It's been all over the news in the last two days.  The police shot a protester in the head in Honduras, injured 26 more, made mass arrests, beat journalists.  What?  Did you miss the four-sentence blurb in the New York Times? 

A fuller report, published on Friday by the Mexican daily La Jornada, follows below (my translation, with abridgements).  

On Thursday the de facto government of Honduras severely repressed the resistance, as President Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales met in Managua with a delegation from the United States Department of State, led by US Ambassador Hugo Llorens, and only hours after coup president Roberto Micheletti had expressed his willingness to support talks in Costa Rica. 

Riot police, supported by soldiers, broke up a march by the Resistance Front, which was protesting the coup and had planned to block for hours the highway to the north of the country. 

Similar actions occurred in Comayagua, where 70 people were arrested, and Santa Barbara, as well as near San Pedro Sula.   

At the wail of a siren, the police began to throw tear gas canisters out of a helicopter and police officers broke into three parts a march of around three thousand Zelaya supporters and began coralling and arresting the protesters.   Some thirty demonstrators took refuge in a car repair garage near El Durazno.  The police reached them even there and brought them out.  Before being put into patrol cars, a number of demonstrators were beaten. 

“Although they had already surrendered, they bloodied themselves with our colleague Carlos H. Reyes,” said a witness.  Reyes, a man of 70 years of age who suffers from diabetes, is a leader of a beverage workers union and an independent candidate for the presidency of Honduras.  The beatings by police left him with a fractured arm and an injured ear.
 
Outside a police station where the demonstrators who had been arrested were taken, a witness recalled the moment an officer fired into the head of man now lying on the ground.  The officer maintained that demonstrators themselves had shot the man.  The injured man, a high school teacher named Roger Abraham Villegas (38 years old), was taken by his own comrades to a hospital.  Before being treated, his heart stopped twice. 

Several dozen demonstrators remained under arrest at the police station, inlcuding Popular Block leader Juan Barahona. [La Jornada identifies by name five additional demonstrators hospitalized with injuries, as well as five more injured demonstrators who remained at the police station.]   The resistance movement has reported 26 injured.

According to reports by the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), “in the hallways of the emergency room at the School Hospital of Tegucigalpa, police officers and apparent police and military intellligence agents were seen, whose mission is to identify leaders of the resistance, follow them, and later arrest them.” 

The police also attacked reporters, who usually are able to cross the roadblocks to go toward the border, although not without difficulty.  A camera belonging to Telesur was destroyed.   Roberto Barra, of Prensa Latina, and Óscar Estrada, of Habla Honduras, were beaten and their equipment was damaged.  Estrada said the police threatened him, saying, “It’s your fault that this country is fucked.  Here there is nothing to report.  If you’re Nicaraguan,” they added, “we’ll kill you.” 

“What they did was a true roundup.  And just yesterday the coup leaders had spoken about dialogue.  Can you dialogue when they are repressing in this manner?” Bertha Oliva, president of COFADEH, said to La Jornada. 

President Zelaya said he had asked the United States to help “detain” the repression.  “It’s a barbarity in the eyes of the world,” he said in a press conference. 

The coup government, meanwhile, extended the curfew along the border zone, perhaps because this Friday the 48-hour work stoppage decreed by the resistance was expected to continue.  The government’s announcement of the extended curfew was followed by the voice of a woman addressing all Hondurans: “It’s not by spilling the blood of innocents that we will overcome the current crisis.  Your life has no price, help us maintain the peace.”
 
In contrast to La Jornada's report is the New York Times’ blurb:  “Several people were wounded and more than 100 were arrested Thursday during clashes between the police and supporters of the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, in at least four locations. The most intense violence occurred on the northern edge of Tegucigalpa, the capital, where one person was shot in the head. Leaders of the demonstrations accused the police of firing tear gas and live ammunition on peaceful protesters. Television footage showed some protesters armed with long sticks and pickaxes.”