September 25, 2009

Remembering Antonio Agostinho Neto, Angolan Patriot


On September 10, 1979, 30 years ago, the noble heart of Antonio Agostinho Neto ceased beating. We received the news from a tearful Kundy Paihama, who was leading the Angolan delegation to the 6th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, which had concluded in Havana the previous day. Fidel, Raúl, Almeida, and President Samora Machel of Mozambique who, at that moment, was talking with us about the historic event, were filled with profound dismay.

Seven days later, on September 17, Neto would have turned 57 years old. His was a life of passion, heroism, and intelligence dedicated to the liberation of his country from colonial oppression and the building of a just society for all Angolans, which would also be a bulwark of solidarity for the sister nations who were victims of the shameful apartheid regi me — Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa.

Antonio Agostinho Neto was an independence fighter, a poet, doctor, guerrilla and statesman, in that order.

For a young man in a colonialized African country, where the overwhelming majority of the people were illiterate, it was difficult to have access to secondary education. Neto, the son of a Protestant pastor father and a teacher mother, was able to finish secondary school and went to work in Luanda as a health services assistant. His dream was to be a doctor.

During those years, he began to stand out as a figure in the cultural movement that grew swiftly in the 1940s under the motto of "Let's learn about Angola."

For several years he saved up his money, and at the age of 25, in 1947, left for Portugal and enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine of the ancient University of Coimbra.

A scholarship from the U.S. Methodist Church for the pastor's son helped Neto, after his second year of living in Portugal, to survive in the metropolis and maintain his dream of becoming a doctor.

But other, even stronger dreams illuminated Agostinho's life: the independence of his homeland and saving the world from another world war.

After becoming involved in political activity, he was imprisoned for the first time, for three months, after being arrested in 1952 collecting signatures supporting the Stockholm Appeal for World Peace.To advocate world peace was a crime under the Portuguese fascist colonial regime, with its close ties to the United States and Britain, which were on a new crusade against the USSR and the popular democracies of Europe and Asia.


That first time in prison did not defeat Neto. He helped create institutions to bring together people living in Portugal who were from its colonies: the African Maritime Club, the Portuguese House of Africa, the Center for African Studies. It was during that time that he became friends with Amílcar Cabral, an agronomy student, as well as Lucio Lara, Marcelino dos Santos and Mario Andrade.

Neto's ideas went beyond the independence movement: he joined the Portuguese Communist Party.

Solidarity with the Assault on the Moncada Garrison

The 4th World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace and Friendship took place in Bucharest, Romania, from late July to early August of 1953, and there I had the privilege of being the first Cuban to meet Agostinho Neto. I was 23 years old and he was 30.

An outstanding medical student, he had traveled secretly to Romania to represent the Portuguese colonies as part of the Portuguese delegation. But instead of staying with the European delegates, he preferred to be with the Latin Americans, specifically the Brazilians, and somebody had told him that I could facilitate his transfer from one area to the other.

Neto was the first Angolan I had come across in my life. All I knew about his country was its name, and that it was a Portuguese colony in Africa. He knew more about Cuba. He remembered the poetry of Nicolás Guillén, whom I admired as the highest voice of black poetry in the world.

Marcelino dos Santos, who with Modlane and Samora Machel founded the Liberation Front of Mozambique — FRELIMO — was also part of the delegation of democratic youth from Portugal and its colonies.

Neto talked to me about the Angolan people's desires for liberation. I talked to him about our struggles, about the assault on the Moncada Garrison, which had taken place a few days earlier, at a point when we still didn't know the fate of the leader of that heroic action, Fidel Castro, or of his brother Raúl, who was one of the signatories to the call for the World Festival in which we were taking part. We asked all of the national delegations to join in the campaign initiated by the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY): "Save the lives of Fidel Castro and his comrades!"

I ran into Neto again in Vienna in December 1954. I had left Guatemala after many months in that Central American nation. After the imperialist coup against the democratic government of President Jacobo Arbenz, and having fought in the underground against Castillo A rmas, the vicious leader imposed by the United States, I managed to leave the country in September and rejoined the WFDY in Europe.

The WFDY was preparing an International Conference of Rural Youth. Agostinho Neto attended that event in late 1954.

A few weeks later, on February 9, 1955, Neto was arrested by the fearsome PIDE, the Portuguese political police. It was a cruel incarceration of more than two years. Neto had already published his first collection of poetry.

