09/12/2021
From: Judy Ancel
Subject: Urgent Alert. Please do a simple task
Dear Cross Border Network Friends,
This one is very personal. Karen Spring, the Honduras Solidarity Network coordinator who lives in Tegucigalpa is a good friend. On Monday her husband, Edwin Espinal and his good friend Raul Alvarez are going on trial for alleged property damage at the Marriot Hotel in Tegucigalpa during demonstrations in January 2017 against the massive election fraud of Juan Orlando Hernandez for an illegal 2nd term as President.
Both Edwin and Raul have already spent 19 months in pretrial detention in a maximum-security prison run by drug gangs. Yet if convicted, they would face 15-30 years more, for the alleged crime of burning a couch. The evidence against them that they have been given is very shaky, but prosecutors have not turned over all the evidence, as they should have.
They are being tried in a court where the judges said they have no jurisdiction but are under orders from politicians to proceed. As the November elections approach despite any electoral reform to ensure that this one will be any less dishonest than the last, Edwin and Raul may be made an example to discourage people who may want to protest the probable election fraud. Edwin’s and Raul’s case is the first, of a number of cases from democracy protesters in 2017.
We need your help to push our members of Congress and the Senate who care about human rights and honest elections to weigh in with both the Honduran government and the U.S State Department.
There’s a really easy form to fill out here: https://afgj.salsalabs.org/2021edwinyraul/index.html to send a message to your member of Congress to ask them to make a couple of phone calls. Next week we’ll be back with more you can do.
For more information, listen to Karen’s Honduras Now podcast about the case here: https://podcasts.google.com/…/Y2U4MjgxYWItNzBjZC00YmY4LTgyZ…
Judy Ancel, The Cross Border Network, Kansas City
It’s not the rebels who create the world’s problems; it’s the world’s problems which create the rebels.
On September 13 and 14th, democracy defenders Edwin Espinal and Raúl Alvarez will stand trial on trumped up charges stemming from widespread protests that occurred in Honduras during the 2017 electoral crisis
