The Presidential election in Honduras took place on November 24. Since the US was involved in the 2009 coup that removed President Manuel Zelaya, Hondurans have lived under a brutal regime in which political activists are harassed and murdered. This year, Zelaya’ wife, Xiomara Castro, ran as the new LIBRE party candidate. The official report is that she came in second, but widespread fraud and repression in the election makes this result questionable and there have been large protests to demand a recount. To discuss this, we will be joined by Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research who writes regularly about Latin America and Chuck Kauffman of the Alliance for Global Justice who was a member of a large delegation of election observers present for this election.
Listen here:
Election Fraud in Honduras with Mark Weisbrot and Chuck Kaufman by Clearingthefog on Mixcloud
Relevant articles and websites:
Why the World Should Care about the Recent Hondura’s Election by Mark Weisbrot
Honduras: America’s Great Foreign Policy Disgrace by Mark Weisbrot
Preliminary Report of the Honduras Solidarity Network regarding the Elections of 2013 by HSN/AJG Delegation
Honduras: The Struggle for Democracy, Human Rights and the Environment by Mark Sullivan and Rick Sterling
Center for Economic and Policy Research
Guests:
Mark Weisbrot co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He has written numerous research papers on economic policy, especially on Latin America and international economic policy. He is also co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000).
He writes a weekly column for The Guardian Unlimited (U.K.), and a regular column on economic and policy issues that is distributed to over 550 newspapers by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and almost every major U.S. newspaper, as well as for Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha de Sao Paulo. He appears regularly on national and local television and radio programs. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy.
Chuck Kaufman is National Co-Coordinator of the Alliance for Global Justice. He has been a leader of the Central and Latin America solidarity movements since joining the staff of the Nicaragua Network in 1987. He gave up his successful advertising business out of disgust at Congress’ cowardice during the Iran-Contra scandal. He went on his first coffee picking brigade to Nicaragua that same year. Chuck has been in the front ranks of the movements to support the right of people in Latin America and the Caribbean to dignity, sovereignty, and self-determination. He has led delegations to Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti and Honduras.
Chuck has written and spoken often about US democracy manipulation programs through the National Endowment for Democracy and US Agency for International Development as well as what he calls the need to look to the Abolition Movement as our inspiration to change the culture of US militarism. He is a board member of the Latin America Solidarity Coalition and a leader of the LASC’s effort to build a stronger movement to oppose US militarism and the militarization of relations with Latin America. He was a founder of the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition and has spoken at most of the major Washington, DC anti-war demonstrations. He is a board member of the Honduras Solidarity Network and a founder of the Venezuela Solidarity Network. He has a B.A. in Government and Politics from George Mason University. His first political activism was as a high school student in 1969 when he organized student walk-out in four county high schools in his native Indiana.