Golpistas Set Sights on El Libertador Director After One of His Journalists is Kidnapped and Burned with Cigarette

by Belén Fernández, NarcoNews (reposted)

Mon, Oct 26, 2009 6:20AM

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS, OCTOBER 26, 2009: On the morning of October 21, Jhonny Lagos – founder and director of El Libertador, the sole anti-coup newspaper in Honduras – received a phone call from a military acquaintance sympathetic to the Resistance. The official reported a meeting between coup president Roberto Micheletti and assistant foreign minister Martha Lorena Alvarado in which the two had begun preparations for Lagos’ demise and Alvarado – evidently irked by her appearance on the list of golpista Opus Dei members in the paper’s October edition – had stipulated that El Libertador be made to pay dearly.

Other forms of paying dearly had been proposed in the aftermath of the June 28 coup against President Mel Zelaya, when Lagos had been offered 10 million lempiras (over half a million dollars) in exchange for an alteration of Libertador principles.

Jhonny Lagos, editor and publisher of the daily El Libertador in Tegucigalpa.The proposal had also called for Lagos to author two articles, one on the subject of national reconciliation and the other in support of the November elections. Lagos had joked to the golpista intermediary who had presented the scheme to him that El Libertador would gladly start featuring advertisements for fast food chains but that the ads would consist of a picture of a hamburger with the label: “Beware, this product is golpista.”