U.S continues to train Honduran military

U.S. continues to train Honduran soldiers
Written by James Hodge and Linda Cooper, National Catholic Reporter
Military coup that ousted president, didn't stop U.S. engagement in Honduras

A controversial facility at Ft. Benning, Ga. -- formerly known as the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas -- is still training Honduran officers despite claims by the Obama administration that it cut military ties to Honduras after its president was overthrown June 28, NCR has learned.

A day after an SOA-trained army general ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya at gunpoint, President Barack Obama stated that "the coup was not legal" and that Zelaya remained "the democratically elected president."
From: School of the Americas Watch.

The Foreign Operations Appropriations Act requires that U.S. military aid and training be suspended when a country undergoes a military coup, and the Obama administration has indicated those steps have been taken.

However, Lee Rials, public affairs officer for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the successor of SOA, confirmed Monday that Honduran officers are still being trained at the school.
"Yes, they're in class now." Rials said

Asked about the Obama administration's suspension of aid and training to Honduras, Rials said, "Well, all I know is they're here, and they're in class."

The decision to continue training the Hondurans is "purely government policy," he said, adding that it's possible that other U.S. military schools are training them too. "We're not the only place."

Rials did not know exactly how many Hondurans were currently enrolled, but he said at least two officers are currently in the school's Command and General Staff course, its premier year-long program.

"I don't know the exact number because we've had some classes just completed and some more starting," he said. "There's no more plans for anybody to come. Everything that was in place already is still in place. Nobody's directed that they go home or that anything cease."

The school trained 431 Honduran officers from 2001 to 2008, and some 88 were projected for this year, said Rials, who couldn't provide their names.

Since 2005, the Department of Defense has barred the release of their names after it was revealed that the school had enrolled well-known human rights abusers.

The general who overthrew Zelaya -- Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez -- is a two-time graduate of SOA, which critics have nicknamed the "School of Coups" because it trained so many coup leaders, including two other Honduran graduates, General Juan Melgar Castro and General Policarpo Paz Garcia.

Vasquez is not the only SOA graduate linked to the current coup or employed by the de facto government. Others are:

Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, the head of the Honduran air force, who arranged to have Zelaya flown into exile in Costa Rica;
Gen. Nelson Willy Mejia Mejia, the newly appointed director of immigration, who is not only an SOA graduate, but a former SOA instructor. One year after he was awarded the U.S. Meritorious Service Medal, he faced charges in connection with the infamous death squad, Battalion 3-16, for which he was an intelligence officer.
Col. Herberth Bayardo Inestroza Membreño, the Honduran army's top lawyer who admitted that flying Zelaya into exile was a crime, telling the Miama Herald that ''In the moment that we took him out of the country, in the way that he was taken out, there is a crime," but it will be justified.
Lt. Col. Ramiro Archaga Paz,the army's director of public relations, who has denied harassment of protesters and maintained that the army is not involved in internal security.
Col. Jorge Rodas Gamero, a two-time SOA graduate, who is the minister of security, a post he also held in Zelaya's government.

The story of the coup in Honduras

Showdown in 'Tegucigolpe'
Stephen Zunes
Foreign Policy in Focus
July 10, 2009
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6250

One of the hemisphere's most critical struggles for
democracy in 20 years is now unfolding in the Honduran
capital of Tegucigalpa (nicknamed "Tegucigolpe" for its
long history of military coup d'états, which are called
golpes de estado, in Spanish). Despite censorship and
repression, popular anger over the June 28 military
overthrow of democratically elected President Manuel
Zelaya is growing. International condemnation has been
near-unanimous, and the Organization of American States
has suspended Honduras, the first time the hemisphere-
wide body has taken so drastic an action since 1962.

In a reversal of many decades of U.S. support for right-
wing golpistas in Latin America, the Obama
administration has denounced the coup. However,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, rather than backing
the largely nonviolent popular uprising for Zelaya's
unconditional return to power, has instead been pushing
for the country's legitimate ruler to compromise with
the very forces which illegally exiled him from the
country and have been violently suppressing his
supporters.

