Honduras Coup: Soldiers kidnap VZ, Cuba, Nicaragua envoys

[Sweejak]

Well, so far the press isn't calling them freedom fighters and we haven't mined any harbors, Obama has not yet said, Honduras is " two days' driving from Harlingen, Texas."

[StarmanSkye]

John Schroeder posted:
"Ok, I think I get it. The driver is President Mel Zelaya, the cop is the military, the car is Honduras, and the alcohol is..."non-binding referendums," maybe? So sure, the cop may have been overzealous when it overthrew constitutional democracy a little, but what are you gonna do, Let Mel get behind the wheel of Honduras again? He's DRUNK, remember? In this analogy Costa Rica is detox, I guess, and this is the kind of drunk that never actually sobers up. And besides the cop already gave the car away to a buddy of his, who's been using it to run over teenagers at the airport.

Gawd remember the Reagan era, when everything was this awesome"
****
Ha-hA! Thanks for the chuckle, a bit of levity in an otherwise sobering reflection on the obnoxious state of American's arrested state of political and economic sensibility. People who couldn;t even FIND Honduras on a map a week ago now act like Honduras Polisci graduate students, posting their 'expert' outraged comments blasting the 'criminal' 'dictator' 'leftist' Zelaya -- based on nothing but the most specious of endlessly-repeated fabrications and distortions. The public has allowed itself to be led by the nose, following the shameful lead of the State Dept. and corporate-media shills who spout utter nonsense about Zelaya the radical 'communist', bosom-buddy of the tyrant strongman Chavas, faithfully following the predictable kneejerk reaction outrage script against the 'socialist demon', so well-crafted by now the public isn't even aware they don't have the first clue or any kind of independant thought about it -- unknowing, uncaring in the least that while they inwardly tremble in Pavlovian response to the emotional-cue keywords 'Socialist' and 'Chavez', they are deaf dumb blind and ignorant about the constant, enduring legacy of US-scripted militarism and client-state dependency that has wreaked such tremendous damage on Central and Southern American nations, their culture, economy, society, politics -- or that much nearer to where they live the scourge of neoliberal idealism has enabled the wholesale pillaging and decimation of US and world economy, propelling the wholesale by-stealth subversion of US democracy, Congress, Courts and Executive branch via corporatism aka fascism, creating IMMENSELY greater property, equity and job losses and causing more real security threats than the most alarmist 'socialist' revolution imagineable via the Bolivarian Revolution, Chavez, Zelaya, Morales, et al. Such silly, silly 'people' (I STILL think they're more like sheeple!).

I've actually read some youtube vid and blog post comments re: Honduras coup in which Reagan is fondly recalled as someone we need NOW more than ever ...
I honestly don't know WHAT kind of alternative-universe they think they are living in. On the other hand, Reagan's 5-yr-old corpse would undoubtedly be a far more reasonable, prudent, honest, compassionate, sincere and genuine entity than the former occupant.



Sweejak wrote:
--quote--
Well, so far the press isn't calling them freedom fighters and we haven't mined any harbors, Obama has not yet said, Honduras is "two days' driving from Harlingen, Texas."
*****
BRILLIANT!!!!
( ;


So, what IS this united condemnation of Zelaya but faithfully playing cheerleader for the US's cynical political stage-management? Absent any independant, critical thinking to understand that the elite-run courts and congress are hardly 'democratic', they endorse the deeply-flawed system which insures power, political participation & economic opportunity aren't shared with the 70% majority who endure the region's worst poverty. S


The US role in Honduras must be appraised in the historical context of Washington’s violent and oppressive relations with Central America and its longstanding ties to the most reactionary forces in the region. As political and economic tensions mount, the big landowning and corporate interests and the US-trained officer corps in America’s traditional “back yard” fear the effects of populist appeals against US imperialism by left-nationalist figures like Chávez and Zelaya.-Alex Lantier

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 US almost always weighing in on the side of the established, entrenched interests.- Roger Burbach

[Sweejak]

I've just gotten a email from an old RI poster who wants to me to post a message of appreciation.. well here is the snip:

... Hey, will you pretty please tell John Schroder for me that he's put together a truly superb thread on the Honduras coup - none better on the web that i've seen - and that I thank him sincerely and profusely for the terrific, important, and timely information?

You guys are doing a great service there... and may the oppressed everywhere finally lose their inexplicable patience and their willingness to acquiesce to un-justice!

[John Schröder]

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2009/07/r ... ident.html

"But as his presidency progressed, Zelaya veered to the left and was in constant conflict with business groups, lawmakers from his own party, the news media and the army."Over the last year, Zelaya's positions moved to the left. He pushed social programs and more attention for the poor who have no work," said Giuseppe Magno, the outgoing Italian ambassador. "This switch was not in line with the program he was voted in on. He was too close to Ortega and Chávez, a position the middle and upper classes did not appreciate."" And who is more qualified than the ambassador of fascist government in Italy to comment on Honduran affairs?

