Pro-Zelaya people caught in another lie

Ada Hernández, mother of Jari Dixon Photo: La Prensa, Honduras

The biased reporting of CNN (Español) has been clear to anyone here in Honduras. Many of the news reports have been extremely exaggerated. But I started to notice outrageous lies from the start about beatings, deaths, kidnappings, disappearances, military brutalities.

Usually the stories stemmed from Venezuela's Telesur and would be repeated around the globe, especially on websites with certain leanings, though the stories were also often picked up by major media as well. (Most of the dead and kidnapped have since arisen in other countries or embassies; the others are in hiding from arrest warrants for money laundering and illegal enrichment.)

Last night I read this on Honduras Solidarity, a blog by author Sandra Cuffe:

Honduran prosecutors family attacked after he denounces military coup on CNN

The family of Honduran public prosecutor Jari Dixon Herrera were attacked by police on Tuesday shortly after he made statements to CNN en Español and other international media in Washington denouncing the recent military coup in Honduras. Dixon’s mother’s house, located in the town of Talanga, was first shot at repeatedly by police agents with automatic weapons. The agents then broke the door of the house down and entered the residence, beat Dixon’s mother and arrested and took away his brother. Jari Dixon is currently in Washington, DC, as part of a delegation of Hondurans that has been meeting with members of Congress, representatives of the World Bank, the State Department and human rights organizations to discuss the rights abuses committed by the Honduran de facto authorities.

Her house was shot at repeatedly with automatic weapons? The door was broken down? The poor elderly woman was beaten and arrested?

Here is what the mother, Ada Hernández, had to say in an interview yesterday with El Heraldo and La Prensa:

"My son's wife made a domestic violence complaint against him. The police surrounded the house to capture him. Look, it was a problem which arose internally, my son Olvin." She also said that the house did not receive any type of damage from any firearm. "They never threatened me. We have been honorable people."

Jari Dixon is an attorney with the Ministerio Publico (state prosecutor) office. He is in Washington, D.C. as one of the delegates of the Frente de Resistencia Popular which is lobbying to reinstate Zelaya.

They met with congressmen and the World Bank to ask the US to take severe economic sanctions against Honduras, including the ban of Hondurans in the US sending remesas to relatives in Honduras, and the cessation of aid and all economic commerce. Dixon was one of the fiscales who went on a month-long hunger strike to fight corruption last year. And now he is pro-Zelaya. Hard to figure.

Last night, there were a dozen online sites reporting that Jari Dixon said,

"Hoy hemos retrocedido a 1980, a la década de los desaparecidos, de la tortura en la que ya nadie tiene nada garantizado", dijo Dixon que señaló que su hermano ha sido detenido por las fuerzas de seguridad y golpearon a su madre cuando acudieron a su casa.

("Today we are going back to 1980, to the decade of the 'disappeared', of the torture in which nobody has anything guaranteed", said Dixon who pointed out that his brother had been detained by the security forces and they beat his mother when arrived at the house.")

This morning there were a hundred articles with this statement, including Yahoo! News Mexico.


So, did Jari Dixon tell the lie or was the original article written in Venezuela? Did the EFE summarize his statements or did Sandra embellished them? Will any reputable media outlet ask those questions? By the way, I saved a copy of Sandra's page in case it gets changed.

Watch what you are reading, folks. There are a lot of lies out there. What is even scarier is that some of those sites know they are lies and report them anyway. Scariest of all, the more it is reported, the more it is taken as 'fact'.