Dangers in US ambivalence to ditched Honduran democracy

[Judi Lynn]

Friday, August 14, 2009
Dangers in US ambivalence to ditched Honduran democracy

OPINION: If Honduras were Iran or Burma, the assault on its democracy would be a global cause celebre. Instead, Obama just sits idly on his hands, writes SEUMAS MILNE

IF HONDURAS were in another part of the world – or if it were, say, Iran or Burma – the global reaction to its current plight would be very different. Right now, in the heart of what the United States traditionally regarded as its backyard, thousands of pro-democracy activists are risking their lives to reverse the coup that ousted the country’s elected president. Six weeks after the left-leaning Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped at dawn from the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa and expelled over the border, strikes are closing schools and grounding flights as farmers and trade unionists march in defiance of masked soldiers and military roadblocks.

The coup-makers have reached for the classic South American takeover textbook. Demonstrators have been shot, more than a thousand people are reported arrested, television and radio stations have been closed down, and trade unionists and political activists murdered. But although official international condemnation has been almost universal, including by the US government, barely a finger has been lifted outside Latin America to restore the elected Honduran leadership.

Of course, Latin America has long been plagued by military coups – routinely backed by the US – against elected governments. And Honduras, the original “banana republic”, has been afflicted more than most. But all that was supposed to have changed after the end of the cold war: henceforth, democracy would reign. And, as Barack Obama declared, there was to be a “new chapter” for the Americas of “equal partnership”, with no return to the “dark past”.

But, as the coup regime of Roberto Micheletti digs in without a hint of serious sanction from the country’s powerful northern sponsor, there is every sign of a historical replay. In a grotesquely unequal country of seven million people, famously owned and controlled by 15 families, in which more than two-thirds live below the poverty line, the oligarch rancher Zelaya was an unlikely champion of social advance.

More:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0814/1224252546730.html