The Honduran Coup’s Ugly Aftermath

[Judi Lynn]

The Honduran Coup’s Ugly Aftermath

August 19, 2015

Exclusive: As Secretary of State in 2009, Hillary Clinton helped a right-wing coup in Honduras remove an elected left-of-center president, setting back the cause of democracy and enabling corrupt and drug-tainted forces to tighten their grip on the poverty-stricken country, as Jonathan Marshall explains.

By Jonathan Marshall


Imelda Marcos will forever be remembered for her hoard of 3,000 pairs of shoes, an ostentatious symbol of the billions of dollars in spoils she amassed as First Lady of the Philippines. Now shoes are again emerging as a symbol of corruption, this time in Honduras, where prosecutors are investigating allegations that a former first lady improperly purchased, or never distributed, 42,100 pairs of shoes for the poor, at a cost to the state of $348,000.

The allegations are just the latest to surface in a wide-ranging corruption investigation that has reenergized grass-roots politics and triggered a nationwide protest movement in Central America’s original “banana republic.”

Every Friday evening for the past three months, thousands of protesters have marched through the streets of Tegucigalpa and smaller cities, carrying torches and signs reading “The corrupt have ripped apart my country” and “Enough is enough.”

The protesters, who call themselves the oposición indignada (the outraged opposition), demand that President Juan Orlando Hernández be held accountable for fraud and graft, which allegedly bled the national health service of more than $200 million to enrich senior officials and finance the 2013 election.

More:
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/08/19/the-honduran-coups-ugly-aftermath/

[PatrickforO]

1. So...in 2009 we helped a right wing group in a coup against a left-leaning president in Honduras.

We've certainly been to THIS rodeo before. The left wing guy was probably a socialist and when the oligarchs in Honduras acted in concert we probably supported the coup because we saw it as being in the best interests of business. Profit over people at home. Profit over people in foreign policy.

[roody]

2. Yes.

[Zorro]

5. No.

[roody]

6. No. They did not stop to refuel

at the U.S. military facility.

[Zorro]

8. No. They did not stop to refuel

at a U.S. military facility. They stopped to refuel at a Honduran military base where the U.S. shares the runway. Not the same thing as the U.S. "helping" a "right wing coup".

At that time there was a lot of caterwauling in the LatAm group because the U.S. did not actively intervene in Honduran internal affairs -- caterwauling by the same motormouths who also demand the U.S. NOT interfere in the internal affairs of Latin American countries.

[Judi Lynn]

9. Soto Cano/Palmerola, hot topic between the US/Zelaya. The US won, of course,

thanks to the convenient coup at just the right moment:


July 22, 2009
Zelaya, Negroponte and the Controversy at Soto Cano

The Coup and the U.S. Airbase in Honduras

by NIKOLAS KOZLOFF

The mainstream media has once again dropped the ball on a key aspect of the ongoing story in Honduras: the U.S. airbase at Soto Cano, also known as Palmerola. Prior to the recent military coup d’etat President Manuel Zelaya declared that he would turn the base into a civilian airport, a move opposed by the former U.S. ambassador. What’s more Zelaya intended to carry out his project with Venezuelan financing.

For years prior to the coup the Honduran authorities had discussed the possibility of converting Palmerola into a civilian facility. Officials fretted that Toncontín, Tegucigalpa’s international airport, was too small and incapable of handling large commercial aircraft. An aging facility dating to 1948, Toncontín has a short runway and primitive navigation equipment. The facility is surrounded by hills which makes it one of the world’s more dangerous international airports.

Palmerola by contrast has the best runway in the country at 8,850 feet long and 165 feet wide. The airport was built more recently in the mid-1980s at a reported cost of $30 million and was used by the United States for supplying the Contras during America’s proxy war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua as well as conducting counter-insurgency operations in El Salvador. At the height of the Contra war the U.S. had more than 5,000 soldiers stationed at Palmerola. Known as the Contras’ “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” the base housed Green Berets as well as CIA operatives advising the Nicaraguan rebels.

More recently there have been some 500-to-600 U.S. troops on hand at the facility which serves as a Honduran air force base as well as a flight-training center. With the exit of U.S. bases from Panama in 1999, Palmerola became one of the few usable airfields available to the U.S. on Latin American soil. The base is located approximately 30 miles north of the capital Tegucigalpa.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/07/22/the-coup-and-the-u-s-airbase-in-honduras/

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The Latin America mistake

Memo to Secretary Kerry: Stop funding the bad guys in Honduras.

