From Bolivia to Honduras ..Coups and Constitutions

[Joanne98]

By CLIFTON ROSS

Even in the best of times a coup in Honduras wouldn’t get much coverage in the U.S. since most North Americans couldn’t find the country on a map and, moreover, would have no reason to do so. Nevertheless, those in the U.S. who have been alert to the changes in Latin America over the past decade and almost everyone south of the border know that the coup d’etat (or “golpe de estado”) against President Manuel Zelaya has profound implications for the region and, in fact, all of Latin America. While the US press will glance from their intent gaze at reruns and specials on Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett only long enough to report on President Obama’s reaction to the coup, Latin Americans will keep their eyes on the governments of the region as well as the social movements in Honduras as they search for a key to how the whole affair will turn out.

In a power play between President Zelaya who maneuvered (some say illegally) to push a referendum on the constitution, and a congress that see their jobs possibly go on the line if there is a new constitution, the military played the decisive role and ousted Zelaya in the early hours of the morning on Sunday, June 28, 2009, preempting the national referendum. After producing a forged letter of resignation, supposedly from President Zelaya, president of the congress, Roberto Micheletti, was sworn in. From exile in Costa Rica, President Zelaya denounced the forgery and maintained that he continued to be the only legitimate president of Honduras. Meanwhile, back at Micheletti’s solemn swearing-in ceremony, the AP reported, “outside of Congress, a group of about 150 people opposed to Zelaya's ouster stood well back from police lines and shook their fists, chanting ‘Out with the bourgeoisie!’ and ‘Traitors!’”

Venezuelan-based Telesur, however, gave a distinctly different impression of the scene. It reported at least one hundred times that many people (“at least 15,000” -- there were other estimates of 20,000) were gathered in a strike and a leader of the Bloque Sindical Popular (Popular Union Block), Ángel Alvarado, was calling for a general strike the following day. On the evening after the coup, Micheletti’s government put the country under curfew enforced by the military which also enforced a ban on all news of the golpe. Meanwhile, regional leaders and members of ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) met in Nicaragua where Chávez recalled the similarities between what happened to him in Venezuela in April, 2002 and the events in Honduras. Chávez ended his tale calling on the “golpistas” (those who carried out the coup) to surrender, while Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa demanded that they be tried for treason.

If possibility for support for the “golpistas” looked slim in Latin America, things didn’t look better up north. Indeed, what was most striking about the coup, if the Wall Street Journal can be believed, is that it appears that the new administration of President Obama was opposed to the coup even in the planning stage. Paul Kiernan and Jose de Cordoba report in the Wall Street Journal that “the Obama administration and members of the Organization of American States had worked for weeks to try to avert any moves to overthrow President Zelaya.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated bluntly that “The action taken against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya violates the precepts of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, and thus should be condemned by all.”

For those hoping to see a new US policy in the region, this is indeed reason to be guardedly optimistic, even more so since Zelaya is a close ally to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. This will be among the first military coups in fifty-five years of coups throughout the continent that the U.S. wouldn’t have either perpetrated or backed after the fact -- the first one being the four-hour-long coup in Ecuador in January, 2000, carried out by center-leftists.

The Wall Street Journal article, however, offered a hardly credible reason for the coup: “Voicing the fears that sparked the military's action, retired Honduran Gen. Daniel López Carballo justified the move against the president, telling CNN en Español that Mr. Zelaya was a stooge for Mr. Chávez. He said that if the military hadn't acted, Mr. Chávez would eventually be running Honduras by proxy.”

While it’s true that the most reactionary forces in the region see sinister motives behind Chavez’s generosity and do all they can to demonize the Venezuelan leader, the more obvious reason for the coup was the fact that Zelaya had called a referendum on the constitution, an act which has drawn a similar response from reactionaries in other countries in Latin America. The problems are the same: progressive leaders enter power on a wave of popular support only to find their hands bound by constitutions written by their neoliberal predecessors of the 1990s under the tutelage of Washington. The new leaders then face the choice of playing by the very limited rules of the neoliberal constitution or writing up a new charter. Even the proposal of new rules enrages the local oligarchy which, of course, was behind the neoliberal constitution in the first place, and the opposition to constitutions aimed at democratizing power has grown with each successive process.

President Hugo Chavez was the first progressive president of the region to call for a referendum on a nation’s constitution after his election. The Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was written by thousands across the country and passed in popular referendum by nearly 72% of the people in a popular vote, establishing the “Fifth Republic.” Chavez then ran again for president, was re-elected with an even larger margin than before, and he now had the possibility of carrying out reforms that would have been impossible under the old, 1961 constitution of the Fourth Republic.

