Honduras (catch all)

[J Wolfsberger]

... On another Latin American front the OAS just issued a report highly critical of Chavez' repression of democratic opposition and freedom in Venezuela - its principal author was a Brazilian diplomat.

Now, that is nice to hear!

[Dayuhan]

The left will still be upset, but the left is congenitally upset, it's their nature. Probably Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia will hold out and refuse to recognize, but the impact of that will be insignificant. This round seems pretty much done.

What happens next depends largely on what Lobo and crowd decide to do. If they lapse back into the status quo, the extreme left will reorganize and there will be another round, whether electoral or otherwise. If Lobo can develop a functional economic policy, implement some effective reforms, and get some results, the radical position will be undercut and they will end up with little more than an ideological core.

It would not be at all a bad thing if a moderate left movement willing to respect the electoral process emerged, as has happened in many other Latin American countries.

[bourbon]

DEA Honduras drug killing part of new, aggressive strategy against illicit flights. The Washington Post, 24 June 2012.

With the new operation, Honduran and U.S. drug agents follow every flight they detect of unknown origin and work with non-U.S. contract pilots who don’t have the restrictive rules of engagement that the U.S. military do.

The area of Brus Laguna, where the DEA says an agent shot a drug suspect as he was reaching for his gun Saturday, is part of the remote Mosquitia region that is dotted with clandestine airstrips and a vast network of rivers for carrying drugs to the coast.

Saturday’s incident marked the first time that a DEA agent has killed someone in Central America since the agency began deploying specially trained agents several years ago to accompany local law enforcement personnel on all types of drug raids throughout the region, said DEA spokeswoman Dawn Dearden.

Man Is Killed by U.S. Agent in Drug Raid in Honduras, by Charlie Savage. The New York Times, 24 June 2012.

WASHINGTON — A United States Drug Enforcement Administration agent shot a man to death in Honduras during a raid on a smuggling operation early Saturday, a spokesman for the American Embassy in Honduras said Sunday. The man who was killed had been reaching for his weapon, the official said, and the agent fired in self-defense.

The shooting brought further attention to the growing American involvement in counternarcotics operations in Central America. Commando-style squads of D.E.A. agents have been working with local security forces in several countries and have been present at several firefights in Honduras in which people have died in the last 15 months.

[davidbfpo]

Within a wider, IMO partisan sketch of Honduras I found:

The region from which the ‘Contra’ war was launched against nearby Nicaragua is now a transfer zone for drug traffickers: the State Department asserts (with suspicious accuracy) that 79% of cocaine smuggling flights from South America land in Honduras, mostly in this region.

The biggest of the land disputes is in the Aguan valley, where several communities are struggling to hold on to land in the face of violent repression by the police and private security forces, ranging from the destruction of whole villages to the assassination of community leaders. There have been more than fifty politically related deaths in this area alone. The main landowner implicated in the violence, Miguel Facussé, was described by the New York Times as ‘the octogenarian patriarch of one of the handful of families controlling much of Honduras’ economy’. He was also a strong supporter of the coup. In October 2011, Wikileaks released cables from the US embassy which revealed that he had been known to them as a cocaine importer since 2004.

Link:http://www.opendemocracy.net/john-pe...ars-after-coup

[davidbfpo]

Now a BBC reporter has been in Honduras:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...lk/9737563.stm

This just sounds like an issue that one day will be rather more high profile:

An elite band of US DEA agents have been embedded with the Honduran security forces in an operation supported by six State Department helicopters, piloted by non-US security contractors, who are not bound by the strict rules of engagement imposed on the DEA.