Judge Nullifies University Arrests

El Heraldo is reporting in its "Minuto a Minuto" column at 12:02 pm Tegucigalpa time, that Judge Iván Castelar, of Tegucigalpa has invalidated the raid the Policia Nacional conducted on the Teaching University in Tegucigalpa. He ruled that the police "violated the university". The police had reported finding "at least 13 molotov coctails and 7 sticks of dynamite" in the gymnasium where the protesters have been sleeping and arrested more than 120 protesters in this case. The protesters say that the evidence was planted, that it was a police officer that brought the "evidence" into the Unversity in a backpack.

The war of words between the rector of the Autonomous University in Tegucigalpa and the Police continues. The police continue to allege that the lab of the Chemistry and Farmacy departments was used in the manufacture of the molotov cocktails, despite the rector's assurances that the lab burned last year in a serious fire that closed the entire building, which is guarded by a security company not associated with the University, and no student or faculty member has had access since it burned.

I'm dubious that the "devices" in the photographs in El Heraldo and the other newspapers are molotov cocktails. The bottles in the photos are painted black, and in at least one photo there is a can of spray paint. There are no sticks of dynamite, nor detonators, in the photos. There is no reason to spray paint the bottles, and one doesn't need a laboratory or equipment to make a molotov cocktail.

Update: El Heraldo has now posted an article with more information about the decision. To reiterate, the Judge, Iván Castelar, has nullified the detention warrants filed by the prosecutor. He ruled that the police and military "violated the autonomy of the university" and the case failed because they failed to follow proper procedures and include a prosecutor in their investigation. Reading between the lines, it appears that they didn't establish the legal grounds needed to enter university property before going in.

In this case, the prosecutor had accused the 24 protesters of sedition, destruction of property, illegal protests against the security of the state, and robbery following the protests where a bus and fast food restaurant burned. Of those arrested, 13 were released, though the charges have not been dropped. The remaining 11 are still imprisoned in the national penitentiary according to a spokesman.

Education is dangerous: Police militarize Tegucigalpa's universities

The excerpts from a chilling first-hand account of the repression of anti-coup rallies really needs little explanation, other than to say it comes from a member of a delegation from the US, from the Quixote Center/Quest for Peace, that went to Honduras to see first-hand what the situation is.

As the author notes, the police are now claiming that the National Pedagogical University stored, and the UNAH produced, bombs, producing rows of devices lined up for photo opportunities as "evidence". The highly-respected sociologist, Julieta Castellanos, rector of UNAH, denies this in an article published in La Tribuna. Ironically, her main argument that the charges of bomb-making were inaccurate comes from the fact that the laboratories are unusable, never having been repaired after an explosion during the course of use. As anyone who has visited UNAH knows, it suffers from an entirely unmaintained set of facilities. Now they also have to contend with police rumor-mongering which, in the present atmosphere, could set up conditions for militarization as has already taken place in the Pedagogica, which trains the teachers who work in Honduras' under-funded, challenged schools.

Wednesday in Tegucigalpa

We had breathed a collective sigh of relief that the mass mobilizations of Tuesday had passed without major incident. In the morning on Wednesday, part of our delegation went to join that day’s march which, after an extended assembly at the University headed off towards downtown Tegucigalpa. Three of us who have been coordinating spent the morning writing a framework for an ongoing presence of delegations.

Our group had agreed to meet up in the mid afternoon at the human rights office, COFADEH. We were planning to participate in a press conference which COFADEH was convening, but had been continually delayed because the report they are issuing includes so many cases of human rights violations, they have not been able to get it finished

.....

Suddenly a part of the crowd started moving backwards instead of forward. We ran to a different door, around the corner, closer to where the crowds were turning around, to see why it was happening. Down the side street, we could see a line of police and military advancing. They advanced on the crowd without the slightest provocation. Suddenly tear gas was flying everywhere and we could see that troops were attacking the crowd from other directions as well. Some people in the march responded by throwing rocks to chase the military and police back. What happened was obviously a previously planned assault. Soon the police and military were chasing people from every direction, and the march disintegrated, as people ran to escape being accosted by the repressive actions. What we would later discover is that assaults were happening somewhat simultaneously all over the city. Our view inside the mall afforded us scant perspective as to what was happening all over the city, and in San Pedro Sula as well. Members of our delegation would later recount of being sandwiched between soldiers from many directions, but fortunately they were able to escape without personal injury.

....


