Honduras is "open for business"

[Judi Lynn]

Honduras is "open for business"
Posted by Thomas Kavanagh - 08 May 2011 10:17
The US-backed Honduran government seeks to attract investment.


Dignitaries from 55 countries descended on Tegucigalpa this week as the Honduran capital played host to the government's "Honduras is open for business" forum. The event is intended to tempt foreign investors back to a country still racked by political instability following the bloodless coup d'état that toppled president Manuel Zelaya two years ago.

Zelaya was seized by the military after the country's Supreme Court issued a detention order, ostensibly to block him from holding a referendum which sought to extend the maximum number of terms a president can serve.

This, however, was a smokescreen. Zelaya had long attracted the ire of the Honduran business community and powerful corporate media, having increased the minimum wage by 60 per cent and channelled money into social welfare programmes in the Americas' second poorest country.

Foreign capital has fled Honduras since the coup, with a 46 per cent decline in investment in the wake of the turmoil that followed Zelaya's deposal. The military declared martial law, broke up rallies held by groups loyal to the ousted leader and arrested a litany of political dissidents prior to the election of current president, Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo, in November 2009.

More:
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/05/honduras-government-zelaya

[Peace Patriot]

1. Keerist! The referendum said no such thing!

This is absolutely false:

"Zelaya was seized by the military after the country's Supreme Court issued a detention order, ostensibly to block him from holding a referendum which sought to extend the maximum number of terms a president can serve." --from the OP

--

Here is the entire text of the referendum, which was proposed by the labor unions and backed by Zelaya:

"Do you agree that, during the general elections of November 2009 there should be a fourth ballot to decide whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political constitution?"

http://www.borev.net/2009/06/national_news_outlets_bring_th.html

This is ALL that it said--and it was an ADVISORY vote of the people--no force of law. If passed, it would have gone to the legislature to consider and implement. It was a GENERAL question--do you want to discuss the ENTIRE constitution (written by Reagan's henchmen in the Middle Ages...er...the 1980s, which Oscar Arias has described as "the worst constitution in the world") in nation-wide assemblies and re-write it?

The LIE that this referendum had anything to do with term limits was invented in a Washington P.R. firm and has been promulgated throughout the corpo-fascist press TO THIS DAY. It is one of the most successful bits of disinformation ever perpetrated.

"New Statesman" writer Thomas Kavanagh slightly redeems himself in paragraph 3, when he says that this was a "smokescreen" for a coup d'etat against the elected president. But damnation, this ignorance of what the referendum actually said is a bad mark on "New Statesman" journalism. They are not alone, however. It is pervasive!

----

Falsehood no. 2: "...following the bloodless coup d'état...".

The coup was NOT "bloodless." But only "little people" were murdered--teachers, labor organizers, anti-coup protestors, journalists--people that apparently the "New Statesman" doesn't think important enough to mention. HUNDREDS of such murders have occurred by shadowy rightwing death squads--one teacher shot to death right in front of his students--and no perpetrators have been caught--more than likely because the coupsters were importing rightwing death squads from another country--Colombia?--and shunting them out of the country once the dirty deeds were accomplished. Furthermore, thousands have been imprisoned, raped, beaten, tortured, fired from their jobs and threatened.

I'm beginning to think of this writer as an asshole. Why should "business" even be a headline topic, with all the UNFINISHED BUSINESS of the wreckage of Honduras' democracy yet to be corrected--including these murders, a U.S.-rigged election, the brutal suppression of dissent and the desperate need for reform of Honduras' constitution and its fascist political structure?

[Judi Lynn]

2. So right! They keep driving home their lie about the referendum, knowing their supporters

won't bother to research for the real information, and will simply parrot what they've written about it. They protect themselves by claiming anything which doesn't support what they're saying is a lie, so ignore it!

The "bloodless" coup made me sick, as it did you. Outrageous, dirty deceit. Ask the people of Honduras how "bloodless" it has been.

It was great to see BoRev again. Surely miss it.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Yup, I'm still mourning BoRev, too! What a delight that web site was! nt

[joshcryer]

4. Your entire post is wrong, the only reason to have a "new political constitution" is to change...

...the only unchangeable part of the constitution. You know it, I know it, we all know it. Pretending otherwise is just patently dishonest. The Honduran constitution has undergone changes for the past decade, every election cycle something has changed. The entire thing is up to referendum except for term limits.

