Boardman writes: Given the longstanding, close, bi-partisan ties between
U.S. and Honduran governments, especially their military establishments, it
is all but inconceivable that high-ranking officials in the Obama
administration, perhaps Obama himself, did not have at least some advance
notice of (if not involvement in planning) the coup.
Sec. Hillary Clinton. (Photo: Zimbio)
Why Is Hillary OK With Honduran Death Squads?
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
18 March 16
Honduran assassination has deep American roots if not fingerprints
When a Honduran death squad gunned down internationally-honored
environmental activist Berta Caceres, 44, a retired teacher and mother of
four, in her home on March 3, the media-filtered world as we know it took
note, briefly, expressed some regret, provided little context, and moved on.
The outcry from rest of the real world included demands from the UN, more
than 20 U.S. Congress members, and hundreds of NGOs for an independent
investigation of this political assassination [a 2014 letter from 108
congressmen to Secretary of State John Kerry calling for the U.S. to address
human rights abuses in Honduras had little impact]. Now, in response to a
similar request, the U.S. has sent FBI agents to help the Honduran
government, whose first action was to detain the only witness, Gustavo
Castro Soto, himself shot twice in the same attack (and still in Honduran
custody two weeks later).
What our media-shielded world mostly did not note is that Honduras is one of
the original banana republics, long open to corporate plunder under the
protection of the U.S. government. Nor was there much attention to
longstanding political corruption in Honduras with its elected puppet
government and major American military presence. Also omitted generally was
how Honduras has served as a main base of American military operations at
least since the Reagan administrations illegal and war-crime saturated war
against Nicaragua in the 1980s. Several hundred U.S.Marines are deployed in
Honduras with official missions to train Hondurans and fight the war on
drugs (similar to the missions of 3,500 Marines in Peru and others
elsewhere), consistent with U.S. military expansion in Central America
during President Obamas first term.
But how could any of this be relevant to the assassination of yet another
Honduran activist defending human rights, defending the rights of indigenous
people, defending the environment, or defending the Honduran majority
against military repression? None of the people currently running for
president have apparently thought it worth more than a passing comment at
most, not even Bernie Sanders, whose vision of an America run by
billionaires has long been a grotesque reality in oligarchical Honduras.
Pretty much irrelevantly, Sanders did take a glancing swipe at Clintons
relationship with Honduras (rated Mostly True by Politifact) during their
March 9 debate:
One of the great human tragedies of recent years is children came from
Honduras where there's more violence than in any place in this country, and
they came into this country
. And I said welcome these children into this
country. Secretary Clinton said, send them back. [This omits Clintons
lawyerly conditions for expatriation, but accurately characterizes her
bottom line: Send them back.]
So why are Honduran children fleeing in the first place?
Perhaps the most interesting contextual aspect of the Berta Caceres
assassination is that its an extension of American engagement in Honduras
and provides a lucid paradigm of foreign policy as Hillary Clinton practices
it.
On June 27, 2009, Honduras had a legitimately elected president, Manuel
Zelaya, himself a multi-millionaire oligarch, who was accused of instigating
a months-long power struggle over whether he could extend his term-limited
presidency by democratic but constitutionally-challenged, nonviolent means.
Zelaya denied this intent, saying he would leave office as scheduled in
January 2010. His opposition, including the Congress, attorney general, and
Supreme Court, were holding their own in June. Congress had begun to
consider impeachment. The stated issue was apparently not the real issue.
In the mid-1970s, Zelayas father had been convicted for taking part in the
massacre of at least 15 priests, students, and other protestors, killed by
Honduran military forces. Victims bodies were burned, castrated, and
otherwise mutilated. In 1980, Zelayas father was freed by an amnesty after
less than two years of a 20-year sentence. Zelaya, during his rise to the
presidency, was accused of embezzling all or part of a missing $40 million,
but he was not prosecuted. He won the presidency in 2005 with 45.6% of the
vote. Zelaya ran as a traditional Honduran conservative from the Liberal
Party and seemed at first to be no great threat to the Honduran sense of
order, control, and wealth distribution. The National Party accused the
Supreme Electoral Tribunal of gross errors and contested Zelayas 3.4%
margin of victory, only to concede the election ten days later.