The United States is now offering support for mediation
efforts to be led by Costa Rican president Oscar Arias.
The Obama administration tried to discourage the exiled
Honduran president from his attempt this past Sunday to
return to his country and has apparently succeeded, for
the time being, in preventing him from trying again.
Clinton pressed this point on Tuesday in pushing for
mediation, arguing that it would be a "better route for
him to follow than attempt to return in the fact of the
intractable opposition of the de facto government."

Clinton also said, "Instead of another
confrontation.let's try the dialogue process." What this
ignores is that while the coup plotters have no
legitimate standing, the Honduran people have a
constitutionally guaranteed right to rebel under such
circumstances. According to Article 3 of the Honduran
constitution:

No one owes obedience to a government that has usurped
power or to those who assume functions or public posts
by the force of arms or using means or procedures that
rupture or deny what the Constitution and the laws
establish. The verified acts by such authorities are
null. The people have the right to recur to insurrection
in defense of the constitutional order.

What the Obama administration apparently fears is that
if it allows the burgeoning pro-democracy movement to
take its course, it may end up with a similar outcome to
what transpired in Venezuela in 2002 - following a
similar coup against that country's left-leaning
president, Hugo Chávez. Within days, a popular movement
had forced right-wing elements of the military and their
wealthy civilian allies to step down. Chávez returned to
govern and emboldened by such a popular outpouring of
support, he moved the country further to the left.

The United States could help such a movement succeed if
it wanted to. If the Obama administration chose, the
United States could impose strict economic sanctions on
Honduras that would, combined with ongoing strikes and
other disruptions, grind the economy to a halt and force
the illegitimate junta in Tegucigalpa to step down.

Unfortunately, while there's no evidence suggesting that
the United States was responsible for the coup, there
appear to be reasons the Obama administration may not
want the coup plotters to suffer a total defeat.

Zelaya's Significance

Despite being a wealthy logger and rancher from the
centrist Liberal Party, Zelaya has moved his government
well to the left since taking office in 2005. During his
tenure, he raised the minimum wage and provided free
school lunches, milk for young children, pensions for
the elderly, and additional scholarships for students.
He built new schools, subsidized public transportation,
and even distributed energy-saving light bulbs. He also
had Honduras join with Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia,
Cuba, and three small Caribbean island states in the
Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), an
economic alliance challenging the neoliberal orthodoxy
that has dominated hemispheric trade in recent decades.

None of these are particularly radical moves, but it was
nevertheless disturbing to the country's wealthy
economic and military elites. More frightening was that
Zelaya had sought to organize an assembly to replace the
1982 constitution written during the waning days of the
U.S.-backed military dictator Policarpo Paz. A non-
binding referendum on whether such a constitutional
assembly should take place was scheduled the day of the
coup, but was cancelled when the military seized power
and named Congressional Speaker Roberto Micheletti as
president.

Calling for such a referendum is perfectly legal under
Article 5 of the 2006 Honduran Civil Participation Act,
which allows public functionaries to perform such non-
binding public consultations regarding policy
measures.Despite claims by the rightist junta and its
supporters, Zelaya was not trying to extend his term.
That question wasn't even on the ballot. The
Constitutional Assembly would not have likely completed
its work before his term had expired anyway.

Yet the Obama administration is implying that the
country's legitimate democratic president somehow shared
responsibility for his illegal overthrow. The initial
White House response was rather tepid, initially failing
to denounce the coup, simply calling upon "all political
and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic
norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-
American Democratic Charter." Similarly, Clinton
insisted the day after the coup that "all parties have a
responsibility to address the underlying problems that
led to yesterday's events." When asked if her call for
"restoring the constitutional order" in Honduras meant
returning Zelaya himself, she didn't say it necessarily
would. Similarly, in a press conference on Tuesday,
State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly evaded
reporters' questions as to whether the United States
supported Zelaya's return. This places the United States
at odds with the Organization of American States, the
Rio Group, and the UN General Assembly, all of which
called for the "immediate and unconditional return" of
Zelaya.

