[en] Americas Policy Program: ‘The Criminal Right and the Obama Ultimatum’

Jul 13, 2009

The Criminal Right and the Obama Ultimatum

see video online @ http://americasmexico.blogspot.com/2009/07/criminal-right-in-honduras-and-obama.html

This is a video of an anti-Zelaya rally taken just days after the military coup in Honduras and shown on the the coup-run national television channel. It is typical of constant broadcasts from the coup-controlled press that seek to pound into the heads of Hondurans and the world the 1984-ish messages that run along the bottom of the screen in Spanish: “Our government is recognized by all Hondurans,” “On to the elections next November!” “We are under a legally constituted government,” “Substitution is in our legal norms,” “Hondurans on the side of the Constitution,” “Honduras has gained democracy.”

Never mind that no Constitution in the civilized world, including Honduras’, condones Armed Forces kidnapping a democratically elected president. Or that no country would recognize elections staged by a military coup. Or that the majority of Hondurans disagree with the forced exile of Zelaya and hundreds of thousands have hit the street calling for his return. The messages here are standard practice when attempting to justify the unjustifiable.

But this montage of doublespeak begins with an interesting twist. Initiating the rally, the speaker says, “We are not alone. I want to recognize a brave man by the name of Robert Carmona.” The crowd, which would be deemed a “mob” by the mainstream press if it were against the coup, cheers wildly.

So who is Robert Carmona?

The man with the anglicized name who has become a hero to the Honduran coup is actually a Venezuelan businessman and lawyer and a veteran of rightwing coups. Carmona is credited with writing the decrees for the short-lived coup d’etat against President Hugo Chavez in April of 2002. The Apr 26, 2002 Miami Herald reports that after that claim to fame he arrived in the US the week of the 15th, where he sought asylum.

Carmona is co-founder of the Arcadia Foundation. The Arcadia Foundation bills itself as an anti-corruption group but its political agenda is up-front. Although it says it works in many countries, the media section lists only Honduras in specific actions.

The foundation launched a campaign in Honduras focused on the telecommunications company Hondutel. In the video Carmona is recognized as “the first to denounce the maneuvers of Hondutel” and thanked for leading to the coup’s arrest, the day before, of former head of Hondutel, Marcelo Chimirri. Chimirri is among more than 1,000 people arrested by the regime since the June 28 coup. The campaign was aimed at weakening and ultimately bringing down the Zelaya government and the hat-tip at the rally explicitly revealed its role in the overthrow.

Honduras was finishing up an investigation of Chimirri, charged with accepting kickbacks for re-routing calls through a U.S. private carrier. The Justice Department fined the carrier, LatiNode, in the case.

In the end, armed force proved a faster route than the slow wheels of justice. Regardless of the merits of the case, the politicized nature of Arcadia’s anti-corruption offensive was clear from the start. Carmona, along with Otto Reich, charged President Zelaya of complicity. The issue grew so hot that Zelaya threatened to file a defamation claim against Reich.

Otto Reich is another name that has come up repeatedly since the Honduran coup as the man behind the scenes. Although Arcadia has denied a formal affiliation, Reich was intimately involved in Arcadia’s anti-corruption charges against the Zelaya government. Honduran government officials note that he was formally featured on the Arcadia site up until Sep 10, 2008 when he was erased from the web page. Reich is infamous for his involvement in the illegal Iran-Contra affair. A 1987 report by the U.S. Comptroller-General, “found that some of the efforts of Mr. Reich’s public diplomacy office were ‘prohibited, covert propaganda activities,’ ‘beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities….’”

Under fire, Reich felt compelled to pen a guest column in the Miami Herald entitled “I Did Not Orchestrate Coup in Honduras.” He spends the entire first half of this article attacking Venezuelan ambassador Roy Chadderton who denounced Reich’s involvement in the OAS. He then goes on to say that he would have allowed legal processes to take their course.

Reich does not mention, or deny, his involvement with the Arcadia campaign or say anything about his activities in Honduras. He concludes, “Without my involvement, these steps (the legal charges issued after the coup) were taken. Therefore, under Honduran law, the new government is legal and constitutional. The United States should not betray our values by joining the efforts of some of the most repressive and undemocratic leaders of this hemisphere to seek the reinstatement of lawbreaker Mel Zelaya.”

