[Peace-discuss] FAIR: Honduras coup pretext recycled from Brazil ’64

[Robert Naiman]

Rerun in Honduras
Coup pretext recycled from Brazil ’64
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3893

By Mark Cook

The pretext for the Honduran coup d’état is nothing new. In a
remarkable replay, bogus charges that the corporate media in the U.S.
and Europe have repeated endlessly without attempting to
substantiate—that Honduran president Manuel Zelaya sought to amend the
country’s constitution to run for another term—are virtually identical
to the sham justification for the 1964 coup against Brazilian
president João Goulart.

The Brazilian coup, depicted at the time as a victory for
constitutional democracy, kicked off a series of extreme right-wing
military coups against democratically elected governments throughout
the Southern Cone of Latin America and beyond. Brazil was turned into
a base for subversion of neighboring democratic governments (National
Security Archive, 6/20/02); Goulart and a previous Brazilian
president, Juscelino Kubitschek, both died in 1976 in incidents that
have since been attributed to the multinational assassination program
Operation Condor (Folha, 1/27/08; Carta Maior, 7/17/08). Given that
history, the strength and unanimity of Latin American and
international condemnation of the Honduran coup—despite a worldwide
media disinformation campaign against Zelaya—is hardly surprising.

On March 31, 1964, the democratic government of Brazil’s Goulart, a
wealthy rancher hated by big business for having dramatically raised
the minimum wage, was overthrown in a coup d’état organized by
ultra-rightist elements in Brazil’s military and strongly backed by
the U.S. government. For decades, U.S. officials denied involvement in
the coup, but in 2004 the nongovernmental National Security Archive
(3/31/04) published newly declassified documents revealing President
Lyndon Johnson’s personal involvement and a massive U.S. military and
CIA commitment.

At the New York Times, which editorially cheered the “peaceful
revolution” (4/3/64), influential columnist Arthur Krock (4/3/64)
accused Goulart of seeking to “prolong [his term] by removing the
constitutional ban against consecutive presidential succession.”

“What really happened,” Krock declared, in phrasing repeated almost
word for word 45 years later in Honduran coverage, “was the failure of
a bid for power, contrary to a fundamental principle of the Brazilian
Constitution.” Newsweek (4/6/64) and Time (4/10/64) ran similar
allegations, also without providing any evidence.

Evidence is just as little needed today, as corporate journalists
drape baseless claims with the word “fear” (instead of “assert” or
“contend”) in the apparent belief that it absolves them of any
responsibility to evaluate whether there is any truth to the charge:
“Critics feared [Zelaya] intended to extend his rule past January,
when he would have been required to step down,” the New York Times
wrote (7/6/09) in a typical passage. Nowhere did the article or others
like it attempt to evaluate whether this would even have been
possible, given that Zelaya was not a candidate in the country’s
November elections and would have to give up the presidency to his
successor in January. In fact, Zelaya’s own vice president had
resigned in order to run for the presidency.

Media depictions of Goulart as a “leftist” and ally of Castro found
their echo in coverage of Honduran President Zelaya as a “leftist”
(e.g, Reuters, 7/31/09) and “power- hungry protégé of U.S.-hating
Venezuela President Hugo Chávez” (Philadelphia Inquirer, 7/19/09).
Forty years after the Brazilian coup, the New York Times (6/23/04) was
still running the line that “the armed forces overthrew Mr. Goulart’s
government, fearing he intended to install a Cuban-style Commu-nist
regime in Brazil.”

There was never the slightest evidence that Goulart intended to
install a “Cuban-style Communist regime,” any more than that he was
attempting to run for another term. As with Zelaya in Honduras,
Goulart’s real crime was to use the minimum wage and similar measures
to attempt to moderate the extremes of wealth and poverty in his
country; Latin America has long suffered from the greatest income
inequality in the world (U.N. Human Development Report, 2007/2008). As
the National Labor Committee (6/27/07) reported, Honduras’ minimum
wage was reduced in 2007, in a race to the bottom against neighboring
Nicaragua, when the country joined the Washington-sponsored Central
American Free Trade Agreement.

The U.S. corporate media’s cheering for the 1964 coup in Brazil
foreshadowed their support for other Latin American dictatorships. In
July 1976, four months after the military seized power in Argentina
and while tens of thousands were being tortured and killed across the
Southern Cone, the New York Times (7/24/76) published a dispatch from
Rio headlined “Grip of Latin Military Squeezes Leftists Out.” The
article, which did not mention or even hint at the death and torture
squads operating across the continent, justified the overthrow of
democratic governments in Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay,
reciting unquestioningly the militaries’ own versions of why they
seized power.

“Most of the South American military groups reached power during
political and economic crises that saw the decomposition of civilian
institutions, threats to the unity of the armed forces and open
appeals by civilian leaders to the military to abandon its political
neutrality,” the article declared, speaking of the militaries’ success
in dealing with “subversives” in cooperation with the School of the
Americas. It was accompanied by a photo from Pinochet’s Chile of a
soldier standing over a box with several handguns. The caption read:
“A Chilean soldier guards weapons taken from leftist terrorists.”