There are serious questions as to whether Clinton can be
trusted to make a clear stance for democracy, given her
traditionally pro-interventionist position on Latin
America. As a senator, she argued that the Bush
administration should have taken a more aggressive
stance against the rise of left-leaning governments in
the hemisphere, arguing that Bush has neglected such
developments "at our peril." In response to recent
efforts by democratically elected Latin American
governments to challenge the structural obstacles that
have left much of their populations in poverty, she
expressed alarm, saying, "We have witnessed the rollback
of democratic development and economic openness in parts
of Latin America." Though no doubt aware that U.S.
policy toward leftist regimes in Latin American in
previous decades had included military interventions,
CIA-sponsored coups, military and financial support for
opposition groups, and rigged national elections, she
argued that "We must return to a policy of vigorous
engagement."

The United States and Honduras

The United States certainly has a history of "vigorous
engagement" in Honduras, actively supporting a series of
military dictatorships from 1963 through the early
1980s. Though military rule formally ended by the end of
1982, the weak civilian presidents who followed in the
subsequent decade served only at the pleasure of
Honduran generals and the U.S. embassy. John Negroponte,
who later served as George W. Bush's ambassador to Iraq
and the United Nations, as well as his Director of
National Intelligence (DNI) was the U.S. ambassador to
Honduras during this period.

During the 1980s, thousands of U.S. forces were sent to
Honduras to train Honduran security forces as well as
train and support the rightist Nicaraguan contras, which
were engaged in a series of cross-border terrorist
attacks. The CIA organized, trained, and equipped a
special military unit known as backed Battalion 316,
bringing in Argentine counterinsurgency experts as
advisors on surveillance and interrogation. These
advisors had been part of the "dirty war" in their
country during the 1970s, in which more than 10,000
people were murdered. Honduran armed forces chief Gen.
Gustavo Alvarez Martinez personally directed the unit
with strong U.S. support, even after acknowledging to
Negroponte that he intended "to use the Argentine method
of eliminating subversives." Though Alvarez' personal
involvement in large-scale human rights abuses were
well-known to State Department and other U.S. officials,
the Reagan administration awarded him the Legion of
Merit for "encouraging the success of democratic
processes in Honduras."

Former Honduran congressman Efraín Díaz told the
Baltimore Sun, in reference to U.S. policy towards human
rights abuses in his country, "Their attitude was one of
tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its
territory more than they were concerned about innocent
people being killed." Under Negroponte, CIA officers
based in the U.S. Embassy frequently visited a secret
prison where captured dissidents were routinely
tortured. It was one of a number of facilities to which
U.S. officials had regular access that were off-limits
to civilian Honduran officials, including judges looking
for victims of kidnapping by right-wing paramilitary
units.

Despite this history, including revelations of his role
in covering up for such human rights abuses, Negroponte
had little trouble on Capitol Hill during the Bush
administration. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), then the
ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee,
praised Negroponte for having "served bravely and with
distinction," and for bringing "a record of proven
leadership and strong management." Representative Jane
Harman (D-CA), then the ranking Democrat on the House
Intelligence Committee, praised him as "a seasoned and
skilled diplomat, who has served with distinction,"
saying he was a "smart choice" to become the first DNI.
This enthusiastic support for Negroponte among leading
congressional Democrats, despite his well-documented
role in human rights abuses while U.S. ambassador to
Honduras, is indicative of how little regard the
majority party in Congress cares about democracy in
Central America.

The Legacy Today

The legacy of U.S. support for repression in Honduras is
very much part of recent events.

The leader of the June 28 coup, Honduran General Romeo V
squez, is a graduate of the notorious School of the
Americas, a U.S. Army training program nicknamed "School
of Assassins" for the sizable number of graduates who
have engaged in coups, as well as the torture and murder
of political opponents. The training of coup plotters at
the program, since renamed the "Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation," isn't a bygone
feature of the Cold War: General Luis Javier Prince
Suazo, who played an important role in the coup as head
of the Honduran Air Force, graduated as recently as
1996.