Reich thus contradicts his own title, which calls the events a “coup,” and in passing accuses the entire 34-nation Organization of American States that have called for Zelaya’s reinstatement “some of the most repressive and undemocratic leaders of this hemisphere.”

Carmona and Arcadia’s involvement in Honduras did not stop with the coup. Honduran Radio Globo reports that Carmona returned to Honduras after the coup. Luis Galdames, who hosts the radio program Detras de la Noticia, located him at the downtown Plaza Libertador Hotel in Tegucigalpa under a false name. He reportedly was in attendance at the above rally.

Why did Arcadia choose Honduras? A brief review of Carmona’s recent writings reveals his abhorrence of progressive governments in Latin America and his broad political agenda to defeat them. Most recently he published a piece against the Feb 2009 referendum to lift term limits, saying “The regime (of Hugo Chavez) is desperate, faced with its eventual defeat next Feb 15. Venezuelans no longer believe in the revolutionary farce, in the equality it professes, in Chavez’s participatory democracy. Only its beneficiaries and collaborators, some who scarcely believe in it themselves, accompany this destructive project in Venezuela.” The referendum passed easily with 54% of the vote.

Carmona also campaigned heavily against the election of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, comparing him to Chavez and calling him a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

This string of failures in popular elections no doubt soured Carmona on the popular will. After exhorting, “The utter failure of populist regimes in the region dangerously opens up a new stage in the political history of the region. Let us hope that the people react in a more civilized manner than their political leaders and find a path that guarantees peace and stability in new societies”, it has been the people who have continued to vote for candidates and measures calling for more equitable distribution of wealth and participatory measures like the constitutional referendum proposed in Honduras.

I attempted to reach Arcadia to find out its position on the Honduran coup and ask about the Reich connection and the recent activities of Carmona. The Washington and Mexico City offices answered with a cheery recording on the foundation’s fight against corruption but then routed the call to voice mail with no human intervention. The New York office recording replied that it does not receive anonymous callers.

The Weakest Lamb in the Flock

Arcadia picked Honduras to block the spread of “populism” by pushing for the fall of Zelaya. It picked Honduras because of its failures in other countries and because Honduras is a small, poor nation with a somewhat erratic president with a low approval rating and weak institutions. In other words, the international right picked Honduras because it was the weakest lamb in the flock.

The coup has consistently portrayed Zelaya as a tool of Hugo Chavez—you see more anti-Chavez signs than anti-Zelaya signs in the video. Coup leaders have developed a message that hides the aspirations of the Honduran poor (70% of the population) for a more fair and equal society. The desperate move to block the vote-on-a-vote over a constitutional assembly reflected their deep suspicion that it would win.

Honduras is a land of deep contradictions where an oligarchy has attempted to destroy logic through the force of repetition. Logic and basic human rights dictate that something has to give in the economic model. No society would be considered viable for long where the top 10% of the population earns 42% of the income, the free-zone wage is 63 cents an hour and more than 10% of its population has been forced to migrate to the United States. A population forced to live under those conditions cannot be called free. Whether or not you agree with what Zelaya did or how he did it, his overwhelming support among poor people demonstrates that he was attempting to take steps toward increasing their wellbeing.

That invariably comes at the price of the haves vs. the have-nots. And that’s why Honduras has become a battleground for the international right—to preserve the privileges of the haves. Today the critical battle on that battlefield is to defeat the coup in the name of law and democracy; it bears repeating–a military coup cannot be tolerated in our Hemisphere or anywhere else on the planet.

But the coup would not exist if it weren’t for the battle against entrenched interests and for greater equality.

The U.S. Must Choose Sides

Ironically, as coup supporters scream “Whoever doesn’t wave the flag is Venezuelan” at their rallies (did Carmona wave his flag, or not?), they have received significant outside help from the Venezuelan and U.S. right and other well-funded and organized rightwing organizations that will emerge as we continue to investigate the roots of the coup.