The army conducted an assault on the National University, and has turned it into a virtual military base. They arrested an undetermined number of people inside, some whose whereabouts are still unknown. Ambulances which left full of people who had been beaten, many reportedly with their faces battered apparently never arrived at the hospital that was their supposed destination. The headquarters of the STYBIS union was also surrounded, and remained under control of the army as of last night. There was also a similar kind of assault on the other city where protesters had converged on Tuesday, San Pedro Sula. We got a report that more than 300 people were detained there. [emphasis added]

We went out in a couple of vehicles to accompany COFADEH staff to rescue several young union activists who were in hiding and feared detention and worse. We brought them back to the COFADEH office, where it is presumed that they will be safer. On the way home we stopped by the University, which looked just like a military base. Outside was a group of lawyers who had been working for hours to secure the release of those who had been illegally detained there yesterday. We also passed in front of the STYBIS headquarters, which was still surrounded by the army. [emphasis added]

This morning our delegation, severely impacted emotionally by the events unfolding around them yesterday, will regroup and again head out to cover the mobilization which has been called for today and prepare reports detailing the breadth of abuses which were committed yesterday. Here in Honduras the coup government’s propaganda machine is fully cranked up this morning. The head of the police and a high military official were in full smile on a morning talk show. They are attempting to justify their criminalization of the protest, alleging that they uncovered bomb making activities by the resistance front, which they use as an excuse to justify their wanton attacks on all of the protesters.

University Rector's Comments on UNAH Confrontation

An article in the pro-coup Honduran newspaper El Heraldo, published Monday, is interesting for a number of reasons.

First, it quotes Rectora Julieta Castellanos, the respect sociologist, highest official of the University, whose man-handling by riot police last week was a shocking breach of university autonomy that underlines how out of control the military/police response is.

Second, it gives an opportunity to have a real eye-witness-- the best eye-witness-- assess who has the responsibility for the violence that escalated after some university students blocked a road in Tegucigalpa and the police over-reacted to this normal form of civil disobedience. Since other commentators have blamed the students for the violence, it is important to listen to Dr. Castellanos. As noted in her own words, she has tried to keep the university neutral in the current crisis, so that it can serve as a site of multilateral debate about Honduran civil society in the future (see this official statement)-- a position for which the university has been criticized.

So these are not the words of a fierce advocate for the restoration of Zelaya; this is what is happening to those who are trying to maintain a civil atmosphere for discourse. Contrast that with the police commissioner's painting of the university as a site of "anarchists" and you have the proof of the contempt for academic debate and free opinion of this authoritarian regime clearly illustrated.

Here's my translation of the article:

"UNAH will not be the stage of this conflict": rector Julieta Castellanos says that the actions of last Wednesday are the responsibility of the Police

The National Autonomous University (UNAH) will not be the stafe of the political conflict in which the country lives, the rector of the alma mater, Julieta Castellanos, said this morning.

"We will not permit that violent deeds be committed and that (the UNAH) would be a stage of this conflict", said Castellanos, for whom the violence in the demonstration of last Wednesday "was a product of the actions of the Police".

The sociologist reacted in response to declarations issued by Danilo Orellana, [police] commisioner, who denounced the highest institution of learning as being used by anarchists.

As well, there have circulated reports that the highest institution of learning was being used as a refuge for unstabilizing groups. "The UNAH is not a lodging for anyone", said Julieta Castellanos in response in an interview with a radio station.

In the judgment of the Rector, it is the police that are involving the UNAH to "justify" the eviction of last Wednesday, when university members came out to demand the return of Manuel Zelaya and were confronted by riot police that arrived with an order to restore activity in the alma mater.

Castellanos said that "she had not appreciated the magnitude of what could happen" last Wednesday August 26.

In respect to the political crisis, she maintained that "we take the position that national dialogue is what we should give primacy to".

She maintained that the demonstrators are "free to do what they wish, to attend the marches that they wish, but that is at the personal level".

Nonetheless, she considers that the political crisis that Honduras is experiencing "will be resolved by the political class".

While State Department Waffles, Honduran University Members are Beaten

As news comes that the State Department has assured Senator Richard Lugar that they do not actually support President Zelaya (confirming the opinions of most of my Honduran correspondents), that they blame him for "provoking" the coup (recalling other forms of blaming the victim whose actions draw violent responses), and that they have no intention to use their economic leverage (reassuring the Micheletti regime that they can dig in and wait and eventually they will get away with their coup), the regime's threatened escalation of violence comes to fruition, unfolding as I write in the National University campus in Tegucigalpa.

Here, reports from multiple correspondents, echoed by Telesur and Tiempo (of Hondurs), note that the National Police are using tear gas, beatings, and shooting at students and faculty who were engaged in peaceful protest of the illegitimate regime that is stealing their freedoms.

