Honduras crisis talks deadlocked over Zelaya return

[Joanne98]

Source: Reuters

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (Reuters) - Prospects for a breakthrough in Honduras' political crisis looked dim on Sunday, with negotiators for deposed President Manuel Zelaya and coup leaders deadlocked over his proposed return to power.

After nearly 10 hours of closed-door meetings on Saturday at the residence of Costa Rican President and mediator Oscar Arias, negotiators appeared no closer to an agreement. Talks were to continue later on Sunday.

Envoys sent by Zelaya, a leftist ousted in a June 28 military coup, and interim leader Roberto Micheletti said the main stumbling block was Arias' proposal that Zelaya be reinstated and form a government giving his rivals a share of power.

Zelaya has pledged to return to Honduras even if the talks fail, but a previous attempt was blocked by the military and sparked violent clashes between his supporters and soldiers that left one protester dead.

From exile in Nicaragua, Zelaya says he is coming back "one way or another", a position that worries the U.S. government


Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1749101420090719

---

If Clinton had anything to do with this coup she's going to have to RESIGN!

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. By all accounts, the US certainly knew it was coming

[Robbien]

2. A good article on this in the UK Independent

The international group of right-wingers who staged the coup d'état against the democratic government of Honduras on 28 June are watching their plot fast unravel.

There is stiffening international opposition to their protégé, Roberto Micheletti, who, in his capacity as President of Congress, ordered President Manuel Zelaya to be expelled from the country by plane in his pyjamas.

. . .

As the Acting President's support shrinks at home, the plotters are lobbying to have Mr Micheletti shored up from abroad by means of a declaration of legitimacy from the US Congress. That scheme is not prospering. Enrique Ortez Colindres, the supremely undiplomatic octogenarian appointed foreign minister by Mr Micheletti, has had to resign, but not before he called Barack Obama "a negrito who knows nothing about anything", on Honduran television.

For some of the plotters it is their second attempt to overthrow an elected reformist government in Latin America: the group includes prominent figures involved in the 2002 ousting of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who was kidnapped for 48 hours and sent to a Caribbean island before being restored to office after widespread popular protest.

The temporary toppling of Mr Chavez was welcomed by the Bush administration, the Blair government and the International Monetary Fund. This weekend, the US seems destined for a replay of 2002's Operation Chaotic Coup. Amid a stream of contradictory messages it is clear that last month's putsch against Mr Zelaya was brewed up in Washington by a group of extreme conservatives from Venezuela, Honduras and the US. They appear to have hidden their plans from the White House, but hoped eventually to bounce President Obama into backing them and supporting the "interim president". They are making much of Mr Zelaya's alliance with Mr Chavez, whose sense of nationalism challenges US hegemony.

Financial backing for the coup is identified by some as coming from the pharmaceutical industry, which fears Mr Zelaya's plans to produce generic drugs and distribute them cheaply to the impoverished majority in Honduras, who lack all but the most primitive health facilities. Others point to big companies in the telecommunications industry opposed to Hondutel, Honduras's state-owned provider. Parallels are being made with ITT, the US telecommunications company that offered the Nixon government funds for the successful overthrow of President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973.

A key figure is Robert Carmona-Borjas, a Venezuelan active against Mr Chavez in 2002, who later fled to the US. He runs the Washington-based Arcadia, which calls itself "an innovative 'next generation' anti-corruption organisation". Its website carries three video clips alleging, without evidence, that Mr Zelaya, his associates and Hondutel are deeply corrupt. Behind Arcadia are the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), the well-funded overseas arm of the Republican Party. Currently active among the Uighurs of western China, the NED has this year funnelled $1.2m (£740,000) for "political activity" in Honduras.

The focus of attention in the campaign against Mr Zelaya is now on the office of Senator John McCain, the defeated US presidential candidate, who is chairman of the IRI, takes an interest in telecoms affairs in the US Congress and has benefited handsomely from campaign contributions from US telecoms companies – which are said to have funded the abortive 2002 coup against Mr Chavez.

Mr McCain's former legislative counsel, John Timmons, arranged the visit of Micheletti supporters to Washington on 7 July where they met journalists at the National Press Club "to clarify any misunderstandings about Honduras's constitutional process and ... the preservation of the country's democratic institutions".

Meanwhile, within the US administration, difficulties in co-ordination have emerged between the State Department and the White House, with the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, issuing a low-key condemnation of the coup which was quickly superseded by stronger words from Mr Obama. The President called for Mr Zelaya's reinstatement, which Mrs Clinton had failed to demand.

