by the El Reportero’s news services
ex Presidente Manuel Zelaya
The Honduran Electoral Supreme Court (TSE) allowed the registration of new party Partido Libertad y Refundacion (Freedom and Refoundation, LIBRE), led by former president Manuel Zelaya, to become the seventh political institution in the country.
LIBRE fulfilled all the established requisites in the Honduran electoral law, gathering more than 42,000 required signatures, presenting structures in the 18 departments of the nation and in more than 50 percent of the municipalities, so now, it can start the formal registration to participate in the future electoral processes.
This new party wants to take Xiomara Castro, wife of Zelaya, as the only candidate to the presidency, and gathers all the groups opposed to the coup in June 28, 2009 in Honduras.
The Morazanic Information Net published that for the first time in Honduras, electoral participation of a movement coming from the people, has been assured.
“With the union of political strength and social struggle, LIBRE and the National Popular Resistance Front (Fnrp) will be towards the power,” said the Morazanic Information Net.
In October 2011, LIBRE presented more than 80,000 signatures requesting its inscription as a legal political party before the TSE authorities, together with documents showing its municipal, department and national structures, statutes, programs and constitution act.
When the TSE official resolution official TSE was known, by means of which the inscription and recognition is legalized and its authorities at national level, they will just wait for the publication of that resolution in the Official Gazette, with which it would be come to request the legal personality.
It assures that with the inscription of that new political force it is qualified for its participation in the general elections and this way to dispute the power to the traditional parties of the oligarchy.
Last week, TSE approved the request of registry of Partido Anticorrupción (PAC) that postulates television announcer Salvador Nasralla for the Presidency of the Republic.
Until then, the Liberal, National, Innovation and Unidad (PINU), Christian Democracy (DC) and Democratic Unification were enrolled legally (UD).
Guatemala: Former soldier involved in massacre sentenced
Guatemalan ex soldier Pedro Pimentel was sentenced on Tuesday to 6,060 years in prison in a trial in which he was prosecuted for a massacre in an indigenous community in 1982.
The three judges dismissed the plea of innocence of the defendant and his lawyers by confirming the veracity of the evidence presented by the prosecutors and the witnesses’ testimonies about his involvement in the events.
Pimentel was sentenced to 30 years in prison for each of the 201 peasants massacred from Dec. 6 to 8, 1982, in the village of Dos Erres, 8in the northern department of Peten, and 30 others for crimes against humanity.
However, technically, the penalty for the former member of the Kaibiles, the elite force of the Guatemalan Army, is 50 years, because it is the maximum sentence allowed in the Criminal Code.
The Dos Erres massacre is considered one of the most famous killings committed by the military, among dozens of them that took place during the domestic armed conflict (1960-1996).
