Honduras Coup: Soldiers kidnap VZ, Cuba, Nicaragua envoys

[Sweejak]

Document links Honduras coup leader to the Cali Drug Cartel http://bit.ly/EGsEG

[geogeo]

I saw that. No big surprise--Micheletti is a veritable Uribe. The forces lining up against Mel are all in the pockets of the narco mafia, who work hand-in-glove with the CIA, Negroponte et al.

[StarmanSkye]

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47644

HONDURAS: Coup Opponents Announce New Stage of Protests
By Thelma Mejía

TEGUCIGALPA, Jul 13 (IPS) - The sectors opposed to the regime that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya on Jun. 28 announced a new stage of resistance, while Costa Rican President Oscar Arias is planning a second round of talks, as peace broker.

Arias, winner of the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end civil wars raging at the time in several Central American countries, told the press over the weekend that within the next week a new round of talks should be held by the representatives of Zelaya and the de facto regime headed by Roberto Micheletti.

The two sides now have a week to "reflect" before sitting down to dialogue "more calmly," said Arias.

The first round of talks, held Jul. 9-10 in the Costa Rican capital, produced no results. Zelaya and Micheletti refused to get together face-to-face, each meeting separately instead with Arias, who said afterwards that "miracles" don't happen overnight and that things would take longer than expected.

Former chief justice of the Honduran Supreme Court Vilma Morales, who formed part of Micheletti's delegation, told IPS that "we are optimistic about the next meeting, because we are all Hondurans and we should look for solutions to the conflict among ourselves, in the framework of our laws, our constitution and the rule of law."

Morales said the next meeting would take place on Saturday, Jul.18.

Rafael Leiva, an analyst who specialises in international law, said Arias "cannot afford to let the mediation fail; he will find a way to overcome the obstacles that emerge, in order to reach a solution. This problem must be resolved by Hondurans themselves, with the support of the rest of Central America."

In his conversation with IPS, Leiva pointed to Arias' ability to "unblock disagreements with his wisdom and insight" during the Central American peace processes that culminated in peace accords in the 1980s and early 1990s.

"We believe he will not allow this situation to get out of hand. He also has the approval of Washington, which has confidence in his peace brokering skills," he said.

Meanwhile, the so-called Resistance Front Against the Coup d'Etat announced a new, more radical phase of protests this week aimed at securing Zelaya's return.

Congressman Marvin Ponce of the leftist Democratic Unification (UD) party said he believes the talks in San José are merely aimed at "buying time, while the Micheletti regime gets established, and we won't let that happen. We think they are only trying to drag this situation out, when things here are clear: there was a coup d'etat and Manuel Zelaya should be reinstated.

"As of this week we are going to take more radical action," he told IPS. "We are calling all of the organisations that make up the Resistance Front to an assembly Tuesday where we are going to propose a nationwide general strike as well as more radical actions. If what it takes is civil war, then that's what we'll do.

"The people owe Honduras a revolution, and if the legitimate president, Manuel Zelaya, is not reinstated, there will be a confrontation between social classes. What I can say is that the days of peaceful resistance, like we have had until now, are numbered," said Ponce, visibly exhausted from the last two weeks of protests.

There have been media reports and footage of harsh crackdowns on pro-Zelaya demonstrators, and two protesters were reportedly killed in a clash with security forces at the airport in Tegucigalpa when the leader's attempt to return to Honduras was thwarted by the military on Jul. 5.

In addition, two of Ponce's fellow UD politicians have been murdered in murky circumstances: Roger Bados was killed over the weekend at his home in Rivera Hernández, a violent slum in the northern city of San Pedro Sula, while Ramón García was murdered while riding in a bus to the capital from the western city of Santa Bárbara.

The deaths of the two UD social activists have not been expressly linked to the crisis triggered two weeks ago, when at least 200 military troops surrounded Zelaya's residence early in the morning on Sunday, Jun. 28, pulled him out of bed at gunpoint and put him on a plane to Costa Rica.

The situation surrounding the two murders is "strange and hazy. We need more information before we can comment on" the deaths, said Ponce.

In the view of Erasto Reyes, a leader of the Bloque Popular that forms part of the Resistance Front in San Pedro Sula, the murders "have increased the fear and sense of insecurity in this tense context in which social activists move. But we are not going to let down our guard, regardless," he told IPS.

On Sunday, the Micheletti government lifted the nighttime curfew in place since the coup, an attempt to show the international community that things were returning to normal in Honduras, in the wake of wide condemnation of the suspension of constitutional guarantees.

Labour and business activity began to return to normal last week, while marches by pro- and anti-Zelaya demonstrators have continued since Jun. 28.

The most affected sector has been education. On Monday, one faction of the teachers' unions called for a return to the classroom, while the rest decided in an assembly to continue the strike.

Lina Pineda, leader of one of the five factions that agreed to continue the strike, told IPS that "besides suspending classes, we are going to block roads, because the resistance will continue. We are completely united, and we are not going to stop until the coup-mongers leave."

In statements from the Dominican Republic, Zelaya announced that he would return to the country this week, in line with remarks by his ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who said Sunday that the Honduran leader would reenter his country at a point "where he is least expected."

Chávez made his comments after a team of journalists from the Caracas-based regional television network Telesur, which belongs to several Latin American countries, were detained and held for several hours by the Honduran police, accused of driving a stolen vehicle.

The Telesur reporters said that although they were not physically mistreated by the police, they were the target of verbal abuse. Several of them left Honduras Sunday because their visas had expired, the local press reported.

The Venezuelan Embassy said it was considering lodging a formal complaint over the journalists' arrest.

No government has recognised the regime in Honduras, which is facing total isolation. The coup was condemned by the United Nations General Assembly and the Organisation of American States, both of which called for Zelaya's immediate return to power.

The Non-Aligned Movement, to which Honduras belongs, is preparing to do the same on Thursday.

But within Honduras, influential voices continue to deny that what happened was a coup. In an interview with an Argentine newspaper, Catholic cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez complained that the international community "has eyes and does not see, has ears and does not hear, has a tongue and does not speak."

Rodríguez insists that Zelaya was removed in accordance with the steps outlined by the constitution. "If you see the steps taken, they are the ones established by the constitution. It would have been a coup if the head of state and the ministers were military officers and Congress or the Supreme Court had been dissolved. Some of the previous government's ministers are even still in the cabinet. What the army did was enforce a judge's order." (END/2009)

[American Dream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/ross07242009.html

Surreal Honduras

By CLIFTON ROSS

Gabriel Garcia Màrquez could easily have written "A Hundred Years of Solitude" in any country of Central America. It's a region replete with characters and magical landscapes and myths with power to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck when you merely hear them. There's the one about the gringo who visited the mining region of Cabañas and soon thereafter the water turned bad and the fish in the river died and the people all began to die simply because a mysterious gringo passed through.

That's the story as Miguel Rivera tells it. His brother, Marcelo Rivera was the latest victim of the newly organized death squads, formed from what appears to be a triad of power: Pacific Rim (a Canadian multinational), the ARENA party (the political party organized by the death squad killer of Monsignor Romero, Roberto D'Aubuisson) and the "maras" or gang members.

