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Panel 10: The yellow quotes here are taken from the Washington Post and Fox News coverage. The 15 countries claim is from the Morning Star.
Panel 11: More on this corrosive decision for democracy here.
This concludes the graphic history of the Honduran Coup. For more comix, check out the comix archive for all my comics journalism.
Remember to scroll down to read my latest comments on news stories and visual journalism from around the world. Or you could just click here.
Panel 1: Seen here with the report is IACHR President, Luz Patricia Mejia Guerrero. Here’s the full report.
Panel 5: News of this predictable yet disturbing development here.
Panel 6: Depicted here is Jorge Rivera Aviles, Chief Justice of the Honduran Supreme Court. For more on his decision, click here.
Panels 1-3: Despite a media blackout on these raids and an official denial by an army spokesman, several accounts corroborate the violent evictions: click here, here or here for spanish coverage.
Panels 1-3: Supporting evidence again thanks to Joe Shansky’s article, Killing Activists in Honduras, published in Upside Down World and on his website.
If you can’t wait to read the rest of this final installment of the Honduran Coup, the complete third part is now up online at the Huffington Post. Please leave a comment or RT the link.
In the meantime, become an Archcomix fan or pre-order your Honduran coup comic for $5 plus shipping if you haven’t already – pre-orders close in the next 5 hours.
Panels 1-4: Supporting evidence again thanks to Joe Shansky’s article, Killing Activists in Honduras, published in Upside Down World and on his website.
The big news you’ve all been waiting for – the whole final installment of the Honduran Coup is now up online at the Huffington Post. Please leave a comment or RT the link.
In the meantime, become an Archcomix fan or pre-order your Honduran coup comic for $5 plus shipping if you haven’t already.
Panels 1-3: Supporting evidence thanks to Joe Shansky’s article, Killing Activists in Honduras, published in Upside Down World and on his website.
The big news you’ve all been waiting for should be announced in a few hours time.
In the meantime, become an Archcomix fan or pre-order your Honduran coup comic for $5 plus shipping if you haven’t already.
Panels 1-4: The COFADEH report can be viewed here.
I also have some big news that you can play a part in. I’ll post it on Monday, so be sure to come back and see how you can get involved.
And if you haven’t already…
Become an Archcomix fan or order a copy of the Honduran coup comic – less than a week left for pre-orders.
Join the ongoing debate about the future of journalism in these technology-obsessed times, courtesy of authors Robert McChesney and John Nichols and their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again. The authors argue for increased government subsidies (like in the Old World) to support the US media and encourage a free press to combat the growing spectre of coporate dominance of content providers, best exemplified by Comcast’s takeover bid for NBC. It’s currently being reviewed to see if it complies with anti-trust laws, though seeing as Comcast currently provides 24m homes with cable, 16m with internet and will suddenly be granted cable networks such as Telemundo, MSNBC and Bravo, TV shows such as Jay Leno’s, regional stations such as Washington’s WRC (Channel 4), and Universal movie studios, it’s clearly a step towards massive media consolidation. Not to mention posing a big threat to net neutrality. How do you feel about it? Leave a comment below.
In other news, the first ever Tea Party convention is currently taking place in Nashville, proving that the right can actually mobilise and protest with just as much (perhaps even more) vitriol than the left. For those outside the US bubble unfamiliar with the trend, it’s essentially a grass roots organization against what they perceive as Obama’s socialist agenda (forcing healthcare, tax hikes and increased state control on an unsuspecting populace). Personally, I think it’s great to see more people engaged in the political process, standing up for what they believe in. Unless, of course, they aren’t so sure why they have those beliefs in the first place – see this video of their march to the White House last year.
One reason, Dr David Runciman argues, that people can feel so passionately against measures that are designed to help them is that they have fallen for the narrative of a specific agenda, despite its lack of substantiating evidence. For more, read this article from the BBC on how interesting stories can speak to voters more than facts and figures, courtesy of Steve Bissette.
Yet further proof that we need to rethink the way news content and information is presented – comics journalism, anyone? Speaking of which, if you haven’t already, you need to check out legendary comics journalist Joe Sacco‘s latest graphic opus, Footnotes in Gaza – a devastating piece of comics journalism form on Israeli policy towards Palestinians in the occupied territories, as well as an investigation of historical truth.
