As
Secretary of State in 2009, Hilary Clinton assisted in the right-wing military
coup in Honduras remove an elected left-of-center president creating a hell-hole of the nation...
Original
title of article: ‘The Honduran Coup’s Ugly Aftermath’
By
Jonathan Marshall
in
Consortiumnews.com
August 19, 2015
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.
“This is a really historic time in
Central America,” said an analyst for the International Crisis
Group. “The question is whether this will really turn into a critical juncture
in which society, civil organizations, the private sector and political parties
can . . . come together in making the best out of this opportunity [to begin]
cleaning up our state institutions.”
Although President Hernández has
promised to prosecute the guilty, he has so far refused to follow Guatemala’s
example and appoint an independent investigative body under United Nations
supervision to attack government corruption. Revelations in Guatemala of customs fraud,
political bribery and money laundering have prompted similar weekly protest
marches in that nation’s capital and the resignation of the vice president.
The Obama administration has expressed
sympathy for anti-corruption movements in Central America, but has yet to
acknowledge its failure to protect democracy in Honduras against a military
coup in 2009, which set the stage for that country’s current crisis.
Bowing to pressure from conservative
Republicans in Congress, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to condemn
the ouster of leftist President Manuel Zelaya in 2009. By her own admission,
she began plotting within days to prevent him from returning
to office.
Her recently released emails show that she sought
help from a pro-coup lobbyist for Honduran business interests to establish
communications with the new military-backed president. She also approved the
continuation of U.S. aid to the illegitimate new regime, blocked demands by the
Organization of American States for Zelaya’s return, and accepted subsequent presidential elections
that were condemned by most international observers as unfair and marred by
violent intimidation.
In 2011, President Obama officially
welcomed Honduras’s dubious new president to the White House and praised his “strong commitment to democracy.”
(His wife is the target of the shoe purchase investigation noted above.)
A year later, two leading human rights
organizations reported that more than 100 political killings
had occurred since the coup, accompanied by “death threats against activists,
lawyers, journalists, trade unionists, and campesinos, as well as
attempted killings, torture, sexual violence, arbitrary arrests and
detentions.”
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.)
Hernández also came under fire for
staging the removal of Supreme Court justices to ram through a law creating autonomous investor zones, independent of normal
governance, and overseen by foreign libertarians such as Grover Norquist and
Ronald Reagan’s son Michael.
The good news is that the grassroots
protests in Honduras are having some effect on the Hernández government. It
accepted an outside mediator, appointed by the Organization of American States,
to bring together rival parties, along with members of the oposición
indignada, to find common ground on a national program of reform.
On Aug. 14, the mediator heard from 50
civil society organizations which identified corruption and political impunity
as the major challenges facing the Honduran state and its democratic
aspirations. The OAS mediator, who praised the initial round of dialogue, plans
to meet next with representatives of the country’s political parties.
Talk is cheap, to be sure. But the
official involvement of the OAS, along with increasing interest in Congress in using U.S.
aid to support justice in Honduras, offer hope that the demands of the Honduran
people will be heard. It may be too soon to declare a Central American Spring,
but that traumatized region at least has reason for hope.
Jonathan Marshall is an independent researcher living in San Anselmo,
California. Some of his previous articles for Consortiumnews were “Risky Blowback from Russian Sanctions”; “Neocons Want Regime Change in Iran”; “The Saudis’ Hurt Feelings”; “Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Bluster”; “The US Hand in the Syrian Mess”; “Hidden Origins of Syria’s Civil War”; and “Escalating the Anti-Iran Propaganda.”]
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