Micheletti: First, get the cartoonist! And the baby!

These are the people the putschists in Honduras fear the most.  They fear them so much they put them at the top of the arrest list.

It’s Allan McDonald, a Honduran cartoonist, and his 17 month old daughter, who were arrested at 3 a.m. Monday morning and taken to a hotel where they shared their detention with two foreign journalists and the Venezuelan consul.  The Honduran military hasn’t gotten around to sports stadiums yet, apparently.  Hotel does not equal food, in case you were wondering.  McDonald and his daughter were given water, nothing else, during the nearly 24 hours they were under arrest.

Meanwhile back at McDonald’s house, in the best Nazi tradition, the military busied itself tearing the place apart and building a bonfire for all of McDonald’s cartoons and his art supplies.  The news report that appeared at YVKE Mundial (originally from hablahonduras.com) follows:

A desperate, drowning Honduran oligarchy

Micheletti Entered Through the Roof, Just Like Thieves Do

Luis Alvarenga, Rebelión
Translation: Machetera

The de facto President of Honduras, Micheletti, entered the Presidential Palace on Monday, not through the main doorway but through the rooftop, with the aid of a military helicopter.  He came in the way robbers do.  The loot was democracy.  It was stolen from Honduras this weekend.  Rightwing business and ranching interests, together with the military, took advantage of a referendum called by the legitimate president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, in order to justify what they had longed for, for some time: the re-taking of absolute power.

Zelaya’s deadly game

Honduras: Is it Written?

José Steinsleger, La Jornada

Translation: Machetera

During the 2005 presidential elections, in plain daylight, the candidate Porfirio Lobo (National Party, conservative, government official) visited Washington’s ambassador in Honduras and proposed that the vote counting be monitored.

“I acted with restraint. There was a proven tendency toward a winner,” commented Charles Ford. Head bowed, the president of the National Congress left the embassy, accepting the facts: the liberal Manuel Zelaya, rancher and director of a private bank, would be the new leader of the poorest country on the continent after Haiti. A national liberal, “corrupt politicians,” … who cares?

Cuban ambassador targeted in Honduras

A curious detail has emerged from the coup underway in Honduras, thanks to the Cuban News Agency (and thanks to Magbana for pointing it out).

During a press conference at the venue of the Cuban Foreign Ministry (MINREX) in Havana, Rodriguez [Cuba's Foreign Minister] also condemned the military’s violation of the diplomatic immunity of Cuba’s Ambassador to Tegucigalpa Juan Carlos Hernandez, who was kidnapped and beaten along with Honduran Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas in the presence of the Venezuelan and Nicaraguan ambassadors.

Note that Rodriguez does not speak of the Venezuelan and Nicaraguan ambassadors being beaten.  Just the Cuban and the Honduran, in their “presence.”

Where is Luis Moreno when you need a resignation letter?

See, according to the former Assistant U.S. Ambassador in Haiti, Luis Moreno, it’s not that hard to get a president to sign a resignation letter.  You tell him what to write, and well, aside from threatening to slaughter a few hundred or maybe thousand citizens unless he signs it, you don’t really have to do all that much.  Then you go on to dictate your version to the stenographers at the Washington Post and repeat it to any bothersome U.S. citizens who show up at the embassy later to ask questions, shrugging your shoulders about the surprising nature of it all and pretending to be completely perplexed about it.

You should of course, have all this happen on the way to the airport, preferably in the middle of the night.  Typing a letter and dating it the THURSDAY before the forced rendition is clumsy, and will only add to suspicions that the letter is faked, which of course the kidnapped president is going to claim, when a letter magically turns up three days later with his three letter nickname forged upon it.

There is a much better view of the letter available here.

Aristide’s kidnappers come for Zelaya

If you’re just learning about the coup d’etat underway in Honduras, where at 6 a.m. this morning President Manuel Zelaya underwent a forced rendition by Honduran soldiers and was flown straight to Costa Rica, Machetera has very little to add.  Except this.  At his press conference today in Costa Rica, Zelaya spoke of entering a plane where all the shades were drawn and he was not permitted to lift any of them, the better to remain in the dark (literally) as to where he was or where he might be going.  Just like the 2004 kidnapping described by Haiti’s president, Jean Bertrand Aristide.  The one thing you have to say for the CIA is that it’s totally consistent – lack of imagination is its hallmark.

An early AP report speculated that Zelaya had been flown to Venezuela.  This of course is total stupidity.  Shame on the AP reporters who thought it up.  Of course he wouldn’t be flown to Venezuela, where the problem would have been immediately recognized and the kidnapping forcefully rejected.  Can you even imagine the phone call to Chávez?  A six year old would know better.  No.  He was flown to a country where they knew they wouldn’t even have to bother asking permission to land.  At the same press conference with Zelaya, when Costa Rican president Oscar Arias was asked if he had personally given landing permission, the look on his face was one of someone who is being forced to eat something particularly unpleasant.  No, he answered.  At no moment was he consulted.

Of course the new decider, Obama, is just a wee bit undecided about the whole thing…waiting to see how the whole thing “plays out” while Honduran military men are beating the hell out of the Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan ambassadors and Obama’s man in Honduras, Hugo Llorens, has his cellphone shut off.

More to come…

Posada-Carriles on the loose in Tehran

Quick, pop quiz.

1. The young Iranian woman in this photo stolen from Ernesto Hernández Busto’s blog (where as you might guess, he’s drooling over the possibility of his own color revolution in Cuba) is:

a. working class

b. professional class

c. trust-fund class

Pop Quiz Part II

2. The potbellied thug in the green Ku Klux Klan hood behind her is

a. Iranian

b. Something else

Back from the salt mine

It’s a difficult job, but somebody’s got to do it.

And unlike Ernesto Hernández Busto, those of us who lack a check from Langley have to find other ways of putting food on the table.  But now that Machetera’s bank account is stabilized again, she can turn her attention to things a little closer to her heart.  Like reminding everyone (in case you missed it) that Twitter’s co-founder, Jack Dorsey, was in Baghdad a month ago courtesy of the U.S. State Department, for talks on how to reconstruct the Iraqi information network destroyed by Iraq’s occupiers, and (conveniently) promote Twitter into the bargain.