Since the 2009 Honduran coup d'état, Freeston has produced roughly 30 mini-documentaries on the coup and the rise of the National People's Resistance Front. He has covered the post-coup struggles of various groups such as the students and teachers,[4] the feminists,[5] the musicians [6] and ousted president Zelaya's return to Honduras.[7] However, his prime focus has been on the land conflict in the Bajo Aguán part of Honduras' Aguán River Valley following the December 2009 occupation of more than 10,000 hectares of palm oil plantations by the Aguan Unified Campesino Movement. According to Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN, Freeston's video documenting the burning to the ground of the village of Rigores by Honduran police "vividly illustrates the courageous struggle for land and food sovereignty that peasants in Honduras are waging against the ruthless combined force of agribusiness and national and foreign governments."[8] Freeston is currently in post-production on a feature-length documentary on the land conflict in the Aguan Valley.
Honduran election fraud
In November 2009, the Honduran coup regime held elections that, in Freeston's words, "laundered a military coup".[9] In a December 6, 2009 report from the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa, Freeston provided evidence that the election was more theatre than democratic practice. In particular, he exposed that the Honduran Supreme Electoral Tribunal's own internal figures on voter turnout were not 65% as election winner Pepe Lobo and Western media reported, but actually 49%. His conclusion was that no one could know for sure how many Hondurans voted, given that the election was run by the same military that overthrew the elected president five months earlier, and that all international election monitoring groups (including the UN, Organization of American States, Carter Center, and EU) refused to observe the election.[2] On December 22, 2009, Freeston was featured on Honduras' Radio Globo alongside ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and American University Anthropologist Adrienne Pine, where he spoke about electoral fraud.[10]
Canadian mining in El Salvador
In 2008, Freeston reported from El Salvador on Canadian mining company Pacific Rim's attempt to open an industrial gold mine in the Central American country. He documented how the company hired 'promoters' in communities opposed to mining, a move that led to violence in a phenomenon the Salvadoran social movement began to call "social contamination".[11] His video reports for The Real News document the popular resistance to mining and the $100 million lawsuit Pacific Rim launched against the government of El Salvador itself for alleged losses when, after months of exploration, it was denied a mining permit. In a November 15, 2009 story for The Real News, Freeston interviewed Tom Shrake, the CEO and President of Pacific Rim about the lawsuit. Shrake claimed Pacific Rim followed El Salvador's mining, investment, and environmental laws and was therefore denied a mining permit illegally. Freeston's investigation from San Isidro revealed contamination of the country's little-accessible water during the exploration stage, the inflammation of conflict by company promoters, the perception that the 2% tax Pacific Rim would pay on its revenues, and other social and environmental concerns were behind the resistance to the proposed mining project.[12] He also reported on cases of murder and torture of anti-mining activists, such as that of Gustavo Marcelo Rivera. The Rivera family maintains that Rivera was killed for his opposition to the mining project and the local leadership that supports it.[13]
FMLN victory in 2009 Salvadoran elections
In 2009, Freeston covered the El Salvadoran elections from the country's capital, San Salvador. He documented the historic ascension to power of former guerrilla group FMLN and their presidential candidate, former journalist Mauricio Funes.[14] According to Freeston, it marked the first time in 500 years that a leader not supported by the tiny Salvadoran elite would take a position of power in the country.
