Honduran Police Reiterate Lack of Education in Teacher Repression

Includes photos depicting recent scenes outside the Pedagogical University in Tegucigalpa and other armed pedagogical endeavors.

Protests in Tegucigalpa, Honduras

(TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras) - During a meeting at the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, shortly after last year’s coup d’état against President Mel Zelaya—which U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens alternately defined at the meeting as “a clear-cut case of a coup” and a “whatever you call it”.

Deputy Mission Chief Simon Henshaw described Honduran soldiers and police as “extremely uneducated” in their physical abuse of peaceful anti-coup protesters, who were variously on the receiving end of tear gas canisters, cigarette butts, vaginally-inserted police batons, and the occasional fatal bullet to the head.

Less than a year later, Llorens had determined that the “whatever you call it” was in fact the result of the “erratic and imprudent course of action” pursued by Zelaya; illegitimate Honduran elections had meanwhile been given the U.S. blessing, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had begun actively campaigning for the reintegration of Honduras into regional organizations from which its anti-democratic behavior had caused its expulsion.

As for whether the exoneration of the coup has been accompanied by a rise in education levels on the part of the Honduran military and police force, this is called into question by the recent violent repression of teachers demonstrating in favor of the return of hundreds of millions of dollars reportedly appropriated from the Teachers’ Savings and Loan and Pension Fund (INPREMA) by the coup regime of Roberto Micheletti.

Other presumably erratic and imprudent comportment by the nation’s educators includes an overwhelming opposition to the coup and the current illegitimate government of Pepe Lobo—an attitude which permitted pro-coup media to justify the fatal shooting of professor Roger Vallejo Soriano last year based on the fact that he had “abandoned his classroom” in order to participate in an anti-coup protest.

Following is a series of photographs provided by the Facebook page Resistente en Linea depicting recent scenes outside the Pedagogical University in Tegucigalpa and other armed pedagogical endeavors.

Belén is a feature writer at Pulse Media. Her articles also have appeared in CounterPunch, Narco News, Palestine Chronicle, Palestine Think Tank, Rebelión, Tlaxcala, The Electronic Intifada, Upside Down World, and Venezuelanalysis.com. Her book “Coffee with Hezbollah,” a humorous political travelogue chronicling her hitchhiking trip through Lebanon in the aftermath of the 2006 Israeli assault, is available at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Barnes and Noble.

Born in Washington, DC, in 1982, Belén earned her bachelor's degree with a concentration in political science from Columbia University in New York City. Her diverse background of worldwide experiences, created a fantastic writer; one whose work we are extremely happy to share with Salem-News.com viewers. You can contact Belén at: belengarciabernal@gmail.com