Despite the involvement of former U.S. diplomat Otto Reich, if the international campaign against the elected government of Zelaya were entirely run and carried out by private organizations like Arcadia, there would be little room for citizens to pressure the U.S. government. The revolving door that permits former diplomats like Reich to use contacts and inside information to carry out political agendas after leaving office, is an established and regrettable pillar of U.S. politics.

But unfortunately, efforts to topple the Honduran government do not end with Arcadia and raise questions about the involvement of U.S. government agencies. These are the opaque “democracy promotion” programs, in particular the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that in turn channels funds to other government-affiliated and non-government organizations in Honduras and the U.S.

According to NED reports the International Republican Institute (IRI) received $550,000 “To promote and enhance the participation of think tanks in Mexico and Honduras as ‘pressure groups’ to impel political parties to develop concrete positions on key issues. Once these positions are developed, IRI will support initiatives to implement said positions into the 2009 campaigns. IRI will place special emphasis on Honduras, which has scheduled presidential and parliamentary elections in November 2009.”

Under another NED grant, IRI received another $400,000 to “equip elected officials with practical institutional management skills” in Honduras, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

Obviously these “positions on key issues” are not politically neutral and represent U.S. interests, and yet the IRI does not specify to taxpayers what they are or whose U.S. interests they represent. Nor does it specify the criteria for selection of elected local officials within the country. Many of the groups who have reportedly received these funds now form part of the coalition supporting the coup. Similar programs were found to favor local governments rising up against the government of Evo Morales in Bolivia.

What little we know of these programs does not prove by itself U.S. government instigation of the coup. But in terms of self-determination and democracy, they constitute a reprehensible form of intervention, as well as being notoriously secretive with public funds.

It is no coincidence that Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen, strongly anti-Castro and ranking Republican on the house Foreign Affairs Committee, proposed an amendment to cut funding to the OAS for “its knee-jerk support of Manuel Zelaya” and transfer the $15 million to NED. The ideological bent of the institution is demonstrable and virtually undisputed.

The indigenous organization OFRANEH made these links in a recent communiqué:

“If a total economic blockade is not established against the de facto government, the polarization of the country will continue, promoted by the existing disinformation and the clamor of groups close to the most feudal sectors of the country. From the churches to the business groups to the shrunken middle class, the effects of the work of NED and the USAID can be felt in the country. For the OFRANEH, it is urgent that the Obama administration stop the work of intelligence agencies dedicated to destabilization and disinformation since they seek to create conflict between groups supporting the coup and the defenders of democracy. The government of the United States will be directly responsible for any bloodshed.”

The U.S. government, including the Obama administration, has said it does not agree with Zelaya’s policies. The Bush administration sought to isolate and undermine ALBA countries and center-left governments throughout its tenure. At stake was not so much an economic model in the abstract but the powerful interests of transnational corporations and national elites.

In Russia, Obama made a strong statement on the Honduran coup saying that self-determination is a principle that should be defended regardless of political differences. The U.S. government took strong steps early on to join with the international community to condemn the coup and call for the reinstatement of Zelaya. That hasn’t worked. The attempt to pass the matter on to mediation has not worked either.

President Zelaya has issued an ultimatum saying he will consider the talks failed unless he is reinstated in the next meeting. The Obama administration also faces an ultimatum, this one from the international community and Hondurans putting their lives on the line in an attempt to restore their democracy: be consistent in upholding principles above shady interests or the attempt to build a new, respectful foreign policy will be considered hypocrisy.

In the short term this means:
1. Issuing the definition of the coup as a coup and suspending remaining aid as stipulated by law;
2. Removing Ambassador Hugo Llorens. In the strict sense, the Bush-era ambassador should not merely be withdrawn in line with the withdrawal of other ambassadors to the country but should be fired. At best, he was inept in avoiding the coup; at worst, he didn’t really try.
3. Assuring the safe and immediate return of President Zelaya.

In the longer term, a public review of “democracy promotion” programs like NED and IRI forms part of the urgent need to coordinate a new consistent foreign policy in the region that will demonstrate the primacy of diplomacy and the principles of non-intervention and self-determination.

