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02 Jul 2009 06:34 pm

"Baring Its Fangs," Ctd.

Al Giordano defends himself again via e-mail:

The reader who accuses me of "twisting the news"  is playing the game of Twister here, and the contortions of fact are staggering. He says I am part of some big media cabal that "won't show one picture" of the protests in favor of the coup. Funny, but I posted a photo on June 30, describing the pro-coup rally as "a decent sized – but not all that impressive considering all the power at its command - crowd." I also pointed out that in the photo appears General Vasquez, who led the coup, on stage next to "president" Micheletti, and that the mostly Caucasian gang on stage is hardly representative of the Honduran people.

What's most interesting is your reader's citing of the daily La Tribuna in Tegucigalpa as of the "independent news" upon which he relies for his "google translated" version of events (I'm fluent in Spanish, and read the same sources, too). The publisher of that newspaper, Edgardo Dumas, was recorded today telling W Radio in Colombia that there is no coup, there is no repression on the press and that "CNN is on the payroll of Chávez."  At that link, we also embed videos that show coup soldiers forcibly taking over Channel 36 TV and Progreso Radio in Honduras. Your readers, I'm sure, would be interested to see one or more of them.

The newspaper publisher - and former Defense Minister in Honduras - Dumas, in that interview. represented himself as vice president of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA), whose executive director Julio Muñoz just thanked me for passing on that interview and said to expect an official statement from IAPA today. I don't expect that IAPA will agree at all with Mr. Dumas' fictional version of events in Honduras, but apparently he has at least one reader - through Google translations - who takes his claims at face value.

"Military coup" is not a buzzword here. It exactly describes what has occurred, and is still happening, in Honduras. As US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice said yesterday, "a coup is a coup, and there are not good coups and bad coups."

--PA

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