February 12, 2013|By Dana Frank

The United States is expanding its military presence in Honduras on a spectacular scale. The Associated Press reported this month in an investigative article that Washington in 2011 authorized $1.3 billion for U.S. military electronics in Honduras. This is happening while the post-coup regime of Honduran President Porfirio Lobo is more out of control than ever, especially since the Honduran Congress staged a "technical coup" in December.

But as the Obama administration deepens its partnership with Honduras, ostensibly to fight the drug war, Democrats in Congress are increasingly rebelling. Here's a message, then, for new Secretary of State John Kerry: Recast U.S. policy in Honduras and the murderous drug war that justifies it.

In the last few years, the U.S. has been ramping up its military operations throughout Latin America in what the Associated Press called "the most expensive initiative in Latin America since the Cold War." The buildup has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $20 billion since 2002, for troops, ships, clandestine bases, radar, military and police training and other expenses.

U.S. military expenditures for Honduras in particular have gone up every year since 2009, when a military coup deposed democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. At $67.4 million, 2012 Defense Department contracts for Honduras are triple those of 10 years ago. The U.S. spent $25 million last year to make the U.S. barracks at the Soto Cano air base permanent, and $89 million to keep 600 U.S. troops based there. U.S. direct aid to the Honduran military and police continues to climb as well.

More:
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/12/opinion/la-oe-frank-honduras-drug-war-20130212

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A Tale of Two Elections: Iran and Hondura

Michael Corcoran

. . .

The near monolithic consistency with which U.S. media outlets heralded the “peaceful” and “fair” election dramatically conflicts with the many reports of voter intimidation, violent repression, and the large boycott of opponents of the coup who did not even run a candidate. Amnesty International released several reports of voter intimidation and other such problems.10 The vast majority of foreign governments, as well as virtually every election-monitoring agency in the world, refused to accept the results of the election.11 Video footage plainly showing state violence against protesters demanding the return of their democratically elected leader were circulated widely on the Internet.12

“Since Zelaya was overthrown by the military in June, 4,000 [Hondurans] have been arrested, hundreds beaten and hospitalised and dozens charged with sedition,” noted Calvin Tucker in the U.K. Guardian. “Yet more have been kidnapped, raped, tortured, ‘disappeared’ and assassinated.”13 Those relying solely on U.S. mainstream media outlets, however, would likely have no idea how brazenly corrupt the election was.

Further, media outlets like Bloomberg reported the Honduran Supreme Electoral Tribunal’s grossly exaggerated turnout numbers of about 61%. The correct number, it would later be revealed, would turn out to be below 50%.14 But by the time the truth came out, these false numbers had already been used to justify recognition of the sham elections by some nations, including the United States. The “turnout appears to have exceeded that of the last presidential election,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement. “This shows that given the opportunity to express themselves, the Honduran people have viewed the election as an important part of the solution to the political crisis in their country.”15

Few media outlets provided any of the crucial context for understanding the coup and its aftermath. Few noted that the Honduran military that carried out the coup is funded and trained by the United States. Nor did many outlets report that during the coup, the plane carrying the kidnapped Zelaya—still in his pajamas—landed and refueled at Soto Cano, a military base shared by the United States and Honduras.16 While the media did report on the occasional condemnations of the coup made by U.S. leaders, it downplayed the U.S. decisions to treat the coup authorities as legitimate political actors, to continue providing them with the flow of substantial aid, and to refuse to use its significant diplomatic muscle to assure Zelaya’s return to power.17 Moreover, according to a report by the Institute for Southern Studies, General Romeo Vásquez, a leader of the Honduran armed forces and a political opponent of Zelaya, was trained at the School of the Americas (now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation)—the Georgia-based military school well-known for training Latin American authorities who have been charged with various human rights abuses.18 But despite these clear connections between the United States and the coup government, the media continued to report as if the United States were not enabling it and its many abuses.

https://nacla.org/article/tale-two-elections-iran-and-honduras

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June 11, 2012 Issue

Honduras: Which Side Is the US On?

In the name of fighting drugs, the Obama administration has allied itself with a corrupt coup regime.

By

Dana Frank

. . .