Posted by Laura Carlsen at 8:49 AM

[es] OFRANEH: 190 años después: Doctrina Monroe versus el Congreso Anfictiónico de Panamá

[OFRANEH en pie de lucha. 4 de julio del 2009. foto: Sandra Cuffe]

190 años después: Doctrina Monroe versus el Congreso Anfictiónico de Panamá

En el año de 1823, Estados Unidos emitió la Doctrina Monroe: “America para los Americanos”, la cual fue elaborada por John Quincy Adams y atribuida a James Monroe. La doctrina supuestamente era dirigida a las potencias europeas, y señalaba como los Estados Unidos no toleraría la intromisión de potencia alguna en el continente.

Sin embargo para los Estados Unidos y precisamente para Monroe, existía la singular experiencia de la Isla de Amelia, en la Florida, donde 150 patriotas venezolanos la ocuparon en 1817, bajo el comando de Gregor Macgregor, siendo la fuerza bolivariana posteriormente desalojada por las tropas de Monroe, las que de paso aprovecharon para apoderarse de la Florida, la cual hasta esa fecha se encontraba bajo el dominio español.

Simón Bolívar en su visionaria Carta de Jamaica (1815), señalaba el ominoso papel que jugaría en un futuro los Estados Unidos y sus intenciones colonialistas. En el 1826 convocó al Congreso Anfictiónico de Panamá, para crear un bloque de naciones latinoamericanas que pudieran responder como tal a las agresiones imperialistas.  Expresamente ordenó no invitar a los Estados Unidos al Congreso, sin embargo con la traición enraizada que padecemos en América Latina, Francisco de Paula Santander procedió a invitar al país del norte.

Ya para 1840, los Estados Unidos procedieron apoderarse de la tercer parte de Mexico, invocando la infausta política  Monroe, la que llegó a su apogeo en los albores del siglo XX, cuando Theodore Roosevelt puso en práctica su famosa frase “Hay que hablar tranquilamente a la vez que se sostiene un gran garrote”, la cual conllevó a la apropiación de Panamá  y la implementación de la política de las cañoneras a lo largo de América Latina.

Ciertamente uno de los capítulos más tristes de nuestra historia, es la invasión a Honduras que parte de un Burdel en Nueva Orleans y tres meses después los conspiradores se encontraban en la casa presidencial en Tegucigalpa. Sam Zemurray (banana man) financió a Manuel Bonilla y su ejercito de mercenarios gringos para apoderarse de Honduras y así proceder a implementar un modelo de estado manejado por una multinacional frutera. Hoy en día se puede considerar a Sam Zemurra y su cipayo Manuel Bonilla como los padres del modelo de república bananera que persiste hasta la fecha.

El modelo colonialista impuesto por los Estados Unidos a lo largo del Siglo XX, encontró su tropiezo con el arribo al poder del geoestratega  Hugo Chávez y su visión Bolivariana. A partir de 1998 comienza la creación de un bloque antihegemónico, por intermedio de la Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América, conocida como el ALBA, y el que ha logrado con cierto éxito frenar los tratados de libre comercio impuestos por la administraciones de los expresidentes Clinton y Bush, poniendo en jaque la iniciativa estadounidense  del Área de libre Comercio de las Américas (ALCA)

El Alba en su esencia no es más que la visión de la unión de los pueblos de América Latina para responder a las agresiones económicas, políticas y militares provenientes del norte, tal como lo planteó Simón Bolívar en su visión del Congreso Anfictiónico de Panamá.

Por supuesto que los Estados Unidos viene haciendo todo lo posible por desarticular el movimiento social latinoamericano y su respuesta de visiones hegemónicas que han incrementado  el abismo entre las clases sociales y incrementado la pobreza de los más desfavorecidos.

El nefasto golpe del 28 de junio pasado en nuestro país, no es más que una respuesta del imperio a los procesos de descolonización promovidos en América Latina. No obstante el trabajo de desinformación y promoción de grupos afines a la reducida elite dominante, promovido por la National Endowment for Democracy (NED) y la USAID, fueron incapaces de prever la respuesta de la gran mayoría de los desposeídos del país que hasta la fecha  permanecen en pie de lucha, refutando la visión impartida por los medios de comunicación – muchos de ellos autocensurados –  promotores del golpe de estado.

