The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (44 page)

Pariah to Latin America, but not the United States. Even though President Barack Obama early on called Zelaya’s ouster “a coup,” the U.S. government soon dropped the term. But there is no other word for it. On Sunday, I spoke with Zelaya in his home. He recounted what happened.

It was around 5 a.m. on June 28, 2009, when black-hooded Honduran soldiers stormed his house after shooting through the back door.

“They threatened me, that they were going to shoot,” he said. “And I said to them: ‘If you have orders to shoot, then shoot me. But know that you are shooting the president of the republic.’ . . . They forced me to go to their vehicles outside with my pajamas on. We landed in the U.S. military base of Palmerola. . . . And then to Costa Rica.”

Ultimately, more important to Honduras is not just the return of Zelaya, but the return of democracy. Zelaya was gaining popular support for policies like a 60 percent increase in the minimum wage, the plan to take over the U.S. Palmerola air base and use it as the civilian airport in place of the notoriously dangerous Toncontin International Airport, plans to distribute land to peasant farmers, and to join the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), the regional cooperative bloc developed to diminish the economic domination of the United States. On the day he was deposed, Zelaya was holding a nonbinding straw poll to assess if the population wanted to hold a national constituent assembly to evaluate possible changes to the constitution. That, he explains, is why he was deposed.

Secretary of State Clinton and her close friend Lanny Davis, who is working as a powerful lobbyist for the coup regime, have pushed hard for the legitimization of the current Lobo government, despite Clinton’s own State Department cable titled “Open and Shut: The Case of the Honduran Coup,” released by WikiLeaks, that the coup was clearly illegal.

As I headed to the airport to leave Honduras after this historic weekend, I passed a group of teachers, one month into their hunger strike outside the Honduran Congress. They, like a broad network of civil society groups in Honduras, while celebrating the return of their ousted president, are clear in their demand, now joined by eighty-seven members of the U.S. Congress, for an end to violence and repression in Honduras.

More News from the Unreported World

November 10, 2010

Obama in the Company of Killers

If a volcano kills civilians in Indonesia, it’s news. When the government does the killing, sadly, it’s just business as usual, especially if an American president tacitly endorses the killing, as President Barack Obama just did with his visit to Indonesia.

As the people around Mount Merapi dig out of the ash following a series of eruptions that have left more than 150 dead, a darker cloud now hangs over Indonesia in the form of renewed U.S. support for the country’s notorious Kopassus, the military’s special forces commando group. Journalist Allan Nairn released several secret Kopassus documents as the Obamas landed in Jakarta, showing the level of violent political repression administered by the Kopassus—now, for the first time in more than a decade, with United States support.

Last March, Nairn revealed details of a Kopassus assassination program in the Indonesian province of Aceh. These new Kopassus documents shed remarkable detail on the province of West Papua. As Nairn wrote in his piece accompanying the documents, West Papua is “where tens of thousands of civilians have been murdered and where Kopassus is most active. . . . When the U.S. restored Kopassus aid last July the rationale was fighting terrorism, but the documents show that Kopassus in fact systematically targets civilians.” In the Kopassus’ own words, the civilians are “much more dangerous than any armed opposition.”

One document names fifteen leaders of the Papuan civil society, all “civilians, starting with the head of the Baptist Synod of Papua. The others include evangelical ministers, activists, traditional leaders, legislators, students and intellectuals as well as local establishment figures and the head of the Papua Muslim Youth organization.”

President Obama lived in Indonesia from the ages of six through ten, after his mother married an Indonesian man. Obama said in Jakarta this week: “[M]uch has been made of the fact that this marks my return to where I lived as a young boy. . . . But today, as president, I’m here to focus not on the past, but on the future—the Comprehensive Partnership that we’re building between the United States and Indonesia.” Part of that relationship involves the renewed support of Kopassus, which has been denied since the armed forces burned then-Indonesian-occupied East Timor to the ground in 1999, killing more than 1,400 Timorese.

A series of cell-phone videos have come out of Papua showing torture being inflicted on men there at the hands of what appear to be members of the military. In one video that surfaced just two weeks ago, soldiers burn a man’s genitals with a burning stick, cover his head with a plastic bag to suffocate him, and threaten him with a rifle. Another video shows a Papuan man slowly dying from a gunshot wound as the soldier with the cell-phone camera taunts him, calling him a savage.

I spoke with Suciwati Munir, the widow of the renowned Indonesian human-rights activist Munir Said Thalib, at the Bonn, Germany, reunion of Right Livelihood Award laureates. Her husband, an unflinching critic of the Indonesian military, received the award shortly before his death. In 2004, as he traveled to the Netherlands for a law fellowship, on board the Indonesian national airline Garuda, he was given an upgrade to business class. There, he was served tea laced with arsenic.

He was dead before the plane landed. Suciwati has a message for Obama: “If Obama has a commitment to human rights in the world . . . he has to pay attention to the human-rights situation in Indonesia. And the first thing that he should ask to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is to resolve the Munir case.” I asked her if she wanted to meet President Obama when he came to Indonesia. She replied: “Maybe yes, because I want to remind him about the human-rights situation in Indonesia. Maybe not, because of his wrong decision, he has perpetuated the impunity in Indonesia.”

This was the third attempt by President Obama to visit Indonesia. His first delay was to allow him to push through health care reform. The second was canceled in the wake of the BP oil disaster. This time he made it, although the Mount Merapi eruption forced him to leave a few hours early. Speaking from Jakarta, journalist Nairn reflected: “It’s nice to be able to go back to where you grew up, but you shouldn’t bring weapons as a gift. You shouldn’t bring training for the people who are torturing your old neighbors.”

