Honduras Coup: Soldiers kidnap VZ, Cuba, Nicaragua envoys

[John Schröder]

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2009/07/n ... stify.html

"Fears that Mr. Zelaya had been plotting to undermine the Constitution and extend his tenure were among the driving forces behind his expulsion from the country at the hands of the military over the weekend."

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2009/07/p ... duras.html

The people have spoken: on the walls of Honduras. (AFP)

[John Schröder]

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1942/68/

Honduras: What’s Behind the Coup?

Written by Nikolas Kozloff
Tuesday, 30 June 2009

Which do you prefer, the official version of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America or the more hidden story? If you were reading the New York Times then you probably got the impression that the military coup which just took place in the small Central American nation of Honduras had everything to do with President Manuel Zelaya’s bid to extend presidential term limits. In a superficial explanation of events, correspondent Elisabeth Malkin wrote “The military offered no public explanation for its actions, but the Supreme Court issued a statement saying that the military had acted to defend the law” against Zelaya who had spoken out against the constitution.

In Honduras, presidents are limited to a single four year term but Zelaya had called for a constitutional referendum which, he hoped, would change the law so he could stand for reelection. The move however inflamed critics who claimed that the President had no right to try to change the law. When the military refused to help organize the vote, Zelaya fired a top military commander. Things escalated from there and on Sunday the military removed Zelaya from power. Thus goes the official Times version, which gives the impression that the political conflict in Honduras boils down to a simple disagreement about the limits of presidential power.

When reading the Times and its coup coverage in Latin America, a healthy degree of skepticism is in order. Let’s not forget the case of the 2002 coup in Venezuela which briefly removed President Hugo Chávez from power. At the time, the Times shamelessly parroted the official White House version of events, writing “Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator…[because] the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader [Pedro Carmona, the “dictator for a day”].” A scant two days later following popular protests, Chávez was back in power and the Times was forced to apologize. “Forcibly unseating a democratically elected leader, no matter how bad he may be, is never something to cheer,” the Times wrote begrudgingly.

Perhaps not wanting to be caught flat footed again, the Times proceeded a bit more cautiously this time round in its coup coverage. In a second article published today, the paper provides a bit more context to the Honduran story, remarking that the U.S. has had longstanding military ties to the Honduran military. The piece however gives the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt, repeating a high up administration’s claim that the White House was not involved in the coup and was genuinely surprised when the military moved to depose the President.

Perhaps Obama is telling the truth and the U.S. wasn’t involved. Or perhaps not --- Chávez has claimed that the hand of U.S. imperialism was at work in Honduras. I don’t endorse either version of events at this point but I do believe the Times has overlooked vital facts which could shed light on the recent political turbulence.

In a long piece which I published yesterday about the coup I went over some of this important history, pointing out for example that Zelaya was a withering critic of official U.S. drug policy, opened up diplomatic channels to the island nation of Cuba, pursued a tight diplomatic alliance with Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and even sent an audacious, strongly worded personal letter to Obama in December of last year in which the Honduran accused the U.S. of pursuing interventionist policies in Latin America and needlessly punishing Cuba through its longstanding economic embargo. Needless to say, the Times chose to gloss over much of these facts. Moreover the paper of record has failed to fully examine the role of Roberto Micheletti, Honduras’ new president.

Who is Roberto Micheletti?

A former Congressman, Micheletti is a long time fixture on the domestic political scene. A member of Zelaya’s own Liberal Party, he studied business administration in the United States and worked as the CEO of Honduras’ own state telecommunications company. Up until two days ago Micheletti was the President of Honduras’ National Congress. All these details aside, what’s most important to know is that Micheletti has been a long time foe of Zelaya’s diplomatic alliance with leftist Hugo Chávez.

At first, it looked like Micheletti would get along fine with Zelaya, a politician who promoted free trade with the United States. But as the so-called “Pink Tide” of left regimes came to power in South and Central America, Zelaya became increasingly more politically independent. What really set the two on a political collision course however was Zelaya’s move to bring Honduras into the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (known by its Spanish acronym ALBA), an alliance of leftist Latin American and Caribbean nations headed by Chávez. The regional trade group including Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Dominica seeks to counteract corporately-friendly U.S-backed free trade schemes. Since its founding in 2004, ALBA countries have promoted joint factories and banks, an emergency food fund, and exchanges of cheap Venezuelan oil for food, housing, and educational investment.

Traditionally, Honduras has been known for its right wing politics and its close ties to the U.S. The third poorest country in the hemisphere, Honduras has long been home to powerful U.S. fruit companies. The military has looked out for business interests, liquidating any challenge to the social order by the likes of organized labor for example. Given the pervasive conservatism of Honduran politics, it’s no surprise that when Zelaya moved to cultivate an alliance with Chávez the maneuver outraged the Honduran business sector and galvanized the media against the president.

The Ford Imbroglio

It wasn’t long before diplomatic relations with the U.S. started to fall to pieces. In the middle of July, 2008 Zelaya went to Managua and met with Chávez to celebrate the 29th anniversary of the fall of Nicaragua’s Somoza dictatorship. Shortly afterwards, Chávez confirmed that Honduras would join in the ALBA scheme. In a sharp retort to the insolent Zelaya, outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Charles Ford said that a large portion of remittances sent by U.S.-based Hondurans back to their home country were the product of illicit drug trafficking. Ford added that he frequently felt intimidated during his three year stint serving in Honduras.

Incensed, Zelaya charged that the U.S. was the “chief cause” of drug smuggling in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ford was being “belligerent,” Zelaya affirmed, simply because Honduras had pursued diplomatic relations with Caracas, Havana and Managua. Just because Honduras received U.S. aid, Zelaya said, did not mean that his country was a “vassal” of its northern benefactor. Moving on from his feudal rhetoric, Zelaya accused the U.S. of promoting coup d’etats, invasions and uprisings across Central America. He added that Ford had suggested that Honduras provide political asylum for the anti-Castro terrorist Luis Posasa Carriles, an offer which Zelaya flatly rejected.

Defending his new found friend Chávez against the Honduran right, Zelaya said he shared the Venezuelan’s antipathy towards superpowers which sought to impose their will on other countries “like when Ambassador Charles Ford asked me through the State Department to give a visa to Luis Posada Carriles.” The Honduran Foreign Minister said that his country had sent a formal letter of protest to the U.S. government, adding that Ford’s remarks were unacceptable.

Needless to say, it wasn’t long before Micheletti joined others in criticizing Zelaya’s moves to join ALBA. The President of the Honduran Congress also called on Zelaya to show more respect towards Ambassador Ford. “I believe we have the obligation to be close with the country to our north because he is our friend and will continue to be so,” Micheletti said. The politician also sought to delay Zelaya’s moves to have Honduras join Chávez’s Petrocaribe program which would provide Venezuelan oil to the Central American nation at subsidized prices, and he also vowed to hold up passage of ALBA in Congress. ALBA, Micheletti declared, would not pass Congress and would wind up as a “dead letter.”