Former members of Battalion 316 were involved in the
coup as well.

Unfortunately, while far more knowledgeable of recent
history than most recent presidents, Obama doesn't seem
willing to apologize, much less make amends, for U.S.
complicity in supporting repression in Latin America. I
am writing this article en route to Chile, where the
United States played a major role in the downfall of
another democratically elected leftist leader, Salvador
Allende, back in September of 1973. Just five days
before the coup in Honduras, Chilean president Michelle
Bachelet visited President Obama in Washington. When
asked by Chilean reporters whether he was willing to
apologize for the U.S. role in bloody 1973 coup and its
aftermath, Obama brushed off the suggestion by saying,
"I'm interested in going forward, not looking backward."

Meanwhile, U.S.-armed and trained security forces have
violently dispersed largely nonviolent demonstrators
protesting across the country, including shooting into a
crowd of demonstrators near the airport on Sunday,
killing two. Rather than acknowledge the widespread
popular opposition to their illegitimate rule, the
Honduran junta, like its authoritarian counterparts in
Iran, have instead tried to blame outsiders for the
unrest, in this case Cuba and Venezuela. Yet the
Honduran people, like the Iranians, don't need outside
agitators or foreign funding in order to resist. This
isn't about geopolitics but about democracy.
Unfortunately, backers of the rightist junta in
Honduras, like backers of the rightist regime in Iran,
are repeating fabricated stories of outside interference
to discredit a genuine home-grown pro-democracy
movement.

What may be at work in these U.S. and Costa Rican-led
mediation efforts is some kind of deal where Zelaya can
return, but under conditions that would preclude a
constitutional assembly, any challenges to oligarchic
interests, or any further efforts to promote economic
justice. Similar kinds of pre-conditions were forced
upon the deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, prior to U.S. assistance in his initial return
from exile in 1994.

How much the junta leaders are willing to compromise
will depend on what is going on outside the meeting
rooms.

One factor would be the ability of the pro-democracy
movement to organize, think strategically, expand their
ranks and maintain a nonviolent discipline. Fortunately,
the rebellion thus far has been largely nonviolent,
which would be far more effective in such circumstances.

For various historical reasons, Hondurans don't have the
same kind of history of armed revolution as their
neighbors. Even during the dictatorships of the 1970s
and 1980s- while the country's immediate neighbors
Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua experienced major
armed insurrections - the armed Honduran revolutionary
movement was quite small and never had much of an
impact.

By contrast, civil society organizations engaged in
strategic nonviolent conflict have grown dramatically in
recent years, including peasant organizations,
indigenous and Afro-Honduran movements, human rights
monitoring groups, environmental groups, women's groups,
an anti-militarization movement, and student groups, as
well as three major labor federations. A series of
strikes, blockages of major highways, and land seizures
occurred over the past year as civil society became
increasingly mobilized.

The second factor which could tip the balance is how
firmly the United States comes down in support for
democracy. Obama has at times been clear in his support
for the legal process, declaring, "We believe that the
coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the
democratically elected president there." Recognizing
larger implications of this stance, he added, "It would
be a terrible precedent if we start moving backward into
the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means
of political transition rather than democratic
elections."

Still, it was a full week before the United States
announced it would slash aid to Honduras, and there have
been no imminent signs of tougher sanctions. Unlike most
Latin American countries, the United States has not
withdrawn its ambassador from Tegucigalpa.

The United States, which hosts a U.S. Southern Command
task force at the Soto Cano Airbase, 50 miles northwest
of Tegucigalpa, exerts enormous influence on Honduras.
Therefore, the pressure pro-democracy forces in the
United States can bring to bear upon our government may
prove as crucial as the efforts of brave pro-democracy
forces within Honduras.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of Politics at the
University of San Francisco and a Foreign Policy In
Focus senior analyst.

___________________

HIstory of the coup in Honduras

Honduras had a new kind of coup
The upheaval epitomizes a new kind of Latin American struggle, in
which elected leftist leaders defy the status quo and test the limits
of democracy.

