Daily Archives: 2010-04-27

English, Honduras

I Accuse Hugo Chávez of Conspiracy to Murder

Already January 31st I presented the evidence, but since nobody seems to have noticed, I’ll present them again with a more direct headline. A video (see below) released by the “resistencia” itself, contains footage from outside the airport on July 5th, the day that Zelaya was allegedly trying to return by airplane. As I reported July 8th, Hugo Chavez had apparently planned for riots resulting in a martyr being created.

While the Zelaya-supporters accused the military of having shot a young man in the neck, my forensic analysis of the video tells a different story. Analyzing the spectral content of the sound of the shot, as well as the echoes in combination with the terrain and surrounding buildings (the images gave away the location), I was able to conclude that shots were fired in the field of view of the camera below.

Screen shot from 2 seconds before a shot is heard nearby, with a double echo.
Screenshot from 2 seconds before a shot is heard nearby in the video.

The young man was killed very close to that place, but the exact location is unknown, since the rioters moved the body before the police could secure the crime scene. Furthermore, it is impossible to know if one of the shots fired in the video was the one that killed him. But this is not relevant.

Based on the evidence we now have, we can conclude that someone was carrying a gun, firing it among the rioters. The 19-year old victim was hit in his neck, i.e., from behind, while he faced the airfield. The soldiers on the airfield were not armed with live ammunition (see air photo below for location).

The inferred location of the shooter based on the estimated location of the camera, and the echo paths, the longer of which is shown.
The inferred location of the shooter based on the estimated location of the camera, and the echo paths, the longer of which is shown.

We also have the photo evidence of Hugo Chávez, which revealed that he planned this. Although we cannot say who pulled the trigger, we can deduce that Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez planned the murder. His stated purpose – on the whiteboard – was to create a martyr, and unfortunately many of the bloggers in the world fell for the trick.

This is a time domain plot of the sound on the video with the inaudible echo (1) and the audible echo (2) indicated.
This is a time domain plot of the sound on the video. First comes the directly transmitted sound from the explosion, followed by an inaudible echo (1) and an audible echo (2). The x-scale shows sample number, with 44100 samples per second. The y-scale is sound pressure in arbitrary units.

Here is the propaganda video from which the above scene was taken (see this post for a comment on its other content):

English

Mob Violence in Nicaragua is a Coup d’État

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A violent street mob in Nicaragua is trying to prevent the democratically elected Congress from convening in order to declare an action by the president illegal. The police is not stopping the mob violence.

This is the first step towards a coup d’état. The international community must take steps now to stop the erosion of democracy. The Organization of American States, OAS, has tools at its disposal for intervening. Failure to intervene now would be disastrous for the credibility of OAS; the little that is left after it assisted Honduras’s president Manuel Zelaya in his coup plans last year.

If the mob is not stopped, and the Congress is not able to carry out their duty, then the only tool left to prevent a coup d’état by the president is to use coup d’état-like methods against the president. As I have argued here that is defensible, but it will lead to the international community turning against the democratic institutions, instead defending the wannabe coupster Ortega.

As those who have followed the development in Honduras closely know, that is just what happened there last year. A mob headed by the president stole ballots that were in the custody of the court, which was trying to prevent a coup d’état. The international community should have taken forceful action against Zelaya at that point, but they failed. That was, as the kids say, the “epic fail” of the conflict.

My call to the international community is to take forceful action against Daniel Ortega’s government now:

-Regard this event as a full-blown attempt at a creeping coup d’état, because if you don’t, you will face another Epic Fail in Central America!