

Copyright © Dina Meza  
_Book design_ Edwin Smet

Smashwords edition.

ISBN 9789462251649

www.evatasfoundation.com
/ TABLE  
OF CONTENTS

[/     CHAPTER I  
CENSORSHIP OF CULTURE AND JOURNALISM THROUGH HISTORY](../Text/chap01.html)

[/     CHAPTER II  
THE STREETS WERE PAINTED WITH SLOGANS AND PUBLIC PLACES WERE FILLED WITH ANTI-COUP MUSIC AND WRITING](../Text/chap02.html)

[/     CHAPTER III  
WHEN CENSORSHIP COMES KNOCKING](../Text/chap03.html)

[/     CHAPTER IV  
THE DREAM](../Text/chap04.html)
Literature has always been the target of persecution by those in power, but no censorship has been as effective as that self-imposed by writers who cease to publish their work.

P. Unamuno
/ CHAPTER I

CENSORSHIP OF CULTURE AND JOURNALISM THROUGH HISTORY

The history of the prohibition and censorship of books dates back to the first texts, engraved on clay tablets in Mesopotamia around 5,300 years ago.

Since then, the powers that be, whether religious, political or institutional, have justified the use of censorship as a mechanism to safeguard principles which they themselves have invented. Censorship seeks to obliterate freedom of thought by banning the circulation of books in the self-same free market which capitalist society has established to sustain itself.

In Egyptian culture, biblioclasts or book destroyers were ordered by Akhenaten to eliminate texts that referred to the old deities when he imposed the religion of the Sun God.

In Greece, the destruction of books dates back to the 5th century BC, when Protagoras of Abdera was accused of impiety and blasphemy for stating that it was impossible to prove that the gods existed.

As history relates, even Plato was a bibliophile pyromaniac who ordered all the poems of Socrates to be burnt.

The library of Alexandria suffered several fires, and in just one of them, in 48 BC, 700,000 manuscripts were destroyed.

The first record we have of censorship in China is when Emperor Qin Shi Huang, in the year 213 BC, ordered most books to be burned, with the exception of texts on certain subjects such as astrology and agriculture. His prohibition on Confucian thought led to the execution of many scholars of the time.

In Berlin's Opernplatz, the Nazis ordered the burning of 20,000 books from the library of Humboldt University, including works by Marcel Proust, HG Wells, Jack London and Thomas Mann.

In Communist East Berlin, in 1953, five million books were destroyed.

On 30 August 1980 in Argentina, a million and a half volumes belonging to the _Centro Editor de América Latina_ ( _Latin American Publishing Centre)_ were burned. It is known as 'The Day of Shame' for Argentina's books.

In more recent times, Bosnia Herzegovina's National Library was shelled in 1992 by the Serbian General Ratko Mladic. This library held two million volumes including 155,000 rare texts.

In Chile, the dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet committed genocide against its own people, burning and censoring books with any left-wing content by leading Chilean poets, essayists, playwrights and intellectuals.

In Honduras, censorship has been present at various times in both culture and journalism.

_The arts and journalism are the focus of censorship

That day everyone was rushing around at the television station. Personally, I was ready, and thought I was going to be doing something noteworthy – I would be reporting that the environmental rights of a community about 15 minutes from the capital were being violated, as a cemetery was being built nearby despite the residents' opposition. Several of them had explained that the construction work would give rise to flooding and other problems.

I went to the Environment Unit of the Public Prosecution Service _(Fiscalía),_ where a prosecutor told me that it would be illegal for this cemetery to go ahead, and I interviewed the owner of the property company which had sold the land who rhapsodized about the project. In the end, my entire investigation remained on the editor's desk. The truth was kidnapped and the problem buried. Censorship has cut to the heart of a democracy which has yet to assert itself in Honduras. This was only one news story, but there are dozens of them around the country that have been kidnapped because they affect the interests of powerful groups.

Censorship in Honduras not only has a catastrophic effect on journalism – it has a similar impact on the arts. Many writers, playwrights and painters have suffered some form of censorship during their careers, particularly if they have criticized the government.

Censorship and death are Honduran journalists' constant companions. Around 45 journalists have been murdered since the coup, while others have had to practise self-censorship to safeguard their lives. Dozens have been subject to surveillance and harassment and have been fired from a range of media outlets for speaking out against the coup and for showing their support for the Honduran Resistance established in response to this assault on the democratic functioning of the state. Others decided to leave Honduras and are exiled from their homeland.

With regard to the arts, the Honduras government denies funding to the institutions responsible for its promotion, arguing – outrageously – that there is no money, while the coffers of the armed forces are full to overflowing. Their budget is constantly being increased so that they can beat down the people and protect the interests of the elites, which have been taking turns in power for over 100 years, and those of transnational companies which come to the country to set up mining, hydroelectric and tourism businesses.

Another form of censorship of the arts is to prevent writers publishing their books, or to persecute those who seek to express their ideas, particularly if they challenge the status quo, in which case there is an even greater incentive to prevent their work reaching the public.

Throughout history, freedom of expression in all its forms has suffered many threats and attacks by the Honduran state, the very entity with responsibility for protecting this human right, essential to the achievement of true democracy.

Regardless of whether the censorship applied is subtle, indirect or direct, ultimately it all has an impact on Honduran society which is left without the information, art and cultural expressions which would help to effect deep structural changes in the citizenry or to transform thinking – the aim instead being to keep minds closed.

In the 1980s, artists and writers suffered persecution for opposing the National Security Doctrine established in Honduras by the United States, a policy which resulted in the forced disappearance of over 184 political dissidents - killed, tortured and persecuted.

With the coup of June 2009 and the coming to power of one of its organizers, Roberto Micheletti, Mirna Castro was appointed Minister of Culture, Arts and Sports. She devoted herself to persecuting writers, promoters of culture and officials opposed to the coup.

Some cultural centres, which held book launches, painting workshops, film screenings and book clubs, were closed by Micheletti's minister who branded them as detrimental to the nation because they gave prominence to the ideas of Venezuela's ex-president, Hugo Chávez. Her historic announcement in July 2009 that she would burn books was reminiscent of Nazi Germany under Hitler.

Mirna Castro announced on television that she had a blacklist of books she considered subversive, including memoirs and travel notes by Froylán Turcios, ' _Estampas de Honduras'_ ('Vignettes of Honduras') by Doris Stone, ' _Panorama de la poesía hondureña'_ ('A Panorama of Honduran Poetry') by Óscar Castañeda Batres, and ' _Soñaba el abad de San Pedro soñaba y yo también sé soñar'_ ('The abbot of San Pedro dreamed and dreamed and I too know how to dream') by José Cecilio del Valle.

The then minister also announced her decision to assign the Historical Research Documentation Centre of Honduras, which holds material of invaluable historical and national significance, to army reservists for use as a military operations centre. This move was halted by a storm of protests.

However, she did launch a witch-hunt against people involved in the arts, dismissing staff and closing libraries and cultural councils.

This is nothing new, as there has been persecution and censorship of political dissidents in Honduras at certain times before. However, the coup laid bare certain truths that had been covered up, such as the fact that the country is ruled by an unscrupulous political and economic class which thinks only of gaining profit by grabbing resources regardless of where they may be.

The coup and these disastrous practices led dozens of artists to form Artists in Resistance _(Artistas en Resistencia)_ , an organization which denounced the situation and made proposals for change.

Meanwhile, journalists became ever more divided. There is no common forum to bring them together, and as a consequence, they have suffered many attacks, resulting in over forty deaths.

This book will address the abuses suffered by Honduran journalists, writers and artists when they seek to exercise their right to free expression. Paradoxically, their main persecutor is the Honduran state; freedom of expression has been kidnapped by censorship in all its forms.

_ **Covert censorship**

With regard to culture, the Honduran government has failed to fulfil its obligations to promote this right in line with international treaties, despite its forming a fundamental part of people's existence.

There has been a state body responsible for cultural policy for a long time. In recent years, up to and including Porfirio Lobo Sosa's presidency, it was the responsibility of the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Sports. However, when President Juan Orlando Hernández came to power, the ministry was downgraded to a directorate, ostensibly for financial reasons, although other government departments such as Defence are flooded with money.

According to Darío Euraque, former director of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History, who was fired for his stance against the coup, the traditional Ministry of Culture has merely served as a kind of handy dumping ground for the government of the day: an ad hoc resource used to repay all kinds of debts to politicians unsuitable for posts in any of the 'real' positions of power.

It is considered a convenient place to park fellow party members, relatives and friends whose lack of expertise denies them access to more 'demanding' ministries requiring sound knowledge of finance, science or technology. With honourable exceptions, it is a bureaucratic refuge for people with no creative and/or administrative background in culture.

This is linked to a form of covert censorship – dismantling the structures responsible for promoting culture and removing the people within them who are considered a nuisance to those who govern, as the less collective memory the people have, the fewer protests there will be.

Tito Ochoa Estrada, director of _Teatro Memorias_ (Memories Theatre) has complained that, in Honduras, the state itself is deceiving the people by presenting culture as simply a label covering the sale of local foods, fairs, traditional costumes and folk dances. However, culture goes beyond that – it is identity, opposition to the status quo. There is a desire to stifle all of this to hide the fact that there are dissenting voices.

For Ochoa, money from the international community is being wasted. In 2013, the United Nations provided about eight million dollars for the arts, without any long-term results. That money should be used to promote grassroots theatre, that dissident theatre which helps to effect structural change, but because it is not considered desirable it is frozen out.

A renowned Honduran writer who was severely persecuted in the 1980s, and who remains a target to this day, asked for her name not to be mentioned because she fears reprisals.

She said that the country has gone through periods of deep obscurantism in relation to literature, "I remember in the 80s we had to put books under the mattress because they were 'dangerous', and you were labelled by the type of books you read." That coincides with the view of the writer Armando García, who notes that one of the books associated with most persecution has been ' _Prisión Verde'_ **('** Green Prison') by Ramón Amaya Amador, which "for a long time was treated as evidence of political beliefs which could lead to imprisonment. The old people in my town still lower their voices even when just mentioning its name. Many times it was buried alive in the solitude of backyards after the coup."

The writer who we will call 'Ana' said that, following the coup, a large number of books were effectively 'burned' at the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Sports' publishing house, around 14,000 books which remained unprinted, referred to further below. 'Ana' recounted how "in the 1980s soldiers came to the house and if they found books by, say, Karl Marx, they would burn them and take you prisoner, but there's no difference between now and then because the arts are being persecuted."

"My politics are Marxist revolutionary, but I can't say this openly in Honduras because it would stigmatize me in all kinds of ways – I can't exercise any freedom of conscience. We have many people who are frustrated because they have to be seen to support the right when their true beliefs are left-wing, because if they don't, they can't earn a living and they're not respected."

Ana says she has to work much harder than others, because she has to find jobs where she can. "It's the same in literature – I've felt that there's been censorship of my work. I haven't written about Communist issues at a literary level, I've just done a couple of poems about political killings and disappearances." The writer explained that there was another, more ruthless form of censorship. "The Honduran right, in power through the two-party system, has taken it upon itself not to support the arts, including literature, because almost all writers are Communists or left-wing, while we have a rancid right-wing that has ruled the nation for over 100 years.

"Its failure to support the arts for over a century, ever since it's been in power, is a form of censorship. Today, artists and people engaged in literature are seeing that there's no money anywhere, or maybe a bit for painting, theatre, or sculpture, but not for poetry, because writers of literature will always have left-wing tendencies. As a result, these writers can only publish small print-runs of a thousand copies, which is bad enough in itself, but then there's nowhere that'll sell them.

"Before the coup, nobody could have cared less about ' _La Biblia del Asno'_ ('The Donkey Bible'), written by a left-winger. Then the author became a coup supporter and he's now presented as one of the great men of letters. He was sent to Europe because he's a right-winger. That proves that if you write what the powers that be want, you'll get money and media coverage – otherwise, there's no way that literature can get exposure.

"Following the 1960s and 1970s, with the introduction of neoliberalism, the system's been designed in such a way that a kind of 'literature light' has emerged which isn't committed to social change, and it's that which is supported by governments because it fits in with what they want."

According to the writer, "With the 'book burning' by a government minister following the coup, they wanted to send the message that it was God-ordained, because all things sinful go up in flames. Symbolically, they were burning the authors themselves. Tearing up books is an act of desperation, but burning them tells writers that they're mortal and will be erased – that's the idea they want to sell us.

"Writers of literature in this country have been burned, but there's also a book written by an anthropologist who, before the coup, had been commissioned to conduct a study of the Moskitia. She wrote about a range of situations and the book was published following the coup but you can't find it now. It's about the world view of the Miskito people, but it's been banned.

"The day the right buries literature is the day when all our hopes of a better country will have died. The country's situation and the scale of writers' desperation being as they are, it looks as though it wouldn't take much.

"Honduras' only chance for development is through culture – there's no other way to overcome the problems of poverty, violence, all the country's ills. However much international organizations do, without an anthropocultural focus, without culture, we can't move forward," Ana said.

The writer said that violence is another form of censorship because writers are so damaged by what has happened in Honduras. "There's no chance of healing the wounds caused by the coup, because it's not a question of left and right, it's a question of what people want for the country."

_ The coup and the dismantling of the little that there was

We understood culture to be the creation of any meeting space among people, and culture, for us, included all the collective symbols of identity and memory: the testimonies of what we are, the prophecies of the imagination, the denunciations of what prevents us from being.

_–_ Eduardo Galeano

In London in 2013, I met a young woman who had been a student at a bilingual school in Tegucigalpa. She was watching me while I was giving a talk about the coup in Honduras at London University, and at the end she came over to me and told me that there were some books at her school which could not be read and had been 'put in storage' – they were by Honduran authors writing about the real situation in the country, and they had been banned.

She recalled that one of her teachers secretly told her that there had been a coup in Honduras. "That's how I got to know what was going on," she said as she pledged to do something in England, where she was studying, to help those persecuted for opposing the coup.

Under the presidency of Manuel Zelaya Rosales, who was forced to leave the country at gunpoint with the coup of 28 June 2009, a national plan for culture was drawn up, with new cultural centres set up in the regions and major cities, and new libraries established. All these centres received decentralized funding.

With the coup, all this ground to a complete halt – local cultural councils were closed and were no longer given funding. These councils and the municipal committees of knowledge and technology, established under Ricardo Maduro's presidency and continued under the Zelaya government, were destroyed, including the Art and Literature Committee, which had set up a short story corner, a novel corner and a poetry corner.