 What’s driving the administration’s aggressive policy? The United States has long regarded Honduras, its most captive client state in Latin America, as strategically important. As in the 1980s, when Honduras served as the US base for the contra war against Nicaragua, the country is the regional hub for US military operations in Central America. It received more than $50 million in Pentagon contracts last year, including $24 million to make the barracks at the Soto Cano Air Base permanent for the first time since 1954. Soto Cano has great strategic significance as the only US air base between the United States and South America. Sixty-two percent of all Defense Department funds for Central America in 2011 went to Honduras.

More:
http://www.thenation.com/article/honduras-which-side-us/

[Bacchus4.0]

10. the new airport is being constructed within the palmerola airbase nt

[yurbud]

4. and will the then Secretary of State act any differently if he has a new title?

[roody]

7. she

[yurbud]

12. she

[Judi Lynn]

3. Regarding drug corruption, filthy elections, from the article:

The coup represented a disastrous step backward for Honduran society as well as its politics. University of California historian Dana Frank observed that “A vicious drug culture already existed before the coup, along with gangs and corrupt officials. But the thoroughgoing criminality of the coup regime opened the door for it to flourish on an unprecedented scale.

“Drug trafficking is now embedded in the state itself . . . all the way up to the very top of the government . . . A former congressman and police commissioner in charge of drug investigations declared that one out of every ten members of Congress is a drug trafficker and that he had evidence proving “major national and political figures” were involved in drug trafficking. He was assassinated on December 7 [2011].”

Yet the Obama administration has continued giving tens of millions of dollars in aid to Honduran police and military in the name of fighting drugs.

Such crime and corruption have rendered millions of Hondurans destitute and desperate. Two-thirds of its people now live below the national poverty level and Honduras’s soaring homicide rate leads the world at nearly one per thousand people each year. These conditions, in turn, fueled a horrifying surge in child migration to the United States.

Seeking to reform conditions in Honduras, Zelaya’s wife ran for president in 2013 on a social democratic platform, but the ruling National Party allegedly stopped her campaign with the help of tens of millions of dollars embezzled from the Honduran Social Security Institute, the national health fund.

“It is widely assumed that Hernández owes his electoral victory in part to these stolen funds,” said Frank. (President Hernández denied knowing the source of the ill-gotten funds and said they amounted to a mere $1.5 million. The prosecutor assigned to the case had to flee the country in the face of death threats.)

So sad.

Hope Hondurans simply take this as a learning experience, not a defeat.

If you recall, the prosecuting attorney for the government in Venezuela, was bombed in his car when he was investigating the oligarchs who were involved in the coup there in 2002. There is an unmistakable pattern.

Regarding Danilo Anderson's assassination, from Wikipedia:

. . .

On 25 July 2004, from his exile in Miami, former President Carlos Andrés Pérez declared "Violence will allow us to remove him. That's the only way we have... [Chavez] must die like a dog, because he deserves it"[5] to the Venezuelan daily El Nacional. On October 25, 2004, famous Venezuelan TV actor and former military friend of Chávez, Orlando Urdaneta, hinted his support of the assassination of Chávez on Miami television.[6] Cuban exile groups in Florida had expressed that they would support anti-communist groups in Venezuela.[6]

Assassination[edit]

On 18 November 2004 at about 9:45 pm, Anderson was in Urbanización Los Chaguaramos in Caracas, driving home in his yellow Toyota Autana from the University Institute of Forensic Science where he was taking postgraduate classes. Anderson stopped at a street and as he accelerated, a military-grade C-4 plastic explosive device placed on the frame under the driver's seat detonated from a wireless device killing Anderson instantly. The blast had such force that it broke windows in the vicinity and covered the street with glass. Witnesses say they heard two loud explosions and saw the vehicle, already in flames, roll into the front of a nearby building. Firefighters and CICPC investigators arrived at the scene shortly after the explosion. Anderson's body was charred an unrecognizable and he had to be identified by his fingerprints and dental records. Anderson's sister and girlfriend also helped identify him as the victim by recognizing personal belongings such as his Glock automatic pistol, two cell phones, his girlfriend's photo, his wallet and a chain.[1][4][6]

Within a few hours, many government officials had gathered at the scene and Attorney General Isaias Rodriguez began to mention Anderson's involvement in the investigation of those who signed the Carmona Decree. The Venezuelan government and opposition, multiple national organizations and international bodies such as the OAS and the IACHR condemned the assassination.[1][6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Danilo_Anderson

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