Today, Secretary Clinton is meeting with ousted Honduran President, Manuel Zelaya. At issue is the current impasse between Zelaya, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the de-facto, illegitimate government of Roberto Micheletti. Also at issue is millions in aid which current law stipulates must be cut-off, should the State Department find that a military coup has in fact taken place. Some are beginning to wonder what exactly is taking so long given the US generally responds very quickly in cutting off funds to de-facto regimes where coups have taken place.
I’ve blogged about the coup in Honduras in varying degreeshere, here, here and here.
Reasonable people may disagree about whether leftist President Manuel Zelaya is good for Honduras, good for Latin America and good for the United States and people may also disagree about the implications of Zelaya’s recent political love-affair of sorts with Venezuela’s colorful leftist leader, Hugo Chavez. But that is really neither here nor there, or at least it shouldn’t be the issue (although someone forgot to tell the Republicans in Congress that). That said, it’s difficult to argue that the way in which President Zelaya was removed from office, ie. the military surrounding him in his bed in the middle of the night, guns drawn and skirting him off, against his will to another country, comports with any long-established democratic principles. This is why almost the entire international community and certainly those who consider themselves democracies, have been united in condemning the coup.
Does any of this mean President Zelaya is a great guy who had no intention of subverting Honduran law to try to increase term limits or do some other dasterdly deed? Of course not. I honestly don’t know exactly what Zelaya was up to but what I do know is that there is more to this issue than simply left vs. right ideology, which unfortunately, is how it seems to be being viewed.
Some people argue that because Zelaya broke the law and because the Honduran Supreme Court “ordered” his removal from office, the coup was therefore de facto legal. They argue that Zelaya had sought to change the constitution in a way deemed impermissible by the courts in Honduras. That argument ignores several key factors highlighted below. The first is that President Zelaya had not violated the constitution- at least not yet. I think this article does a nice job cutting through the political rhetoric and explaining exactly what Zelaya was planning to do:
Americans, relying on media reports, are likely to believe that Zelaya was ousted because he tried to use a referendum to extend his term of office. This is false.
Zelaya’s referendum, planned for the day the coup took place, was a nonbinding poll. It only asked voters if they wanted to have an actual referendum on reforming the country’s Constitution on the November ballot. Even if Zelaya had gotten everything he was looking for, a new president would have been elected on the same November ballot. So Zelaya would be out of office in January, no matter what steps were taken toward constitutional reform. Further, Zelaya has repeatedly said that if the Constitution were changed, he would not seek another term.
[snip]
So it’s up to Obama to do the right thing. He can have the U.S. Treasury freeze the coup leaders’ personal bank accounts and the assets of the coup leaders and their supporters, and deny them visas to the United States. He could also impose trade sanctions — 70 of Honduran exports go to the United States. He would have worldwide support for such steps: Both the Organization of American States and the U.N. General Assembly have voted unanimously to demand the immediate and unconditional reinstatement of Zelaya.
Almost all of the Latin American governments — which are mostly left of center — also sympathize with Zelaya because he is a reform president fighting against a corrupt oligarchy. In one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, he raised the minimum wage by 60 percent and increased teachers’ salaries and public pensions, as well as access to education.
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.[emphasis added]
The above high-lighted portion is key because it specifies what Zelaya had in mind- a non-binding poll as opposed to a referendum. Even assuming what Zelaya was planning was illegal, we (ie. democracies) generally don’t remove duly-elected presidents from office at gunpoint because of planning to do something which may be deemed illegal. Additionally, even if the Honduran courts were empowered to prevent Zelaya’s actions (similar to a US court issuing an injunction to prevent further harm while the legal issues are ironed out), generally some sort of adversarial proceedings [where both parties get to make their case and present whatever evidence allowed by the particular court] take place.
Now, I am not an expert on Honduran law but it seems to me that the issue of the legality of a “non-binding poll” vs. a referendum to per se extend Zelaya’s period in office, is exactly the type of issue which adversarial proceedings could adjudicate, after which a formal legal opinion could issue forth and all parties would go from there. As far as I have been able to tell, no such adversarial proceedings took place. Instead, the court deemed Zelaya’s actions (which was actually a plan to act) a per se violation of law without any opportunity for him to make his case in court and instead of even being arrested, he was forcibly removed from office by the military and taken to another country. I don’t want to oversimplify the legal issues involved because just as with anything, nothing is simply black and white and certainly shades of gray exist in this case, but it seems that politics has trumped reason. Just ask yourself this- if President Zelaya had been a conservative, right-leaning leader who vocally opposed the policies of Hugo Chavez and he been overthrown by a leftist, would Republicans and others be supporting the legality of the coup? Of course not.
When looking at the politics of Latin America, some historical context is helpful and about two weeks ago, the Nation Magazine provided that context to help understand what may be going on behind the scenes in the current conflict:
… In the 1980s Honduras served as a staging ground for Ronald Reagan’s anticommunist operations in neighboring Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala and as a portal for New Right Christians to roll back liberation theology. Central America’s anticommunist crusade became something of a death-squad Da Vinci Code, pulling together a carnivalesque cast that included first-generation neocons, Latin American torturers, local oligarchs, anti-Castro Cubans, mercenaries, Opus Dei ideologues and pulpit-thumping evangelicals.