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2009/07/h ... -find.html

"GABRIEL Ciro Noriega, a journalist from San Juan Pueblo, was killed on Friday night after leaving a television program, according to Andrés Pavón Murillo, president of the Human Rights Defense Committee in Honduras. He added that thugs strafed the Radio Sonaguera broadcasting station in La Ceiba, Solaya municipality, Colón department, with machine guns and that another journalist, whose last name is Montero, received serious bullet wounds. When he was taken to hospital the hired killers followed to try and finish him off, but he was removed elsewhere in time for his protection. His state of health is unknown. Pavón also detailed the human rights situation in the country since President Manuel Zelaya was deposed on June 28. He said that more than 400 people had been detained, some have been released and others held and charged with sedition and material damage.""

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2009/07/t ... -neda.html

"At least one person died and three received bullet wounds in clashes at the Honduran capital's airport ahead of the expected arrival of ousted President Manuel Zelaya, a cameraman on the scene said Sunday." Where is CNN on this story and where is the showy (and shallow) correspondent, C Amanpour?

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2009/07/h ... -coup.html

"Internally split, Hondurans have taken to the streets both in support of Zelaya and in opposition to his return." Oh, they admit that there is a split. Because if you read the New York Times, you get the impression that there are opponents of Zelaya and then there are who are opponents of both sides (see the op-ed piece in NYT today).

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2009/07/obama-coup.html

"Those critics point, for example, to the American deliberations over whether Mr. Zelaya’s ouster meets the legal definition of a coup, a decision that would set off an automatic suspension of aid from the United States. A senior administration official said that, for now, most aid to Honduras was “on pause.” While all of the countries in the European Union and most of the nations in the hemisphere have recalled their ambassadors from Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, the United States has kept its envoy in place, saying it wanted to keep open channels of communication with Honduran civil society."

[John Schröder]

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22995.htm

A Coup is Not a Coup. A Not-Coup is a Coup.

By Kevin Coleman

July 07, 2009 "History News Network" -- On Sunday June 28th, the Honduran military kidnapped their president, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, and flew him to Costa Rica in his pajamas. In doing so, the military enforced an unconstitutional and undemocratic transfer of power from the Honduran left to the right. The international community immediately and unanimously condemned the coup d'état. Meanwhile, there is ongoing censorship of the press and several laws protecting Hondurans’ basic civil liberties have been indefinitely suspended by the coup government. In light of these basic facts, there are at least three historical problems that both activists and policymakers must address.

First, what is the significance of this coup for Honduras? Second, why is it that what from the outside is universally regarded as a coup d'état, is from the inside seen by so many as an authentically democratic step? And finally, what are the regional implications of the sudden and violent seizure of power by the Honduran right?

In the magical realism of Honduran politics, the past comes back to repeat itself as farce. On Monday June 29, in a replay of the military raids on the Jesuit radio station El Progreso of the 1960s and 1970s (the Jesuits committed the grave error of walking with the poor rather than serving as mere instruments of the rich), the Jesuits' progressive radio broadcasts were abruptly pulled off the air at four in the morning. On Sunday evening at 6 PM, just an hour after the coup government’s curfew began, a military contingent broke into Radio Progreso’s headquarters. With fury and guns pointed, they shouted, “We’ve come to close down this piece of shit!” One broadcaster had locked himself in to keep broadcasting throughout the night. Shortly after, another military convoy stopped outside Radio Progreso. A group of soldiers approached the radio station’s guard and asked him if there were any people still working inside. When the guard said no, the soldier in charge told him, “If we find someone inside, you will regret it.” Radio Progreso is the only radio station on the north coast that has remained critical of both the right and left wings of Honduras’s ruling Liberal Party. This military operation to shut down the radio station was not accompanied by any written orders, only the threat of violence. On Tuesday, Radio Progreso went back on the air and continued to cover the diverse acts of resistance to the coup. And while the coup government, led by Roberto Micheletti, a native of El Progreso, threatens to shut down the station with violence, popular organizations resisting the undemocratic change in their government are criticizing the station for “watering down” its reporting of the tense and dynamic situation.

The significance of this coup is that it is in fact a break from the pattern of past coups. In past Honduran coups, either one political party overthrew the other, preserving their traditional patron-client relations and taking the spoils of the state for those within their patronage network, or the military overthrew a civilian government so that it could stay in power itself, as happened multiple times during the 1960s and 70s. This, however, is the first coup by a united upper class. The Honduran business community united across party lines, deciding that it was worth severing the traditional patron-client relations that they enjoyed through their affiliation with one of the dominant parties so that they could stop Zelaya in his effort to increase the participation of common citizens in the affairs of their government while he also drew the country closer to Venezuela. In past Honduran coups, ethnic and regional divisions created cleavages between economic and political elites that most often led Hondurans of Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese origin to support democratic and liberalizing measures while Tegucigalpa-based criollo elites clung to conservative and often anti-democratic political configurations. In contrast, this was a coup in which social class was the main galvanizing element.

A class-based coup cannot be openly declared as such and must instead be articulated through existing political ideologies that allow the group seizing power to represent what they are actually doing as something other than what it is. So as the business, industrial, and news media of the country summoned the repressive power of the military to create the political conditions to rule by the traditional economic and political ideologies that have left the majority of Hondurans in dire poverty, they justified subverting the legal and democratic system as a defense of democracy.

