Vanessa Zepeda left her house in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa around 2pm on 4 February. By 6.30pm her lifeless body had been dumped from a passing car in the city’s Loraque neighbourhood – a community known for its resistance to the military takeover of Honduras. The point was to intimidate. Vanessa was a 29-year-old nurse, a union organizer with the Social Security Union and an activist in the democratic resistance to last June’s Honduran coup and its normalization under ‘elected’ President Porfi rio ‘Pepe’ Lobo, who had been inaugurated just eight days before. Pepe is said to be a law-and-order man – although that doesn’t seem to have done much good for Ms Zepeda or any of the other Honduran activists who continue to be brutalized and murdered.
The official language coming from the Honduran political élite these days is all about amnesty (for the coup-plotters), national reconciliation, truth commissions (chaired by a rightwing Guatemalan politician) and forgetting the past. The legitimate President, Manuel Zelaya, has been seen off from his precarious perch in the Brazilian embassy to exile in the Dominican Republic. Also anxious to ‘forget the past’ is the US Government – whose anti-coup actions were timid and ambivalent. It is currently clinging to the fi gleaf of last November’s martial law elections, in which less than half the electorate bothered to vote.