The ALBA Debate

Facing political opposition, Zelaya indignantly declared that he did not legally need to consult Congress to pass the ALBA accord with Chávez. That in turn set up a confrontation with Congress and one legislator even remarked that he was thinking about introducing a motion which would declare Zelaya a usurper and mentally unfit to serve as president. By this point the Honduran private sector was going into hysterics with one powerful association charging that ALBA would constitute “a political and military alliance which would ideologically conspire against free trade, the exercise of individual liberty and societal free choice.”

Insinuating himself further into contentious local politics, Chávez went to Tegucigalpa where he spoke before a crowd of 50,000 unionists, women’s groups, farmers and indigenous peoples. Venezuela, Chávez said, would guarantee cheap oil to Honduras for “at least 100 years.” Infuriating the local elite, Chávez declared that Hondurans who opposed ALBA were “sellouts.” Hardly content to stop there, Chávez lambasted the Honduran press which he labeled pitiyanquis (little Yanqui imitators) and “abject hand-lickers of the Yanquis.” The outburst led Micheletti and members of Congress to denounce Chávez for being “disrespectful” and “vulgar.”

With Honduran society becoming increasingly polarized over Chávez and ALBA, Zelaya moved to mollify his political enemy in Congress. In October, the President of Congress agreed to sign the ALBA agreement and in exchange Zelaya offered his political support to Micheletti who was intent on running for president in 2009. In exchange for joining ALBA, Venezuela offered to buy Honduran bonds worth $100 million with proceeds spent on housing for the poor. Chávez also offered a $30 million credit line for farming, 100 tractors, and 4 million low-energy light bulbs. Cuba would send technicians to help install them, in addition to more doctors and literacy teachers. Relations continued to deteriorate with the U.S. and in December, 2008 Zelaya sent a strongly worded letter to Obama criticizing the conduct of U.S. ambassadors, amongst other issues [see my last article for a fuller discussion of the note].

Micheletti’s Towering Ambition

Ultimately Micheletti came up short in his bid to get his party’s nomination, losing out to ex-Vice President Elvin Ernesto Santos. When Zelaya declared his intention to proceed with the constitutional referendum which would allow him to stand for reelection, Santos opposed the move as illegal. Micheletti however won out in the ensuing power struggle: following Sunday’s coup d’etat Congress declared the veteran politician Honduras’ next President.

In a press conference after being sworn in, Micheletti said that if Zelaya “returns without the support of [the Venezuelan president] Mr. Hugo Chávez, then we will receive him warmly.” Asked whether Honduras would continue to participate in ALBA, Micheletti remarked, “I believe that first we are going to revise what ALBA has produced for Hondurans.”

As a political figure Micheletti is very reminiscent of another coup plotter, Pedro Carmona. In April, 2002 this politically well connected businessman briefly became Venezuela’s “dictator for a day.” With the support of Washington and the New York Times, Carmona held on until Chávez was reinstated with the help of the military and angry protesters in the streets of Caracas. Could history be repeating itself now in Central America? Today, the New York Times presents Washington’s point of view concerning events on the ground in Honduras without delving too deeply into the political context or Micheletti’s possible motivations.

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Hugo Chávez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge to the U.S. (Palgrave, 2006) and Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave, 2008). Check out his Web site at http://senorchichero.blogspot.com

[John Schröder]

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebo ... s-honduras

The anti-coup movement's momentum appears to be building across Honduras, with protests reported across the country. Meanwhile, international pressure builds against the coup government.

Over the past two days, anti-coup protests were reported in Tocoa, Colon; San Pedro Sula; La Ceiba; El Progreso, Yoro; Tegucigapla; Intibuca; El Paraiso; Olancho; Santa Barbara; and all over President Zelaya's native department of Olancho. Moreover, the BBC reports that citizens have blocked major highways in Copan and Tocoa. The BBC's sources on the ground in Honduras say anti-coup protests have occurred in the majority of Honduras' departments.

[John Schröder]

http://www.chavezcode.com/2009/07/day-4 ... on-of.html

CNN en Español, viewed throughout Latin America, has been backing the coup against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya since day 1, Sunday, June 28th. They initially referred to the events as a military coup during the early hours, then slowly transformed their headlines to call the coup a "forced succession". By the end of the day, dictator Roberto Micheletti was considered, by CNN, the "constitutional president" of Honduras and Zelaya was the "deposed" president.

Since then, CNN has shown about 90% coverage favorable of the coup government in Honduras, conducting interviews with Micheletti as well as those in his "cabinet". The "analysts" and "experts" providing insight and commentary on the coup in Honduras have all been either conservative U.S. voices of those on the Latin America right, like Alvaro Vargas Llosa. CNN has done little or no reporting on the mass protests on the streets in Honduras against the coup government, nor has it covered or reported on the detention of several Telesur and Associated Press journalists by military forces in Honduras this past Tuesday. CNN is also not providing much coverage of the major media blackout still in place in Honduras or the repressive measures taken by the coup government to impose states of emergency, suspend civil and human rights and mandate a national curfew through the weekend. And CNN is obsessed with making this whole thing to be about Chávez, and not about the internal class struggles in Honduras.

The coup government in Honduras announced this evening that the congress has passed a decree suspending all constitutional rights in the country indefinitely. This means the coup forces can enter homes without warrants, detain anyone with no notice or justification, prohibit all public gatherings, such as marches, rallies, protests or meetings, and maintain censorship of independent media. Due process rights are also suspended as are all other civil and political rights. Hondurans are also denouncing the coup government is forcing men as young as 15 to join the military to "defend" the country against any potential foreign threats or forces that may invade the country to restore Manuel Zelaya to the presidency.

If, as the coup leaders say, all is calm and peaceful in the streets of Honduras and a majority of Hondurans support the coup government led by Micheletti, then why does martial law need to be imposed and individual rights suspended?

In April 2002, when the coup was executed against President Chávez, the dictator who took over briefly, businessman Pedro Carmona, told CNN in a live interview that all was calm and peaceful in the streets of Caracas and throughout Venezuela. Meanwhile, millions of people were pouring into the streets around the capital and the nation to demand their president be returned to power. In Venezuela, the people and loyal armed forces were able to rescue their democracy, constitution and president, and defeat a coup backed by Washington.

