"Death Threats Here Are Normal": Honduras One Year After the Coup.

• Author: Lydersen, Kari

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In Honduras these days, death threats seem as common as the taco-like baleadas sold on street corners nationwide. And like the baleadas , the threats certainly aren't empty.

Since President Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo Sosa took office January 27, at least a dozen activists have been assassinated, and many more have been beaten, sexually assaulted, kidnapped, or attacked. Meanwhile, Lobo has been trying to convince the international community that things are back to normal after the June 28, 2009, coup that overthrew popular president Manuel "Mel" Zelaya and after Lobo came to power in a discredited election last November.

On the one-year anniversary of the coup, hundreds of thousands of Hondurans marched in the streets to denounce the Lobo government. Many Hondurans have not accepted the post-coup political landscape. They are calling for a national assembly to revise the constitution and empower a truly democratic government.

Human rights experts and Honduran activists see the assassinations as part of a larger, strategic campaign of intimidation and terror carried out on behalf of the government and the private oligarchy that controls most of the country's wealth.

Sitting in the national beverage workers' union hall a year and a day after the coup, union leader and past presidential candidate Carlos H. Reyes talks about the death threats. He gets a lot of them, he says, including a cell phone call from someone promising to behead him. And in the spring, a taxi driver told him he'd overheard two would-be assassins watching Reyes get on a bus and lament that the bus came too quickly for them to carry out their hit. Because of the constant threats to his life, Reyes uses different vehicles and never keeps set hours. Paraphrasing a quote he says is from the Latin American revolutionary Simón Bolivar, Reyes says his legs may be trembling from fear, but when his legs tremble he pushes forward instead of falling backward.

Luther Castillo, a Garifuna doctor who runs the only hospital serving the African-descended people on the steamy Caribbean coast, lets loose his trademark laugh and wide smile when asked if he gets death threats. "Of course!" he says. "Death threats here are normal."

Castillo is less concerned about the threats than he is about the government's decision to cut off support to his hospital, which provides badly needed free medical and dental care to the Garifuna communities and the surrounding regions. After the coup, the government revoked funding for doctors, nurses, and supplies. Now the hospital is sustained largely by donations...