We Can't Repress Our Own People: Honduran Police Respond

[Judi Lynn]

by Jeff Abbott
December 11, 2017

The normally chaotic streets of San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second largest city, were abnormally quiet. Only a few sex workers and others, and the occasional passing car, were in the streets at 9:30 p.m.

“This is not normal,” the clerk at my hotel near San Pedro Sula’s central park told me as we stood on the deserted main street on December 5. “This is because of the state of siege.”

Just days earlier, on December 2, the Honduran government announced this state of siege to put down the mobilization of angry citizens over the election. The government deployed the military, suspended the constitution, and established a curfew for the hours between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. But the government quickly was forced to change the curfew to 8 p.m. to 5 a.m., because no one was respecting the curfew.

Just days later, on December 7, the government changed the curfew yet again to 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. And by December 9, the government had decided to end the state of siege.

More:
http://progressive.org/dispatches/we-cannot-repress-our-own-people-”/