Obama's Central American Legacy? The New Generation of Honduran Death Squads
April 03, 2013
Obama's Central American Legacy?
The New Generation of Honduran Death Squads
by MARK WEISBROT
The video, caught randomly on a warehouse security camera, is chilling. Five young men are walking down a quiet street in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. A big black SUV pulls up, followed by another vehicle. Two masked men with bullet proof vests jump quickly out of the lead car, with AK-47’s raised. The two youths who are closest to the vehicles see that they have no chance of running, so they freeze and put their hands in the air. The other three break into a sprint, with bullets chasing, and the second team of assassins firing. Miraculously, they escape, with one injured – but the two who surrendered are forced to lie face down on the ground. The two students, who were brothers 18 and 20 years old, are quickly murdered in front of the camera with bullets to the back of the head. In less than 40 seconds after their arrival, the assassins are driving away, never to be found.
The high level of professional training and modus operandi of the assassins have ledmany observers to conclude that this was a government operation. The video was posted by the newspaper El Heraldo last month; the murder took place in November of last year. There have been no arrests.
Now the Obama administration is coming under fire for its role in arming and funding murderous Honduran police, in violation of U.S. law. Under the “Leahy Law,” named after Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, the U.S. government is not allowed to fund foreign military units who have committed gross human rights violations with impunity. The Director General of Honduras’ national police force, Juan Carlos Bonilla, is himself implicated in death squad killings; and members of the U.S. Congress have been complaining about it since Bonilla was appointed in May last year. Thanks to some excellent investigative reporting by the Associated Press in the last couple of weeks – showing that all police units are in fact under Bonilla’s command — it has become clearer that U.S. funding of Honduran police is illegal.
Now we will see if the “rule of law” or the “separation of powers” means very much here in the capital of the country that likes to lecture “less developed” countries about these principles.
Why would the Obama administration be so stubborn as to deceive and defy Congress in order to support death squad government in Honduras? To answer this question we have to look at how the current government of Honduras got to power, and how big a role its violent repression of political opposition plays in keeping it there.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/03/the-new-generation-of-honduran-death-squads/