Once in office, Zelaya started doing things that displeased the elites as
well as the United States. He led Honduras to join ALBA (the Bolivarian
Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), founded in 2004 by Venezuela and
Cuba to promote social, political, and economic integration of Latin
countries. Although the U.S. remained Hondurass main trading partner,
Zelaya pursued expanded trade with Oceania and Africa. His foreign policy
included improving relations with Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro. This
alienated Honduran business elites, as did his other initiatives, including:
education for all children, subsidies to small farmers, lower bank interest
rates, an 80% increase in the minimum wage, and numerous programs that
reduced poverty by 10% in Honduras (one of the worlds poorer countries with
a 62.8% poverty rate in 2014, substantially higher than when Zelaya was in
office). For three years, Honduran mass media, owned by just six families
(media concentration similar to the U.S.) provided little unbiased coverage,
leading Zelaya to invoke a little-used law to force the media to carry
government broadcasts.
U.S.-sanctioned military coup ended Honduran non-crisis
On June 28, 2009, Honduran military forces seized President Zelaya and took
him to a nearby U.S. military base. From there, Zelaya was sent into exile
in Costa Rica, setting off protests around the region and the world,
including a UN General Assembly resolutionon June 30, with Zelaya present at
the UN (in Washington, Obama officials refused to meet with him). The
resolution, agreed to by consensus, unanimously condemned the coup and
demanded immediate, unconditional restoration of democratically-elected
President Zelaya. The U.S., by choosing not to block the consensus, managed
to avoid voting for or against a resolution that condemned its own proxies
actions.
In October 2009, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued a statement
re-affirming the June resolution that condemns the coup détat in the
Republic of Honduras that has interrupted the democratic and constitutional
order and the legitimate exercise of power in Honduras.
At least part of the explanation for U.S. duplicity was made clear in an
email to Clinton from Tom Shannon, Assistant Secretary for Western
Hemisphere Affairs, saying that he planned on calling the new SouthCom
Commander to ensure a coordinated U.S. approach [since] we have big military
equities in Honduras through Joint Task Force Bravo at Soto Cano airbase.
Coincidentally or not, Shannon was in Honduras a week before the coup,
consulting with the military and civilian groups later involved in the coup.
Given the longstanding, close, bi-partisan ties between U.S. and Honduran
governments, especially their military establishments, it is all but
inconceivable that high-ranking officials in the Obama administration,
perhaps Obama himself, did not have at least some advance notice of (if not
involvement in planning) the coup. How else does the Honduran military take
a president at gunpoint and fly him to a U.S. military base only to be
welcomed with open arms?
The Obama administration has never offered a credible, principled
explanation for indirectly supporting and directly securing the Honduran
coup. Early on, President Obama gave appropriate lip service to opposing the
coup: We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya
remains the democratically elected president there. By avoiding calling the
transparent military coup a military coup, Obama avoided triggering an
American law that would have imposed significant sanctions against Honduras
and especially the Honduran military. Instead, the Obama administration
applied only token sanctions, did little to resist Republican support for
the coup government, maneuvered to take the issue out of public view, and
acted as if the Honduran governments investigation of itself was sufficient
response. The point person in this exercise in anti-democracy was Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton, who described her actions in her official
autobiography Hard Choices (now out in paperback with the Honduran section
scrubbed).
Hillary Clintons diplomacy whitewashed the military coup
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was excellently positioned to move
the question of the Honduran military coup out of the potentially
pro-democratic forum of the Organization of American States into more
sheltered talks that included both Zelaya and his appointed successor,
Roberto Micheletti Bain, who publicly offered to step down during the summer
of 2009 on the condition Zelaya would not return to power. During that same
period, Clinton received an email from Ann-Marie Slaughter, then director of
policy planning at the State Department, strongly urging her to take bold
action
find that [the] coup was a military coup under U.S. law, a
position the administration had refused to take for the prior six weeks.
Slaughters August 16 email added:
I got lots of signals last week that we are losing ground in Latin America
every day the Honduras crisis continues; high level people from both the
business and the NGO community say that even our friends are beginning to
think we are not really committed to the norm of constitutional democracy we
have worked so hard to build over the last 20 year [sic]. The current
stalemate favors the status quo; the de facto regime has every incentive to
run out the clock as long as they think we will have to accept any
post-election government. I urge you to think about taking bold action now
to breathe new life into the process and signal that regardless what happens
on the Hill, you and the president are serious.