Thousands are protesting in the streets throughout Honduras, facing repression and risking detention, or even worse, assassination. The people of Honduras fighting this brutal repressive coup and dictatorship (that is refusing to step down, despite all the international pressure) need your solidarity and support! Especially if you are in the US, find ways to pressure the Obama administration and demand it suspend aid to Honduras until the coup government steps down. Both the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank have temporarily suspended loans to Honduras until constitutional order is restored. All member nations of the European Union have withdrawn their ambassadors in Honduras. The US is the only nation that has not followed suit. Washington appears to be buying time trying to figure out how to save face and save its strategic interests in Honduras. Latin America and Europe have stood firm against tyranny. Will the US be an ally to tyranny or an example of democracy?

http://www.chavezcode.com/2009/07/day-5 ... ainst.html

Despite the suspension of constitutional rights in place as of yesterday, per a decree by the Honduran congress in support of the coup government, tens of thousands of Hondurans are mobilizing throughout the country and participating in nationwide marches in route to the capital, Tegucigalpa. Demonstrators are protesting the illegal coup d'etat that ousted the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, on Sunday, after kidnapping him from his bedroom and forcing him into exile. Hondurans in support of President Zelaya are marching on the capital to await President Zelaya's return, scheduled as of now for Saturday, July 4th, after the Organization of American States (OAS) 72-hour ultimatum, that was issued to the coup government on Wednesday, calling on them to step down or face severe sanctions, has expired.

Hondurans are still denouncing the media blackout in place in their country, preventing the majority of people in the country from receiving news from independent and international sources. The only media permitted to broadcast or publish since Sunday's coup are those supporting the illegal takeover of the state.

Hondurans are also reporting food and medicine shortages in the country, resulting from the border closings imposed by neighboring nations Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador, in reaction to the coup. Central American nations have adamantly condemned the coup and refused to recognize the illegal government in place, led by Roberto Micheletti, former head of congress. Nations around the world have expressed they only recognize Manuel Zelaya as the legitimate and constitutional president of Honduras.

It is still unsure how things will play out over the next few days, since the coup government is defiantly holding its power in Tegucigalpa and still has the military on its side. If they refuse to step down by Saturday, further sanctions could be imposed that would severely harm the already third poorest nation in Latin America's economy and infrastructure. As it stands today, the coup government appears ready to bear the consequences of months of isolation from the world community. The US may determine next Monday that sanctions should be in place against Honduras, resulting from the military coup, but it is unlikely that substantial aid will be cut, which will allow the illegal government to ride out the next 6 months until elections are held in November.

Governments in Latin America have stated they will not recognize any government elected during the November elections if the coup government remains in place until then, since such a process would not be considered legitimate or constitutional.

[John Schröder]

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22955.htm

Democracy Derailed in Honduras

By Greg Grandin

July 01, 2009 "The Nation" -- When Honduran president Manuel Zelaya--who was rousted out of his bed on Sunday morning by a detachment of armed soldiers and forced into exile still in his pajamas--took office in early 2006, unionists, peasant activists and reformers expected little of the center-right politician, a rancher and member of the establishment Liberal Party. Neither did the handful of elite Honduran families who, bankrolled by foreign finance, control their country's media, banking, agricultural, manufacturing and narcotics industries. "You are only temporary, while we are permanent," they told him soon after his inauguration, according one report, reminding Zelaya that he served at their pleasure.

But the realities of governing in a country as poor as Honduras--more than 60 percent of its population live in poverty, more than 50 percent in extreme poverty--tends to reinforce a left-wing slant. Perhaps it was the imperious and imperial behavior of George W. Bush's ambassador to Honduras, described by Zelaya as "barbarous." Or maybe it was the fact that the Central American Free Trade Agreement, rather than delivering promised development, worsened his country's trade deficit with the United States while driving low wages even lower, as Honduras competed with its equally impoverished neighbors for investment. Or perhaps it was the US Food and Drug Administration's unilateral ban of Honduran cantaloupes because they were supposedly tainted with salmonella, though the FDA offered no proof of the charge, a move Zelaya called "unjust."

Whatever the reason, Zelaya shifted course, and over the past two years he has adopted a progressive agenda. As a solution to the disastrous "war on drugs," which has turned Central America into a well-traversed trans-shipment corridor for narcotraficantes--profitable for some, deadly for many--he has proposed the legalization of some narcotics. Earlier this year at the Summit of the Americas, he took the lead in pushing Barack Obama to normalize relations with Cuba. And he has steered his country into both the Bolivarian Alternative to the Americas and Petrocaribe, two regional economic alliances backed by Venezuela meant to wean Latin America off its extreme dependence on the US market.

This left turn is less ideological than pragmatic. Honduras is so broke it "can't even build a road without getting a loan from the World Bank," Zelaya once complained. But that money comes in "dribbles, held up years by paperwork" and often accompanied by onerous terms. In contrast, he said, Petrocaribe financing for infrastructure investment came all at once, at extremely low interest, with no conditions, which helped free up other scarce funds for social services. Through Petrocaribe, Venezuela also provides Honduras with 20,000 barrels of crude oil per day, also on very generous terms.

For those who presume to rule behind the scenes, Zelaya took a step too far when he began to push for the convocation of a constituent assembly in order to democratize Honduras's notoriously exclusionary political system. Expectedly, these efforts were opposed by the national Congress and the Supreme Court, both of which are controlled by an inbred clique of career politicians and judges invested in keeping Honduran politics restricted--including members of Zelaya's Liberal Party. For its part, the US media seem intent on reporting on events in Honduras through the prism of its obsession with Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. The New York Times, for instance, ran an op-ed by free-market ideologue Alvaro Vargas Llosa, who claimed that the most unfortunate aspect of the coup is not that it derailed Honduran democracy but--wait for it--that it has allowed Chávez to defend democracy and thus claim the "moral high ground." Vargas Llosa describes Zelaya as a man of privilege, an "heir to the family fortune" who had "devoted decades to his agriculture and forestry enterprises" and who had run for president on a conservative platform that included supporting CAFTA. Misleadingly, Vargas Llosa attributes Zelaya's political turn not to the absolute failure of CAFTA and the fiasco of the "war on drugs" but to Chávez's seductions. The US media have also falsely yet unanimously presented Zelaya's moves as a power grab, an effort to end term limits to allow him to run for re-election. But the referendum Zelaya was pushing--which prompted the coup--asked citizens only if there should be a vote on "whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political Constitution." In other words, Hondurans weren't being asked to vote on term limits or even on revising the Constitution. They were simply being asked to vote on whether or not to have a vote on revising the Constitution, with the terms of that revision being left to an elected assembly.

Latin America has demonstrated a remarkable degree of unanimity in condemning the coup and demanding Zelaya's return to power. "We cannot accept or recognize any new government other than President Zelaya," said Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Organization of American States has stated that it will refuse to make any concessions to the coup plotters and that it will be open only to dialogue that would facilitate the "return of President Zelaya to his legitimate position." Other Central American nations have recalled their ambassadors from Honduras and have taken steps to isolate the country until democracy is restored.

Barack Obama, too, has issued strong words against Zelaya's overthrow: "I think it would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition, rather than democratic elections," he said. "The region has made enormous progress over the past twenty years in establishing democratic traditions in Central America and Latin America. We don't want to go back to a dark past."

