US Revokes Diplomatic Visas of Honduran Coup Members

Honduran First Lady Xiomara Castro de Zelaya has been let through military roadblocks...

Xiomara with Mels' mother is about to join Mel at Nicaraguan border...

A caravan of 400 cars follow Xiomara...

The state department has four additional visas targeted for cancellation

EU is preparing to cancels visas of ALL Coup members...

The Coup is losing support...

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I think you helped shame some people into doing the right thing.

The US is only cancelling their diplomatic visas. If they have tourist visas they'll still be able to go to the US.

They would have to apply for a tourist visa and go through the whole process of obtaining one; I think it would be rather difficult to receive one after having a Type A Diplomatic visa revoked.

"To qualify for an A-1 or A-2 visa, you must be traveling to the United States on behalf of your national government to engage solely in official activities for that government.  The fact that there may be government interest or control in a given organization is not in itself the defining factor in determining if you qualify for an A visa; the particular duties or services that will be performed, must be governmental in character or nature. Government officials traveling to the United States to perform non-governmental functions of a commercial nature or traveling, as tourists, require the appropriate visa, and do not qualify for diplomatic visas.



Foreign officials who are traveling to the United States on official business must obtain an A visa prior to their entry. They cannot travel on tourist’s visas, or visa free under the Visa Waiver Program."

See: US Citizenship and Immigration Services

Tiempo has stories identifying two of the people who had diplo visas revoked: Tomas Arita, the Supreme Court judge who signed the order to arrest Zelaya, and Jose Alfredo Saavedra, the president of the Honduran Congress (elected to replace Micheletti in that post).

Surely one of the other two is Micheletti himself...

I guess, John refers to the event in which an indivual may have two visa types, per say B1/B2 and F1/F2, Turist/business and Student/Spouse respectively. If one get revoked one of them, recall F1/F2 for example. One can still go to USA with the B1/B2 visa. I went through this experince 3 years ago, and after 1 hour in Homeland Security questioning, I was let in.

Ok, they got ther A1/A2 visas revoked but they can still get in the case they already have a B1/B" visa, as long as they don´t engage in official govermental functions.

It´s only a physological victory so far.

Hector, why would these guys have B/B1 visas at all? They've never needed them because they've had diplomatic visas up until now.  This is a significant move, especially if it's part of a set of other actions increasing the pressure.

More pressure, and interesting timing:

If there's one set of government institutions in Colombia to be praised for their performance the past few years, instead of the Special Forces, maybe it should be the independent judiciary and the prosecutors, who along with journalists have been pursuing the links between right wing death squad narco-paramilitaries and the Uribe-allied conservative national and local governments.

Colombian politicians actively sought support of the country's right wing paramilitary death squads and not the other way around, Prosecutor General Mario Iguaran said on Tuesday.

"The paramilitaries did not seek politicians but the politicians sought [the help of] paramilitaries," Iguaran said during his annual accountability speech.

According to the PG, his office is currently investigating 26 congressmen, 12 governors, 166 mayors, 58 councilmen and 13 deputies for their alleged links to paramilitary groups.

las otras dos personas que les revocaron la visa son Ramon Custodio, lider de los derechos humanos en Honduras, aleneado con el golpe de estado, y la otra persona es el General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez.

The Sweatshop Cartel speaks up! I guess everyone being on strike makes them nervous; possibly also the specter of a better organized citizenry gets them hot under the collar.

That a portion of the US business sector is coming in now, rather on the side of Zeleya, is interesting. They also are looking to Clinton, which makes sense, since she was Wall Street's choice. (The Clinton from WalMart) Although I also see them pitching to her as a way of minimizing Obama - seeing if they can get an independent foreign policy out of the Clinton State Department.

I mistrust Senator Clinton's political movtives in many things, and foreign policy is one area for sure. What does the DLC wing of Wall Street want? And why?

But Obama's all about divide and conquer. If he can play with the gopista's allies, get them somewhat neutralized, then he forestalls them uniting against him. I don't feel that Hillary has that finesse, although she's clearly willing to get all Kissenger on people. (I think the power analysis done by her faction is flawed and that makes her less effective.) Also this might be a way to flush out some of the crap that Cheney and Bush burrowed into the body of offical Washingtondom. Give these folks a little rope, and when their stuff fails, ERK! (This seems to be some of what Al is suggesting)

Clearly the old cold war control systems are still of some power there. This whole coup is cold war standard.

Al said "I doubt very much he has any legal footing for that argument because immigration laws give zero rights to foreign citizens on US soil."

Come on, Al -- you know better than that.  THere are privacy laws about revealing immigration information.  "zero rights" is not true.  I'm disappointed, Al. 

Claude - Show me the law - or at least a citation to it - that forbids the US government from naming whose visa it revoked.

In the mid-1990s, when then Colombian Attorney General Gustavo de Greiff had his US visa pulled simply because he had called for the legalization of drugs as the only way to defeat the cocaine mafias (it was de Greiff who led the capture of Pablo Escobar of the Medellin crime organization), Washington made no such secret of it. Rather, it made a big show of it.

