Honduras: International Response to the Elections and Human Rights Violations

Opponents of the coup in Honduras denounced as illegitimate the elections held the last Sunday of November but have set their sights on a long-range effort to convene a popular assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution.   

Despite a low turnout and their control by a coup government, the November elections in Honduras have been recognized by a handful of governments in the region, including Costa Rica and El Salvador and, less surprising, Colombia.  International diplomatic efforts have focused without success on some sort of face-saving but meaningless exercise to briefly restore ousted-President Manuel Zelaya to office for the few weeks remaining in his term.

The effort to in effect sweep the coup under the rug by legitimizing the November 29 elections has not been bought by many, even in the mainstream media, e.g. see Time magazine’s excellent post-election piece, Obama's Latin American Policy Looks Like Bush's.

However, the mainstream press continues to under-report the extensive human rights violations, which have taken place since the June 28 coup.  In December, the Coalition for Peace and Democracy in Honduras released a report citing 4,234 human rights violations since the coup.