The State Department, though, has been more circumspect. At first it was reluctant to use the word "coup" to describe Zelaya's overthrow, since to do so would trigger automatic sanctions, including the suspension of foreign aid and the withdrawal of US troops. Honduras hosts Soto Cano Air Force Base, the main US military base in the region, and Washington is concerned with keeping that installation fully operational. Likewise, according to John Negroponte--who as ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s was implicated in the cover-up of hundreds of death-squad executions--Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is working to "preserve some leverage to try and get Zelaya to back down from his insistence on a referendum" and presumably from his other populist policies.

It seems like what the United States might be angling for in Honduras could be the "Haiti Option." In 1994 Bill Clinton worked to restore Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide after he was deposed in a coup, but only on the condition that Aristide would support IMF and World Bank policies. The result was a disaster, leading to deepening poverty, escalating polarization and, in 2004, a second coup against Aristide, this one fully backed by the Bush White House.

Though there is no indication that the United States is considering using military force to restore Zelaya--as Clinton did for Aristide in 1994--Washington should follow the lead of the rest of the Americas and resist the temptation to attach conditions to its support for his return to office. Last week, during a meeting with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, a reporter asked Obama if he would apologize for America's role in the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power (and led to the torture of Bachelet and her father, who died as a result). Obama demurred and said that he was "interested in going forward, not looking backward."

As Honduras teeters on the brink--as of this writing, the new regime has cracked down on the media and instituted a curfew, with reports of escalating repression by security forces against Zelaya supporters--one way to move forward would be to provide unconditional support for Zelaya's immediate return.

"This is a golden opportunity," Costa Rica's former vice president, Kevin Casas-Zamora, said, for Obama "to make a clear break with the past and show that he is unequivocally siding with democracy, even if [some in Washington] don't necessarily like the guy."

[Jeff]

Limbaugh: "So we've got hell breaking loose in Honduras. You know what we learned about Honduras? We learned the Obama administration tried to stop the coup. Now what was -- the coup was what many of you wish would happen here, without the military."

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert ... rage-milit

[John Schröder]

www.counterpunch.org/maher07032009.html

The Honduran Coup and the Limits of Hope and Change

The Counter-Revolution Will Not be Tweeted

By GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER

The recent street rebellions against the Ahmadinejad regime in Iran were touted by many as the first baptism-by-fire of Twitter as a political tool. Celebratory articles abounded for a brief time, before such foolish dreams came crashing back to earth under the weight of a metric ton of misinformation, unsubstantiated rumor, and idle gossip.

…And the Tweeters Fell Silent

Any Iranian foolish to put her hopes in this most fickle of constituencies that is the Tweeter must have begun to doubt the wisdom of such an approach as short attention spans inevitably set in and, most devastatingly of all, the death of Michael Jackson stole the headlines. Ahmadinejad couldn’t have planned it better if he had offed MJ himself (in cahoots, perhaps, with South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, the other clear beneficiary of Jackson’s untimely demise). Indeed, the Iranian dissidents were the biggest losers of the day, suffering an even worse fate than Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Billy Mays, condemned to historical oblivion by sheer bad timing. But to this list of those suffering from the technophiles’ abandonment of their brief flirtation with the political, we must now add Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, legitimately elected president of Honduras, recently deposed in a barefaced military coup from the far right.

Zelaya, a former centrist who has recently made leftward moves, raised the ire of the entrenched Honduran oligarchy by, among other things, joining the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), a radical counterpoint to U.S.-promoted free trade agreements. His overthrow has been followed by a press blackout, military curfew, and repression in the streets, as hundreds of thousands have rallied to the cause of their former leader, only to meet an iron heel reminiscent of Honduran military regimes of the past (dodging bullets in the street, as the magnificent BoRev puts it, “is sort of like Twittering, for poor people”). There have been mass arrests, injuries, and deaths, but some exceptions notwithstanding, these Hondurans are nevertheless, to quote one observer, “Protesters We Don’t Tweet About.”

Following the Venezuelan Blueprint

Comparison to the April 2002 coup against Chávez seems obvious to many. For Kiraz Janicke, for example, the move against Zelaya constitutes a “carbon copy” of the earlier coup, while Atilio Boron calls it a “repeat” of Chávez’s brief ouster. Certainly, Zelaya is no Chávez, and as we will see, Obama is certainly no Bush, but especially in light of efforts on the liberal left to deny any similarity, it is worthwhile nevertheless laying out the striking parallels between the strategies adopted by the Honduran golpistas and their Venezuelan counterparts:

1.

The faithful media sows the seeds: in both Venezuela 2002 and Honduras 2009, the national and international media prepared the ground for an eventual coup by distorting the truth and calling into question the democratic credentials of the president. In Honduras, this has taken the form of misrepresenting Zelaya’s constitutional proposal as a re-election bid, a line which was and continues to be shamelessly pushed in the media, when the referendum question had nothing to do with re-election at all, but was instead a completely legal mandate to transforming the existing constitution (itself a holdover from the far-right governments of the 1980s). Some nominally of the left repeated this tasty morsel of misinformation, while Fox News’ Shep Smith argued today that not only had Zelaya sought to extend his term, but to do so would have been “treasonous” (an interesting perspective on constitutional amendments, to say the least).

2.

A coup which is not a coup: in both Venezuela 2002 and Honduras 2009, every effort was and is being made to deny that what is happening is actually a coup (here the preceding media efforts really pay off). It was not the military gorilas who violated democratic norms, we are told, it was the democratically elected president who brought this on himself by undermining the “established institutions.” Here, of course, there is no mention of the origins these institutions have in military government, or the far-right partisan bias with which the Congress and Supreme Court declared the non-binding constitutional referendum illegal. In Venezuela, this even led to a situation in which, after Chávez’s return, the Supreme Court ruled that what had occurred was not a coup, but instead a “power vacuum” into which the military and the far right just conveniently stepped.

3.

Cartoons and soap operas conceal repression: both coups were followed by an immediate and total press blackout by the elite, oligarchic media outlets. News of the national crisis gave way unexpectedly, and in an undeniably Kafkaesque manner, to reruns of cartoons and soap operas. An effort to put a lid on the brewing resistance, to be sure, but it does little when the smell of burning tires is already in the air and established popular organizations are communicating by text message. For those not responding to the calming effect of mindless programming, hegemony gives way to domination and live ammunition will have to suffice.

4.

A fake letter of resignation: in an effort not so much to convince detractors as to give supporters a less embarrassing explanation of events, coup leaders produced a resignation letter allegedly written and signed by Zelaya. The only problem? Zelaya was still very much alive to deny that he had ever written such a letter (and the wonderful BoRev.net adds the insightful observation that, had Zelaya actually resigned, he might have changed out of his pajamas before boarding a flight to Costa Rica).

5.

A botched timeline reveals premeditation: when sniper deaths at a march sparked the Venezuelan crisis in 2002, the military high command released a videotaped statement denouncing the government very quickly, almost too quickly. As it turned out, the statement, complete with a nearly-accurate death count, was filmed ahead of time, strongly suggesting the premeditated massacre occurred at opposition hands. In Honduras, this has not been quite so dramatic, but the message is the same: the fake resignation letter allegedly signed by Zelaya was dated three days prior to the coup.

