Political Perspectives on 05/18/11

Host Carlos Chavez interviews Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California at Santa Cruz specializing in Honduras. She recently wrote a piece for the Nation titled “Open Season on Teachers in Honduras,” which states: “In Honduras, it’s come to this: when 90 percent of the city’s 68,000 public schoolteachers went out on strike in March to protest the privatization of the entire public school system, the government tear-gassed their demonstrations for almost three solid weeks, then suspended 305 teachers for two to six months as punishment for demonstrating, and then, when negotiations broke down, threatened to suspend another 5,000 public schoolteachers. The level of repression in Honduras, after a nationwide wave of attacks on the opposition in March and early April, now exceeds that of the weeks immediately following the June 28, 2009 military coup that deposed President Manuel Zelaya, as current President Porfirio ‘Pepe’ Lobo Sosa wages war on entire swaths of the Honduran population.”