Up 50% from previous administration. "The thing is it hurts less 'cause he's nicer." Click for original in El Tiempo:

One more from the annals of the de facto absurd:
A presidential commission will be created to defend human rights

Tuesday, March 9, 2010
President Porfirio Lobo Sosa confirmed yesterday that he will create a presidential committee for human rights that will have the participation of all the civil organizations that defend these principles.

It's not at all shocking that the State Department would use the Country Human Rights Report to whitewash the coup and provide justification for a tightening of neoliberal mechanisms of crime control (further criminalizing poverty and democratic dissent) in Honduras; it's exactly what I'd predicted after my meeting with Christopher Webster in which he smugly responded to my questions about human rights abuses prior to the elections by saying they'd look into them in the country human rights report. I wish I had more time here to break it down here. Meanwhile, have a look.

You read right. General Romeo Vasquez Velásquez has been selected by U.S.-appointed Honduran president Pepe Lobo as head of the embattled Hondutel, which has been the central site of the fight over privatization. For anyone who said Lobo was better than Micheletti, hold on...he's just getting started. From a friend:

I have been traveling and am thus woefully behind in writing about various shocking developments (never say it can't get worse) in Honduras, and will get to that momentarily, ISA. In the meantime, have a look at this month's NACLA:

RIGHTS ACTION INFORMATION: Annie Bird, Washington DC, annie@rightsaction.org, 202-470-6075; Grahame Russell, Connecticut, info@rightsaction.org, 860-352-2448

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HILLARY CLINTON VISITS GUATEMALA & HONDURAS
March 6, 2010, by Annie Bird, Rights Action

THREE EIGHTS (I / III)
Juan Almendares

The number eight in the vernacular means mess, three eights are three tangles, a horizontal eight in math represents infinity and three eights asleep and aligned imply an infinite maze.

On 28 February 2010, three days after the appointment of new Chief of the Armed Forces, a story of 888 words highlighted in the newspaper La Prensa: "Guerrilla cell arms itself in Lower Aguan" whose source is, according to the article, a report from the Honduran military intelligence agency.

The story about the bereaved golpista journalist Carol Cabrera just keeps getting more absurd and tragic. When her 8-months pregnant 16-year-old daughter was assassinated by a soccer gang last December, she and Micheletti immediately went all over the national and international media claiming it was done by the resistance assassins (even his own police force had to shut him up). Micheletti did that mostly, I suspect, to take away from media attention of Walter Tróchez's assassination, carried out by his forces.

Click image for 2-page pdf:

The dark mass for those who have made a pact with the devil
for Mayra and Rodil
by Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle
my translation