By Tracy Wilkinson
July 12, 2009

Reporting from Tegucigalpa, Honduras — On Saturday, June 27, the order
came down: Arrest the president.

That night, Honduran military officers stopped taking calls from U.S. officials.

At sunrise Sunday, army commanders firing warning shots into the air
marched through the back door of the president's home, rousted him
from bed and took him away, still in his pajamas.

It was over in 15 minutes. But the coup that toppled President Manuel
Zelaya was a slow boil, over many months, of an increasingly arbitrary
and provocative leader, the often-exaggerated fears of a hidebound
elite and a military with divided loyalties.

That simmering crisis exploded into one of the most serious challenges
facing Latin America in a decade. In some ways, it was a throwback to
the old Latin America, when coups and men in uniform more often than
not decided who ruled. But it was also emblematic of a struggle
underway today on the continent, where a crop of leftist leaders with
authoritarian tendencies have risen to power through elections, defied
the status quo and tested the bounds of democracy.

The following account is based on interviews with numerous Hondurans
and foreigners involved in the coup or the events that led to it. Some
details are still in dispute.

::

When he won the presidential election in 2005 by a narrow margin,
Zelaya was something of an outsider -- gruff, not fully part of the
elite that had always governed. Even Hondurans who admire him,
however, say he became enamored of the power he thought he had.

His ticket, he soon decided, was to align himself with the emerging
bloc in the region headed by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, an
erratic, charismatic populist who evokes passionate extremes of
admiration and hatred. Zelaya adopted Chavez's socialist rhetoric, his
bluster, even the gimmicky dress. (He started wearing a white cowboy
hat as his symbol.)

Zelaya managed to push through legislation that helped the poor and
ruffled the elite, including a huge raise in the minimum wage, in a
country where 40% of the population lives on less than a dollar a day.
But power was more important to him than solid ideology.

"For him, it was all about becoming a big figure," said Juan Ramon
Martinez, a historian and political analyst who had many dealings with
Zelaya. "If he had to dance the cha-cha-cha, he'd do it. If he had to
spout Marxist rhetoric, he'd do it."

Ideology might not have been important to Zelaya, but it was to his
inner circle, whose members traced their roots to Honduras' small
radical left that emerged in the 1970s. They had gone to university
together, fought against the brutal military dictatorships of the day,
suffered persecution. Eventually they went into human rights or became
lawyers, but didn't abandon their goals.

They helped coax Zelaya to the left, and last year he stepped firmly
into the Chavez camp by joining a group of Latin America's leftist
presidents formed five years ago by the Venezuelan leader and Cuba's
Fidel Castro.

With the old left gaining power, the old right leapt into action, with
businessmen and the news media at their service, hitting back at
Zelaya relentlessly.

Then came an old trauma. Zelaya began speaking of changing the
constitution, and his enemies decided he was making a move to end term
limits and so he could stay in office -- much as Chavez had done in
Venezuela.

The Honduran Constitution bars presidential reelection, a provision
born of a history replete with rulers who overstayed their welcome.
Most famously, Tiburcio Carias, a military man with close ties to the
foreign-owned fruit companies that made Honduras the original banana
republic, rewrote the constitution to stay in office from 1933 to
1949.

In March, Zelaya called for a vote June 28 to weigh support for
changing the constitution. Initially, the wording of the convocation
was innocuous enough, and momentum built behind the "consulta
popular," as it was being called. It had a lot of support among a
disaffected majority for whom Honduras' 27-year experiment in
democracy had failed to improve daily life.

On May 12, the attorney general's office ruled against holding the
vote. Zelaya ignored the order and pressed ahead with his campaign.

Congress, led by Roberto Micheletti, a transportation magnate from
Zelaya's Liberal Party, also opposed the vote. Honduras' tiny rich
class is notoriously loath to share its wealth, and members saw
Zelaya's move to tinker with the constitution as the last straw. They
organized street protests and a media blitz against the referendum.

"Never had a ruler so frightened the instruments of political and
economic power," historian Martinez said.

Pressure mounts

In mid-June, events started to veer precipitously toward disaster.

