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Edited on Mon Mar-01-10 12:25 PM by Peace Patriot
"On December 2 Angel died, joining scores of other victims of the Honduran coup regime. That same day, the Honduran Congress--emboldened by its public relations victory in the elections--voted against reinstating the elected president, Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted from office on June 28 after serving for three and a half years. The vote confirmed Latin America's first successful twenty-first-century coup, and crowned the failure of US diplomacy to restore constitutional order in the impoverished Central American nation." --from the OP
This paragraph presumes that the U.S. promise to constitutional president, Zelaya, that he would be restored to his rightful office, was sincere and not a treacherous betrayal, and it presumes that the coup Congress defied U.S. wishes "emboldened by its public relations victory."
I think this is a misread of what happened. The coup groups were getting multimillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars both from John McCain's "International Republican Institute" (via USAID) and from Hillary Clinton's Millennium funds. The coup's P.R. firm was Lanny Davis, Bill Clinton's P.R. firm. Hillary was being advised by John "death squad" Negroponte prior to and throughout the coup. And she had been previously advised by Mark Penn, who was a paid agent of the rightwing/fascist narco-thug government of Colombia while he worked on her campaign (and whose P.R. firm had been involved in a rightwing coup attempt in Venezuela, though he ended up shedding that partner--Schoen--when Schoen's false poll and connection to a coup attempt was exposed). And, finally, at the very beginning of the coup, the Honduran coupsters were aided by the U.S. military at their base in Soto Cano, Honduras--where the plane carrying the kidnapped president out of the country at gunpoint stopped for refueling.
I have no doubt that this coup was designed by the Bush Junta--it had to have been in the planning stages for quite some time, and was then sprung on Obama six months into his term, shortly after he had promised "peace, respect and cooperation" in Latin America. Though he seemed to back Zelaya in his first remarks about the coup, early on, who knows what Obama really thought, or thinks now? He seems to be a chameleon--and a cipher. That may be a result of his lack of power--which may be the result of deals he made not to be Diebolded in 2008. Early in the Honduran coup, I thought that there had been a U.S. coup by Bushwhack moles in the Pentagon and Bushwhack appointees in the U.S. embassy in Honduras, who were proceeding with a Bushwhack coup plan on their own. But I don't think that any more--and wherever Obama actually stood or stands on this matter, and whatever his actual powers may be (Hugo Chavez described him as "the prisoner of the Pentagon")--and whatever the coup's origins, I think Hillary Clinton approved of and colluded on the coup from the beginning.
Somebody told the U.S. military in Honduras to stand down, as the kidnapped president was removed from the country, in violation of an explicit provision of the Honduran Constitution, forbidding the exile of any Honduran citizen (let alone the president!). (The supposed job of the U.S. commanders at the Soto Cano air base is to interdict illicit drug and and other criminal traffic. They didn't notice a plane with blackened windows refueling at their air base? Not believable. They work closely with the Honduran military. They TRAIN the Honduran military.)
And somebody told the coup regime to "hang in there" for six months--while the rest of Latin America tried to get Zelaya reinstated and while Zelaya himself made heroic efforts to return and while a huge grass roots anti-coup movement developed in Honduras. Somebody assured the coup regime that the U.S. would take only cosmetic measures against them and would help them put "lipstick on the pig," which the U.S. proceeded to do. No self-respecting international election monitoring on earth would have anything to do with this martial law 'election' in Honduras--with the opposition press shut down, peaceful anti-coup activists getting murdered, hundreds of leftists illegally jailed--some beaten, tortured, raped--and all-out suppression of dissent. All of the reputable election monitoring groups refused. So Hillary Clinton put together a real special U.S. election monitoring team, comprised in part of rightwing nutballs from John McCain's IRI, and various U.S. toadies, who would raise no objections to these absurd election conditions.
The method used to give this coup regime time to kill opposers of their coup, to loot the country, to crush the leftist reform movement and to destroy Honduran democracy, was the business in Costa Rica with Oscar Arias supposedly overseeing "talks" which legitimized the coup regime by giving them a seat at the table equal to that of the elected, constitutional president they had illegally and violently removed. And of course those "talks" dragged on and on and got nowhere, while the coup regime tightened its vulture talons on the neck of the Honduran people.
The article is hard-hitting in its criticism of the U.S. but it continues to make the mistake of calling this a U.S. "failure" without making clear what is now obvious to me and to many observers--and to most of Latin America--that, to the U.S. State Department, to Hillary Clinton, and to the most retrograde, corpo-fascist forces and players in the U.S., it was a victory!
The article does, to some extent, point out that it will not be a victory in the end. This John McCain/Hillary Clinton/Jim DeMint supported coup has ended whatever cache President Obama had in Latin America. The article's conclusion:
"The US State Department insists on the formation of a national unity government and a truth commission to repair the rifts in Honduras. But by recognizing the coup-run elections, it has hardened the regime's position and made a mess of mediation efforts to end the coup. The Obama administration now has both the continuing Honduran crisis and a divided hemisphere on its hands, with no solution in sight."
What needs to be clarified is that U.S. policy in Latin America, run by Clinton and Bushwhacks, INTENDS "a divided hemisphere." It was the PURPOSE of this coup to DEMONSTRATE U.S. domination to Latin America--to intimidate, to threaten--and to "divide and conquer" wherever possible. The Honduran coup has been COMBINED with the secretly negotiated U.S./Colombia military agreement and other actions to deliberately anger and frighten Latin American governments. Over the last half decade, numerous leftist governments have been elected: Venezuela (the first, the leader, in 1998) followed by Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay (!), Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala (and the left came within 0.05% of winning the presidency of Mexico in what is widely believed to have been a stolen election). Chile has been inexplicably lost to the left by the recent election of a rightwing billionaire (--the termed out leftist president enjoys an 80% approval rating! How did her successor not get elected?). And Honduras has been lost to the left by a U.S. engineered rightwing military coup. But the triumph of the left remains the overwhelming reality in Latin America--and that is not acceptable to our corporate rulers and profiteers. Honduras was/is part of a strategy to restore rightwing U.S. toady rule throughout the region--by any means necessary, including destroying Latin American democracies and--I greatly fear, and see lots of evidence for--another oil war.
We should not be fooled by the notion that the U.S. had good intentions in Honduras that "somehow" got messed up. Very unfortunately, that is not true.
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