It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.
But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya’s abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.
A far cry from their treatment of the Iranian elections in which its editorial opinion seems firmly on the side of the protestors and their demands for free and fair elections. How come the Wall Street Journal is so concerned about Iranian democracy but so cavalier about the Hondurian coup?
Simple. Iran is an enemy of the US and is therefore safe to attack. Honduras is an ally and what happened there has not be done without at least some level of support or approval from the US government, if not necessarily any official support. It’s an old, old tradition Mary O’Grady engaged in, this whitewashing of a military coup. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Argentine; every time the US government meddled in a South American country or allowed its military to thwart a nascent democracy, the newspapers of record were there to excuse it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the “liberal” NYT or the “conservative” WSJ, every time an US supported coup happened, they helped whitewash it. Read Manufacturing Consent, read Killing Hope, dig through the newspaper archives and you’ll find the same thing over and over again.
Let’s see. Honduras’ leftist president, Manuel Zelaya is lifted from his bed in the middle of the night by the army, sent into exile into Costa Rica. The speaker of the Hondurian national congress is instead sworn in and immediately sets a curfew for the next two days. All of this is justified with claims that Zelaya was violating the Hondurian constitution. In the background is a deeper social struggle between the old elite and the reformist government of Zelaya. Oh, and the Honduran Joint Chief of Staff was a graduate of the School of the Americas, the US infamous torture school.
Does or does this not sound like a classic South American coup?
UPDATE: According to Eva Gollinger, it does. She provides some background about the conflict between leftist president Zelaya and the coupists:
The current constitution, written in 1982 during the height of the Reagan Administration’s dirty war in Central America, was designed to ensure those in power, both economic and political, would retain it with little interference from the people. Zelaya, elected in November 2005 on the platform of Honduras’ Liberal Party, had proposed the opinion poll be conducted to determine if a majority of citizens agreed that constitutional reform was necessary. He was backed by a majority of labor unions and social movements in the country. If the poll had occured, depending on the results, a referendum would have been conducted during the upcoming elections in November to vote on convening a constitutional assembly. Nevertheless, today’s scheduled poll was not binding by law.
In fact, several days before the poll was to occur, Honduras’ Supreme Court ruled it illegal, upon request by the Congress, both of which are led by anti-Zelaya majorities and members of the ultra-conservative party, National Party of Honduras (PNH). This move led to massive protests in the streets in favor of President Zelaya. On June 24, the president fired the head of the high military command, General Romeo Vásquez, after he refused to allow the military to distribute the electoral material for Sunday’s elections. General Romeo Vásquez held the material under tight military control, refusing to release it even to the president’s followers, stating that the scheduled referendum had been determined illegal by the Supreme Court and therefore he could not comply with the president’s order. As in the Unted States, the president of Honduras is Commander in Chief and has the final say on the military’s actions, and so he ordered the General’s removal. The Minister of Defense, Angel Edmundo Orellana, also resigned in response to this increasingly tense situation.
This is a pattern we’ve seen before, a carefully proscribed democracy in which it’s impossible to change the status quo without going outside its legalistic boundaries, at which point the mkilitary has an excuse to intervene to “restore democracy”.
While the UK and US media are having a happy happy fun time decidering the election and the actual electorate gets more and more irate about it, banana republicanism and all round diplomatic skullduggery goes on as blithely as usual. In this particular instance, Venezuela, it may have electoral implications – but perhaps that’s the plan.
The supposedly lame-duck Bush administration is continuing to destabilise neighbouring countries for fun and profit by fomenting dissent and plotting coups:
President Hugo Chávez last night ordered the US ambassador to leave Venezuela within 72 hours and accused Washington of fomenting a coup attempt against his socialist revolution.
Chávez also ordered Venezuela’s ambassador to Washington to return home and threatened to cut oil supplies, plunging relations between the countries to a new low. “Go to hell a hundred times, fucking Yankees,” he told a televised rally thronged with supporters clad in red.
The move came a day after Venezuela’s ally Bolivia expelled its US ambassador for allegedly backing opposition groups engaged in bloody clashes with police and government supporters; turmoil which claimed eight lives and split the country in two.
[…]
In a day of intrigue and brinkmanship, Chávez announced that Venezuelan military officers had plotted to assassinate him with US complicity. “They’re trying to do here what they were doing in Bolivia. That’s enough shit from you Yankees,” he said.
Ties would be restored when the US had a new government that “respected” Latin America, he added.
