kirktastic

With the Michael Jackson blah blah blah and now the Sarah Palin noise, news from our neighbor to the south is a little disconcerting. Today the exiled president of Honduras is returning. Shit, meet fan. Fan, this is shit.

Here’s the parts that scare me…

“The government of President (Roberto) Micheletti has order the armed forces and the police not to allow the entrance of any plane bringing the former leader,” the foreign minister of the interim government, Enrique Ortez, told The Associated Press on Sunday.

and then…

In comments to a local radio station, Zelaya said he would be accompanied by Argentine President Cristina Fernandez, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, several foreign ministers and 300 journalists.

So what does this “armed forces and police not allow the entrance of any plane” mean? Are they going to shoot it down? With the presidents of two South American countries, foreign ministers and journalist? That is just amazing if they do that. It would mean pretty much annihilation of Honduras be everyone on this continent from Canada to Argentina, wouldn’t it?

Honduras is a dirt poor country and doesn’t need this. It didn’t need Zelaya announcing an illegal referendum to try and nab another term a la Hugo Chavez. It didn’t need the coup that ousted him and sent him off to Costa Rica (there are definitely worse places to go in exile). And it doesn’t need this comeback. Even if the current government backs down and lets Zeleya back in there will be riots and shit.

Like I said, Honduras is a very poor country. Actually a lot of the immigrants that people think are Mexicans are actually Honduran. Mexico catches and sends back lots of Hondurans (often brutalizing them and robbing them in the process), or they die by falling or being pushed off freight trains by crooks. In a documentary I saw, many Honduran and other Central American immigrants worried more about making it through Mexico in one piece than making it to the US. My point is, even more desperation and unrest in Honduras means more people will risk their lives to come to the relative safety of the US.

Although Obama has denounced the coup and like most of the world called for Honduras to re-seat Zelaya, we haven’t seen how far he’ll go in supporting this. Perhaps the plane will be escorted by US jets. I’m sure that the US State Department is working behind the scenes on this because if the threats from the current government are carried out and the elected president of three countries and other officials are shot down, shot or arrested at the airport or anything like that all hell will break loose.

But like with Iran, the US media isn’t covering this well. With Michael Jackson still being dead and Sarah Palin still being a dipshit there’s no time to talk about political crises in countries with a bunch of poor brown people. At least the LA Times has a story on its front page about it (the lines at banks and at the Bennetton store was a little surreal for me).