|
CLAREMONT, Calif. - November 12 - Over 240 academics and experts on Latin America sent a letter to President Obama yesterday urging him to denounce the ongoing human rights violations perpetrated by the coup regime in Honduras ahead of the planned November 29 elections. They also urged him to demand the immediate restitution of President Manuel Zelaya and to support a full three months of electoral campaigning after the coup has been overturned and "debating, organizing, and all other aspects of election campaigns can be conducted in an atmosphere that is free from fear; in which all views and parties are free to make their voices heard - not just those that are allowed under an illegal military occupation." This would mean that this month's elections - which Latin America and the European Union have said they will not recognize - would need to be rescheduled.
"With only days left before the scheduled November 29 elections, the U.S. government must make a choice," the letter states. "It can either side with democracy, along with every government in Latin America, or it can side with the coup regime, and further isolate the United States in the hemisphere."
Last Thursday, the Rio Group, which includes all of Latin America and most of the Caribbean, issued a statement declaring that they would consider the November 29 elections to be illegitimate if Zelaya is not first reinstated.
The current letter continues: "Moreover, the U.S. cannot afford to maintain its deafening silence regarding the innumerable and grave human rights abuses committed by the coup government in Honduras - a silence that has become a conspicuous international embarrassment."
Numerous press reports have described human rights abuses and violations of civil liberties during the three-month period in which electoral campaigning is allowed under Honduran law, including illegal mass arrests, beatings, torture, and shootings by state security forces, attacks on the freedoms of assembly, speech, and of the press. This repression has been widely documented and denounced by Honduran and international human rights organizations, including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International.
Despite this, the Obama administration has yet to condemn the human rights violations, or to threaten sanctions or other strong action to force the coup regime to stop them.
Last week, Bertha Oliva, the head of Honduras' most well-known and respected human rights organization, the Committee for Families of the Disappeared and Detained in Honduras (COFADEH), also called on the Obama administration to denounce the "grave human rights violations" in Honduras, and declared that "It's too late to have elections on November 29."
|