Internationally-known intellectuals spoke out for the freedom of the anti-colonialist and anti-fascist fighter: Jean Paul Sartre, André Mauriac, Aragón, Simone de Beauvoir, Nicolás Guillén, Diego Rivera, and others.

In 1957, Amnesty International declared him "political prisoner of the year."

The regime felt obliged to mount a legal farce. The court that tried him sentenced him to 18 months in prison, even though he already had been behind bars for 28 months and three days.

In October 1958, at the University of Lisbon, he finished his medical studies and married María Eugenia, his companion until death and mother of his three children.

After working as a gynecologist in a Lisbon hospital for a short time, he returned to Angola in 1959, where he worked as a doctor among the poor, particularly women, and at the same time assumed the leadership of the Popular Movement for the Liberat ion of Angola (MPLA), founded in Luanda in 1956.

In June 1960, he was jailed for the third time. The local PIDE (secret police) chief personally arrested him in his Luanda medical office. Sent to prison in Lisbon, he was later confined to the island of Sao Antón, and then Santiago Island, both part of the Cape Verde archipelago. He continued practicing medicine among the people of Cape Verde and his comrades, patriots from various Portuguese colonies who were exiled there.

Once again, a campaign was built to free Agostinho Neto, honorary president of the MPLA, and the Portuguese authorities were forced to release him in 1962, ordering him to live in Portugal.

The MPLA and the Portuguese anti-fascists devised an escape plan. Neto left Portugal with his wife and small children, and after a hazardous journey, arrived in the capital of Congo Leopoldville (present-day Kinshasa), where the MPLA then had its headquarters outside of Angola.

In December of that year, Neto was elected MPLA president at the organization's national conference.

In 1963, the MPLA headquarters was transferred from Kinshasa, where the government had become a yanki-Belgian instrument, to Brazzaville, capital of the former French Congo, where a progressive government was in power, presided over by Massemba Debat.

In late August 1965, eleven years after we saw each other in Vienna, I met up with Agostinho Neto ag ain, this time in Africa, in the Congo.

Earlier that year, in January, at the MPLA headquarters in Brazzaville, Neto had received Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara, who was on a tour of Africa. One hundred days later, Che returned to Africa, this time as commander of Column One, to join up with Lumumba's forces in the eastern region of the former Belgian Congo.

Neto's request to Che for six Cuban instructors to train and fight with the MPLA guerrilla forces on the Cabinda Front was met in May, when Captain Rafael Moracén and five other compañeros traveled from Havana and joined the Angolan combatants.

I arrived in Brazzaville and immediately went to see him at the MPLA headquarters. I was no longer talking as an organizer of festivals and international congresses, but as chief of Cuba's internationalist mission, the Patricio Lumumba Battalion, Che's Second Front in the Congo Basin, and it was with an illustrious interlocutor, the president of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola.

The main point on my agenda was Cabinda, where the six Cuban instructors were carrying out their work. We exchanged opinions on the subject, but I soon realized that his central concern was not focused on Cabinda.

"Nambuangongo," he said, pausing and then, more forcefully, repeated the word, which has the sonority of an African drum. On a large map of Angola covering one square meter of the wall, he showed me the Dembos mountain range. Nambuangongo, relatively close to Luanda. He was deeply distressed over the fate of combatants in that first political/military region, who were facing many thousands of colonial soldiers.

Portugal had bombarded the area with defoliant, the same chemical the yankis later used in Vietnam.

Neto was obsessed with sending reinforcements to the First Front. Later, he talked to me about the possibility of opening a Third Front in eastern Angola, for which collaboration was being negotiated with newly-independent Zambia. I understood his strategic idea, and that the Cabinda Front was principally a polygon with a real enemy for training cadres via the guerrilla life and small-scale combat.

The idea of training and sending columns to the First Region became stronger after Operation Macaco in Cabinda, implemented in late December by joint Angolan/Cuban forces that did not achieve their specific goal of attacking a Portuguese garrison, but which turned out to be a grand rehearsal by a unit of more than 100 men operating as such.

The conversation in Havana between Fidel and Neto, accompanied by Hoyi Ya Henda, during the Tricontinental Conference in January 1966 revolved precisely around our collaboration in these strategic ideas.

In mid-July, a column of 100 combatants was ready to reinforce the First Region. It was Neto 's decision that that elite unit, called upon to execute such a difficult mission, should bear the name of our hero Camilo Cienfuegos.