There had been literary initiatives in more than 100 municipalities in Honduras, but they were destroyed due to internal divisions with the advent of the coup – there were people from the Resistance to the coup and others called ' _blanquitos_ ' ('whiteys') who were coup supporters.

The coup gouged deep into the country's darkest recesses and exposed the fact that there were fascist tendencies in Honduras. There are even people from families with a high social standing, in powerful positions, who identify themselves as neonazis. It is they who have taken control of the country and robed themselves in the trappings of democracy. "It's a pretty complex situation, it's a leviathan for those of us who are trying to build some kind of life for ourselves and others," said Ana.

_ No voices of dissent

Tito Ochoa said that the people responsible for promoting and supporting the arts in Honduras disregard them and, as a result, theatre and music are very much the poor relations. The aim is to present a country with uniform ideas and no voices of dissent.

The eight million dollars that the United Nations contributed in 2013 for a three-year project are not destined for artists but instead for this conception of culture already mentioned.

The state co-opts artists who reinforce the status quo through their work. Unfortunately, in this scenario there is no place for dissident art because the powers that be need artists who will enhance the system's image. Art is always dissident, and as a result, governments and states will not want to embark on a programme to support the arts.

Ochoa denounced the fact that the mayor is now persecuting Memories Theatre through the tax system. "It's severe censorship of all Memories Theatre's activities. I can't say for certain if it's being done on purpose to cripple us financially." He stresses that censorship lies in the state's failure to create the conditions for art to flourish, but that art is essential to create the country we want.

In 1987 the playwright and author Isidro España was kidnapped and tortured by state agents and was forced to go into exile to save his life. His works were censored. In them, he wrote about what was happening at that time to the Honduran people, enduring forced disappearances, killings, torture and exile.

España pointed to a historic incident as evidence of the censorship of the arts in Honduras. It was the International Festival of Folk Art which was to take place Honduras in 1979, but it could not go ahead because the military closed air and land borders to keep out the delegations. The organizations' offices were raided, the artists were arrested and they were taken to clandestine prisons where they were given electric shocks to their genitals.

España said, "The discrimination against folk art and artists, the lack of cultural, scientific and democratic policies, the lack of subsidies for independent art and Honduran artists, the squandering of foreign aid money, the insult to Honduran artists and art of the 'Vision of the Country' policy document, issued by Porfirio Lobo Sosa's government, in power from 2010 to 2013, which states that art will be prioritized up to 2038 – these are all forms of censorship."

_ Obscurantism is not science fiction in Honduras

In 1946, the dictator Tiburcio Carías Andino who ruled the country for 16 years, from 1933-1949, ordered the issue of Decree 95, 'The Fernanda Law', a move against leftist parties. It prohibited 'totalitarian activities' and banned their media, such as the militant _Vanguardia_ weekly newspaper. The Liberal government of Ramón Villeda Morales (1957-1963) issued Decree 183 of 27 July 1959, known as 'The Book-Burning Act', which ordered the confiscation of all texts in private libraries featuring Communist ideology or doctrines opposed to the established democratic order. They would then be burned at post offices and police stations.

In the 1990s, every copy of ' _Cuando Las Tarántulas Atacan'_ ('When the Tarantulas Attack') by the writer Longino Becerra was bought up so that nobody could read it. The book describes the atrocities of the 1980s, including the forced disappearance of Eduardo Lanza, General Secretary of FEUH (Honduran Federation of University Students).

The book states that Oswaldo Ramos Soto, former rector of UNAH (National Autonomous University of Honduras), was one of those responsible for Lanza's abduction and subsequent disappearance. Ramos Soto ran for the presidency in 1993, and apparently it was he who bought all the copies so that he would not be associated with human rights violations during his candidacy.

The artist and writer Roger Rovelo says that creating art in Honduras is an act of heroism and of deep commitment to the country. "Until now it's been something we've done to please ourselves, but now we need to put forward proposals which will help promote reflection among the general public as well as a critical analysis which will contribute to the country's cultural development."

He tells how artists were subjected to close surveillance in the 1980s, particularly if they studied or taught at the School of Fine Art.

"I've felt censored because I've had to create art in a climate of surveillance and persecution. I've done stage acting and puppet theatre with the _Grupo Frijolito_ (Bean Group) to help promote the arts, but the forces of repression had every grassroots theatre group in their sights, ready to crack down on them."

The groups had to practise self-censorship and convey their messages in very subtle ways which still allowed the audience to understand what they were actually trying to say, for example, on the issue of forced disappearances.

The climate that Rovelo describes has returned with the coup – there is a lot of fear of being killed or persecuted, although amid all the troubles of the coup, there was also an awakening of the arts.

One form of censorship is to close down the spaces available to artists, such as performance and exhibition venues and ballet schools (with numerous attempts to close the School of Dramatic Art), as well as to restrict publishing opportunities, and cut off funding.

The writer Rebeca Becerra was the former Director-General for Books and Documents at the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Sports, sacked for opposing the coup. She said in an interview with El Clarín newspaper that the coup interrupted cultural work, with 14,000 books due to be printed in December 2009 which remained unpublished. Over the past four years, a total of 41,000 books were due to be published, 10,000 a year.

Since the coup there has been no investment in books for libraries. Becerra revealed that the budget allocated to the Directorate-General for Books and Documents which she managed was diverted to the recruitment of staff for the Minister of Culture, Mirna Castro, imposed by the Micheletti regime. The minister preferred to introduce Fashion Week Honduras to supporting writers.

The historian Natalie Roque Sandoval was formally charged with the crime of 'dissemination of ideas and public material' when she was the Director of the National Newspaper Library in the immediate aftermath of the coup.

Roque had looked into the pasts of the coup leaders, and had found that they were involved in human rights violations, car thefts, embezzlement, changing the Constitution – on a whim – and influence-peddling. This cost her her job at the National Newspaper Library; on 21 July 2009 she was evicted from her office by soldiers.

The witch-hunt did not end there. A month later, Darío Euraque, director of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History, was sacked. He had opposed the use of the Honduran Historical Research Documentation Centre by the military because it constituted an attack on national heritage protected by international conventions. Apparently this annoyed those in power and led to his dismissal.

In addition, Euraque was charged with cultural subversion for the benefit of Communists and _chavistas_ (supporters of the late Venezuelan president Chávez).

_ Journalism, censorship and death

Journalists in Honduras are very afraid. About 45 have been shot since 2009, depriving Honduras of their thoughts and ideas. Now they are buried. They were killed in various circumstances, but their murders have been engraved on the survivors' memories and fear has gripped the newsrooms.

Interviewing journalists in Honduras is not easy in the current climate, as no one wants us to put their name. They will not speak openly as they are afraid of losing their lives because of what they say, and so meetings are held in secret and in very discreet places.

Imposing censorship and self-censorship through fear emerges as a clear strategy in a survey by Comunicándonos, a Salvadoran organization _,_ in the book 'Central America under threat from censorship and discrimination' (' _Entre la censura y la discriminación Centroamérica amenazada_ ') which is a study of human rights violations against journalists and community media in Central America, published on 14 October 2014. In a survey of 67 journalists, 90% said there were risks in practising journalism in Honduras and 72% reported suffering some form of censorship.

Powerful groups were identified as sources of risk for 12.5%; central government for 11.8%; the armed forces for 7.57%, media owners for 5.12%, the judiciary for 7.35%, and organized crime and drug traffickers for 7.35%.

_ Media owners have common interests

The Honduran media is in the hands of just a few people. There are four daily newspapers – _La Tribuna, El Heraldo_ , _La Prensa_ and _Tiempo,_ as well as weeklies such as the Catholic Church's _Fides_ , and _El Libertador_.

There are 274 radio stations on the AM band and 436 on FM, a total of 710. Radio stations are heavily concentrated in the hands of politicians whose interests affect the free transmission of ideas and opinions on their programmes. The names of actual or aspiring mayors and members of congress come up frequently on the list of owners of local stations.

According to a 2005 report by CONATEL (National Telecommunications Commission), there are between 60 and 70 television stations - local, regional, and national – in Honduras. Officially there are about 270 cable television companies, but industry insiders estimate the real number to be in excess of 600.

Of this whole inventory, those who wield great power because of the concentration of media in their hands are Jaime Rosenthal Oliva and his family, the owners of _Tiempo_ , and Channel 11 ( _Canal 11_ ); Rafael Ferrari, Manuel Villeda Toledo and their families, with _Emisoras Unidas_ (United Radio Stations), _Televicentro_ and _Multivisión;_ Jorge Canahuati Larach and family, owners of _La Prensa_ and _El Heraldo;_ Carlos Flores Facussé, of _La Tribuna_ and Miguel Andonie Fernández, with _Audiovideo_.

As well as the media, all these proprietors own a vast range of other businesses, including banks and companies dealing with insurance, export, processing, import, soda and bottled water, and telephone, cable, and broadband communications. That is one of the main problems affecting freedom of expression in Honduras – the media has become the spearhead for the other businesses, many of which have the state as a client or need state patronage in order to become highly lucrative.

Covering issues affecting the businesses of these media owners is a minefield for journalists. They take great care not to touch these interests because, in many cases, their jobs or even their lives may be at stake. Thus censorship or self-censorship is imposed on such topics, violating the Honduran people's right, not only to freedom of expression, but also to freedom of information. The corporate media has been at the service of the economic power groups since the 1990s when President Rafael Leonardo Callejas came to office. President Callejas held a meeting of media owners and told them, "You've got a gold-mine and you've got to exploit it." They began negotiating financial deals, such as advertising contracts, which has become standard practice under every government since.

_ There are topics which are not touched

"There are issues that are not investigated in Honduras because they involve major interests," said a journalist whom we met in secret. It was in the evening and he had sneaked out of the media building because if he were discovered he would inevitably lose his job.

"Please don't mention my name. I'll only talk to you on that condition – if not, I can't tell you anything." That is why we will call him Mario, who has over three decades' experience in journalism.

Mario described how the corporate media protects powerful interests. He cited the press as an example, with four newspapers which produce print and now digital editions.

The owners of all these newspapers share common interests and the only difference is the political banner they operate under, with each of them signed up to one or other of the two traditional parties – Liberal and National – where, in most cases, they hold important positions.

Mario told me that _El Heraldo_ newspaper covers the central and southern region. The owner plays the two traditional parties off against each other, giving them money for their campaigns and then taking his share of the various spoils, including being awarded contracts for the supply of medicines.

_La Prensa_ newspaper, which has the same owner, defends economic and political interests in the north of Honduras, in the same way as _El Heraldo_.

To make it appear that press freedom is being exercised, an investigation unit has been established, which is limited to issues of interest to the newspaper owner.

There censorship is rampant. This unit has relative independence in how it deals with the topics assigned to it, but if the investigation ends up with a focus affecting the newspaper owner, the article will not be published. The journalist is left in suspense, the newspaper's managing editor or director apply the guidelines issued by the owner, and in most cases the journalist will be told that his or her investigation is in direct conflict with the owner's interests, while on rare occasions they are told that they will be notified when it is decided to publish the story.

The problem is that there is a chain of connections between politicians and newspaper owners, as well as family relationships, and so they watch each other's backs and impose censorship to conceal the truth.

For Mario there are two types of censorship: the journalists who realize that there is no way they can get their investigations published and so practise self-censorship to keep their jobs. The other is direct censorship, whereby journalists are dictated to in terms of the issues they can research, including investigations to apply pressure on companies which have stopped buying advertising space from the newspaper, as a form of covert blackmail. There are also campaigns against health officials who award contracts for medicines.

Mario stresses that the manipulation of news by the media is so prevalent that the acts of corruption committed by Roberto Micheletti during the coup have not been published by any of them.

According to Mario's investigations, Micheletti diverted funds from international reserves to other accounts. It is not known if they were personal accounts, but Micheletti committed a series of acts of corruption never before witnessed. "It's an open secret known by people in the opposition and in Micheletti's party, but these facts have been covered up, while the media goes to a huge amount of effort to publicize acts of corruption by Manuel Zelaya Rosales' government."

Mario looked frustrated and said that, at first, media censorship has a terrible emotional impact on new journalists fresh from the School of Journalism. "They strongly believe in independence, but then there are the businesses owned by the proprietor which can't be mentioned, and the journalist reaches a crossroads because there are also political interests at play, and so he or she enters into a process of frustration, accommodation, acquiescence and complicity," Mario said.

Since the coup, manipulation of news stories has taken a particularly vicious and malicious turn, its aim being to harm people in the Resistance against the coup. The editor's bias is obvious, adhering to the party line to profit himself. That is how the news stories against LIBRE (Freedom and Refoundation Party) and other left-wing movements can be characterized.

"I was affected by censorship with the coup. I worked on _Abriendo Brecha_ for 21 years," says Robert Budde, who has no problem with being named because he says that people need to know the truth.

During his 21 years working on _Abriendo Brecha,_ a television news programme, he says that there was a golden age. "Before, I had a lot of freedom, I produced the news stories I wanted, there was no censorship. However, when the coup came, my colleagues became my enemies. They had close ties with Rodrigo Wong Arévalo, the owner of the television station, and to get into his good books they insulted me. They tried to make me lose heart and make mistakes and make me leave without compensation or other benefits. Rodrigo didn't even speak to me. There were about six or seven journalists who stopped me from having a desk every day, so that I couldn't write my scripts."

The journalist described to me many occasions when he was under surveillance. His conversations were passed in full to the station owner, and they tried to get him to slander the Resistance.

"My boss was Hector Ordóñez and he told me, on my 2 till 10 pm shift, 'Look, I want you to talk to Captain So-and-so because he's going to say that the Resistance are going to explode a bomb and kill 30,000 people. I said, 'I can't do that because it's unethical. My name can't appear with me saying that the Resistance are going to commit murder - send another journalist because it's a lie,'" he said.

They tried other ruses. For example, they wanted to send him in the television station's car to the site of a Resistance protest, so that he would be attacked. "I told them, 'I'm not going. Why are you putting me in danger?'"

"One day I was handed a page of text. They said it was sent by the Resistance and that I had to read it on the news. I had three months of total pressure and there was censorship everywhere, and because I refused to cooperate my problems grew."