But speaking of premeditation, we come to arguably the most important similarity, one which has been controversial in recent days, as liberal/leftist supporters of Obama bend over backwards to reinforce their waning “hope” in the final days of the post-electoral honeymoon: the covert U.S. role in the coup.

Dissecting the U.S. Response

Previously resigned Obamaphiles, desperate to grasp at any shred of proof suggesting that they were right to get high on hope and expect imminent change, are closing ranks around their government and insisting that the U.S. government’s response to the Honduran coup is proof positive of such change. Some even go so far as to claim that the Obama administration’s support for Zelaya has been “unambiguous,” adding that “complaints that Washington hasn’t acted fast enough to denounce the Honduran coup are silly and ignorant on the face of them.”

Let’s be clear: no one is saying that U.S. foreign policy is the same under Obama as under Bush, but nor did we expect them to be. Rather, we expected things to look very different while maintaining an underlying continuity. And for anyone who looks closely, Washington’s response to the Honduran coup has been the definition of ambiguity, and such knee-jerk reactions to criticism simply fail to explain the subtle progression of this response, and moreover willfully neglect the subtleties and nuances that State Department officials and Obama himself have deployed. Let’s lay this out briefly:

On Sunday, at a meeting with narco-terrorist Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, Obama issued the following carefully-worded statement:
“I am deeply concerned by reports coming out of Honduras regarding the detention and expulsion of President Mel Zelaya. As the Organization of American States did on Friday, I call on all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Any existing tensions and disputes must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference.” Such a purposefully-vague statement was meant to communicate a wait-and-see approach: yes, we are “deeply concerned,” but what’s done is done and we must now work toward the reestablishment of “democratic norms.” The implication is clear: fascistic coup leaders are quite capable of leading a transition back toward the very same democracy they attacked, and the United States is still hoping to avoid Zelaya’s return.

Some commentators were understandably perplexed when the text of a conference call with unnamed “Senior State Department Officials” was released later Sunday, claiming that the United States recognizes only Zelaya as the legitimate leader of Honduras, while implying that the State Department would be calling for his return via an OAS resolution. But the sharp disconnect between this statement and Obama’s vagaries would only deepen when Secretary of State Clinton stepped into the fray, contradicting claims by both the president and the unnamed senior officials by insisting that the U.S. is not currently classifying events in Honduras as a coup and is not yet demanding Zelaya’s return, but only a vague return to democratic normalcy.

This, of course was another hedge, allowing the State Department leeway both to negotiate with and carry on business as usual with the coup regime were it to remain and to pressure Zelaya for a conditional return. As to the former, the U.S. seems unwilling to take the risk of cutting direct aid to Honduras, a legal requirement if a “coup” is declared. The latter is arguably more important: the State Department under Clinton most certainly did not support Zelaya’s efforts to radically challenge entrenched elites through a constitutional reform, and will likely pressure him to return humbled and defanged, with no such transformative aspirations.

John Negroponte, for one, sees things this way, arguing that Clinton “wants to preserve some leverage to try and get Zelaya to back down from his insistence on a referendum.” And when it comes to containing and undermining Central American leftists, few know the playbook by heart like Negroponte, who as U.S. ambassador to Honduras during the Contra wars personally oversaw both death squads and the drug trade. Indeed, against all the left-liberal defenders of the Obama administration, it was probably Mara Liason who was closest to the truth when, speaking as one of three panelists on Fox News (all of whom, incidentally, support the coup), argued that:

“I think they are perfectly happy with the outcome… Now, I think it’s the correct public diplomacy and policy to say, of course we’re for the democratically elected president and we don’t like coups in Latin America, but when all the dust settles, they will be perfectly happy to work with this new guy. They are not working to get Zelaya back into power… This is the outcome the United States would have preferred, this is not the method they would want to publicly condone.”

This is the iron fist with a velvet glove: while it may feel softer, it’s as “interventionist” as ever.

But all this aside, what is truly shocking is that the government is being taken at its word in the first place. Here, the White House and State Department functions as a stand-in for the U.S. state as a whole, obscuring an entire history of underhanded interventionism, especially from the CIA. Few have sought more insistently to reveal this dark underside of U.S. interventionism in Latin America than Eva Golinger, whose legal efforts to demand the release of government documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) revealed the true extent of the Bush administration’s role in the 2002 coup against Chávez (published in The Chávez Code). Golinger, who has been liveblogging the coup as it has progressed, describes a situation in which it would be utterly implausible to assume the United States government was not at least passively involved:

“The United States maintains a military base in Soto Cano, Honduras, that houses approximately 500 soldiers and special forces. The U.S. military group in Honduras is one of the largest in U.S. Embassies in the region. The leaders of the coup today are graduates of the U.S. School of the Americas, a training camp for dictators and repressive forces in Latin America…The US Military Group in Honduras trains around 300 Honduran soldiers every year, provides more than $500,000 annually to the Honduran Armed Forces and additionally provides $1.4 million for a military education and exchange program for around 300 more Honduran soldiers every year.”

As Greg Grandin described the situation on Democracy Now!: “The Honduran military is effectively a subsidiary of the United States government… if any Latin American country is fully owned by the United States, it’s Honduras… So if the U.S. is opposed to this coup going forward, it won’t go forward.” To which we could add Jeremy Scahill’s response: “Obama and the US military could likely have halted this coup with a simple series of phone calls,” or, we might add, by threatening to pull funding (which now, even after the coup, they seem unwilling to do). When we consider the leverage the U.S. enjoys in Honduras, claims by the Obama administration that they attempted to prevent the coup border on the absurd. Even more absurd, however, are efforts to defend the continued funding of a coup regime as “progress.”

Giordano’s “Fact” Fetish

Here, unfortunately, the frequently admirable Al Giordano of Narco News falls deeply into contradiction. For some inexplicable reason, Giordano has in recent weeks adopted as his modus operandi the flimsiest of pop psychology, first diagnosing those expressing any hesitancy whatsoever about the Iranian rebellion as suffering a profound case of Cold War nostalgia, before then transposing this same exact argument onto those critical of the Obama administration’s response to Zelaya’s ouster. Setting his sights on Golinger in particular, who he accuses of “screeching” about the U.S. bogeyman, “not operating with a full deck of cards,” and “crying wolf” to fool the masses (an accusation which is sharply at odds with his description of aloof leftists who have lost their Cold War coordinates and simply can’t figure things out), Giordano concludes with astounding self-seriousness: “In this hour, those that adhere strictly to the documented facts are those that are showing character worth trusting, today and into the future.”