U.S. corporate media extolled the economic programs of the
dictatorships, ultra-neoliberal policies that greatly increased
inequality throughout the region and ended all too often in economic
breakdown. Almost two years after the 1964 Brazilian military coup, by
which time the intensity of the political repression was undeniable,
Time magazine (12/31/65) praised the coup government for slashing
wheat and oil subsidies, “thus halting a wasteful drain on Brazil’s
treasury.” The effect in skyrocketing food prices was devastating to
most Brazilian families. The same article praised the coup regime’s
ending of “labor’s inflation-producing 75 percent-to-100 percent wage
hikes.” “Many Brazilians still gripe about this year’s 45 percent
increase in the cost of living,” the magazine acknowledged, “but
businessmen give [Economic Planning Minister Roberto] Campos a rousing
cheer, and foreign investors are registering their votes with money.”

Time added approvingly that the World Bank and International Monetary
Fund, virtually or entirely absent from Brazil since 1959, had
extended massive new loans. The loans, which often disappeared into
the pockets of the key figures in the military dictatorships, saddled
country after country with massive debts by the early 1980s.

U.S. corporate media typically depict the plotters of these sorts of
coups as responsible leaders stepping in to save the country from an
erratic left-winger who had lost all popular support because of
disastrous economic policies; accordingly, the plotters in Tegucigalpa
were described as the “interim government” (AP, 8/1/09), the
“caretaker government” (New York Times, 7/6/09), even the “new
government” (New York Times, 7/8/09). Newspaper editors are familiar
with phrases like “coup leaders,” “coup government” and “de facto
rulers,” and use them when they wish—but those were conspicuously
missing in most coverage.

Unfortunately for their purposes, the media’s attempt to present the
coup group as responsible leaders kept being undermined by the
behavior of the leaders themselves. They flew the democratically
elected president they had just overthrown into forced exile clad in
his pajamas (Washington Post, 7/28/09). They waved around an obviously
forged presidential “letter of resignation” that the Honduran Congress
straightfacedly pretended to believe in order to “legalize” his ouster
(BBC, 7/28/09). (The Honduran Congress has no constitutional authority
to dismiss a Honduran president.) Apologists for the coup kept
forgetting their lines about term limits, complaining instead about
the deposed president’s raising the minimum wage (AP, 8/6/09).

Attempts by the coup leaders and their Washington-based apologists to
claim that they were acting in accordance with the Honduran
constitution were so laughable that even the corporate media relegated
them to guest columns on the opinion page. The drumbeat of such op-eds
(e.g., New York Times, 7/7/09), however, with virtually no opposing
viewpoints published*, would lead U.S. newspaper readers to believe
falsely that Zelaya was ousted because he tried to use a referendum to
extend his term in office.

In one widely circulated column, the Los Angeles Times (7/10/09)
featured Miguel Estrada, a Bush administration Appeals Court nominee
blocked by a Democratic filibuster. Estrada, like other coup
defenders, stressed that the current Honduran constitution mandates
removal for any president who attempts to change the constitution to
run for a second term. The trouble is that Zelaya never proposed
anything of the sort—something Estrada had to admit. He asserted,
however, that that was the “only conceivable motive” Zelaya could have
had for seeking a new constitutional convention—which would have
occurred after Zelaya’s successor had already been elected.

Even if Estrada’s sleight-of-hand assertion were true, Zelaya would
have had a right to indictment and trial. But there are plenty of
legitimate reasons to rewrite the Honduran constitution. It was
written in 1982, during the thinly disguised military dictatorship of
Gen. Gustavo Alvarez. Alvarez, a School of the Americas alum who
worked closely with U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, set up the death
squads that terrorized Honduras and made the country’s security forces
indistinguishable from the country’s extreme right wing. It was in May
1983, under the current constitution, that the Honduran congress
adopted the infamous Decree 33. As Gerry O’Sullivan wrote in the
Humanist (3/1/94), the decree “declared anyone a ‘terrorist’ who
distributed political literature, associated with foreigners, joined
groups deemed subversive by the government, damaged property or
destroyed documents.”

The U.S. corporate media have carefully averted their eyes from such
history as that of General Alvarez—as from the role of School of the
Americas graduates in the current coup. It was thanks to the School of
the Americas Watch and the National Catholic Reporter (6/29/09), not
the corporate media, that the public learned of ongoing U.S. training
of the Honduran military, despite the Obama administration’s claim to
have cut military ties. When history repeats itself, don’t look for
accurate coverage from those who got it wrong the first time around.


* The L.A. Times did publish one of the very few op-eds critical of
the coup plotters’ pretexts, a piece by Mark Weisbrot (7/23/09).


-- 
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org

Senator Feingold Calls for Timetable for U.S. Troop Withdrawal from Afghanistan
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/exit-afghanistan