Budde was obviously proud to be honest despite the difficulties it presented for journalists in Honduras. He said that shortly after the coup, Roberto Micheletti told him that he would be given an award for his work for culture. "That made me furious – I couldn't receive a prize from someone implicated in the coup.

"The next day Rodrigo called me and asked me why I wouldn't accept the award. I told him I didn't agree with Micheletti – he's a coup-organiser and I'm not going to accept an award from a coup-organiser," Budde said.

"One day a historian called Luis Sánchez, who teaches at the university, turned up at my home. We've been friends since childhood. He'd brought me a document on rock music one night while I was writing for Channel 10, at about 7 in the evening.

"When he arrived, the security guards said to me, 'A member of the university trade union's come to visit you'. Although he didn't tell them his name, he was wearing a tee-shirt with the union's name on it. I went downstairs and the security guards were standing next to him.

"Luis said to me, 'Look, I've brought this document'. I showed it to the security guards because it was about rock music. The next day, when I got to work, Rodrigo called me and said 'I want to talk to you. Yesterday a trade unionist came to your home. You sent information to the Resistance through him.' I said, 'I haven't sent them anything', and then he said, 'I'm sure you're an informant for the Resistance.' I protested, and told him to prove it – I've never been an informant.

"Then he told me, 'I don't want you here' and he arranged a time for me to collect my pay and benefits. When I arranged to collect them, he didn't give me what I was due. I took him to court, but I lost because he's a man with a lot of tentacles. Even though I had all the right documentation, I lost the case. It was straightforward, but I lost.

"When I went to a court hearing they said that I'd stolen a camera worth 45,000 lempiras [about 2,000 US dollars]. I asked them to prove it because I was never issued with a video camera. The camera I used at work was mine – they didn't even provide me with that – I had to buy one to be able to do my job.

"Censorship also came afterwards, when I started looking for a new job. I couldn't find one because I was a marked man. Rodrigo had closed doors for me everywhere. When I put that I'd worked for _Abriendo Brecha_ in my job applications _,_ the people who wanted to hire me called the station and were told that I was a thief.

"The atmosphere was awful in a place where everything had been great. After the coup there was a kind of Gestapo, with security guards eaves-dropping everywhere, and the secretaries asking questions about the Resistance and then passing the information on.

"When I was disputing my pay-off and benefits, I was phoned and told that they wanted to kill me, about two years ago. I reported it to the police, but the case was never investigated."

Another issue that is not addressed in Honduras is militarism. Militarization has intensified in Honduras since the coup. Six new US military bases have been established at strategic points and soldiers have been given police functions so they can take part in actions against the civilian population. The results have been catastrophic, and have included people being shot at close range, attacks on public transport with people wounded, and even the murder of young people, including a 15-year-old boy named Ebed Jasiel Yanez, killed by an army patrol in the east of the capital in 2011.

There has been heavy militarization of the Bajo Aguán, an area where there is systematic repression of peasant farmers, and where major landowners occupy their land, which is state property. It is an issue that, if it is addressed by the corporate media at all, receives heavily-biased treatment, and a lot of information which would help resolve the problem is censored.

In 2012, various journalists covering news in the region were branded subversives and accused of undertaking a campaign to discredit the military.

While farmers in the region have suffered censorship, journalists there have been severely persecuted. The case of Nahum Palacios, a journalist murdered in March 2010, who had been granted precautionary measures by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, was used as a warning to his colleagues. Some have received messages on their mobile phones saying "What happened to Nahum Palacios is going to happen to you."

_ **"Forget it - if I talk they'll kill me"**

I went to the meeting. We had arranged to meet very early before the person went to work. When I arrived at the restaurant he was already seated. When he saw me, he looked worried.

I offered him a coffee. His voice became shrill, fear preventing him from expressing himself naturally. A week before he had said that he would tell me everything. However, in the cold light of day he had regretted his decision, and when I asked him what he thought of censorship and those who impose it, he replied, "Forget it – if I talk they'll kill me."

"You haven't got the slightest idea what it's like for us in the newsroom. There's a lot of pressure but they also monitor what we write. There's a coffee machine where the news items considered awkward are left on top, without being published."

I already knew that because I had spent a year at _La Prensa_ newspaper, where at first, for me, censorship was not at all that drastic. Everything went smoothly until the 1998 elections when Carlos Roberto Flores Facussé, owner of _La Tribuna_ newspaper, was elected president. He was already known as one of the main people exercising power behind the throne, regardless of who was in government.

Voting in Honduras takes place on the last Sunday of November. I was given the job of covering the TNE (National Electoral Tribunal), now the TSE (Supreme Electoral Tribunal).

On Monday morning I went to see the place where the votes were being counted. I was surprised to see that everything was being packed away even though the count had not finished. I called the photographer to come and help me document it, as I thought this was dreadful, because the winner had still not been declared.

I was excited, I thought my story would be on _La Prensa's_ front page _._ I wrote it, but then it came up against the screening process. The managing editor called to tell me that it could not be true – there was no way that they would close a place where they were still counting the votes. I told him to call the photographer so that he could show him the evidence. When he saw the photos, he said, "Actually, I'm telling you that we can't publish your article – these are our orders from the newspaper's director."

I protested because I felt that my freedom of expression was being violated and I was very distressed because the Honduran people would not have this valuable information, but the article was never published - it was drowned in the river of censorship. This river is vast and dark, and as fast-running as rapids so the truth can be concealed.

_ There are silent dismissals of journalists as a result of censorship

Mauro Orellana, a well-known journalist nationally, who was Head of the Research and Analysis Unit of HRN Radio, owned by Rafael Ferrari, was dismissed in March 2009 after he publicized the findings of a report by the TSC (Supreme Court of Auditors), according to which goods seized by the Public Prosecution Service had been discovered at the homes of Rosa Bautista and members of his staff. Rosa Bautista had been Director of Public Prosecutions.

Rosa Bautista called the station to protest about the article which stated that valuable confiscated property, such as furniture, televisions, luxury vehicles and even horse saddles, had been found at the former prosecutor's home.

During the same period, the station censored two radio programmes by the journalist Danilo Osmaro Castellanos – one cultural and the other a news programme.

Julio Ernesto Alvarado's news television programme _Mi Nación_ (My Nation) has suffered constant censorship, which began to rear its ugly head in September 2009, about three months after the coup.

He said that Víctor Bendeck, owner of Hondured-Channel 13 which broadcast his programme, began to pressure him about the news content and especially about the air-time given to President Manuel Zelaya Rosales who would call Alvarado from Nicaragua to address the Honduran people.

The journalist said that a number of times Bendeck ordered all the interviews related to President Manuel Zelaya to be cut, as well as coverage of Resistance activities.

Sometimes the programme would be taken off the air completely. "I couldn't find any items for it, then that Sunday I had an interview - President Manuel Zelaya was going to call me [from Managua] at 7.15 pm." However, Bendeck warned him that he didn't have authorization for the call. Alvarado's programme was eventually taken off the air, and the journalist moved with it to Globo TV.

On 9 December 2013, the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court sentenced Alvarado to a year and four months' imprisonment for inviting a university official onto his programme in 2006 to denounce irregularities allegedly committed by Belinda Flores, the Dean of Economics. Alvarado was accused of defamation.

These legal proceedings continue in the courts and the journalist continues to fight for the restoration of his rights.

On 15 May 2014, the television programme _Suelte la lengua_ (Spill the beans) was taken off the air. Juan Orlando Hernández's government had been criticized on the programme, which was broadcast on Channel 6, and presented by the journalists Jorge Burgos and Emy Padilla.

Their programme, which often exposed cases of corruption involving banks and companies, annoyed some of the channel's shareholders. Emy Padilla said that, for example, one day Channel 6's production team handed her a note in the middle of recording which forbade her from mentioning certain subjects. _Suelte la lengua_ often invited directors of NGOs and human rights defenders onto the programme, according to the journalists' report to Reporters Without Borders.

_ Advertising that silences

Another form of censorship occurs when advertisers are annoyed by issues raised by reporters. Ricardo Guerra, presenter of the programme _Actualidad Porteña_ (Port News) said, "We're censored by media owners, something we hadn't seen for a long time, but now things have changed.

There are certain issues that we can't mention on our programmes, which are made on a free-lance basis, because the owners of the TV and radio stations say that they harm their interests. They have advertising contracts with customers and you can say absolutely nothing." He added that it is common for independent journalists to propose a topic concerning the Puerto Cortés authorities, only to hear the response, "We don't cover that issue."

Some of the biggest advertising contracts are with Congress and local and national government which exert pressure and threaten to withdraw advertising from media outlets if they air topics deemed to affect them.

The government uses advertising as a carrot and stick for the media and journalists. Under Juan Orlando Hernández's government, advertising is centralized, managed from the Presidential Palace. The president uses the people's money to control criticism of his government, imposing a homogeneous approach which presents his presidency as efficient, with many successes in all areas.

Journalists from various media outlets have complained that they are being financially crippled through the lack of advertising contracts. "What John Orlando wants is to make us to feel strangled by our financial situation and then to call us to sign advertising contracts which are hedged about with conditions. We've had to take our children out of school and there's a lawsuit against us in the tenancy court because we can't afford to pay the rent on the house we're living in."

They complain that colleagues working for the corporate media are receiving contracts worth millions of lempiras.

_ Censorship by decree

_Censorship is the genocide of thought. It kills ideas through omission, ignorance and fear_.

– Adolfo Marcovich

In October 2009, Gladys Lanza, Coordinator of Visitación Padilla Women's Peace Movement, was faxed a memorandum from Radio Cadena Voces, owned by ex-President Ricardo Maduro, who supported the coup. In the memorandum the radio station's administrators informed her that the movement's programme, _Aquí entre Chonas_ (Here among Women) _,_ broadcast every Saturday, had been cancelled because it was in breach of Decree 124-2009.

Three other radio programmes, such as _La Bullaranga_ (The Noise) broadcast by CEM-H (Centre for Women's Studies-Honduras), and _Tiempo de Hablar_ (Time to Talk), by the CDM (Centre for Women's Rights), were cancelled, and these organizations were also notified by fax.

Decree 124-2009, issued in the immediate aftermath of the coup, authorized the revocation or cancellation of permits or licences to radio or television stations which 'broadcast messages inciting national hatred, damage to legally protected assets, or a regime of social anarchy against the democratic state to the detriment of civil order and human rights.'

Following the coup, the three programmes broadcast information on the repression of the Honduran people and especially of women who took part in the protests against it, as well as broadcasting their attitudes towards this attack on the integrity of the state's democratic institutions.

On 29 September 2009, another decree entered into force – PCM-M016-2009 which violated constitutional guarantees including freedom of assembly, association, and expression and the right to humane treatment. It was used against Radio Globo and Channel 36 which were taken off the air for about 22 days. Earlier, on 28 June, on the day of the coup, their premises had been raided by soldiers who took all their equipment.

Article 4 of the decree authorized CONATEL to suspend any media outlet that 'threatens the peace and public order,' or issues publications that 'offend human dignity, public officials, or violate the law and government resolutions.' Both stations were accused by the de facto regime of being supporters of ex-President Manuel Zelaya Rosales.

On 13 January 2014, the Honduran Congress passed the Official Secrets and Declassification of Public Information Act. Under this law, information can be withheld from Honduran citizens from 5 to 25 years, with no right of access, and it gives ministers discretion to decide whether or not information can be made public. This is a hugely retrograde step which invalidates the Access to Public Information Act.

It introduces prior censorship for public information that should be available to anyone who requests it.

_ Censorship of community radio stations

In early 2014, CONATEL staff phoned _La Voz de Zacate Grande_ (The Voice of Zacate Grande) to inform the radio station that the murals on the outside walls of its building had to be removed because "they incite disorder and destabilization," and that items that "oppose development must not be broadcast," according to the Honduran branch of the Mesoamerican Network of Community, Indigenous, Garífuna and Feminist Radio Stations _(Red Mesoamericana de Radios Comunitarias, Indígenas, Garífunas y Feministas de Honduras)_.

The radio station is based in a community in the south of Honduras. There ADEPZA (Association for the Development of the Zacate Grande Peninsula) has been engaged in a major struggle for land against the powerful landowner Miguel Facussé who has been trying to dispossess several communities of their territory because they have access to the sea and are located in an area rich in natural resources.

The radio station is subject to constant power-cuts which damage its equipment and as a result, at times it is off the air for long periods because the repair costs are very high. The station staff suffer outrageous forms of censorship, applied continuously, not only through the power-cuts, but also through threats, persecution and surveillance.

The Mesoamerican Network also reported that OFRANEH (Garífuna People's Federation of Honduras) had received summonses concerning two Garífuna radio stations – Waruguma in May 2013 and Sugua on 17 September 2014.

In March 2014 came the first act of verbal intimidation, with a demand to see Radio Waruguma's equipment and frequency. Then OFRANEH was summonsed to appear in the next 10 days before CONATEL, accused of violating several articles of the Telecommunications Act and its implementing regulations, as well as the Civil Proceedings Code.

Meanwhile, the radio stations of COPINH (Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras), which support struggles to defend territory, have been harassed by municipal officials, with threats to the radios' staff and premises, as well as threats of sabotage.

The Honduran Congress passed Decree 35-2013 of 27 February 2013, which imposed direct censorship on women victims of domestic violence by prohibiting them from mentioning the names of the perpetrators.

It also stipulated that the media must refrain from publishing or disclosing information related to domestic violence trials, regardless of whether these were administrative or judicial proceedings. Breach of this provision is punishable with a fine of 10 - 25 minimum salaries.

_ Why is there censorship in Honduras?

Honduras is divided into 18 departments and 298 municipalities. The form of government is republican, democratic and representative, with three branches – legislative, executive and judicial – which, according to the Constitution, are complementary, independent and of equal standing.

Levels of economic, social and political inequality are high. The lack of disaggregated statistical data and the excessive centralization of decision-making have limited the ability to design appropriate strategies to address this.

The so-called 'traditional parties' - the Liberal and National – have governed the country for over 100 years. They are run by groups wielding a huge amount of economic and political power.

These two parties have taken turns in power. From 1982, they initiated what they called the 'democratic era,' through general elections, establishing an electoral democracy. However, the voters do not exercise sovereign power but instead are only taken into account when they go to the polls.

Throughout this period, this system has had a corrosive effect, because when the parties come to office, the aim of their activities is to benefit a small elite which gets rich on the state's money and natural resources, such as rivers and forests.