The column honored his glorious name. It secretly entered Congo Leopoldville. It formed as an armed column on that country's border with Angola, and after a 35-day march, evading the enemy, reached the First Region. It was the first time I remember seeing Neto laugh. His smile, with his large teeth, lit up his face months later when he received the news of the Cienfuegos squad and its successful march.

Two new columns, the Kamy and the Ferraz Bomboko, took off for the same destination, the interior of Angola, although with different fates. We are not going to tell the whole story, but both contributed to taking forward the struggle in Angola's interior, in the north and in the east. Two and a half years after our first meeting in Brazzaville, Neo's strategic ideas were becoming a reality.

For years, I preserved the memory of seeing Neto with that victorious smile. We would meet again in Luanda, nine years later, in early December of 1975.

I had the privilege of collaborating closely in Angola with President Neto for three and a half years. The more I dealt with him, the more I admired his position of principles, his revolutionary ideas, and his unshakeable identification with the cause of justice, freedom and socialism. On May 1, 1979, I returned from my long residence in Angola as representative of the leadership of our Party and chief of our civilian mission.

Four and a half months later, we suffered his loss.

His poetry speaks of the need to battle, to dream, to fight for independence, and the need to fight for a new Angola, to re-conquer the Angolan identity despite the presence of the colonizers.

Allow me to offer this vivid biographical portrait of Agostinho Neto, in remarks made in his presence by Fidel, during the 26th of July rally of 1976 in the city of Pinar del Río:

"And we have here a man who also devoted his whole life to the effort of liberating his homeland, who was forced to confront enormous difficulties. In order to make the two situations more similar, Neto is also a man of extraordinary culture, of great intellectual capacity and an extraordinary poet, who devoted his life and his pen to his people, to his brothers and sisters, discriminated against and enslaved, to forging the political consciousness of the Angolans.

"And like Martí, he wrote many of his best works and his best poems in the suffering of imprisonment, of exile and of the enslavement of his brothers and sisters. Martí and Neto have been forgers of the homeland.

"Not only did he forge a consciousness, he also forged, like Martí, the instrument of the struggle and c harted a line, a road — the only road in Angola, like yesterday in Cuba — for achieving independence, which was the heroic struggle of the people, the armed struggle of the people. And for many years, he has led that struggle. Neto is also one of the most modest, noble and honest men I have ever known."

I would like to end my evocation of the beloved figure of Agostinho Neto by reaffirming what General of the Army Raúl Castro stated in Luanda, in February of this year, at the start of official talks with President José Eduardo dos Santos of the Republic of Angola:

"The historic fraternity between Cuba and Angola is indestructible. It was forged in our common struggle against colonialism and apartheid, under the guidance of two exceptional men: Agostinho Neto and Fidel Castro."

Translated by Granma International

The McChrystal Ball predicts more troops and more war.


Canadian Peace Alliance

On October 7, organize in your community to bring the troops home now.

Join us on October 7, the eighth anniversary of the start of the war, to organize in your community to bring the troops home now.

What can you do on October 7:

1) Organize a mass leafleting and distribute Afghanistan factsheets and postcards, available for download on the CPA website: www.acp-cpa.ca. Don’t forget to download some petitions, fill them with signatures, and return them to the CPA office. Please fax completed petitions to 416-588-5556.

2) Organize a public forum to discuss the issue of the war. Host it in your neighbourhood, during a lunch break at work, or on campus.

3) Organize a banner drop. Help make the public’s opposition to the war more visible.

4) Organize a street poll in your area. Ask people on the street, “Should we bring Canadian troops home from Afghanistan Now!” This is a great visual to accompany your outreach.

5) Meet with your local Member of Parliament, or organize a “phone-in” day to keep the pressure on the politicians.

6) Write a letter to the editor. The newspapers are full of articles about the war, and anti-war voices are getting a bigger hearing. Let us know you’ve sent a letter, and cc cpa@web.ca.

The McChrystal Assessment

The top US soldier in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has delivered a bleak assessment of the war in a strategic document leaked to the Washington Post. His document contains little news about the war, but it is nevertheless significant. Coming from the highest levels of the US military, McChrystal’s document is an explicit call for the US and its NATO partners to send more troops to Afghanistan.

