As has been tradition for the past 36 years, the Committee of the Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH) held its fifth monthly assembly of the year at Merced Park, also known as the Plaza of the Disappeared to demand truth and justice.
In a public statement, COFADEH condemned the brutality that state security forces committed against workers on May 1st when they violently repressed the march that took place in Tegucigalpa.
The full text of the statement is below.
Honduras, The Face of International Cynicism
The Committee of the Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras, COFADEH, at its assembly this Friday May 4th, states:
The Armed Forces of Honduras, following the lead of Israel, Colombia, and the United States, in a perverse triangulation ruined the May 1st commemoration of Guadalupe Carney, the martyr from Chicago, in the central and southern parts of the country.
The dictator’s army, which is an instrument of transnational speculative capital, used war tactics and psychological operations against the opposition crowds led by the general population, not by regime unions.
The objective of the repression was politically premeditated to demonstrate the brute force of the impostors and prevent the restarting of the “insurrectional calendar,” which obstructs the consolidation of this dictatorship supported by the United States, Canada, and the European Union.
Taking the resolutions of the political Opposition Alliance as pretext, which the night before called for the resumption of the insurrection towards the revolution, military forces used infiltrators to distort the meaning of the demonstration and throw flames and smoke to the scavenging press that promoted its criminalizing headlines.
The COFADEH team, which during the march commemorated the victims of forced disappearance in the 1980s, and the Committee for the Liberation of the 21 Political Prisoners from the thieves that stole the election, was directly attacked with tear gas and forced to evacuate the area near the historic center of the capital.
A day after the repression in Tegucigalpa, military forces occupied the roads in Pajuiles, Tela, Atlántida, in order to escort heavy machinery from Hawit’s company, which would destroy the upper part of the mountain range, against the objection and resistance of the community.
As if the country was not fleeing in a caravan because of uncertainty and as if foreign investment has not been absent due to the violence, the narco groups and the corrupt mafias controlled by the State agree on mutual impunity and choose a general prosecutor in front of the Organization of American States, the United Nations, and the European Union that finance this masquerade.
There can be no greater shame in the near future than this one today. The international community that finances police and military forces, the “fight” against corruption, “political dialogue” and “prosperity”, watches the mockery of Honduras’s crooked elites with indifference. Is it because they don’t blush? Because they don’t care that the Honduran people know that this illegitimacy that they hold is criminal, inhumane, and unsustainable?
The countries that we’ve considered serious defenders of human rights because of their discourse and practice of universal values should reconsider their relationships with this cesspool of ambitious and ruinous people, who increasingly push the population to lose its good judgment and look for allies on the extremes.
For their candidates for the general prosecutor, they do not care about professional qualifications, nor a history of independence. They only know how to appoint their guard dogs. And all of you, esteemed members of the international community, should know that.
We, in this plaza as always, where we talk about hope with our white scarves and reclaim truth and justice through the pain of our loving stubbornness, demand freedom for the political prisoners of Honduras who are held incommunicado in unhealthy conditions in prisons under control of a military dictatorship. Free them; they exercised their constitutional rights in the protests of December 2017 and January 2018.
Of the deeds and of their perpetrators, we neither forget nor forgive!
COFADEH
May 4th, 2018