Of course Miguel, who has a deep and even scientific knowledge of his locale, is aware that the myth is just that: a small story that reveals a larger, hidden truth, in this case that a "Gringo" multinational indeed entered the area, but the reason for the deaths was the heavy metal waste from the mining that was poured into the community's water.

In cultures and states where telling the exact truth can lead to one's death, it's always more convenient to wrap the story in myth. Those who unpackage the myths, like Marcelo Rivera, often disappear into thin air -- that is, until they're found, as he was, naked, castrated and murdered after being horribly tortured: his fingernails had all been pulled out; his face had been disfigured so much that his brother could only identify him by his nose; the beatings had broken his skull. Finally, after he had been strangled to death, his body was thrown in a sixty-foot well, covered with chicken manure, dirt, and pieces of meat.

The right wing press did, of course, repeat the official story that Marcelo had fallen in with "mara" gangsters and drank with them, but editors had the integrity to also print a counterpoint that everyone who knew Marcelo had quite clear: that the victim of the unholy triad of moneyed power in El Salvador never drank nor hung out with the maras. His hero was Monsignor Romero and Miguel says the last time he saw his brother he was wearing a t-shirt with the image of that martyr on it.

There's a significant difference between El Salvador under the FMLN where power in the media is actively being contested, and Honduras where there is a blackout of the opposition perspective. Another difference is that the ARENA party has lost control of the military and has to rely on "maras" to do its dirty work while in Honduras the government hasn't yet had to consider recruiting "civilian contractors" from the 100,000 or so "maras" operating in Central America. Thus far the military has been quite happy to do the job of eliminating or terrorizing opponents under the "golpista" Honduran government (coup government) of Micheletti. On July 5, for example, the military fired with machine guns on a crowd numbering in the thousands. This is the unofficial story, of course. The papers, including El Heraldo, claimed that the military had fired on the crowd with rubber bullets. Officially, also, only one person died. Protestors say that there were eight or nine victims who died on the way to the hospital, and whose bodies were disappeared. Given the machine gun fire, it's only surprising that more didn't die.

The Honduran government of the 1980s found it had no need to replicate the widespread massacres being carried out in El Salvador and Guatemala. It was able to selectively eliminate a couple hundred leaders of the opposition and take care of its problem with the "subversives." But in order to maintain control over the rest of the population and assure its docility and compliance, like anywhere else, it required a press willing and able to cloak a damning reality in a less threatening myth.

Once again Honduran reporters are being called in to do overtime in psyops. Granted, the press in Honduras under the "golpista" government isn't any worse than Fox News. That being said, everything having to do with the news around the recent "golpe" (coup) has a quality that ranges from surreal interpretation to black propaganda. It would seem that the journalists of the major papers of Honduras really were frustrated writers of dystopian science fiction.

One Honduran tells me she saw a murder in her neighborhood that was multiplied in the journalistic alchemy of the Honduran press by six the following day. I keep that in mind as I sit here in my hotel room in Tegucigalpa, leafing through what my wife back home would call "the daily pack of lies."

As I try to discern the Honduran narrative of the "golpe" I recall the copy of the article I left behind in El Salvador, printed in a right wing paper -- and, unfortunately, the newspapers are all right wing in El Salvador, with the exception of the Diario Co-Latino, the latter a blessing not bestowed upon Honduras. The Salvadoran article was based on a piece that appeared in Honduras' El Heraldo. The author claimed to have in possession secret documents that indicated that President Hugo Chavez was working with a large number of "maras" who he was arming and paying, and also infiltrating his own military to do a lightning attack and kill high-ranking officials of the Micheletti government. Supposedly residents have seen armed men in inaccessible regions of the country. Does that sound like the narrative of "Al Qaeda sleeper cells" doped up on the Koran ready to attack Bush's America? Only the names, places and drugs of choice have changed.

I'm looking here at a full page ad in La Tribuna from Tuesday, the 21st, paid for by "Hondurans for Democracy." There is a photo, in the top half, of Chavez aiming a gun. Beside the photo is the caption "Chavez calls for violence and wants bloodshed in Honduras" Beneath that picture is a crowd shot of Hondurans dressed in white (the color of the Conservative Nationalist Party) and holding the blue flags of Honduras. The caption reads, "But Hondurans want peace, unity, democracy and freedom." Ah, behold the foreign devil who has brought death to our peaceful little country. It's a variation on the diabolic gringo myth, but in reverse, since Chavez has been a counterforce to the "deadly gringo."

The following day, (Wednesday, July 22) El Heraldo has an interview with Alejando Peña Esclusa, a right wing Colombian who is president of UnoAmerica, described as "a democracy organization (sic: organización democracia) of Colombia." The headline reads, "The FARC [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), Narcotrafficking and ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas) are all the same thing." The surrealism doesn't end with the title, which makes laughable connections between a program of solidarity created by Venezuela to share its wealth with loans and grants to Latin America to facilitate growth and development, and narcotics trafficking and a guerrilla that, while it taxes the cocaine trade, seems to have fewer connections to the actual trade than does the Uribe government.

Esclusa develops his surreal story in this large-spread article on page 6: He says that the coup "has kept Honduras from falling into the project of Hugo Chavez and saved democracy from the Constitutional coup which Zelaya hoped to undertake." What was the "Constitutional coup" Zelaya was plotting? To bring people more deeply into the political process of the country by asking them if they'd like to write a new constitution. So according to Esclusa, the military coup was a way of saving "democracy" by taking it away. And the project of Chavez, well, ask 60-70% of Venezuelans who support Chavez and they'll tell you that his project is to move the country from "representative to participatory democracy." But the interview with Esclusa gets even wilder: "the principle element of the disturbances in Honduras is not "Mel" Zelaya nor the discussion of whether or not he returns" (this would come as a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of people marching daily in Honduras for the single purpose of having their president return) "but it is Hugo Chavez who finances the dirty campaign, buying minds ("conciencias") so as to disinform about Honduran reality."

Again, the utterly implausible charge that Chavez, and not the golpistas, is behind all the country's problems. For Esclusa, the solution is simple: Isolate Chavez from Honduras and all the problems will be solved.

What's fascinating about this analysis is that there's not even a hint of truth in it. First of all, the marches aren't financed by anyone but the marchers. And secondly, the only Venezuelan I've seen has been an old friend who is a documentary filmmaker--and probably the last Venezuelan journalist in the country since Telesur was chased out. Noticeably absent from the marches is even the slightest mention of Chavez or Venezuela, neither of which appear in any of the chants, placards, discussions, programs, or anything else. There's only one message: "Golpistas Leave! Bring Mel Home."

In this surreal world where Chavez is working with narco gangsters and infiltrating along the coast, paying people to demonstrate, the poor golpistas are also unfairly being persecuted by "the OAS, UN and the international community."