The main thrust of his argument is that, while the war is going badly for the West, there is still time to turn it around—but with another surge in troops. It is expected that McChrystal will ask for between 10,000 and 45,000 new troops.

Most observers have known for some years now that the war is being lost, that the resistance to NATO’s occupation is growing, and that widespread corruption in the Afghan government leaves most Afghans with little hope for the future. We also know that, with each new deployment of troops, violence in Afghanistan increases. In fact, it is the presence of foreign soldiers that keeps giving the Taliban a new lease on life.

NATO is now in damage-control mode. The recent presidential election in Afghanistan has been a disaster, and has led one-time supporters in the West to question the purpose of the mission. In every NATO country, including the US, there is now a clear majority of public opinion in opposition to the occupation. McChrystal’s document is a desperate attempt to win back public support for the war.

But McChrystal doesn’t provide any brilliant new insights. Instead, he rehashes the same old arguments about “staying the course” and issues a call to pursue tactics that will “win the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people.

His main argument is that NATO should maintain a presence in regions that it has conquered—to “connect with the people” and to stop the resistance from re-capturing the territory once NATO forces leave. Media reports in Canada suggest that McChrystal’s document is a vindication of the so-called “model village” strategy adopted by Canadian Forces in Deh-e-Bagh.

But this is essentially a call for a larger and deeper occupation.

Once again, the assessment misses the mark. There is no new tactical approach that will win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, as long as it extends control of a corrupt government dominated by drug lords and warlords. The Afghan people don’t want their land occupied by foreign troops. The fact that only one “model village” has been created in eight years of war renders any triumphalism about this strategy a little premature.

The second major argument is that NATO needs to train more Afghan police and soldiers, but offers no new plans to overcome the obstacles that have made such training impossible. The Afghan police and army have been unable to retain recruits. After their training, police recruits are sent to remote outposts, where they become target practice for the resistance. As a result, more than 60 per cent of them are addicted to heroin.

In the Afghan army, desertion is commonplace. In a country where 40 per cent of the men are unemployed, the short-term job of becoming a soldier provides some stable employment. But after receiving their training, most soldiers desert and join the resistance.

The Canadian government has yet to announce any plan to extend Canada’s mission—as the McChrystal document asks. But we know that Prime Minister Stephen Harper supports continuing the occupation. Defence Minister Peter McKay has already hinted at a new role for Canada after 2011, which would include training members of the Afghan National Army and police. But that would require a significant military commitment past 2011.

In Canada, the threat of a federal election has shifted the debate about the war. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives share the blame for extending the war in Afghanistan to 2011. Not surprisingly, neither party wants an election in which the war is an issue. It is up to us in the peace movement to build that opposition, and to keep the question of the war front-and-centre for the Canadian public and politicians alike.

Join us on October 7, the eighth anniversary of the start of the war, to organize in your community to bring the troops home now.

September 23, 2009

Melanie Cervantes on Chicano Art

The next issue of Rebel Youth will feature some of Melanie Cervante's art on our cover. Here is an interview with her talking about art and politics.


Testimonies by Honduran coup resistors



By Denise M.
Special to Rebel Youth

The lack of media attention to the coup in Honduras disgusts me. Not enough attention is being brought to human rights violations that are being committed by this military regime that assumed power through violent means and ousted democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya. President Zelaya is now in the Brazilian embassy demanding that dictator Roberto Micheletti steps down. Thousands of supporters are out in the streets defending their president, despite the terrorist actions that have been taken by the military and the police. These are two testimonies written by two coup resistors.


The names of the authors were removed for their own protection.


From XXXX

Friends,

I am now in a building close to Brazil’s embassy with 30 comrades, the majority of which are members of the Artists of the National Front Against the Coup D’etat (Artistas del Frente Nacional Contra el Golpe de Estado).

We came to this place to rest, all the while knowing that at any moment the military and the police could enter the perimeter where we, around 5000 people, are to protect President Manuel Zelaya.

They attacked at 5:45am with guns and teargas. They killed an undetermined number of comrades from the first barricade at the end of the Guantaste bridge. They also surrounded and attacked the barricade of La Reforma bridge.

After doing approximate calculations, the militant operation counted with around 1000 active policemen and militaries.

They cornered and beat up. 18 were severely hurt and taken to the Escuela Hospital. In Barrio Morazan and in Barrio Guadalupe, they are still hunting down the brave students that organized the precarious barricades.

