The “authentic representatives of the people” of Honduras (h/t The Confluence) used tear gas and bullets against thousands of their constituents today at the airport at Tegucigalpa. The crowds were supporters of ousted President Manuel Zelaya; they were at the airport to greet Zelaya, who tried to return to his country in spite of threats from the coup government to arrest him if he stepped foot on his native soil. As it turned out, he was not permitted to land at all, and after circling the airport several times, returned to Nicaragua (although other reports I have read had him being flown to El Salvador).
BBC News has a graphic video of Honduran government soldiers spraying tear gas pellets into a massive crowd inside a fenced security pen. The size of the crowd looked to be creating a crush that was pushing people against the fence, and obviously they were trying to get out, but I saw nothing that justified the use of tear gas.
The Wall Street Journal says that the soldiers started tear gassing the protesters after some of them threw stones. The WSJ article also says that the crowd “was trying to break through one of the fences surrounding the runway.” It didn’t look that way to me, at least not in the BBC video. Furthermore, the soldiers had shields to deflect the stones; the protesters had no protection against the tear gas.
The larger question, of course, is why the right-wing revolutionaries in Honduras’s government are having to use lethal levels of violence against their own people (at least one bystander was killed, and eight wounded, after the soldiers opened fire on the crowd) to defend a “democratic” political transition (NOT a coup) that Hondurans supported and wanted.
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