This cacophonous composition, in which the coup is merely the crescendo, started to play within elite circles of the Liberal Party just one day before Mel Zelaya was sworn in as president in 2005. Although he ran his presidential campaign as a traditional Liberal Party candidate, refusing to say whether or not he would withdraw Honduran troops from Iraq and declaring that the free market economic policies that the country had dutifully enacted to the detriment of its legions of poor would not be modified. But after winning the election, Zelaya gradually began to confront the main power blocks in the country. It was then that he gave Roberto Micheletti Bain, who was at the time the President of the Honduran Congress, an ultimatum: either sign a law widening the scope of the citizenry’s participation in the affairs of its government or he would not take office the next day. Micheletti signed the Law of Citizen Power (La Ley de Poder Ciudadano; the government website explaining this law has been shutdown by Micheletti’s interim government). In 2006, Zelaya pushed through the Law of Transparency, giving the public unprecedented access to the information produced by and for the Honduran government. In January 2009, he increased the minimum wage from $132 per month to $290 per month, infuriating the elite and small business owners. Shortly after, he joined ALBA. Spearheaded by Hugo Chávez, ALBA is an economic development initiative that is intended as a counterweight to U.S.-backed development initiatives in the region. Each of these steps to the left alienated the right wing of his own Liberal Party, not to mention the already hostile opposition in the Nationalist Party. Furthermore, given Honduras’s tiny and rather ineffectual left, along with his inability to ground his discourse of Citizen Power (Poder Ciudadano) in the social movements of the country, Zelaya found himself more isolated than ever, with a rapidly dwindling power block.

Given his background as a member of the landed elite, Zelaya’s moves to the Latin American left have caught everyone off guard. The public persona of “Mel” is rooted in Olancho, a notoriously rowdy region of the country dedicated to ranching and harvesting lumber. And although he wears a cowboy hat and speaks as if he just came out of Honduras’s Wild West, he hails from an extremely wealthy family with vast holdings of land. And the one strong social movement that he could have fallen back on, the peasant movement, was not only disarticulated by the Reagan-backed repression of the 1980s but its remnants were also deeply wary of him.

On June 25, 1975, at the height of the agrarian reform movement, the National Peasant’s Union (Unión Nacional de Campesinos -- UNC) led a nationwide hunger march to Tegucigalpa. As a group from Olancho reached Juticalpa, the army moved in to stop it. With the help of local cattle ranchers, the soldiers attacked the peasant activists when they were meeting at their training center. Five peasant leaders, two students, and two foreign priests were shot dead and nine peasants were forcibly disappeared. Their dismembered bodies were found a week later in a dynamited well of a local landowner, the father of President Zelaya. This incident became known as the “Los Horcones” massacre, after the name of the ranch where the bodies were found. The mid-1970s massacre at Los Horcones reverberated throughout Honduran society, deepening fissures between the military government and popular movements, between Catholic traditionalists and progressives. The memory of the brutal killing of these peasants resurfaced during Zelaya’s 2005 presidential campaign. Nevertheless, we could be looking at a very different Honduras had Zelaya sought to ground his actions in a discourse that resonated with the social and economic cooperatives that are one surviving legacy of the peasant movement. Tractors from Venezuela are not land reform.

In a word, in the eyes of Honduran elites, “Mel” was considered a traitor to his social class. And in the eyes of the poor and marginalized, he was perceived as inauthentic.

With regard to the radical disjunction between international perspectives (“It was a coup and that is inherently undemocratic”) and local perspectives (“It was not a coup but the rescuing of democracy”), we can look to the role that the Honduran media played in Zelaya’s overthrow. Over the past seven months, Honduras’s ultra-conservative and reactionary media has served as an echo chamber in which the elite has been able to repeatedly use a recycled version of Cold War anti-communism to convince much of the Honduran population that Zelaya was driving the country toward, to quote La Prensa, “a system of totalitarian socialism.”

Part of the media’s hostility toward Zelaya might be due to the fact that it is largely controlled by families who have accumulated their wealth not through the inheritance of land but through commercial and industrial endeavors. The bulk of these families emigrated from the Middle East early in the twentieth century, at the height of the banana boom, opening up stores and servicing the banana-export economy of the North Coast. Their exclusion from the circles of criollo power was one reason that this economically elite group was friendly to labor and tended to support liberal democratic reforms throughout the Cold War. Whereas in the past there was a disconnect between local Arab and criollo elites, in this coup, they have united across lines of ethnicity, party affiliation, and economic sector. President Zelaya’s failure to adopt the cultured elegance of a European minister made him the source of endless ridicule in the national press. As the Presidential Palace was peopled for the first time by indigenous and black Hondurans, the disconnect between the urbane, who for so long had enjoyed ruling the country, and the hitherto invisible governed became more pronounced.

As Hondurans have been bombarded by a coherent media assault that began many months ago, they internalized the constantly repeated notion that seeking the public’s input through a non-binding referendum was in fact a veiled attempt to consolidate power in the executive branch and to force them into adopting Hugo Chávez’s socialism of the twenty-first century. The tightening of media control since the coup has only reinforced the notion within Honduras that the military’s sacking of the elected president “was not a coup.”