This line was repeated to me the other day in the hotel by the woman behind the desk, who identified herself as a National Party supporter. She almost whined as she told me that "everyone is against us." Does that sound a little paranoid? When a sane person is told that everyone is opposed to what he or she is doing, that person begins to reflect again on his or her actions. Not so Micheletti; not so Mr. Esclusa; not so the National Party and Liberal Party members who went out on the 23rd on the march for "peace, unity, democracy and freedom."

Then the bombshell: According to Mr. Esclusa, the FARC, a guerrilla force of 30,000 with shrinking power, is the force behind all the presidents who are part of ALBA which is, in turn, a project of the FARC and financed by cocaine money.

If this were the ravings of a madman in the street, we could afford to ignore him. But this interview is published in one of Honduras' two major newspapers, with big headlines, a photo of Esclusa, on page 6. And obviously the government is taking this same paranoid siege narrative seriously because on page eight is the story and headline, "Honduras Breaks Diplomatic Relations with Venezuela" and the subhead reads, "Venezuelan officials, in a confrontational attitude, warn they won't leave the country. The [Honduras] Chancellor cancels the consular visa of Iranians for fear of terrorism."

Now that's interesting. Honduras breaks relations with Venezuela and it's Venezuela that is being confrontational. Takes you back to the bad old days of Bush and the Saddam Hussein "menace" doesn't it? Then there are the Iranians, whose government has never so much as threatened anyone in Latin America, yet who now "feared as terrorist." Wild rumor, speculation on a fantastic level: Vice Chancellor Marta Lorena Alvarado says that "we've confirmed the existence of terrorist Iranian cells in Latin America and considering that there are direct trips from Teheran... to Venezuela and from Venezuela to Nicaragua... there's concern that there's been a terrorist incursion into [Honduras]."

Here we've definitively returned to the bad old days of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush with the Amber, Yellow and Orange alerts when supposed "sleeper" cells that were never uncovered or identified were sleepwalking the US.

These are but a few of the jewels from the Honduran press. You could do with it as I did when I first confronted it in the hotel with the woman behind the desk: you could try reasoning with it. You could, as I did, say, isn't the very definition of a coup when an elected representative is removed from office and, rather than being held and tried and convicted or returned to office, is sent out of the country into exile at gunpoint. But the response is just as wild: "They were trying to prevent bloodshed. If they kept him here, his followers would cause bloodshed." But we're to believe that the people who sent the military to the airport on July 5th to machine gun protesters are really concerned about bloodshed? By the look on the woman's face, a gringo has come to town and poisoned the water.



Clifton Ross is the writer and director of Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out and Translations from Silence, a book of poetry introduced by Jack Hirschman available at: www.freedomvoices.org.

[American Dream]

Our Man in Honduras

By Roberto Lovato
Associate Editor,New America Media

The American Prospect
July 22, 2009

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?art ... n_honduras


"If you want to understand who the real power behind
the [Honduran] coup is," says Robert White, president
of the Washington- based Center for International
Policy, during a recent interview, "you need to find
out who's paying Lanny Davis."

Davis, an ally of the Clinton family who is best known
as the lawyer who defended Bill during the presidential
impeachment proceedings, was recently on Capitol Hill
lobbying members of Congress and testifying against
exiled President Manuel Zelaya before the House Foreign
Relations Committee. White, who previously served as
the United States ambassador to El Salvador, thought
that such information about Davis' clients would be
"very difficult to find."

But the answer proved easy to find. Davis, a partner at
the law firm Orrick, Herrington, & Sutcliffe, openly
named them -- and his clients are the same powerful
Hondurans behind the military coup.

"My clients represent the CEAL, the [Honduras Chapter
of] Business Council of Latin America," Davis said when
reached at his office last Thursday. "I do not
represent the government and do not talk to President
[Roberto] Micheletti. My main contacts are Camilo Atala
and Jorge Canahuati. I'm proud to represent businessmen
who are committed to the rule of law." Atala,
Canahuati, and other families that own the corporate
interests represented by Davis and the CEAL are at the
top of an economic pyramid in which 62 percent of the
population lives in poverty, according to the World
Bank.

For many Hondurans and Honduras watchers, the
confirmation that Davis is working with powerful, old
Honduran families like the Atalas and Canahuatis is
telling: To them, it proves that Davis serves the
powerful business interests that ran, repressed, and
ruined Honduras during the decades prior to the
leftward turn of the Zelaya presidency.

"No coup just happens because some politicians and
military men decide one day to simply take over," White
says upon hearing for whom Davis is working. "Coups
happen because very wealthy people want them and help
to make them happen, people who are used to seeing the
country as a money machine and suddenly see social
legislation on behalf of the poor as a threat to their
interests. The average wage of a worker in free trade
zones is 77 cents per hour."

"The tragedy," adds White, "is that the Canahuatis and
the Atalas and the other big businesspeople don't
understand that it's in their best interest to help to
do things like help people make a decent living, reduce
unemployment, and raise the minimum wage."

Davis disagrees. He believes that the tragedy of
Honduras lies with Zelaya and that the president
brought the coup upon himself. "It is an undisputed
fact that Mr. Zelaya has violated the constitution.
It's my job to get the facts out."

Asked if he had qualms about representing
businesspeople linked to a coup government denounced
and unrecognized by the United Nations, the
Organization of American States, and many countries
across the globe (including the United States), Davis
responded, "There are facts about Mr. Zelaya that the
world community may not be aware of. I'm proud to
represent clients who support the decision of Secretary
of State [Hillary] Clinton to back the mediation of
President Arias in the conflict [between Zelaya and
coup leaders]. But my biggest concern is safety and
security of the Honduran people."

Davis is not the only one concerned about the safety
and security the Honduran people. The Committee of
Families of Disappeared-Detainees in Honduras
(COFADEH), a nongovernmental human-rights organization,
released a report last week documenting over 1,100
human-rights violations -- arbitrary detentions,
physical assaults, murders, and attacks on the media by
the government and affiliated clandestine forces --
that have occurred since the coup began on June 28.

COFADEH has also placed responsibility for the coup and
the terror it has wrought directly on many of the
founders of the Alliance for Progress and Development
of Honduras (APROH), a predecessor of CEAL. Though now
defunct, APROH brought together some of the same
business and military interests that compose the
political and economic hub of Honduras' radical right,
including the Canahuatis, Atalas, and other CEAL
families and businesses represented by Davis.

The CEAL predecessor's track record on human rights has
been less than stellar. In 1983, Honduras' El Tiempo
newspaper leaked an internal APROH document that
recommended a military solution to problems in Honduras
-- and the rest of Central America -- to Ronald
Reagan's Kissinger Commission, a bipartisan committee
charged with formulating U.S. policy in the region.
Perhaps more damning, APROH is considered by COFADEH
and other human-rights organizations as the eminence
grise behind the death squad killings conducted by the
infamous "Batallion 316" in the 1980s.

Upon hearing Davis' statements, Jose Luis Galdamez, a
journalist for Radio Globo, laughs. "Mr. Davis is
either ignorant of Honduras or is knowingly bloodying
his name and that of the Clintons for lots of money,"
he says. Galdamez recently went into hiding after
members of the armed forces and paramilitary
organizations harassed him and his colleagues. The
military raided his radio station, beat workers there,
and threatened them for working at one of the few
independent media outlets willing to "report about
what's actually happening in Honduras," Galdamez says.