No such seriousness was forthcoming from the administration. Clinton, with
no interference from Obama, played out the clock until bogus elections, held
under the complete control of the coup government, could produce a result
satisfactory to the U.S. The State Department kept negotiations alive among
a variety of parties (including Zelaya and Micheletti) until it was
effectively too late to have a meaningful democratic election. During
September and October, Micheletti suspended five basic constitutional rights
(including freedom of association, movement, speech, and personal liberty,
as well as habeas corpus). On October 30, a joke of an agreement was
announced by mediator and Costa Rican president Oscar Arias. Under this
agreement, Zelaya was to be reinstated, almost powerless, in the final weeks
before the election, which would remain under the control of the coup
government, and even this farce included its own poison pill: the
requirement that the Honduran Congress approve Zelayas temporary
reinstatement. Not surprisingly, the agreement was never realized, in part
because four days later, the U.S. said it would honor the coup governments
elections whether Zelaya was ever reinstated or not. So much for the
restoration of democracy in Honduras under Secretary Clinton.
What good is an election that doesnt confirm the power structure?
The November 27 sham election held under the control of a unity government
that included no constitutionally-legitimate members, was punctuated by
police violence and widespread media censorship. The winner was Porfirio
Lobo Sosa, another multi-millionaire agricultural oligarch, who had lost to
Zelaya in 2009. In an election boycotted by numerous candidates and with a
turnout 6% lower than 2005, Lobos won 56.6% of the vote. The result was
rejected by Spain and 11 Latin American countries, but widely accepted by
the U.S. and its allies and got a hypocritically glowing gloss from
Assistant Secretary Shannon in an email to Clinton aide Cheryl Mills that
falsely hyped the voter turnout:
The turnout (probably a record) and the clear rejection of the Liberal Party
shows our approach was the right one, and puts Brazil and others who would
not recognize the election in an impossible position. As we think about what
to say, I would strongly recommend that we not be shy. We should
congratulate the Honduran people, we should connect today's vote to the deep
democratic vocation of the Honduran people, and we should call on the
community of democratic nations (and especially those of the Americas) to
recognize, respect, and respond to this accomplishment of the Honduran
people
.
As president, Lobo presided over the further descent of Honduras (literally
the depths) into violence, chaos, and corruption. Political assassinations
now run to the hundreds as Honduras has achieved the highest murder rate in
the world. Lobo (and now his dubious successor) have nurtured a vicious but
U.S.-friendly government that has allowed its country to grow so violent
that Hondurans flee northward by the thousands, while those who stay behind
to resist are murdered by the hundreds. The environmental organization
Global Witness, which tracks assassinations of environmentalists worldwide,
found Honduras the most dangerous country per capita for environmental
activists.
Among Clintons foreign policy achievements, Honduras may or may not be more
disastrous than Libya. In Hard Choices, Clinton assessed Honduras this
way:
We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free
and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would
render the question of Zelaya moot.
In retrospect, the strategy failed to restore order, ensured no free and
fair elections, nor any legitimate election but it did effectively
legitimize a military coup undertaken in Americas interest (as in Haiti or
Egypt sorry, Madagascar).
Clintons record seems unknown only to Americans
In a healthy democracy, one might expect candidates for president to
challenge the one who actively supported a military coup that helped turn an
impoverished country into an expanding charnel house. In the United States
in 2016, the devastation produced by American foreign policy is an issue
only for those who see it as inadequate. In the home countries, American
depredation is not such a secret, least of all to those who resist it. In
2014, more than a year before her assassination, Berta Caceres named Clinton
as one of the perpetrators of Honduran suffering (translated):
Were coming out of a coup that we cant put behind us. We cant reverse it.
It just kept going. And after, there was the issue of the elections. The
same Hillary Clinton, in her book, Hard Choices, practically said what was
going to happen in Honduras. This demonstrates the meddling of North
Americans in our country. The return of the president, Mel Zelaya, became a
secondary issue. There were going to be elections in Honduras. And here,
she, Clinton, recognized that they didnt permit Mel Zelayas return to the
presidency. There were going to be elections. And the international
community officials, the government, the grand majority accepted this,
even though we warned this was going to be very dangerous and that it would
permit a barbarity, not only in Honduras but in the rest of the continent.
