[Peace-discuss] What the US is doing in Honduras

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From Alex Cockburn at CounterPunch.org.]


There’s no continent where the pwogwessive  “left” (I have to set this exhausted 
noun on the crutches of gloomy quotemarks) in the United States has entertained 
higher hopes of Obamian change from traditional U.S. thuggery than Latin 
America. This was a big constituency for Obama to allure last year. Radicals 
here in their senior decades have been rooting for Cuba ever since they cheered 
Fidel’s triumphant entry into Havana in 1959. Twenty-five years later in the 
late 70s and mid-80s the hottest issue for young people on the left in the US 
was the brutal and ultimately successful efforts of the US government in the 
Carter and Reagan years to crush revolutions in El Salvador and Nicaragua. To 
this day the “Hands off Central America”  movement of those years remains by far 
the most determined mobilization of the US left in the post Vietnam era.

Now, after six months, the desire among many of these  pwogs to believe that in 
the White House resides  Gob (Good Obama) rather than  Jaaap (Just Another Awful 
American President) is pitiful to behold. What, in Latin America, do they have 
to hang their hat on, regarding Gob’s actual performance? He’s maintaining the 
embargo on Cuba, pushing for the “free trade pacts” that have laid waste Latin 
American for a generation. He fondly embraces the vicious Uribe regime in Colombia.

The zig-zagging response of the Obama administration to last Sunday’s coup in 
Honduras has now put these hopes to to the test of reality yet again, and 
already the progressives are successfully persuading themselves that either it’s 
“unclear” what Obama’s complicity amounted to, or even that he opposed it from 
the getgo.  To believe this nonsense requires powerful doses of self-deception 
about the nature of this presidency.

The coup itself was an entirely traditional enterprise. Honduras is a wretchedly 
poor place – the third poorest in the hemisphere, where about 70 per cent of the 
population live in grinding poverty. President Zelaya, ousted last weekend, took 
office as a credentialed member of the commercial and political elite and then, 
against all expectation, moved to the left, as well described on this site last 
week by Nicholas Kozloff and other writers.

He ordered a 60 per cent increase in the minimum wage This, he declared, would 
“force the business oligarchy to start paying what is fair.” He joined a 
regional organization, the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas - known by its 
Spanish acronym ALBA - a socially progressive trade pact backed by Hugo Chávez 
of Venezuela opposing the  U.S “free trade” model. He  started using Chavezian 
rhetoric, declaring his to be “a government of great social transformations, 
committed to the poor.” He welcomed Cuban doctors and harshly denounced  US 
meddling in the region.

The Honduran elite viewed Zelaya, elected to his 4-year term in 2006, with 
growing alarm and diligently communicated their disquiet to Washington, where 
the military and civilian intelligence agencies were already being primed by 
their substantial assets and agents inside Honduras, historically an important 
CIA and military staging post in Central America, from which  many sinister and 
lethal operations in the region, such as the Contra war,  were supervised.

A large number of Honduran military commanders have their own long-term 
relationships with the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, many of them 
forged during their training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Here is the notorious 
School of the Americas where promising officers from Argentina, Colombia, 
Honduras and other US allies are given training such useful skills as seizing 
power, hunting down leftists and torture.

In 1996 the Pentagon was forced to release training manuals used at the School 
providing expertise in torture, extortion and execution. Among the SOA's nearly 
60,000 graduates are Manuel Noriega  of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto 
Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of 
Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. SOA graduates were responsible for 
the assassination of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador and 
the El Mozote Massacre of 900 civilians. Check out the excellent School of the 
Americas Watch website for the detailed history.   In 2001 the Pentagon tried to 
clean up the School’s image by changing its name to the Western Hemisphere 
Institute for Security Cooperation. It didn’t catch on.

School of the Americas alumni are thick on the ground in Honduras, including 
General Juan Melgar Castro who seized power in 1975, followed five years later 
by another grad, Policarpo Paz Garcia, patron of the infamous Battalion 3-16, a 
death squad founded by Honduran SOA graduates with the help of Argentine SOA 
graduates. There is profuse evidence available in declassified files that these 
SOA men were in constant touch with CIA case officers and the US Embassy in 
Tegucigalpa.

Last Sunday’s power grab was led by yet another SOA grad, Romeo Vasquez, whose 
men bundled Zelaya, still  in his pajamas, onto a plane to Costa Rica and 
installed as interim president, Roberto Micheletti, a conservative businessman 
and creature of the elites.The rationale was an alleged effort by Zelaya to 
cling to office beyond a Honduran president’s single four year term. Actually 
Zelaya had merely asked the military to help in distributing materials for a 
non-binding referendum to assay whether Hondurans were interested in proceeding 
towards another referendum on constitutional changes.

The US government has admitted that its officials had been in touch with the 
conspirators in the run-up to the coup, It  makes the claim that it was seeking 
to head off any coup. This is as absurd as Henry 11 claiming he tried to talk 
his knights out of killing Thomas Becket and that what he really said was “Do 
not rid of me of this meddlesome priest” and it somehow got garbled and came out 
as “Who will rid me of this meddlesome  priest.” We can take it as an absolute 
certainly that CIA and Pentagon advisors were at the elbows of the Honduran 
plotters, giving the green light and barely bothering to maintain deniability, 
and that Obama and Mrs Clinton had been fully briefed.  The coup was modeled on 
the initial stages of the attempted ouster of Chavez in 2002, before popular 
resistance put Chavez back in power. Earlier versions of the script are profuse 
in the archives of the School of the Americas.

The first statements from Obama and Secretary of State Clinton bear all the 
marks of careful preparation. In the coup’s immediate aftermath last Sunday they 
merely urged negotiations with the coup plotters to "restore constitutional 
order”, feebly enjoining "all political and social actors in Honduras to respect 
democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American 
Democratic Charter”, which has all the moral and persuasive power of  telling a 
child not to go swimming immediately after lunch. Carefully avoided was any 
tough demand by Obama or Clinton – still hoarse from shouts for “democracy” in 
Iran --  for the legitimate Honduran President Zelaya to be returned to office. 
The plan was obviously to try and run out the clock with indecisive parleys 
until Zelaya’s term ends in six months.

It was only after  furious denunciation of the coup  and  call for Zelaya’s 
reinstatement from the Organization of American States, the presidents of Brazil 
and Argentina , the Rio Group,  the European Union, and the UN General Assembly 
– that Obama was forced  to climb off the fence and declare on Monday that "We 
believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the 
president of Honduras..." Secretary of State Clinton did not call for Zelaya’s 
reinstatement. There have  been no tough words from Obama or Clinton,  about the 
shutting down of all opposition press, the curfew, the violent suppression of 
free  speech.

The silver lining may conceivably be, as in 2002 in Venezuela, that Honduras has 
been another miscalculation in Washington of the strength of the spirit of real 
as opposed to merely rhetorical change across Latin America.

http://www.counterpunch.org/