US Involvement In Honduran Massacre

By Laura Carlsen
EurasiaReview
Jun. 22, 2012

Hilda Lezama was taking passengers back upriver to the township of Ahuas after a fishing expedition in a remote area of the Mosquito Coast in Honduras. In the pre-dawn darkness, she could hear the helicopters buzzing overhead, but she thought nothing of it at first.

Suddenly, bullets shot from U.S. State Department helicopters with DEA agents and Honduran police aboard penetrated both her legs.

"I threw myself in the water so they wouldn't shoot me again," she said. She stayed there, grabbing onto a branch and keeping only her nose above the water, to avoid the hail of bullets.

Later, in a press conference, Lezama spoke on her daughter's cell phone from a hospital bed in La Ceiba. In a surprisingly calm voice for someone just shot and at risk of never walking again, Lezama said she never imagined the helicopters would fire on her little boat– with its cargo of fishermen, women and children.

Lezama is one of the lucky ones in that boat the morning of May 11.

Juana Jackson and Candelaria Pratt–both bearing unborn children–were shot to death, along with 14-year old Hasked Brooks and Emerson Martinez. Three other Mosquito villagers are in serious condition.

The State Department helicopters were carrying out a joint counter-narcotics operation with a unit of the Honduran police trained by the U.S. government and a "Foreign-Deployed Advisory Support Team (FAST)" of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Their side of the story is that the boat had received an illegal drug shipment from a small plane they had followed into the nearby jungle. Why there were no arrests from the alleged drug plane is one of the many open questions to the story, along with contradictory reports on confiscations and conflicting versions of how and why the villagers were killed.

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