And weve been witnesses to this.[emphasis added]
Writing in The Nation, historian Greg Grandin amplified what Caceres meant
when she warned that Clinton policy was going to be very dangerous. Once
the sham election installed a U.S.-compliant government, Honduras adopted
Washington-sponsored terrorism and counterintelligence laws that
criminalized political protest. Clintons policy consolidated the power of
murderers, Grandin noted, and led to the murder of Caceres:
Well, thats just one horror. I mean, hundreds of peasant activists and
indigenous activists have been killed. Scores of gay rights activists have
been killed. I mean, its justits just a nightmare in Honduras. I mean
theres ways in which the coup regime basically threw up Honduras to
transnational pillage. And Berta Cáceres, in that interview, says what was
installed after the coup was something like a permanent counterinsurgency on
behalf of transnational capital. And that wasthat wouldnt have been
possible if it were not for Hillary Clintons normalization of that
election, or legitimacy.
Of course, it was also Obamas discreet blessing of a predator state that
keeps Honduras bleeding. Theres blood enough for his hands as well as
Clintons and all the apparatchiks at the White House and State Department
who enthusiastically helped this enduring crime against humanity go down.
And now there is another victim that we know about among the hundreds still
unknown. On March 15, another death squad (or perhaps the same one) shot a
man four times in the face in his home. He was a member of the same
indigenous peoples organization as Caceres (she is one of 14 members killed
so far). He was Nelson Noe Garcia Lainez, 39, father of five and a community
leader. His execution followed a violent government eviction of indigenous
people from their homes because they were protesting the megadam project
(Agua Zarca, funded in part by USAID) that would destroy their ancestral
land.
The Associated Press reported, with profound but apparently unintended
irony: The United States Embassy condemned the killing, saying that coming
so close to the murder of his colleague Berta Cáceres, his death is cause
for particular concern. So it would not be a cause for concern had it
happened later?
When Latino USA asked if Clinton is still proud of the hell she helped
routinize in Honduras, a Clinton spokesperson said criticism of Clintons
Honduras policy simply nonsense. Clinton is not known to have expressed
regret for any part of her Honduran activities, not even sending children
back to hell. Running an empire aint for sissies.
________________________________________
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Sec. Hillary Clinton. (Photo: Zimbio)
http://readersupportednews.org/http://readersupportednews.org/
Why Is Hillary OK With Honduran Death Squads?
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
18 March 16
Honduran assassination has deep American roots if not fingerprints
hen a Honduran death squad gunned down internationally-honored
environmental activist Berta Caceres, 44, a retired teacher and mother of
four, in her home on March 3, the media-filtered world as we know it took
note, briefly, expressed some regret, provided little context, and moved on.
The outcry from rest of the real world included demands from the UN, more
than 20 U.S. Congress members, and hundreds of NGOs for an independent
investigation of this political assassination [a 2014 letter from 108
congressmen to Secretary of State John Kerry calling for the U.S. to address
human rights abuses in Honduras had little impact]. Now, in response to a
similar request, the U.S. has sent FBI agents to help the Honduran
government, whose first action was to detain the only witness, Gustavo
Castro Soto, himself shot twice in the same attack (and still in Honduran
custody two weeks later).
What our media-shielded world mostly did not note is that Honduras is one of
the original banana republics, long open to corporate plunder under the
protection of the U.S. government. Nor was there much attention to
longstanding political corruption in Honduras with its elected puppet
government and major American military presence. Also omitted generally was
how Honduras has served as a main base of American military operations at
least since the Reagan administrations illegal and war-crime saturated war
against Nicaragua in the 1980s. Several hundred U.S.Marines are deployed in
Honduras with official missions to train Hondurans and fight the war on
drugs (similar to the missions of 3,500 Marines in Peru and others
elsewhere), consistent with U.S. military expansion in Central America
during President Obamas first term.
But how could any of this be relevant to the assassination of yet another
Honduran activist defending human rights, defending the rights of indigenous
people, defending the environment, or defending the Honduran majority
against military repression? None of the people currently running for
president have apparently thought it worth more than a passing comment at
most, not even Bernie Sanders, whose vision of an America run by
billionaires has long been a grotesque reality in oligarchical Honduras.
