3 weeks later… Is it ever gonna end?
Honduras: Democracy at stake
7.1 magnitude earthquake hits Honduras
La Tribuna Cultural
You can’t see it online but I took a photo of it…
Click to zoomIngrid Betancourt, free at last!
Now, this has to be one of the best news of all year!
Ingrid Betancourt is a Colombian politician who was kidnapped over 6 years ago (February 23rd, 2002) by the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia)
Over the last year many have been the news related to her, mostly about her health and the inhuman conditions in which she was being forced to live. Hugo Chavez (President of Venezuela) came up with Operation Emmanuel, where Clara Rojas (Ingrid’s campaign manager) was released.
It was named Emmanuel in honor of Rojas’ child that was conceived while they were captive.
Also, in April, as the uncertainty about her situation was getting worse and worse (specially after an announcement that she had been in a hunger strike for a few weeks) Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France announced that he would launch a humanitarian mission to contact the FARC and hopefully get Ingrid’s freedom.
Finally, today in an amazing operation Ingrid Betancourt and other 14 hostages were released by Colombian Military Forces.
“Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said military intelligence agents infiltrated the guerrilla ranks and led the local commander in charge of the hostages, alias Cesar, to believe they were going to take them to Alfonso Cano, the guerrillas’ supreme leader.
The hostages, who had been divided in three groups, were taken to a rendezvous where two disguised helicopters piloted by Colombian military agents were waiting. Betancourt said her hands and feet were bound, which she called “humiliating.”
The pilots, she said, were posing as members of a relief organization, but “they were dressed like clowns,” wearing Che Guevara shirts, so she assumed they were rebels.
But when they were airborne, she looked behind her and saw Cesar, who had treated her so cruelly for so many years, lying on the floor blindfolded.
“The chief of the operation said, ‘We’re the national army. You’re free,’” she said. “The helicopter almost fell from the sky because we were jumping up and down, yelling, crying, hugging one another. We couldn’t believe it.” ” – Excerpt from Internation Herald Tribune.
I don’t think that any of the people involved in all this will ever read it, but Congratulations to Colombian Goverment and to Ingrid Betancourt, the 11 colombians and the three americans just a huge HUGE Welcome back!
Yes, I’m excited! I can’t help it! Even if the politics in my country are hard to understand, it’s amazing to see that somewhere in the world, governments are still fighting for freedom and justice.
One week after the plane…
So I’ve been missing mostly due to the lack of something interesting to blog about… I’m off from school for two weeks and there’s not much to do… some knitting and frogging (unraveling), some jewelry making, a bit of cooking and lots of airplane-related conversations….
At the moment is still close to big aircrafts… and the plan of moving it to Palmerola is still quite strong… For me it’s a terrible idea… and for quite a lot of people, but the president is not accepting his mistake… Lots of people are struggling now that all of the flights are landing in La Mesa (San Pedro Sula) Airport, but the government seems to be ignoring this fact…
The president of the congress said the other day that he didn’t care about the financial losses that the companies around the airport were suffering, that he only cared about the human lives… but I wonder, what about the lives of the employees? Of those that depend on the tips that the visitors, that arrive to Toncontin, give them. I’m guessing those lives aren’t as important…
Yesterday, the maleteros (the guys that offer to carry the luggage, i don’t know the correct word…) went to a meeting with the Major of Tegucigalpa, Ricardo Alvarez, along with other groups that are also having problems because of the closing of the aiport and in an interview their representative informed that their union had decided to send a group of them to San Pedro Sula’s Airport for seven days and the money they made would be shared among all of them and then another group will be sent.
I hope that the president realizes that he has taken the wrong decision and that it is not wise to act on impulse. If the airport was as dangerous as the government is claiming, I honestly don’t think that important airlines would let their planes land in Toncontin and it would have been shut years ago.
As for the airplane, well, it’s still there… and that is a whole different mess… causing huge problems with the traffic and angry people everywhere, specially the people that lives and works near the area where the plane crashed… because they said they were going to take up to 45 days to remove it… now, since they started to protest about it, they’ve said that they will take two weeks, but I passed by the area today and the plane is still there… and I don’t see much difference from the pictures from the day of the accident…
Tegucigalpa throughout disaster
Well, We’ve certainly had a couple of really difficult days lately…
Yesterday (Thursday 29th), it rained all day… and in the afternoon, when I finally watched the news I found out that it was because there was a hurricane (Hurricane Alma) getting close to Honduras from the Pacific Ocean… Quite scary…
Tegucigalpa was on yellow alert for most of the night, but apparently it changed during the night, because the news papers were quite scandalous… Thankfully, by the time I woke up, the hurricane had gone from a hurricane to a tropical depression…
But I’m guessing that bad things never come alone… I left for school at 9:30 am and about half an hour later, as I was parking at a café, my phone started ringing… it was my dad, to ask me what road I had used…(I tend to use the Anillo Periferico as I find it faster or at least the cars move at a faster pace… As opposed to the Boulevard of the Armed Forces, that as it might be supposedly closer to everywhere it does move far slower… ) So obviously I tell my dad that I took the Anillo and he then tells me that there has been an airplane crash on the road that I should have used to get to the boulevard of the armed forces…
I must say that I, still, am awestruck, the images are heartbreaking…
The Toncontin Airport is known as a very dangerous airport as it has a small runway and the landing is always quite bumpy. Though the last accident was almost over 11 years ago. So, it’s not as bad as many people make it seem. What I consider to be the biggest problem here, is how the government keeps stalling the plans that they apparently have to improve the runway, to make it larger.
According to what the news are saying everywhere, the airplane (Flight 390) attempted to land once, but couldn’t (bear in mind that, even if the hurricane was now a tropical depression we still have some rain), and tried again and landed too late and wasn’t able to stop on time.
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This is being written two days later…
Since I didn’t have Internet since the day of the accident because of it, I left the post unfinished and until today it seems to be working properly.
For what I’ve been told, the plane is still there… Though the technicians of Taca have removed the so-famous black box from the plane.
The death toll remains the same as of Friday (5), thanks god!
Among them, the President of the Banco Centroamericano De Integracion Economica, Harry Brautigam who died of heart failure shortly after leaving the plane; The wife of the Brazilian Ambassador Brian Michael Fraser Neele, Janneth Shantall; The pilot César D’Antonio. The other two, weren’t on the plane but on a car that was passing through the area at the moment of the accident. They were students of the UNAH (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras) and UTH (Universidad Tecnologica de Honduras).
Almost 80 people were injured, though most of them have already left the hospitals.
Among the passengers were also an Argentinean Tango group “Compañía Viejo Barrio de Argentina”, that was going to perform that very night at the II Festival Rotario de Música. And that, amazingly enough, did present their show, with clear bruises in their faces but obviously rejoiced after the initial shock.
Now the situation is a bit messy, with the president acting without much thought, and saying that the airport will be immediately closed to big aircrafts and that these will be sent to the Soto Cano base in Comayagua. To me, it doesn’t make much sense to act like this on pure desperation, for starters the Soto Cano base (Palmerola) is not ready to receive commercial air traffic, and the situation on the Toncontin Airport is not as desperate as it appears. Hopefully they will analize the current situation and act not upon desperation as it usually happens in my country… (like it happened with the famed stickers…) but on well considered and discussed plans.
May 1rst: Labour Day
Labour day is “is the commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886, when Chicago police fired on workers during a general strike for the eight hour day, killing a dozen demonstrators”.
I´ve always had this preconceived notion of the May 1rst Protest… mainly that it was a really dangerous mess… It was exactly the opposite… It actually seemed like a celebration; with people demanding things but still a celebration :-p
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