The conservative-minded Mrs Clinton retains John Negroponte, an ambassador to Honduras under Ronald Reagan, as an adviser. He also represented George W Bush at the UN and in Baghdad. Democratic Senator Chris Dodd attacked Mr Negroponte in 2001 for drawing a veil over atrocities committed in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, by military forces trained by the US. Mr Dodd claimed that the forces had been "linked to death squad activities such as killings, disappearances and other human rights abuses".

much more

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/democracy-hangs-by-a-thread-in-honduras-1752315.html

[Vidar]

3. My God, Negroponte's advising Hillary?

[Judi Lynn]

4. "Death Squads" Negroponte. Horrific, isn't it? NEVER would have expected this.

http://www.musicismysanctuary.com.nyud.net:8090/HeadsUp/Nosferatu_door_in_the_castle.jpg http://www.sourcewatch.org.nyud.net:8090/images/d/d5/John_D._Negroponte.jpg
What's the point of having elections, if you merely keep the same war criminals in place for decades? The hold-overs in the State Department should have been on trial long ago. Otto Reich is ALSO embedded in this wreckage, a man who ran propaganda from the Office of Public Diplomacy for Reagan during Iran/Contra and was found by Congress to be employed ILLEGAL propaganda measures on the taxpayers' dime to keep everyone misinformed about the nature of that conflict.

He's (Otto Reich) so involved in this he had to take the time a couple of weeks ago to place his own disclaimer in the Miami Herald insisting he is not responsible for the Honduran coup. Oh, you betcha.

[Vidar]

7. I agree. Thanks Judi. Nosferatu is appropriate.

[LiberalLovinLug]

5. Good article

Hillary is even more right wing than first glance. Thank gawd she's not the President.

I wonder if this is what Cheney's secret CIA group has been working on this last 6 months?

[Selatius]

6. This is very bad news for American democracy.

I can imagine one day the incestuous relationship between politicians and corporate leaders leading to a coup here.

[Peace Patriot]

8. "violent clashes between his supporters and soldiers that left one protester dead."

Rotters is as bad as the Associated Pukes.*

The Honduran military, using rifles paid for by US tax dollars, open fired on a crowd of peaceful Zelaya supporters at the airport, killing one youngster and wounding many.

It is not accurate to say that "violent clashes" occurred "between" the armed and the unarmed, and that these "clashes" "left one protestor dead." The armed SOLDIERS KILLED a protestor, a youngster of 16. They aimed their lethal weapons AT the unarmed crowd, and fired. "Clashes" don't kill people. Soldiers with rifles, ordered to shoot, kill people.

This sentence is deceitfully written to make it seem like an unarmed crowd pushing at a fence, or even throwing a few rocks, is equal to a squadron of armed troops, and that somehow the death by a bullet through the head, and other bullet wounds, just HAPPENED.

Lord Almighty, I hate this kind of 'reporting.'

------------------------

*(http://www.borev.net/2009/07/heres_an_interesting_question.html )

[Judi Lynn]

10. "Clashes" doesn't connect with reality. The crowd was, as you said, entirely PEACEFUL.

They went there completely unarmed, at great risk to themselves, to lend support to their elected government.

Reuters (as well as A.P., New York Times, L. A. Times, even A.F.P., etc.) shows determination to fully misrepresent every story they cover, in favor of a hard-right spin. Someone really is afraid of democracy in Latin America.

[Robbien]

13. U.S. Continues to Train Honduran Soldiers

A controversial facility at Ft. Benning, Ga. -- formerly known as the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas -- is still training Honduran officers despite claims by the Obama administration that it cut military ties to Honduras after its president was overthrown June 28, NCR has learned.

A day after an SOA-trained army general ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya at gunpoint, President Barack Obama stated that "the coup was not legal" and that Zelaya remained "the democratically elected president."

The Foreign Operations Appropriations Act requires that U.S. military aid and training be suspended when a country undergoes a military coup, and the Obama administration has indicated those steps have been taken.

However, Lee Rials, public affairs officer for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the successor of SOA, confirmed Monday that Honduran officers are still being trained at the school.

. . .

The school trained 431 Honduran officers from 2001 to 2008, and some 88 were projected for this year, said Rials, who couldn't provide their names.

Since 2005, the Department of Defense has barred the release of their names after it was revealed that the school had enrolled well-known human rights abusers.

The general who overthrew Zelaya -- Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez -- is a two-time graduate of SOA, which critics have nicknamed the "School of Coups" because it trained so many coup leaders, including two other Honduran graduates, General Juan Melgar Castro and General Policarpo Paz Garcia.