But Giordano’s contradictory rhetoric of “documented facts” would have prevented him from accurately understanding the Venezuelan coup of 2002 (since the “facts” were very much contested), and especially the U.S. role. Such things are not advertised, and required the painstaking legal work of Golinger herself to reveal. Were it not for Golinger’s departure from the “documented facts” parroted by press and government alike, we would never have known what happened in April 2002. As Golinger herself puts it: much like today in Honduras, “during the April 2002 coup against Chávez in Venezuela, the State Department also claimed it knew of the coup and tried to ‘stop’ it. Later, in my investigations, it was discovered through documents from State and CIA declassified under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that CIA, State and other US agencies, funded, supported, advised and armed the coup leaders.”

When in 2002 we insisted that the CIA was involved, would Giordano have accused us of “crying wolf”? When we questioned the established facts and sought to painstakingly establish our own, would he have sat us on the couch to psychoanalyze our “Cold War nostalgia”? But of course, Giordano did not follow his own advice in 2002. If we are to understand what happens, we need to approach the “documented facts” from a more critical (dare I say, dialectical?) perspective. We need to draw on our historical understanding, on our grasp of the forces in play, and insistently create our own facts and truths. Otherwise, we’ll always be one step behind the enemy, and unwittingly attacking our comrades.

As it stands, the coup against Zelaya seems to be running out of steam. Zelaya has announced he will return to Honduras after the OAS ultimatum expires in 72 hours, and flanked by heads of state and OAS head José Miguel Insulza no less, while the coup leaders insist that he will be arrested on sight. Social movements are mobilized, and some army battalions are refusing to accept the coup government. Unless they are prepared to take the low road of outright repression, it seems likely that the coup leaders will need to crawl back into their hole and wait for the next manufactured crisis.

George Ciccariello-Maher is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at U.C. Berkeley. He is currently completing a book entitled We Created Him: A People’s History of the Bolivarian Revolution, and can be reached at gjcm(at)berkeley.edu.

[John Schröder]

http://counterpunch.org/burbach07032009.html

Crossing the Rubicon in Latin America

Honduran Coup: Target Left?

By ROGER BURBACH

The coup against Manuel Zelaya of Honduras represents a last ditch effort by Honduras’ entrenched economic and political interests to stave off the advance of the new left governments that have taken hold in Latin America over the past decade. As Zelaya proclaimed after being forcibly dumped in Costa Rica: “This is a vicious plot planned by elites. The elites only want to keep the country isolated and in extreme poverty.”

Zelaya should know, since his roots are in the country’s large, land-owning class, having devoted most of his life to agriculture and forestry enterprises that he inherited. He ran for president as the head of the center-right Liberal Party on a fairly conservative platform, promising to be tough on crime and to cut the budget. Inaugurated in January, 2006, he supported the US-backed Central American Free Trade Agreement, which been signed two years earlier, and continued the economic policies of neo-liberalism, privatizing state held enterprises.

But about half way into his four year term, the winds of change blowing from the south caught his imagination, particularly those coming from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, the largest regional power fronting on the Caribbean. With no petroleum resources, Honduras signed a generous oil subsidy deal with Venezuela, and then last year joined the emergent regional trade bloc, ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. Inspired by Venezuela it now has Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Dominica and Ecuador as members. Simultaneously, Zelaya implemented domestic reform policies, significantly increasing the minimum wage of workers and teachers’ salaries, while stepping up spending in health care and education.

The upshot is that a reform-minded president supported by labor unions and social organizations is now pitted against a mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political elite that is accustomed to controlling the Supreme Court, as well as congress and the presidency. It is a story often repeated elsewhere in Latin America, with the United States almost always weighing in on the side of the established, entrenched interests.

The Honduran elites were outraged that a member of their class would carry out even modest reforms. They began to portray Zelaya as a demagogue, and demonized Hugo Chavez as trying to take over the country. When Zelaya announced that he would hold a plebiscite on June 28 to see if the country wanted to have the option in the upcoming November presidential elections to vote for the convening of a constituent assembly that would draft a new constitution, the political establishment would have none of it. They incorrectly claimed that Zelaya was trying to stand for re-election. In fact the possibility that a president might serve a second term could only emerge in a new constitution that would not be drafted until well after Zelaya left office in January, 2010. The elites did however have reason to fear a new magna carta, since this is the path that Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador have used to draft new constitutions to begin transforming their countries political, social and economic structures.

The political establishment decided to nip this process in the bud by quashing the plebiscite scheduled for Sunday, June 28. The Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional and the military refused to help distribute the ballots. Then Zelaya fired the head of the army, General Romeo Vasquez, and led workers and social movement activists to seize ballots stored at an air force base for distribution. On Sunday at 6AM, the day of the plebiscite, the military sent a special army unit to seize Zelaya in his pajamas and to deport him to Costa Rica. The next day the Supreme Court levied charges of treason against Zelaya, and the Congress elevated its president, Roberto Micheletti to be the interim president of the country.

The rest of the Americas, and most of the world, reacted with outrage against the coup. The Organization of the Americas convened an emergency session and voted unanimously to call upon the coup makers to restore Zelaya to power. Regional organizations like the Group of Rio also denounced the coup, while the European Economic Union and the World Bank announced that they were suspending economic assistance to Honduras. Even the governments of Alvaro Uribe of Colombia and Felipe Calderon of Mexico felt compelled to denounce the coup.

What explains this virtually unanimous opposition to the coup? Most of Latin America still remembers the dark days of the 1970s and 1980s when three-quarters of the continent’s population fell under military rule. Countries like Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil still bear the scars and traumas of this period, and do not want to contemplate any opening that would allow their militaries to begin interfering once again in the political sphere.

The United States is also opposed to the coup, with President Obama denouncing it, saying it set a “terrible precedent” and that “We do not want to go back to a dark past” in which coups often trumped elections. He added: “We always want to stand with democracy.”

Many observers are suspicious of how solid the US stand against the coup is. Obama given his emphasis on multilateralism, may have had little choice, knowing that his predecessor George W. Bush had roiled Latin America when he rushed to endorse the last coup attempt in the region against Hugo Chavez in October, 2002.

The State Department has taken a more tepid stance. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was asked if “restoring the constitutional order” in Honduras meant restoring Zelaya, she would not say yes. The New York Times reports that she did not take to the Honduran president when she met him on June 2 at the meeting of the OAS in Tegucigalpa. Zelaya annoyed her by asking her to a private room late at night to have her meet and shake hands with his extended family. In a more formal meeting Zelaya brought up his plans for the referendum on June 28 with US officials taking the position that it was unconstitutional and would inflame the political situation.

Washington also has a very close relationship with the Honduran military, which goes back decades. During the 1980s the US used bases in Honduras to train and arm the Contras, Nicaraguan paramilitaries who became known for their atrocities in their war against the Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua. John Negroponte who became the czar of intelligence during the Bush administration after serving as US ambassador to Iraq, first achieved notoriety when he served as US ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s and granted US approval to death squads run by a special Honduran military unit against domestic opponents.

On Wednesday, the OAS meeting in Washington called for the restoration of Zelaya to office by Saturday, July 4. The head of the OAS, Jose Miguel Insulza of Chile, along with the president of the UN General Assembly Miguel d’Escota of Nicaragua, and Presidents Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and Rafael Correa of Argentina and Ecuador respectively have said they will accompany Zelaya on his return.

