OFRANEH: Media War about Military Coup in Honduras gets worse
The media word that preceeded by years the coup d'etat that took place in Honduras on June 28th, is intensifying and seems to have opened new fronts, in this ocassion that of public opinion in the United States and in its capital in Washington, D.C..
The news source Bloomberg.com, in an article from July 10th titled "War for Power in Honduras Splits Democrats, Republicans" shows us how the coup-makers in their wisit to Washington contracted the lawyerLanny Davis as a public relations agent for the de facto government (http://www.bloomberg.com/
But who is Lanny Davis? He is a Jewish lawyer who formed part of the Special Council of ex-president Clinton, as well as Crisis Administrator in the White House and he is the spokesperson for Project Israel. He was a member of the Committee of Civil Rights Vigilance during the Bush administration and was also part of the 9-11 Commission. Currently he is part of the firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP.
In other words Mr. Davis is part of the Israel Lobby and of course has excellent connections with Leo Panetta and his current CIA team, including White Latin American Advisor Dan Restrepo.
The war of opinions and the apathy demonstrated by Hillary Clinton, which made the solution of Honduras's problems a regional one by passing the hot potato to the right-wing president of Costa Rica Oscar Arias, who concluded yesterday regarding the benefits of diologue and the prolongation of the negotiations, a situation that implies diluting the impact of the acts through the labyrinth of time and forgetting.
The media war and the distorsion of what has happened become the bread of each day. Last July 5th a column signed by Moisés Naim in Spain (Grupo Prisa) titled "idiots against hypocrits" made an aparent condemntation of the management of the coup by the Honduran military at the same time that it virulently attacked, as he always does from its usual column, the Cuba-Venezuela axis, accusing Chavez of a politcy of institutionalized interventionism.
But who is Moisés Naim to accuse the government of Hugo Chavez of being interventionist, when his once minister Carlos Andres Perez plays a role as part of the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an insitution close to the CIA and in charge of distributing economic help to create processes of de-stabilization from Georgia, passing through Venezuela and obviously involved in the pre-meditated coup in Honduras?
Naim from his habitual column in El País and from the magazine Foreign Policy, has made himself one of the voices of the U.S. neoconservatives, using his analyses as a distorting light of the concept of freedom of expression, twisting the essence of that basic principle of democracy.
At the same time the media war has been taking place throughout the continent, where the most carnivorous financial grops have use the written press, television and radio to distort the advances of the social movemnts that have taken place in the last decade in Latin America.
From the Inter-american Press Society (SIP in Spanish) a distortion of information has been fomented to the point that the great majority of the newspapers of the continent serve as mouthpieces for the financial groups and their political and economic interests. In addition, they use polarizing techniques intented to create clashes between the under classes.
In Honduras, Jorge Canahuati, president of the International Commission of the SIP, has been one of the direct managers of the coup, using his papers La Prensa and El Heraldo, which are currently fervant defenders of the coup and continue maniplating the information to try to maintain a false image of support from the Honduran people for the murderous coup.
But it is not just the media of Latin America that have been involved in the distortion of information. The Blog Dayly Kos, in an analysis called "spinning the news from Honduras" makes an analysis of the difference in the coverage of the news between the impartial Al-Jazeera and the distorted AP, agency that feeds the majority of newspapers in the United States. Daily Kos makes a comparison between the coverage of the events that took place in the Tegucigalpa airport last Sunday.
The journalist Ken Silverstein from Harper Magazine, in a column from July 6th titled "Some Facts about the Coup in Honduras"indicates that very little of what you can read about the coup in U.S. newspapers is true, stressing that Manuel Zelaya is not a radical, his worst crime being the raising of wages that was more than necessary for the working class, but which received a catagorical rejection by Honduras's powerful elite.
One of the biggest distortions propagated about Manuel Zelaya was his intent for Constitutional changes that would let him stay in power, a fallacy that was created by the newspapers of Mr. Jorge Canahuati and that has been reproduced throughout the world as a true fact, when because of time it was impossible to have a Constituionaly assembly before Zelaya left pwoer. To this day the international news agencies for the most part have echoed the rumors of Mr. Canahauti, pointing at Mel Zelaya as a violator of the National Constitution and a supposed plot to stay in power.
The coup in Honduras was hatched with explicit support of the local media, which are for the most part property of a tiny group of businessmen aligned with the colonialist interests of the United States; a country that has historical interest that are summed up in the classic description Banana Republic.
In the heart of the Banana Republic is the military base Cano Soto, where the Conjunta Bravo Force operates with the presence of 600 soldiers and a runway of 2,600 meters (the bigges one in the isthmus), from where it is very probable that the coup d'etat has been controlled. Of course the United States claims innocence about what has happened.
The Obama-Clinton administration has resoundingly proved that it does not control certain facets of the power of the country. As proof of this way before Barack Obama had won the elections, Robert Gates was already decided on as the future Secretary of Defense for Obama-Clinton, creating continuity in the imperialist politics of the neoconservatives of that country (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
Honduras has been converted into a military-political laboratory for the United States and its interests in Latin America, while we the Hondurans find ourselves afoot in the struggle to reinstate democracy and stop the sickening intervention of the military and the step backward it represents, meanwhile the encounter between the delegations of the elected government and that of the coup-makers finds itself faced with an attitude of gaining time, a situation that favors the White House and the thugs in charge.
National Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras, OFRANEH
Telephone (504) 4420618, (504) 4500058
Av 14 julio, calle 19, Contiguo Vivero Flor Tropical, Barrio Alvarado, La Ceiba, Honduras
email: garifuna@ofraneh.org, ofraneh@yahoo.com
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