Honduras has been a lot of turmoil in the last few months. In June the President, Manuel Zelaya, was forced out of office at gunpoint. I wrote about it at the time, here and here. And I still don’t know exactly what happened or why, but then I read pieces like this one from Sarah Stephens who is the executive director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas and she has visited Honduras at least twice since the coup. And the picture she paints is not very pretty at all.
And now we have elections come up on Sunday. It is hard to argue that an election held in Honduras today could be considered free and fair. So I have to agree with Ms. Stephens when she argues that the US must not recognize the election’s winner until the situation improves.
An exerpt from her piece on Huffington Post:
“The de facto government of Roberto Micheletti, the former head of the Honduran Congress who the military installed as president, has issued various decrees restricting freedom of assembly and authorizing the military and police to shut down opposition media outlets and, in one instance, to confiscate their equipment. The opposition media is back on the air, but regular interruptions of television and radio transmissions continue. Meanwhile the threat of another shutdown looms due to a recent decree that prohibits any statement by the press that threatens ‘national security.'”
Butter, Not Guns 