Among those victimized by this violence: Julietta Castellano, Rector (equivalent to Chancellor) and respected symbol of the integrity of this institution. According to Olvin Rodriguez, member of the Junta Directiva (executive committee) of the university, as they were exiting with their hands up in response to police demands, they were set upon, beaten, and thrown to the ground. He writes that "Not even in the epoch of repression by the bloody General Alvarez Martinez in the 1980s was the autonomy of the university violated as it was today."

The reference is to the dictator who preceded the period of almost thirty years of constitutional rule destroyed in the coup of June 28. As Honduran commentators have argued, the damage being done to the fabric of civil society will not easily be repaired.

An email report from the scene sent to me at 1:45 describes a scene of horror:

A half hour ago, the police force and military of the dictatorial regime imposed on Honduras, has initiated a vandalistic offensive against the National Autonomous University of Honduras. With the pretext of dissolving a peaceful demonstration of resistance that the students were carrying out at the entry to the University in Tegucigalpa, they began to throw tear gas, and as the students fled to the interior of the university grounds, they have pursued them and continue their human hunt at this moment, with SHOTS. The Rector and members of the Junta Directiva of the University, who had come out to dialogue with the police and military, have been assaulted in their physical integrity, thrown on the ground, grabbed with blows.

There are wounded, the cruel repression continues in the present moments. Colleagues, students and administrators from within the University are calling us, anguished, they cannot exit, they are shooting at them, breaking in the windows and walls, the tear gas has entered the university halls, they feel they are suffocating and are afraid to come out and be shot with bullets.

Meanwhile, a second correspondent, whose father is among those trapped on the campus, writes that Radio Globo is reporting that at least three wounded have been transported by a Red Cross ambulance for medical care. These reports also say the Police Commander Somoza, supposedly in charge, disclaims any knowledge of whoever is giving orders to this contingent of police and military. Radio Globo reports that students have armed themselves with stones and are attacking the police and commandos, pushing them back, but that strong reinforcements are coming for the military.

It is imperative that the US State Department NOT BE ALLOWED to ignore these latest acts of violent repression by the Honduran regime. The State Department MUST DENOUNCE these actions, and must take action to punish the regime and induce it to cease its campaign of terror against its citizens.

Statement of the Central American Cultural Studies Congress

Delegates to the second Central American Cultural Studies Congress recently held at the Universidad de Costa Rica, in lieu of the original planned venue of Tegucigalpa, endorsed the following statement against the disruption of constitutional government in Honduras in a special final session featuring scholarly discussion of the coup and its causes. As noted here previously, Honduran and Central American academic opinion is strongly against this reversion to authoritarian rule. It is no accident that the victims of the Honduran regime include teachers, most recently, Roger Vallejo, fatally wounded by gunshot to the head during protests in Tegucigalpa, who taught at the Instituto San Martín.

As the signatories reiterate, the events in Honduras are part of a larger regional process through which democracies that have failed to extend benefits to the clase popular, which could be inadequately and misleadingly translated "working class", but actually is better thought of as extending to all those disenfranchised everyday people who were the projected beneficiaries of constitutional reform in Honduras.

These scholars also emphasize, as I will continue to do in upcoming posts, that there was no completed judicial process prior to the illegal expatriation of President Zelaya that could have served as a legal basis to remove him from office. I have come to believe that the reason for the de facto regime ordering President Zelaya's removal was, quite simply, that they had no viable case against him that would have risen to the level necessary to procedurally remove him from office. They did not want to wait out the rest of his term and risk there being a mobilization of a larger popular movement that, in the November elections, might have upset the long-term hegemony over the presidency shared by the Liberal and National parties, if only by giving a third-party candidate a sufficiently large number of votes to make it harder to claim a clear mandate to govern.

But for now, I simply wish to reiterate a second point of this blog: that cultural policy is central to what happened in Honduras. As much as the economic spoils and threats to political hegemony motivated the authors of the coup d'etat, so too did their discomfort with the changing complexion of the country: with the increasing visibility of indigenous people, african-descendant people, women, sexual minorities, people whose families were recent and not-so-recent immigrants to the country. Scholars, academics, and intellectuals are at risk in this authoritarian regime not solely when they protest and risk being killed, but when they speak out. We need to be as angry about stifled voices as we are about those whose lives are lost.

Declaration Against the Coup d'Etat in Honduras by the Central Americanist Academic Community

The academic community that the undersigned represent, university professors and officers, researchers, essayists, literary writers, artists, students of the MA and PhD in distinct Central American, Latin American, European centers and those of other regions, would like with this declaration to energetically and publicly reject the civil-military coup d'Etat carried out in Honduras and demand the immediate return to a democratic regime under the principles of national constitutional order and jurisprudence and the international treaties in force for the country and the region.



