Hondurans demand DEA leave after shooting

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Published: 5/17/2012 8:31 AM | Last update: 5/17/2012 8:31 AM
Hondurans demand DEA leave after shooting
The Associated Press

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - People in Honduras' predominantly Indian Mosquito coast region burned down government offices and demanded that U.S. drug agents leave the area, reacting angrily to an anti-drug operation in which they say police gunfire killed four innocent people, including two pregnant women.

The anger is aimed at both Honduran authorities and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which confirmed on Wednesday that some of its agents were on a U.S.-owned helicopter with Honduran police officers when the shooting happened Friday on the Patuca River in northeastern Honduras.

Honduran and U.S. officials said only the police officers on the anti-drug mission fired their weapons, and not until the helicopter was shot at first. The officials said the aircraft was chasing a small boat suspected of carrying drugs on the river.

Local officials said the two men and two pregnant women killed weren't drug smugglers. They said the victims were diving for lobster and shellfish.

Read more: http://www.hutchnews.com/World/Hondurans-demand-DEA-leave-after-shooting

[pscot]

1. Narco-terrorism

Sponsored by us.

[xtraxritical]

2. Big business for everybody, narcs, and pushers and gun sales and banks and politicians and...

[xtraxritical]

3. and how could I forget morticians!

[Judi Lynn]

4. US DEA Kills Innocent Civilians in Honduras -- US Media Silent

US DEA Kills Innocent Civilians in Honduras -- US Media Silent
Posted: 05/16/2012 1:38 pm

According to the Honduran newspaper, Tiempo, as well as the Honduran human rights group, COFADEH, the agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), dressed in military uniforms, killed at least four and possibly six civilians in a raid which took place on Friday, May 11. The victims included two pregnant women and two children. The newspaper Tiempo did not pull any punches, writing that those killed "were humble and honest citizens." Apparently, the DEA agents fired from helicopter gunships upon a boat carrying civilians on the Patuca back to their community of Ahuas which itself is located in the Mosquito coast of Honduras. According to Tiempo, the DEA mistakenly fired upon the civilian boat because it was well-lit while the intended target -- a boat carrying drug traffickers -- was floating down the river without its lights on.

According to Tiempo, the mayor of Ahuas decried the killings, saying that "[t]hese operations were performed irresponsibly" and that the people in his community live in fear "because they now have the threat of operations because they kill poor people... "

COFADEH, the Committee of the Families of the Disappeared of Honduras, has been very pointed in its condemnation of the role the U.S. played in these killings. COFADEH was founded in 1982 in response to the disappearance of 69 persons that year. As COFADEH explains on its website , it believes that the disappearances which took place in the 1980's (a total of 184 between 1980 and 1989), was the direct result of the National Security Doctrine which the U.S. imposed on Honduras. This doctrine, according to COFADEH, "included a systematic and selective form of human rights violations. The most emblematic violations were torture, murders and enforced disappearances" of the type which the U.S. had sponsored in the Southern Cone of South America in the 1970s.

COFADEH has taken on renewed importance in Honduras after the 2009 military coup against President Manual Zelaya which was at least tacitly supported by the United States. Since that time, the types of killings and disappearances which led to COFADEH's creation have started again, and are entirely the responsibility of the U.S.-supported coup government. Thus, according to a wonderful February, 2012 piece in the New York Times by Dana Frank, who relies heavily on COFADEH's figures, "at least 34 members of the opposition have disappeared or been killed, and more than 300 people have been killed by state security forces since the coup," including at least 13 journalists. Sadly, in researching this article, I discovered that a kind and brave woman, Vanessa Zepeda, who I had the honor of meeting on a School of Americas Watch delegation to Honduras shortly after the coup, has since been killed as a direct consequence of this coup. See, list of victims of the coup.

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/honduras-civilians-dead_b_1521177.html

[Bacchus4.0]

7. incorrect. the Tiempo story does NOT say DEA agents killed those Hondurans

Los hechos ocurrieron la madrugada del viernes anterior cuando un helicóptero con policías hondureños y estadounidenses abrieron fuego contra una embarcación en el río Patuca, en el lugar conocido como Paplaya, creyendo que eran narcotraficantes


http://www.tiempo.hn/index.php/honduras/10766-muertos-en-la-mosquitia-no-eran-narcos-dicen-autoridades


The events occurred in the wee hours of the previous Friday when a helicopter with honduran and american police opened fire against the boat on the Patuca River, in the place known as Paplaya, believing they were narcos.

[Judi Lynn]

14. Honduras: Miskito villagers demands answers after deadly raids

Honduras: Miskito villagers demands answers after deadly raids
Submitted by WW4 Report on Sun, 05/27/2012 - 23:02.

Indigenous Miskito residents of Ahuas village on the remote Caribbean coast of Honduras are demanding justice in the wake of a deadly raid by Honduran National Police and DEA agents May 11—with details still emerging on the scope of the violence. Villagers report that machine-gunned fire from two helicopters lasted 15 minutes near the man village pier, adding to initial accounts of four killed in a combined air and ground assault on a canoa or pipante (dugout canoe) on the Río Patuca. As residents cowered in their homes, the two choppers—marked with the US flag, villagers say—next landed and disgorged some 50 heavily armed and uniformed men, who then proceeded to break down the doors of local homes. Residents were menaced at gunpoint and threatened with death to demand information about one "El Renco," as their modest homes were ransacked. Residents say English-speaking "gringos"—presumably, DEA agents—took part in the raids and rough interrogations, which last up to two hours.