A couple of years later, I met de Greiff in Mexico City, where he had become ambassador in 1997. I went back to New York to look for a lawyer who would take his case. They all told me the same (and I always speak with the best lawyers): that as a foreign national, he had no rights upon which to hang any kind of lawsuit.

You say there is a "right to privacy." I'd like to see the law that says so. Unless you can cite it then I'll be the disappointed one.

What happens Nell is that most of the executive banch of the coup goverment don´t have A1/A2 visas. Pay carefull attention that Micheletti (Liberal Party) has surrounded himself of National Party militants. Zelaya has only Liberal Party members in his goverment. For instance, Deputy Foreign Minister Martha Lorena Casco (National Party) is usurping this ministry; therefore, she doesn´t have diplomatic visa but has tourist visa.

Héctor - Although you responded to another commenter, I'm going to weigh in on your latest:

Since nobody has claimed that what is reported here as a partial revocation of a few (four to be exact) visas is anything more than that, your continued Eey ore Syndrome is telling.

I've been around long enough to recognize it when I see it: Activists or commentators who can never recognize any progress at all as positive because it doesn't immediately solve a problem.

You're upset because the revocation of four visas isn't enough. Nobody said it was enough! But is it a step in the right direction, one that has demoralized the coup supporters and suggested that more turns of the screw are coming if the coup doesn't cede? Yes, it is.

I marvel at how some activists and academics are never satisfied, and they wish to share their misery with all the world. I don't know what you people want, frankly. Even if today Zelaya were restored with full powers, you guys would be bummed out. Truth is, even if whatever kind of utopia you favor were to break out all over the world you would fast become disillusioned and wish to share that downer with all.

For some, it's that you can't stand winning. You think it's wrong, that winners are evil, that only losers are pure. I've called that, for many years, "beautiful loser syndrome." For others, your heads explode anytime that Washington doesn't fulfill the role of the Great Satan, responsible for all the woes of the hemisphere and the world. No positive step can ever be acknowledged because it fucks with your calcified ideological framework and you have lost the ability to think outside the box.

No revolution has ever brought utopia because freedom and justice are constant struggles. Those of us who acknowledge that and still fight for revolutions understand that the struggle is permanent, it is life long, there will be no magic bullet. You ought to study what happened to the Makhnovishnas of the Ukraine - who won for themselves an anarcho-syndicalist republic for 18 months during the Russian revolution only to be brutally repressed by the early Soviet. Do you think that struggle has somehow ended in Venezuela or Bolivia or Ecuador or Nicaragua or elsewhere simply because the people elected governments of the left? Nonsense! La lucha siempre sigue... y sigue... y sigue..

Those of us from the organizer left understand that it is a constant struggle, and therefore we welcome every step forward, no matter how small, as long as it is in the better direction.

In that light, does the revocation of four visas topple the coup? Of course not. You're behaving as if somebody said it did. But does it improve the chances that the coup can be toppled? It absolutely does. Because it emboldens the Honduran civil resistance and demoralizes the coup supporters.

The other thing that loses my respect is the tendency in certain corners of the left - where I take a back seat to nobody, and have the scar tissue and mileage to say so - to want the coup fixed "by Washington" when the far better scenario is that the Honduran people themselves do it. That is the path to greater human progress: not asking permission or for salvation from above, but by doing it ourselves.

Come help write it, help pay to circulate it and help do more then sit here and talk about it.

Constitution of Honduras 

We the People of Honduras do hereby grant our government a monopoly on the use of force and violence.  But with the understanding, that such deadly force shall have absolute limits as set forth in this our Constitution, the organized will of the People.

(1) This Constitution derives its just powers by the consent of people.  For the highest law of the land is the organized will of the people, and a Constitution is but a transcript of this dynamic, on going and ever changing will.  Therefore this Constitution may be changed at any time by a majority vote of the people.

(2) The highest priority of government is to protect the people from those with power and excessive wealth.  And to achieve this goal, government shall have all power necessary to prevent anyone from enriching themselves upon the misery of another.

(3) Equality is equal access to power, and to achieve this no one shall be discriminated against because of their religion, color, ancestry, education or level of intelligence. 

(4) It is a self-evident truth that all men are not created equal.  For all are given a different ability to earn income as a test, to see if they pass their excessive wealth down to those less fortunate where it belongs.

(5) No one shall be allowed to have excessive wealth while workers lack a living wage or others suffer want of food, shelter or clothing.

(6) All lands in Honduras belong to the people and shall be divided equally as agreed to by a majority vote of the people.

Gracias!  Custodio has confirmed that his visa's been revoked. 

Has Gen. Vasquez?  Can you provide a link to confirm?

My money is still on Micheletti being at the top of yesterday's list.  He's denied having been notified of anything, but he's lied so often and so brazenly (remember when he said Taiwan and Israel had recognized his government?) that this non-denial denial means nothing.

The Nike-Gap-Knight letter, sent Monday, seems to have been the straw that broke the State Dept. camel's back on the visas.