At this moment it is 8am. In front of Brazil’s embassy they now placed a loudspeaker which is blasting the national anthem while they search the houses that border the embassy. They threw teargas bombs inside the embassy. The president remains inside threatened by the coup participants that have explained to the media the “legal” reasons for searching these homes.

Thousands of people that were heading towards the city of Tegucigalpa (where the Brazilian embassy which is where Zelaya is) have been detained all around the city. The city is completely empty: a ghost town. The curfew has been extended to entire day.

The repression against defenseless protestors was brutal. In various occasions, Globo Radio and Channel 36 were taken off the air.

Hundreds have been imprisoned.

We are alienated.

Here we are, the principal members of the planning of great cultural events of resistance: poets, singers, musicians, photographers, film makers, painters…humans.


Read an interview with President Zelaya on his return.

Wednesday morning: Honduras








Rebel Youth magazine expresses its support to a series of emergency demos occurring around the world, including Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.

September 22, 2009

Crowds Being Rounded Up in Honduras! Democracy Under Seige!


Please write immediately to the UN missions members of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, from Canada, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, India, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and others, IMMEDIATELY. The contact information for all the listed missions is below the sample letter.

Demand that the United Nations immediately impose an economic blockaid on Honduras, a demand of the National Front of Resistance to the Coup against Honduras. The United Nations initiated a session today.

Honduran President Manuel Zelaya yesterday arrived in Honduras, and is in the Brazilian Embassy. The defacto government is attacking protesters who have gathered around the Brazilian Embassy to protect the constitutionally elected President Manuel Zelaya. Dangerous quantities of tear gas are being used around the Brazilian embassy at a level that puts in danger the lives of the Brazilian diplomatic corps, President Zelaya, and neighbors of the Embassy.

According to radio reports in Honduras, protesters are being rounded up and held in stadiums. Live ammunition has been used against protesters along with extreme beatings. Masked men accompany police and military. Deaths of protesters are rumored. The offices of leading Honduran human rights organization COFADEH was attacked with tear gas. A curfew is in effect and scheduled to begin at 4 pm, and extreme repression during the curfew is expected.

Over the past 88 days the Resistance Front has maintained constant protests of thousands of protester daily.

SAMPLE LETTER

Esteemed Ambassador:

I write to request that in your capacity as a member of the United Nations Economic and Social Council you propose a resolution to obligate members of the United Nations to impose a trade bock aid against Honduras. In this way the non recognition of the de facto regime that came to power through a military coup on June 28, 2009 will be made effective.

Today the coup regime is undertaking a direct attack on the Embassy of Brazil, where the constitucional President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya is located. They are using dangerous levels of tear gas, and have fired live ammunition; acts that put at risk the lives and wellbeing of hundreds of members of Brazils diplomatic corpse and thousands of people in the street and homes around the embassy. This repression is the latest in 88 days of repression by the coup government.

For this reason it is urgent that an economic blockaid be imposed and that the possibility of a peace keeping mission be discussed.

Sincerely,


United Nations Missions in the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations

Canada
E-mail: canada@un.int or prmny@international.gc.ca
Telephone:
212-848-1100
Fax: (1) 212-848-1195, -1192, -1128

United States
http://www.archive.usun.state.gov/Issues/contactus.html
Telephone212-415-4062
Fax: 212-415-4053

United Kingdom
UK@UN.int
Telephone: (1) (212) 745 9200
Fax:1 (212) 745 9316

France
france@franceonu.org
Telephone : 1 (212) 702 4900
Fax : 1 (212) 421 6889

Germany
http://www.new-york-un.diplo.de/Vertretung/newyorkvn/en/Kontakt.jsp

India
India@un.int
Tel: 212-490-9660
Fax: 212-490-9656

Netherlands
Tel: (212) 519-9500
Fax: (212) 370-1954
netherlands@un.int

New Zealand
Tel: (212) 826 1960
Fax: (212) 758 0827
Email nzmissionny@earthlink.net

Norway
Phone: 212-421-0280
Fax: 212-688-0554
E-mail: delun@mfa.no

Sweden
sweden@un.int
Telephone: (212) 583-2500
Fax: 212 583 2549

This Alert was prepared by the Campaign for Labor Rights.
We can be reached by phone at 202-544-9355 or 520-243-0381. You can also email james@afgj.org for more information.
Visit our website at: http://www.clrlabor.org/wordpress/

A look back: Young Worker 1934 and residential schools



In this digitized page of the Young Worker, a headline reads: "Nineteen Indian Boys Flogged with Strap Soaked in Vinegar" this had a dateline of April 25, 1934.

