Articles with the Tag Honduras

Wikileaks confirms: removal of Hondurian president was a coup

Honduras
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From a cable sent by the US ambassador to Honduras on 24th July, 2009 we learn that the removal of the then president Zelaya from power by the military and his subsequent deportation was illegal and hence a coup:

— the military had no authority to remove Zelaya from the country;

— Congress has no constitutional authority to remove a Honduran president;

— Congress and the judiciary removed Zelaya on the basis of a hasty, ad-hoc, extralegal, secret, 48-hour process;

— the purported “resignation” letter was a fabrication and was not even the basis for Congress’s action of June 28; and

— Zelaya’s arrest and forced removal from the country violated multiple constitutional guarantees, including the prohibition on expatriation, presumption of innocence and right to due process.

The official US response to the coup back then was ambivalent. While the Hondurian military’s actions were condemned, the US government accepted the outcome of the coup. It hesitated to put pressure on the coupists and sought to mediate between them and Zelaya and his supporters. This was sold as a properly neutral, unbiased position, but the end result was that the coupists won: Zelaya remains in exile while they remain in power. Had the US made this analysis coming from its own embassy public, it would’ve been much harder if not impossible for the coup to succeed.

Honduras: unions call for general strike against the coup

Honduras
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the Hondurian unions, through bitter experience well aware of what a rightwing regime can do to their country, have been out in force against the coup from the start. Now they’re calling for a general strike, as deposed president Zelaya has sworn to return soon:

The CUTH represents 250,000 workers in both urban and rural areas.

Previous protests against coup leader Roberto Micheletti have been confronted by large numbers of armed soldiers and police.

Mr Salinas told the Morning Star that opposition to the coup is gathering strength. “We have been in the streets for 22 days and our movement is becoming stronger and stronger.

“Our aim is to stop production, trade and transport,” he said.

Despite the resistance of the oligarchy, Mr Zelaya’s government had doubled the minimum wage and the trade unions predict that unless the coup regime is removed from power, it will attempt to reverse this and other progressive measures.

So far the coupists seem to have kept somewhat of a low profile: repressive, intransigent, but just standard issue repression rather than football stadiums full of dissidents being tortured and shot. They seem to be playing for time, establishing the facts on the ground and count on the “international community” to lose interest. They’ve been trying to spin the coup as an emergency measure to prevent the constitution from Zelaya’s supposed depravity, urged on them by the people. If they can keep Honduras quiet without too much visible repression, this old trick might just work. Hence the importance of a general strike as a very visible show of support for Zelaya.

By the way, it would be a mistake to think that this is just about Zelaya and his return. Until he came in office he was your fairly establishment candidate, who was half pushed into taking some measures to better the existence of the majority of Hondurians. He isn’t a socialist or populist reformer like Chavez, but hopefully if he does return, he will be radicalised like Chavez was, rather than cowed as happened to Ariste in Haiti. More important than Zelaya’s fate however is what this struggle is doing for the working classes in Honduras: if they win it’s a huge boost; if they lose they know everything that was achieved during Zelaya will be taken away again.

The Obama strategy in Honduras

South America
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Is the Obama administration attemptting to have its cake and eat it too in Honduras? Greg Grandin thinks so, arguing that the ideal outcome for Washington would be president Zelaya’s restoration but without his populist policies:

The State Department, though, has been more circumspect. At first it was reluctant to use the word “coup” to describe Zelaya’s overthrow, since to do so would trigger automatic sanctions, including the suspension of foreign aid and the withdrawal of US troops. Honduras hosts Soto Cano Air Force Base, the main US military base in the region, and Washington is concerned with keeping that installation fully operational. Likewise, according to John Negroponte–who as ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s was implicated in the cover-up of hundreds of death-squad executions–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is working to “preserve some leverage to try and get Zelaya to back down from his insistence on a referendum” and presumably from his other populist policies.

It seems like what the United States might be angling for in Honduras could be the “Haiti Option.” In 1994 Bill Clinton worked to restore Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide after he was deposed in a coup, but only on the condition that Aristide would support IMF and World Bank policies. The result was a disaster, leading to deepening poverty, escalating polarization and, in 2004, a second coup against Aristide, this one fully backed by the Bush White House.

The ambiguity with which the American government has responded to the coup in Honduras is mirrored in such establishment barometers as the New York Times, as seen in this article on Zelaya’s attempted return last Sunday. Condescending towards Zelaya, but not very enthusiastic about the coupists either.

Excusing dictatorships the liberal media way

Iran, Manufacturing consent, South America
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Sadly No is surprised and upset that the Wall Street Journal would defend the military coup in Honduras:

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.

And liberals fall for it everytime.

(Crossposted at Wis[s]e Words.)

Honduras.

South America
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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”.

UPDATE II: leftwing politician killed when soldiers attempted to arrest him.