US Counterinsurgency Policing Tactics Ravage Honduras

[Judi Lynn]

US Counterinsurgency Policing Tactics Ravage Honduras
Monday, 18 April 2016 00:00
By Annie Bird

Honduran media is ablaze with the latest in the constant stream of police corruption crises.

This time the Honduran newspaper El Heraldo published a leaked police investigation into the November 2009 murder of the chief of the anti-narcotics unit Julian Aristides Gonzales, and the related December 2011 murder of his advisor, Alfredo Landaverde.

The investigation indisputably shows that high level police commanders planned, and police officers carried out, the assassinations. The public is not surprised: this was common knowledge and is just the latest scandal involving top level police commanders in murder and organized crime.

In scandal after scandal, all that seems to change are the acronyms. This time ski mask clad agents from the one-year-old new unit of the Public Prosecutor's Office, the Criminal Investigation Technical Agency (ATIC), swooped in to take the files on 136 investigations from the archives of the Directorate for Investigation and Evaluation of Police Careers (DIECP), amid calls to shut down the DIECP. The DIECP was created in 2011 to replace the Direction of Internal Affairs of the National Police after the October 2011 murder of the son of the rector of the national university, Julieta Castellanos, by police officers.

Each scandal spurs the reconfiguration of police, the public prosecutor's office, and military security agencies, but the pattern of criminal activity by the police continues. Three days after the scandal broke, on April 7, President Juan Orlando Hernandez presented a law giving his administration the capacity to fire police officers at will with no formal process. The same measure had been taken in 2012 in the wake of the Castellanos police murder scandal. While press reported hundreds of police officers fired, the reality was that it was just a handful, and the credibility of the whole process fell apart when the man with the power to fire at will, then director of the national police Juan Carlos Bonilla, was accused of sending gang members to kidnap the son of a former National Police Director. Police reforms look like nothing more than redistributing power between organized crime networks.

More:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/35678-us-counterinsurgency-policing-tactics-ravage-honduras

[Judi Lynn]

1. Do you remember this info. regarding the author of the posted article above?

December 19, 2013

Honduras: Accusations by Military Endanger Activist

Government Should Repudiate Colonel’s Claims

(Washington, DC) – The Honduran government is putting human rights activists at risk by failing to repudiate dangerous remarks by a senior military officer, Human Rights Watch said today. An army colonel recently claimed that Annie Bird, co-director of the US-based nongovernmental organization Rights Action, was working to destabilize the Bajo Aguán region, where land disputes have led to violence.

The commander of Operation Xatruch III, a military-police task force based in the Colón province, which includes Bajo Aguán, publicly accused Bird of destabilizing the area by “questioning the methods of the Honduran justice system” and making false claims about security forces operations. On December 12, 2013, the newspaper La Tribuna quoted Col. German Alfaro Escalante as saying: “We are in the process of investigating a complaint against a supposed American named Annie Bird, who is going around doing destabilizing work here in the Aguán sector, meeting with various campesino leaders.” Alfaro’s comments have been reproduced in national media, accompanied by photos of Bird, a US citizen.

“In Honduras, where rights advocates and community leaders have been assaulted and even killed for their work, the colonel’s accusations show a reckless disregard for a longtime activist’s safety,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “President Porfirio Lobo and the defense minister need to make clear that the military has no business investigating complaints against activists, let alone smearing them in the media.”

La Tribuna reported that Col. Alfaro said that Bird had pressured campesinos (small-scale farmers)in the region to rebel against security forces.

The Bajo Aguán region of northern Honduras has been the setting for long-running, often violent, land disputes, many stemming from changes to the country’s agrarian law in 1992. Large tracts of territory in the region have been contested between campesino groups and agro-industrial businesses, which mostly cultivate African palm oil. According to a report by the National Human Rights Commissioner of Honduras, 92 people were killed in the land disputes in Bajo Aguán from 2009 through 2012.

Bird has reported on human rights issues in Honduras for 12 years, and has written several reports on the country for Rights Action.
Bird told Human Rights Watch that she considered Col. Alfaro’s statements to be a response to her efforts to document recent abuses alleged to have been committed by government security forces. On December 11, Bird accompanied a group of local people to the government human rights prosecutor’s office to report alleged abuses by members of Xatruch task force, which is officially assigned to bring security to the region. On December 10, she had given an interview to a local radio station in which she described her work to document abuses and report them to international bodies.

More:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/12/19/honduras-accusations-military-endanger-activist

Best wishes for the well-being of this exception person, dedicated and honest journalist, and may she be spared evil efforts to harm her by the fascists who refuse to mind their own business.

[ReRe]

2. If those are your words...

... at the bottom of this post, or even if they are not, I concur with them. I am tired and half-slept through the original post, so I need to go back now and re-read. I say that because I'm afraid the original post may be a report that something happened to Annie Bird.

On Edit... After reading the original post, I see that Annie bird is indeed fine and author of the OP article. I need to go to bed!

[Judi Lynn]

3. Yep, she's still alive, we hope. She's one courageous writer.

It takes so much more courage trying to get the truth out to the human race than it does to plot in secrecy, and send strangers out to attack an unarmed journalist. It's a wonder they can face their own reflection in the mirror, but fascists are hell bent upon silencing ALL voices other than their own.

This writer, Annie Bird is more courageous than ALL of the fascists strung together, and everyone who's heard of her at all knows it. She lives for a higher purpose, genuinely respects the human race, for whom she works night and day. People like her are a real gift to this world.

[ReRe]

4. I look at her kind as...

... Guardian Angels. They go into the gates of Hell to get the story and sometimes they don't come out, which always shakes my soul to it's depths. I love them all. I don't know what your opinion of Chris Hedges is, but he is one who went through those gates and came out alive, and, I might add, totally changed. Remember that movie "The Year of Living Dangerously"? (I think that was it's name.)