Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes. The first one, Antonio Trejo Cabrera, was a lawyer for the MARCA, a group of campesinos in the Aguán Valley who had been pursuing an exclusively legal strategy. They were trying to reclaim land that had been illegally seized by Miguel Facussé, the richest and most powerful man in the country.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Well, this is a question that goes way back. If you cut off the cash, then you don't have a lever. But this kind of argument was precisely what was used in Brazil in the late sixties and early seventies in the name of constructive engagement, and in Argentina, where the U.S. would continue to support the Argentinian police and military as they were killing thousands and thousands of people under terrifying circumstances.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  I have enormous respect for Mr. Blackwell, whom I have met, and I also saw that exact quote from his previous testimony. Many of the things Mr. Blackwell said in his earlier testimony, I completely agree with. That quote did pop out to me as well. I find it completely out of the realm of the possible that the three parties could reach consensus, because we're talking about a ruling party that has increasingly run roughshod over the constitution.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes. First to the charter cities or so-called model cities, which have been proposed by figures outside of Honduras. They would create economic and political zones in which the Honduran constitution wouldn't apply, including things like labour law, and you name it: the legal system would not apply.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  No, there hasn't been any evidence of this and, of course, this is what we're all watching for. He had been mostly silent about Honduras in the last two years. The only signal we have had is when Obama was in Costa Rica last week, where a delivered speech before all of the Central American presidents.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Yes. There's a variety of groups that have been raising alarms increasingly. I would speak first of the Organization of American States, which has regularly issued alarms. In particular, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has heard testimony from the peasants and the campesinos in the Aguán Valley.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you. In terms of what other countries can do, I think the current approach of the United States, which is to continue to say...[Technical difficulty--Editor]. I think that while efforts have been made by the United States and other governments to pressure the Honduran government to respect the rule of law and to increase prosecutorial capacity and clean up the police, those have been overwhelming failures so far.

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Many of these problems go way back, for decades and decades, in Honduran history, and many of them have been made dramatically worse by the illegal coup, which opened the door to spectacular corruption and the near complete decline...[Technical difficulty--Editor]. Some of these questions go way back to the control of the Honduran economy by...

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Thank you so much. May I ask a procedural question? Do I wait for each question to be translated before I answer it, or is the whole thing translated after that?

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Okay. Thanks so much. Let me just start off by saying thank you so much for inviting me to speak. It's really an enormous honour. I want to start by saying that, and also how grateful I am to the committee for caring about the human rights situation in Honduras, which is so terrible.