "excessive."
Pushing back against this argument for means-testing, Darcy Stueber—director of Nutrition Services for Mankato Area Public Schools and public policy chair of the Minnesota School Nutrition Association—asserted that meals should be guaranteed to all kids at no cost, just like other basic learning necessities.
"We don't charge for Chromebooks and desks and things like that," she told MPR. "It's a part of their day and they're there for so many hours. It just completes that whole learning experience for the child."
Minnesota Rep. Sydney Jordan (DFL-60A), the bill's lead author, made the same point to counter GOP lawmakers' complaints following the initial passage of the legislation.
"We give every kid in our school a desk," Jordan said last month. "There are lots of kids out there that can afford to buy a desk, but they get a desk because they go to school."
Walz, for his part, stressed Friday that his administration is "just getting started" when it comes to boosting education funding.
"The big stuff," said the governor, "is still coming."
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