"I wish Mr. Davis would come here where I'm hiding so I
can show him what it's like to feel threatened not just
by [de facto Honduran President] Micheletti and the
military, but by the Canahautis and other groups of
power he represents," Galdamez says.

Galdamez, Gilda Rivera of the Center for Women's
Rights, and others interviewed for this story fear
that, in hiring Clinton ally Davis, Canahuati, Atala,
and CEAL are using the liberal sheen of the Democratic
Party to divert attention from the dark history behind
the current Honduran coup.

"The rich simply send you out to kill you and then kill
with impunity. They never investigate into who killed
who because the groups in power control the media,
control the judiciary, and now control the government
again," Galdamez says. "Mr. Davis is trying to
legitimize people who use psychological intimidation
and violence. He's representing the interests of state
terror."

In a recent statement denouncing the coup, COFADEH
described its backers as "the same group that in the
1980s was known as Alliance for Progress and
Development of Honduras, which maintains its terror
thru death squads." The COFADEH report documents four
cases of extra-judicial killings, including the July 5
shooting of 19-year-old Isis Obed Murillo, captured in
a graphic video subsequently posted on YouTube.

Asked about human-rights violations by the Micheletti
government, Davis again places the onus for the current
crisis on Zelaya. "I researched the facts on what
occurred during the presidency of Mr. Zelaya. Mr.
Zelaya led mob violence, and you can see that on a
YouTube video."

When pressed about the grisly footage of the shooting
of Murillo, Davis responded, "Is there a video of the
shooters? We need to know the facts." He added, "If you
can show me facts proving that my clients are involved
in violations of civil liberties, I'll resign."

[American Dream]

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6329

Honduran Coup: The U.S. Connection
Conn Hallinan | August 6, 2009
Foreign Policy In Focus

While the Obama administration was careful to distance itself from the recent coup in Honduras — condemning the expulsion of President Manuel Zelaya to Costa Rica, revoking Honduran officials' visas, and shutting off aid — that doesn't mean influential Americans aren't involved, and that both sides of the aisle don't have some explaining to do.

The story most U.S. readers are getting about the coup is that Zelaya — an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez — was deposed because he tried to change the constitution to keep himself in power.

That story is a massive distortion of the facts. All Zelaya was trying to do is to put a non-binding referendum on the ballot calling for a constitutional convention, a move that trade unions, indigenous groups, and social activist organizations had long been lobbying for. The current constitution was written by the Honduran military in 1982, and the one-term limit allows the brass-hats to dominate the politics of the country. Since the convention would have been held in November, the same month as the upcoming presidential elections, there was no way Zelaya could have remained in office in any case. The most he could have done was to run four years from now.

And while Zelaya is indeed friendly with Chavez, he is at best a liberal reformer whose major accomplishment was raising the minimum wage. "What Zelaya has done has been little reforms," Rafael Alegria, a leader of Via Campesina, told the Mexican daily La Jornada. "He isn't a socialist or a revolutionary, but these reforms, which didn't harm the oligarchy at all, have been enough for them to attack him furiously."

One of those "little reforms" was aimed at ensuring public control of the Honduran telecommunications industry, which may well have been the trip-wire that triggered the coup.

The first hint that something was afoot was a suit brought by Venezuelan lawyer Robert Carmona-Borjas claiming that Zelaya was part of a bribery scheme involving the state-run telecommunication company Hondutel.

Carmona-Borjas has a rap-sheet that dates back to the April 2002 coup against Chavez. He drew up the notorious "Carmona decrees," a series of draconian laws aimed at suspending the Venezuelan constitution and suppressing any resistance to the coup. As Chavez supporters poured into the streets and the plot unraveled, Carmona-Borjas fled to Washington, DC. He took a post at George Washington University and brought Iran-Contra plotters Otto Reich and Elliott Abrams to teach his class on "Political Management in Latin America." He also became vice-president of the right-wing Arcadia Foundation, which lobbies for free-market policies. Weeks before the June 28 Honduran coup, Carmona-Borjas barnstormed the country accusing Zelaya of collaborating with narco-traffickers.

Carmona-Borjas' colleague, Reich, a Cuban American with ties to right-wing factions all over Latin America and former assistant secretary of State for hemispheric affairs under George W. Bush, has been accused by the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization of "undeniable involvement" in the coup.

This is hardly surprising. Reich was nailed by a 1987 congressional investigation for using public funds to engage in propaganda during the Reagan administration's war on Nicaragua. He is also a fierce advocate for Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, both implicated in the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1973 that killed all 73 on board.

Reich is also a ferocious critic of Zelaya. In a recent piece in the Weekly Standard, he urged the Obama administration not to support "strongman" Zelaya because it "would put the United States clearly in the same camp as Cuba's Castro brothers, Venezuela's Chavez, and other regional delinquents."

One of the charges that Reich levels at Zelaya is that the Honduran president is supposedly involved with bribes paid out by the state-run telecommunications company Hondutel. Zelaya is threatening to file a defamation suit over the accusation.

Reich's charges against Hondutel are hardly happenstance, as he is a former AT&T lobbyist and served as Senator John McCain's (R-AZ) Latin American advisor during the senator's 2008 presidential campaign. McCain has deep ties with telecom giants AT&T, MCI, and Qualcomm and, according to Nikolas Kozloff, author of Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge of the United States, "has acted to protect and look out for the political interests of the telecoms on Capitol Hill."

AT&T, McCain's second largest donor, also generously funds the International Republican Institute (IRI), which has warred with Latin American regimes that have resisted telecommunications privatization. According to Kozloff, "President Zelaya was a known to be a fierce critic of telecommunications privatization."

When Venezuelan coup leaders went to Washington a month before their failed effort to oust Chavez, IRI footed the bill. Reich, as then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's special envoy to the Western Hemisphere, met with some of those leaders.

Republicans in Congress have accused the Obama administration of being "soft" on Zelaya. Sen. Jim DeMint (SC) protested the White House's support of the Honduran president holding up votes for administration nominees for the ambassador to Brazil and an assistant secretary of state. Meanwhile, Zelaya's return was unanimously supported by the UN General Assembly, the European Union, and the Organization of American States.

But meddling in Honduras is a bipartisan undertaking.

"If you want to understand who is the real power behind the [Honduran] coup, you need to find out who is paying Lanny Davis," says Robert White, former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador and current president of the Center for International Policy. Davis, best known as the lawyer who represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial, has been lobbying members of Congress and testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in support of the coup.

According to Roberto Lovato, an associate editor at New American Media, Davis represents the Honduran chapter of CEAL, the Business Council of Latin America, which strongly backed the coup. Davis told Lovato, "I'm proud to represent businessmen who are committed to the rule of law."

But White says the coup had more to do with profits than law. "Coups happen because very wealthy people want them and help to make them happen, people who are used to seeing the country as a money machine and suddenly see social legislation on behalf of the poor as a threat to their interests," says White. "The average wage of a worker in free trade zones is 77 cents per hour." According to the World Bank, 59% of Hondurans live below the poverty line.