“No fue golpe!” is the refrain constantly shouted by supporters of Micheletti’s interim government. A coup is not a coup. A not-coup is a coup. This is the Alice-in-Wonderland world of present-day Honduras.

Although many have commented on the links between Chávez and Zelaya, few have noted the ties between in the undemocratic Latin American right. Just as the international community has denounced the coup and called for the restoration of constitutional rule in Honduras, throughout Latin America, Chambers of Commerce have been expressing their support for the rightwing coup government. The closing of ranks of the Honduran media is eerily familiar to those who followed the Venezuelan media’s all out war on Hugo Chávez following the unsuccessful coup in 2003. In another eerie similarity, at the rallies in support of Micheletti’s coup government, the mostly upper middle class and mostly light-complexioned participants are almost all dressed in white, draping themselves in the Honduran flag, repeatedly singing the national anthem, holding candles, and always holding the same mass-produced Honduran flag. This attempt to represent order, purity, and to portray themselves as the “true” Honduran defenders of the constitution is similar to the anti-Chávez rallies in Venezuela. In contrast, Zelaya’s supporters are a raucous bunch, eclectically dressed, and ethnically diverse. They are creatively getting around the media’s attempt to ignore them and render them invisible to the rest of the nation and the world. If they can’t get their messages across through radio, television, or print media, they will spray paint them on the walls. If the interim government says that there is no repression and everything is normal, they will bring the cartridges of bullets and tear gas that the military has used against them to the next demonstration. And for his part, Hugo Chávez’s threats to invade Honduras have sparked defiant nationalist sentiments that Micheletti is using to consolidate his power.

This coup has just upped the ante for all involved. It was Zelaya’s unexpected moves to the left, without the strong support of any particular social and political base, that helped to unify the Honduran right against him. But while less than a week ago, Zelaya had no social base to speak of, the coup has outraged even those who thought his policies and erratic behavior to be ridiculous. For them, this is no longer about the political left or right and much less about Mel Zelaya. Instead, they see the military’s illegal sacking of the president as an assault on their democratic system.

And geopolitically, the stakes are equally high. If the Honduran right gets away with this military coup, what is to stop the Salvadoran right from sacking Mauricio Funes? And if the international community allows the military to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Honduras, why shouldn’t the Nicaraguan right feel emboldened enough to overthrow Daniel Ortega?

[John Schröder]

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/6/fi ... n_honduras

AMY GOODMAN: John, talk about the contrast between the media coverage of the Iranian elections and the Honduran coup, and the response to it on the ground.

JOHN PILGER: Well, you know, you take the New York Times. The New York Times basically has said, in so many words, that the Iranian protests represent a mass movement, embracing the majority in the country. Now there is no doubt that among the people protesting, the many people protesting in the streets of Iran, are those who want another Iran, those who want greater freedoms, we have heard from that in the past, but without any smoking gun, without any credible information, without any evidence that that election in Iran was rigged. Rigged to get rid of something like 10 million votes. I mean, I don’t think anyone does in an election like in Iran or in the United States, there is a fraud. In most elections, there are. They may well have been extensive fraud in the Iranian elections. But the way our perception of those events in Iran has been manipulated is to suggest that this was a revolution that was said to overthrow the Islamic revolution of 1979. That is simply just not true. That has preoccupied the mainstream media. It has been on the front pages, and the top of the news and the networks.

Contrast that with Honduras, yes, it has been a news item, way at the end of Michael Jackson. As a main component of this news item has been the Obama administration’s alleged condemnation of the Honduran coup. But if you look at the condemnation, which is built on the fact they said, well they’ve tried to sway the Honduran military from staging the coup, and I have to say Hiliary Clinton does not want to call it a coup because she does so, the Foreign Assistance Act would kick in and she would have to withdraw all the military support to the 600 US military personal who are based in Honduras. But she said and administration officials have said, “Look, we tried to persuade the Honduran military from going ahead with this.” Well, you turn that around, and that means they knew that a coup was coming. And just beggars belief that they did not play a major role in the events–that may well have gone out of their control, they may well have not wanted the coup in its present form, in its present crude form to happen-but they knew about it.

It is so parallels the 2002 coup against Chavez. Now that story, what really is the kernel of that news story, it is really what really matters in that story, what did the U.S. play its traditional role or not, and why has the elected president of Honduras been kicked out of this country? That has been relegated. So, you have two news stories. You have the Iranian story of protests for freedom, that’s approved, thats a worthy story. You have the Honduras story of our friends in the south just getting a little bit of control, that is an unworthy story. Two different perceptions in two very, very important areas.

[John Schröder]

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4596

A solidarity convoy of sixty people bound for Honduras was detained in Maicao, Colombia, by military forces, Venezuelan public television channel VTV reported on Monday. The convoy, which included nineteen Honduran doctors, was initiated by grassroots organisations, workers representatives and students in Venezuela and aimed to show solidarity with the Honduran people in the aftermath of the military coup that ousted the democratically elected president of that country, Manuel Zelaya, on June 28.

Miguel Mora, a member of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), and a participant in the convoy, denounced via telephone, that immediately after Colombian customs had allowed the convoy to cross the border, they were detained by the Administrative Security Department (DAS) of Colombia, who alleged they had committed crimes, such as carrying political material.