La polarización de clases y el socavamiento del estado de derecho por intermedio de una Corte Suprema de Justicia y un Ministerio Público sin verguenza, que se han comportado afines a las políticas intervencionistas del imperio,  y se han convertido en cómplices de la destrucción  de la democracia.

El experimento político militar que se esta efectuando en Honduras, no es más que una receta elaborada por los neoconservadores estadounidenses para diluir cualquier intento de frenar la Doctrina Monroe e implementar la visión bolivariana del Congreso de Panamá. Honduras ha sido escogido como el campo de batalla  entre la visión hegemónica y la independentista.

Mientras tanto, el gobierno de facto ha demostrado una vez más su actitud sumisa al imperio: muestra de ello es la presencia de Bennett Ratcliff y un interprete en las negociaciones de San José, auspiciadas por Hillary Clinton y el presidente Arias, donde los delegados del golpista Miceheletti, consultaba los pasos a seguir con el funcionario norteamericano. Estas son señales innegables del sometimiento absoluto de los golpistas a las indicaciones de la administración Clinton_Obama.

Pero la señal más clara del gobierno de facto es la inclusión del torturador Billy Joya como ministro asesor de Micheleti. Esa escogencia  es una señal macabra para un pueblo que fue sometido durante años a una guerra psicológica por parte de los secuestradores  del poder, que durante décadas han mantenido a los hondureños sometidos y pretenden a través del miedo repetirlo en una ocasión más.

A pesar de todos las estratagemas de dominación de parte del imperio y la agresión hacia el el pueblo hondureño, la resistencia continúa. Para la OFRANEH la restitución del orden institucional no consiste únicamente en el retorno del presidente Manuel Zelaya. Los objetivos de la lucha van más allá. Los pueblos Indígenas y Negros exigimos cambios constitucionales que nos visibilicen y garanticen el reconocimiento de nuestros derechos, y sobre todo que tengamos la certeza de la existencia de una democracia participativa, donde el pueblo soberano tome sus propias decisiones y dejemos ser caricaturas al servicio de los intereses foráneos.

A los casi dos siglos de la Doctrina Monroe y del Congreso Anfitiónico de Panamá, los pueblos de América Latina luchamos por nuestra verdadera independencia y el derecho a la no injerencia. Es hora que la administración Clinton-Obama reconsidere su política intervencionista y proceda a una relación de respeto hacia América Latina

La Ceiba 16 de Julio del 2009.

Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña, OFRANEH

OFRANEH
Organizacion Fraternal Negra Hondureña
Calle 19, #130.
La Ceiba, Atlantida,
Honduras
telefax: 504-4420618
email:garifuna@ofraneh.org/ ofraneh@yahoo.com

[es] Rebelion: Se filtra carta que demuestra que Micheletti presionó a las Fuerzas Armadas para ejecutar el golpe

LibreRed

El actual Presidente de facto de Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, emitió una carta dos días antes del golpe de estado a Romeo Vázquez Velázquez, jefe de las Fuerzas Armadas, recordándole la “misión a realizar el 28 de junio”.

Más adelante, en la misma carta, habla de que los “hondureños que quieren cambiar nuestra constitución no merecen estar en este país”.

En la carta que está fechada el día 26 de junio, dos días antes del golpe de estado, se puede ver el sello del Congreso Nacional y la firma del actual Presidente.

La carta enviada desde el congreso por Roberto Micheletti no es el único documento que se les ha filtrado a los golpistas. También llegó a nuestra redacción un documento de la Cámara de Comercio e Industria de Tegucigalpa fechada el viernes 26 de junio del 2009 y firmada por su presidenta Aline Flores, donde pide colaboración económica a los empresarios para llevar a cabo la que según ellos es “una estrategia comunicacional y cívica”. Las colaboraciones económica están separadas por categorías y van desde los 1,000.00  hasta los 3,000.00 dólares.

Micheletti, que hasta hace unos días decía que no existía marcha atrás en el golpe de estado, a día de hoy rebaja sus exigencias y abre la puerta a su posible abandono del poder siempre y cuando no regrese Manuel Zelaya a la Presidencia.

A continuación adjuntamos las cartas,

http://www.librered.net/wordpress/?p=5148

[en] WW4 Report: Otto Reich Behind Coup in Honduras?