G-20 coverage
During the 2010 G-20 Summit in Toronto, Freeston published a series of video stories for The Real News. Most of his stories focused on police brutality and repression against activists before, during, and after the Summit.[15] Freeston was himself the target of police violence when he was attacked during one of the demonstrations. He spoke about the event in a CTV interview after the incident. "I was taken back by my collar, I was thrown against bikes and then one officer punched me twice in the mouth."[3] In another CTV interview he added, "I then had my mic stolen from me by one of the officers as you'll see in the tape, and it was only after a few other journalists gathered around and put pressure on them that they returned my mic within a few minutes." When asked whether he believes he was targeted, he answered, "there's a pattern here, we've seen numbers of journalists that have gone through similar things. I wasn't detained, but there are numerous journalists who were detained and we see a real pattern here throughout the weekend of journalists being denied access."[3] Freeston filed an official complaint with the Office of the Independent Police Review Director, but as of June 2011, he had received no response.[16]
In a piece published by the Canadian Journalism Project, Freeston asked all concerned journalists to openly call for a public inquiry into police actions during the G20. He called into question the meaning of having Freedom of the Press listed as a fundamental freedom in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, saying that "no crisis, real or perceived, gives authorities the right to revoke it. On the contrary, it is precisely for such times that these freedoms exist. In other words, it is not to cover Blue Jays games that we have freedom of the press, but specifically to document things like extraordinary measures taken by authorities."[17] Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said no public inquiry was necessary.[18]
In the months following the summit, Freeston filed additional reports and opinion pieces about the G-20 aftermath including the story of Alex Hundert. Hundert is a Kitchener-based activist who was arrested in a house raid before the G-20 began and charged, alongside 17 other activists, with conspiracy. After being released on bail, Hundert was re-arrested and jailed for participating as an invited speaker on a university panel at Ryerson University in Toronto. The government argued that his participation on a panel broke his bail condition barring him from participating in public protests. The courts agreed and adjusted Hundert's bail conditions to ban all political speech, including to the media. In an apparent challenge to the ban, Freeston published a 10-minute video that included a lengthy interview with Hundert, which according to Freeston was filmed before the ban was put into place.[19]
Officer Bubbles
Also following the G-20, Freeston released a mini-documentary based around the experience of lawyer Riali Johanesson during the mass arrest of anti-G20 activists in the working-class Toronto neighborhood of Parkdale. Johanesson was detained without charges when she arrived to provide legal advice to a client who had been detained without charges.[20] Freeston and colleague Nazrul Islam captured footage of Toronto Police 52 Division Constable Adam Josephs threatening a G-20 protester for blowing bubbles. A short YouTube video of the confrontation was released as a supplement to the longer Parkdale video.[21] The shorter video received more than 1,000,000 views and was commented on by international news outlets as far away as Fox News in the United States and ABC National News in Australia. In an appearance on Dan Speerin's show Truth Mashup lamented the "YouTube physics" that saw the "Officer Bubbles" video skyrocket to stardom while the longer Parkdale video was "weighed down by all the context".[22]
Josephs quickly became infamous in Toronto under the nickname "Officer Bubbles". According to Jesse McLean of the Toronto Star, "The original video of Const. Josephs became a symbol for what many viewed as heavy-handed policing during the G20 summit that brought world leaders to Toronto in June."[23]
Josephs, with the support of the Toronto Police Union, filed a defamation lawsuit against Google-owned YouTube, a user who posted a "collection of eight cartoons… that show a police officer resembling Josephs engaging in abusive acts of power" and 24 additional YouTube users that commented on the cartoons. The animations depict "Officer Bubbles" arresting Santa Claus and Barack Obama, punching a news photographer, and overreacting in various ways.[23] Josephs' lawsuit also targets 24 YouTube users who commented on the animation.[24] However the lawsuit did not target the original news video.[25]
The cartoons were removed by YouTube but copies were immediately uploaded by dozens of other YouTube users. Legal commentators across the spectrum said the lawsuit had zero chance of success and views of the original video tripled as a result of the lawsuit.
Telesur
In 2012, Freeston made three 30-minute documentaries for the Venezuelan government television propaganda network, Telesur. Informar y Resistir en Honduras details the repression of critical journalists in post-coup Honduras, and includes interviews with numerous survivors. ¿Un sueño aplazado? is a look at activism in the United States following the Occupy Wall Street movement. Also in the U.S., Todo está bien argues that the two major political parties deny the true nature of the ongoing economic crisis, the film focuses on the regions of Detroit and Central Appalachia, alongside interviews with Noam Chomsky and Richard D. Wolff.
Resistencia
Freeston is currently finishing a feature-length documentary, called Resistencia, on the farmer-led land occupation movement in Honduras' Lower Aguan Valley. According to Resistencia's Facebook page, the film is about "landless farmers [who] have taken over the most fertile land in Central America, the palm oil plantations of Miguel Facussé, the richest and most powerful man in Honduras. Just months after he helped organize a military coup."
The Independent Media Center, better known as Indymedia, is an open publishing network of activist journalist collectives that report on political and social issues. Following beginnings during the 1999 Carnival Against Capital and 1999 Seattle WTO protests, Indymedia became closely associated with the global justice movement. The Indymedia network extended internationally in the early 2000s with volunteer-run centers that shared software and a common format with a newswire and columns. Police raided several centers and seized computer equipment. The centers declined in the 2010s with the waning of the global justice movement.
Telesur is a Latin American terrestrial and satellite news television network headquartered in Caracas, Venezuela and sponsored by the governments of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.