"First they allowed us to pass, but when we had crossed the border towards the interior of Colombia and we were going in buses with logos of President Hugo Chavez that said ‘Solidarity with the Honduran people', the DAS immediately detained us alleging that we were committing a crime that in their country is not allowed, of carrying political material, of carrying images of President Chavez and material in solidarity with the Honduran people," Mora explained.

The convoy, which departed on Saturday from Simon Bolivar House, Caracas, had planned to pass through Colombia, Panamá, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and arrive a few days later in Honduras via land.

Mora said the forty Venezuelans, nineteen Honduran doctors and one Cuban participating in the convoy remained detained; their passports had been taken from them and the place where they were located, cordoned off. Mora indicated that he had managed to slip away with a telephone and, through this, communicate with VTV.

"They detained us simply for carrying pictures of Chavez and a solidarity banner with the Honduran people," he said.

[John Schröder]

http://www.chavezcode.com/2009/07/role- ... lican.html

The Role of the International Republican Institute (IRI) in the Honduran Coup

The International Republican Institute talks of “coup” in Honduras, months before

By Eva Golinger

The International Republican Institute (IRI), considered the international branch of the U.S. Republican Party, and one of the four “core groups” of the congressionally created and funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), apparently knew of the coup d’etat in Honduras against President Zelaya well in advance. IRI is well known for its role in the April 2002 coup d’etat against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and its funding and strategic advising of the principal organizations involved in the ouster of President Jean Bertrand Aristide of Haiti in 2004. In both cases, IRI funded and/or trained and advised political parties and groups that were implicated in the violent, undemocratic overthrow of democratically elected presidents.

After the 2002 coup d’etat occured in Venezuela, IRI president at the time, George Folsom, sent out a celebratory press release claiming, “The Institute has served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…” Hours later, after the coup failed and the people of Venezuelan rescued their president, who had been kidnapped and imprisoned on a military base, and reinstalled constitutional order, IRI regretted its premature, public applause for the coup. One of its principal funders, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), was furious that IRI had publicly revealed the U.S. government had provided funding and support for the coup leaders. NED President Carl Gershman was so irritated with IRI’s blunder, that he sent out a memo to Folsom, chastising him: “By welcoming [the coup] – indeed, without any apparent reservations – you unnecessarily interjected IRI into the sensitive internal politics o Venezuela”. Gershman would have much prefered that NED and IRI’s role in fomenting and supporting the coup against President Chávez have remained a secret.

IRI, chaired by Senator John McCain, was created in 1983 as part of the National Endowment for Democracy’s mission to “promote democracy around the world”, a mandate from President Ronald Reagan. In reality, one of NED’s founders, Allen Weinstein, put it this way in a 1991 interview with the Washington Post, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." IRI’s own history, according to its website (www.iri.org) also explains that its original work was in Latin America, at a time when the Reagan administration was under heavy scrutiny and pressure from the U.S. Congress for funding paramilitary groups, dictatorships and death squads in Central and South America to install U.S.-friendly regimes and supress leftist movements. “Congress responded to President Reagan’s call in 1983 when it created the National Endowment for Democracy to support aspiring democrats worldwide. Four nonprofit, nonpartisan democracy institutes were formed to carry out this work – IRI, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS).”“In its infancy, IRI focused on planting the seeds of democracy in Latin America. Since the end of the Cold War, IRI has broadened its reach to support democracy and freedom around the globe. IRI has conducted programs in more than 100 countries.”

In its initial days, IRI, along with the other coup groups of the NED, funded organizations in Nicaragua to foment the destabilization of the Sandinista government. Journalist Jeremy Bigwood explained part of this role in his article, “No Strings Attached?”, "’When the rhetoric of democracy is put aside, NED is a specialized tool for penetrating civil society in other countries down to the grassroots level’ to achieve U.S. foreign policy goals, writes University of California-Santa Barbara professor William Robinson in his book, A Faustian Bargain. Robinson was in Nicaragua during the late ‘80s and watched NED work with the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan opposition to remove the leftist Sandinistas from power during the 1990 elections.”

The evidence of IRI’s role in the 2002 coup d’etat in Venezuela has been well documented and investigated. Proof of such involvement, which is still ongoing in terms of IRI’s work, funding, strategic advising and training of opposition political parties in Venezuela, is available through documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act posted here: , and also available in my book, The Chávez Code: Cracking U.S. Intervention in Venezuela (Olive Branch Press 2006). None of the claims or evidence regarding IRI’s role in fomenting and supporting the April 2002 in Venezuela and its ongoing support of the Venezuelan opposition has ever been disclaimed by the institution, primarily because all evidence cited comes from IRI and NED’s own internal documentation obtained under FOIA.