[published on July 5th @ http://ww4report.com/node/7541%5D

The Cuban newspaper Periodico 26 July 3 notes claims by the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH) of the “undeniable involvement” of former US under-secretary of state Otto Reich and the DC-based Arcadia Foundation in the coup d’etat in the Central American country. The account says OFRANEH accuses Reich of “heading misinformation and sabotage operations, with close ties to international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles and the Cuban-American mafia in Miami.” The account also names an anti-Zelaya civil coalition, the Movimiento Paz y Democracia, which was apparently funded by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The website Solidarity with the People(s) of Honduras runs the complete text (in Spanish) of the OFRANEH statement. We translate the critical passages:

The mobilizations in support of the de facto government are being organized by, among others, Sra. María Martha Díaz Velázquez, who directs the supposed civic organization known as the Peace and Democracy Movement (MPD), which has for several months been acting as a pressure group against the administration of Manuel Zelaya… The same Sunday the 28th [as the coup], the Peace and Democracy Movement convened a demonstration in Tegucigalpa’s Plaza Morazán, accompanied by the Civil Democratic Union, a group made up of the country’s ultra-conservative business associations…

The ambiguous position assumed by the government of Barack Obama is clear indication of the participation of the United States in the coup perpetrated last Sunday. The Obama administration has condemned the coup in timid terms, but has taken no concrete actions. The press declarations from the White House call the coup illegal, but avoid declaring the events a coup d’etat, which would mandate an immediate suspension of economic aid from the United States.

According to the Obama administration, it is trying to “reinstate” Zelaya, and he insists on disassociating himself from the impertinent rumors of his country’s involvement in the recent events. According to the White House press statements, the United States Embassy made efforts to avoid the coup, serving as a mediator between the golpista army and Manuel Zelaya.

[But it] is undeniable that there exists direct interference on the part of organizations of the extreme right in the United States, such as the Arcadia Foundation, in which meddles Otto Reich, the notorious personality in charge of disinformation and sabotage operations, not far from Posada Carriles and his Cuban terrorists entrusted with dirty tricks by the CIA. Supposedly, one of the primary objectives of the Arcadia Foundation is the struggle against corruption, and under this pretense it has maintained a low-intensity war against the Zelaya administration since 2006.

Then there are the large sums of money received by the Peace and Democracy Movement through US AID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), institutions recognized as financiers of coups and processes of destabilization across the planet…

For OFRANEH, it is clear that the Obama administration could halt the efforts of the intelligence organisms dedicated to destabilization and disinformation, and which seek to create a confrontation between groups allied with the golpistas and the defenders of democracy. It is the United States government that will be directly responsible for any bloodshed.

The Arcadia Foundation website does indeed identify the non-profit as an anti-corruption watchdog, which also promotes “good governance and democratic institutions.” Otto Reich’s name does not appear in any obvious place on the website. However, one of the two names on the site’s Founders page is Robert Carmona-Borjas, identified as “a Venezuelan lawyer and an expert in military affairs, national security, corruption and governance. In Venezuela, concerned with the issue of governability, the defense of human rights, democracy and the fight against corruption, he became an activist, disregarding the risks that such a stance implied. Following the events of April 2002, he was forced to abandon his country and seek political asylum in the United States of America.”

The Honduran newspapers El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa) and La Prensa (San Pedro Sula) noted June 11 that Carmona-Borjas had brought legal charges against Zelaya and other figures in his administration for defying a court ruling that barred preparations for the constitutional referendum scheduled for the day Zelaya would be ousted. A YouTube video dated July 3 shows footage from Honduras’ Channel 8 TV of Carmona-Borjas addressing an anti-Zelaya rally in Tegucigalpa’s Plaza la Democracia to enthusiastic applause. In his comments, he accuses Zelaya of collaboration with narco-traffickers.