On June 12, the military high command met secretly, pointedly leaving
Zelaya out of the loop. Coup rumors that had ricocheted around the
capital for weeks grew stronger. Five days later, Zelaya's defense
minister quit, though this development would not be revealed for a
week.

Ignoring an appeals court ruling that again declared the June 28 vote
illegal, Zelaya announced that the army would help with the election
by distributing and collecting ballot boxes.

This threw the army command into turmoil: It was being tasked to carry
out an operation that had been judged illegal.

On Thursday, June 25, troops deployed throughout the capital as
Congress met to depose Zelaya. Politicians, including Micheletti,
worked to put together the legal and constitutional cover to remove a
president who was breaking the law.

The next day, La Gaceta, the government's official register of laws,
published the decree convoking the following Sunday's vote. Zelaya's
enemies contend that the wording of the final decree had been changed
in a way that would allow hasty revision of the constitution through a
constituent assembly. Non-Honduran analysts say a series of
legislative steps would still have been required.

But logic really didn't matter at this point; the die was cast.

U.S. officials apparently underestimated how serious and how advanced
the crisis was. In the final weekend before the coup, they were
frantically telephoning Honduran contacts in an attempt to avert it.
They spoke on several occasions to commanders of the Honduran army,
with which the United States has had a long relationship.

But in the hours before the coup, U.S. officials found they could no
longer reach the officers.

A defining move

Juan Ramon Martinez likes to get up early on Sundays. Quiet time to
write and think. About dawn on June 28, he was sitting at his computer
in his home a block or two from one of President Zelaya's residences.

Suddenly he heard gunfire. He stepped gingerly out the front door to
ask the young watchman what was happening. "Golpe de estado!" the man
answered in a loud whisper. A coup. Martinez turned to see a huge
soldier in battle dress standing in the street a few feet away. "Get
back in your house!" the soldier barked.

Fifteen minutes later, it was over. An army team, under the command of
a general and two colonels, had seized Zelaya.

Up to this point, the coup plotters might have been able to justify
their actions to the international community by arguing that the
military was fulfilling a legitimate court order to arrest the
president. What happened next, however, deprived them of that luxury.

The military bundled Zelaya away to a military aircraft. Still in his
pajamas, the president was flown to Costa Rica.

Even among some who supported the removal of Zelaya, the decision to
expel him went beyond the pale, and the army's chief juridical advisor
now acknowledges that the expulsion was illegal.

"It has made Honduras look bad for an action being taken to benefit a
democratic system," said Jorge Canhuate Larash, one of the country's
most powerful businessmen.

The military has assumed responsibility for what it says was a
last-minute decision to remove Zelaya from the country, arguing that
to leave him in a prison in Honduras would have invited mobs to
attempt to break him free. But many here don't think they made the
decision alone.

It is not clear what kind of role the Roman Catholic Church, another
pillar of power and influence here, played before to the coup;
Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga was at the Vatican that
week. But within days he lent fervent support to the action.

Nine days after the coup and two days after Zelaya attempted
unsuccessfully to land at the airport, the cardinal was overheard on
his cellphone to the attorney general, urging him to produce drug
trafficking evidence against Zelaya. "My son," he said, "we need that
proof. It's the only thing that will help us now."

Two days later, one of Latin America's veteran negotiators, Costa
Rican President Oscar Arias, invited Zelaya and Micheletti to his home
for talks. But the ousted leader and the man who deposed him refused
to sit in the same room.

More talks were vaguely planned, Micheletti flew back to Honduras, and
Zelaya bounced around from capital to capital, in any country that
would have him.
From the Los Angeles Times

Special correspondent Alex Renderos contributed to this report.

Honduran Coup

Hondurans Resist Coup, Will Need Help From Other Countries

By Mark Weisbrot


This column was published by The Guardian Unlimited on July 8, 2009. If anyone wants to reprint it, please include a link to the original.

The military coup that overthrew President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras took a new turn when Zelaya attempted to return home on Sunday. The military closed the airport and blocked runways to prevent his plane from landing. They also shot several protesters, killing at least one and injuring others.