Coincidental or not, his accusation fell on the 35th anniversary of the CIA-backed coup which replaced Chile’s leftist president, Salvador Allende, with the dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The American diplomatic and security apparatus has learned precisely nothing from Chile. They think that it’s still the 1970s in South America: the cold war has never ended there for them.
It’s all beginning to look rather Georgian, or even Bay of Pigsian, isn’t it, what with the Russian navy conducting war games off the coast of Venezuela and Russian bombers at South American bases and everyone taking sides:
Russian bombers arrive in Venezuela
Russia has flown two long-range bombers to Venezuela for military exercises, a move likely to cause concern in Washington.
Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, said on Wednesday that the Tu-160 strategic bombers had arrived to strengthen military ties and to counter US regional influence.
Apart from the larger geopolitical political implications there are domestic US electoral considerations too, in light of the bellicose attitude being expressed shown by McCain/ Palin towards Russia. United against a common enemy and all that…
The Bush administration definitely seems to have a strategy; it’s armageddon or bust. Trouble in South America, the Caucasus, the Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan -any one of of those situations could ripen into regional and perhaps global war, given the right sequence of events. Surely one’s got to pay off in time to give the Republicans a pre- election boost.
Is it just me or is there more than a whiff of October Surprise to all this?
It’s a canard of the liberal left in the USA that the country is on the verge of fascism, but it’s been 8 years now and an observer might reasonably ask, “When do they stop teetering on the verge and tip right over the cliff?”
Police Raid Berwyn Heights Mayor’s Home, Kill His 2 Dogs
By Aaron C. Davis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 31, 2008; Page B01
A police SWAT team raided the home of the mayor in the Prince George’s County town of Berwyn Heights on Tuesday, shooting and killing his two dogs, after he brought in a 32-pound package of marijuana that had been delivered to his doorstep, police said.
Yes. Delivered by undercover cops.
Mayor Cheye Calvo was not arrested in the raid, which was carried out about 7 p.m. by the Sheriff’s Office SWAT team and county police narcotics officers. Prince George’s police spokesman Henry Tippett said yesterday that all the residents of the house — Calvo, his wife and his mother-in-law — are “persons of interest” in the case.
The package was addressed to Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic, said law enforcement officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.
Tippett said police are working to determine for whom the drugs were meant.
Calvo said yesterday that he did not know how the drugs wound up on his doorstep. He works part time as the mayor and serves as director of expansion for the SEED Foundation, a well-known national nonprofit group that runs urban public boarding schools.
“My government blew through my doors and killed my dogs,” Calvo said. “They thought we were drug dealers, and we were treated as such. I don’t think they really ever considered that we weren’t.”
Calvo described a chaotic scene, in which he — wearing only underwear and socks — and his mother-in-law were handcuffed and interrogated for hours. They were surrounded by the dogs’ carcasses and pools of the dogs’ blood, Calvo said.
The dogs were pets, labradors to be precise, hardly the most agressive of animals, and they were running away from paramilitaries invading their space. They weren’t shot because they were a threat, but purely to terrify and intimidate the mayor and his family.
These are classic School of The Americas terror tactics and exactly the kind of thing that was done in Chile, Argentina or any number of Central American puppet states to intimidate and harass elected officials who might threaten the military or police with accountability for their political and financial misdeeds.
Prince George’s County has a reputation for brutal, dirty cops but it’s hardly alone in that. It appears that America’s police and security forces have been turned into a unaccountable collection of virtually private paramilitaries, weapons to be used by the corrupt rich against the very people that are paying for that corruption.
When heavily armed police trained to be amoral, murderous thugs are then given free rein to profit from bribery and the ludicrous ‘war on drugs’, how then can anyone we be surprised when they use those same weapons to stop anything and anyone that might cut into those profits? It’s not as though anyone in government gives a damn that the US is way over that fascist cliff and accelerating. In the dying days of the GOP it’s everybody for themselves and the devil take the hindmost. If I was an as yet uncorrupted local politician I’d be buying myself a shotgun or two. Or several.
Peronist President-elect of Argentina Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner‘s election might be said to presage the almost inevitable (she has Murdoch money) anointment of Hillary Clinton to succeed her husband in office, in what seems to be becoming rather a trend amongst a certain class of well-off and well-connected women. Mind you, there’s not a lot of sisterhood on display despite the superficial similarities; Kirchner is not happy to be compared to Clinton:
“Hillary (Rodham Clinton) was able to position herself nationally because her husband was president. She didn’t have a political career beforehand and that isn’t my case,” Fernández de Kirchner said in an interview with CNN en Español, referring to her 30-year career in Argentine politics.