But it is doubtful if he will be allowed to return by the coup leaders. For Micheletti and Vasquez, the Rubicon has been crossed and they cannot abandon power without suffering consequences. Any aircraft trying to descend with this list of dignitaries would require air-landing clearance by Honduran authorities and this would likely be denied. The key may well be whether the Obama administration is willing to bring inordinate pressure to bear on its historic allies or use its military air power to impose the deadline for Zelaya’s return. And if the external pressure gets Zelaya back in office, will he be allowed to get the vote for a constituent assembly that the country so badly needs to become a progressive society?

Roger Burbach is the director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and author of The Pinochet Affair.

[John Schröder]

http://www.borev.net/2009/06/poll_name_ ... ed_ju.html

Poll! Name the Most Retarded Justification for the Coup D'état in Honduras



Let freedom ring, bitches! The U.S. has just come out with some whacked policy statement explaining that while the situation in Honduras is like totally a coup d'état, we are technically going to refrain from calling it that. How lame is that? Super lame! But it's really just the latest of all the bizarre ways people have decided to described the violent overthrow of a democratically elected government in the last 24 hours. All this begs the question: Whose description is the most tortured, Orwellian, or otherwise insane?

* Candidate 1: Interim dictator Roberto Micheletti describes how he found himself in this new role: "I did not reach this position because of a coup. I am here because of an absolutely legal transition process."

* Candidate 2: The WSJ's Mary Anastacia O'Grady describes the military overthrow as all part of a country's democratic system of "checks and balances."

* Candidate 3: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air invents an awesome new concept. This was "less of a coup and more of a military impeachment."

* Candidate 4: At the Corner, Ray Walser praised the way "Congress, the courts, and the military joined forces" in a "deliberate, bipartisan manner."

* Candidate 5: Rick Moran at the American Thinker doesn't care if it's a coup, only who it serves: "Does the fact that the coup is in the interests of the United States even matter to our president?"

Your turn starts...now!

[John Schröder]

http://www.borev.net/2009/07/the_perfec ... to_co.html

The "Perfect Idiot's" Guide to Coups and Democracy



Alvaro Vargas Llosa is famous for exactly two things: 1) being the son of a brilliant Peruvian novelist, and 2) co-writing a book once about how poor people are stupid.

Naturally this qualifies him a thousand times over to be the authentic voice of the Honduran coup in the U.S. media, and so he is. The New York Times ran some crap piece of his on Tuesday, explaining how exiled president Mel Zelaya actually plotted his own violent overthrow, and in today's Washington Post op-ed, we learn how this particular coup is really just democracy in disguise:

The crisis in Honduras should bring to people's attention this truth about Latin America today: The gravest threat to liberty comes from elected populists who are seeking to subject the institutions of the law to their megalomaniac whims.

Yes, darn those "elected leaders" and their "whims". Fortunately Honduras has finally imposed the fuck out of democracy on its people, military style! In the capital, civil liberties have been officially suspended, reporters have been detained and beaten, news outlets shut down, and at least one Catholic priest is in hiding, because the democracy enforcement squads want to kill him.

[John Schröder]

http://www.borev.net/2009/07/its_a_hat_ ... or_th.html

It's A Hat Trick Of Fail, For The Washington Post Editorial Page



God bless 'em, the Washington Post remains quite devoted to making this insanely bungle coup go well. Today they published their third opinion piece defending the military takeover, bringing the tally to, um, 3-0. They are officially far, far to the right of the Obama administration, every world institution, and every single country in Latin America and Europe, including Silvio freaking Berlusconi.

And for every gasbag pundit out there still making the comical argument that this was somehow a constitutional process, you'll probably want to revisit your talking points, now that the coup government's top military lawyer has acknowledged the whole thing was totally illegal but, in his professional opinion, was like fuck it.

[John Schröder]

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/america ... 24528.html

'You will help me change the opinion of the world,'' Micheletti told a gaggle of foreign reporters hailing from Nicaragua to Italy who were at the country's presidential palace for a news conference Wednesday evening.

But if Micheletti was looking for an easy ally in the foreign press corps Wednesday, what he had instead was a hard time trying to explain his foreign relations gaffes. A man who just a week ago was the head of congress now finds himself in the hot seat, as the international press and leaders from throughout the world press him for explanations.

Micheletti said he looked forward to welcoming a team of four or five countries, including Canada, Mexico and Guatemala, that he heard plan to visit Honduras in the coming days.

''But, you just said a couple of minutes ago that trip hasn't been confirmed; it's just a rumor on an Internet page,'' a Salvadoran reporter shot back.

After a brief pause, Micheletti responded: ``That's fine, then I have the hope and faith in God that they will come. Israel and Taiwan have said they support us, and I have faith that other governments will follow.''

The reporters pressed: Had Taiwan and Israel formally expressed their support?

''I don't have an official declaration, but that is the rumor I've heard,'' Micheletti responded. ``It's an aspiration I have that all of the countries will be a friend of ours.''

[John Schröder]

http://www.miamiherald.com/1506/story/1125872.html

The military officers who rushed deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya out of the country Sunday committed a crime but will be exonerated for saving the country from mob violence, the army's top lawyer said.

In an interview with The Miami Herald and El Salvador's elfaro.net, army attorney Col. Herberth Bayardo Inestroza acknowledged that top military brass made the call to forcibly remove Zelaya -- and they circumvented laws when they did it.

It was the first time any participant in Sunday's overthrow admitted committing an offense and the first time a Honduran authority revealed who made the decision that has been denounced worldwide.

''We know there was a crime there,'' said Inestroza, the top legal advisor for the Honduran armed forces. ``In the moment that we took him out of the country, in the way that he was taken out, there is a crime. Because of the circumstances of the moment this crime occurred, there is going to be a justification and cause for acquittal that will protect us.''

Zelaya was ousted in a predawn raid at his house Sunday after he vowed to defy a court order that ruled a nonbinding referendum to be held that day illegal. The leftist wealthy rancher had clashed with the attorney general, the Supreme Court, Congress and the military he commanded.

But instead of being taken to court to stand trial for abuse of power and treason, the military swept him out of bed at gunpoint and forced him into exile.

Inestroza described weeks of mounting pressure, in which a president who was viewed as allied with Venezuela's Hugo Chávez used soldiers as ''political tools.'' The attorney general's office had ordered Zelaya's arrest, and the Supreme Court, Inestroza said, ordered the armed forces to carry it out.

So when the powers of state united in demanding his ouster, the military put a pajama-clad Zelaya on a plane and sent him to Costa Rica. The rationale: Had Zelaya been jailed, throngs of loyal followers would have erupted into chaos and demanded his release with violence.

