Washington’s Invented Honduran Democracy

Washington’s Invented Honduran Democracy

by COHA Staff

• With the wave of killings now besieging the country, the White House will be hard put to provide credible evidence that it has helped found a democracy in Honduras

• It should come as no surprise that the Obama administration’s disappointing Honduran policy has done little to discourage the seventh murder of a Honduran journalist in recent days, making the tiny Central American country the world’s murder capital when it comes to gunning down media professionals with impunity.

Since the constitutionally-elected government of President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown by a military coup on June 28, 2009, Washington has dragged its feet and repeatedly has acted as an apologist in first defending the Honduran de facto government of Roberto Micheletti and its successor, the government of Porfirio Lobo Sosa. Although the (U.S. based) National Democratic Institute’s characterized Lobo’s election as democratic, it was boycotted by dozens of anti-coup candidates, carried out under conditions of state-sanctioned violence, and the UN, EU, OAS and Carter Center refused to send monitors to Honduras to evaluate the quality of the elections. Despite the U.S. position of glossing over the non-democratic aspects associated with U.S. policy towards Honduras, most of the world has established a cordon sanitaire around the tainted heir of the coup government and has blocked military, financial, and diplomatic ties to it.

Washington’s Latin American policy makers have insisted in their erratic and inconsistent policy gyrations and rapidly altered scripts that they were following a policy aimed against the protagonists of a coup d’état against the legitimate Zelaya government, but the reality of U.S. policy was another matter. The June 2009 coup that ousted Zelaya took place five months after the Obama administration had assumed office; as such, the entire affair has occurred on president Obama’s watch. In October of 2009, COHA expressed its extreme concern that conservative Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) had been playing a definitive, if not destructive role in the formulation of U.S.-Honduran foreign policy by placing a “hold” on two U.S. diplomatic nominations by the Obama White House. These included Arturo Valenzuela, who had been nominated to be Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. COHA further reported that “Senator DeMint has stated that he will release his hold on the confirmations of Valenzuela and [Thomas] Shannon [to be Ambassador to Brazil] only after the U.S. affirms that it will recognize the upcoming November elections in Honduras.”

This is exactly what came to pass as DeMint “announced the lifting of the veto since he had secured a commitment from the Obama administration to recognize the Honduran elections on November 29th.” This commitment came in the form of results of a telephone call from Secretary Clinton and Valenzuela assuring DeMint (according to the Senator) that regardless of whether President Zelaya joined a then U.S.-advocated unity government involving the major political forces in the country (as stipulated in the San José-Tegucigalpa accords), the U.S. would recognize the election’s results. In other words, the Secretary of State and Valenzuela were prepared to allow DeMint to sabotage the U.S.’s stance on Honduras by caving in on the most important Latin American-related decision of the Obama presidency based on DeMint’s terms. The amended U.S. position was at variance with the vast majority of nations in the hemisphere and the world, including most of the OAS leadership and the entire EU.

“There is no evidence that the Honduran government has been seized by any great sense of urgency regarding the danger facing working members of the Honduran press,” said Larry Birns, the director of Washington-based Council in Hemispheric Affairs, in denouncing the slaughter of seven working Honduran journalists and news people in a little over a month.

1. Joseph Ochoa (1 March, in the capital Tegucigalpa);
2. David Meza (11 March, La Ceiba);
3. Nahún Palacios (15 March, Topoa, near La Ceiba);
4. Bayardo Mairena (26 March, on a road in the province of Olancha, bordering Nicaragua)
5. Manuel Juárez (killed with Mairena)
6. Luis Antonio Chévez Hernández (12 April, San Pedro Sula)
7. Giorgino Orellana (20 April, San Pedro Sula)

To the contrary, the Honduran government has shamelessly come up with a canard attributing this rash of politically-motivated extrajudicial murders to common criminals.
in Front Page, Honduras -->

ENDS

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