The truth about Honduras?

Investors Business Daily has a feel-good editorial piece this weekend about how USA chose the correct side in Honduras and helped to spread "freedom". As if! USA is not a charity.

Anyway, if you've ever read General Smedley Butler's piece entitled: War is a Racket, you will see that around the 1900's the Dole company and other companies used the USA army to conquer and spread their business in South America.

Some things never change?

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Honduras: Military Coup Engineered By Two US Companies?

By John Perkins

August 07, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- I recently visited Central America. Everyone I talked with there was convinced that the military coup that had overthrown the democratically-elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, had been engineered by two US companies, with CIA support. And that the US and its new president were not standing up for democracy.

Earlier in the year Chiquita Brands International Inc. (formerly United Fruit) and Dole Food Co had severely criticized Zelaya for advocating an increase of 60% in Honduras’s minimum wage, claiming that the policy would cut into corporate profits. They were joined by a coalition of textile manufacturers and exporters, companies that rely on cheap labor to work in their sweatshops.

Memories are short in the US, but not in Central America. I kept hearing people who claimed that it was a matter of record that Chiquita (United Fruit) and the CIA had toppled Guatemala’s democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and that International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), Henry Kissinger, and the CIA had brought down Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. These people were certain that Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been ousted by the CIA in 2004 because he proposed a minimum wage increase, like Zelaya’s.

I was told by a Panamanian bank vice president, “Every multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly rate, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean will have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom line for minimum wages. The big companies are determined to stop what they call a ‘leftist revolt’ in this hemisphere. In throwing out Zelaya they are sending frightening messages to all the other presidents who are trying to raise the living standards of their people.”

It did not take much imagination to envision the turmoil sweeping through every Latin American capital. There had been a collective sign of relief at Barack Obama’s election in the U.S., a sense of hope that the empire in the North would finally exhibit compassion toward its southern neighbors, that the unfair trade agreements, privatizations, draconian IMF Structural Adjustment Programs, and threats of military intervention would slow down and perhaps even fade away. Now, that optimism was turning sour.

The cozy relationship between Honduras’s military coup leaders and the corporatocracy were confirmed a couple of days after my arrival in Panama. England’s The Guardian ran an article announcing that “two of the Honduran coup government's top advisers have close ties to the US secretary of state. One is Lanny Davis, an influential lobbyist who was a personal lawyer for President Bill Clinton and also campaigned for Hillary. . . The other hired gun for the coup government that has deep Clinton ties is (lobbyist) Bennett Ratcliff.” (1)

DemocracyNow! broke the news that Chiquita was represented by a powerful Washington law firm, Covington & Burling LLP, and its consultant, McLarty Associates (2). President Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder had been a Covington partner and a defender of Chiquita when the company was accused of hiring “assassination squads” in Colombia (Chiquita was found guilty, admitting that it had paid organizations listed by the US government as terrorist groups “for protection” and agreeing in 2004 to a $25 million fine). (3) George W. Bush’s UN Ambassador, John Bolton, a former Covington lawyer, had fiercely opposed Latin American leaders who fought for their peoples’ rights to larger shares of the profits derived from their resources; after leaving the government in 2006, Bolton became involved with the Project for the New American Century, the Council for National Policy, and a number of other programs that promote corporate hegemony in Honduras and elsewhere.

McLarty Vice Chairman John Negroponte was U.S. Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-1985, former Deputy Secretary of State, Director of National Intelligence, and U.S. Representative to the United Nations; he played a major role in the U.S.-backed Contra’s secret war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and has consistently opposed the policies of the democratically-elected pro-reform Latin American presidents. (4) These three men symbolize the insidious power of the corporatocracy, its bipartisan composition, and the fact that the Obama Administration has been sucked in.

The Los Angeles Times went to the heart of this matter when it concluded:

What happened in Honduras is a classic Latin American coup in another sense: Gen. Romeo Vasquez, who led it, is an alumnus of the United States' School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). The school is best known for producing Latin American officers who have committed major human rights abuses, including military coups. (5)

All of this leads us once again to the inevitable conclusion: you and I must change the system. The president – whether Democrat or Republican – needs us to speak out.

Chiquita, Dole and all your representatives need to hear from you. Zelaya must be reinstated.

FOOTNOTES

 

Total rubbish. Zelaya was planning a Hugo Chavez-style presidency for life. Chavez was even furnishng ballots for the illegal referendum he tried to run. The fact is the Supreme Court of Honduras ruled his actions to be illegal and his own party in the legislature voted to remove him.

This was hardly a coup. It was a rare example in latin america of the rule of law. It prevented another marxist takeover of a latin american country. The fact that obama and the State Department backed this traitor and tried to have him reinstated in office was an outrage.

 

This statement is speculative.

AAAintheBeltway, do you agree or not that the coup in Honduras was planned in the US (CIA or both banana companies - doesn't matter) and financed with US money?

 

US has treated Western Hemisphere as its personal playground since 19th century. It began with the monroe doctrine and only got worse.

 

President for life may be speculative, but isn't that how you would characterize Chavez? The fact is that the Honduran constitution explicitly forbids altering the provision limiting the president to one term. He tried to do it anyway and the Supreme Court rejected the referendum, so he tried to end run them by getting Chavez to provide the ballots, etc. I don;t see that as democracy in action. I see it as one marxist helping hisprotege subvert democracy.

I reject the label "coup" for what happened. "Coup" implies a lawless transfer of power. The Supreme Court approved his removal and hisown party in the legislature approved it. Another official ofhis party assumed the office, not a general. Thereis an election scheduled in a few months nayway, so the whole thing wil become moot. Of course, subverting that election was why there was all the incessant leftist pressure to return him to office.

I see no evidence that the CIA was involved. Since Obama supports these marxists, why would his CIA be trying to get rid of him? Makes zero sense.

 

I agree Chavez is a ''president for life'' kind of asshole. Poor Venezuelians.

Looks like you have a more detailed knowledge of the situation in Honduras than I do, which is promising for the thread as I think the Latin America has been the neglected region in this forum.

Hope this thread develops.

CIA was involved in many operations on behalf US corporations in Latin America in the past under the Monroe Doctrine. It seems natural to me that many people would look for cast supporting a thesis of CIA's involvent in anything that happens in this region, Honduras case inclusive.

It also seems natural to me that some Latin America's leaders when faced with the choice of either (i) to be a US puppet or (ii) get killed by CIA's jackals, sometimes manage to survive and end up as marxists (Castro and Chavez)

Marxism is a standard deviation in Latin America

As far as Obama goes, he is a socialists - for sure. His socialism is however far from pure marxism to the best of my belief. Any evidence of Obama suporting Latin marxists?

 

<img src=http://www.foxnews.com/politics/img/Obama_Chavez_041809.jpg>

<img src=http://nicedeb.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/obama-chavez.jpg>

<A href="http://thinkexist.com/quotes/hugo_chavez/">Some Chavez quotes</a>

It's not solid evidence of The One supplying arms and fake ballots to Chavez, but it is disheartening to see an American President treating with such a person.

 

I recollect ''the book incident''. Chavez disregarded the diplomatic protocol, came up to Obama at a conference and handed a book to the surprised US president. To me it looked as if Obama was laughing at Chavez, not laughing with Chavez.

Far from supporting.

 

One we didn't see here

 

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/index.php

Don't tell me, all you assholes are "men of the people" right.
GTFOH.