While the term "Indian" is outdated except in specific legal terms, the article shows the racism of the government, society and the YCL's fight against it then, and sadly is still having to fight against racism today.

click on an image to read







FIGHT FOR THE RIGHTS OF INDIAN PEOPLE! (editorial from 1934)


The inhuman flogging of nineteen boys at the Indian Home at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia brings sharply before the whole toiling youth the misery of the young Indians. Segregated in reservations, denied the simplest democratic rights, considered as wards of the government, discriminated against, the young Indians are brutally oppressed and exploited by the ruling class. The few schools which exist for them are controlled by the catholic church. Indian youths who become educated in one way or another are refused the chance to teach as was shown recently at a school. The Indian people have nearly no say as to their children's education.

This case also exposes the role of the church and brings out sharply the need for struggle for secular education and against religious instruction in schools.

The young workers and farmers of Canada should protest against the oppression of Indians; we must fight for equal rights for them; for the right to vote; for unemployment relief; for special governmental aid to the starving Indian farmers, hunters and fishermen. We should begin to fight for the right of the Indian people to control their own schools, assign their own teachers and have these schools in their own languages.

The fight for Indian rights is part and parcel of the struggle for the RIGHT TO SELF DETERMINATION FOR THE INDIAN PEOPLES, which means the right for them to establish their own governments, the right to separate from Canada if they wish.

While the Indian youth does not form the most decisive section of the Canadian young workers and farmers, the fight for Indian rights will help develop proletarian internationalism and will help combat national chauvinism and patriotism. The Canadian toiling youth will never be freed from oppression.

This brutal assault must call forth protests which should be sent to the government. We should demand a thorough investigation and punishment of the school principal, Father Mackey. We should support the financial drive carried on by the Indians of the Shubenacadie and other reservations for the purpose of asserting their rights in this case.

As against this case of brutal assault which is but one example of oppression of the Indian people, we have the example of the Soviet Union which freed all peoples formerly oppressed under the Czar's government and where all nations live in fraternal equality. Intensified struggle can wrest better conditions and equality for the Indians and they will lead to decisive battles for the right to self determination. However it will be a SOVIET CANADA which will finally solve this problem for the benefit of the oppressed Indian masses.


Please note that some views of 1934 have obviously changed here in 2009 in light of present circumstances. Examples are the masculine terms like fishermen. Another example is: "we must fight for equal rights for them" and " However it will be a SOVIET CANADA which will finally solve this problem for the benefit of the oppressed Indian masses." sounds paternal but shows that the wording is simply not reflecting the meaning proven by the following lines: "RIGHT TO SELF DETERMINATION FOR THE INDIAN PEOPLES, which means the right for them to establish their own governments, the right to separate from Canada if they wish."

The line: "While the Indian youth does not form the most decisive section of the Canadian young workers and farmers..." in light of present day events and the way history has played out shows that this is not exactly the case. Aboriginal peoples are very much in the forefront of battles against imperialism and capitalism. What remains to be seen is when the masses (versus the activists) of the Aboriginal population join the fight, not to mention the rest of the workers and the trade union movement. Because divided we fall.


latest on Honduras-snipers aiming into embassy






After Manuel Zelaya appeared in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, the country's capital, repression has intensified. This link below is to a blog that is dedicated to following coup events:

http://hondurascoup2009.blogspot.com/

here's a few snippets:

...Members of the union of electrical workers of the National Electric Company (ENEE) called in to Radio Globo to announce that the Micheletti government intends to cut electricity in the entire country today...They've taken Channel 36 off the air that way...Radio Globo... is reporting that the
police and military has shot into the Brazilian Embassy...Sharpshooters are now being placed on top buildings in and around the Brazilian Embassy
...A friend who lives a couple of kilometers from the Brazilian embassy wrote at 4:30 this morning to report hearing gunshots: "We can hear gun shots and more from our house, about 2km from the Brazilian Embassy. There are hundreds injured. We can hear many gunshots." This as Martha Lorena Alvarado, of the de facto regime,denies that any shots were fired. Romeo Vasquez Velasquez said "we will maintain the order no matter what the cost. "

Another good blog that deals with various subjects including the coup in Honduras is Left Turn.

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