''What was more beneficial, remove this gentleman from Honduras or present him to prosecutors and have a mob assault and burn and destroy and for us to have to shoot?'' he said. ``If we had left him here, right now we would be burying a pile of people.''

This week, Deputy Attorney General Roy David Urtecho told reporters that he launched an investigation into why Zelaya was removed by force instead of taken to court. Article 24 of Honduras' penal code will exonerate the joint chiefs of staff who made the decision, because it allows for making tough decisions based on the good of the state, Inestroza said.

U.S. State Department lawyers are studying whether the action is legally considered a military coup, even though the person who was constitutionally next in line took power.

Inestroza acknowledged that after 34 years in the military, he and many other longtime soldiers found Zelaya's allegiance to Chávez difficult to stomach. Although he calls Zelaya a ''leftist of lies'' for his bourgeoisie upbringing, he admits he'd have a hard time taking orders from a leftist.

Memories of the 1980s fight against guerrilla insurgents are still fresh in Honduras.

''We fought the subversive movements here and we were the only country that did not have a fratricidal war like the others,'' he said. ``It would be difficult for us, with our training, to have a relationship with a leftist government. That's impossible. I personally would have retired, because my thinking, my principles, would not have allowed me to participate in that.''

And if Zelaya comes back, he'll have to retire anyway.

''I will resign and leave the country, and so would most of the military,'' Inestroza said. ``They would come after us and the other political leaders who were involved in this.''

Zelaya has said he will try to stage a brazen comeback on Sunday. The Organization of American States' secretary general, José Miguel Insulza, arrives in Tegucigalpa Friday to try to lay the groundwork for Zelaya's return. Insulza refuses to meet any member of the new administration led by the former head of Congress, Roberto Micheletti.

''I am 54 years years old,'' Inestroza said. ``I left my youth, my adolescence and part of my adulthood here -- an entire lifetime. You should understand it's very difficult for someone who has dedicated his whole life to a country and an institution to see, from one day to another, a person who is not normal come and want to change the way of life in the country without following the steps the law indicates.''

[John Schröder]

http://blogs.newamericamedia.org/nam-ro ... telesur-tv

Whatever happens in Honduras, the crisis has been tremendously good to Telesur TV.

The satellite and cable news channel launched as a sort of Latin American Al Jazeera in 2005. Funded in large part by the oil dollars of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, it intended to become a combative alternative to CNN or BBC en Español. Until Telesur’s emergence, Latin America lacked a homegrown continent-wide news channel.

Critics laughed Telesur off as “Chávez TV,” and said it wouldn’t have enough independence or objectivity to produce reputable TV news.

But with the crisis in Honduras, Telesur has hit its stride. Objective, it’s not. It’s clearly resolutely on the side of deposed left-leaning President Manuel Zelaya, a Chávez ally, and against the de-facto, post-coup government of the center-right Roberto Micheletti. Just as Al Jazeera found its true calling as an Arab conscience reporting critically on the 2003 Iraq War, Telesur has found it as a gadfly to the Honduran coup leaders.

Despite having its cameramen beat up, its signal blocked in Honduras, its staff arrested and harassed, it has provided the best up-to-date coverage of the crisis. So much so, that Twitter posts about the coup frequently referenced Telesur’s on-air broadcasts. In other words, Telesur has sometimes been even one step ahead of Twitterers.

On Monday, the second day of Micheletti’s government, CNN International and the BBC still seemed to be fumbling for dramatic street footage. On Telesur’s live online feed, I watched unedited, gritty footage of screaming protesters running from riot police. I saw rooftop views of camouflaged soldiers standing guard at the presidential palace, as helicopters airlifted in boxes of supplies for the besieged coup leaders.

Instead of dry quotes served up in the newspapers or rumor-mongering on Twitter, this was palpable, irrefutable stuff. Watching Telesur, one could feel the anxiety and adrenaline roiling Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital. Telesur has come of age.

[John Schröder]

http://blogs.newamericamedia.org/nam-ro ... as-matters

Why Honduras Matters

Posted on Jun 30, 2009 09:51:00 AM by Marcelo Ballve

Honduras is the original “Banana Republic.” The American writer O. Henry coined the term in his early 1900s book of interlinked stories called Cabbages and Kings, set in a fictional Central American country named Anchuria.

Anchuria is Honduras—a backwater bedeviled by incompetent governments and thick with political conspiracies.

Honduras, from its very beginnings as a Spanish colony, was a laboratory for political skullduggery and state-sponsored murder. Founded as a colony by men ostensibly loyal to Hernán Cortés, the conquistador of Mexico, it quickly became a quagmire.

In the mid 1520s, word reached Cortés in Mexico that his subordinate Capt. Olid, sent to colonize Honduras, had staged a rebellion and declared Honduras an independent kingdom—arguably the first sovereign political entity in the Americas.

Cortés promptly organized an expedition to smash Capt. Olid’s upstart government, but by the time Cortés had slogged through hundreds of miles of jaguar-infested jungle, Olid already had been stabbed to death. A soldier loyal to Cortés, a certain Las Casas, had escaped from prison and dispatched Olid in a bloody duel.

Nearly 500 years later, Honduras is still repeating this history of tropical instability. On Sunday, word raced around the world that democratically elected left-leaning president Manuel Zelaya had been deposed in a military coup.

A longtime legislator and local entrepreneur of Italian descent, Roberto Micheletti, was selected to replace him.

It seems like a flashback, improbable, that a coup would occur now in Central America.

Is this Latin America’s last coup?

Perhaps in future history books de-facto President Micheletti will be regarded as the last Capt. Olid, the last politician to grab power by force in Honduras.

Or maybe history will repeat itself again and again, and Honduras will continue its cycle of politics dictated by blade and bullet.

Sociologically it’s primed for instability. Honduras has one of the worst unemployment rates in the world: about 30 percent. Economic inequality is dramatic: the wealthiest 10 percent of the population control over 40 percent of the wealth. Forty percent of the labor force works in agriculture: mostly coffee and bananas, unreliable commodity crops dependent on prices set by traders in wealthy countries.

It’s a combustible mix of statistics, and yet geopolitically Honduras is a lynchpin. It borders a trio of nations with a bloody history: Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. All these countries were Cold War battlefields. And Honduras became a staging ground for revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. Meanwhile, CIA station chiefs in the capital Tegucigalpa acted as de-facto National Security Advisers to brutal pro-U.S. governments.

Honduras matters because it is the keystone country in Central America. If the U.S. government recognizes the coup that brought Micheletti to power, the die will be cast.

If Micheletti is not forced out by international pressure, and Zelaya reinstated, neighboring governments will be put on notice: the whims of military leaders and backroom politicking might at any time usher them out of power at the end of a gun.

Central Americans will then get the message: the international community doesn’t step in when latter-day “banana republics” are threatened by coups. And so, these countries are condemned to remaining banana republics.

When Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was taken from his house by soldiers and put on a plane to Costa Rica, he was still in pajamas.

In a single day—his country’s democracy regressed to the wearing of diapers.