Reich’s name did pop up in the media in relation to Honduras earlier this year, when he publicly accused the Zelaya administration of corruption after the Latin Node digital telephone company (which had since been acquired by eLandia) was fined $2 million by US authorities for allegedly bribing officials in Honduras and Yemen. “President Zelaya has allowed or encouraged this kind of practices [sic] and we will see that he is also behind this,” said Reich. (Miami Herald, April 9) After an outcry in Honduras, Reich said he was prepared to make a sworn statement on the affair before Honduran law enforcement—but said he would not travel to Honduras to do so, because his personal security would be at risk there. (HonduDiario, April 25)

The US government recently filed criminal perjury charges against Luis Posada Carriles, although he remains at large and his trial has been postponed until next year. (AP, June 11) Federal prosecutors are moving to suppress documents his lawyers are seeking detailing Posada’s “long-term association with US government intelligence and law enforcement agencies.” (AP, June 12)

See our last post on Honduras.

[en] Honduras: US-backed mediation legitimizes military coup

Bill Van Auken | Global Research
http://www.observatoriocrisis.org/readarticle_EN.php?article_id=92

The talks convened in the Costa Rican capital San José on Thursday with the purported aim of resolving the political crisis unleashed by the June 28 coup in neighboring Honduras, are shaping up as a farce. The apparent object of this fraudulent exercise is to legitimize the military overthrow of the elected president of Honduras and realize the aims of Washington and the predominant sections of the right-wing Honduran oligarchy.

Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who last month was seized by troops, bundled onto an airplane and flown to San José and exile, returned to the Costa Rican capital Wednesday and was the first to hold talks the next day with the US-designated mediator, Costa Rican President Óscar Arias.

He was followed by Roberto Micheletti, head of the government installed by the coup, whom Costa Rican authorities referred to as the “acting president,” a description that disconcerted Zelaya and his supporters, who have denounced the former head of the parliament as a criminal who illegally usurped power.

Before the talks, Arias stressed that he would treat both men equally as presidents.

Each met separately with Arias at the Costa Rican president’s mansion in the wealthy San José neighborhood of Rohrmoser, which was surrounded by police and hundreds of demonstrators, who came to denounce the coup, shouting “assassin” at Micheletti and burning him in effigy.

After meeting with Arias, Zelaya told reporters waiting outside, “We believe we have been in accord with the position of Honduras: the restoration of the state of law and democracy. The restoration, as the UN and the OAS have demanded, to office of the president elected by the Honduran people.”

Micheletti followed Zelaya into Arias’s residence shortly afterwards. Before coming into the city, he had spent three hours at the airport, apparently concerned for his security. According to some reports, he had asked Arias to meet him there in order to avoid demonstrators.

For his part, Micheletti, declared himself “satisfied” with Arias’s mediation, and then immediately flew back to Honduras. His departure upended Arias’s vow to keep the two men negotiating until a settlement was reached. Instead, Micheletti announced that he was leaving behind a “commission” of Honduran political figures who supported the coup. Zelaya then formed a commission of his own supporters to participate in negotiations.

After returning to the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa, Micheletti told reporters, “We are in agreement with his (Zelaya’s) return here, but directly to the judges.” The coup leaders are demanding that Zelaya be tried for treason for attempting to hold a non-binding plebiscite to determine popular support for amending the country’s constitution. Critics have charged that this was part of an attempt by Zelaya to win another term in office, a virtual impossibility given that the vote for a constituent assembly to redraft the constitution would not be held until national elections on November 29, when a new president is to be chosen.

Micheletti added, “I anticipate that on my next visit to Costa Rica the brotherly people of that beautiful country will receive me as my own people do today, as the constitutional president of Honduras.”

The coup leader has reason to exude such confidence. The entire mediation process is stacked in favor of those who overthrew Zelaya. Backed by the army, the Church and the predominant sections of the landowning and business sectors, the only thing Micheletti has to fear are the masses of Honduran working people, who have been at the center of resistance to the coup.

For his part, Arias reacted to the first encounter with Zelaya and Micheletti by declaring, “We have no illusions, this may take longer than what we imagined.” He added, “In two days there could be a solution, or it could be that in two months there is no solution.”

Given that elections are to be held in barely four-and-a-half months, Micheletti and his fellow coup leaders can run the mediation sessions out until the end of Zelaya’s term.

Arias has insisted that any solution must include the restoration of Zelaya to office. His sponsor, the Obama administration, has taken an ambiguous position on this score, with Obama calling for him to be reinstated and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, pointedly refusing to make such a call. A State Department spokesman said that Washington hopes the Arias mediation “restores the democratic order in Honduras.” He made no mention of the elected president.

