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]
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.
Honduras, officially the Republic of Honduras, is a country in Central America. Honduras is bordered to the west by Guatemala, to the southwest by El Salvador, to the southeast by Nicaragua, to the south by the Pacific Ocean at the Gulf of Fonseca, and to the north by the Gulf of Honduras, a large inlet of the Caribbean Sea. Its capital and largest city is Tegucigalpa.
The Armed Forces of Honduras, consists of the Honduran Army, Honduran Navy and Honduran Air Force.
Óscar Arias Sánchez is a Costa Rican activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He was President of Costa Rica from 1986 to 1990 and from 2006 to 2010.
Porfirio Lobo Sosa also known by his nickname, Pepe Lobo, is a former Honduran politician and agricultural landowner who served as President of Honduras from 2010 to 2014. A member of the conservative National Party and a former deputy in the National Congress of Honduras from 1990, he was president of the National Congress of Honduras from 2002 to 2006. He came second to Manuel Zelaya with 46% of the vote in the 2005 general election. After the military ousted Zelaya in a coup d'état, Lobo was elected president in the 2009 presidential election and took office on 27 January 2010.
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 three 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 President of Honduras from 27 January 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.
Iris Xiomara Castro Sarmiento, also known as Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, is a Honduran politician and businesswoman who is the 56th president of Honduras, in office since January 2022. She is the country's first female president, having earlier served as first lady during the presidency of her husband Manuel Zelaya.
Roberto Micheletti Baín is a Honduran politician who served as the interim president of Honduras from 28 June 2009 to 27 January 2010 as a result of the 2009 Honduran coup d'état. The Honduran military ousted the President, and the National Congress read a letter of resignation, which was refuted two minutes later by Manuel Zelaya in conversation with CNN en Español; days later, the coup-plotters claimed that the Supreme Court had ordered to forcefully detain President Manuel Zelaya because "he was violating the Honduran constitution"; Zelaya was exiled rather than arrested. Micheletti, constitutionally next in line for the presidency, was sworn in as president by the National Congress a few hours after Zelaya was sent into exile by the Honduran military. He was not acknowledged as de jure president by any government or international organization. The 2009 general election took place as planned in November and elected Porfirio Lobo Sosa to succeed Micheletti.
Honduras and the United States have had formal relations since 1830. There is close cooperation between the two countries, particularly in the areas of the War on Drugs while the National Port Authority in Puerto Cortés is part of the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection's Container Security Initiative.
General elections were held in Honduras on 29 November 2009, including presidential, parliamentary and local elections. Voters went to the polls to elect:
The 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis was a political dispute over plans to either rewrite the Constitution of Honduras or write a new one.
International reaction to the 2009 Honduran coup d'état of June 28, 2009, was that the coup was widely repudiated around the globe. The United Nations, every other country in the Western Hemisphere and others, publicly condemned the military-led 2009 Honduran coup d'état and ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya as illegal and most labelled it a coup d'état. The Obama administration, along with all other governments in the hemisphere, branded the action a "coup." Every country in the region, except the United States, withdrew their ambassadors from Honduras. All ambassadors of the European Union were recalled. Venezuela said it would suspend oil shipments, and Honduras's neighbors — El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua - stopped overland trade for 48 hours. The World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank suspended lending to Honduras.
The 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis was a political confrontation concerning the events that led to, included, and followed the 2009 Honduran coup d'état and the political breakdown associated with it. The coup was repudiated around the globe, but Roberto Micheletti, head of the government installed after the coup, has claimed that the Honduran Supreme Court ordered the detention of Manuel Zelaya, deposed President of Honduras, and that the following succession was constitutionally valid.
The 2009 Honduran coup d'état, which took place during the 2009 Honduran constitutional crisis, occurred when the Honduran Army, following orders from the Honduran Supreme Court, ousted President Manuel Zelaya on 28 June 2009 and sent him into exile. Zelaya had attempted to hold a referendum on convening a constituent assembly for writing a new constitution, which would allow him to remain in office indefinitely.
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.
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.
Alexander Erick Martínez Ávila, also known as Erick Martínez, was a Honduran advocate and spokesperson for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) minority rights in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. A former journalist, he went into public relations for Asociación Kukulcán. He was also known to be a "Zelayista" activist. Days after his announcement to run as a Resistencia Party congressional candidate in the November elections, Martínez went missing and was found strangled to death about 3 kilometers from the capital.
General elections were held in Honduras on 26 November 2017. Voters went to the polls to elect the President of Honduras to serve a four-year term, as well as 128 members of the unicameral National Congress, 20 members for the Central American Parliament and mayors for the municipalities of Honduras.