The campaign to oust Zelaya and prevent his restoration has reunited old comrades from that struggle, including shadowy figures like Fernando “Billy” Joya (who in the 1980s was a member of Battalion 316, a Honduran paramilitary unit responsible for the disappearance of hundreds, and who now works as Micheletti’s security adviser) and Iran/Contra veterans like Otto Reich (who ran Reagan’s Office of Public Diplomacy, which misused public money to manipulate public opinion to support the Contra war against Nicaragua). The Honduran generals who deposed Zelaya received their military training at the height of the region’s dirty wars, including courses at the notorious School of the Americas. And the current crisis reveals a familiar schism between conservative Catholic hierarchs and evangelical Protestants who back the coup, on the one hand, and progressive Christians who are being hounded by security forces, on the other.
[snip]
In Honduras, Zelaya shook things up by raising the minimum wage and apologizing for the executions of street children and gang members carried out by security forces in the 1990s. He moved to reduce the US military presence and refused to privatize Hondutel, the state-owned telecommunications firm, a deal that Micheletti, as president of Congress, pushed.
Zelaya also vetoed legislation, likewise supported by Micheletti, that would have banned sale of the morning-after pill. Considering Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s shameful support of the Catholic Church’s position on abortion, which resulted in legislation mandating up to thirty-year jail terms for women who receive them, this was perhaps Zelaya’s most courageous move. He also accepted foreign aid, in the form of low-cost petroleum, from Venezuela. It would be impossible to overstate the Central American ruling class’s hatred of Chávez, whose hand is seen behind every peasant protest and every call to democratize the region’s politics and economics. The president of a Honduran business council recently said Chávez “had Honduras in his mouth. He was a cat with a mouse that got away.”
The fixation on Chávez usefully diverts attention from the gnawing poverty in the region, as well as from the failure of the neoliberal economic model promoted by Washington in recent decades. Forty percent of Central Americans, and more than 50 percent of Hondurans, live in poverty. The Chávez mania also distracts from the fact that under Washington’s equally disastrous “war on drugs,” crime cartels, deeply rooted in the military and traditional oligarchic families, have rendered much of Central America into what the Washington Office on Latin America calls “captive states.”
For the White House, Honduras is proving to be an unexpectedly difficult foreign-policy test. After condemning the coup, Obama handed the crisis to the State Department. Rather than working with the Organization of American States (OAS), Secretary of State Clinton unilaterally charged Oscar Arias with brokering a compromise, ignoring the concerns of most other Latin American governments that negotiations would grant too much legitimacy to the coup. Clinton has so far been unwilling to apply a range of possible sanctions, including freezing the bank accounts of those who carried out the coup, to force Micheletti to accept the Arias plan. And for those who see Micheletti as the last line against the spread of Chavismo–be it in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador or elsewhere in the Americas–the return of Zelaya, even just to finish the few months left in his term, is unacceptable.
In the late 1970s the Sandinista revolution revealed the limits of Jimmy Carter’s tolerance of Third World nationalism. The more Carter tried to appease hawks in his administration, the more he was accused of vacillating, thus paving the way for neoconservatives, under Reagan, to use Central America to showcase their hard line.
A similar dynamic is taking place today. Republicans have rallied around Micheletti, sending a Congressional delegation led by Connie Mack to visit Tegucigalpa. Taking a page out of the Latin American right’s playbook, they have red-baited Obama by associating him with Chávez. Obama, said Texas Senator John Cornyn, “must stand with the Honduran people, not with Hugo Chávez.” It’s the kind of grandstanding that Republicans, absent a domestic agenda, have come to rely on. Venezuela’s position on Honduras is identical to that of Brazil and Chile–and, for that matter, the European Union. But the right-wing attacks are effective, largely because self-described liberals repeatedly indulge in the demonization not just of Chávez, as Lanny Davis recently did, but of leftists like Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador.
In early August the State Department seemed to give ground to Republicans, stating in a letter to Republican Senator Richard Lugar that Zelaya’s “provocative actions…unleashed the events that led to his removal.” This statement, as well as other tepid efforts to pressure Micheletti, bodes ill for the Obama administration’s willingness to stand up to right-wing pressure.
[snip]
The failure to restore Zelaya to power will send a clear message to Latin American conservatives that Washington will tolerate coups, provided they are carried out under a democratic guise…
All of the above is why the current situation in Honduras seems to be, at least to hear the media, the pundits and the politicians tell it, less about the facts and more about whether one agrees with the leftist policies of Hugo Chavez and Manuel Zelaya and continuing to enable certain trade policies and powerful, monied business interests in Latin America. Make no mistake, when one looks at the supporters of Zelaya and the supporters of Micheletti, the class implications are difficult to ignore:
…it’s no secret that the President was at odds politically with the Honduran elite for the past few years and had become one of Washington’s fiercest critics in the region.