Pretty much irrelevantly, Sanders did take a glancing swipe at Clintons
relationship with Honduras (rated Mostly True by Politifact) during their
March 9 debate:
One of the great human tragedies of recent years is children came from
Honduras where there's more violence than in any place in this country, and
they came into this country
. And I said welcome these children into this
country. Secretary Clinton said, send them back. [This omits Clintons
lawyerly conditions for expatriation, but accurately characterizes her
bottom line: Send them back.]
So why are Honduran children fleeing in the first place?
Perhaps the most interesting contextual aspect of the Berta Caceres
assassination is that its an extension of American engagement in Honduras
and provides a lucid paradigm of foreign policy as Hillary Clinton practices
it.
On June 27, 2009, Honduras had a legitimately elected president, Manuel
Zelaya, himself a multi-millionaire oligarch, who was accused of instigating
a months-long power struggle over whether he could extend his term-limited
presidency by democratic but constitutionally-challenged, nonviolent means.
Zelaya denied this intent, saying he would leave office as scheduled in
January 2010. His opposition, including the Congress, attorney general, and
Supreme Court, were holding their own in June. Congress had begun to
consider impeachment. The stated issue was apparently not the real issue.
In the mid-1970s, Zelayas father had been convicted for taking part in the
massacre of at least 15 priests, students, and other protestors, killed by
Honduran military forces. Victims bodies were burned, castrated, and
otherwise mutilated. In 1980, Zelayas father was freed by an amnesty after
less than two years of a 20-year sentence. Zelaya, during his rise to the
presidency, was accused of embezzling all or part of a missing $40 million,
but he was not prosecuted. He won the presidency in 2005 with 45.6% of the
vote. Zelaya ran as a traditional Honduran conservative from the Liberal
Party and seemed at first to be no great threat to the Honduran sense of
order, control, and wealth distribution. The National Party accused the
Supreme Electoral Tribunal of gross errors and contested Zelayas 3.4%
margin of victory, only to concede the election ten days later.
Once in office, Zelaya started doing things that displeased the elites as
well as the United States. He led Honduras to join ALBA (the Bolivarian
Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), founded in 2004 by Venezuela and
Cuba to promote social, political, and economic integration of Latin
countries. Although the U.S. remained Hondurass main trading partner,
Zelaya pursued expanded trade with Oceania and Africa. His foreign policy
included improving relations with Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro. This
alienated Honduran business elites, as did his other initiatives, including:
education for all children, subsidies to small farmers, lower bank interest
rates, an 80% increase in the minimum wage, and numerous programs that
reduced poverty by 10% in Honduras (one of the worlds poorer countries with
a 62.8% poverty rate in 2014, substantially higher than when Zelaya was in
office). For three years, Honduran mass media, owned by just six families
(media concentration similar to the U.S.) provided little unbiased coverage,
leading Zelaya to invoke a little-used law to force the media to carry
government broadcasts.
U.S.-sanctioned military coup ended Honduran non-crisis
On June 28, 2009, Honduran military forces seized President Zelaya and took
him to a nearby U.S. military base. From there, Zelaya was sent into exile
in Costa Rica, setting off protests around the region and the world,
including a UN General Assembly resolutionon June 30, with Zelaya present at
the UN (in Washington, Obama officials refused to meet with him). The
resolution, agreed to by consensus, unanimously condemned the coup and
demanded immediate, unconditional restoration of democratically-elected
President Zelaya. The U.S., by choosing not to block the consensus, managed
to avoid voting for or against a resolution that condemned its own proxies
actions.
In October 2009, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued a statement
re-affirming the June resolution that condemns the coup détat in the
Republic of Honduras that has interrupted the democratic and constitutional
order and the legitimate exercise of power in Honduras.
At least part of the explanation for U.S. duplicity was made clear in an
email to Clinton from Tom Shannon, Assistant Secretary for Western
Hemisphere Affairs, saying that he planned on calling the new SouthCom
Commander to ensure a coordinated U.S. approach [since] we have big military
equities in Honduras through Joint Task Force Bravo at Soto Cano airbase.
Coincidentally or not, Shannon was in Honduras a week before the coup,
consulting with the military and civilian groups later involved in the coup.
