President Obama, his shortcoming in Honduras aside, should be honored for opening relations with Cuba. He's traveling to Cuba next week, followed by a visit to Argentina, where he has said he plans to declassify US military and police records relating to US involvement in the nefarious "dirty war" of the 1970s and 80s. That's the period when Henry Kissinger was famous for saying that "the arc of history" did not pass through South America; so whatever happened there didn't matter. In 1976, when the military government was cracking down violently on the left, he was recorded telling Argentina Foreign Minister Cesar Augusto Giuzzetti, "If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly."
A famous book called Civilization and Barbarism written in 1868 by an Argentine military man named D.F. Sarmiento focuses on a cruel tyrant of the time, Facundo Quiroga. The two abstract nouns of the title characterize a long struggle in Latin American history, leading up to today. Too often, US leaders have felt compelled to cozy up to the barbarians. As FDR famously said about Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, "He's a bastard, but he's our bastard."
The President should be pressured to do what he says and to release all the dirty details of US complicity in the Argentine dirty war. Corpses of the many leftists "disappeared" were slit open to counter buoyancy and shoved out of airplanes over the sea. Declassifying dirty war secrets is a good instinct and should not stop with Argentina. The facts concerning Honduras reveal a contemporary public policy atrocity that the US has had an unfortunate hand in. Information is like sunlight. The low-level killers and thugs who do the dirty work down in the depths below the elite level of plausible deniability cannot thrive in sunlight.
Donald Trump has it wrong: What will "make America great again" is to create our own truth commission here in Exceptional America. With the right policies, there is so much we could do here in America and in places like Honduras.
Nothing can be done until the truth is out on the table. COPINH and other political groups in Honduras are fighting for an official commission to investigate all the killings. Following the Caceres murder and before the Garcia murder, sixty-two US congress members sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew calling for a review of U.S. security aid to Honduras and an investigation into the killing of Caceres. They wrote: "We are profoundly saddened and angered by the brutal assassination of Berta CÃ ¡ceres and appalled by our government's continuous assistance to Honduran security forces, so widely documented to be corrupt and dangerous."
Next, there needs to be a consensus (the 62 US congress members is a good place to start) that opposes the forces of violence unleashed by the 2009 coup -- even if they're free-market capitalists. This is certainly hard for many American leaders to do, given how entrenched the arrogant Kissinger view of the region is among moneyed elites and the dirty US alliances that an honest truth commission would reveal. President Zelaya was keen on lifting the poor in Honduras; over time, the goal was to encourage small businesses leading to more disposable income to buy products and, in the end, an improved local economy. It's not rocket science: It boils down to the subtitle of E.F. Schumacher's famous book back in the 1970s Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered.
Cuba has long been a controversial issue. After Obama's visit, with two conservative Cuban-Americans in the race for president, one would expect the opening to Cuba to rise to the level of an elite pissing contest. But what about poor Honduras?
It would be great to see presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (or a serious reporter) raise the matter of the oppressive post-coup violence in Honduras to pissing contest level in debates with Ms. Clinton. Ask her why she didn't join the Latin American countries that demanded the return of Zelaya to his duly-elected presidential post. Why did she, instead, pressure those Latin American nations to drop that demand and support a new election? What exactly was wrong with the election that named Manuel Zelaya president of Honduras? Who was she e-mailing about the coup? Somebody needs to put Ms. Clinton on the hot seat over Honduras.
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