The United States is also involved in the coup through a network of agencies that funnel money and training to anti-government groups. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contribute to right-wing organizations that supported the coup, including the Peace and Democracy Movement and the Civil Democratic Union. Many of the officers that bundled Zelaya off to San Jose were trained at the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation, the former "School for the Americas" that has seen torturers and coup leaders from all over Latin America pass through its doors.

The Obama administration condemned the coup, but when Zelaya journeyed to the Honduran-Nicaragua border, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced him for being "provocative." It was a strange statement, since the State Department said nothing about a report by the Committee of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras charging 1,100 human rights violations by the coup regime, including detentions, assaults, and murder.

Human rights violations by the coup government have been condemned by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, the International Observer Mission, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Committee to Protest Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders.

Davis claims that the coup was a "legal" maneuver to preserve democracy. But that's a hard argument to make, given some of its architects. One is Fernando Joya, a former member of Battalion 316, a paramilitary death squad. Joya fled the country after being charged with kidnapping and torturing several students in the 1980s, but he has now resurfaced as a "special security advisor" to the coup makers. He recently gave a TV interview that favorably compared the 1973 Chilean coup to the June 28 Honduran coup.

According to Greg Grandin, a history professor at New York University, the coup makers also included the extremely right-wing Catholic organization, Opus Dei, whose roots go back to the fascist regime of Spanish caudillo Francisco Franco.

In the old days, when the United States routinely overthrew governments that displeased it, the Marines would have gone in, as they did in Guatemala and Nicaragua, or the CIA would have engineered a coup by the local elites. No one has accused U.S. intelligence of being involved in the Honduran coup, and American troops in the country are keeping a low profile. But the fingerprints of U.S. institutions like the NED, USAID, and School for the Americas — plus bipartisan lobbyists, powerful corporations, and dedicated Cold War warriors — are all over the June takeover.

[StarmanSkye]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=14659

Speaking of Democracy, Honduras, and President Obama. . .
by John Perkins

In writing my new book Hoodwinked (Random House, Nov 2009 publication date), I recently visited Central America. Everyone I talked with there was convinced that the military coup that had overthrown the democratically-elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, had been engineered by two US companies, with CIA support. And that the US and its new president were not standing up for democracy.

Earlier in the year Chiquita Brands International Inc. (formerly United Fruit) and Dole Food Co had severely criticized Zelaya for advocating an increase of 60% in Honduras’s minimum wage, claiming that the policy would cut into corporate profits. They were joined by a coalition of textile manufacturers and exporters, companies that rely on cheap labor to work in their sweatshops.

Memories are short in the US, but not in Central America. I kept hearing people who claimed that it was a matter of record that Chiquita (United Fruit) and the CIA had toppled Guatemala’s democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and that International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), Henry Kissinger, and the CIA had brought down Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. These people were certain that Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been ousted by the CIA in 2004 because he proposed a minimum wage increase, like Zelaya’s.

I was told by a Panamanian bank vice president, “Every multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly rate, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean will have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom line for minimum wages. The big companies are determined to stop what they call a ‘leftist revolt’ in this hemisphere. In throwing out Zelaya they are sending frightening messages to all the other presidents who are trying to raise the living standards of their people.”

It did not take much imagination to envision the turmoil sweeping through every Latin American capital. There had been a collective sign of relief at Barack Obama’s election in the U.S., a sense of hope that the empire in the North would finally exhibit compassion toward its southern neighbors, that the unfair trade agreements, privatizations, draconian IMF Structural Adjustment Programs, and threats of military intervention would slow down and perhaps even fade away. Now, that optimism was turning sour.

The cozy relationship between Honduras’s military coup leaders and the corporatocracy were confirmed a couple of days after my arrival in Panama. England’s The Guardian ran an article announcing that “two of the Honduran coup government's top advisers have close ties to the US secretary of state. One is Lanny Davis, an influential lobbyist who was a personal lawyer for President Bill Clinton and also campaigned for Hillary. . . The other hired gun for the coup government that has deep Clinton ties is (lobbyist) Bennett Ratcliff.” (1)

DemocracyNow! broke the news that Chiquita was represented by a powerful Washington law firm, Covington & Burling LLP, and its consultant, McLarty Associates (2). President Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder had been a Covington partner and a defender of Chiquita when the company was accused of hiring “assassination squads” in Colombia (Chiquita was found guilty, admitting that it had paid organizations listed by the US government as terrorist groups “for protection” and agreeing in 2004 to a $25 million fine). (3) George W. Bush’s UN Ambassador, John Bolton, a former Covington lawyer, had fiercely opposed Latin American leaders who fought for their peoples’ rights to larger shares of the profits derived from their resources; after leaving the government in 2006, Bolton became involved with the Project for the New American Century, the Council for National Policy, and a number of other programs that promote corporate hegemony in Honduras and elsewhere. McLarty Vice Chairman John Negroponte was U.S. Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-1985, former Deputy Secretary of State, Director of National Intelligence, and U.S. Representative to the United Nations; he played a major role in the U.S.-backed Contra’s secret war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and has consistently opposed the policies of the democratically-elected pro-reform Latin American presidents. (4) These three men symbolize the insidious power of the corporatocracy, its bipartisan composition, and the fact that the Obama Administration has been sucked in.
The Los Angeles Times went to the heart of this matter when it concluded:
What happened in Honduras is a classic Latin American coup in another sense: Gen. Romeo Vasquez, who led it, is an alumnus of the United States' School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). The school is best known for producing Latin American officers who have committed major human rights abuses, including military coups. (5)
All of this leads us once again to the inevitable conclusion: you and I must change the system. The president – whether Democrat or Republican – needs us to speak out.
Chiquita, Dole and all your representatives need to hear from you. Zelaya must be reinstated.

[American Dream]

US Ambassador Hugo Llorens Discloses Secrets of the Honduran Coup; Chinese Viewing Prohibited

http://www.narconews.com/Issue59/article3767.html

[smallprint]

PressTV: IMF gives Honduras coup govt $150 million

The de facto government of Honduras has received $150 million from the International Monetary Fund even though President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a coup in June.

The Special Drawing Rights from the Washington-based lending agency will be used to boost its dollar reserves, Honduras' central bank said Tuesday. It will receive an additional $14 million in the next few weeks, it added.

In April, the IMF agreed to issue its member countries $250 billion in Special Drawing Rights (SDR), a mechanism to improve liquidity by printing new money to counteract the effects of the global economic crisis. Mexico and Nicaragua received similar issues last week.

And just a few days ago:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. State Department staff have recommended that the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya be declared a "military coup," a U.S. official said on Thursday, a step that could cut off as much as $150 million in U.S. funding to the impoverished Central American nation.

The official, who spoke on condition he not be named, said State Department staff had made such a recommendation to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has yet to make a decision on the matter although one was likely soon.

Washington has already suspended about $18 million aid to Honduras following the June 28 coup and this would be formally cut if the determination is made because of a U.S. law barring aid "to the government of any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree."