Given the longstanding, close, bi-partisan ties between U.S. and Honduran
governments, especially their military establishments, it is all but
inconceivable that high-ranking officials in the Obama administration,
perhaps Obama himself, did not have at least some advance notice of (if not
involvement in planning) the coup. How else does the Honduran military take
a president at gunpoint and fly him to a U.S. military base only to be
welcomed with open arms?
The Obama administration has never offered a credible, principled
explanation for indirectly supporting and directly securing the Honduran
coup. Early on, President Obama gave appropriate lip service to opposing the
coup: We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya
remains the democratically elected president there. By avoiding calling the
transparent military coup a military coup, Obama avoided triggering an
American law that would have imposed significant sanctions against Honduras
and especially the Honduran military. Instead, the Obama administration
applied only token sanctions, did little to resist Republican support for
the coup government, maneuvered to take the issue out of public view, and
acted as if the Honduran governments investigation of itself was sufficient
response. The point person in this exercise in anti-democracy was Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton, who described her actions in her official
autobiography Hard Choices (now out in paperback with the Honduran section
scrubbed).
Hillary Clintons diplomacy whitewashed the military coup
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was excellently positioned to move
the question of the Honduran military coup out of the potentially
pro-democratic forum of the Organization of American States into more
sheltered talks that included both Zelaya and his appointed successor,
Roberto Micheletti Bain, who publicly offered to step down during the summer
of 2009 on the condition Zelaya would not return to power. During that same
period, Clinton received an email from Ann-Marie Slaughter, then director of
policy planning at the State Department, strongly urging her to take bold
action
find that [the] coup was a military coup under U.S. law, a
position the administration had refused to take for the prior six weeks.
Slaughters August 16 email added:
I got lots of signals last week that we are losing ground in Latin America
every day the Honduras crisis continues; high level people from both the
business and the NGO community say that even our friends are beginning to
think we are not really committed to the norm of constitutional democracy we
have worked so hard to build over the last 20 year [sic]. The current
stalemate favors the status quo; the de facto regime has every incentive to
run out the clock as long as they think we will have to accept any
post-election government. I urge you to think about taking bold action now
to breathe new life into the process and signal that regardless what happens
on the Hill, you and the president are serious.
No such seriousness was forthcoming from the administration. Clinton, with
no interference from Obama, played out the clock until bogus elections, held
under the complete control of the coup government, could produce a result
satisfactory to the U.S. The State Department kept negotiations alive among
a variety of parties (including Zelaya and Micheletti) until it was
effectively too late to have a meaningful democratic election. During
September and October, Micheletti suspended five basic constitutional rights
(including freedom of association, movement, speech, and personal liberty,
as well as habeas corpus). On October 30, a joke of an agreement was
announced by mediator and Costa Rican president Oscar Arias. Under this
agreement, Zelaya was to be reinstated, almost powerless, in the final weeks
before the election, which would remain under the control of the coup
government, and even this farce included its own poison pill: the
requirement that the Honduran Congress approve Zelayas temporary
reinstatement. Not surprisingly, the agreement was never realized, in part
because four days later, the U.S. said it would honor the coup governments
elections whether Zelaya was ever reinstated or not. So much for the
restoration of democracy in Honduras under Secretary Clinton.
What good is an election that doesnt confirm the power structure?
The November 27 sham election held under the control of a unity government
that included no constitutionally-legitimate members, was punctuated by
police violence and widespread media censorship. The winner was Porfirio
Lobo Sosa, another multi-millionaire agricultural oligarch, who had lost to
Zelaya in 2009. In an election boycotted by numerous candidates and with a
turnout 6% lower than 2005, Lobos won 56.6% of the vote. The result was
rejected by Spain and 11 Latin American countries, but widely accepted by
the U.S. and its allies and got a hypocritically glowing gloss from
Assistant Secretary Shannon in an email to Clinton aide Cheryl Mills that
falsely hyped the voter turnout:
The turnout (probably a record) and the clear rejection of the Liberal Party
shows our approach was the right one, and puts Brazil and others who would
not recognize the election in an impossible position. As we think about what
to say, I would strongly recommend that we not be shy. We should
congratulate the Honduran people, we should connect today's vote to the deep
democratic vocation of the Honduran people, and we should call on the
community of democratic nations (and especially those of the Americas) to
recognize, respect, and respond to this accomplishment of the Honduran
people
.
