GREG GRANDIN [in New York City] Greg Grandin teaches history at New York University. He is the author of
Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New
Imperialism and The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War.
He said today: “Obama needs to align his position with the rest of the
American republics, and not just express ‘concern’ about events in Honduras,
but repudiate the coup and its plotters, and demand the restoration of Manuel
Zelaya to the presidency.”

JUAN ALMENDARES
Almendares is a Honduran medical doctor and award-winning human rights
activist. He is the president of the Honduran Peace Committee. He appeared on
Democracy Now this morning. He said today: “What we are looking [at] now is,
we are going back to [a] repressive situation. Some of the advisers of the
[new] government have been perpetrators, torture perpetrators, of the 1980s.
Some of these people think like Pinochet, and they are comparing Zelaya with
Salvador Allende. And we have here in Honduras a different situation. We have
a government who were doing not a referendum; they were doing just a survey,
a simple survey, to ask people whether they want to have a constitutional
reform. But we have an alliance between the very powerful class in this
country [and] the military.”

Video is available at:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/29/coup_in_honduras_military_ousts_president

MARK WEISBROT, [via Dan Beeton]
Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Weisbrot is
the author of numerous papers and articles on Latin America available at
www.cepr.net . He said today: “There was no excuse for the Honduran military
to intervene, regardless of the constitutional issues at stake. Today’s
proposed referendum was non-binding and merely consultative. Thus no one
could argue that allowing it to go forward could cause irreparable harm.”

ANDRES THOMAS CONTERIS, http://nonviolentaction.net/?p=290
Conteris is scheduled to co-lead a delegation to Honduras co-sponsored by
Nonviolence International and CodePink this week. He said today: “It is vital
for the international community to support the call by the democratically
elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, to engage in nonviolent civil
disobedience to support the rule of law and the will of the people of
Honduras.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020 or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167