Today, Lobo makes a sneaky but clearly well-orchestrated surprise visit to Washington with Ambassador Lisa Kubiske.

Click title for original in UDW with lots of links and proper formatting:
Decline 'Friend' Request: Social Media Meets 21st Century Statecraft in Latin America
Written by Cyril Mychalejko
Monday, 16 January 2012 20:17
A Senate report released in October 2011 urging the US government to expand the use of social media as a foreign policy tool in Latin America offers another warning for activists seduced by the idea of technology and social media as an indispensable tool for social change.

In this past year as the world witnessed uprisings from Santiago to Zuccotti Park to Tahrir Square, social media has been lauded as a weapon of mass mobilization. Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent, wrote in his new book published this month Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, (excerpted in the Guardian) that this new communications technology was a “crucial” contributing factor to these revolutionary times. Nobel peace laureate and Burmese human rights campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi pointed out in a lecture in June that this “communications revolution...not only enabled [Tunisians] to better organize and co-ordinate their movements, it kept the attention of the whole world firmly focused on them.” CNN even ran an article comparing Facebook to “democracy in action”, while Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was imprisoned in Egypt for starting a Facebook page told Wolf Blitzer that the revolution in Egypt “started on Facebook” and that he wanted to “meet Mark Zuckerberg some day and thank him personally.”

Click on title to see original with image at the Independent:
Honduran charter cities trample on democracy
By Suzy Dean
The Foreign Desk - International dispatches from Independent correspondents -
Monday, 16 January 2012 at 4:32 pm

A worrying development in Honduras echoes anti-democratic trends in Italy and Greece, whereby technocracy is usurping popular rule.

Click title below to see original article with proper formatting in In These Times by Jeremy Kryt:

A security guard stands next to a barrier in a streets of Loarque neighborhood in southern Tegucigalpa, on December 19, 2011. Honduras has become one of the world's most dangerous countries and by the end of 2011 it is likely to have the highest murder rate in the world--86 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the Violence Observatory in Tegucigalpa, a UN-backed monitor. (Photo by Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images)

Thunderstruck in Honduras
‘Operation Lightning’ allows the country’s soldiers to play sheriff, but violence continues to damage Latin America’s ‘butcher shop.’
BY Jeremy Kryt
January 17, 2012

Click title for original by RAJ in HCP:
Massacre in the Aguan: Two Ways to Report
Earlier this week, another group of farmworkers living in the Aguan valley died. Children as young as one year old were killed in an act of great violence.

Click title for original in UDW:
Honduras: Return to Rigores
Written by Chuck Kaufman
Wednesday, 11 January 2012 09:05

On Jan. 9, 2012 an Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ) delegation of US and Canadian citizens visited the farming community or Rigores, Honduras in the fertile Aguan Valley near the country’s Caribbean Coast.

Translating articles like this one in El Tiempo from today is a race against time. I keep hoping that if I translate faster, I won't throw up, or maybe, go mad, as my favorite oligarch warned me recently in an apocryphal story about an exiled Salvadoran revolutionary intellectual friend of his who stayed married to his wife after she was institutionalized because he accepted the reality of his exile but she kept helping the guerrillas until it drove her crazy. There can be very little doubt that this is another political assassination of Aguán campesinos, retaliation for their standing up to the murderous African Palm plantation owners of the region.

Four children and four adults murdered in a village of Sabá
Tuesday, January 10 2012

SABA, COLON.- Eight people, among them four children, were murdered by criminals in the village of Regaderos after being kidnapped from their home and taken to a site close to the municipal crematorium of Sabá, where they were shot.

Rights Action - January 5, 2012
HONDURAS - The Pro-democracy Struggle Continues

BELOW:

• Fund-raising Appeal for International Human Rights Gathering in Solidarity With Honduras, February 17-20, 2012, in Honduras
• Delegation to Honduras, February 12-22, 2012

FROM: COPINH (The Honduras Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations)

Traveling around Honduras with visitors from the States. As usual when I have visitors, we went to the ruins at Copán. I normally dread this, but this time around it was much more enjoyable, thanks to the help of a friend who grew up there.

As RNS mentions in HCP, the NYE firecracker figure of the year was a cop. In Honduras, the New Year's eve tradition is to stuff your paper machéd enemies with firecrackers and explode them, just as often, marches, concerts, and celebrations call for setting them ablaze from the outside. The previous two years saw a lot of Pepe Lobos and Michelettis.