The official said that $215 million in grant funding from the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation to Honduras would also have to end should Clinton make the determination that a military coup took place.

About $76 million of that money has already been disbursed and a second U.S. official said this implied that the remaining roughly $139 million could not be given to Honduras should the determination be made.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090827/pl_ ... nduras_usa



Hmmm... Millenium Challenge Corporation...

... I wonder who the Chairman of that organization is...

http://narconews.com/Issue59/article3760.html

[Sounder]

Bump and thanks smallprint, those folk over at narconews have got it going on.

[StarmanSkye]

Eyewitness Honduras: Resistance to the Coup d'etat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRLAxK0aaMc

Very interesting, good recent overview with personal observations of events, details of how the coup leaders have resisted widespread demands for their removal. One example of how the entrenched elites have been exploiting their wealth and power: for more than ten years the wealthiest families and owners of businesses have failed to pay their electricity bills. President Zelaya had examined the accrued expense and found it amounted to some 10-20 million dollars which Honduras could have used for critical services, was preparing a suit to recoup loss but Congress passed a law granting amnesty for all electricity debts. That's how the oligarch system works.

Also details a peaceful marching crowd was overtaken by hundreds of armed army and policemen who brutally attacked a congressman, severely beating him and breaking his arm in several places as if to make an example of him. Accounts of Israeli military training Honduran forces in violent crowd-control, also indiscriminate equal-opportunity violence against all classes, age groups and sexes.

Also recounts that in a meeting with the group of councilmen who hosted this talk that 3 lawyers from the Attorney General's office openly acknowledge the takeover was a coup that had no legal justification; Zelaya had committed NO illegal acts.

The liberation/resistance movement remains very strong, determined and organized, fighting for EVERYONE's rights including gays and lesbians, so in many ways its far more progressive than many US social justice and political activist/protest movements.

The resistance doesn't seem to be giving-up any time soon. This vid shows LARGE crowds, representative of the seeming majority who don't support the coup. Concludes with large crowd in solidarity singing Honduran national anthem.

[smallprint]

Bump and thanks smallprint, those folk over at narconews have got it going on.

Yeah, Al Giordano and Co are great, although Al has a weird thing about Obama.

Anyway, the Seattle Times has printed an op-ed by an anti-coup Honduran congresswoman:

Our Constitution does not allow Congress to remove a president from office, as it did under Micheletti's direction on June 28. The judicial actions invoked to justify the detention of the president also go against our Constitution. Micheletti's regime deported President Zelaya from the country without even trying him for an alleged crime, something to which even the worst criminal has a right.

Moreover, on top of being unconstitutional, the vote to approve the destitution of Zelaya was not transparent. I am a member of our Congress' Executive Committee, yet I was not summoned to participate in the vote to approve the president's removal, nor were another 20 fellow Liberal Party members of Congress. The regime then tried to fool the world by claiming there was a unanimous congressional decision supporting the coup, even though some 27 congress members publicly voiced their opposition.

The international community has rejected the de facto regime's belated legal, moral and political justifications for the coup. This was not only a coup d'etat against President Zelaya, but a coup against all the leaders and institutions of the Americas. It could have a destabilizing effect on the region, and act as a distraction from grave problems such as terrorism, poverty and climate change.

The question remains: How far is the Obama administration willing to go to pressure the de facto government? If it stands by and allows the consolidation of the coup, Latin American leaders will have serious doubts about the administration's intentions to rebuild diplomatic and political relations with other countries, and to its commitment to democracy.

Clearly, what is needed from the United States are targeted sanctions, designed in a way that will avoid hurting the poor, but will pressure the coup plotters to accept the proposal of Costa Rican president and mediator Oscar Arias, which President Zelaya has already endorsed. The U.S. should freeze the de facto regime leaders' U.S.-based assets, and revoke their visas, as the U.S. State Department has already started to do.

The U.S. should also join the Union of South American Nations and Mexico in refusing to recognize the outcome of November's elections. Since the electoral process would be held under a de facto regime that has suppressed all constitutional liberties, civil guarantees and the freedom of expression, conditions for free and fair elections will be impossible, and some politicians who have publicly denounced the coup now face reprisals and retaliation for their ties to President Zelaya.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2009766701_guest31valle.html

[American Dream]

http://www.narconews.com/Issue60/article3805.html

Secrets of the Honduran Armed Forces
And More Secrets About the US Soldiers Stationed There
By Belén Fernández
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
September 7, 2009


I was forced to visit the Honduran military museum in Tegucigalpa on my own after proving unable to convince any of my Honduran acquaintances that the armed forces were not sufficiently showcased on the streets. A few blocks from the parque central, the museum boasts signs denoting it as such on both sides of the building; I approached the side closest to the park and was directed by a teenage soldier to the opposite side of the building, where another teenage soldier denied that there was a museum on the premises.

The soldier nonetheless unlocked the gate for me and motioned me inside, whereupon I directed his attention to a banner listing all of the features of the museum, such as an arms exhibit and a library. He shrugged, and we stood staring at one another until two more young soldiers arrived to confirm that there was in fact a military museum but that it currently being renovated, by the military itself.


The Soto Cano Air Base in Palmerola, Honduras has 600 US Troops Stationed There.

The new arrivals assured me that renovation duties would be abandoned in the event that the Honduran military needed to attend to a civil war perpetrated by Venezuelans and Cubans. When I asked them to elaborate on how a conflict pitting the Honduran military against Venezuelans and Cubans would qualify as civil, a 21-year-old soldier named Ángel replied that they all still had a lot to learn—especially the soldier who was not yet aware that the museum was a museum—and that they were being aided in their learning endeavors by the museum’s library.

Ángel had joined the Honduran armed forces upon his return from three years of prison in the United States, where his sentence for possession of false papers had been exacerbated when he attacked fellow prisoners who had reportedly tried to skewer him with a fork in the bathroom. Patting his gun as a testament to the progress he had made since then, Ángel grinningly informed me that I could do anything I put my mind to in life. He then asked me if there had ever been a book that I had been unable to put down, explained that this was a common occurrence among the Honduran military, and added that he liked to feed pigeons.

The theme of assigning non-military jobs to national armed forces surfaced once again when I ended up seated on a plane out of San Pedro Sula next to a 23-year-old US helicopter pilot, thanks to whom I now know of the existence of the term “gyroscopic procession.” The pilot, who was currently stationed at the joint US-Honduran Palmerola Air Base in the state of Comayagua, explained that he had recently returned from a mission in Costa Rica in which he had been tasked with searching for a lost hiker from Chicago. According to his analysis, the diversification of military chores may have had something to do with the wealth of the lost hiker’s family and the fact that the US military was not supposed to be cooperating with the Honduran military at the moment, as the US State Department was still determining whether or not the June 28 coup against President Mel Zelaya had been military in nature or not.

The pilot reported that the search for the hiker from Chicago had been abandoned after the hiker’s family hired a psychic to guide the helicopters, and cited other recent military chores he had participated in, such as a Black Hawk helicopter deployment to Nicaragua a few days after the coup in order to transport Nicaraguans with cataracts and other afflictions to the USNS Comfort waiting offshore. As for US collaboration with the Honduran armed forces, he explained that it currently consisted of displaying one’s ID to Honduran soldiers guarding the base at Palmerola, but that this was not in fact necessary as the guards’ guns were not loaded anyway.