William Sterling Blair is a Canadian politician and former police officer who has served as the minister of National Defence since 2023. A member of the Liberal Party, Blair represents Scarborough Southwest in the House of Commons. Blair previously held the portfolios of Minister of Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction and minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. Before entering politics, Blair worked for four decades with the Toronto Police Service (TPS), serving as the chief of police from 2005 until retiring in 2015.
José Manuel Zelaya Rosales is a Honduran politician who was 35th President of Honduras from January 27, 2006 until his forcible removal in the 2009 coup d'état, and who since January 2022 serves as the first First Gentleman of Honduras. He is the eldest son of a wealthy businessman, and inherited his father's nickname "Mel". Before entering politics he was involved in his family's logging and timber businesses.
Viral videos are videos that become popular through a viral process of Internet sharing, primarily through video sharing websites such as YouTube as well as social media and email. For a video to be shareable or spreadable, it must focus on the social logics and cultural practices that have enabled and popularized these new platforms.
Video journalism or videojournalism is a form of journalism, where the journalist shoots, edits and often presents their own video material.
Jeffrey David Berwick is a Canadian-Dominican entrepreneur, libertarian and anarcho-capitalist activist. Berwick founded Stockhouse.com in 1994. In the late ‘90s, the company expanded into eight different countries and had 250 employees and a market cap of $240 million, before the “tech bubble". He later sold the company in 2002 for an 'undisclosed' amount.
The 36th G8 summit was held in Muskoka, Ontario, Canada, on June 25–26, 2010. In this year's meeting, the G8 leaders agreed in reaffirming the group's essential and continuing role in international affairs and "assertions of new-found relevance". The form and function of the G8 was reevaluated as the G20 summits evolved into the premier forum for discussing, planning and monitoring international economic cooperation.
General elections were held in Honduras on 29 November 2009, including presidential, parliamentary and local elections. Voters went to the polls to elect:
Kettling is a police tactic for controlling large crowds during demonstrations or protests. It involves the formation of large cordons of police officers who then move to contain a crowd within a limited area. Protesters either leave through an exit controlled by the police, leave through an uncontrolled gap in the cordons, or are contained, prevented from leaving, and arrested.
The 2009 G20 London summit protests occurred in the days around the 2 April 2009 G20 London summit. The summit was the focus of protests from a number of groups over various long-standing and topical issues. These ranged from disquiet over economic policy, anger at the banking system and bankers' remuneration and bonuses, the continued war on terror and concerns over climate change.
Ian Tomlinson was a newspaper vendor who collapsed and died in the City of London after being struck by a police officer during the 2009 G-20 summit protests. After an inquest jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing, the officer, Simon Harwood, was prosecuted for manslaughter. He was found not guilty but was dismissed from the police service for gross misconduct. Following civil proceedings, the Metropolitan Police Service paid Tomlinson's family an undisclosed sum and acknowledged that Harwood's actions had caused Tomlinson's death.
The 2009 G20 Pittsburgh Summit was the third meeting of the G20 heads of state and heads of government to discuss financial markets and the world economy. It was held on September 24 and September 25, 2009 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis was a political dispute over plans to either rewrite the Constitution of Honduras or write a new one.
Serious issues involving human rights in Honduras through the end of 2013 include unlawful and arbitrary killings by police and others, corruption and institutional weakness of the justice system, and harsh and at times life-threatening prison conditions.
Nahúm Elí Palacios Arteaga was a Honduran journalist and reporter. Palacios was the news director for the Canal 5 television network in Aguán and the host of a news program on Radio Tocoa within the Colón Department along the Caribbean coast.
The 2010 G20 Toronto summit was the fourth meeting of the G20 heads of state/government, to discuss the global financial system and the world economy, which took place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, during June 26–27, 2010. The summit's priorities included evaluating the progress of financial reform, developing sustainable stimulus measures, debating global bank tax, and promoting open markets. Alongside the twenty-one representatives of the G20 major economies, leaders of six invited nations, and eight additional intergovernmental organizations also took part in the summit.
Public protesting and demonstrations began one week ahead of the 2010 G20 Toronto summit, which took place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on 26−27 June. The protests were for various causes, including poverty and anti-capitalism.
Nery Geremias Orellana was a Honduran station manager for Radio Joconguera in Candelaria, Lempira, Honduras, a reporter for Radio Progreso and a member of the Community Radio Network. He was murdered July 14, 2011, in San Lorenzo after confirming his attendance at a regional meeting of community radio stations.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Honduras began its work on May 4, 2010 and submitted a final report in July 2011. The commission was created due to its inclusion as one of the measures in the “Accord for National Reconciliation and the Strengthening of Democracy in Honduras".
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
