17 Facts About Jesse Freeston

Jesse Freeston was born on February 18,1985 and is a Canadian video journalist and filmmaker on social movements in North and Central America, the military-industrial complex, the global economic crisis, and undocumented migration.

Jesse Freeston is mostly known for exposing fraud in the Honduran election of 2009, and for his coverage of the 2010 G-20 summit in Toronto, where Freeston was attacked by an officer with the Toronto Police Service before having his microphone ripped from his hand by another officer.

Since the 2009 Honduran coup d'etat, Freeston has produced roughly 30 mini-documentaries on the coup and the rise of the National People's Resistance Front.

Jesse Freeston has covered the post-coup struggles of various groups such as the students and teachers, the feminists, the musicians and ousted president Zelaya's return to Honduras.

In November 2009, the Honduran coup regime held elections that, in Jesse Freeston's words, "laundered a military coup".

Jesse Freeston's conclusion was that no one could know for sure how many Hondurans voted, given that the election was run by the same military that overthrew the elected president five months earlier, and that all international election monitoring groups refused to observe the election.

On December 22,2009, Jesse Freeston was featured on Honduras' Radio Globo alongside ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and American University Anthropologist Adrienne Pine, where he spoke about electoral fraud.

In 2008, Jesse Freeston reported from El Salvador on Canadian mining company Pacific Rim's attempt to open an industrial gold mine in the Central American country.

Jesse Freeston documented how the company hired 'promoters' in communities opposed to mining, a move that led to violence in a phenomenon the Salvadoran social movement began to call "social contamination".

Jesse Freeston reported on cases of murder and torture of anti-mining activists, such as that of Gustavo Marcelo Rivera.

In 2009, Jesse Freeston covered the El Salvadoran elections from the country's capital, San Salvador.

Jesse Freeston documented the historic ascension to power of former guerrilla group FMLN and their presidential candidate, former journalist Mauricio Funes.

Jesse Freeston was himself the target of police violence when he was attacked during one of the demonstrations.

Jesse Freeston spoke about the event in a CTV interview after the incident.

Also following the G-20, Jesse Freeston released a mini-documentary based around the experience of lawyer Riali Johanesson during the mass arrest of anti-G20 activists in the working-class Toronto neighborhood of Parkdale.

In 2012, Jesse Freeston made three 30-minute documentaries for the Venezuelan government television propaganda network, Telesur.

Jesse Freeston is currently finishing a feature-length documentary, called Resistencia, on the farmer-led land occupation movement in Honduras' Lower Aguan Valley.