Vasquez is not the only SOA graduate linked to the current coup or employed by the de facto government. Others are:

* Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, the head of the Honduran air force, who arranged to have Zelaya flown into exile in Costa Rica;
* Gen. Nelson Willy Mejia Mejia, the newly appointed director of immigration, who is not only an SOA graduate, but a former SOA instructor. One year after he was awarded the U.S. Meritorious Service Medal, he faced charges in connection with the infamous death squad, Battalion 3-16, for which he was an intelligence officer.
* Col. Herberth Bayardo Inestroza Membreño, the Honduran army's top lawyer who admitted that flying Zelaya into exile was a crime, telling the Miama Herald that ''In the moment that we took him out of the country, in the way that he was taken out, there is a crime," but it will be justified.
* Lt. Col. Ramiro Archaga Paz,the army's director of public relations, who has denied harassment of protesters and maintained that the army is not involved in internal security.
* Col. Jorge Rodas Gamero, a two-time SOA graduate, who is the minister of security, a post he also held in Zelaya's government.

The ongoing training of Hondurans at Ft. Benning is not the only evidence of unbroken U.S.-Honduran military ties since the coup.

more . . .

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_56363.shtml

[EFerrari]

9. Lanny Davis is advising the coupsters.

Maybe that's just an accident.

[Judi Lynn]

11. Unbelievable, until you remember Carville/Shrum ran a campaign for genocidal "Goni" in Bolivia,

who ordered his military to mow down unarmed protesting Bolivian people in the streets.

Carville's (and Bob Shrum's) candidate, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, is wanted by Bolivia right now, and is being protected by the U.S. at his home in Maryland perpetually if we won't extradite him and his two ministers who fled with him, to stand trial for the murder and serious injury of a whole lot of people. One indigenous woman lingered, paralyzed for months with a fist-sized hole in her BACK in extreme pain before she was able to simply die. Others even lost limbs. Some only lost their LIVES, and others lost their loved ones. Well over 80 slaughtered, over 500 injured. Thanks, Goni.

What a shame we are protecting this monster from the consequences of his filthy crime.

http://www.bbc.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/spanish/specials/images/1122_andesbolivia/1123036_goni.jpg

[bemildred]

12. Latin America's Real "Mr. Danger" -- Negroponte's Latest Gig

January 12 / 14, 2007

President Bush's nomination of current director of National Intelligence John Negroponte for the position of deputy secretary of state brings bad news for Latin America. If proven, the allegations of Negroponte's sordid involvement in the Central American "dirty wars" of the 1980s should fundamentally disqualify him for any job in public service; at the very least, his nomination requires a serious inquiry into the deep stains on his record. There is compelling evidence that Negroponte routinely covers up his complicity in a variety of questionable entanglements, including being aware of, if not helping to guide and facilitate funding for, a Honduran military death squad in 1983 while serving as U.S. ambassador in Tegucigalpa. With a newly elected U.S. Congress that has been given a mandate to fix the country's profoundly troubled foreign policy, now is the time for this country's policymakers, particularly the new Democratic majority, to call into question yet another of Bush's egregious foreign policy errors-in-the-making.

Considering Bush's "with us or against us" doctrine which was richly applied to the southern nations during the reign of such hard-right State Department figures as Otto Reich and Roger Noriega, it is not surprising that the White House has continuously elevated very controversial figures--like former UN ambassador John Bolton--to prominent positions in the administration. But even today, with a new Democratic congress committed to reforming an increasingly unpopular foreign policy, the White House does not appear to be changing its tack. President Bush continues to promote controversial advocates of the Reagan Cold War strategy, as in the case of Robert Gates (the Iran-Contra scandal-implicated former deputy director of the CIA), who was recently made Secretary of Defense following the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. Like Negroponte when asked about the details of his Honduran service, Gates consistently displayed memory loss when it came to his familiarity with a roster of illegal and black box initiatives during that period.

The Case Against Negroponte Deserves to be Heard

The nomination of John Negroponte is a brazen move that displays a lack of sensitivity to the damage he has done to the United States' image abroad and the creation of democratic initiatives in the Americas. It is an especially poor choice because it is made at a time when U.S.-Latin American relations have hit an all-time low.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cohen01122007.html

[Robbien]

14. Some good news: UN Ignores Honduras Coup Leaders

United Nations - The United Nations Security Council tossed aside a letter by Honduras coup leaders in which they requested its intervention after alleged threats and provocation by Venezuela.

UN diplomats told Prensa Latina that the letter has not received any attention, and it will not be distributed as an official document.

That decision was made by Ugandan Ambassador Ruhakana Rugunda, who received the document Thursday as Security Council chairman.

"The Security Council only receives correspondence from governments and organizations that it recognizes", the consulted diplomatic officials highlighted.

. . .

The UN Security Council considers the de facto government in Honduras illegal, after the UN General Assembly passed a resolution condemning the June 28 coup.

It has also called upon the UN 192 members not to recognize other government than Zelaya's

http://insidecostarica.com/dailynews/2009/july/19/ca02.htm

[David__77]

15. So, I think Zelaya should request Latin American assistance.

He is president. He is commander of his country's armed forces. He has the legal authority to request military solidarity from fraternal Latin countries like Venezuela.

[Wednesdays]

16. K&R

:kick: