HONDURAS: Democracy cannot be built on top of Impunity – Adolfo Perez Esquivel
Exclusive Interview with Adolfo Pérez Esquivel
Exclusive Interview with Adolfo Pérez Esquivel
Tegucigalpa. The Commissioners of the Commission of Truth (Comisión de Verdad – CDV – in Spanish) have arrived in Honduras to accompany the information collecting work of in-country staff, hold bilateral meetingsinternational institutions, and meet with the Supreme Court of Honduras in order to better understand their versions of events in Honduras since the Coup d’État on June 28, 2009.
Below is a summary of the human rights violations that took place on Wednesday, March 30th across Honduras during the day-long national civic strike.
Ilse Ivania Velázquez Rodriquez, a teacher who was allegedly hit in the head with a projectile tear gas canister fired by police then struck by a vehicle, has died in Hospital Escuela in Tegucigalpa as a result of her injuries. Ilse Ivania was peacefully participating in a protest including representatives of teachers unions, parents of school-aged children, primary, secondary and post-secondary students, popular organizations and members of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP).
The Honduran Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared just released this statement that following the violent eviction of teachers from the National Teacher’s Pension Institute (Inprema) police and military are pursuing protesters in the street with tear gas and a tank with some kind of orange coloured chemical, which they believe has two functions: to overwhelm protesters with the toxins in the gas and to identify them with the orange colour so that they can be apprehended even after running away.
As this is being written, at 11:00 AM on March 18, 2011, police and military are violently evicting teachers from the National Teacher’s Pension Institute (INPREMA), which they have been occupying for two weeks protesting the new General Education Law, which teacher’s associations believe to be a legal mechanism to move towards the privatization of all levels of education in Honduras, and demanding the government pay a debt of approximately 1,500 million lempiras (approx. 80 million USD) which it owes the pension fund.
The Honduran Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared (COFADEH) repudiates the harassment and death threats directed towards human rights defender Blanca Azucena Espinoza, President of the Buenos Amigos Peasant Cooperative, in the municipality of Sabá in the department of Colón in the north of Honduras.