Guardian investigation into consequences of Obama’s migration crackdown reveals US deportees have been murdered shortly after return to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, with study saying as many as 83 killed since 2014
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.theguardian.com
Two men are arrested in the deaths of Honduran beauty queen María José Alvarado Muñoz and her sister, and one of the men is the sister’s boyfriend.
Source: www.cnn.com
What’s it like for children in Honduras?
ESPINAL: Throughout the country we have a child mortality rate of 23 per 1,000. We have 900,000 children and adolescents who neither work nor go to school. We have 12 children who are assassinated every day
Source: www.unicefusa.org
In the early morning hours of June 28, 2009, masked soldiers raided the Zelaya home in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. President Zelaya’s daughter Xiomara Hortensia “Pichu” Zelaya hid under the bed as soldiers fired shots into the home. Following the coup she went into exile and hadn’t seen her home until Saturday. “My dad, when he heard the gunshots, he went out of his room, and he went to my room, told me to get dressed up, because the military are coming,” Pichu Zelaya says. “And I heard the gunshots and everything. So he told me to hide, to find somewhere to hide.” [includes rush transcript]
Source: www.democracynow.org
FRIDAY, MAY 18, 2012
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has confirmed its agents were on board a U.S.-owned helicopter with Honduran police officers when four people were shot and killed on a boat earlier this week. Two of the victims were said to be pregnant women. The deadly incident has highlighted the centrality of Honduras in the U.S.-backed drug war.
Honduras is the hub for the U.S. military operations in Latin America, hosting at least three U.S. bases. We speak to Dana Frank, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. [includes rush transcript]
Source: www.democracynow.org
DANA FRANK:
Yeah, when we talk about the fleeing gangs and violence, it’s also this tremendous poverty. And poverty doesn’t just happen. It, itself, is a direct result of policies of both the Honduran government and the U.S. government, including privatizations, mass layoffs of government workers, and a new—in Honduras, a new law, that’s now made permanent, that breaks up full-time jobs and makes them part-time and ineligible for unionization, living wage and the national health service. And a lot of these economic policies are driven by U.S.-funded lending organizations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, which itself is funding the corrupt Honduran police. The Central American Free Trade Agreement is the other piece of this. Like NAFTA did for the U.S. and Mexico, it opens the door to this open competition between small producers in agriculture in Honduras, small manufacturers, and jobs are disappearing as a result of that.
So, with this poverty that we’re seeing that people are fleeing, it’s not like people are like, “Let’s go have the American dream.” There are almost no jobs for young people. Their parents know it. And we’re talking about starving to death—that’s the alternative—or being driven into gangs with tremendous sexual violence. And it’s a very, very tragic situation here. But it’s not like it tragically just happened. It’s a direct result of very conscious policies by the U.S. and Honduran governments.
Click through for VIDEO and transcript.
Source: www.democracynow.org
Mr. Obama called the surge in children from Central America an “actual humanitarian crisis on the border,” and said it “only underscores the need to drop the politics and fix our immigration system once and for all.”
Source: www.nytimes.com