Until 2005 the elections functioned. Five political parties took part, two of which were simply appendages of the traditional parties. They negotiated their share of power and their decisions were based on the needs, not of the citizens who had voted them into power, but of the traditional parties which they served unconditionally. However, everything changed with the 2009 coup. It exposed the fragility of the Honduran democratic system and human rights guarantees, and deepened citizens' distrust of state institutions. It also thrust into relief the high levels of civil insecurity and impunity.

With the coup, the sale of natural resources was stepped up - to mining and hydroelectric companies and international tourist consortia, leading to the dispossession of communities.

This has been achieved through the adoption of laws benefiting economic interests, such as concessions for rivers for hydroelectric companies and for large tracts of land for mining multinationals.

A law has been passed which paves the way for the sale of sovereignty and deepening dispossession through the creation of ZEDEs (Employment and Economic Development Zones) or model cities. These will have their own legislation and absolute autonomy, including the ability to pass laws within communities at the complete whim of powerful groups which will have the authority to expel the true owners from their land.

With the coup, there was a national awakening. People are now not as willing to put up with illegal projects and have been organizing themselves in communities to put a stop to them.

However, at the same time, the state has armed itself with its apparatus of repression to subdue them and to protect the interests of economic groups.

Everything functions in a coordinated way. This elite has at its disposal most of the media which distorts information and makes it appear that the elite is working for the public good.

The justice system is no different and acts to protect those interests through the criminalization of social movements, journalists and other sectors of the population.

The truth about all this remains kidnapped in the newsrooms. The public does not have access to information and that gives more power to this elite that not only uses censorship but also kills those who are vocal in their criticism.

Therefore, as the prominent Honduran writer Froylán Turcios said, "This is the time when silence is a crime." That is why we must not be silent. We have the essential task of rescuing Honduras and transforming it into a country with equal opportunities for all its citizens.

We must release freedom of expression from its captivity, as it has not seen the light of day for a long time. For this to happen, we need to break the silence and shout 'Freedom'!!!!
/ CHAPTER II

THE STREETS WERE PAINTED WITH SLOGANS AND PUBLIC PLACES WERE FILLED WITH ANTI-COUP MUSIC AND WRITING

During various periods in its history, the Honduran state has resorted to repressive conduct and practices, and continues to do so. At these times, various forms of creativity have been used by the people to confront this repression.

In 1893, during Domingo Vásquez's presidency, there was a crackdown on women who were very active in their opposition to the regime. The president ordered his sidekicks to cut the women's hair, while others were arrested and sent to prison where they were forced to cook for the army.

Following the coup, in response to mass protests by women on the streets, the armed forces under the command of Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, who supported the de facto government of Roberto Micheletti, beat women on the buttocks with batons, while others were raped in the streets during demonstrations. This was so prevalent that condoms featured among the instruments of repression carried by the police and military. Other women were abducted or killed. It was a direct message to women, intended to instil fear and make them go back to their kitchens.

In the 1980s, we can find significant resistance to the National Security Doctrine during the era of forced disappearances. The artistic movement contributed to this through music, literature and theatre.

During that time, there were only a few groups who dared to challenge the system. One of them was _Luz y Fuerza_ (Light and Power), a band formed by members of STENEE (National Electricity Company Workers' Union). Their songs raised awareness nationally about the US military occupation of Honduran soil.

Honduran territory was the scene of much violence. The Nicaraguan Contras staged incursions from Honduras into Nicaragua in an attempt to overthrow the Sandinista government. In addition, the US army had military bases in the country from which it operated against Nicaragua and gave support to the Salvadoran army in its suppression of its fellow citizens.

The theatre group of SITRAPANI (National Child Welfare Board Workers' Union), formed by trade unionists deeply committed to fighting for a better country, also supported the Honduran people's struggle through art. The _Frijolito_ (Bean) and _Rascaniguas_ (Chigger Scratchers) groups addressed issues such as human rights violations from their various perspectives.

Félix Cesario, journalist and poet, former professor at UNAH's School of Journalism, is an emblem of tenacity and a symbol of resistance to the repression used to silence artists since time immemorial. He walked through public squares reading out his poem ' _Secreto de Estado'_ ('State Secret'), about forced disappearances in Honduras. He paid the price in 1983 when he was leader of SITRAUNAH (UNAH Workers' Union). On 18 August, agents of FUSEP (Public Security Force) arrested him and took him to the cells in the basement of the Congress building. He was subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment which has left him to this day with a dislocated fifth lumbar vertebra and fractures to the tibia and fibula. He was released 11 days later, dumped unconscious on the road to Valle de Ángeles, near Tegucigalpa. This did not prevent him from continuing to fight, and he is still doing so today.

_ Censorship of art and literature in Honduras

We interviewed Jorge Miralda, a writer who has published various books in Honduras. He is known as the chronicler of the Resistance and since the coup he has covered every inch of the street protests to document and publish the 'Chronicles of the Coup d'État' _('Las Crónicas del Golpe de Estado')_.

We asked him if he believed there to be censorship of art and literature in Honduras. He replied, "Of course there is, because we don't live in a democracy in Honduras, we're immersed in a dictatorship under the aegis of the two traditional parties, the National and Liberal, supported by the military and the police. The United States is perfectly aware of this, but it suits it in terms of its strategic, political and economic objectives in the Central American region.

"There's no real freedom of expression here, as shown by many international organizations, including PEN International and Human Rights Watch, which seek to defend and protect this human right. If authors and journalists want to be read, if they want to publish their personal opinions about the situations they experience, it has to be in line with everything that the current regime dictates and they must immediately adjust to this. If not, they'll spend their time being harassed and/or frozen out."

_ Types of censorship identified

Miralda sees two kinds of censorship applied in the context of the coup – religious and political.

The most senior exponent of religious censorship was Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Madariaga who, in his capacity as head of the Catholic Church in Honduras, accepted the coup and condemned the Honduran social movements in the Resistance and the supposed Communist interference of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez in our country's affairs.

Meanwhile, political censorship was used to control the Honduran population and prevent the free expression of ideas because the promoters and perpetrators of the coup saw it as harmful to the government. They therefore 'protected themselves' - and continue to do so – through disinformation in the media which they manipulate at will, to confuse the public and distort the facts surrounding the crimes committed daily in Honduras. For this, they have a huge apparatus set up in the three branches of government, through which they control most of the spoken, written and televised media.

_ What did he see of censorship during the coup?

Miralda described how those responsible for the coup, along with the regime in power and the media, raised the spectre of Communism and made the people believe that the then president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, and Fidel Castro, former president of Cuba, were coming to the country to steal everything. If Honduran families had two children, one would be taken away from them, and everything would go to the Communist state. They silenced opposition radio and television stations, supposedly on ideological and political grounds. They even closed down Radio Globo and Globo TV, using the army which damaged their equipment and threw acid at the transmitter on Cantagallo Hill to the west of the capital.

Community radios were closely monitored and some considered high risk were closed down. Their journalists were persecuted and some killed. In response, writers and the general public turned to social networks such as the internet and to graffiti on the streets to make the world aware of the situation.

_ Who was censored and for what purpose?

Miralda highlighted the fact that, during the coup, the de facto authorities directly censored the people who, despite everything, took to the streets demanding justice, freedom and democracy. The state also censored opposition writers and journalists, of whom over 44 have been murdered since the coup and, in most cases, the perpetrators have not been convicted due to corruption and impunity. It is important to stress that this opposition does not exist just for the sake of it. The coup opponents are motivated by the truth, supported by statistical data, and what they have observed, experienced and suffered. As a result, they are the targets of attacks by the dictatorship in Honduras.

_ When did he start experiencing censorship of his work?

Miralda said that following the 2009 coup, he became a chronicler of the FNRP (National Popular Resistance Front), writing about what was happening at that time on the streets – the crackdowns, the arbitrary arrests, the beatings with batons, the gassings, the killings. Acting as a conduit for information, he sent the 'Chronicles of the Coup d'État' to social networks, based on his own eyewitness accounts.

"From then on I began to suffer various kinds of censorship – I received death threats by phone, my phone was tapped, I was followed in the street, and they even went as far as to publish a forged document with my photograph, crediting me as its author. It was called _'Los Comandantes Eros'_ ('The Eros Commanders'), and it ridiculed certain people and gave them nicknames - Honduran social leaders such as Juan Barahona, Carlos H. Reyes, Nelson Ávila, Renán Valdez, Rafael Alegría, and leading international figures such as the late President Chávez, Fidel Castro, Evo Morales, Daniel Ortega, Lula da Silva, Correa, Mujica, Lugo, Mauricio Fúnez. It was published online on 7 November 2010," said Miralda.

For Jorge Miralda, censorship is used by governments to prevent their dark side being exposed, and to achieve this, they impose censorship both directly and indirectly. In the case of Honduras, the current regime applies it for the sole purpose of retaining power, using it to conceal the social, economic and political crisis in our country. It has gone as far as to draft laws in Congress to achieve this aim, most recently with the so-called 'Gagging Law', which will be applied to media outlets, especially those which do not agree with the situation in our country created by the government. From the government's point of view, it is legally acceptable to control the opposition to pave the way for the re-election of the current president, Juan Orlando Hernández.

_ Forms of protest in response to the coup

During the coup various songs emerged which were sung by the protesters taking part in marches, such as ' _Honduras, el pueblo está contigo'_ ('Honduras, the people are with you') by Polache.

There were also the songs of Café Guancasco, a group that gave many concerts in the wake of the coup. Its equipment was destroyed by police and soldiers in San Pedro Sula on 15 September 2010 during a brutal crackdown on a peaceful demonstration, in which tear gas canisters were fired all over the stage, and children and the elderly were attacked.

The National Front of Artists against the Coup emerged to support the opposition to the coup d'état of 28 June 2009 in Honduras. People who were allegedly police investigators took on the task of threatening artists taking part in demonstrations by the FNRP.

These artists held countless cultural events, including concerts, to draw attention to the violation of laws on culture, as well as the censorship and repression of artists and the Honduran people. Artists from the worlds of theatre, poetry, photography, painting and sculpture all formed part of this Front. It was a pioneering initiative because in the 1980s, their involvement in the opposition movement had been on an individual basis.

For Eduardo Bahr, the writer and art critic, the coup benefited the arts in Honduras because it produced an explosion of groups of artists that had previously been working individually. They pooled their talents to give the Honduran people strength to fight against the dictatorship established by the coup.

In one such initiative, the Memories Theatre developed 'The Great Coup', a play which, through irony, portrays many of the events of the 2009 coup.

The use of the visual arts was one element, as were the traditional techniques of the plastic arts. The artist Gabriel Galeano, author of the essay 'Las manifestaciones artísticas en las luchas de resistencia: una visión de la crisis política ' ('Artistic expression in the Resistance struggles: a vision of the political crisis'), says that he presented two works: 'The Wailing Wall' and 'A Critical Attitude'.

In the first work, Galeano handed out black ski-masks to the first 20 people who came to see his work. His aim was to show the climate of repression in the country. In the second work, he carried a gas lamp around near the offices of the National Human Rights Commissioner. Galeano's intention was to enter the building to ask if there was an honourable man there, as a rebuke to the National Commissioner, Ramón Custodio López, who had defended the coup and the repression of the Honduran people. Galeano was dressed in black, emulating Diogenes the Cynic.

_ They can't stop the spring

The other art forms in response to the coup included graffiti, with anonymous artists expressing their opposition on the walls of the capital's main streets, including painting caricatures of the coup organizers.

For Eduardo Bahr, the painting of walls came about because the opportunities for expression in the media were closed off and the people wanted to register their discontent wherever they could. What they had closest to hand were the walls, where they could write, and so emerged the grassroots art of graffiti which, in both words and pictures, expressed strength, dissent and opposition to all that was happening.

Young people have formed collectives to paint graffiti. Their subject is love and they use their amorous messages to make social comments.

There are also painted words or pictures where profanities are sometimes used to register dissent, and sometimes we find graffiti which is permanent and remains in people's memories to be constantly repeated, such as 'We are not afraid' or the widely-used phrase by women 'No coups d'état, nor blows to women'.1

"This graffiti's novel, it's unprecedented, it's akin to the reaction in 1988 when Ramón Matta Ballesteros, accused of drug trafficking, was abducted by the US military and taken to the United States," says Bahr.

"However, it's important to stress that this kind of street art exposed half-hidden social problems, such as homophobia.

"Members of the LGBTI community [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transvestite, transsexual and intersex] took to the streets to paint their messages, waving the rainbow flag bearing anti-coup slogans. There was a punitive response to these demonstrations – they began to be killed. It was easy to attack them because society has become accustomed to constant _machismo_. However, what had been hidden was censorship of the arts and that was exposed," notes Eduardo Bahr.

"The first person to be killed was a transsexual." The murder was committed the day after the coup began, in the early hours of 29 June 2009, in San Pedro Sula. Another transsexual was killed in Tegucigalpa the same day. "By December, 17 members of the LGBTI community had been killed." Their genitals were mutilated and then stuffed into their mouths. State security agencies were identified as implicated in these executions, and before being killed, the victims were tortured, stated Pepe Palacios, a member of the LGBTI community, during a talk outside the country.

On 16 September 2010, after the "big Resistance parade on 15 September," there was a "strange reference" in _La Tribuna_ newspaper to the fact that two transsexuals, Salomé and Zaida, had gone on the march. On 20 September, they were both murdered. "Now, if those aren't political killings..." said Palacios.

Women play an active part in the marches, and the women's movement takes to the streets to support them but also to fulfil a very important role - to raise awareness of priority issues. They not only take a stance against the coup, they also take advantage of the context to present violence against women as a central issue, as women were one of the groups subjected to most ill-treatment as a result of the repression in support of the coup.

The coup shattered a myth that everyone had believed for a long time – that the Honduran people were passive, that they would put up with anything, that they quickly forgot. It was clear that the opposite was true, because the people stayed on the streets every day for over 100 days.

The walls of buildings served as blackboards. Although their owners and the oligarchy repainted them, there were demonstrations every day, and these walls would again be covered with new messages, including one that said 'We don't know why you're repainting when we're coming back tomorrow – The People.'

There were also poetic phrases but with a political meaning, denouncing the repression, such as 'They can cut all the flowers, but they can't stop the spring' written in the centre of the capital. The people also found other forms of protest, writing 'Coup-plotters out' and 'Roberto Micheletti – fascist' on banknotes.