According to the helicopter pilot, the lack of ammunition was a result of an incident in which an emergency vehicle was fired upon for not stopping; the Honduran military meanwhile had a different interpretation of the contents of its gun barrels, and claimed to merely shoot rubber bullets at anti-coup protesters. The pilot predicted that Honduran battle readiness would plummet even further as a result of the moratorium on military cooperation with the US, although his prediction was not as dire as that of US Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens, who had declared at a meeting in August that the Palmerola base had been shut down.

Upon further questioning Llorens had conceded that US troops were still stationed at the base but that they were not talking to anyone, thus casting some doubt on the helicopter pilot’s personal account of taunting bullet-less Honduran guards before finally agreeing to show his ID. The pilot predicted another effect of current US military silence at Palmerola, which was that Honduran soldiers would no longer be able to practice jumping out of US planes and would be limited to jumping off of buildings instead. He allowed that this might in fact constitute a face-saving modification, as it would mean that the Hondurans would no longer have to be removed from trees; the shortage of Honduran military aircraft might meanwhile explain why the military is parking buses on Honduran airfields in order to prevent Zelaya’s sudden homecoming.

Prior to the cessation of bilateral military communications, the helicopter pilot informed me, the Hondurans had participated in US operations against narcoterrorist targets, although their contributions had not affected his estimate that 90 percent of narco traffic still got through to the US. The pilot was not distressed by the minimal success rate of such operations and assured me that the real US war was currently being fought in Afghanistan, a perspective apparently not shared by Honduran army commander Miguel Ángel García Padget.

In an August 5 article in La Prensa, García is reported as declaring that the most serious threat over the next 10 years is for Central America to become a breeding ground for anti-democratic military bases, by which he does not mean the current US military presence that is not talking to him but rather potential Venezuelan bases. García credits Honduras with having halted Hugo Chávez’ expansionist designs on US territory and announces that “la historia nos va a juzgar”—“history will judge us,” the optimism of which is nonetheless bested by Fidel Castro’s 1953 conviction that “la historia me absolverá.” The army commander goes on to remind Hondurans to have faith in the dignity of their armed forces and in the immortality of “that little book called the Constitution,” although he does not establish whether that little book is one of the page-turners that the Honduran military is unable to put down.

Coup general Romeo Vásquez Velásquez elaborates on military dignity elsewhere in the article, affirming that noble sentiments are being taught in all military schools but failing to specify whether the school list includes the former School of the Americas, which he himself attended twice. Vásquez’ remarks indicate that he is unaware of the opinion of the Deputy Mission Chief of the US embassy in Tegucigalpa, Simon Henshaw, who—during the same August meeting in which Ambassador Llorens declared the Palmerola Air Base shut down—had classified Honduran military troops and policemen as “extremely uneducated.” As for sentiments currently being instilled in non-military academies, the front page of the August 18 edition of La Prensa warns of indoctrination in schools nationwide.

As proof of willful coercion of pupils by teachers opposed to military coups, the paper has photographed an exam supposedly administered at a school in San Pedro Sula, which consists of fill-in-the-blank requests such as: “Hondurans have the right to_______.” The exam has been completed and graded prior to being handed over to La Prensa, which draws our attention to the X through the idea that Hondurans have the right to “democracia” when they in fact have the right to “insurección.” A different answer is provided by Honduran Air Force commander Luis Javier Prince in the August 5 La Prensa article lauding Honduran blockage of Venezuelan expansionism, who reckons that Hondurans have the right to “una sustitución presidencial.”

As for other air force employees dabbling outside their traditional range of duties, the US helicopter pilot I met on the plane in San Pedro advised me that he was en route to Fort Benning, Georgia—home to the former School of the Americas—for UFC training. Under the impression that it was stranger for me not to know what the Ultimate Fighting Championship was than for him not to know who Romeo Vásquez Velásquez was, he patiently outlined the martial arts organization for me and explained that he would be importing grappling techniques to Palmerola Air Base.

I joked that the Honduran military would presumably not be invited to the training sessions based on the moratorium on inter-military communications. The helicopter pilot reminded me that the physical size of Honduran soldiers was not compatible with certain sports and made a crushing motion with his hand, which does not constitute an auspicious beginning to the historical judgment that the Honduran armed forces are awaiting from history.

[John Schröder]

http://counterpunch.org/weisbrot09072009.html

A Familiar Pattern

IMF Gives Honduran Government $175 Million

By MARK WEISBROT

The IMF is undergoing an unprecedented expansion of its access to resources, possibly reaching a trillion dollars. This week the European Union committed $175 billion, $67 billion more than even the $108 billion that Washington agreed to fork over after a tense standoff between the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration earlier this summer.

The Fund and its advocates argue that the IMF has changed. The IMF is “back in a new guise,” said the Economist. This time, we are told, it’s really going to act as a multilateral organization that looks out for the countries and people of the world, and not just for Washington, Wall Street, or European banks.

But it’s looking more and more like the same old IMF on steroids. Last week the IMF disbursed $150.1 million to the de facto government of Honduras, and it plans to disburse another $13.8 million on September 9. The de facto government has no legitimacy in the world. It took power on June 28th in a military coup, in which the elected President, Manuel Zelaya, was taken from his home at gunpoint and flown out of the country. The Organization of American States suspended Honduras until democracy is restored, and the United Nations also called for the “immediate and unconditional return” of the elected president.

No country in the world recognizes the coup government of Honduras. From the Western Hemisphere and the European Union, only the United States retains an ambassador there. The World Bank paused lending to Honduras two days after the coup, and the Inter-American Development Bank did the same the next day. More recently the Central American Bank of Economic Integration suspended credit to Honduras. The European Union has suspended over $90 million in aid as well, and is considering further sanctions.

But the IMF has gone ahead and dumped a large amount of money on Honduras – the equivalent would be more than $160 billion in the United States – as though everything is ok there.

This is in keeping with U.S. policy, which is not surprising since the United States has been – since the IMF’s creation in 1944 – the Fund’s principal overseer. Washington has so far made only a symbolic gesture in cutting off about $18.5 million to Honduras, while continuing to pour in tens of millions more.

In fact, more than two months after the Honduran military overthrew the elected president of Honduras, the United States government has yet to determine that a military coup has actually occurred. This is because such a determination would require, under the U.S. Foreign Appropriations Act, a cut off of aid.

One of the largest sources of U.S. aid is the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a government entity whose board is chaired by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Interestingly, there were two military coups in the last year in countries that were receiving MCC money: Madagascar and Mauritania. In both of those cases, MCC aid was suspended within three days of the coup.