Hence, when the recent coup d’etat occured in Honduras, against democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya, there was little doubt of U.S. fingerprints. IRI’s name appeared as a recipient of a $700,000 Latin American Regional Grant in 2008-2009 from NED to promote “good governance” programs in countries including Honduras. An additional grant of $550,000 to work with “think tanks” and “pressure groups” in Honduras to influence political parties was also given by the NED to IRI in 2008-2009, specifically stating, IRI will support initiatives to implement [political] positions into the 2009 campaigns. IRI will place special emphasis on Honduras, which has scheduled presidential and parliamentary elections in November 2009.” That is clear direct intervention in internal politics in Honduras.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) also provides approximately $49 million annually to Honduras, a large part of which is directed towards “democracy promotion” programs. The majority of the recipients of this aid in Honduras, which comes in the form of funding, training, resources, strategic advice, communications counseling, political party strengthening and leadership training, are organizations directly linked to the recent coup d’etat, such as the Consejo Nacional Anticorrupción, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, the Honduran Private Enterprise Council (COHEP), the Council of University Deans, the Confederation of Honduran Workers (CTH), the National Convergence Forum, the Chamber of Commerce (FEDECAMARA), the Association of Private Media (AMC), the Group Paz y Democracia and the student group Generación X Cambio. These organizations form part of a coalition self-titled “Unión Cívica Democrática de Honduras” (Civil Democratic Union of Honduras) that has publicly backed the coup against President Zelaya.

IRI’s press secretary, Lisa Gates, responded to claims that IRI funded or aided (which also involves non-monetary aid, such as training, advising and providing resources) groups involved in the Honduran coup as “false reports”. However, there are several interesting links between the republican organization and the violent coup d’etat against President Zelaya that do indicate the institute’s involvement, as well as to the above mentioned funding that exceeds $1 million during just this year. In addition to its presence on the ground in Honduras as part of its “good governance” and “political influence” programs, IRI Regional Program Director, Latin America and the Carribean, Alex Sutton, has recently been closely involved with many of the organizations in the region that have backed the Honduran coup. Sutton was a featured speaker at a recent 3-day conference held in Venezuela by the U.S.-funded ultraconservative Venezuelan organization CEDICE (Centro para la Divulgación de Conocimiento Económico). CEDICE’s director, Rocío Guijarra, was one of the principal executors of the 2002 coup d’etat against President Hugo Chávez, and Guijarra personally signed a decree installing a dictatorship in the country, which led to the coup’s overthrow by the people and loyal armed forces of Venezuela. The conference Sutton participated in, held from May 28-29 in Venezuela was attended by leaders of Latin America’s ultra-conservative movement, ranging from Bolivian ex president Jorge Quiroga, who has called for President Evo Morales of Bolivia’s overthrow on several occasions, Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa and his son Alvaro, both of whom have publicly expressed support for the coup against President Zelaya in Honduras, and numerous leaders of the Venezuelan opposition, the majority of whom are well known for their involvement in the April 2002 coup and subsequent destabilization attempts. The majority of those present at the CEDICE conference in May 2009, have publicly expressed support for the recent coup against President Zelaya.

But a more damning piece of evidence linking IRI to the Honduran coup, is a video clip posted on the institute’s website at http://www.iri.org/multimedia.asp. The clip or podcast, features a slideshow presentation given by Susan Zelaya-Fenner, assistant program officer at IRI, on March 20, 2009, discussing the “good governance” program in Honduras. Curiously, at the beginning of the presentation, Zelaya-Fenner explains what she considers “a couple of interesting facts about Honduras.” These include, “Honduras is a very overlooked country in a small region. Honduras has had more military coups than years of independence, it has been said. However, parodoxically, more recently it has been called a pillar of stability in the region, even being called the U.S.S. Honduras, as it avoided all of the crisis that its neighbors went through during the civil wars in the 1980s.”

Important to note is that what Zelaya-Fenner refers to as “U.S.S. Honduras” and “avoid[ing] all of the crisis that its neighbords went through during the civil wars in the 1980s” was because the U.S. government, CIA and Pentagon utilized Honduras as the launching pad for the attacks on Honduras’ neighbors. U.S. Ambassador at the time, John Negroponte, and Colonel Oliver North, trained, funded and planned the paramilitary missions of the death squads that were used to assassinate, torture, persecute, disappear and neutralize tens of thousands of farmers and “suspected” leftists in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Zelaya-Fenner continues, “Thus, Honduras has been more recently stable, and it’s always been poor, which means that it’s below the radar, and gets little attention. The current president, Manuel Zelaya and his buddies, the leftists in the Latin American region have caused a lot of political destabilization recently in the country. He is a would-be emulator of Hugo Chavez and Hugo Chavez' social revolution. He has spent the better part of this administration trying to convince the Honduran people, who tend to be very practical and very 'center' that the Venezuelan route is the way to go. Zelaya's leftist leanings further exarcerbate an already troubled state. Corruption is rampant, crime is at all time highs. Drug trafficking and related violence have begun to spill over from Mexico. And there's a very real sense that the country is being purposefully destabilized from within, which is very new in recent Honduran history. Coups are thought to be so three decades ago until now (laughs, audience laughs), again.”

