I'm proud to be a signatory on this campaign built around Keane Bhatt's latest brilliant exposé of media bias. Click title to see the letter at NACLA:

Noam Chomsky, Scholars Ask NY Times Public Editor to Investigate Bias on Honduras and Venezuela
Keane Bhatt
Manufacturing Contempt
May 14, 2013

The following petition, signed by over a dozen experts on Latin America and the media, was sent today to Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor of The New York Times:

DELEGATION TO HONDURAS
July 13-21, 2013

THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY, HUMAN RIGHTS & THE ENVIRONMENT
~versus~
THE MILITARY-BACKED REGIME, & GLOBAL COMPANIES & INVESTORS

Since the June 28, 2009 military coup against the government of Honduras, Rights Action - along with other North American organizations – has been working hard to support the courageous Honduran people's pro-democracy movement.

...in which my colleague Elijah Edelman and his undergraduate student coauthor Jessica Murgel deftly expose AU's dirty secret of unconscionable debt promotion and indentured servitude. Click title for original:

Biopolitical Economies in Higher Education Debt Formation

Elijah Adiv Edelman
Jessica L Murgel
Financial Exploitation of Knowledge Production

The National Endowment for Democracy is funding an International Center For Journalists initiative Strengthening Investigative Reporting and Transparency in Mexico and Central America. Here's a news flash for you, NED: Investigative Reporting and Transparency in Honduras were doing a lot better before you sponsored sham elections to whitewash a coup.

Not the most critical of articles, but this BBC report provides a window into what is going on. Most obvious flaws: "President Porfirio Lobo has made tackling police corruption a priority"--way too much credit to give Lobo for getting backed into a corner; "[Eduardo Villanueva] blamed a lack of funds for the slowness of the process"--no counterargument offered, leaving intact the implication that if the US were to throw more money at it, it would work.

C-Libre Denounces Death Threats to its Director and Wiretapping

Tegucigalpa.- The Committee for Free Expression (C-Libre), denounces to the National and International Community that the journalist and executive director of our organization, Héctor Longino Becerra, received a death threat on Saturday April 20th, via phone call, at approximately 9:42pm.

The call was made by an unknown person from the cell phone number 9737-5471, who stated that they "had a campaign to assassinate him."

Campesino remains exhumed from clandestine grave
Source: Defensores en Linea, Translation from PROAH

Thursday, 25 April 2013

Foto Radio Progreso
Trujillo, Colón.

Friday's show titled Young and in Debt, produced by Kaelyn Forde, features my student Ashley Lofria talking about her own experience with debt.

A note to my anthropology colleagues: As a member of the AAA's Committee on Anthropological Consulting for Security Institutions (CACSI) I am gathering information on recent U.S. government and private sector intelligence overtures to anthropologists. If you have been contacted by and/or collaborated with any organization that may fit within those categories (see below for one example of such an overture), please email me at adrienne@quotha.net with as much information as you feel comfortable sharing with the committee.

Jesuit says US drug war undermines Honduran democracy
April 24th, 2013
By Catholic News Service

SEATTLE – A priest from Honduras says the United States is repeating the same errors in Central America as it did in the 1980s, and his country is suffering as a result.