by Oui
Wed Mar 10th, 2021 at 08:43:01 PM EST
Honduran president says U.S. probe of his alleged drug ties could scuttle cooperation with Washington | Reuters |
Honduras. a country not caring for its people ... thus tens of thousands start the long track North with hope of reaching the U.S. border ...
Immigration and the Trump executive orders
The Obama administration and history
A Labyrinth of Deception: Secretary Clinton and the Honduran Coup
At 4 a.m. on June 28, 2009, a battalion of 150 masked Honduran soldiers under orders from Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez initiated a shootout with the Presidential Honor Guard. Honduras's President Manuel Zelaya was then dragged in his pajamas onto a plane at gunpoint and left on the tarmac in San José, Costa Rica. Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas was also seized by Honduran soldiers and flown out in an aircraft belonging to one of Honduras's wealthiest billionaires, Miguel Facussé. Power, cell-phone service, and broadcast facilities were promptly cut throughout the capital city Tegucigalpa, followed by a weeklong curfew enforced by tanks in the streets.
Within days, Honduras reverted to its recurrent role as a narco-state due to the coup,[i] as had been in the cases of 1978 and 1987. Public death lists began to circulate.[ii] By 2013 seventy percent of the police would be found "beyond saving," paid off or themselves engaged in organized crime, including trafficking, extortion, rape, and murder for hire. Twelve percent of Congress was narco.[iii] The son of Porfirio Lobo Sosa, President from 2010 to 2014, was a trafficker trading off of his lucrative government ties.[iv] U.S. funds poured into the unrepentantly brutal Miguel Facussé, a supporter of the 2009 coup and a known kingpin [v] who had acquired his billions by defrauding state enterprises and murdering scores of campesinos until he owned a fifth of the land in the Aguán Valley. [vi]
The coup similarly represented a full takeover by the country's big ranching, trafficking, oil-palm, and mining interests.[vii] These interlocking political-economic families and cartel chiefs are "violence entrepreneurs" relying on the connections, the budgets, and the impunity provided by the state. This sector of the elite were long accustomed to using terror to get their way economically and politically.
The "continuing coup" has imposed a death toll that is directly caused by the security forces, not due to the surge in the mara violence. Over two hundred campesinos were killed in what is now the world's most dangerous country for community land advocates.[viii] 215 LGBT people were recorded murdered between July 2009 and 2015, compared to only twenty during 1994-2008, when mara violence was already on the rise.[ix] More than 50 journalists and over 100 lawyers and public prosecutors--even Cabinet ministers--have been gunned down by hitmen and narco-police.[x] Not even the members of the death squads have been immune.[xi] Deadliest has been the National Party's embezzlement from the public healthcare system, which condemned over 3,000 to their deaths over 2013-15.[xii] Bertha Oliva, founder of the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared/Detained, who witnessed her husband get dragged away in the night to be murdered in 1981, concludes that the post-coup regimes are unimaginably worse than the death-squad-ridden military-run regimes that prevailed in the 1980s.[xiii] Decades of hard-won democratization and strengthening of civil society have been permanently reversed by the coup and years of consequent open state aggression.
From the diaries ...
Honduras On A Slippery Slope | by Ask @Booman - Sept. 2009 |
Booman blogged on Honduras yesterday, not once, but twice since there was a dramatic development during the day with (deposed) president Zelaya's surprising return to the country. Using various transportation, a 15 hour trek through the country brought him to the Brazilian embassy where he is currently located. Zelaya obviously has considerable popular support - in spite of a curfew declared by the coup leaders - thousands gathered in the streets to show their support.
::
Today, there have been dramatic developments. In retaliation, the coup makers have cut of all utilities to the Brazilian embassy.
Yangui Military Intervention South of Border | @BooMan - Dec. 5, 2009 |
After Honduras: Obama's Latin American Policy Looks Like Bush's | TIME - Dec. 3, 2009 |
As he ends his first year in office, Obama seems to have ceded Latin America strategy to right-wing Cold Warriors whose thinking -- including the idea that coups are still an acceptable means of regime change -- is no more equipped to help bring the region into the 21st century than the ideology of left-wing Marxists is.
That's been most apparent in Honduras, where the country's congress this week refused to reinstate democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, a leftist who was ousted in a June 28 military coup. The Obama Administration condemned Zelaya's overthrow as an affront to Latin America's fledgling democracies. But conservatives led by GOP South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint-- who blocked Valenzuela's confirmation to protest Obama's stance -- and Bush Administration holdovers such as the U.S.'s ambassador to the Organization of American States, Lewis Amselem (who was finally replaced this week), pushed Obama into brokering a deal in which the U.S. effectively condoned yet another armed putsch in the region. In an about-face, Obama recognized last Sunday's presidential election in Honduras, even though almost every other government in the world didn't because they consider the current regime there illegitimate. (The incoming Honduran president will be Porfirio Lobo, a wealthy cattle rancher)
US Policy Failure on Honduras, Zelaya Returns! | @BooMan - May 2011 |
During Honduras Crisis, Clinton Suggested Back Channel With Lobbyist Lanny Davis | The Intercept - July 2015 |
The Hillary Clinton emails released last week include some telling exchanges about the June 2009 military coup that toppled democratically elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, a leftist who was seen as a threat by the Honduran establishment and U.S. business interests.
At a time when the State Department strategized over how best to keep Zelaya out of power while not explicitly endorsing the coup, Clinton suggested using long time Clinton confidant Lanny Davis as a back-channel to Roberto Micheletti, the interim president installed after the coup.
During that period, Davis was working as a consultant to a group of Honduran businessmen who had supported the coup.
U.S. Interference and Troubles In the Americas | @EuroTrib - Feb. 2019 |
The Biden administration using Climate Change as excuse for refugees fleeing Honduras ...
"We have to go": Climate change driving increased migration from Central America | CFR |
Addressing the Needs of Central American Asylum Seekers and Vulnerable Migrants | CSIS |