Did she really say that? Yes, you can hear it yourself on the podcast. Is it merely a coincidence that the coup against President Zelaya occured just three months after this presentation? State Department officials have admitted that they knew the coup was in the works for the past few months. Sub-secretary of State Thomas Shannon was in Honduras the week before the coup, apparently trying to broker some kind of deal with the coup planners to find another “solution” to the “problem”. Nevertheless, they continued funding via NED and USAID to those very same groups and military sectors involved in the coup. It is not a hidden fact that Washington was unhappy with President Zelaya’s alliances in the region, principally with countries such as Venezuela and Nicaragua. It is also public knowledge that President Zelaya was in the process of removing the U.S. military presence from the Soto Cano airbase, using a fund from the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA – Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua, St. Kitts, Antigua & Barbados and Venezuela) to convert the strategically important Pentagon base into a commercial airport.

IRI’s Zelaya-Fenner explains the strategic importance of Honduras in her presentation, "Why does Honduras matter? A lot of people ask this question, even Honduran historians and experts. Some might argue that it doesn't and globally it might be hard to counter. However, the country is strategic to regional stability and this is an election year in Honduras. It's a strategic time to help democrats with a small “d”, at a time when democracy is increasingly coming under attack in the region.”

There is no doubt that the coup against President Zelaya is an effort to undermine regional governments implementing alternative models to capitalism that challenge U.S. concepts of representative democracy as “the best model”. Countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, are building successful models based on participatory democracy that ensure economic and social justice, and prioritize collective social prosperity and human needs over market economics. These are the countries, together now with Honduras, that have been victims of NED, USAID, IRI and other agencies’ interventions to subvert their prospering democracies.

[John Schröder]

http://www.chavezcode.com/2009/07/day-1 ... ngton.html

President Manuel Zelaya arrived early this morning to Washington, D.C., to participate in several meetings with the Organization of American States (OAS) and the U.S. Department of State. The Honduran president, ousted in a military coup on Sunday, June 28, has a scheduled meeting at 1PM (EDT) with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It is unclear what exactly is expected of this meeting. Most likely President Zelaya will request the US Government cease ALL military and economic aid to Honduras until the coup government steps down. However, it is unlikely that Washington will comply with this request in its entirety. The Department of State has already been clear that it is not subject to suspending any aid directed toward "democracy promotion", which includes large part of the $49 million it is investing this year in Honduras through USAID. There have also been no moves to remove the US military presence from Honduras, which probably won't happen either, since the Pentagon undoubtedly wants to maintain the presence, and also shares very close ties with the Honduran military involved in the coup against President Zelaya.

Today, a group of representatives from the coup government have also arrived in Washington, and have a scheduled press conference at 3pm at the National Press Club in Washington DC. Their visit has been organized by Republican Senator John McCain, who is also the chairman of the International Republican Institute, heavily implicated in the Honduran coup (see my blog entry below). A lobbying firm with close ties to McCain, the Cormac Group, has organized the coup representatives' press conference this afternoon. John W. Timmons, founding partner of the Cormac Group, was legislative counsel to Senator McCain and directed his legislative agenda, principally in the area of commerce. Cormac Group also represents the neo-fascist, anti-castro Cuban mafia company, Barcardi USA.

Yesterday, President Obama mentioned the situation in Honduras in a speech he gave before the New Economic School in Moscow. He stated the following: "Even as we meet here today, America supports now the restoration of the democratically-elected President of Honduras, even though he has strongly opposed American policies. We do so not because we agree with him. We do so because we respect the universal principle that people should choose their own leaders, whether they are leaders we agree with or not."

Well, glad that's cleared up. Obama, et al, don't like President Zelaya, but he was elected by his people, so....

http://www.chavezcode.com/2009/07/day-1 ... costa.html

President Zelaya's meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has just concluded in the State Department's offices in Washington. President Zelaya is still meeting right now with Sub-Secretary of State Thomas Shannon and National Security Council Advisor on Latin America, Dan Restrepo. Clinton gave several remarks at the end of the meeting with President Zelaya, announcing that Costa Rican President Oscar Arias will lead "negotiations" between President Zelaya and the coup government in order to reestablish constitutional order in the country. Clinton refused to respond clearly to a question regarding whether or not the US Government was formally and legally considering the events in Honduras as a "coup d'etat", stating that since "negotiations" and "diplomatic efforts" are going on now, Washington prefers not to comment more on the situation. Clinton, and later State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly, would not comment on the presence of the coup representatives delegation in Washington today, invited by Senator John McCain. Nor would they respond to inquiries regarding alleged meetings between those coup government representatives and Sub-Secretary of State Thomas Shannon.

The main question here is why any negotiations at all are being conducted with a criminal, coup government that violently kidnapped and forced a democratically elected president into exile. The US government says it won't negotiate with terrorists, yet it will negotiate with criminals, repressors, human rights violators, kidnappers and coup leaders. And, its letting them roam freely through the halls of Congress today.

[John Schröder]

http://www.borev.net/2009/07/great_mome ... tin_1.html

Great Moments In Coup Reporting



Awesome headline! But you know what would be really funny is if the developers turned out to be hilarious, impossibly racist sleazebags. Oh right:

"[As Americans] it's like, 'Oh my god, people are rioting in the streets!' But they're doing that every Saturday night. I hate to be so crass about it all, but it's just the way their culture works. My job is build golf course -- to get others to invest in the country so they quit acting like like crazy people. Of course it's not crazy to them, just to us."

