Honduras Coup

Outside of the direct actors, we don't know exactly what just happened in Honduras. But the spinning will start soon, and neither President Obama nor Secretary of State Clinton have called for the return of President Zelaya to his rightful office. They have made tepid statements of opposition to military takeovers and a return to "democracy" and "constitutionality."

While we wait, I will share an older piece about the US-directed coup in Haiti (which Obama and Clinton apparently support) and the attempted coup -- with US support -- against the democratically elected government of Venezuela.

In 1994, when my last Special Forces team, Operational Detachment Alpha 354, entered the Haitian city of Gonaives, I along with three members of that detachment waded through a huge and agitated crowd to encounter four soldiers and two plainclothes death squad members about to fire into that crowd with M-1 Garands. They were surprised to see us, and we took advantage of that surprise to compel them to lay their weapons down and submit to arrest. One of the plainclothes gents hesitated to relinquish his weapon, and I came very near shooting him. I'm only being honest - knowing this will put some people off - when I say that I now wish I had gone ahead and pulled the trigger. Instead, I protected him from a very angry crowd, one member of which lambasted him across the head with a heavy stick when he finally laid his weapon down, obliging my own team's medics to suture his gaping scalp laceration.

Link to Part 1

In this part of the world, it never pays to be intellectually lazy on these issues. They're tricky.

Haiti has two predominant ruling classes, one based on land and one based on money. Duvalier's base was among the landed class that exploited peasants in a sharecropping system. Their dominance was challenged by the mechanized capitalist form of agriculture that was imposed on much of the island in conjunction with the 19-year US Marine occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934. This accounts for Duvalier's hostility to the US, which was only resolved when both Duvalier and the US were alarmed by a leftist uprising in Haiti. Duvalier massacred the communists, and from then on the US and Papa Doc were on fine terms. But the class of cosmopolitans in Haiti who have survived through international trade sought the lowest price for export crops grown on these tenant plots, while the big landowners sought the highest price, which was a structural antagonism between the two. Given the nationalist xenophobia of the landowners and the desire for more foreign investment by the compradors, there was another, deeper, political antagonism. These two groups have fought fiercely in the past, and they share only one point of unity.

Link to Part 2

I hope Obama-mania and the reign of Democrats hasn't completely effaced out skepticism.

Comments

[AlinaM]

You may wish to read this article for some additional perspective on the alleged coup:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0702/p09s03-coop.html

[elcid]

I'm still curious as to when anyone will produce these supposedly awesomely legal and Constitutional court rulings or orders or post-it notes or anything which authorized the death squad military of Honduras to shoot its way into the Presidential palace, expel the elected president, and then accept it when the parliament 'votes' in a new President from someone who's not in the line of succession.

President Zelaya just complained in front of the UN that he hasn't been given these rule of law documents either.

If someone knows where they are and have been published, can they please provide it so we readers can check them out and maybe even forward them to the ousted President?

[Zapatista]

The 1954 CIA / United Fruit Co. coup of Guatemala's democratically elected leader Arbenz - 'created' Che Guevara who was living there at that time. I wonder what this one will give us?

[altohone]

Where are Graham and John McCain on this?


Aren't they supposed to be the new defenders of democracy?

Oh, there's no money in the Honduras lobby?

[Jeffry House]

It's a bad start when you respond to a crisis in Honduras by posting about Haiti. I am hoping that when you decide to say something about the actual country of Honduras, you will mention that it has a Constitution. After that, please let us know whether the Constition bans referenda within six months of scheduled elections. Next, tell us whether the Supreme Court of Honduras should be treated as an irrelevant annoyance, or instead whether its decision on the proposed referendum was not in fact legally correct.

After all that tiresome concentration on Honduras itself, let us know who, exactly, was attempting a coup against the Constitution.

[nquotes]

There are a lot of crises going on around the world right now. Michael Jackson's death seemed to suck the US attention away... I found a great site with Hunduran news in Spanish and English: periodicos de honduras en español http://www.enewsreference.com/newspaper/hondues.htm

[Stan Goff - Huffpost Blogger]

This was in response to the coup in Honduras, but the linked articles are about two coups in the last few years in which the US hand was malevolent and apparent. I was in Port-au-Prince the day before the last one when you could get trampled by passengers trying to get out through Touissant L'Overture Airport before the arrival of US-trained thugs crossing over from the Dominican Republic. In Venezuela, the coup lasted a day when Venezuelan soldiers turned against their paid-off clique of generals, and returned the government to its popular leaders.

The reason I posted -- which may be opaque to readers accustomed to sound-byte debates and re-cycled imperial tropes -- was to provide an account of the mechanics of coups d'etat that might shed some light on how this one evolved. The background is important, a lot more important than distant imputations by people who know next to nothing about Honduras (and show little interest in correcting their ignorance before they start to pontificate about this coup).

When I was training Honduran troops in 1991, a colonel I was drinking with challenged me on my knowledge of Honduras. A quiz. Where were the three capitals of Honduras? I was embarrassed not to know (Trujillo & Comayagua, then Tegucigalpa), and I learned a valuable lesson (I was there to train THEM?). Would that posters on todays core-nation blogs learn the same thing...

to be continued

[Stan Goff - Huffpost Blogger]

continued from last

... is really one of serial retrenchments of the a-critical Obama personality cult, now that the prez has made Wall Street whole while he runs the rest of the economy into a fatal ditch, ramped up a secret CIA war in Pakistan that is killing civilians like flies, committed to his own personal Vietnam in Afghanistan, has moved to strengthen executive power (and to detain people without charges), strengthened the state's ability to keep secrets, and capitulated to insurance and pharmaceutical companies in taking single-payer off the table.

