Honduras: Election Fraud, Coups and US Support

Thanks for the post. I hate the fact that this injustice has been almost completely ignored by the world media. Cry Freedom!!!

Fascist state whistle blower turned humanist John Perkins delivers another chapter of the , "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" narrative. His classic exposé spent over 70 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and is published in more than 30 languages.
http://www.johnperkins.org/

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)

Key leaders of Honduras military coup trained in U.S.
At least two leaders of the coup launched in Honduras on June 28 were apparently trained at a controversial Department of Defense school based at Fort Benning, Georgia infamous for producing graduates linked to torture, death squads and other human rights abuses.

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Leftist President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and transported to Costa Rica on Sunday morning after a growing controversy over a vote concerning term limits. Over the last week, Zelaya clashed with and eventually dismissed General Romeo Vasquez -- who is now reportedly in charge of the armed forces that abducted the Honduran president.

According to the watchdog group School of Americas Watch, Gen. Vasquez trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at least twice -- in 1976 and 1984 -- when it was still called School of Americas.

The Georgia-based U.S. military school is infamous for training over 60,000 Latin American soldiers, including infamous dictators, "death squad" leaders and others charged with torture and other human rights abuses. SOA Watch's annual protest to shut down the Fort Benning training site draws thousands.

According to SOA Watch, the U.S. Army school has a particularly checkered record in Honduras, with over 50 graduates who have been intimately involved in human rights abuses. In 1975, SOA Graduate General Juan Melgar Castro became the military dictator of Honduras. From 1980-1982 the dictatorial Honduran regime was headed by yet another SOA graduate, Policarpo Paz Garcia, who intensified repression and murder by Battalion 3-16, one of the most feared death squads in all of Latin America (founded by Honduran SOA graduates with the help of Argentine SOA graduates).

General Vasquez isn't the only leader in the Honduras coup linked to the U.S. training facility. As Kristin Bricker points out:

The head of the Air Force, Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, studied in the School of the Americas in 1996. The Air Force has been a central protagonist in the Honduran crisis. When the military refused to distribute the ballot boxes for the opinion poll, the ballot boxes were stored on an Air Force base until citizens accompanied by Zelaya rescued them. Zelaya reports that after soldiers kidnapped him, they took him to an Air Force base, where he was put on a plane and sent to Costa Rica.

http://southernstudies.org/2009/06/key-leaders-of-honduras-military-coup-trained...

Based on the recent past, the coup leaders -- one of whom was forced to resign his post as foreign minister after calling President Obama "a plantation Negro" and other racial epithets -- might think they can safely ignore the agreement. But the rest of the hemisphere, and the Honduran people -- who have courageously resisted the coup from day one -- will not let them get away with it. No one will recognize the November elections if Zelaya is not restored promptly.

Last night U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Thomas Shannon told CNN en Espanol that the United States plans to recognize the November 29 elections whether or not President Zelaya is restored. This would definitely put Washington on a collision course with the rest of the hemisphere, including Brazil. Furthermore, according to diplomats close to the negotiations, both Shannon and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had given assurances that the October 30th accord would bring Zelaya back to the presidency.

Shannon's statement to CNN prompted a letter from President Zelaya to Hillary Clinton, asking whether the U.S. government had changed its position on the coup d'etat in Honduras.

President Obama now has a choice: he can force the coup regime to honor the accord, or lose further credibility among governments in the hemisphere and the world.

This column was published by the Guardian Unlimited on November 4, 2009.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/04/honduras-zelaya-a...

Last Friday an agreement was reached between the de facto regime in Honduras-- which took power in a military coup on June 28th -- and the elected president Mel Zelaya, for the restoration of democracy there.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in announcing what she called an "historic agreement, said: "I cannot think of another example of a country in Latin America that ... overcame such a crisis through negotiation and dialogue." Hopefully this will turn out to be true.

But the ink was barely dry on the accord when leaders of the coup regime indicated that they had no intention of honoring it. Some of them clearly saw the agreement as just another delaying tactic. They have talked of postponing congressional approval of the accord until after the November 29th elections, or even voting not to restore Zelaya.

If the Honduran congress delays or rejects the restoration of Zelaya, they will be violating the clear intent of the accord. The agreement states: "The decision the National Congress adopts should establish a basis for achieving the social peace, political tranquility and democratic governability the society requires and the country needs." This and other language makes it clear that the negotiators -- who have the ability to deliver the votes in Congress -- agreed on Zelaya's restoration.

Furthermore, justice delayed here is justice denied: two-thirds of the legally allowed campaign period has already lapsed, under conditions of dictatorship that made free election campaigning impossible.

The Obama administration has itself been divided on what to do about the military overthrow of democracy in Honduras. Hence the mixed signals and vacillation from the very beginning, when the first statement from the White House failed to even condemn the coup.

Those in the Administration who think they can now wash their hands of the accord, and let the coup leaders turn their back on it, had better think twice. The Obama team has embarrassed itself enough by having to be pressured -- by the rest of the hemisphere -- to tell the coup government that Washington would not recognize the November 29 elections without prior restoration of Zelaya. Just a few weeks earlier, the Obama administration had blocked the Organization of American States from passing a resolution to this effect.

But now Washington's credibility is really on the line: the Obama team brokered this accord, and got a commitment from the coup leaders. If they go back on it, how much will the Obama administration's word be worth on anything else? Everyone knows that Washington has the ability to force the coup regime to comply: there are billions of dollars of its assets in the U.S. that could be frozen or seized; seventy percent of the country's exports go to the U.S. The coup regime has no international legitimacy and no standing to challenge the United States under international treaties, for any economic sanctions that might be invoked.

The Obama administration never used the effective tools at its disposal. Instead it dithered for months, finally cutting off a fraction of its aid to the coup government and revoking some visas. The administration refused to even declare that a military coup had taken place, since this would have required more cuts in foreign assistance. Most tellingly, Washington refused to denounce the massive human rights violations committed by the dictatorship. These included police beatings, illegal detention of thousands, closing of independent radio and television, suspension of civil rights and even some political murders. The crimes were denounced by all major human rights organizations, inside and outside of Honduras -- and many governments -- but the Obama administration maintained a deafening silence.

continued

Washington, D.C. - The Center for Economic and Policy Research released a new report on the Honduran economy today. The report finds that the economy has become especially vulnerable to the combined impacts of the world recession and the political crisis that has followed the military coup of June 28th.

"The whole region (Central America) has been hit by the U.S. recession," said Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of CEPR. "But things have worsened in Honduras since the coup in June and it is difficult to see how the economy will recover without a solution to the political crisis."

The paper, "Honduras: Recent Economic Performance," by Senior Economist Jose Antonio Cordero, looks at longer-term trends as well as the pre-crisis years. It finds that poverty and inequality decreased significantly during the administration of President Manuel Zelaya, with rapid growth of more than 6 percent for the first two years. The government also increased school enrollment significantly by abolishing school fees, expanded school lunch programs, and raised the minimum wage by 60 percent, drawing fierce opposition from employers and business groups.

In 2008, the government used expansionary monetary policy to counteract the effects of the global credit crunch and recession.

Since the coup, the Central Bank has lost about 18.4 percent of its international reserves and cannot access the extra reserves that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has provided to all member countries, because of the coup regime's lack of international legality. The economy is expected to shrink by 2.6 percent this year, and forecasts have been recently revised further downward.

The Honduran economy is also enormously dependent on remittances, which peaked at more than 21 percent of GDP in 2006. The continuing decline in this source of income and foreign exchange will also hurt the Honduran economy.

See the full report
http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/honduras-2009-11.pdf