That doesn’t bode well for future US/Argentine relations, does it?
But less flippantly, how did Argentina get to the political point where Peronism is once again in fashion? What happened to the people’s movements born out of the 2001 economic collapse? Bring yourself up to basic speed on the politics of the greater American continent and the contnuing malign influence of US foreign policy with John Pilger’s documentary, The War On Democracy. It’s now up on YouTube in ten parts here: if you have an acccount, load them all into ‘playlist’ and play back to back. Here’s part one to start you off:
Award-winning documentary maker John Pilger suggests that, far from bringing democracy to the world as it claims, the US is doing its best to stifle its progress. Talking exclusively to American government officials, including agents who reveal for the first time on film how the CIA ran its war in Latin America in the 80s, Pilger argues that true popular democracy is more likely to be found among the poorest in Latin America, whose movements are often
ignored in the West.
She may be female but Kirchner is no Michelle Bachelet. I’ll have no truck with the brand of feminsim that says any woman elected is better than none – a woman can govern just as badly and undemocratically as any man and that goes for Hillary Clinton as well as Kirchner. The Democrats and the Peronists both purport to be the champions of the poor, the little guys, the blue-collar and the dispossessed, but both actually work to advance neoliberal economic policy and corporate profit. It’s no coincidence that like the Peronistas both Clintons have adopted the Third Wayas their defining political stance, along with Tony Blair.
Kirchner may have more elected political experience than Clinton but just like Clinton there’s no denying she’s used her husband’s reflected popularity to boost her own quest for presidential power. Both are so firmly wedded to the notion of a corporate state they married it. That’s dedication to a cause, the cause of Evita Peronism.
By the time Nestor Kirchner announced he was stepping down to let his wife run, observers said she had fuller lips, tighter skin and a more lustrous auburn mane, prompting speculation about surgery and hair extensions.
It remains an open question whether this was a personal decision to offset the effects of age, a political strategy to court votes in an aesthetic-obsessed era, or both.
Newspapers gleefully reported that on foreign trips she brought large trunks of clothes and fashion helpers, and changed her outfit up to four times a day. Critics said the makeover was an effort to evoke the magic of Eva Peron, the icon who died in 1952 aged just 33.
Just like Evita, Kirchner’s clothes, shoes, handbags and hair are the stuff of gossip magazines and like Clinton she’s alleged to not be a stranger to Botox. It’s described as vanity but it’s something more insidious. It’s all about the image. masking state corporatism with an attractive, warm and fuzzy media-friendly facade. Don’t look at the policies, look at the hair!
To my mind Clinton’s at the very least a quasi-Evita Peronist. Trading on reflected glory? Check. Image management? Check. Cult of personality? Third Way-ist? Check. Corporately funded? Check. Hawkish on the military and defence? Soft on neofascism and torture? Check…
If the ascendance of Kirchner and Clinton tells women anything at all, it’s that we can only succeed to high office a] by marrying advantageously b] putting a softer, feminine face on the perpetuation of a political and economic system which keeps other women down and c] pandering to the corporate media’s trivialisation of politics. This is no big step foward for women.
This is how The Times described the Argentinian election – ‘Fatty’ v the new Evita in all-girl fight for Argentina” Murdoch himself may be bankrolling a woman for US president but that says it all about what the global press really thinks of women in presidential politics, doesn’t it?
The election of a woman in Argentina and the potential election of another in the US is not a sudden blossoming of equality, it’s the corporate status quo donning a velvet Prada glove over the hand holding the cattleprod.
Because to get back to my original point, that US and Argentinian politics are beginning to echo one another, the ironic thing about all this is that while the US (as Pilger shows) has been meddling in Argentinian politics for years in the cause of corporate world hegemony it’s rebounded and now both countries’ politics seem to be converging. Both have a politicised military, a greedy plutocracy, entrenched and growing social inequality and a fatal taste for the firm smack of authoritarian government. They’re more alike than they’d admit.
The US now has also a falling currency and an economy that’s could nosedive and has the potential to cause untold social disorder and chaos, just as Argentina did six years ago. What’s Hillary’s plan for that, if any? Will we see disposessed Americans selling their all on the streets like the residents of Buenos Aires had to? Americans north and south may find they have much more in common than they think.
Oh well, never mind. Let’s look on the bright side – at least their potential misery‘ll be misery with a kinder, gentler, less wrinkled face.
