Spotlight on Latin America: Honduras
The coup d'etat in Honduras had the objective of eliminating ALBA's [the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean] weakest link, Honduras, whose president, Manuel Zelaya, in spite of his conservative origins undertook modest social reforms. Zelaya also, for economic reasons, moved closer to Venezuela and this made him look like a dangerous revolutionary. The coup was also directed to reinforcing the destabilisation in Guatemala (whose president Colom is at present in the sights of imperialism). Also in El Salvador, where the Farabundo Mart? National Liberation Front won the government, but doesn't have the power, which is still in hands of the ultra-rightists (led by the incumbent Nationalist Republican Alliance), and similarly in Nicaragua. The United States wants to reinforce in this way strategically, through its servants, the weak link in the Merida Plan. The Plan involves a multi-billion dollar package to Mexico under the pretence of fighting the on-going drug wars, but in reality guarantees a corridor for American dominance from Mexico to Colombia. It also intends to turn this last country under Uribe?s dictatorship into a beach head; an Israel in South America, to control Venezuela, the Caribbean, Ecuador, and Brazil.
The coup was carefully prepared in the American base of Soto Cano, with the presence of United States ambassador, Llorens. He left and took his family, although he knew about the coup in advance. He didn't want to appear too close to the Honduran guerrillas. These guerrillas were trained by the United States and are known to them since the time of John Dimitri Negroponte and Iran-gate. (They delivered armaments to the Nicaraguan ‘contras’ from Honduras and were paid by the CIA with drug money.) Negroponte was also Llorens's direct boss. However, Negroponte, who was Bush's national secretary of security, former representative in the UN, and former viceroy in Iraq, is not the only high level conspirator. Coup master Micheletti, for example, has two important Bill Clinton assistants for advisors: Lanny Davis, who advised him during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He was Hillary Clinton's most virulent consultant in the fight against Obama and is advisor to the
Honduran Council of Private Enterprises, the axis of the local oligarchy, and Bennett Ratcliff. Consequently, it is absolutely impossible that the State Department (that is, Hillary Clinton) and the Pentagon could have been surprised by a coup, which had been very much announced and very poorly organised by four guerrillas very sure of their impunity.
Therefore, this coup is a torpedo below the buoyant line of Obama's distension effort with Latin America and Cuba that was thrown by the American conservative right. Rightists not only within the Democratic Party, with Hillary Clinton and her clan, but also in the Republican Party, through the connections of the Bush followers to the military and the Latin American right. This is Obama's first serious weakening coming from Washington. The right has a designated role for Obama, which is the same as the one Costa Rican President Oscar Arias wants to give Zelaya: that of a president pour la galerie. The role of a puppet, without any initiative, and with a foreign policy absolutely controlled by the State Department. Indeed, the Foreign Relations Minister of the Honduran guerrillas expressed the opinion that Obama is a ‘little Black man’ who doesn't know anything about anything. This opinion, although they don't express it openly yet, is shared by all the saints that the guerrillas have in the American paradise.
The coup in Honduras is against the neighbouring countries friendly to Chavez and Cuba. It is against Venezuela and Cuba, and against all progressive governments in South America. It is also a coup without Obama and against Obama. Arias' aberrant proposal is useful to the guerrillas. It allows them to win time to organise their de facto power and to tire out and demoralise those in favour of the constitutional president. Besides, it rewards them with amnesty although they organised a coup d'etat, murdered people who defended the Constitution and are infamous traitors to the homeland, liable to death sentences. To make matters worse, in accordance with the San Jose Agreement, the proposal tabled by Arias calling for a government of “unity and reconciliation”, Zelaya would have to admit to key positions in the cabinet the same people who kidnapped him, deported him from his country, insulted him, forged his signature in an infamous letter of renunciation and are oppressing the Honduran people by terror. He would only be those people's hostage.
If he accepts the Clinton solution (a solution that only favours the guerrillas), it will encourage future coups and future blows and ‘soft’ dictatorships (military dictatorships with legal facades). The alternative is difficult, but it is the only positive one: reject the Arias-Clinton agreement and become the leader, inside Honduras, of a fight, by all possible means, to impose a national constituent assembly to decide who will govern the country and how. That is to say, to create a breach in the armed forces and the police by means of a mobilisation, like they did in Bolivia to oppose Sanchez de Lozada or in Venezuela, with the coup against Chavez.
Zelaya is the son of a man who murdered leftists. He is the leader of a traditional conservative party, whose approach toward politics is more advanced solely for opportunistic reasons and because he did not calculate the consequences. He has demonstrated he has courage but probably he cannot head such a fight. But, he can start it. The Honduran people and the sectors from the left that demand his unrestricted return to government will know then how to defeat the guerrillas and make them pay for their crime against the Constitution through public processes.
Comments
No comments yet. Use the form above to have your say.