And last but not least comes the news of a corruption scandal at the heart of the world’s second largest arm manufacturer (the UK’s own BAE), and the £300m it has been forced to pay out in compensation. Check out the Guardian and the Serious Fraud Office’s combined efforts to bring the company to justice over the past 30 years here. Remember my Jan 28th post about Attorney General Goldsmith from the Chilcot Inquiry? Turns out he was once again silenced by Tony Blair, this time when it came to investigating BAE’s £43bn al-Yamamah fighter plane sales to Saudi Arabia. Which was on a par with the sale of a hi-tech military radar system to poverty-stricken Tanzania. Naturally, both cases were of the utmost concern to the respective parties’ national security.
Brace yourselves, this is going to be a long one to reflect what an ugly week it’s been in US-related politics. First up, here’s the latest part of the School of the Americas piece – skip back 3 steps to get to the beginning and find out more about SOA/WHINSEC and their illustrious graduates’ violent pasts.
As the estimated number of dead in Haiti rises past the 200,000 mark, several news reports (Democracy Now!, The Guardian and Al Jazeera for starters) are describing the US’s apparent takeover of the main airport at Port-au-Prince. Convoys carrying aid, medical supplies and water are being re-directed to make way for a worrying number of US troops, who are being deployed ‘to ensure security’. Yes Magazine had a great quote from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who, after declaring her expectation that the Haitian government would pass an emergency decree – including things like the right to impose curfews – said, “The decree would give the government an enormous amount of authority, which in practice they would delegate to us”. Of course they would.
Naomi Klein leads the charge for transparency to prevent Haiti from succumbing to the free market agenda that New Orleans did in the aftermath of Katrina. Here’s a checklist of suggested actions sent by Rep. Paul Teller on September 13, 2005 – let’s hope they don’t start happening in Port-au-Prince. One other chilling similarity with Katrina is the already conspicuous presence of Blackwater-esque private mercenary forces, operating under the philanthropically-tinged moniker International Peace Operations Association. For an altogether more upfront description of their services in Haiti, checkout this webpage hosted by a similar private outfit called All Pro Legal Investigations – under the ‘Personal Protection’ header they’ll even deal with ‘worker unrest’ and ‘high-threat terminations’. What more could an International Peacekeeping force want? Jeremy Scahill has the whole scoop over at the Nation.
The bad news then came home, not only with the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat for the Democrats, but also yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that curbing corporate donations to electoral campaigns is unconstitutional. Why? Because it infringes on the said corporations’ first amendment rights to free speech. I’m sure that’s exactly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he said, “the end of democracy will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.” See corporate watch for more info.
Lastly, one piece of good news to try and even up the balance. The online human rights and social justice magazine Independent World Report will publish my 4-page piece on Diego Garcia in their next issue.
At last the US has successfully brokered a deal between Zelaya and Micheletti. Hopefully this will also result in an investigation of the de facto regime’s litany of human rights abuses over the past four months, which are still continuing on the streets of Tegucigalpa. Articles about police ‘meowing’ and firing sonic blasts of pig noises at the Brazilian embassy in total impunity to keep the Zelaya party deprived of sleep sound both surreal and horrendous: here’s a great article by Joe Shansky at Pulsemedia.org on the worrying use of psychological weapons by police, both in the US and abroad.
Today’s comic is the first page of a new piece based on Diego Garcia, which many are labelling ‘the new Guantanamo’ for its role as one of the prime US Military bases for Iraq/Afghanistan, not to mention in interrogating ‘enemy combattants’. I’d entered it in the Observer Graphic Short Story Competition 2009, but perhaps as Joe Sacco was mysteriously taken off the judging panel in their final press release announcing the winners, it may have led to a bigger step away from any non-fictional entries. Who knows.
Although it’s been in the papers as a popular transit point for illegal rendition flights run by the CIA and MI6, my piece concentrates on the backstory to the island, more specifically how the UK and US governments conspired to illegally evict the island’s inhabitants from their home in the 1960s. Two invaluable sources were David Vine’s Island of Shame and John Pilger’s Stealing A Nation, which I thoroughly recommend. As always, the whole comic is posted on the COMIX page, so please forward the link around to raise awareness for the Chagossians’ campaign to return to their homeland.