A former Costa Rican official with some insight into the mission that Arias has accepted from Washington suggested another alternative: that Zelaya would be brought back to Tegucigalpa to serve briefly as a powerless figurehead president of the regime installed by the coup. The obvious aim of such a solution would be to lend a democratic cover to a US-backed military overthrow of an elected government.

Kevin Casas-Zamora, who was vice president under Arias until two years ago and is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, spelled out this scenario in an interview Thursday with the Council on Foreign Relations. “My sense of what the international community is demanding, and what is correct, is first of all that Zelaya should return to the presidency, though not necessarily to power,” said Casas.

In addition to abandoning any real power, Zelaya, Casas said, would be required to scrap any plans to amend the constitution (something he has already pledged to do), sever the ties he has established with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and enter into an explicit “power-sharing agreement” with those who overthrew him.
The Times and the Post on Honduran “democracy”

That this is the alternative favored by the US political establishment was made clear in similar editorials that appeared this week in the Washington Post and New York Times, both characterized by political cynicism and hypocrisy.

The only problem that the Post had with the Honduran coup was that the manner of its execution “played into the hands of the faction, led by Mr. Zelaya’s mentor, Hugo Chavez, that is attempting to overthrow democratic institutions across the region.” In other words, those trying to overthrow democracy were not the Honduran officials who ordered troops to storm the presidential palace and take control of the streets, closing down radio and television stations unsympathetic to the seizure of power and firing on unarmed demonstrators. Rather it was their victims.

The Post argues that the Honduran coup leaders have little to fear from Zelaya’s return. “Even if he does not wind up in jail,” the newspaper writes, “there is little chance he could now … succeed in changing the constitution.”

Similarly, the Times argues, “Probably the best outcome would be for the Honduran military, courts and de facto government to allow Mr. Zelaya back into Tegucigalpa for the remainder of his term, which ends in January, in exchange for his pledge to abandon all efforts to change the Constitution so he can run for a second term.”

Strict fealty to the Honduran constitution and steadfast opposition to changing the document to allow Zelaya to run for another term is invoked by both newspapers to justify the coup and the stripping of the elected president of any real power. Their adherence to such “principles,” however, is entirely situational, depending on whether maintaining or changing such laws best serves the interests of America’s ruling elite.

Neither newspaper, for example, voiced any great concern when Alvaro Uribe, Colombia’s right-wing president and a loyal supporter of US foreign policy, amended the Colombian constitution to give himself a second term—without even bothering to submit the proposal to a popular referendum.

The Times’ response at the time was that Uribe’s maneuver “would ensure that Washington retains a reliable caretaker for two of the Bush administration’s top priorities in this tumultuous region, the fight against drugs and Marxist rebels.”

Even closer to home, the newspaper was enthusiastically in favor of the move by New York City’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, to rewrite the city’s laws in order to end term limits and award himself a third four-year term in office. In this case, the newspaper proposed that the changes be carried out in backroom deals between Bloomberg and the City Council, explicitly opposing a popular referendum, like the one proposed in Honduras, as “technically difficult.”

As the US-orchestrated “mediation” got under way in San José, Honduran workers and youth continued to resist the coup. Thousands of people demonstrated Thursday and Friday in Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula and many other cities.

In a number of areas, protesters occupied highways and bridges, halting traffic. On Thursday, demonstrators blocked traffic for six hours on the main route connecting Tegucigalpa to the Pan American highway and Nicaragua and El Salvador to the south, leaving long lines of tractor trailers backed up into the capital. On Friday, thousands marched to northern Tegucigalpa to shut down the highway leading to San Pedro Sula, the country’s second largest city.

The coup regime’s repression is also continuing. On Thursday, security forces detained the father of Isis Obed Murillo, the 19-year-old youth who was shot to death on July 5, when soldiers opened fire on demonstrators who had gathered at the Tegucigalpa airport as Zelaya made his abortive attempt to return to the country.

The father, David Murillo, has spoken out since the killing, demanding justice for his son. He was grabbed by the national police after speaking at the headquarters of the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared of Honduras and taken directly to a prison controlled by the military.