BOGOTA – The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders said Wednesday that the junta which took power in Honduras after the June 28 military coup is abusing rights and stoking xenophobia against migrants from neighboring Nicaragua.

At a Bogota press conference to present the Spanish version of the organization’s 2009 annual report, the director of the Observatory’s Guatemala unit, Claudia Samayoa, said that Nicaraguans make up the majority of the 189 foreign nationals expelled from Honduras since the ouster of President Mel Zelaya.

She said Honduran security forces have killed at least three people under the “interim” government of erstwhile Congress speaker Roberto Micheletti.

“We manage to detect that 35 people have been wounded, some of them seriously, and three others executed in the context of this dispersals of (pro-Zelaya) protests,” Samayoa said.

The activist added that Honduran security forces “are detaining and deporting Nicaraguan citizens” based on the junta’s expressed expectation of war with the neighboring country, whose government strongly supports Zelaya.

Human rights defenders in Honduras have been subject to surveillance, monitoring and arbitrary arrest since the coup, she said.

“In the demonstrations in which there are processes of resistance to the coup there are roundups and they are detaining human rights defenders in a massive way,” Samayoa said.

She said that five of the 135 human rights activists whose names appeared on a list seen in the hands of a Honduran intelligence official later turned up dead.

Samayoa likewise noted the junta’s muzzling of independent media outlets and said that one journalist who refused to tow the regime’s line, Gabriel Fino, was slain to send “a message to reporters.” EFE