Thanks for the scoop, Broward-Palm Beach New Times!

[John Schröder]

http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/247

Honduran Military: "We Won't Take Orders from a Leftist"

Submitted by robert naiman on 6 July 2009 - 7:37pm

Predictably, the Washington Post and New York Times the have given op-ed space in recent days to people seeking to justify the military coup in Honduras, and blaming the coup on President Zelaya (the same writer in the latter case. )

Meanwhile, the Honduran military's top legal adviser was talking to the Miami Herald. Army attorney Col. Herberth Bayardo Inestroza was, shall we say, a little off-message.

In the interview, Col. Inestroza made two admissions that were remarkable in light of the efforts by pundits and Republicans in the United States to justify the coup.

First: he admitted that the coup was initiated by the military, and that it broke the law:

"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."

This much, of course, was obvious. But much more remarkable was Inestroza's admission of what the core issue for the Honduran military was: taking orders from a leftist.

"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."

So, this is democracy, according to the Honduran military: we won't take orders from a leftist, because of our "training."

You might hope that these statements would cause some heated questions in Washington. After all, where did that "training" come from? Much of it came from the United States.

U.S. military assistance to Honduras - and other countries - is frequently justified on the grounds that it gives us "influence" over the militaries of these countries - the implication being that the influence so purchased is a positive force.

Now, the Obama Administration suggests it is doing all it can to reverse the coup and restore President Zelaya to office - as called for unanimously by the UN General Assembly and the Organization of American States.

So far, whatever the Obama Administration has done has not caused the coup government to budge in its unwillingness to allow the democratically elected President of Honduras to resume his office.

So, at least one of the following things must be true: either the Obama Administration is not doing all it can, or the "influence" we purchased with our military aid isn't worth very much, or the influence that we purchased was not a positive force. Far from influencing the Honduran military in the direction in which most Americans would characterize as "American values," the Honduran military has been "trained," apparently, to regard itself as a power above the law, whose mission is to protect the interests of a narrow elite.

If you don't think Col. Inestroza's statements reflect "American values" in the commonsense use of the term, why not give Secretary of State Clinton a call, and urge her to do everything in her power to restore the democratically elected president of Honduras to office, as called for by the UN and the OAS. You can reach the State Department at 202-647-4000.

[John Schröder]

http://incakolanews.blogspot.com/2009/0 ... ortez.html

Honduras: Gotta love this Enrique Ortez guy

Hot off the presses, here's a Youtube (with subtitles in English) of the Chancellor of Honduras's de facto government, aka racist shit Enrique Ortez, speaking on yet another TV show and yet again calling Obama "That blackie who doesn't even know where Honduras is" (again, plenty of much worse ways to translate the word 'negrito' he uses in this context). This isn't the same occasion we reported last week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vbZAb6j ... r_embedded

Enjoy.

[John Schröder]

http://incakolanews.blogspot.com/2009/0 ... ummer.html

Honduras: School's out for summer....



....school's out forever.

The usurper government of Micheletti again ordered teachers back to all schools and universities this morning. The teachers (and the students for that matter...probably more important) gave them the royal finger and have ratified their indefinite strike. I'd link to something better than RadioRebelde, but for some reason the local Honduran media aren't covering this angle...wonder why....

Meanwhile, President Zelaya's wife Xiomara Castro is leading a massive march against the coupmongers in the capital this morning. However 800 people won't be able to make it as they've been arrested by the police state under the new laws that give them no protection and allow authorities to hold them without charge or trial forever. Hey, just like Gitmo! What fun! The 800 is the number only in the Capital Tegucigalpa, by the way....gawd knows how many have disappeared in the provinces so far.

Final note; before the wingnuts amongst you get into a lather, it's best to point out that the family name 'Castro' is very common all over the continent. Consider it "the thing wot I learned about LatAm today".

[John Schröder]

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... Wf-TR--xyA

Using amateur videos and mobile phone pictures, young Hondurans opposed to the ousting of President Manuel Zelaya are uploading images to YouTube in what they have branded a 'tele-coup.'

With media controls in place, national channels offer biased political coverage and frequently cut off all cable channels to broadcast their messages.

Some repeatedly air speeches from the interim leaders who sent Zelaya away on a plane to Costa Rica on June 28, as well as pictures of days-old demos by their supporters.

To counter the one-sided coverage, Zelaya supporters are uploading videos of protests, speeches by union leaders and clashes with the army.

"We call it 'tele-coup' because on the national channels you can't see the reality of what's happening," said engineering student Cesar Silva.

"Obviously if they cut Internet broadband we're dead," Silva told AFP, adding that the supporters use several servers to try to avoid being cut off.

[John Schröder]

Thank you John.

I'm amazed at how this thread and the one on Iran seem to be the best third-party compilers of relevant information and analysis on the two crises in English available on the Web. And it's mostly thanks to you.

Hey, will you pretty please tell John Schroder for me that he's put together a truly superb thread on the Honduras coup - none better on the web that i've seen - and that I thank him sincerely and profusely for the terrific, important, and timely information?

Thanks. I'm spending so much (too much, actually) time on this, it's encouraging to get some positive feedback.