The graffiti was painted at night and the people engaging in this form of resistance ran a huge risk because if they were caught in the act they were arrested, beaten and taken to police cells where they were charged with damage to the state of Honduras and illegal protest. Public prosecutors, the police and judges were all enlisted to mount legal proceedings against this form of protest, and although some of those arrested did not go to jail, they were banned from taking part in demonstrations or even being near them, and from leaving the country. In addition, they had to sign a register at a court-house every eight days.

Expressions of digital art can also be mentioned, such as designs for tee-shirts, posters, postcards, diaries and calendars. According to Gabriel Galeano's book, there was a huge cultural movement in protest against the coup because of human rights violations and the actions taken to attack and limit creative freedom.

There were also mega-concerts. One of them, 'Voices Against the Coup', featured nationally- and internationally-known artists. Other concerts were held in the capital's residential areas.

The censorship of freedom of expression through the closure of media outlets opposed to the coup was met with an immediate creative response, with journalists and artists forming a group to record all the images of repression and then screen them in the neighbourhoods of Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela.

It was an enormous contribution to efforts to keep people informed of what was happening on the street. Several members of the team were persecuted and killed, including Renán Fajardo, who was strangled to death with a telephone cord in his apartment.

The journalist César Silva, another member of this media collective that spontaneously emerged as a symbol of protest against censorship, was kidnapped and taken to a clandestine prison where he was tortured. He had to go into exile for some months, but was forced to return despite his situation because he could not support himself or the family he had left at home.

Manuel de Jesús Varela Murillo and Ricardo Antonio Rodríguez, Globo TV cameramen also involved in this project, were kidnapped in February 2010 and taken to clandestine detention centres where they were tortured. Murillo was murdered in October 2013 and Rodríguez was forced into exile.

Photography was another means of publicizing the actions taken against Honduran society under the coup, through exhibitions about the regime, one of the most notable being ' _Tierras del Nunca Más_ ' ('Never Never Lands'). There was also the feature-length documentary film ' _Quién Dijo Miedo_ ' ('We are not Afraid') by Kathia Lara, which was used abroad to inform the international community about the coup. One of the main people featured in the video was forced to go into exile as a result of persecution.

Kathia Lara said at a screening of the documentary in 2010, "This process has been hard and painful. We've lost valued comrades – for us, exile wasn't an option. But it's also provided powerful reasons to continue the struggle to rebuild Honduras through a National Constituent Assembly, to carry on believing in a Latin America united in solidarity and dignity."

"There's no democracy in a country where thousands of men and women have to choose every day between defencelessness and exile. Now I have the privilege and responsibility to tell our story of peaceful resistance..... Latin American protests against the events in Honduras must increase and grow stronger to force governments around the world to act in line with the wishes of their people rather than on behalf of imperialist interests."

There was also another film – ' _No Amanece Igual para Todos_ ' ('It Doesn't Dawn the Same for Everyone') which deals with the coup. It was made by independent artists including Javier Espinal and directed by Manuel Villa, Ramón Hernández and Francisco Andino, who began filming three weeks before the coup and continued even on days when there was a curfew. The documentary was screened until 2011.

Writers have also made their contributions – for example, Jorge Miralda through his book 'Chronicles of the Coup d'État' and 'Night Walker' (' _Caminante de la Noche_ '). In 'Chronicles of the Coup d'État', Miralda devoted time every day to documenting the demonstrations against the coup. This material has been invaluable because it portrays the context in which the anti-coup Resistance operated, as well as the state's response.

Lety Elvir's book ' _Honduras: Golpe y Pluma' ('_ Honduras: Coup and Quill') is an anthology of Resistance poetry written by 47 Honduran women between 2009 and 2013. She said that she was unable to collect all the poems by women written in response to the coup for various reasons, "They're not all here, because I didn't know about them or they didn't know about the project; others said they hadn't been able to write a single poem on the subject – 'I've dried up, frozen, I can't write about the coup, it paralyses me'. More than one was afraid of adverse literary criticism, or of reprisals by their employers, the state or paramilitaries; others have lost their poems or in some cases the computers where their poems were saved were simply stolen."

_'Mis Lápices en Resistencia'_ ('My Pencils in Resistance') is a book by Oscar Montecinos, a 10-year-old boy who recounts his experiences on the mass protest marches and makes an appeal for a foundation to be set up to help orphaned children of the Resistance. He says it is the children's duty to remember their parents, murdered for opposing the coup, and that they should not be forgotten.

In an interview with _Honduras Laboral_ magazine on his motivation for writing this book, Montecinos said, "I was inspired by the imagination that we have as children, although in Honduras it's limited by the rich because they only think about money and don't care about the children of Honduras".

_ Images to rescue the history of Honduras

Audiovisual media is another tool used to document events. An example is the independent project by two Hondurans, Luis Méndez, Coordinator of the School of Political Education for Social Movements ( _Escuela de Formación Política para Movimientos Sociales_ ), and Blanca Ochoa, a graduate of Cuba's International School of Film and Television.

"We're seeking to reconstruct historical memory through the testimonies of people who've played an important role in the history of Honduras but who've been sidelined by the corporate media," they both said to the journalist Giorgio Trucchi, Central American correspondent for SIREL (Latin American Regional Information Service) of the IUF (International Union of Food Workers).

"When we went searching for the images and sounds of many of these phases in our history, we realized that there was nothing, everything had been lost. The alternative media has to go on the offensive, recover the real stories of those who've lived and fought on their own land and at the side of their brothers and sisters in Central America. We're going to search out their voices, their faces, their contributions to politics and theory, their dreams, their failures and their sorrows. We're going to retrace their steps, reconstructing histories," said Luis Méndez.

For Blanca Ochoa, "Without historical memory, you're left relying on empty models, with the risk that the hegemonic projects of manufacturing and consumption, as well as the false models of a so-called democracy, will gain traction among young people.

"We're in the middle of a media war and we must fight for a historical and collective consciousness which motivates and nourishes the younger generation, so that they can take on an active role and become this country's future," she said.

For Méndez, "reality has been deliberately concealed" in Honduras to convince the younger generation that there was never strong opposition to the prevailing predatory economic model.

"In Honduras there's no sense of nationhood and our territory has always served as a platform for American strategic interests. They've tried to homogenize us, disappearing indigenous cultures, leaving us in limbo. The local oligarchy and imperialism continue to manipulate reality, conspiring with transnational interests. For them we don't exist, we simply pass through this world without leaving a trace. They feed on our native culture, segregate the indigenous and black peoples, suppress them, exclude them, discriminate against them and turn them into folklore, handicrafts and merchandise. They rob us of life," said Ochoa.

_ Blogs and Twitter as tools for reporting violations

It is young people who make the most use of social networks, posting videos and photos on the internet as soon as repression occurs. This provides very important supporting evidence for formal actions against human rights violators, including the main promoters and organisers of the coup who have been reported to the International Criminal Court.

It is also important to mention the role bloggers have played during the coup in exposing abuses. There is no doubt that technology plays a vital role in environments where there is state violence, as abuses can be reported as soon as they are committed. Dozens of blogs were created by people who felt a sense of outrage at the atrocities committed under the coup and the grave human rights situation in Honduras.

Online newspapers also emerged, such as voselsoberano.com and hondurastierralibre.com, which present various social movements' ideas and reports of abuses and are reference sources both nationally and internationally.

_ Fear and complicity have infected journalists

According to the report by the Commission of Truth, established for the victims, journalists are a group that has suffered many acts of repression including actions to prevent them from working; intimidation to curb freedom of expression; psychological and physical attacks; the adoption of rules and the use of legislation to impede free expression and access to information; acts of censorship and financial reprisals.

The Commission of Truth concluded that working as a journalist in a climate of political crisis is stressful and has had repercussions for the emotional well-being of media workers who, for example, have suffered sudden mood changes following the incidents they have experienced and then recounted in their testimony.

"We're under so much pressure that if we make a mistake in the number of people we say are at a march [by opponents of President Zelaya's overthrow], we're instantly the target of threats by text or phone. We're in a difficult situation which we've never before experienced as professional journalists," said Nancy John, a television reporter.

The self-censorship practised by journalists – and their sources – for fear of attempts on their lives, or of being sacked, acts as a constraint on the enthusiasm and rigour with which they can carry out their investigations and present the news. Unlike art, which shifted from individualism to collective action, journalists were infected with fear. There were only a few who managed to escape this web – they were generally in non-governmental organizations, freelancers, or a few in media outlets which openly opposed the coup and were repressed and persecuted as a consequence. Most of those in the corporate media, on the other hand, opted to write what their bosses told them to, for fear of reprisals.

To keep their jobs or to avoid being exposed to repression, they stuck to the media owners' script even when they disagreed with it. Information was distorted, with photographs doctored to make demonstrations appear poorly attended when in fact there were a large number of protesters.

In contrast, the marches by the ' _Camisetas Blancas'_ ('White Tee-Shirts'), used by the business sector to make it appear that there was mass support for the coup, were made to look a success. Workers were obliged to wear these white tee-shirts bearing pro-coup slogans. They worked in maquilas (sweat shops), fast food outlets and other businesses whose owners forced their employees to go on the marches, otherwise they would be sacked. Others, who objected, preferred to lose their jobs and are still unemployed because they have been stigmatized.

The use of discriminatory language by journalists, describing members of the Resistance as 'vandals', 'criminals', 'Communists' or 'terrorists', was very common in the mass media corporations in Honduras. There were also journalists who were genuinely in favour of the coup and therefore were under no pressure when they were writing their articles.

_ Kidnapped and tortured

In September 2009, Delmer Membreño, photography editor of _El Libertador_ newspaper, was kidnapped by four masked men who also tortured him.

"I left the newspaper at about 9.30 am, and went to get a taxi to Radio Globo. As I was going down the steps near La Hoya, a double cab pick-up pulled up, two men in ski-masks got out and they forced me at gunpoint to get into the back of the car," he said.

They handcuffed him and put a hood on him. The men drove around for an hour and then, when they came to a dirt road, they stopped the car, took off his hood and said they wanted to look him in the eye before killing him.

Apparently these were plain-clothes policemen. They burned his hands with cigarettes and made as if to shoot him in the head. However, in the end they said it would be better if he went to inform _El Libertador's_ editor, Jhony Lagos, that he could suffer a worse fate. During the coup and ever since, the newspaper in question has been a constant target of repression, its staff heavily threatened because of their work.

During the kidnapping Membreño was severely beaten. "Someone put their foot on the right side of my head and they began to burn my face with cigarettes. They burned me three times on the arm and twice on the chest and then made me get up. They put the hood back on and made me get into the car," he said after getting out alive. The men took his camera.

_ Hooded and threatened

César Silva's case has already been mentioned, with his involvement in the work to preserve collective memory by showing videos in the capital's neighbourhoods to prevent people forgetting that there had been a coup in Honduras.

Silva also suffered reprisals because of his profession. On 28 December 2009, he was pulled out of a taxi by three armed men, who took him at gunpoint to a clandestine prison where they subjected him to over 24 hours of intensive interrogation so that he would say "where the weapons were and which groups I was working with." They shone a spotlight in his face and he lost track of time.

I interviewed him and he told me, "I was asked about guns, about groups which, according to them, I was training, contacts I had abroad and what I did with the videos and photos because, they said, I was causing them a lot of trouble."

He said that it was 8.30 am when he was abducted, on the ring road near a petrol station. He was coming from the south of the capital, and was taking a taxi to his home on the other side of the city.

When he was on the ring road he saw a white car which came up very close and signalled with its headlights for César's taxi to stop, but the journalist warned the driver not to. However, the driver was so frightened that he braked, and the other car drew up with three men inside who pulled out 9 millimetre and 38 calibre handguns.

According to the victim, the men got out of the car, guns in hand. "They pulled me out and pushed me into their car. I only had time to tell the taxi-driver that I was a journalist and from the Resistance. Another car was coming, but I couldn't do anything – they'd already pushed me into the car and put me in the back between two of them. The taxi-driver was told, 'Get lost – if you don't, we'll kill you.'"

Silva recalled that when he was already in the vehicle he tried to raise his head, but the men swore at him and threatened to shoot him dead if he continued. One of the men hit him with his forearm when Silva attempted to move because his hands felt very restricted. "He said to me, 'You've always fancied yourself as a bit of a tough guy.'" The man on his right asked for instructions on his mobile phone while they travelled around in the car.

When they were speaking on the phone they mentioned that they were talking to The Jackal, but beforehand they had put a leather or canvas hood on his head so he could not see their faces. Two of the men had Chilean-sounding accents.

Silva did not know where they stopped, but two men were expecting his arrival. He was led into a dark room where there was a stove. A spotlight was shone in his face, while on the other side a man questioned him. Silva could only see the man's silhouette. "I don't know if they took turns to question me, but they didn't let me sleep all night, as a way of applying pressure. When I was asked my name I said another. 'Cut the crap – say who you are and what you do,' they replied. He could not conceal his true identity because they had taken his wallet with his personal documents inside.

"When I didn't say anything else, one of them left the room and came back absolutely furious. He grabbed the chair and put it on my neck and threw water over me from a bag they'd given me which I hadn't drunk because I didn't trust them. I assume he didn't have orders to kill me because, from outside, they were saying, 'Leave it – don't make trouble for yourself,'" said the journalist.

"In the early hours I asked to go to the toilet and a man told me rudely 'Crap there' but I waited and another man came along who was more obliging. He took me outside as there was no toilet. I relieved myself, but all the time they kept the spotlight trained on me so I couldn't see who was behind it."

In the morning he was told, "You've got a guardian angel, you're being protected. Give up doing stupid things – you've free to go." Only about three minutes later, they took him out of the house, put his hood back on, and made him get into another car. "I asked them where they were taking me. They didn't talk, there was total silence. I asked them again, 'So what happens now? Where are you taking me?' It made me terribly worried. There was a moment when another car took their right of way and they argued over it. I could sense that we'd got to a dirt road and they left me there." A few seconds before he had thought they were going put a bullet in his head, as it is a very isolated place which serves as a dumping ground for bodies.

The kidnapping and subsequent release of César Silva is similar to that of Walter Tróchez, the human rights defender and member of the LGBTI community. On 4 December 2009, he was abducted by unidentified men who let him escape, only to shoot him dead in the centre of Tegucigalpa nine days later, on 13 December.