June 15, 2011

Failed War on Drugs: Fast, Furious, and Fueled by the U.S.

The violent deaths of Brian Terry and Juan Francisco Sicilia, separated by the span of just a few months and by the increasingly bloody U.S.-Mexico border, have sparked separate but overdue examinations of the so-called War on Drugs, and how the U.S. government is ultimately exacerbating the problem.

On the night of December 14, 2010, Agent Brian Terry was in the Arizona desert as part of the highly trained and specially armed BORTAC unit, described as the elite paramilitary force within the U.S. Border Patrol. The group engaged in a firefight, and Terry was killed. While this death might have become just another violent act associated with drug trafficking along the border, one detail has propelled it into a high-stakes confrontation between the Obama administration and the U.S. Congress: Weapons found at the scene, AK-47s, were sold into likely Mexican criminal hands under the auspices of a covert operation of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Dubbed “Operation Fast and Furious,” the secret program aimed to trace arms sold in the U.S. to so-called straw buyers, people who buy arms on behalf of others. The ATF’s operation allowed gun shops to sell bulk weapons to straw buyers who the ATF suspected were buying on behalf of Mexican drug cartels. Instead of arresting the straw buyer, considered a relatively low-level criminal by the ATF, tracing the guns as they made their way into Mexico might allow the ATF to arrest more senior members of the criminal cartels. At least, that was the plan.

According to reporting by the Center for Public Integrity, 1,765 guns were knowingly sold as part of “Fast and Furious.” Another 300 or so were sold before the operation started. Of these more than 2,000 guns, fewer than 800 have been recovered. Two of the guns recovered were found at the site of Terry’s death, in a region known as Peck Canyon, on the U.S. side of the border between Nogales, Mexico, and Tucson, Arizona.

Special Agent John Dodson of the ATF was among many field agents who advised superiors that the covert operation was unwise. Their concerns were not acted on, and the operation continued. After Terry’s murder, Dodson blew the whistle, first to the Justice Department, then to Republican Sen. Charles Grassley. Grassley has questioned Attorney General Eric Holder, and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Republican Darrell Issa, is now engaged in hearings on the case.

South of the border, Sicilia and six other young men were brutally murdered in March, just seven more innocent victims in the raging violence in Mexico that has claimed more than 35,000 victims since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon began his crackdown on the drug cartels. Sicilia’s father is Javier Sicilia, a renowned poet and intellectual in Mexico. Soon after his son’s murder, Sicilia wrote his final poem, dedicated to his son. He is now committed to the nonviolent struggle against the bloodshed in his country. He led a protest march in May from his hometown of Cuernavaca to Mexico City’s famous Zócalo, the central plaza, where 200,000 people rallied. Last weekend, he led another march, all the way to the border, and then into El Paso, Texas.

Sicilia is against the cartels, for sure. But he holds Calderon, and the United States, culpable as well. He is calling for an end to the “Merida Initiative,” in which the U.S. provides arms and training for the Mexican military to fight the cartels. Sicilia also is calling for the legalization of drugs, a call in which he is joined, surprisingly, by the conservative former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, and increasingly by Calderon himself.

Calderon is traveling in the U.S. this week, and has spoken out about the U.S. arms industry that is profiting from the sales of weapons that end up in Mexico. He also has criticized the repeal of the U.S. assault-weapons ban, which has led to a massive increase in gun violence in Mexico.

A new report released by three Democratic U.S. senators finds some 70 percent of guns seized in Mexico from 2009 to 2010 came from the United States. Of the nearly 30,000 guns seized in Mexico during that period, more than 20,000 came from the U.S.

If anything should be fast and furious in the United States, it should be the push for sane and sensible gun control and drug policies. Perhaps then, Javier Sicilia will start writing poetry again.

March 28, 2012

Forget Fear of Flying, Fear Airport Screening

There was terror in the skies this week over Texas, caused not by a terrorist but by a pilot—a Flight Standards captain, no less. JetBlue Airways Capt. Clay Osbon, flying Flight 191 from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Las Vegas, began moving up and down the aisle after the jet was airborne, ranting, according to several passengers, about Iraq, Israel, al-Qaida, and bombs, calling on passengers to recite the Lord’s Prayer, saying that they were “all going down.” An off-duty pilot in the cabin went to the cockpit to help the co-pilot with the emergency landing, while passengers and crew subdued Osbon. Osbon, who’d been with JetBlue almost since its founding, was taken to the hospital, suspended with pay, then criminally charged with interfering with a flight crew.

That’s enough to inspire a fear of flying in anyone. But just getting to your airplane these days may present a greater risk to your health than the actual flight.

New airport security screening technology, primarily backscatter X-ray devices, have come under increased scrutiny, as their effectiveness is questioned amid concerns that the radiation exposure may cause cancer. Adding to health concerns are both the graphic nature of the images captured, essentially nude photos of every person passing through the machine, and the aggressive—and for some, humiliating—nature of the alternative to the scans, the “enhanced pat-down” by a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins introduced a bill that would require independent laboratory testing of the X-ray backscatter machines, exactly what a group of University of California, San Francisco scientists called on the Obama administration to do in April 2010. Responding to the TSA claim (provided by the manufacturer, Rapiscan) that the radiation dose is less than “the dose one receives from eating one banana,” professor John Sedat and others wrote: “While the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high. . . . There is good reason to believe that these scanners will increase the risk of cancer to children and other vulnerable populations [including pregnant women].” When this risk is multiplied over 700 million annual travelers, Michael Love, Ph.D., the manager of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine X-ray facility, told
Discover
magazine, “someone is going to get skin cancer.” The European Union has banned the machines.