The violence and the enormous crowd - estimated in the tens of thousands and reported as the largest since the coup on June 28 - put additional pressure on the Obama administration to seek a resolution to the crisis. On Tuesday Secretary of State Clinton met with President Zelaya for the first time.

In many ways this is similar to the coup in Venezuela in 2002, which was supported by the United States. After it became clear that no government other than the United States would recognize the coup government there, and hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans poured into the streets to demand the return of their elected president, the military switched sides and brought Chávez back to the presidential palace.

In Honduras we have the entire world refusing to recognize the coup government, and equally large demonstrations (in a country of only seven million people, and with the military preventing movement for many of them) demanding Zelaya's return. The problem in Honduras is that their military - unlike the Venezuelan military - has more experience in organized repression, including selective assassinations carried out during the 1980s, when the country was known as a military base for U.S. operations in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The Honduran military is also much closer to the U.S. military and State Department, more closely allied with the country's oligarchy, and more ideologically committed to the cause of keeping the elected president out of power. Colonel Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, a Honduran army lawyer who admitted that the military broke the law when they kidnapped President Zelaya, told the Miami Herald, "It would be difficult for us, with our training, to have a relationship with a leftist government. That's impossible." Mr. Inestroza, like the coup leader and army chief General Romeo Vasquez, was trained at Washington's infamous School of the Americas (now renamed as WHINSEC).

This puts a heavy burden on the people of Honduras, who have been risking their lives, confronting the army's bullets, beatings, and arbitrary arrests and detentions. The U.S. media has reported on this repression but only minimally, with the major print media sometimes failing to even to mention the censorship there. But the Honduran pro-democracy movement, through their courage, has in the last few days managed to change the course of events. It is likely that Clinton's decision to finally meet with Zelaya was the result of the large and growing protests, and Washington's fear that such resistance could reach the point where it would topple the coup government.

The Obama administration's behavior over the last eight days provides strong evidence that if not for this threat from below, the administration would have been content to let the coup government stall out the rest of Zelaya's term.

This was made clear again on Monday, at a press briefing held by State Department Spokesperson Ian Kelly. Under prodding from a reporter, Mr. Kelly became the first on-the-record spokesperson for the U.S. State Department to say officially that the U.S. government supported the return of President Zelaya. This was eight days after the coup, and after the United Nations General Assembly, the Organization of American States, the Rio Group, and many individual governments had all called for the "immediate and unconditional" return of Zelaya - something which Washington still does not talk about.

Meanwhile, on the far right, there has been a pushback against the worldwide support for Zelaya and an attempt to paint him has the aggressor in Honduras, or at least equally bad as the people who carried out the coup. Unfortunately much of the major media's reporting has aided this effort by reporting such statements as "Critics feared he intended to extend his rule past January, when he would have been required to step down."

In fact, there was no way for Zelaya to "extend his rule" even if the referendum had been held and passed, and even if he had then gone on to win a binding referendum on the November ballot. The June 28 referendum was nothing more than a non-binding poll of the electorate, asking whether the voters wanted to place a binding referendum on the November ballot to approve a redrafting of the country's constitution. If it had passed, and if the November referendum had been held (which was not very likely) and also passed, the same ballot would have elected a new president and Zelaya would have stepped down in January. So, the belief that Zelaya was fighting to extend his term in office has no factual basis - although most people who follow this story in the press seem to believe it. The most that could be said is that if a new constitution were eventually approved, Zelaya might have been able to run for a second term at some future date.

Another major right-wing theme that has spilled over into the media and public perception of the Honduran situation is that this is a battle against President Chávez of Venezuela (and some collection of "anti-U.S." leftist allies, e.g. Nicaragua, Cuba - take your pick). This is a common subterfuge that has surfaced in most of the Latin American elections of the last few years. In Mexico, Peru, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, for example, the conservative candidates all pretended as if they were running against Chávez - the first two with success, and the second pair losing.

