PHOTOS-58 Days: National Resistance Still on the Streets and So Are the Repressors

Reports out of Tegucigalpa yesterday warned of a significant increase of military on the streets.  Evidently, after the National Resistance concert on Sunday, military clubbed some of the concert goers, threatened to kill them, and then released them.

Anti-golpista media seems to be a particular target of the military.  Both Radio Globo and Cholusat Sur TV-Channel 36 were attacked and sabotaged by masked “special forces” members.  Radio Globo reported that some sort of  “special” chemical had been applied to its transmitter rendering it inoperable, but used  a replacement  to get back on the air in the afternoon. It looks like Cholusat Sur TV was damaged so thoroughly that it might not be up and running for several weeks.

There are a few interesting things about  the upswing in repression and especially the “reappearance” of the military.  First, the eyes and ears of prominent human rights organizations have left Honduras after having documented very serious abuses of human rights by the golpista regime.  This makes it easier for the golpista regime to escalate the repression in order to keep the National Resistance under wraps while the OAS is in town, ostensibly, to achieve a brokered settlement to the crisis.

Both the Amnesty International and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reports discuss human rights abuses committed by the police as well as the military.  Both reports express concern that the army was used to “back up” the police in civilian crowd control situations.  Yet, in the first few weeks after the coup, the kidnapping of President Zelaya and all manner of crowd control throughout the country was led by the military with the police serving as back up.  About five weeks ago, the pattern changed to the police being the lead with only occasional back up from the military.  Because the US doesn’t want to label this a military coup, it could be that it leaned on the golpista regime to cool it with the military and use the police more prominently.

As you will see from these pictures, picked up from the Honduras Indymedia site , the military has boots on the ground in Tegucigalpa as well as  the police.  And, the National Resistance is out in the streets and holding their own.