As president, Lobo presided over the further descent of Honduras (literally
the depths) into violence, chaos, and corruption. Political assassinations
now run to the hundreds as Honduras has achieved the highest murder rate in
the world. Lobo (and now his dubious successor) have nurtured a vicious but
U.S.-friendly government that has allowed its country to grow so violent
that Hondurans flee northward by the thousands, while those who stay behind
to resist are murdered by the hundreds. The environmental organization
Global Witness, which tracks assassinations of environmentalists worldwide,
found Honduras the most dangerous country per capita for environmental
activists.
Among Clintons foreign policy achievements, Honduras may or may not be more
disastrous than Libya. In Hard Choices, Clinton assessed Honduras this
way:
We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free
and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would
render the question of Zelaya moot.
In retrospect, the strategy failed to restore order, ensured no free and
fair elections, nor any legitimate election but it did effectively
legitimize a military coup undertaken in Americas interest (as in Haiti or
Egypt sorry, Madagascar).
Clintons record seems unknown only to Americans
In a healthy democracy, one might expect candidates for president to
challenge the one who actively supported a military coup that helped turn an
impoverished country into an expanding charnel house. In the United States
in 2016, the devastation produced by American foreign policy is an issue
only for those who see it as inadequate. In the home countries, American
depredation is not such a secret, least of all to those who resist it. In
2014, more than a year before her assassination, Berta Caceres named Clinton
as one of the perpetrators of Honduran suffering (translated):
Were coming out of a coup that we cant put behind us. We cant reverse it.
It just kept going. And after, there was the issue of the elections. The
same Hillary Clinton, in her book, Hard Choices, practically said what was
going to happen in Honduras. This demonstrates the meddling of North
Americans in our country. The return of the president, Mel Zelaya, became a
secondary issue. There were going to be elections in Honduras. And here,
she, Clinton, recognized that they didnt permit Mel Zelayas return to the
presidency. There were going to be elections. And the international
community officials, the government, the grand majority accepted this,
even though we warned this was going to be very dangerous and that it would
permit a barbarity, not only in Honduras but in the rest of the continent.
And weve been witnesses to this.[emphasis added]
Writing in The Nation, historian Greg Grandin amplified what Caceres meant
when she warned that Clinton policy was going to be very dangerous. Once
the sham election installed a U.S.-compliant government, Honduras adopted
Washington-sponsored terrorism and counterintelligence laws that
criminalized political protest. Clintons policy consolidated the power of
murderers, Grandin noted, and led to the murder of Caceres:
Well, thats just one horror. I mean, hundreds of peasant activists and
indigenous activists have been killed. Scores of gay rights activists have
been killed. I mean, its justits just a nightmare in Honduras. I mean
theres ways in which the coup regime basically threw up Honduras to
transnational pillage. And Berta Cáceres, in that interview, says what was
installed after the coup was something like a permanent counterinsurgency on
behalf of transnational capital. And that wasthat wouldnt have been
possible if it were not for Hillary Clintons normalization of that
election, or legitimacy.
Of course, it was also Obamas discreet blessing of a predator state that
keeps Honduras bleeding. Theres blood enough for his hands as well as
Clintons and all the apparatchiks at the White House and State Department
who enthusiastically helped this enduring crime against humanity go down.
And now there is another victim that we know about among the hundreds still
unknown. On March 15, another death squad (or perhaps the same one) shot a
man four times in the face in his home. He was a member of the same
indigenous peoples organization as Caceres (she is one of 14 members killed
so far). He was Nelson Noe Garcia Lainez, 39, father of five and a community
leader. His execution followed a violent government eviction of indigenous
people from their homes because they were protesting the megadam project
(Agua Zarca, funded in part by USAID) that would destroy their ancestral
land.
The Associated Press reported, with profound but apparently unintended
irony: The United States Embassy condemned the killing, saying that coming
so close to the murder of his colleague Berta Cáceres, his death is cause
for particular concern. So it would not be a cause for concern had it
happened later?
When Latino USA asked if Clinton is still proud of the hell she helped
routinize in Honduras, a Clinton spokesperson said criticism of Clintons
Honduras policy simply nonsense. Clinton is not known to have expressed
regret for any part of her Honduran activities, not even sending children
back to hell. Running an empire aint for sissies.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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