Coup General: "We're Going After the Protest Leaders"
AUGUST 4, 2009, TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS: Five members of the Honduras coup regime's military brass went on the pro-coup Televicentro Channel 5 from 7:30 to 8:30 a.m. this morning in the capital city to defend their actions over the past 38 days since they kidnapped the elected President and forcibly exiled him from the country.
There, General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, issued an exasperated threat to the leaders of the social movements organized against the coup:
"They lie and they lie and they lie forty times until it becomes the truth when they call us golpistas (coup mongers). Saying that we're golpistas is a strategy. They call us 'assassins.' It's an effort to demoralize the troops. When they do this, they are committing a crime, first and foremost, that of defamation. We're going to go after them. They are acting with impunity."
In sum, the coup's maximum military leader is apoplectic that the Honduran population sees the coup as a coup, and the military that enforces it as part of that coup, and he wants to seek scapegoats for the fact that public opinion has turned against him, as if public opinion might change or at least shut up if only enough repression could be heaped upon it.
Offering heavy doses of defensiveness and delusion, the coup's military leaders spent an hour this morning on TV 5's Frente a Frente ("Face to Face") program offering their spin on the events that are shaking this nation of 7.5 million people to the core.
Comandante General Miguel Angel García Padget of the Armed Forces said that the coup was necessary to stop "socialism and communism dressed as democracy." He referred to the right wing authoritarian governments that preceded the Latin American wave of center-left electoral victories as "the true democracies."
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