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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 3/8/13

Why There Should Be Dem. Pres. Primaries in '16: Hillary Clinton's Two Foreign-Policy Catastrophes

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On 29 November 2009, the Heritage Foundation bannered  "Heritage in Honduras: "I Believe in Democracy',"  and Big Brother propagandized: "Today the Honduran people are voting in an historic election with consequences for the entire region. Heritage's Izzy Ortega is on the ground as an official election observer speaking with Hondurans practicing their right to vote. Watch his first interview below." A typical reader-comment posted there was "I want WE THE PEOPLE back in the United States. For once in my life I'am jealous of another country!" Conservatives wanted fascism in the U.S.A. -- not only in Honduras. Of course, the aristocracy's stooge was "elected" in Honduras. (Zelaya wasn't even a candidate in this "election." Most democratic countries throughout the world did not recognize the results of this "election." However, the U.S. did; and so did Israel, Italy, Germany, Japan, Peru, Costa Rica, and Panama.)

 

By contrast, on the same day, Costa Rico's Tico Times headlined  "Peaceful March Faces "Brutal Repression' in San Pedro Sula"  Honduras. Mike Faulk reported that, "About 500 people marching peacefully in the northwestern city of San Pedro Sula were repressed by tear gas and water cannons on Election Day today." The next day, Agence France Presse headlined "Conservatives Win Honduran Election," and reported that "Conservative Porfirio Lobo has claimed a solid win. ... The United States was quick to underline its support." Barack Obama was the leading (virtually the only) head-of-state supporting the Honduran fascist transfer of power to their new "elected" Honduran President. The major "news" media in the U.S. deep-sixed what was happening in Honduras, but the Honduran situation was widely reported elsewhere. Typical of the slight coverage that it did receive in the U.S., the Wall Street Journal bannered on November 26th,  "Honduras Lurches Toward Crisis Over Election,"  and their "reporter," Jose de Cordoba, opened, "Honduran President Manuel Zelaya's push to rewrite the constitution, and pave the way for his potential re-election, has plunged one of Latin America's poorest countries into a potentially violent political crisis." Rupert Murdoch's rag never reported the gangster-government's violence. Moreover, Zelaya had never pushed "to rewrite the constitution"; he had wanted to hold a plebiscite on whether there should be a constitutional convention held to rewrite the nation's existing Constitution, which everyone but the Honduran aristocracy said contained profound defects that made democracy dysfunctional there. The editors of the former U.S.S.R.'s newspaper Pravda would have chuckled at Murdoch's "reporting." By contrast, for example,blog.AFLCIO.org had headlined on 16 November 2009,  "Trumka: Free Elections Not Possible Now in Honduras."  The American labor movement was reporting on events in Honduras, but had been defeated by the U.S. aristocracy increasingly since 40 years earlier (Reagan), and therefore no longer constituted a major source of news for the American people. Richard Trumka was the AFL-CIO President, but was by now just a marginal character in the new fascist Amerika.

 

On 9 January 2010, the Honduras Coup 2009 blog translated from a Honduran newspaper published that day, and headlined  "Honduras Is Broke."  Honduras's Finance Minister, Gabriela Nuà ±ez, was quoted as saying that international aid must keep coming in order for the nation to continue paying its bills, and that avoiding default is "a work from week to week."

 

A few months later, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs headlined on 5 March 2010,  "Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Does Latin America,"  and reported that, "While in Buenos Aires, she carelessly stated, "The Honduras crisis has been managed to a successful conclusion ... It was done without violence.' This is being labeled as a misguided statement considering the physical violence including murders, beatings, torture that the coup government used in order to repress the opposition. Many of these tactics are still being used. This diplomatic stumble is expected to draw significant attention to the multiple errors in the U.S. approach." Moreover, while there, she was "announcing that the Obama administration will restore aid that had been previously suspended." The commentator said that this drew attention to "a political decision that once again may have served to isolate the U.S. from much of Latin America." Furthermore, "While in Costa Rica, ... Clinton said the post-coup [Honduran] government ... was, in fact, democratically elected," which made a mockery of the term "democracy." That election was perhaps even less democratic than the "elections" in Iran have recently been, but it was remarkably similar, with the main difference being that in Honduras the aristocracy controlled the "election," whereas in Iran the theocracy did. Anyway, Hillary approved.

 

On 1 May 2010, Britain's Guardian headlined regarding Honduras,  "Cocaine Trade Turns Backwater into Hideout for Brutal Assassins : The Central American nation is on the brink of becoming a fully-fledged narco-state," and reported that, "Corrupt police and drug gangs are blamed, with the government unable or unwilling to crack down on them."

 

Without Obama, Honduras's fascists would have been defeated. Obama's refusal to employ either his financial and banking power or his bully pulpit, and Hillary's outright support of the fascist junta, together sealed the deaths of many thousands of Hondurans. The U.S. thus, single-handedly among all nations, kept Honduras's newly-installed fascist regime in power. A U.S. professor who specialized in Honduras, Orlando Perez, said that Obama did this probably because he concluded  "that Honduras' political, military and economic elite wouldn't accept Zelaya's return";  in other words, that Obama wanted to serve Honduras's aristocracy, regardless of the Honduran public, and even regardless of the increased contempt that Latin Americans would inevitably feel toward the U.S. from this matter.

 

The results for Hondurans were hellish. On 11 April 2011, McClatchy Newspapers bannered "Honduran Police Ignore Rise in Attacks on Journalists,  Gays,"  and reported that within just those almost-two years, Honduras had become "the deadliest country in the hemisphere," because of the soaring crime-rate, especially against homosexuals and against journalists. The new fascist government tacitly "sends a message to the criminals, the paramilitaries and the hit men that they can do as they please." Hondurans were by then five times likelier to be murdered than Mexicans were. Honduras's aristocrats, however, were safe, because they hired their own private security forces, and also because the government's security-apparatus was controlled by the aristocracy. Only the public were unprotected.

 

Fox "News" Latina bannered, on 7 October 2011,  "Honduras Led World in Homocides in 2010,"  and (since Rupert Murdoch's Fox is a Republican front) pretended that this had happened because Latin America was violent -- not because Fox's Republican friends had had their way in policy on Honduras, and had thus caused the Honduran murder-rate to soar. (During the latest year, whereas homicides had declined in all of the other high-homicide nations, homicides had skyrocketed 22% in Honduras -- and that's why Honduras now led the world in homicides, but Fox "News" didn't mention any of these facts.)

 

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010,  and of  CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that (more...)
 
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