Honduran journalist dies of COVID-19 contracted in prison

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

A Honduran journalist known as a strong critic of President Juan Orlando Hernandez has died at a hospital of COVID-19 that he apparently contracted while in prison on a defamation sentence

ByThe Associated Press
July 18, 2020, 7:06 PM
2 min read

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras -- A Honduran journalist known as a strong critic of President Juan Orlando Hernandez died Saturday at a hospital of COVID-19 that he apparently contracted while in prison on a defamation sentence.

The National Cardio-pulmonary Institute confirmed the death of Radio Globo director David Romero due to respiratory failure associated with the novel coronavirus. He had been imprisoned since March 2019, when Honduran police broke down the door of a radio station and arrested him.

Defamation has since been decriminalized under a new law in Honduras that took effect in June, and Romero could have been eligible for release.

Former President Manuel Zelaya wrote in his Twitter account that “the death of David Romero is a murder by the regime of JOH,” referring to the current president's initials. “The order was given that he serve an unfair sentence and to not take him out of prison until he had caught COVID-19.”

. . .

“I know they can kill me and, if that happens, the person responsible is the president,” Romero said as he was forced into a police vehicle when he was arrested in 2019.




Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/honduran-journalist-dies-covid-19-contracted-prison-71863595

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By all means, the current Honduran administration is very US-friendly, business friendly, and very corrupt.



Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez and peer.

"This is how David Romero Ellner, director of Radio / TV Globo in full transmission, was captured"

Honduran journalist dies of COVID-19 contracted in prison

[sandensea]

1. Honduras' ruling Hernandez family are KNOWN drug kingpins

But Wall Street and the neo-cons like them, so it's all good.

Thanks for always keeping up with their shenanigans, Judi (and so many other Latin miscreants!).

[Judi Lynn]

2. Horrible! The whole country is controlled by so few people, which is fine with US right-wingers.

They've fairly well worked it out so that the actual people's election results have a very short shelf life. I think they must still be living under the constitution managed during the last Ronald Reagan-influenced war on the left, last adjusted in 1982, bless their hearts.

I know "Mel" Zelaya wanted to conduct a national poll asking whether the people would prefer their own, real, democratic, non-dictatorship created constitution, and Mel was kidnapped at gunpoint and dumped on an airport in his pajamas in Costa Rica.

After some temporary readjustments they got Honduras back just the way they like it, the tiny elite very white creeps at the controls again, as always.

Your comments remind us even US politicians have had investments in Honduran sweatshops, which was discovered during the coup in 2009. What a vicious game it all is.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Very interesting article written BEFORE the last coup in Honduras:

A Carefully Crafted Deception
By BY GINGER THOMPSON AND GARY COHN
SUN STAFF |
JUN 18, 1995 AT 3:00 AM

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS — A dangerous truth confronted John Dimitri Negroponte as he prepared to take over as U.S. ambassador to Honduras late in 1981.

The military in Honduras -- the country from which the Reagan administration had decided to run the battle for democracy in Central America -- was kidnapping and murdering its own citizens.

"GOH [Government of Honduras] security forces have begun to resort to extralegal tactics -- disappearances and, apparently, physical eliminations ` to control a perceived subversive threat," Negroponte was told in a secret briefing book prepared by the embassy staff.

The assertion was true, and there was worse to come.

Time and again during his tour of duty in Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was confronted with evidence that a Honduran army intelligence unit, trained by the CIA, was stalking, kidnapping, torturing and killing suspected subversives.

. . .

A disgruntled former Honduran intelligence chief publicly denounced Battalion 316. Relatives of the battalion's victims demonstrated in the streets and appealed to U.S. officials for intervention, including once in an open letter to President Reagan's presidential envoy to Central America.

Rick Chidester, then a junior political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, told The Sun that he compiled substantial evidence of abuses by the Honduran military in 1982, but was ordered to delete most of it from the annual human rights report prepared for the State Department to deliver to Congress.

Those reports consistently misled Congress and the public.

"There are no political prisoners in Honduras," the State Department asserted falsely in its 1983 human rights report.

More:
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bal-honduras4-story.html

[ck4829]

4. Why?