_Profiles to harm the opposition

Images were also used against the Resistance, as they were employed by police to compile profiles of the people who took part in demonstrations. According to information from a journalist who asked for his name to be withheld, at night the police went to media outlets to get them to hand over the images. Many people were killed as a result.

Nevertheless, we should mention the brave journalists who covered demonstrations which were heavily suppressed, but who managed to get their material out and disseminate the information which then contributed to, for example, the reports of international missions. During demonstrations, these journalists were attacked by the police, soldiers and paramilitaries. Their homes were raided and their equipment confiscated. However, others who wrote articles supporting the coup also came under pressure during demonstrations. Some were even beaten up, given the degree of polarization at the time.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended the strengthening of freedom of thought and the promotion of measures to help preserve the professional and ethical freedom of media workers (journalists, cameramen, editors, designers, cartoonists, etc.), including the adoption of codes of ethics drafted and discussed with all members of the profession, as well as a 'conscience clause' to regulate the relationship between media proprietors and journalists.

It also recommended that the journalists undergo a new form of professional training and capacity-building, equipping them to deal with self-, direct and indirect censorship, and promoting the responsible exercise of freedom of expression. This implies respect for the dignity of all people, regardless of their social, economic, political, ideological or legal situation.

Honduran journalists and authors are operating in a climate of increasing violence, impunity and fear created by the infiltration of the state by organized crime, increased militarization and weakened state institutions. The ability of writers to investigate and report is being increasingly restricted, while the cultural sector has stagnated due to the lack of long-term policies and investment, according to a report presented to the UN Human Rights Council by International PEN, PEN Canada and the International Human Rights Programme at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, as part of the second Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Honduras.

This situation did not come about overnight – there has been a gradual deterioration. In Honduras there have been significant stages which have left their mark – the 1980s, the 1990s with neoliberal economic policies, and Hurricane Mitch which left thousands dead or missing and material damage from which the country has still not recovered. In the 2000s, the tragic milestone has been 2009, with the coup.

The infiltration by organized crime and drug trafficking at all levels of the state keeps the country on its knees, impunity is rampant and violence is increasing and out of control.

The state through its various structures has been establishing ineffective mechanisms to combat impunity and the scourges mentioned above, which have made Honduras one of the world's most dangerous countries, with the second highest rate of killings for a country not at war.

At the same time, the corporate media has been closing off opportunities for people to express themselves or to raise awareness of emerging problems - it has been masking reality. Thus, there are issues that do not feature on radio or television programmes, nor in the press, whether printed or digital.

These are topics such as extractive projects – open-cast mining, for example, which has caused a great deal of harm. If the subject is broached at all, it is to present it as a project that will provide new job opportunities, while ignoring the environmental damage it causes for rural communities.

Another issue is hydroelectric power, presented as opening up the country to development, and not as the theft of rivers from the communities where the schemes are to be located.

Laws violating human rights are being presented as socially beneficial, such as the Official Secrets Act under which information can be withheld for up to 25 years. The establishment of a military police, militarizing the policing system, which was under the control of the armed forces in the 1980s but removed from them due to pressure from Honduran society in the 1990s, is being characterized as the last hope in the fight against delinquency, drug trafficking and organized crime.

The news agenda is controlled by powerful groups and psychological techniques for social control are being applied, such as 'consensus' for a given topic. Both pre- and post-coup, Hondurans' sense of uncertainty about the future was exploited, with the message that the conflict needed to be resolved as quickly as possible without any radical change from the system that had been imposed, according to ' _Cobertura mediática de los acontecimientos previos y posteriores al golpe de Estado en Honduras_ ' ('Media coverage of pre- and post-coup developments in Honduras'), a study by C-Libre (Committee for Free Expression).

The line peddled by the media was that the country needed a definitive solution to the political crisis and that the least traumatic way of achieving this was to leave things as they were, and that the return of the overthrown regime would bring 'insecurity' and an uncertain future for the country.

Throughout history, the corporate media has sought to use repetition of information as a kind of brainwashing in their efforts to inculcate ideas favourable to the country's power groups. However, something happened in the minds of the public. The media could not palm people off with its messages in the way that it had done for so long. Quite the contrary – they met with grassroots rejection. People stopped reading the newspapers, listening to the radio and watching television if they had pro-coup content. In addition, people stopped eating fast foods and using other businesses where it was known that their owners supported the coup.

Three of the print newspapers - _La Prensa, El Heraldo_ and _La Tribuna_ \- had almost no readership. People realized the extent of their manipulation of information and they refused to buy these newspapers, such was the level of public awareness that had been achieved. Sales nose-dived.

Meanwhile, radio and television programmes were also boycotted because of their manipulation of coverage of the coup. People switched stations and only listened to Radio Globo in Tegucigalpa, Radio Uno in San Pedro Sula, Radio Progreso in the Progreso, Yoro, or listened to them on their computers. With television, the audiences stuck to Channel 36 and Globo TV, Channel 11 and programmes by independent journalists, as long as they were not censored.

_ **Information is power and documentation is education**

Extremely creative research was undertaken to document the political and economic connections of the coup perpetrators and promoters. The results of these investigations were then published so that the sectors of the population against the coup did not consume any products marketed by these businesses.

One of the most interesting results of this process was the article by Father Ismael Moreno, published in _Envío_ magazine, issue no. 370, in May 2012, which describes how the concentration of economic, political and media power creates dependency in Honduran society. Here is an extract of the article:

'If you're in the kitchen and decide to fry up some eggs and ham, the eggs, oil, stove, gas or whatever energy you use, the refrigerator where you keep the eggs and the coffee and sugar you'll have with your breakfast are all sold by people with five surnames: Facussé, Canahuati Larach, Kafie, Ferrari and Kafatti. While having breakfast, you listen to the radio news, which is brought to you by a station owned by Ferrari and Villeda-Toledo or Andonie Fernández. And if you prefer a TV debate program, you'll watch it on one of the Ferrari and Villeda-Toledo channels. If a newspaper is more your cup of tea, then you'll buy one owned by Canahuati, Rosenthal or Flores Facussé.

If you decide to go out for your lunch break and you call a friend to invite him or her along, you'll be doing so with a cell phone from a company owned by the same families you acquainted yourself with during breakfast. And if you decide to eat at a fast food place, whichever franchise you choose will be in the hands of one of those same surnames. If you stop at a supermarket on the way home to pick up some soap and toilet paper, as well as soft drinks and snacks for the kids, all are associated with the same surnames from your breakfast and lunch. With the same names from supper to bed.

Remembering that you need petrol, you have the choice of filling up at any station under the control of the Terra group of Fredy Nasser, who is part of the Facussé family. Back home, you take a pill for a headache brought on by the hard day's work. You bought it at the pharmacy chain owned by the Faraj-Atala family—who also own the Ficohsa bank—and by the same surnames that made their appearance at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Feeling better, you sit down in front of the television, which you purchased – using a Ficohsa bank credit card – at DIUNSA, Honduras' largest import store, owned by the Faraj-Atalas, who jointly hold shares with the Facussés, Canahuatis and Ferraris. If you watch a national soccer match, the rights to whichever game you chose are owned by the Canahuatis, Ferraris, Rosenthals, Atalas and Abufeles. Even if you decide to watch the Real Madrid-Barcelona game, you'll be watching a Ferrari and Villeda-Toledo channel, as they are the only ones with the rights for international games.

You finally go to bed to get some rest. Your bed is from a distributor controlled by the Faraj-Atalas. Perhaps before dozing off, you remember hearing on the news that there will be rallies of candidates from the two main political parties on the weekend. Well, the same surnames you breakfasted with are the leaders of both parties.

Your whole life is controlled by a group of families with no more than 12 surnames. They're the same ones that have been taking a few cents out of their pockets over the year to donate to the Telethon, a charity initiative controlled by the Ferraris and the Villeda-Toledos.'

This explains why it is so easy to censor issues of national interest in Honduras.

The report 'Honduras: The "media war" and the polarisation of the media' by an international mission on press freedom and freedom of expression from 1 to 7 November 2009, notes that the increasing censorship under the presidency of Zelaya continued after he was overthrown, through the indiscriminate use of control mechanisms on the internet and for the distribution of electricity, the arbitrary application of the system for granting licences for radio and television frequencies and the termination of state advertising contracts for media outlets which had not supported the coup.

These actions were complemented by coercive measures such as impeding the importation of paper and newspaper distribution, to which should be added the huge influence implied by the control of advertising by the trade associations of business leaders and transnationals. The mission that produced this report interviewed media owners, editors and journalists, and concluded that the basis of self-censorship is fear, intimidation, coercion, and a closed media system where advertising acts as a straitjacket. As well as these factors, there are also the close links between media, politics and business.

Various international missions came to Honduras and there are countless reports on freedom of expression and press freedom in the wake of the coup. They gave rise to country missions by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights which gathered victims' testimonies and interviewed key figures.

The truth emerged despite the censorship imposed by the corporate media, the militarization of Honduran society and the bloody repression of the Honduran people. Now history and the news are communicated through Facebook, Twitter, blogs, digital newspapers, the walls of the major cities and by word of mouth.

Honduras learned to distrust those who turn lies into truths with persistent messages which evoke Goebbels' eleven principles of propaganda. His so-called Principle of Orchestration states that propaganda must be limited to a small number of ideas and repeated tirelessly, presented again and again from different perspectives, but always converging on the same concept, seamlessly and without doubts. From this comes the famous phrase: "If a lie is repeated often enough, it becomes the truth."

But that came to an end...

1 Translator's note: _'Ni golpes de Estado, ni golpes a las mujeres'_ – it is a play on words as 'golpe' means both 'coup' and 'blow'.
/ CHAPTER III

WHEN CENSORSHIP COMES KNOCKING

The start time was eight o'clock. We all had to have our notebooks in hand to jot down what topics from our sources would be priorities for the newspaper. This was the daily meeting before we headed out in search of news.

I looked at Carlos who shifted uncomfortably in his seat as the managing editor told us that the other newspaper, our competitor, had scored a goal against us. 'Scoring a goal' meant that it had published a big news story which had escaped our reporter who covered that area. "The director's furious - you know you've got to make sure that this doesn't happen again because otherwise you'll be fired," said our boss. We all left the meeting discussing the case and the colleague who had been covering the item made excuses so as to not feel guilty.

"Let's go and have a coffee and see what we can do to stop this happening again," said Jorge, and we went to a café. We all ordered cappuccinos. The smell of coffee raised our spirits. The meagre salary we were paid was not enough to allow us to buy cappuccinos every day. In my case I had to support my small children on a salary of under $100, which is what leads some colleagues to increase their pay packet in other ways.

At best, this could be by selling advertising space, and at worst by 'requesting' support from their sources. Many of my colleagues did this and some did gain some money from it, but the problem was that they then had to look after that source to ensure that no news stories harmed his or her interests.

It appalled me, the idea of my freedom to write being limited in that way, just to earn a bit more money. In the long run it is a kind of slavery, and of covert censorship.

The newsroom filled up every day at one o'clock. We had to get back by then because our deadline was five in the afternoon. We covered our sources who sometimes held press conferences, or we could interview them if there was a very interesting issue or simply so that they could talk to us about something totally unimportant.

The news stories then went through the screening process. There, they were thoroughly reviewed by two people whose role was to protect the newspaper proprietor's interests. Many news stories stayed there, unpublished, because they would stir up trouble for the owner.

We used to work a number of hours a day. The newspaper usually did not provide transport because there were only two cars available. These were used by those journalists who had worked at the newspaper the longest and could somehow exert enough influence to be given a lift to their sources and be picked up afterwards. At first, it is hard to imagine that practising journalism could be so difficult in Honduras. Then, one gradually comes to realize that the enjoyment of freedom of expression is only a dream.

Over time, my colleagues have covered the news in very complex situations. During the 1980s, Honduran politics was dominated by the United States' security priorities, with East-West tensions and the implementation of the National Security Doctrine. Against this background, the military maintained and increased its power within the state. It was the time of gross human rights violations, of clandestine cemeteries and dumping grounds for the bodies of the victims.

In the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, along with the issuing of amnesties for members of the armed forces who had committed human rights violations and with impunity firmly established, came the implementation of structural adjustment programmes, also known as ' _paquetazos',_ under the presidency of Rafael Leonardo Callejas. It was the time of the Chicago Boys, the alumni of Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, and the introduction of the neoliberal economic model in Honduras.

So began the privatization of public services and the cut-price sale of state companies such as CONADI (National Investment Corporation). The military held economic power, setting up businesses through the Military Welfare Board _(Instituto de Previsión Militar)_ , including a bank, funeral and financial companies, and a cemetery.

With the 2000s, there came an era of social pressure to demilitarize Honduran society. The institutions held by the military passed over to civilian control and new institutions were created such as the Public Prosecution Service _(Ministerio Público)_ and CONADEH (Office of the National Human Rights Commissioner). There was also a change to the way Supreme Court judges were appointed. However, the leading members of such bodies are appointed by Congress, controlled by the political elites who negotiate their share of power among themselves.

Submitting news stories in these circumstances is a daily problem for journalists because, in most cases, if they portray situations accurately, their articles are not accepted for publication for the reasons already explained – the application of a screening process which blocks the flow of information.

As a result, journalists face daily dilemmas, but there are also those who charge for misrepresenting the truth. At various institutions, they turn up at the end of the month to collect the cheques issued to them personally. The objective is to impose a standardized journalistic approach which does not deal with the substantive issues and presents a flattering image of the government of the day and its officials.

This is now continuing under the government of Juan Orlando Hernández which seeks to have news journalism which is uniform in approach, which does not rock the boat and does not report on abuses. It makes use of state advertising to achieve this, granted if journalists produce 'news' beneficial to the government – if not, they are denied contracts.

However, it does not stop there, because at local level, mayors get up to all sorts of tricks to make sure that the truth does not slip out.

Here, too, advertising contracts are used as leverage. In the north of the country, journalists complain that the mayor of Puerto Cortés municipality has them securely in his pocket. He monitors the type of news stories they publish and makes veiled threats or takes away their advertising contracts.

Local radio stations and freelance journalists – who make up most of the media and reporters – are also pressured through the selective allocation of advertising to those who agree, through necessity, to limit themselves to providing officially approved and uniform coverage.

