Honduras: Director of Radio Uno Survives Assassination Attempt

Date: Thursday, April 28, 2011

(Versión original en español, haz clic aqui)

The Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras
(COFADEH by its Spanish initials), urgently denounces that at 11:30pm on
Wednesday, April 27th, 2011, around ten armed men wearing ski masks
attempted to assassinate Arnulfo Aguilar, the Director of Radio Uno in the
city of San Pedro Sula, in front of his house.

Aguilar told COFADEH that he succeeded in locking himself into his home
while the men surrounded the house trying to jump over the wall. He
reports that he called the local Police Division #1 where he was told they
would move immediately, however it was a full hour before, in a very
indifferent manner, officers of Patrol #123 did no more than escort
Aguilar to the central boulevard and left him there.

The General Coordinator of COFADEH, Bertha Oliva, attempted a series of
calls to high-ranking officials of the police, even with the very Security
Minister Oscar Alvarez, where she was told that their mobile phones were
turned off and that the minister has left orders to not call him after 10
pm.

Arnulfo Aguilar has protective measures granted by the Inter-American
Commission of Human Rights resulting from the series of attacks that he
and his team at Radio Uno have suffered. The attacks include death
threats, kidnappings, and attacks against the radio equipment itself, all
taking place since Aguilar and the entire radio collective assumed a
position of opposition to the coup d'etat of June 28th, 2009.

Aguilar denounced that in the last few months, various members of the
collective have been victims of kidnappings and attempted kidnappings.

Aguilar told COFADEH that, “tensions have risen since April 26th when we
began tackling the subject of the Armed Forces involvement in supplying
weapons to the drug cartels.”

According to a US Defense Intelligence Agency report leaked by WikiLeaks
entitled “Honduras: Military Weaponry Feeding the Black Weapon Market”,
serial numbers found on anti-tank weaponry discovered in Ciudad Juárez,
Mexico and San Andrés Island, Colombia, match the serial numbers of
weapons that had been sold to Honduras. Beyond the weapons, the US
authorities confiscated a series of M433 grenades from criminal
organizations in Mexico, which can also be traced back to the Honduran
military.

For COFADEH this latest attack against Arnulfo Aguilar is very worrying
and, once again, places the State of Honduras in a delicate position given
that it has done nothing to protect the lives of Aguilar or the Radio Uno
collective. We have already seen the serious consequences that come when
the state doesn't urgently implement these measures. Such as the case of
the journalist Nahum Palacios, who also received protective measures from
the IACHR and yet was assassinated by numerous masked men armed with
AK-47s, shot dead while heading to his home in Tocoa, Colon on the night
of March 14th, 2010.

For all the reasons described above, we demand immediate actions to
protect Aguilar, who succeeded in saving his life, but he has told COFADEH
that he has concerns further actions could be carried out against him,

FOR THE FACTS AND THE CULPRITS

NO FORGETTING, NO FORGIVING

Committee of the Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras

COFADEH

Tegucigalpa, April 27th, 2011