[Peace Patriot]

5. Read. The. Referendum.

President Zelaya would have been long out of office before this NON-BINDING referendum got implemented, if it ever did. It was proposed by the labor unions and other grass roots groups to bring about political reform of Honduras' rancid political system, set up by the Reaganites (death squad purveyors) to favor the "School of the Americas"-trained military and the "ten families" who run Honduras. It had nothing to do with Zelaya's or anybody else's term limits. And all it did is CALL FOR A VOTE. Do you want to vote on whether or not to have a Constituent Assembly? WHY SHOULDN'T PEOPLE VOTE ON THIS?

WHY SHOULDN'T PEOPLE VOTE ON whether or not to vote on what Oscar Arias called "the worst constitution in the world"?

WHY SHOULDN'T THE PEOPLE OF THE COUNTRY write their own constitution?

Thomas Jefferson said that we should discuss, write and vote on a new constitution every 20 years*! There is nothing sacred about any constitution or any provision of any constitution. It is all based on consent. If the people don't consent to it, then they write ANOTHER constitution. It is their RIGHT.

And a constitution written by rightwingers in Washington DC, which gives untoward power to a military that is funded by Washington DC, most certainly needs to be reconsidered by the people.

But, really, the most telling thing about this NON-BINDING VOTE OF THE PEOPLE that Zelaya proposed is that the MILITARY disobeyed the president of the country and refused to deploy the ballots, the president fired the general who disobeyed him and the military then shot up his house, dragged him out of bed at gunpoint, put him on a plane that stopped at the U.S. military base in Soto Cano, Honduras, for refueling, and forced him out of the country--violating a SPECIFIC provision of the constitution that the rightwing oligarchs claimed to be devoted to, that FORBIDS the exile of ANY citizen of Honduras--let alone the elected president of the country!

They spit on their own constitution! And they were LYING from the get-go!

THEN they started leaving the beheaded bodies of anti-coup protestors on the side of the road and shooting teachers in front of their students--and jailing, raping, beating, torturing and killing others.

Your snotty little rightwing "talking point"--'oh, we all know what the referendum was REALLY all about'--is no doubt the drunken chit-chat in the country club bars around the new U.S. military base in Honduras these days. But it won't wash here. We know what the referendum SAID. We know where it CAME FROM (the labor unions). We know what its PURPOSE was (political reform). And we know that the MILITARY forbade the people of Honduras to vote on whether they wanted to vote on discussing a new constitution!

The MILITARY!

-------------------------


*(Jefferson also strongly opposed a term limit on the president as UN-democratic, as did most of the other Founders. They did NOT put a term limit on the president into the U.S. Constitution. That is why FDR could run for and win FOUR terms in office. The term limit on the U.S. president was rammed through Congress in the mid-1950s to prevent a "New Deal" from ever happening here again, and to begin to dismantle the one we had, which they have very nearly accomplished. It was never put to a vote of the people.

(And, guess what, we now have a country run by the military and its war profiteers for the benefit of the rich and transglobal corporations. And it's interesting that General Eisenhower was the one who, in his last speech in office, warned us against this and coined the phrase "the military-industrial complex" to describe it. He had been stripped of his right to run for office again, to do anything about it, once he understood it, and, before we knew it, the next president, who opposed the Joint Chiefs on nuking Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis and who had pledged to "break the CIA into a thousands pieces" was shot dead in Dallas, with elaborate misdirection to Russia! The president is the only power that stands between the people and military rule, whether overt or semi-overt, in countries with standing armies. Look around the world right now! THREE U.S. wars--all of them MIC/corporate resource wars! Tell me that the "MIC" and the CIA don't rule this country. Eisenhower was right! And if he'd been able to run for a third term, maybe he would have been shot, too, or maybe he would have been able to do something about it, where JFK could not. Why shouldn't the people have that choice? Thomas Jefferson and our other Founders thought that we should.)

(If you ever want to stop spouting rightwing "talking points" and get educated, you might start with "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters," by James Douglass. You want to understand what happens to a country where the military has too much power--that's the book.)

[rabs]

6. Not a minor point

"Dignitaries from 55 countries descended on Tegucigalpa ..."

-----------------------------

The forum was held in San Pedro Sula, NOT Tegucigalpa.

With the first seven words of the article, there was no point in reading the rest.

(Edit to delete that reporter is in Sao Paulo. Got him mixed up with another one. But it does not excuse the fact that he was in gross error about where the forum was held.)