The IMF’s decision to give money to the Honduran government is reminiscent of its reaction to the 2002 coup that temporarily overthrew President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Just a few hours after that coup, the IMF’s spokesperson announced that “we stand ready to assist the new administration in whatever manner they find suitable.” This immediate pledge of support by the IMF to a military-installed government was at the time unprecedented. Given the resources and power of the IMF, it was an important source of international legitimacy for the coup government. Members of the U.S. Congress later wrote to the IMF to inquire how this happened. How did the IMF decide so quickly to support this illegitimate government? The Fund responded that no decision was made, that this was just an off-the-cuff remark by its spokesperson. But this seems very unlikely, and in the video on the IMF’s web site, the spokesperson appears to be reading from a prepared statement when talking about money for the coup government.

In the Honduran case, the IMF would likely say that the current funds are part of a $250 billion package in which all member countries are receiving a share proportional to their IMF quota, regardless of governance. This is true, but it doesn’t resolve the question as to whom the funds should be disbursed to, in the case of a non-recognized, illegitimate government that has seized power by force. The Fund could very easily postpone disbursing this money until some kind of determination could be made, rather than simply acting as though there were no question about the legitimacy of the coup government.

Interestingly, the IMF had no problem cutting off funds under its standby arrangement with the democratically-elected government of President Zelaya in November of last year, when the Fund did not agree with his economic policies.

We’re still a long way from a reformed IMF.

Mark Weisbrot is an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and has written numerous research papers on economic policy. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy.

[John Schröder]

http://www.cubaperiodistas.cu/noticias/ ... 03-eng.htm

Pre and Post-Coup Honduras

This country is now more than ever part of this vast movement in South America for new economic, anti neo-liberal policies and political institutions, while being against US domination, pillage of its natural resources, and installation and extension of military bases

By Arnold August

The Frente Nacional de Resistencia is leading the courageous struggle of the Honduran people. For 70 consecutive days the people of Honduras, from all walks of life, are confronting violent repression by the military and the police. They are peacefully, with a very coherent political and increasingly sophisticated organization, putting forward their demands. These include the restoration of the constitutional order in Honduras and the return of President Zelaya. As the situation is evolving the people are more and more pressing for a constituent assembly to re-found the constitution and the nation. They are saying that whether Zelaya returns or not, this has become the objective of the on-going resistance.

Now that the elections have been called by the coup perpetuators, the Frente Nacional de Resistencia has also called for the boycott of the elections. The non-recognition of the elections and the simultaneous continued mass movement in the streets for a new Honduras is a most important phase in the battle. Workers’ and employees’ unions, women activist groups, peasants, students, intellectuals and other sections of the society are all in the forefront. The Honduran putschists are hoping to legitimize the coup through the holding of the elections.

Political forces not connected with the military regime are also joining forces with the mass movement. The Resistance has gained so much prestige that it has succeeded in winning the adherence of a wide range of political forces. For example, on July 18 (over one and a half months ago), in an interview with Prensa Latina’s Raimundo López, the presidential candidate (at that time) for the Partido de Unificación Democrática (UD) and current deputy César Ham stated that that there is “a pre and post-coup Honduras.” His statement, in very few words, crystallized the current situation in Honduras and provides the historical context. The UD has joined the Frente Nacional de Resistencia in the streets. In fact two of UD’s leading members were assassinated by the military regime. On August 31, according to a Prensa Latina report, Ham and others UD members confirmed that they are boycotting the elections. Other non-traditional and even some sections of the traditional political forces are doing the same. "The grassroots movement," Zelaya said [as reported in The Nation, September 4, 2009], has only one purpose, the transformation of Honduras, including deep structural changes. "This movement is now very strong. It can never be destroyed," he said.[1] On September 5, when the people’s resistance against the military coup was going on for 70 days, the Frente Nacional de Resistencia was analyzing its next actions.

Post-coup Honduras has now joined the movement that has been spreading like wild-fire across South America, even if its elected President Zelaya is not in the country at this time. This grass-roots South American movement represents a push in favour of people’s power and against neo liberal policies and US domination. The goal is to use the ballot box in order to bring about radical change in their respective countries. The election of constituent assemblies and the writing of new modern constitutions have already been accomplished in several countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. Others such as Nicaragua, El Salvador and Paraguay just to mention a few, have taken the path to re-found their nations. Cuba is the pioneer, even if change took place in entirely different historical conditions and with different means. The 1959 triumph of the Revolution and its resulting complete revolutionary transformation had its roots in the nineteenth century Cuban Mambisi tradition. Amongst other characteristics, it consisted of people writing their own constitutions as a Republic in Arms while Cuba was still a colony of Spain.

Honduras was known as an example of what the US deprecatingly and arrogantly described as a banana republic. Honduras is the third poorest nation in all of South America and the Caribbean. Honduras is highly illiterate as was the case in Bolivia before election of Evo Morales and the re-founding of the political system there. However, it is these people of Honduras who are now giving lessons to Washington as to what is needed, that is a new modern constitution.

The political and economic situation in the US is so bad that given its immense foreign debt even some American commentators refer, tongue-in-cheek of course, to the US as a banana republic. The US was the scene of two fraudulent elections victories under the Bush family. How is it that a program for health reform results in a strongly divided nation with citizens at odds with each other, while right-wing extremist opponents to the new health scheme are even threatening violence? While in theory slavery and official racial discrimination have been eliminated in favour of civil rights, racism is not only still rampant, but it is on the increase in the society. Americans of Latino origin are increasingly the victims of racist attacks from the major media, trickling down into the society. Racism is institutionalised. Even President Obama is the victim of right-wing racist threats and attempts at intimidation. While there was a move to impeach former Vice-President Cheney (something which never was capable of being executed) for war crimes and lying to his fellow citizens in order to lead them into a war, there are now rumours that Cheney may be a candidate for the 2012 presidential elections! If Cheney turns out to be only a non-candidate, he is definitely leading the charge at this time for a return to Bush-era politics. The Washington Post openly supports torture and coincides with the Cheney position.[2] The full story of September 11 is still to be revealed by the US government. The US is the biggest arms and drugs dealer in the world. All of this and much more take place in the murky swamp in conformity with, and/or the violation of, the US Constitution.

The peoples in the south are advancing. Would not the most progressive and forward-thinking sections of United States society take this movement into account and thus reflect upon the need for a new constitution in the US itself which would assure the citizens control over their destiny and over foreign policy? (The same question applies to other countries in the north.)

The people of Honduras, for their part, are certainly for a constituent assembly and a new constitution: Poetic justice for the inhabitants of a “banana republic.” During the period leading up to the coup, President Zelaya was leading his people towards a new situation. That is why he was ousted. However, post-coup Honduras has changed the country. The movement since June 28 is even more profound and going beyond pre-coup Honduras. This country is now more than ever part of this vast movement in South America for new economic, anti neo-liberal policies and political institutions, while being against US domination, pillage of its natural resources, and installation and extension of military bases. Honduras may have its ups and downs in the near future, but in the long-run, the trend is irreversible - as it is throughout the south which is today rising up.

[1] Zelaya Speaks, Tom Hayden. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090921/hayden_zelaya

Español por Cubadebate: http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2009/ ... aya-habla/

[2] How a Detainee Became An Asset: Sept. 11 Plotter Cooperated After Waterboarding
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 03874.html