"When you're hungry, you obviously take what's going," admitted a reporter. This notorious practice is known in Honduras as 'journalism for hire,' which allows anyone with enough money to pay a reporter to put out a story that benefits their individual interests. This situation and the near-monopoly of the leading media companies leave little room for independent and critical news reporting, according to a statement by Reporters without Borders issued five years after the coup in Honduras.

_When they come knocking

At the entrance of the Honduran Supreme Court is a statue of Themis, the goddess of justice, who is blindfolded and holding a set of scales.

These scales convey the idea that there is an objective assessment of the arguments presented by the opposing parties in a trial.

The blindfold represents the impartiality with which cases must be treated. Regardless of who is involved, be they rich or poor, the judgments must be in accordance with the law and international treaties.

Every day, hundreds of people go to the various buildings where justice is administered. Most of their faces show deep disillusionment, because they usually do not have access to a fair trial. Those exceptional judges who are impartial in their verdicts can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Here is where much influence is peddled, where case files disappear without a trace when they affect the interests of someone powerful or simply a person who has influence or who makes illicit payments. It is impossible to prove because everything is conducted in the shadows.

At other times, sentencing is used to 'teach lessons' – to create fear in certain social sectors which are the particular targets of repression.

Journalists form one such sector, as they often sniff around too much, and must be stopped because if they are allowed to make progress in their investigations they may expose the rottenness within this branch of government, composed of judges who were appointed by Congress, their selection motivated by political interests.

In 2012 alone, according to a register by the Supreme Court, 25 lawsuits for libel and slander were brought against journalists who had exercised their right to freedom of expression, and there are no exact figures on the number of lawsuits in total.

Although the table provided by the Supreme Court provides no details on why these lawsuits were brought, very often it is because the reporters have published news stories implicating state officials who want to continue acting with impunity.

According to a survey by Comunicándonos _,_ in the book 'Central America under threat from censorship and discrimination', censorship dominates reporters' daily lives, as this chart from the book illustrates all too clearly.

Who is responsible for censorship?

The same survey asked journalists if they had received any form of threat and 58% answered yes. Lawsuits increase in certain periods – it depends on public officials' degree of intolerance.

According to a study by the IACHR (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights), in at least 17 states in the Americas, defamation of the authorities is a punishable offence, used to silence criticism.

'At another joint meeting in November 2000, the Rapporteurs issued a further joint statement, on the problem of laws on disrespect and defamation. In this statement, the Rapporteurs called for the replacement of defamation laws by civil laws and for legal proceedings regarding defamation of the state to be prohibited', according to the report 'Legislation and freedom of expression: Monitoring of Member States' domestic laws' (' _Legislación y libertad de expresión seguimiento de la legislación interna de los Estados miembros'),_ published by the IACHR in 2000.

They also stated that defamation laws should reflect the importance of open debate on issues of public interest, as well as the principle that public figures must accept a greater degree of criticism than private citizens, and in particular, that laws providing special protection for public figures should be repealed.

In 2001, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression also spoke out against libel laws, especially those providing special protection to public officials. He called upon states to remove the ability for government bodies and public officials to file defamation charges on their own behalf. He also maintained that there should only be civil remedies for defamation and that offences such as 'defamation of the state' should be abolished.

_ It has existed since 130 AD

From the earliest times, there have been measures taken against defamatory and injurious public statements. The Praetor's Edict, codified circa 130 AD, held that a person could be prosecuted for shouting abuse 'contrary to good morals' at someone - _'qui adversus bonos mores convicium cui fecisse cuiusve opera factum esse dicitur, quo adversus bonos mores convicium fieret, in eum iudicium dabo_ '. In Honduras, it became an offence under the Penal Code, and has been used by various public officials.

_ Lawsuits brought against journalists by government officials

In January 2002, the journalist Sandra Maribel Sánchez, of Radio America, released a tape of a conversation between the former Treasury Inspector and Minister of the Interior and Justice, Vera Sofía Rubí, and an ex-president of the Supreme Court. On this tape, both officials used extremely foul language about a case on which the Court had to issue a ruling. Its president asked the then Treasury Inspector to intervene, and to get her brother, who was a judge, to help resolve it, according to _Tertulia,_ a weekly digital magazine.

Rubí promised to use her influence with her brother, the judge, but in return, asked the Court President to "give importance" to rulings which were political in nature (favouring certain people). In addition, during the conversation, both mocked the Attorney General.

In retaliation, Rubí filed a lawsuit against the journalist Maribel Sánchez, whom she accused of espionage. Although the lawsuit is currently dormant, it could be reactivated at any time.

On 18 February 2004, the Trial Court of the Third Chamber of the Supreme Court sentenced the journalist Renato Álvarez to two years eight months' imprisonment for defamation. Álvarez was the first journalist to be prosecuted for disseminating information of public interest in Honduras.

The complaint had been filed by Eduardo Sarmiento, leader of the National Party, who was on a list of 15 people mentioned in a report on alleged ties to drug trafficking. In June 2003, Álvarez invited the Security Minister, Óscar Álvarez, onto his programme, _Frente a Frente_ (Face to Face), to consult him on the accuracy or otherwise of the document. The official replied that it was being investigated by various government authorities in Honduras.

Along with imprisonment, the Trial Court agreed to apply a number of accessory penalties of special disqualification and civil interdiction for the duration of his sentence. These consisted of suspending his civil rights, such as the exercise of parental rights, the administration of his property, the right to vote and to hold public office, while at the same time he was ordered to pay his own court costs, as well as those of others.

However, his defence lawyer, Enrique Flores Lanza, managed to demonstrate that the journalist had not committed defamation. This is because there was no wilful misconduct in publicizing a document of public interest which was endorsed by the appearance of the Security Minister, Óscar Álvarez, on his programme on 23 June 2003 when the information was broadcast.

According to Lanza, the court judgment establishes jurisprudence on freedom of expression, as it was the first case of its kind to be brought before the courts in Honduras.

In 2006, a lawsuit was brought against Julio Ernesto Alvarado, who had invited Carlos Villela, a professor at UNAH's Economics Faculty, onto his television news programme _Mi Nación_ (My Nation). Villela had applied for the deanship of the Faculty along with Belinda Flores, who was selected for the post. Villela went onto Alvarado's programme on 11 June 2006 to report irregularities in the issuing of university degrees by Flores.

Flores launched a lawsuit for 'defamation through statements constituting slander' which has already gone on for eight years and is still having an impact on freedom of expression in the country.

In March 2011, a public hearing took place in the Third Chamber of the Trial Court in Tegucigalpa on the lawsuit for defamation against Alvarado and university professors Guillermo Ayes and Carlos Villela. In its ruling, the trial court stated that it could not issue a guilty verdict and it acquitted the three defendants.

However, Belinda Flores filed an appeal through her legal representative with the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court, which was accepted, and as a result, Julio Ernesto Alvarado was sentenced to a year and four months' imprisonment, temporarily banned from practising his profession and his civil rights suspended, a ruling in violation of freedom of expression.

When journalists are subjected to this kind of pressure it creates a vicious circle of impunity. It enables public officials and powerful figures to intimidate them, thereby preventing the publication of information.

I remember that in October 2006 I was taken to court by Delta Security company, along with the journalist Robert Marín, when we worked on revistazo.com, a digital newspaper. Since 2004, I had been involved in an investigation into abuses of security guards' employment rights in Honduras, taking as a starting point one of the worst offenders among security companies. After reviewing newspaper reports of guards who stated that they did not benefit from social security payments, holiday pay and other rights, and in addition were made to work exhausting shifts of up to 72 hours at a stretch, it was decided that Delta Security was one of the companies which most abused its employees.

Following months of research, in December 2005 we published our investigation with the testimony of some of those affected, but a few months before, we had been threatened by the company's legal representatives.

In September of that year, several cars with armed men had been stationed outside our offices. Senior company officials had arrived holding the document granting legal status to the non-governmental organization which owned the newspaper. "We're going to destroy you," one of them told me. "You're Dina Meza, and we're going to sue you." They were furious because they had tried force their way into the newspaper offices and we had warned them that if they did so they would be guilty of unlawful entry.

I thought it was just a simple threat, but I remember that a few days later, Jacobo Cálix, now a Supreme Court judge, but at that time the company's legal representative, arrived at the offices of the ASJ (Association for a More Just Society), which owned revistazo.com, and told me that if I published the investigation, I would be taken to the Supreme Court.

I was surprised at how he chose to deal with the matter. Instead of advising his client to reinstate the security guards' employment rights, he chose to support actions proven to be in violation of them.

I remember that he turned up with armed men from the company and tried to intimidate me. I was certain that my findings proved that there were violations of the Labour Code, the law protecting employment rights in Honduras. I told him to file a lawsuit if he wanted – publication would go ahead because I had hard evidence.

The lawsuit was filed in October 2006 with the Trial Court of Tegucigalpa by the security company solely because the newspaper was publicizing its abuses. The company wanted us to pay damages for the alleged harm to its image and, if we were found guilty, we would then also be sued for damages in the civil courts.

Fortunately the Trial Court dismissed the lawsuit, but the harassment continued, as did the threats and surveillance. On 4 December 2006, Dionisio Días García, the security guards' lawyer and member of my team, was murdered on his way to the Supreme Court, hours before a hearing was to be held about the case against Delta Security. To date, his killing has gone unpunished.

Although we reported to the authorities that both of us, as well as other journalists with revistazo.com, were being harassed, the Honduran state was complicit in this persecution - from the National Human Rights Commissioner, Ramón Custodio López, who shelved our complaint, to the Public Prosecution Service which never did anything, despite having a CD recording the voices and names of the people from the company who were threatening us.

Journalists, already working in a hostile climate, who are then also threatened with legal proceedings, are placed in a deeply insecure position in every respect, which is precisely why lawsuits are brought.

In the case of Julio Ernesto Alvarado, the Honduran state is an accomplice to and perpetrator of the violation of freedom of expression, through the judgment of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court, upheld by the Court of Appeal and accepted by the Supreme Court's Constitutional Chamber, where a challenge to the ruling had been lodged by Julio Ernesto's defence lawyer, backed by 17 more legal challenges filed by journalists in solidarity.

Many of the other journalists sued are suffering this judicial harassment in silence, as they are community reporters based in rural areas.

When a lawsuit comes knocking at the newsrooms' doors, it not only interferes with the work of the journalist concerned, it also crosses the threshold into the violation of freedom of expression. I very much agree with the words of John Ralston Saul, President of PEN International, who writes that power loves silence, with 'punishment meted out .... to citizens who forget the golden rule of silence.'

They certainly come to mind in the case of Julio Ernesto Alvarado who was only acting as an intermediary when the allegations about Belinda Flores were made. He made air-time available so that silence would not bury the illegal acts reported by the Dean of Economics' own colleagues.

While she brought a lawsuit against Alvarado, the allegations against her were never investigated or punished. She was not even required to answer the charges against her at a hearing. Instead, to avoid the avalanche of opprobrium that would have come down upon her if anyone had got to the bottom of the matter, she resorted to using the judiciary herself.

_ Reporting while suspended between life and death

Lawsuits maintain reporters in a state of anxiety, but death threats leave them suspended between life and death. Some do not have time to digest the threat before the bullets have penetrated their bodies. Over 40 journalists lie in their graves, leaving their families terrified. Some had children who are now orphans.

Juan Carlos Argeñal Medina, owner of _Vida Televisión_ (Life Television), a Christian channel, and a correspondent in Danlí, in eastern Honduras, for Globo TV, the opposition channel, never imagined that his investigation into corruption at a local hospital would lead to the grave. On 7 December 2013, gunmen went to his home and killed him.

The corruption was allegedly at the Gabriela Alvarado regional hospital, with embezzlement of funds and major theft of medical supplies by an administrator together with a local political leader.

Argeñal raised the issue on _Vida Televisión_ and in a report for Globo TV in June and July 2013. His accusations forced the hospital authorities to set up a supervisory board to investigate the alleged corruption and the hospital administrator was apparently fired, PEN International was informed by Mario, Juan Carlos' brother.

Prior to his death, Juan Carlos had received threats on his mobile phone which were reported to the police. Furthermore, an alleged hit-man had let it be known that someone had asked him to murder the journalist. That has not been investigated either, and there has been no progress on the case despite his family's calls for justice.

Journalists do not know if they will live to see another day. Hernán Cruz Barnica, on the staff of the community radio station, Radio Opoa, _La Voz de la Esperanza_ (The Voice of Hope), was killed in the department of Copán on 28 May 2014.

He was the host of the programme _'Otro Nivel'_ ('Another Level'). The night before his murder, he talked about human rights. His colleagues say that he put his heart into everything he said, and in the radio booth he had left his notes on human rights which he had used for the programme. Before he was murdered he, too, had said that he had received threats. The State fails to prevent these killings. The lack of functioning institutions means that no investigations are conducted into these threats, which would prevent the loss of more lives.

In response to a request for information on threats to journalists and the trends in attacks, the Public Prosecution Service stated that it had not received any formal complaints of threats against them.

However, if we look at the national press we can see numerous reports of threats against journalists which should be automatically taken up by the Public Prosecution Service.

Television reporter Selvin Martínez of Puerto Cortés stated that he had been receiving death threats by text since the beginning of 2013. In 2012, the journalist had been the victim of two armed attacks and several threats.

On 1 and 2 March 2012, Julio Ernesto Alvarado was subject to surveillance and harassment on his programme on Globo TV, and later the same month, his car was broken into. This was against a background of a series of negative reports and criticisms of the police and armed forces on his programme.

In April 2013, Fidelina Sandoval of Globo TV was the victim of an attack near the television station's offices. According to information received, two unidentified men had fired a gun in her direction. A few days before, the journalist had received two suspicious phone calls in which she was asked for personal information.

The journalist said that these attacks could be related to reports she had presented the previous week about the clean-up of the police force and land disputes in the Bajo Aguán region. She was forced to leave the country because of the series of incidents that threatened her life.

The Public Prosecution Service has the monopoly on prosecutions, but it investigates fewer than 20% of cases, and in fewer than 3% of cases are those responsible put behind bars.

For example, it should have taken seriously President Juan Orlando Hernández's threat to José Ramón Maldonado of La Ceiba, who had simply asked him whether he would allow a marble mine and quarries in a national park.

