Honduras... The Big Backstory

The dramatic call for "insurrection" by deposed Honduran president Mel Zelaya and the 72 hour ultimatum issued by the Organization of American States (OAS) are reminders of how just much the stakes have escalated since negotiator Oscar Arias won the Nobel Prize trying to bring peace to his region a generation ago.

Mara Salvatrucha gangs now exercise the same de-facto government status the Mafia once had in Sicily thanks to a wide berth from Zelaya. His main backer, Venezuela, is now a Russian client giving the Kremlin a beachhead in South America. Sandinista lite Nicaragua has become the poorest nation in the Americas. And Cuba, apparently still sponsoring terrorism, was reinstated to the OAS in a Zelaya organized effort just days before his army removed him from power.

Hondurans earning $1800 a year in real wages and neighboring Nicaraguans earning just $475 want economic equity,effectivo, not the social equity that US president Barack Obama's foreign policy vision offers them.

More social unrest in Latin America could complicate Washington's emerging soft power strategy, which morphs the US from global superpower to kinder gentler top cop for the world economic order. Obama wants to take the war out of the war on drugs while Honduran gangs who haven't had their alpha drives stepped on by Harry Potter books sell crack in Chicago for less than a value meal. No 40 hour work week, no problem; sweatshop labor issues get wrapped in a tidy package by consultants like former assistant secretary of state Otto Reich.

To complement the makeover of American might one would expect Washington to have top line intelligence and embassy resources to not only predict but prevent getting blindsided by diplomatic train wrecks like Honduras. The fact that they didn't show up gives legs to the Miami Herald story in which Fidel Castro blames Zelaya's ouster on the US Embassy in Honduras.

The White House denounced the action in Honduras as "illegal." But that call requires Washington to cut off all but humanitarian aid and could jeopardize the big Soto Cano base outside Tegucigalpa used by a large contingent of US military and civilian advisers that is critical to Pentagon regional security strategy and logistics.

Known as Palmerola, when the US armed the Contras and return trips carried contraband back to governor Bill Clinton's Arkansas, the base boasts runways long enough to handle C-5 aircraft carrying 219,000 pounds of helicopters, troops and weapons. NGOs, wonks and media amping up the noise to volume ratio for the US to end its military presence in Honduras might ask themselves just how comfortable they'd feel when Russia exploits the power vacuum their recommendations would create. Although mafia drug war games have become the rage on Facebook, the realpolitik reveals Honduras as a pawn in a geopolitical picture larger than what the Obama administration likes to paint.

Prospects of an Obama flip-flop on Honduras and Zelaya's friendship with Fidel and Raul Castro and the Venezuela-Russia connection play into the hands of Republicans searching for issues in the run up to mid-term elections. Thanks to Jimmy Carter's giveaway for globalism, Chinese interests operate the key ports on both sides of the Panama Canal. Iran is trying to sensitize Latin America's large middle eastern population to the politics of revolutionary Islam and working with Venezuela and Russia to broker nuclear technology to the highest bidder.

Prospects of having Ahmadinejad tag team with Venezuela on nuke deals when Hugo Chavez is having a Prozac moment has caused enough consternation that in a meeting earlier this year with Mossad chief Meir Dagan, Saudi Arabia agreed to authorize overflights by Israeli aircraft in the event facilities in Iran need to be taken out.

So far, $20 million in cutbacks in aid to Honduras have been announced. But influential Cuban-American congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee with strong ties to Miami anti-Castro groups, has formally requested to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that aid to Honduras not be stopped. Zelaya's visit with Fidel and Raul Castro in Havana did little to raise his popularity among her constituents. Obama's relations with Cuban Americans could become more problematic now that assistant secretary of state-designate, Arturo Valenzuela, recently testified before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the full rehabilitation of Castro's Cuba is the crowning achievement of the Inter-American system.

As long as globalism and free markets fail to distribute wealth more equitably relative deprivation and political instability will ratchet up. Latin Americans know that dollars, drugs and NAFTA flow north and south, But Washington took the Latin out of Latin America during Bill Clinton's presidency, with the State Department servicing the southern hemisphere with an assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs. That job, in its various makeovers, has the highest churn rate of all regional assistant secretaries of state in the post World War II era. As Oscar Arias said in his 1987 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "peace has no finish line."

Comments

[crush2496]

Good article, great backstory. please keep writing. Your article shows why Zelaya was a big risk for the area. This is just the tip of the Iceberg.

[lastyellowdogintx]

Time to shut the CIA down. It has done more harm
than good for the last 50 years.

[Froggybottom]

@ jast You are right. The people who left the Ottoman empire for North and South America from the Middle East, areas we know today as Turkey, the Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Palestine were mostly Christian. Orthodox, Maronite. Constantinople was named after Constantine, eh. But that does not make them Arabs. You can ask the Zogby, who are Christian, to define what an Arab is. It gets complex, since Arabs and the Arabic language in its various evolutions existed before Islam emerged as a religion. But if you read the text of the article above, the context of the statement you call out is not to convert in the sense of religious conversion, but to promote a cultural and radical populist political line. Not much different than what Nasser attempted with the "United Arab Republic. Moreover, Iranians are not Arabs, they are Persians.

[demockracy]

The idea that Cuba could somehow have defied the Godfather...er, I mean the U.S., despite decades of terrorism sponsored by the U.S. against them is supposed to be anathema. After all, they imprison dissidents! OK, so the U.S. has a higher incarceration rate (we're #1!!!), has been sending invaders (the Bay of Pigs), and has even tried everything from assassination to economic sabotage (infecting Cuba's livestock with swine flu), but the Cubans are the bad guys. Yeah, that's my story!

OK, sure, we got behind Batista, and even overthrew the Spaniards (but wouldn't withdraw our troops until the Cuban legislators gave the U.S. permission to re-invade at their whim). But we're the good guys! Don't you see!

It's not for nothing Castro is a hero throughout the region.

My personal favorite: The U.S. is so committed to hemispheric democracy that the Bush 43 administration kidnapped the legitimately elected president of Haiti, and dumped him in Central Africa. This, after supporting "Papa Doc" Duvalier for decades.

[demockracy]

Oddly, this report mentions relatively little of how complicit the U.S. has been in Central American instability. Does no one remember "Iran / Contra"? The U.S. fought to oust a legitimately elected government, and even got convicted of illegally mining Nicaraguan harbors (essentially being a state sponsor of terrorism) by the World Court.

Then-president Reagan solicited an endorsement of this assault on one of the poorest nations in the hemisphere as necessary because of Nicaragua's threat to the U.S. The president of Mexico replied he would be happy to do so if he wouldn't be laughed out of office by his electorate.

So the U.S. has been invading Panama (after stealing it from Columbia), the Dominican Republic, Cuba, etc., sponsoring death squads in El Salvador (thanks Mr. Negroponte!), and supporting dictators and oligarchies throughout the hemisphere, despite its avowed "pro-democracy" stance... But it's those other guys who are responsible for our unfavorable reception... Okaaay!

[jast]

" Iran is trying to sensitize Latin America's large middle eastern population to the politics of revolutionary Islam "

aren't most arabs in latin america christian...?