An op-ed in the http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/opinion/07Marin.html?_r=1&emc=eta1/"> New York Times on Monday, written by Honduran journalist Roger Marin Neda, suggests that nobody in Honduras does or should care whether ousted president Manuel Zelaya returns to finish out his term.  Marin quotes his friend Julia, a housewife who lives near the affluent Colonia Las Lomas neighborhood and runs a market out of her garage: "What do I care?  Things will continue as usual.  Nothing will change.  All I want is that they let me live in peace to run my business."

Marin doesn't mention the 30,000 to 50,000 Zelaya supporters who gathered last Sunday at the airport in an attempt to welcome their president home, facing down soldiers with machine guns and, in two cases, giving their lives.  No, he sticks with Julia (although, as a member of the middle class, she is hardly representative of the average Honduran).  The Julia's of Honduras probably will be left in peace.  They pose  no threat to the de facto government and are, in fact, its support base.  But to suggest that everyone has been left in peace, or will be, is an error, one that our mainstream media seems intent on promulgating. 

The New York Times, for example, on July 7 reported that "at least one person" had been killed--although on July 6, coup government chancellor Enrique Ortez had confirmed for the foreign press that two demonstrators were dead.  The Washington Post, in its Monday print edition, mentioned no deaths, leaving it at this: "Shots were heard."  The tendency is clear.   Our mainstream media is underreporting the repression.

Five Hondurans have been extrajudicially executed since the June 28 coup.   I learned this, not from our newspapers, of course, but from the Guatemalan press.  Guatemalan human rights leaders, who recently returned from a fact-finding mission to Honduras, released preliminary results of their investigation yesterday in a press conference in Guatemala City.  Those killed were described as follows:

*On July 2, journalist Gabriel Noriega was shot to death by individuals traveling in a black vehicle with tinted windows and no license plates.

*In a place known as la Montañita, the body of a forty-year-old man was found with signs of torture.  He had been mutilated (descuartizado, in Spanish--quartered).

* On June 29, during a protest, a union member was crushed by a military vehicle. 

* Two Zelaya supporters were shot to death by soldiers on Sunday, July 5, as they waited at the International Airport for the ousted president's return.   Nineteen-year-old Isis Obed Murillo was one of the victims.  (The photo of his body that was published in the Honduran daily La Prensa has http://ecodiario.eleconomista.es/internacional/noticias/1390978/07/09/Manipulan-la-foto-de-un-muerto-tras-las-manifestaciones-en-Honduras.html">has caused an uproar because the blood covering his shoulder and pouring from his head was edited out. 

A June 30 communique from a Honduran rights group, published on the International Peace Brigades website, states that the army, beginning at 2 A.M., raided homes and abducted youths in the Department of Olancho, where Zelaya is from.  Many young people, fearing the army, fled to the mountains to hide.

Completely unaware of the irony, Marin writes in his op-ed that "middle-class members look at Venezuela and ask why we should adopt the ways of a country that does not seem to have progressed very much over the past decade, and where freedom of the press and other liberties have been suppressed."  While in his own country, tanks roll through the streets.  Foreign journalists have been arrested.  A 6:30 P.M. curfew has been imposed, which means the rights to free association and free speech have been curtailed.  Media outlets have been shut down.  Hardly progress. 

In giving space to such a biased, short-sighted view, the New York Times is in good company.  A Monday analysis in the Washington Post claims that the biggest threat to democracy in the region is governments that "ignore checks and balances," not "bayonet-wielding soldiers." 

 Of course, the soldiers in Honduras are not carrying bayonets.  They're carrying submachine guns.  Another instance of downplaying.   But it's understandable;  imagine the difficulty of arguing that the biggest threat to democracy in the region is governments that ignore checks and balances, not soldiers carrying submachine guns. 

If the military coup in Honduras succeeds, a dangerous precedent will be set for the entire hemisphere, and democracy, which is already tenuous in many countries of South and Central America, will be further imperiled.   If only our papers could get beyond the Julia's and understand the danger this coup represents for the impoverished majority and for democracy as a whole.