When the journalist told him that INHGEOMIN (Honduran Institute of Geology and Mines) and SERNA (Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment) would be granting licences for these mines, with support from the Presidential Palace, Hernández ordered his staff to take a camera and photograph José Ramón Maldonado's face. He then told the journalist that he would report the matter to the Public Prosecution Service so that Maldonado could justify his 'allegation'. This happened on 10 July 2014.

This is the text of a video that circulated on the internet about this threat: "Mr. President, excuse me, an act of corruption is about to be committed. They're trying to move the boundaries of the Nombre de Dios National Park which provides water to much of the tourist industry in this area.

At the same time, it's been announced that INHGEOMIN and SERNA intend to grant permits for quarries and a marble mine in the region and that this has the Presidential Palace's direct support. Is the President willing to support this kind of supposedly unlawful act?" asked the reporter.

The President replied:

"Let's see, lend me the phone – I want you to answer my question. I'm telling you, we're talking responsibly here – where did you get that information? It's news to me and I want this to be recorded, because I'm going to refer this to the Public Prosecution Service right now."

The President again asked the reporter, "Where did you get that information? Give me the name – what's the person's name? I want everyone to record this for me, or at least use the camera I've got with me to photograph my friend's face and take his name."

Maldonado, defying the President, gave his full name and identity number and made it clear that Juan Orlando Hernández's aim was to intimidate him. This courageous journalist had been attacked, along with his cameraman, on 9 May 2013 while he was driving his car just a few minutes after leaving the building of _Canal Litoral Atlántico_ (Atlantic Coast Channel) where he had reported on the sale of a green area by La Ceiba municipal authorities.

When the current President was president of Congress, he was denounced by Renato Álvarez, director of _Frente a Frente,_ who said that Hernández had launched a hate campaign against him solely because he had tackled the issue of the Supreme Court judges who were dismissed for declaring illegal a decree on the police purge.

Sometimes I go to the Public Prosecution Service to ask them what they have done about the constant threats that I am receiving and they always give me some excuse or other. It makes me think that there is an interest in our being threatened to maintain a state of terror. Who would have an interest in that? The Public Prosecution Service should be independent and carry out investigations. However, since the coup everything seems to work in a concerted fashion.

The threats are so brazen that some public officials do not even bother to be discreet about them. A stark example is the case of Marlon Escoto, the current Minister of Education, who threatened the Radio Globo journalist, Marvin Ortiz, on Twitter on 14 January 2014:

"Marvin Ortiz of Radio Globo, after 27 January, I'm coming after you, so you can tell me why you're insulting me and if I owe you anything. I hope that the insults from you journalists are because of my job. Once my job's ended, if you've got a difference of opinion with me you want to explain, please do. I forgive all the journalists who insult me, basically because it's not their fault that they're uncultured and badly-educated."

Ortiz reported that the threats stemmed from questions he had asked Escoto about his constant repression of the teachers' unions. Leonel García Hernández of Channel 19 and Radio Discovery is another case in point. He was visited by the Head of Land Registry in Nacaome, Valle department, in the south of Honduras, after the journalist revealed that the institution had been engaged in the fraudulent signing of mortgage deeds.

According to Ramón Custodio López, the former National Human Rights Commissioner (CONADEH), over a hundred journalists were threatened and attacked from 2010 to 2013, and there were attempts on the lives of 20 of them, three of them at their place of work. During this period, over 50 journalists reported being the target of persecution and threats, while 20 were assaulted. The contradictions between state institutions in their treatment of threats to journalists are clear. While the Public Prosecution Service claims to have no cases at all, CONADEH has impressive figures on the impunity with which those who threaten journalists are able to operate.

The report 'Honduras: Journalism in the shadow of impunity', by PEN International, PEN Canada and the University of Toronto's International Human Rights Programme at the Faculty of Law, highlights the fact that the threats and attacks on journalists are rarely investigated and almost never punished.

Violence against journalists often silences coverage of subjects such as corruption, drug trafficking and impunity. In addition, the economic elites have imposed unwritten limits on what the major news agencies can investigate. Consequently, sensitive topics are under-reported by the mainstream press in Honduras, the report said.

Although during the UPR in November 2010, the Honduran government undertook to investigate violence against journalists, it has failed to fulfil this commitment.

The process of militarization on which the country has embarked, and which has intensified under Juan Orlando Hernández's presidency, is another serious threat that endangers the lives of journalists, particularly those working for community media, who must cover new mining and hydroelectric schemes, as well as the model cities. They have to pass through heavily-manned military checkpoints where, at best, their equipment is inspected, but in most cases, their cameras and tape recorders are confiscated, and they are told that if they file a complaint, they will have problems.

_ No hope of breaking the cycle of violence

There is a Draft Law to Protect Human Rights Defenders, Journalists, Media Workers, and Justice Operators going through Congress. Perhaps the pressure from the forthcoming UPR on Honduras in 2015 will provide some impetus for its adoption. If there were the political will to pass this law it would be very significant. This political will would also be necessary to ensure the approval of an adequate budget for the law's implementation.

This Bill proposes three types of measures:

1)Preventive Measures

2)Protection Measures

3)Emergency Protection Measures

For Protection Measures in cases of serious risk the following is proposed:

1)Allocation of mobile phones, radio or satellite phone

2)Installation of cameras, locks, lights, etc at workplaces or in homes

3)Allocation of bullet-proof vests

4)Installation of metal detectors

5)Constant monitoring in coordination with the Ministry of Security on the level of risk and the measures adopted

6)Assignment of police for personal protection

7)Assignment of police protection of buildings

8)Other measures required to safeguard the life, physical and mental integrity and freedom of the beneficiaries.

Urgent Protection Measures in cases of very serious risk are the following:

1)Immediate evacuation

2)Temporary relocation within or outside the country

3)Permanent relocation within or outside the country

4)Allocation of bullet-proof cars, permanently or temporarily

5)Assignment of escorts from specialized corps

6)Assignment of bodyguards for personal protection

7)Assignment of police protection of buildings in specific cases

8)Other measures required to safeguard the life, physical and mental integrity

and freedom of the beneficiaries

As there is currently no such mechanism in place, civil society has made some efforts, although minimal and unsystematic through lack of funds, to introduce some measures to ensure that the lives of the people covered by the Bill are not at risk.

However, the journalism profession has many shortcomings, including deep divisions. There is also the lack of an entity to take appropriate action on behalf of journalists. There is the CPH (Honduran Journalists' Association), created under Decree No. 759 of 25 May 1979. Its objective was to ensure that the profession could be practised freely, to promote solidarity within the CPH, and to contribute to the progress and overall development of Honduras.

In practice, it is a dead letter because the CPH fails to meet its obligations, but rather supports the interests of media owners who are the employers of the CPH's board members. The CPH rarely speaks out in support of journalists facing threats or the families of those killed. This institution apparently exists to collect its members' subscriptions and to manage the IPP (Journalists' Welfare Board), which has become almost inaccessible to those outside a circle which has been increasingly impenetrable over the years, with the association controlled by just one group.

As most journalists do not feel represented by this body, some joined together to form another organization. This initiative was presented to Congress over five years ago, but it has been shelved in violation of the right to association enshrined in the Constitution. In not having an organization to support them in their struggle for a better standard of living, journalists have to endure deplorable conditions when practising their profession.

Salaries are well below the established rates, and in most cases journalists are required to sell advertising space as well as gather news stories, which undermines the impartiality of news coverage and freedom of expression. "How can I publish revelations about someone who's giving me an advertising contract? If I do I'll go hungry," said a reporter when asked why he was not exposing the irregularities committed by a state official.

Institutions need to be established to protect journalists. They must be independent of government and economic interests, and free of the interference that allows news stories to be influenced.

Silence must be left behind and the truth allowed to shine... but the profession also needs to wake up.
/ CHAPTER IV

THE DREAM

The phone rang. It was the person I was due to interview. I was going to ask him a lot of questions – I wanted him to tell me what officials got up to when they took office. When I arrived everything was in darkness. I was full of adrenaline and a shiver ran down my spine. "Is this going to be my last report?" I wondered.

Suddenly a door-bell rang and a man came out and after him two more. "Come upstairs, we're waiting for you," he said. I climbed the stairs, and found a small room with three chairs and a table covered with numerous documents. "I'm going to give you all of them," said the man who was the leader of the group. "Don't worry – you can publish them. Everything's different now."

"There's no need to use the Access to Public Information Act – here everything's transparent. You can discuss anything you want, no one will threaten you or kill you because, as I say, everything's different now. Anyone who tries to harm you will be brought to justice," he said, handing me a cup of coffee.

I was happy. I leafed through a document and found that it was a mining concession, and there were the names of members of Congress who had received large sums of money for approving the new law permitting open-cast mining. It allows mining companies to destroy the environment with no consequences whatsoever while gaining profits worth millions of dollars.

"Why are you shocked?" said the man, as if reading my thoughts, "These documents are now public. We're going to stick them up in the main streets of the city so that everyone can know what's going on."

In fact, I was amazed to have access to government information, I said to myself. "Why has everything changed?" I asked. He stared at me intently and replied, "Because this country doesn't belong to just one person, it's for all Hondurans. No one can feel they have the right to appropriate the country's resources. This wealth – and there's a lot of it – must be shared equally."

"When did all this happen? Where was I, to not know anything about it?" I asked again. "Just imagine," said the man, "the jails are now filled with the people who stole the country's resources. We put them on trial, and the judges ensured justice was done. Nobody could exert undue influence upon them because nobody helped them to do it."

I looked through another document and found all the names of the promoters and perpetrators of the coup. There was the whole plan, the design of the strategy whereby the economic and political class drew up a list of all the national assets in order to share them out among themselves – this elite that had been ruling the country for over 100 years.

The man came up to me and took away the documents. I was surprised and asked him to let me see all the information. "That's why I took them off you," he replied. "I want to show you the trials they all underwent. They're in jail and they must return everything they stole. They've been sentenced to life imprisonment for all the murders they committed.

"Look – here's Roberto Micheletti. He kept public funds worth millions of lempiras. He was the most corrupt president in recent years, but he wasn't acting alone, he was just one of the perpetrators - he's in jail with them now."

"Don't tell me that the _gringos_ have been sent to jail," I said jokingly. "They're not there," he replied. "They're being tried by the International Criminal Court – they'll have to pay for their crimes, too. I forgot to tell you that there's a new world order in which peace has returned. Populations can exercise their right to self-determination – they're not under military occupation. The major powers had to hand back all their resources and the troops abandoned their territories because millions of people retook their property.

"We've also brought human rights violators of the 1980s to justice. It was a disaster for the country, the way they could stroll through the streets with impunity, and their new crimes led to a vicious circle which encouraged more violence."

"Don't tell me that Billy Joya, former member of the 3-16 death squad, is finally in prison?" I asked. "Well yes," the man replied, "and I imagine that there he's writing another book, as he has done every time the families of victims have marked him out as responsible for the forced disappearance of their relatives. He had to tell the truth and the families finally found the remains of their loved ones.

"Not only Billy Joya was put on trial, but also other human rights violators such as Discua Elvir, Alexander Hernández and everyone involved in the repression of the 1980s."

"I'm impressed with everything that's happened," I said. "How much time passed for there to be so much change?"

"What happened was that the people couldn't take any more and they took control of the country, changing the laws to benefit the majority of the population," the man replied. "They repealed laws that harmed the people, including those promoting the militarization of the country and giving more power to the military, who have been sent back to their barracks.

"We also repealed the Intervention of Private Telecommunications Act, in force from January 2012, which allowed the state to intercept private communications.

"The Public-Private Partnerships Act, better known as the Concessions Act, establishing Coalianza, the Commission for the Promotion of Public-Private Partnerships, which reported directly to the President, is a thing of the past, because all it did was line the pockets of those who'd squandered public funds.

"The people didn't stop there – they dismantled the REDs, the Special Development Regions or model cities, that would have led to the creation of autonomous cities and 11 special regions. These could have included international financial centres set up anywhere in the country, complete with their own laws, while others could have been economic, agribusiness, mining or forestry regions.

"The decisions included the repeal of river concessions throughout the country that had robbed communities of their sources of water and other natural resources, taken from them by force by the private armies of big business. Black and indigenous people finally live in dignity without being dispossessed of their resources."

Following the coup, over 47 river concessions had been granted for the construction of hydroelectric dams, in most cases without consulting the local communities where it was planned to carry out these schemes.

The Garífunas had been dispossessed of the Marmol River in the Santa Fe community, the Cuyamel River in the Sambo Creek community, the Verde River and Ojo de Agua, both in the Iriona area, in Colón department. With the concession of the Patuca River, the coastal wetlands would be affected. The coastal water system of La Moskitia consists of lagoons and rivers which flow towards the Garífuna communities in the Iriona area and Gracias a Dios department.

"Can I make a suggestion?" I asked. "It'd be good to hold a press conference." "We already have done," the man replied. "You're too late. All the press came and they're publishing the story."

"What? Even the corporate media?" I said. "I don't believe it. The media owners are responsible for so much disinformation and for stigmatizing people fighting for a better country, and they're not going to shoot themselves in the foot."

"Where've you been all this time?" the man replied. "The people have also regained their right to communication. The media is no longer a business of the elites – it's now required to report impartially. Anyone who violates the people's right to information will have to face the consequences."

Very proudly, the man told me that journalists can now report without any problems and media owners will be punished if they limit the population's enjoyment of freedom of expression and the right to information.

"The radio and television wavebands have been redistributed so that public, private and community stations have equal access. The country's on the right track," he continued.

"All the murderers of journalists are in jail. The police, military, and paramilitaries and those who used terror tactics to spread fear can no longer use this strategy. Justice has caught up with them and they're now paying for their crimes in prison.

"The nation's working very well because all the justice institutions have been purged and they are now run by people of great integrity."

When the man finished speaking, there was a knock on the door. It was a horde of journalists who were curious to know whether the man was giving me accurate information.

"Don't worry," he said, "I've told her everything I've told you. I haven't lied because if I did, I'd go to jail."

After the interview I ran off to write it up. I was very happy because that man had spoken the truth, and the people would realize all the lies they had been told in the past.

The alarm clock rang very loudly. It was four in the morning.

I would have to get up to get my youngest son ready for school, as I did every day.

"Oh no!" I said to myself. "It was just a dream, that's awful! If only you didn't have to wake up from something so beautiful.

I definitely want to dream again."

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