On the plane back from Panama City a couple weeks ago, I sat next to a Salvadoran woman in her 40s from Virginia. We spoke a bit about Honduras, which she hadn't been following closely, and then she told me about a problem she had with human rights groups in El Salvador. "They only want to protect the criminals," she said. "They don't care about the police. They don't let the police do their jobs." This narrative, perpetuated by neoliberal mano dura security forces and the mass media they are aligned with in Central America, is so pervasive that it has come to be doxa. Doxic and toxic. The funny thing in Honduras is that this narrative is so strong that even the totally ineffectual and useless Human Rights Unit head in the Attorney General's office, put there like Ana Pineda to whitewash the Lobo regime's crimes (in that every time a question of human rights violations surfaces, Llorens can say Lobo's doing great-he set up the first ministry of human rights ever!), has herself been accused of hindering the police. When Sandra Ponce opened an investigation of the recent police massacre of 7 alleged gang members in Ciudad Planeta, Lobo's Deputy Security Secretary Armando Calidonio accused her of hindering police work.

InSight, based (sadly) at my university (where I love working, but fear I am rapidly losing my shot at tenure), recently published a piece by Jose Luis Flores called Honduras Mass Grave Found, Amid Gang's Peace Offer, in which great weight is given to government claims that the mass grave recently found in La Lima is a Mara 18 burial ground for its victims. InSight further authoritatively states that this undermines Mara 18's attempts at negotiations with the police.

Anything InSight publishes, as well as any claims by Security Minister Oscar Alvarez, should be viewed with deep suspicion, if not discarded out of hand as pro-neoliberal crime control propaganda. A large part, if not a majority, of so-called "street violence" in Honduras is perpetrated by the police force and military, which regularly orchestrate massacres that are then blamed on gang members (and in which the victims are posthumously blamed for their deaths for having been involved in gangs or drugs themselves, when this is more often than not patently false). Álvarez is likely behind the El Porvenir massacre of '03, the Choloma bus massacre of '04, and more recent massacres in San Pedro (the shoe factory last year, and this March outside UNAH-VS), among others, where there is substantial forensic evidence that police were the perpetrators. In each case, there was an immediate political or fiscal-political objective related to strengthening the police force.

InSight, funded by the Open Society, aligned with WOLA, and completely in sync with U.S. policy initiatives that further the militarization of police throughout Central America, is not on the side of the Honduran people. Their reporting is bad, and often counterfactual, and if we are going to take seriously the work of being in solidarity with Hondurans, we need to start thinking more critically than the State Department. The criminalization of poverty, which Álvarez was behind in 2003 with Lobo's Anti-Gang law, laid the foundation for the criminalization of the Resistance with Álvarez's "Anti-terrorist" law of last November. In 2004, Álvarez, cited here as if he were a reliable source, claimed that Al Qaeda was infiltrating MS-13.

We don't know who killed those people, or who put their dead bodies in the mass grave. The Honduran State, which has recently altered forensic evidence to hide its role in Ilse Velasquez's killing, cannot be trusted in the slightest to provide a reliable analysis, and as far as I'm concerned, the last thing we should be doing is believing without extensive evidence more of the same propaganda that has been falsely used for over a decade to criminalize poverty and youth and to justify an invisible genocide, when there is so much at stake for Álvarez's murderous ministry and the Obama administration's foreign policy objectives of creating the Central America Regional Security Initiative and strengthening the Mérida Initiative.

Gang members are not angels, but there is a much larger agenda here. Even if somehow, a reliable external forensic investigation were to find that so-called gang members were to blame for these deaths and burials, for InSight to parrot the de facto Honduran government's argument that this disqualifies representatives of Mara 18 from trying to find a peaceable outcome through negotiation, represents a total, pathetic lack of critical analysis. What right does the de facto government have to negotiate, except via U.S.-funded murderous military force? Lobo was not democratically elected. The police force enjoys impunity for the hundreds of well-documented targeted assassinations it has carried out in the past two years alone, let alone the past decade plus. Soros money buys you an audience in Washington. Sadly, it does not buy you brains, or a heart.