One youth was marched down to the riverfront at gunpoint in plastic handcuffs, ostensibly to identify a drug drop-off point—and was then abandoned there, still handcuffed. A neighbor with a machete freed him, and villagers kept the cuffs as evidence of the abuse. Another villager's boat and gasoline was commandeered to explore along the river—along with nephew to serve as a guide. One of the "gringos" apparently had a laptop, and input the names of interrogated residents, who were made to produce their ID cards. Reports now say that one of the buildings burned down in the subsequent protest by outraged villagers was that of the local trafficker, who they blamed for drawing the heat.

The DEA insists that none of its agents were in the village. The US embassy in Tegucigalpa referred reports' questions to Honduran authorities. The State Department said that the helicopters used in the operation were piloted by Guatemalan soldiers and contract pilots of unidentified nationality who are temporarily deployed in Honduras. The Pentagon's Southern Command said there were no US military troops involved. The Honduran Security Ministry said it had no information about the raid reported by residents.

An investigation by the Honduran Joint Military Task Force-Paz Garcia based in nearby Puerto Lempira appeared to only acknowledge the raid on the boat, concluding that the agents fired on the civilians by mistake, killing four and wounding four. “It’s terribly sad,” Col. Servio Arita told the New York Times. “It was an error.”

More:
http://ww4report.com/node/11117

[FreeBC]

5. Bad news for us if it means more of them back on our soil.

[Webster Green]

6. DEA are scum.

The entire agency should be abolished.

Useless fucking scum.

[Uncle Joe]

8. Good, the DEA needs to be abolished here in the U.S. as well.

Thanks for thread, Judi Lynn.

[Dawson Leery]

9. Cut the deficit, shut down the DEA.

[Meiko]

10. US law enforcement

agencies conducting military style operations in a foreign nation. Excuse me Mr. President, I have a question.

[EFerrari]

11. Counter insurgency.

Our coup in Honduras can't be allowed to fail.

[Judi Lynn]

12. The bystanders of Honduras are not fair game in America's drug war

The bystanders of Honduras are not fair game in America's drug war

As US resources shift from the Middle East to its drug war in the Americas, people's proximity to the trade is getting them killed

Douglas Haddow
guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 May 2012 11.00 EDT

One month after relinquishing control of night raids in Afghanistan, a raid in Honduras led by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has shed light on how the US is beginning to shift resources from its wars in the Middle East to its ongoing drug war in the Americas.

In the pre-dawn hours of 11 May, the DEA and Honduran police (in concert with the US Navy) were tracking a group of suspected cocaine smugglers along the Patuca River, near the village of Ahuas. Using a fleet of US state department helicopter gunships, piloted by Guatemalan military personnel and temporary contract pilots, the operation followed the smugglers to a boat dock, at which point a firefight broke out, killing four.

Now here's where things get even murkier. The DEA initially reported that only two people were killed in the raid, both of whom were involved in the transport of cocaine. But the mayor of Ahuas, Lucio Baquedano, claimed that four innocent bystanders were also killed. In an interview with the Honduran newspaper El Tiempo, Baquedano stated that the helicopters mistakenly fired on a fishing canoe near the one transporting cocaine. After anti-DEA protests erupted, the Honduran government confirmed that the raid had in fact killed two pregnant women, a man and a 14-year-old boy, as well as injuring five others. Locals claim that the fishing canoe was involved in a routine trip to the Caribbean coast, where it dropped off lobster and picked up passengers on the way back. But Honduran and American officials have both cast doubt on the nature of the trip, suggesting that due to its timing and remote location and the canoe's proximity to the cocaine, its passengers must have been involved, somehow.

In the New York Times, an unnamed American official said of the incident: "There is nothing in the local village that was unknown, a surprise or a mystery about this … what happened was that, for the first time in the history of Ahuas, Honduran law enforcement interfered with narcotics smuggling." The raid, or "small-footprint mission", is part of a new counter-narcotic offensive in which the DEA, along with various segments of the US military, is applying tactics developed in the Iraq and Afghan wars to combat cocaine smuggling throughout Central America. The offensive thus far includes the construction of three new military bases in Honduras, which house some 600 American soldiers. This expansion of the US's presence was agreed upon shortly after former president Manuel Zelaya was deposed by the Honduran military in 2009.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/21/bystanders-honduras-america-drug-war

[Judi Lynn]

13. Survivor: Honduran police fired on passenger boat

Survivor: Honduran police fired on passenger boat
ALBERTO ARCE, Associated Press
Updated 12:48 a.m., Monday, May 21, 2012

LA CEIBA, Honduras (AP) — Lucio Adan Nelson dozed on a riverboat ferrying him home from a visit with his mother when helicopters appeared overhead and started shooting. He and about a dozen other passengers traveling in the middle of the night jumped into the water for cover.

Nelson was hit in the arm and back, but says he couldn't seek help. "I had to stay in the water for some time because they kept shooting," he said Sunday from a hospital bed.

Honduran police, who with DEA agents were aboard U.S. helicopters for an anti-drug operation, have said they were shooting at drug traffickers who fired first from a boat in the Patuca River in the remote Mosquitia region near the Caribbean coast.

~snip~
Honduran military intelligence is investigating, said Col. Joaquin Arevalo, a military spokesman. He referred The Associated Press to two Honduran commanders at the Caratasca Naval Base and a U.S. Joint Task Force installation in Mocoron in the heart of the Mosquitia. The area, which is near the Nicaraguan border, saw heavy U.S. military presence in the 1980s when the U.S. was backing Contra rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

More:
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/article/Survivor-Honduran-police-fired-on-passenger-boat-3572908.php#ixzz1vWiAZxY5