US Contribution to Death of Honduran Activist Goes Unmentioned in US Coverage

[newthinking]

US Contribution to Death of Honduran Activist Goes Unmentioned in US Coverage
By Adam Johnson
Fairness and Accuracy in reporting

http://fair.org/home/us-contribution-to-death-of-honduran-activist-goes-unmentioned-in-us-coverage/


This photo of Honduran environmental activist Berta Caceres accompanied The Nation‘s expose of the US role in her death. (image: Goldman Environmental Prize)

Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres was shot and killed in her home in La Esperanza, Intibuca, Wednesday. While the killers’ ID remains unknown, activists, media observers and the Cáceres family pointed to the increasingly reactionary and violent Honduran government, which has frequently clashed with Cáceres over her high-profile activism against land dispossession and mining, and her defense of indigenous rights.

There was widespread outcry and grief over her death, and the story was covered by major media in the United States. But there was a glaring problem with the coverage: Almost none of it mentioned that the brutal regime that likely killed Cáceres came to power in a 2009 coup d’etat supported by the United States, under President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

As Greg Grandin at The Nation explains:

Cáceres was a vocal and brave indigenous leader, an opponent of the 2009 Honduran coup that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of State, made possible. In The Nation, Dana Frank and I covered that coup as it unfolded. Later, as Clinton’s emails were released, others, such as Robert Naiman, Mark Weisbrot and Alex Main, revealed the central role she played in undercutting Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president, and undercutting the opposition movement demanding his restoration. In so doing, Clinton allied with the worst sectors of Honduran society.

Continued:
http://fair.org/home/us-contribution-to-death-of-honduran-activist-goes-unmentioned-in-us-coverage/

[deathrind]

1. Sad...

She was a very courageous lady. Given the history of the region and the history of activists in the region...

Can't say the same for HRC...

[Zorro]

2. More anti-US, anti-Hillary agitprop

"...2009 coup d’etat supported by the United States..." and "...2009 Honduran coup that Hillary Clinton...made possible."

What a load of unadulterated horseshit.

[newthinking]

5. Now FAIR (Liberal Media watchdog) goes under the bus?

By the way, The Nation (an extremely accredited progressive investigative Journalism org) has a story about this as well.

Democracy Now also discussed this FACT Friday.

[newthinking]

6.  The Nation: The Clinton-Backed Honduran Regime Is Picking Off Indigenous Leaders

 The Clinton-Backed Honduran Regime Is Picking Off Indigenous Leaders

The names of Berta Cáceres’s murderers are yet unknown.
But we know who killed her.

http://www.thenation.com/article/the-clinton-backed-honduran-regime-is-picking-off-indigenous-leaders/

illary Clinton will be good for women. Ask Berta Cáceres. But you can’t. She’s dead. Gunned down yesterday, March 2, at midnight, in her hometown of La Esperanza, Intibuca, in Honduras.


Cáceres was a vocal and brave indigenous leader, an opponent of the 2009 Honduran coup that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, made possible. In The Nation, Dana Frank and I covered that coup as it unfolded. Later, as Clinton’s emails were released, others, such as Robert Naiman, Mark Weisbrot, and Alex Main, revealed the central role she played in undercutting Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president, and undercutting the opposition movement demanding his restoration. In so doing, Clinton allied with the worst sectors of Honduran society.

Despite the fact that he was a rural patriarch, Zelaya as president was remarkably supportive of “intersectionality” (that is, a left politics not reducible to class or political economy): He tried to make the morning-after pill legal. (After Zelaya’s ouster, Honduras’s coup congress—the one legitimated by Hillary Clinton—passed an “absolute ban on emergency contraception,” criminalizing “the sale, distribution, and use of the ‘morning-after pill’—imposing punishment for offenders equal to that of obtaining or performing an abortion, which in Honduras is completely restricted.”) He supported gay and transgender rights. (Read this. Among the first to be murdered was Vicky Hernandez Castillo, a transgendered activist in San Pedro Sula. Hernandez left her home on the night of the coup, apparently unaware that the new government had decreed a curfew. She was found dead the next morning, shot in the eye and strangled; Sentidog, an LGBT monitoring group, writes that 168 LGBT people were killed in Honduras between the coup and 2014.) Zelaya apologized for a policy of “social cleansing”—that is, the murder and disappearance of street children and gang members—executed by his predecessors. And he backed rural peasant and indigenous movements, such as the one Cáceres led, in the fight against land dispossession, mining, and biofuels. Zelaya, as president, was by no means perfect. But he was slowly trying to use the power of the state on behalf of the best people in Honduras, including Berta Cáceres.


Since Zelaya’s ouster, there’s been an all-out assault on these decent people—torture, murder, militarization of the countryside, repressive laws, such as the absolute ban on the morning-after pill, the rise of paramilitary security forces, and the wholesale deliverance of the country’s land and resources to transnational pillagers. That’s not to mention libertarian fantasies, promoted by billionaires such as PayPal’s Peter Thiel and Milton Friedman’s grandson (can’t make this shit up), of turning the country into some kind of Year-Zero stateless utopia. (Watch this excellent documentary by Jesse Freeston on La Resistencia: The Fight for the Aguán Valley.)

http://www.thenation.com/article/the-clinton-backed-honduran-regime-is-picking-off-indigenous-leaders/

[Judi Lynn]

3. Thank you, newthinking. Many of us have been thinking about this since 2009. n/t

[Mika]

7. And the pro coup anti Zelaya posters call the story agitprop.

And our ever faithful coporomedia talks about the GOP being a split party.

[Solly Mack]

4. K&R