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as political prisoners, a couple of them dead, months of martial law, suspension of all Constitutional civil rights and shutdown of all opposition or objective media, and the people of Honduras in a state of fear, for the elections in November. Zelaya was term limited out, so he wont' be able to run, and his proposal for an advisory referendum on whether people want fundamental change in Honduras (a Constituent Assembly to discuss, re-write and hold a vote of the people on a new Constitution) got taken off the table by the junta. So these will be ideal conditions in which to prevent any new leftist (pro-labor, pro-social justice, pro-reform) candidates from mounting a successful campaign for president or other offices, and in which to suppress leftist votes through intimidation, lies and propaganda, and/or outright election theft. In other words, their objective may not have been so much to rid themselves of a reformer president by force--a president with only six months left to his term--but rather to stay in power by fixing the election.
International election monitors may be present, but they really can't stop a determined junta from stealing an election; they can only report on it afterwards. And this junta has shown that it cares not a wit for the opinion of the entire world. They hold all the levers of power and suppression; they will elect themselves and declare it legit--while the Associated Pukes, Rotters and the whole gang backpage any election monitors' reports that say otherwise. Generally, election monitors won't touch a situation like this; they require months and sometimes years of involvement with the government and electoral authorities, in setting up election rules, so they know WHAT they are monitoring. They can't just drop into a country, at the last minute, and insure a fair election. It will be interesting to see if any of them--the OAS, the Carter Center, the EU election groups, etc.--agree to monitor the election. This is the kind of situation that Jimmy Carter does get involved in (civil war, need for outside election monitors). It's why he set up the Carter Center. It is first of all a means of achieving peace in a divided country, where violence threatens or has already occurred. The Carter Center is very good at this sort of thing. But one of their rules is that all parties agree to their involvement in pre-election planning. And if I am right about this junta--that their goal is stealing the election--they may not agree to that, and they may just steal the election anyway and kiss off the post-election reports.
The coup's stance that they will not let Zelaya finish his term may be a ruse. They may know that ultimately they will have to yield on that point. And every day they delay, they entrench themselves further and have more time to plan election fraud. Zelaya's return will complicate that goal. He will most certainly fight for an honest election--or as honest a one as possible. In the position of president, he can probably do a lot toward that end. So delaying his return as long as possible may also be related to the coming elections. He will have less time to champion leftist candidates for president and other offices, but, more importantly, less time to insure a clean election (to negotiate with election monitoring groups--who need to be invited to the country by the government--to prevent voter intimidation, to get political activists released from prison, to restore media freedom, etc.).
The motives of the entities behind the coup--hidden hands like those of John McCain, Otto Reich and John Negroponte, and Rumsfeld moles in the Pentagon--may be much bigger than keeping a corrupt "free trade" government in power. The Pentagon and associated war profiteers want to keep the US military base in Honduras and control of the Honduran military. McCain*, et al, probably want to sabotage Obama's stated policy of peace, respect and cooperation in Latin America--to embarrass Obama, and to create a rightwing "talking point" that he is "soft on communism" or whatever--as part of a planned stolen election in 2012 (which we are extremely vulnerable to with rightwing corporations controlling our vote counts with 'TRADE SECRET' code in all the voting machines). And there may well be a plan for Oil War II behind all this. Honduras has a long history of being used as a "lily pad" country for US aggression in Latin America. And there is considerable evidence that the Bushwhacks intend to regain global corporate predator control of the oil in Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and other countries.
They of course all want to stem the leftist democracy tide in Central America. (All three of Honduras' immediate neighbors now have leftist governments--Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala.) The Bushwhacks have tried to do so in South America, and have colossally failed. (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile--all with leftist democratic governments.) Real democracy is a huge obstacle to global corporate predator goals of resource exploitation and enslavement and looting of the poor. And our government has become largely a tool of these predators. (That's why they took over our voting system.) They've hijacked our military for their corporate resource in Iraq, but failed to extend that resource war to Iran, so where else are their major oil reserves to be stolen by war or other means? Right here in our own hemisphere, controlled democratically by the people of Venezuela, Ecuador and other Latin American countries. And this is essentially indefended oil (visa vis the US military). When the Bushwhacks reconstituted the US 4th Fleet in the Caribbean, Lula da Silva said that it is a threat to Brazil's oil. Everybody south of the border knows that it is a threat to Venezuela, whose main oil reserves are located on its Caribbean coast. Not even Brazil feels safe. And it was Brazil that proposed a "common defense" in the context of the new South American "common market"--UNASUR--which everyone agreed to. Brazil. Not Venezuela.
It was in this context that Zelaya was ousted at gunpoint, by a military that is under the thumb of the Pentagon, and that Obama's stated goals of peace, respect and cooperation in Latin America are hanging by a thread. I do think Obama wants Zelaya to be reinstated, and maybe Clinton does, too. But that isn't the whole story, by any means. What will be the state of Honduran democracy, even if he is restored to his elected position (for the four or five months remaining in his term)? Can the coming elections be fair? Who will insure their fairness? And will Honduras--a country with an extremely poor population, lashed by "free trade"--continue to be just a stepping stone for US warmongers in the region?
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*(McCain has been funneling $40+ million US taxpayer money to the rightwing groups in Honduras, through the USAID/International Republican Institute, as Evo Gollinger's FOIA research has shown. He has a direct interest in Honduras, as a shill for the telecommunications industry. He is a major player in this situation, and is thick with fascist coup plotters all over Latin America.)
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