Read the linked article on the Venezuela and Haiti coups, and respond to that. It requires an attention span longer than a beagle's, but -- alas -- so does making sense of the world beyond imperial sound-bytes. There is a class struggle in Honduras, with material bases and a history of human suffering, yet no one talks about this dimension. We want to talk about myopic legalisms learned while we were being propagandized in middle school.

This coup is an attack by the rich against the poor for their temerity in approaching real political power through Zelaya's presidency. The role of the US is generally unknown right now; but to determine that role -- which is what we should concern ourselves with instead of acting like we know what Hondurans need -- we have to know how coup's are done. It is a process, and one with identifiable milestones... milestones that are described in the attached article.

[Halbert Priday]

You were doing good until the last two paragraphs. With all due respect, you are completely ill-informed and ignorant of the reality in Honduras.

The class struggle mirrage was spurred by Zelaya himself as part of the process of turning our nation into a Chavist state. It isn't a coup. The tribunals ordered his arrest and the military did so. In Honduras (sorry, things might be different outside the US), the mission of the military is to defend our land's sovereignity and to defend the Constitution. The Attorney General, Judicial Branch, and Congress had warned him time and time again that what he was trying to ram into our throats was illegal. He went ahead anyways. He was then taken to Costa Rica (im guessing that when you were here in Honduras you got a glimpse of the prisons--not presidential.) so his life would not be in danger here in Honduras. 90% of the people support the destitution of Zelaya. This is why there were very few supporters of him in the streets (usually they are generally dressed as vandals and can be found looting buildings, blocking streets, attacking police, and attacking the press). In contrast, yesterday there were 50,000 Hondurans in support of the new president, rejecting Chavez's imperialism and demanding that the UN, OAS, and media informed themselves before they acted. This is not a coup of the military, nor the rich. It is the upheaval of a nation against the abuses of power.

[oxi]

Key leaders of Honduras military coup trained in U.S.

At least two leaders of the coup launched in Honduras today were apparently trained at a controversial Department of Defense school based at Fort Benning, Georgia infamous for producing graduates linked to torture, death squads and other human rights abuses.

The Georgia-based U.S. military school is infamous for training over 60,000 Latin American soldiers, including infamous dictators, "death squad" leaders and others charged with torture and other human rights abuses. SOA Watch's annual protest to shut down the Fort Benning training site draws thousands.

According to SOA Watch, the U.S. Army school has a particularly checkered record in Honduras, with over 50 graduates who have been intimately involved in human rights abuses. In 1975, SOA Graduate General Juan Melgar Castro became the military dictator of Honduras. From 1980-1982 the dictatorial Honduran regime was headed by yet another SOA graduate, Policarpo Paz Garcia, who intensified repression and murder by Battalion 3-16, one of the most feared death squads in all of Latin America (founded by Honduran SOA graduates with the help of Argentine SOA graduates).

http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/06/key-leaders-of-honduras-military-coup-trained-in-us.html

[Beelzebufo]

Sorry, there are bigger fish to fry in the world right now. Let the Hondurans sort this out.

[zola77]

UPDATE: Just in case anyone is interested, the media is saying that the protestors who want to reinstate zelaya have 'shut the capital city down" for hours and have a list of demands... which you can look up online, but they are mainly for the extension social and environmental programs, and for the US troops to leave Honduras...

[citygal]

thank you for your frank and sharp assessment.
As you say, and now the spin begins.

Does the US still have those giant airstrips in the honduran jungle, left over from the 80s?

[zola77]

LATEST UPDATE FROM NYT: Good News!
By Sunday night, officials in Washington said they had spoken with Mr. Zelaya and were working for his return to power in Honduras, despite relations with Mr. Zelaya that had recently turned colder because of the inclusion of Honduras in the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, or ALBA, a leftist political alliance led by Venezuela.
from NY Times

[BruceF]

Thanks for putting this on Huffington Post.

As you say, it's too soon to tell exactly what happened. Aside from more direct statements of support from Clinton/Obama, what other signs could we look for to decide if US policy is truly Changing when it comes to Honduras/Latin America?

And to echo the earlier comment, what can an individual do if it turns out that the US gov is behind this?

[S1m0n]

When a president refuses to abide by a supreme court ruling and is ejected by the military, which side was the coup?

[zola77]

The coup was against the will of the people - thats why they are on the streets protesting and trying to get the prez back

[RON STAMANT]

The will of which people though...
See it is easy to cite the 'will of the people' however what you have is social civil cold war and both sides believe they represent the 'will of the people'.
The thing is Zelaya was legally elected under a Constitution that limited his term to one. Then because he is at a certain point popular among a majority (we can debate and disagree about why) he decides he can remain in power by attempting to overturn a portion of the Constitution.
You should be careful just what sort of 'democracy' you support here. Imagine if in 2002, George W Bush, whose popularity was upward of 75% approval had wanted to have a referendum to change the Constitution's term limits.
Populism and 'the will of the people' are dangerous so be careful how you start embracing it because at some point, the fickle winds of "popular will" are going to blow back on you.

[Maria Fiallos]

The people are not protesting on the streets, there are only a few supporters still holding on; less than 100 in any given spot in Tegucigalpa. Maybe it’s the torrential rains keeping them inside, but personally I think President Zelaya just went too far, he defied everyone, the Supreme Court, the National Congress and the Military. What did he expect?