It is unacceptable from every point of view, illegal and contrary to the most minimal rules of democratic coexistence that, taking advantage of military force, a democratically elected President of the Republic has been made prisoner, deported, and removed from his office without there having been completed any prior judicial process.



The unanimous international condemnation of this act of violence makes manifest the consensus that exists in regard to the obligation that the powerful groups in any country have, whether they may be economic or military, to respect these minimal norms, without which what we have is the usurpation and abuse of political power.



Honduras, like many Latin American countries, is passing through the difficult process of consolidating and deepening democracy as a mode of existence that wishes to respect and promote the rights of the clase popular, historically exploited and maginalized, in societies dominated by elites that lack the capacity or the interest to administer resources and direct institutions with benefits deserved by everyone.



The events that occurred in Honduras constituted a complex and controversial episode in this process, inasmuch as there were in play these aspirations of democratic transition with the resistance of powerful factions, the same that have confused opportunisms of every type with the legitimate aspirations of society.



Restoral of the constitutional order in Honduras constitutes an unavoidable challenge for the democratic transition not only in this country but in many others of the continent inasmuch as they expect to encounter routes to advance toward social equity without deception and with feasible proposals, both of how to guarantee sustainability and the respect of the rights of the citizens.



This declaration comes from the Second Central American Congress of Cultural Studies that has been implicated in this conjuncture because it was to have been celebrated at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras on dates that fell after the coup, and had to be moved to the Universidad de Costa Rica in order to offer better guarantees of security to the participants.



This Congress that had been conceived to be celebrated in times of peace, has had to be carried out in an altered context because of the crisis in Honduras and the consequent political tension in the region. The declaration that we sign, nevertheless, does not wish to be a simple protest of the disturbance that in practice the coup d'Etat in Honduras has entailed for regional academic activity, but more than that it wants to be a political action by those who occupy ourselves with Central American actuality in our studies and are especially concerned with the destiny of those societies.



We sign this Declaration as an academic and intellectual community, in San Jose, Costa Rica, on the 24th day of the month of July of 2009.


[details of affiliations, which were provided for identification purposes only and did not imply any position by the institutions, are not provided here, but are listed in full in the original petition.]


Hector M. Leyva
Werner Mackenbach
Beatriz Cortez
Ricardo Roque
Valeria Grinberg
Ligia Bolaños
Patricia Fumero
Alexandra Ortiz Wallner
Leonel Delgado
Carlos B. Lara Martínez
Julio Escoto
Rodrigo Rey Rosa
Arturo Arias
Jorge Roviria Mas
Waldina Mejía
Rolando Sierra
Jeffrey Browitt
George Yúdice
Carolina Pezoa
Julia Medina
Claudia Ferman
Marc Zimmerman
José Antonio Funes
Erick Blandón Guevara
Douglas Carranza
Yansí Pérez
Claudia García
Guillermo González Campos
Bernardo Bolaños
Giselle Bustos Mora
Xinia Zúñiga Muñoz
Roxana Reyes Rivas
Raúl Rodríguez Freire
Reagan Boxwell
Sebastián Calderón
Silvia Gianni
Karen Poe
Pablo Delano
Emilio del Valle Escalante
Peggy von Mayer
José Cal Montoya
Magda Zavala
Teresa Fallas Arias
Ronald Nibbe
Tania Camacho
Magdalena Perkowska
Sandra García
Marisol Gutiérrez
Olga Solano
Mónica Zúñiga Rivera
Edgard Zuno
Henry Vargas Benavides
Robert Rodríguez Delgado
Julio Blanco
Rebeca Alpizar
Grettel Andrade C.
Marcela Carías
Flor Alvergue
Miguel Barahona
Paúl Martínez
Fernando Galindo Rodríguez
Hugo Gil R.
Diana Campos Ortiz
Sofía Vindas Solano
Sofía González Escalante
Ramón Morales
Stéphanie Rodríguez
David Morales
Marlen Jiménez
Marisol Patiño
Alejandra Aguilar
Adriana Corrales
Roxana Morales Bonilla
Mónica Quirós Villalobos
Vera Gerner
Adrián Cruz García
Mario Salazar
Héctor Hernández
Daniel Solano
Ana Elisa Pérez Quintero
Rolando Canizales
Ana Delia Ramírez Calderón
Karol Carmona
Mayra Herrera M.
Elena Arce Salazar
Christina Schramm
Rafael Zamora Chaves
Mariela Richmond
Deybel Chaves Sánchez
Juan Andrés Montero V.
Lorenzo Montiel Z.
Adriana Alpizar
Roberto Pacheco
María del Pilar Rivas D.
María de los Ángeles Ramírez Chinchilla
Ronald F. Chacón Chavaría
Jeffrey Morales G.
Roberto Zúñiga Garro