Lies and ODCA

The Organización Demócrata Cristiana de América (ODCA) met this weekend in Panama to discuss their philosophical document "Projection of Christian Democratic Thought and Central Political Humanism". ODCA is the parent organization of 36 political parties in 25 countries in Latin America. In Honduras, both the Nationalist and Christian Democrat parties are affiliated with it. We wrote about its core philosophy here.

Interesting press coverage of the event. In the world media, such as EFE and AFP, the coverage was all about how the meeting was to develop a unified approach to stopping populist governments, specifically the governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

The international press coverage is primarily of the statements of Milton Hernandez of the Popular Party of Panama.

"We have to rescue democratic values."

Also quoted was Jorge Suarez, a representative to the conference from Bolivia, who told the press:

"The populist projects have proposed much and nothing has come of them....They have been spending too much and now we are seeing a way to get out of them."

In Honduras, El Heraldo ran with the statements of its president, and Mexican Senator for the State of Puebla, Jorge Ocejo, who invented a reality full of discredited ideas and misinformation. In El Heraldo, the whole story was Ocejo's announcement that there was no coup in 2009 in Honduras.

In the fantasy world of Ocejo, there was no coup because the Congress had a discussion and decided they could not go along with Zelaya:

"There was no coup, no one came and entered and took the positions of government,"

said Ocejo. I'm not quite sure how that matches with the reality of the military kidnapping and forcibly exiling Zelaya, but Ocejo continued:

"he was trying to change the rules of the game that are already established in a democratic country to seek re-election as president."

We thoroughly debunked that claim at the time of the coup. Saying it now does not make it so. The "Cuarta Urna" question was about asking voters if they had any interest in voting on whether or not to have a constitutional convention. The Cuarta Urna was not about re-election. Yet Ocejo repeatedly raises this lie as his justification for why there was no coup.

What El Heraldo chose to make the focus of the story, of course, either merited only a single sentence in the major international press, such as the AFP, or went unmentioned.

Ocejo is entitled to opinions, and we've reported them faithfully here, but we've also thoroughly debunked them; they are lies.