It is true that under Zelaya Honduras joined the ALBA, a grouping of countries that was started by Venezuela as an alternative to "free trade" agreements with the United States. But Zelaya is nowhere near as close to Chávez as any number of other Latin American presidents, including those of Brazil and Argentina. So it is not clear why this is relevant, unless the argument is that only bigger countries or those located further south have the right to have a co-operative relationship with Venezuela.

As this article goes to press, Clinton has announced that she arranged for Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to serve as a mediator between the coup government and President Zelaya. According to Clinton, both parties have accepted this arrangement.

This is a good move for the U.S. State Department, as it will make it easier for them to maintain a more "neutral" position so long as mediation is taking place - as opposed to the rest of the hemisphere, which has taken the side of the deposed president and the Honduran pro-democracy movement. "I don't want to prejudge what the parties themselves will agree to," said Clinton in response to a question as to whether President Zelaya should be restored to his position.

It is difficult to see how this mediation will succeed, so long as the coup government knows that they can stall out the rest of Zelaya's term. The only thing that can remove them from office, in conjunction with massive protests, is real economic sanctions of the kind that Honduras's neighbors (Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala) imposed for 48 hours after the coup. These countries account for about a third of Honduras's trade, but they would need economic aid from other countries to carry the burden of a trade cutoff for a longer time. It would be a great thing if other countries would step forward to support such sanctions and to cut off their own trade and capital flows with Honduras as well.

So it is up to the rest of the world to help Honduras; it is clear that Hondurans won't be getting any help from the United States. The rest of the world will have to scream bloody murder about the violence and repression there, too, because Washington will not be making much of an issue about it.
Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis, and has written numerous research papers on economic policy. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy.

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S

Man in the Mirror

Honduran coup continues

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (CNN) -- Deposed Honduran President Jose Manuel Zelaya said he was denied permission to land at Tegucigalpa's airport Sunday evening amid a tense standoff between Zelaya's supporters and government troops.

Zelaya told the Venezuela-based news network Telesur that he was denied permission to land the jet in Tegucigalpa, where military vehicles were arrayed on the runway.

Soldiers lined barricades surrounding the airport in expectation of clashes between Zelaya's supporters and the provisional government that has vowed to keep him from coming back from a weeklong exile.

Before Zelaya's landing attempt, police fired warning shots and tear gas at several thousand protesters who ringed the airport and had vowed to protect the ousted president with a human cordon. Organizers said several people were wounded in the clashes.

The small jet was transporting Zelaya and United Nations General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto from Washington. The U.N. General Assembly condemned the June 28 military-led coup last week and demanded that Zelaya be reinstated.

Brazil's Lula Scolds Rich Nations on Migration

Brazil's Lula Scolds Rich Nations on Migration
AFP July 3, 2009

RIO DE JANEIRO

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva issued a
law giving tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants
legal status and criticized rich nations for taking a
tough stance against illegal migrants.

He also once again blamed the global economic crisis on
"men with blue eyes," a controversial accusation that
he first leveled during a meeting in March with British
Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

His advisors have said the expression was a "metaphor."

"Blame for the crisis that was provoked by men with
blue eyes must not fall on the blacks, the Indians, and
the poor of the world," Lula said during a speech in
Brasilia on Thursday.

He also accused European countries, without naming any
in particular, of toughening immigration rules, which
he deemed "unjust."

"In our eyes, repression, discrimination and
intolerance do not address the root of the problem," he
said.

"Illegal immigration is a humanitarian question that
should not be confused with criminality," added the
Brazilian leader, who was wearing the traditional
clothes of Bolivia and Paraguay, the home countries of
many of Brazil's immigrants.

The law issued by Lula allows all undocumented
foreigners who entered Brazil before last February to
obtain two-year provisional residency permits that can
be made permanent.

All recipients will be entitled to work and receive
public education and healthcare.

Brazil's Justice Department says there are around
60,000 undocumented foreigners in the country, but non-
governmental groups believe the number could be as high
as 200,000 illegal immigrants, with most coming from
Latin America and China.

Copyright c 2009 AFP.