People in Honduras have burned down government offices and demanded U.S. drug agents leave the area after news got out that American and Honduran forces shot and killed up to six innocent Hondurans.
The dead included two pregnant women and two children. The Drug Enforcement Administration agents, with their Honduran counterparts, fired from U.S. helicopter gunships at a boat carrying the civilians, mistaking it for their intended target – a boat carrying drug traffickers.
Anger is aimed at both Honduran authorities and U.S. authorities. “These innocent residents were not involved in the drug problem, were in their boat going about their daily fishing activities … when they gunned them down from the air,” Lucio Vaquedano, mayor of the coastal town of Ahuas, said Wednesday.
“For centuries we have been a peaceful people who live in harmony with nature, but today we declared these Americans to be persona non grata in our territory,” the statement continued.
Honduran news media and human rights organizations began publicizing the incident, of which the American people were not informed, and claimed the DEA agents themselves did the shooting. But after news broke out, U.S. authorities started claiming the American agents merely assisted Honduran forces, without doing any of the shooting themselves and that didn’t shoot first.
Honduras has become a hub of drug-trafficking, particularly cocaine, which has earned it renewed focus from Washington.
The Obama administration chose to support the illegal military coup in Honduras in 2009, which ousted democratically elected Jose Manuel Zelaya. The coup leaders continued to receive U.S. aid as American military and DEA presence in the country began to expand. This began a descent into what Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California, called “a human rights and security abyss.”
More than 600 U.S. troops are stationed in Honduras and the DEA has a Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team based there. By the end of 2011, 42 Honduran law enforcement agents were working with the DEA, despite widespread human rights abuses and forced disappearances of political opponents and journalists.
“We have seen over the years that whenever the military interfaces with the populace, incidents of human rights abuses go way up,” said George Withers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America. “We’re concerned that the U.S. is encouraging the use of the military for police work.”
In a written statement, the Committee of the Families of the Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), a human rights organization, said that “a foreign army [i.e., the U.S. army] protected under the new hegemonic concept of the ‘war on drugs,’ legalized with reforms to the 1953 Military Treaty, violates our territorial sovereignty and kills civilians as if it was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria.”
COFADEH called Honduras “a failed state” and said “the so called Honduran authorities have the ethical and political duty to demand from the U.S. Department of State an explanation and a public apology, and to punish those responsible.”
"Honduras has become a hub of drug-trafficking, particularly cocaine, which has earned it renewed focus from Washington." This statement is true and has been true everyplace that the US government sets up shop on the war on drugs, so, who is running and benefiting from the illegal drug business in those countries?
Good point, Walter.
Everything that US is been doing (militarely) has been a mistake, no matter if is about wars on drug or wars on humanity, or the democracy itself.
Mistakes imply that such behavior is not done by design. We don't make mistakes. We only say we do to give a weak illusion of righteousness, in defense of the indefensible. When Honduras was overrun, and Zelaya abducted out to Costa Rica, our government played a role in that. We backed it. And, in front of American media cameras, feigned ignorance, and looked the other way.
Free Honduras!
Tomorrow they will evidence of WMD there and voila, shock and owe again.
It is shameful to be American now.
Six innocent people murdered. Hell our boys used to do that every moring before breakfast in Iraq.
Upper half enrichment = lower half misery
Walter Cole
“so, who is running and benefiting from the illegal drug business in those countries?”
But surely, the real issue is who is not winning, for the voting majority is the upper half of society, the 51% most wealthy being all of law enforcement and everyone with wealth by the drug trade able to acquire more wealth.
For it is the laboring class, the careful thinking lower half of society, that suffers much misery so that the upper half may be enriched.
half and half eh? Yeah, You got it.
If I didn't know better I'd think your real name was Claus. He's got that same broken-record habit of posting the same damn thing over… and over … and over….
The 'real' Hondurans want America to stay. And while they're in the catbird seat, Uncle Sammy is an honored 'guest'.
Ehud Barack Obomba ousted Zelaya. The American people should oust Obomba by voting him out of office. Just don't elect Romney. Now we know why he hesitated to prosecuted George Warmonger Bush.