Latin America
Related: About this forumHow the Media Sanitize Honduras’s Brutal Regime
How the Media Sanitize Hondurass Brutal Regime
Sunday, 03 March 2013 11:35 By Keane Bhatt, North American Congress on Latin America |
On the evening of Saturday, September 22, human rights lawyer Antonio Trejo stepped outside a wedding ceremony to take a phone call. Standing in the church parking lot of a suburb of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, he was shot six times by unknown assailants. Despite his requests, he had been granted no police protection in the face of death threats; Trejo had believed he would be targeted by wealthy landowners over his outspoken advocacy on behalf of small farmers seeking to reclaim seized territories.1 In his death, Trejo joined dozens of fallen peasant leaders whom he had defended, as well as murdered opposition candidates, LGBT activists, journalists, and indigenous residents. All were victims of the violence and impunity that has reigned in Honduras since the 2009 coup détat against its democratically elected and left-leaning president, Manuel Zelaya.
Earlier that day, Trejo had appeared on television, denouncing the powerful interests behind the governments push for ciudades modelosswaths of land to be ceded to international investors and developed into autonomous cities, replete with their own police forces, taxes, labor codes, trade rules, and legal systems. He had helped prepare motions declaring the proposal unconstitutional.
This concept of charter cities has been promoted for a couple of years by Paul Romer, a University of Chicagotrained economist teaching at New York University. He described his brainchild in a co-authored op-ed as an effort to build on the success of existing special zones based around the export-processing maquila industry. A new city on an undeveloped site, free of vested interests could bypass the inefficient rules that hinder peace, growth and development worldwide, he argued. With new and stable institutions, the charter city could become an attractive place for would-be residents and investors.2
The international press swooned over Romers revolutionary idea: Foreign Policy magazine named him one of its Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2010 for developing the worlds quickest shortcut to economic development;3 that same year, The Atlantic dedicated a 5,400-word paean to Romer and his urban oases of technocratic sanity, which held the promise that struggling nations could attract investment and jobs; private capital would flood in and foreign aid would not be needed.
More:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/14898-how-the-media-sanitize-hondurass-brutal-regime
ocpagu
(1,954 posts)They're sanitizing Honduras while satanizing Venezuela.
It's impressive how Honduras climbed to the top of global violence rankings right after the 2009 coup. Looks like the right-wing there is trying to stop another leftist of getting to the presidency by killing their voters.
And, as this article makes clear, they do believe it's better to drown a country in blood than having a leftist as a president.
Bacchus4.0
(6,837 posts)and it wasn't reported that violence escalated under Zelaya.
I wonder what the writer thinks about socialist cities in Venezuela.