While the Venezuelan process was peaceful, when Rafael Correa came to power in Ecuador, his call for a constituent assembly to write the new constitution frightened the old congress, almost cost him his job and led to street battles and the cordoning off of the congress. Eventually that crisis passed, with Correa beating the old congress and a winning a new Constitution, the first in the world to guarantee the rights of Mother Earth and nature.

Continued>>>
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross06292009.html

See. All the constitutions in Latin America were wrote by neo-liberals from the US! They ALL have to be repealed.

READ THE SHOCK DOCTRINE

[Joanne98]

1. From the Shock Doctrine. Neo-liberalism..........

For years, there had been rumors that the international financial institutions had been dabbling in the art of "pseudo-crisis," as Williamson put it, in order to bend countries to their will, but it was difficult to prove. The most extensive testimony came from Davison Budhoo, an IMF staffer turned whistle-blower, who accused the organization of cooking the books in order to doom the economy of a poor but strong-willed country.

Budhoo was a Grenadian-born, London School of Economics-trained economist who stood out in Washington thanks to an unconventional approach to personal style: he let his hair stand on end, a la Albert Einstein, and preferred the windbreaker to the pinstripe suit. He had worked for the IMF for twelve years, where his job was designing structural adjustment programs for Africa, Latin America and his native Carribean. After the organization took its sharp right turn during the Reagan/Thatcher era, the independant-minded Budhoo felt increasingly ill at ease in his place of work. The fund was packed with zealous Chicago Boys under the leadership of its managing director, the staunch neoliberal Michel Camdessus. When Budhoo quit in 1988, he decided to devote himself to exposing the secrets of his former workplace. It began when he wrote a remarkable letter to Camdessus, adopting the j'accuse tone of Andre Gunder Frank's letters to Friedman a decade earlier.

Showing an enthusiasm for language rare for senior fund economists, the letter began: "Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after over twelve years, and after 1000 days of official Fund work in the field, hawking your medicine and your bag of tricks to governments and to peoples in Latin America and the Carribbean and in Africa. To me resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind's eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples....The blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up, too; it cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name."

He then went on to build his case. Budhoo accused the fund of using statistics as "lethal" weapons. He exhaustively documented how, as a fund employee in the mid-eighties, he was involved in elaborate "statistical malpractices" to exaggerate the numbers in IMF reports on oil-rich Trinidad and Tobago in order to make the country look far less stable than it actually was. Budhoo contended that the IMF had more than doubled a crucial statistic measuring the labor costs in the country, making it appear highly unproductive-even though, as he had said, the fund had the correct information on hand. In another instance, he claimed that the fund "invented, literally out of the blue," huge unpaid government debts.

Those "gross irregularities," Which Budhoo claims were deliberate and not mere "sloppy calculations," were taken as fact by the financial markets, which promptly classified Trinidad as a bad risk and cut off its financing. The country's economic problems-triggered by a drop in the price of oil, its primary export-quickly became calamitous, and it was forced to beg the IMF for a bailout. The fund then demanded that it accept what Budhoo described as the IMF's "deadliest medicine": layoffs, wage cuts and the "whole gamut" of structural adjustment policies. He described the process as "deliberate blocking of an economic lifeline to the country through subterfuge" in order to see "Trinidad and Tobago destroyed economically first, and converted thereafter."

In his letter, Budhoo, who died in 2001, made it clear that his dispute was over more than the treatment of one country by a handful of officials. He characterized the IMF's entire program of structural adjustment as a form of mass torture in which "'screaming-in-pain governments and peoples are forced to bend on their knees before us, broken and terrified and disintegrating, and begging for a sliver of reasonableness and decency on our part. But we laugh cruelly in their face, and the torture goes on unabated."

After the letter was published, the government of Trinidad commissioned two independent studies to investigate the allegations and found that they were correct: the IMF had inflated and fabricated numbers, with tremendously damaging results for the country.

Even with this substantiation, however, Budhoo's explosive allegations disappeared virtually without a trace; Trinidad and Tobago is a collection of tiny islands off the coast of Venezuela, and unless its people storm the headquarters of the IMF on Nineteenth st, its complaints are unlikely to capture world attention. The letter was, however, turned into a play in 1996 called Mr. Budhoo's Letter of Resignation from the IMF (fifty years is enough), put on in a small theater in New York's East Village. The production received a surprisingly positive review in The New York Times, which praised its "uncommon creativity" and "inventive props." The short theater review was the only time Budhoo's name was ever mentioned in The New York Times.

[bertman]

2. I hope Clifton Ross is correct in his statement that the tide seems to be turning away

from intervention by the "imperial eagle from the north". It's way past time.

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