Zelaya committed his first sin when he began to criticize the media and owners of sweatshops which “produced goods for export in industrial free zones.” Kozloff reports that Zelaya began to adopt some socially progressive policies that included a minimum wage, drug legalization, and bilateral relations with Cuba. Zelaya sealed his fate when he joined the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, an alliance of leftist Latin American and Caribbean nations headed by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.
The Hondurans have reacted to this coup with as much gusto as the Iranians did during their supposed election fraud. The military has shut down public transportation and put up roadblocks to prevent protesters from reaching the capital. ¡Presente!’s Kristin Bricker writes that unknown numbers of citizens have taken to the streets, and she even includes photos in her report that are available for the taking by any network (CNN, MSNBC, FOX).
Somehow, the U.S. media isn’t picking up on these details. A democratically elected president has been ousted by a military strongly supported and trained by the US government as apparent punishment for his adoption of progressive ideals. Where is the outrage, or at the least, the intrigue? Where are the solidarity movements?
…
One rather large problem the Micheletti government is having with respect to ensuring it’s democratic legitimacy in the face of international outrage, is that it essentially admitted it should have arrested President Zelaya[ie. initiated the democratic, adversarial legal process] rather than invoking the military and forcibly removing him from office:
Acting Honduran President Roberto Micheletti said forcing deposed President Manuel Zelaya to leave the country, instead of arresting him, was a mistake.
“There was an error by a certain sector,” Micheletti said today in an interview in Tegucigalpa. “It wasn’t correct. We have to punish whoever allowed that to happen. The rest was framed within what the constitution requires.”
Micheletti repeated that the military was following the law when soldiers seized Zelaya at his house early June 28 because he had ignored court rulings and was illegally seeking to change the constitution in order to run for office again. A mistake was made when Zelaya, still wearing pajamas, was put on a plane to Costa Rica instead of being held for trial, Micheletti said.
[snip]
Supporters of the interim government say that Zelaya became too closely aligned with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his plan for “21st-century socialism” after being elected in 2005. Zelaya signed the nation up for aid programs including Petrocaribe, which offered oil at discounted prices.
Approval of his government fell to a record 30 percent in February from a high of 57 percent in January 2007, according to a nationwide poll by CID-Gallup.
Honduras’s business leaders are “paranoid about Chavez, and that’s probably unwarranted,” said Kevin Casas Zamora, a former vice president of Costa Rica and fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The real and perceived closeness between Zelaya and Hugo Chavez is the absolute essence of this crisis as seen from the lens of the Honduran elite.”
…
Given the military overthrow of Zelaya and the Micheletti government’s resulting crack-down on the media and civil liberties such as freedom to assemble and freedom of speech, not to mention the imprisonment and abuse of pro-Zelaya supporters, one would think the American media would be all over this issue, particularly given it comes on the heels of having watched protesters in the streets of Iran being beaten and killed by a government intent on squelching dissent. Yes, one would think. But one would be wrong. The media and the Obama administration itself have been eerily silent about the human rights abuses taking place right this minute in Honduras. So, what gives? Perhaps this:
But when viewed from the closer physical (Miami is just 800 miles from Honduras) and historical proximity of the United States, the differences between Iran and Honduras are marked and clear in important ways: the M-16’s pointing at this very moment at the thousands of peaceful protesters are paid for with U.S. tax dollars and still carry a “Made in America” label; the military airplane in which they kidnapped and exiled President Zelaya was purchased with the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid the Honduran government has been the benefactor of since the Cold War military build-up that began in 1980’s; the leader of the coup, General Romeo Vasquez, and many other military leaders repressing the populace received “counterinsurgency” training at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the infamous “School of the Americas,” responsible for training those who perpetrated the greatest atrocities in the Americas.
The big difference between Iran and Honduras? President Obama and the U.S. can actually do something about a military crackdown that our tax dollars are helping pay for. That Vasquez and other coup leaders were trained at the WHINSEC, which also trained Agusto Pinochet and other military dictators responsible for the deaths, disappearances, tortures of hundreds of thousands in Latin America, sends profound chills throughout a region still trying to overcome decades U.S.-backed militarism.
Hemispheric concerns about the coup were expressed in the rapid, historic and almost universal condemnation of the plot by almost all Latin American governments. Such concerns in the region represent an opportunity for the United States. But, while the Honduran coup represents a major opportunity for Obama to make real his recent and repeated calls for a “new” relationship to the Americas, failure to take actions that send a rapid and unequivocal denunciation of the coup will be devastating to the Honduran people — and to the still-fragile U.S. image in the region.
Recent declarations by the Administration — expressions of “concern” by the President and statements by Secretary of State Clinton recognizing Zelaya as the only legitimate, elected leader of Honduras — appear to indicate preliminary disapproval of the putsch. Yet, the even more unequivocal statements of condemnation from U.N. President Miguel D’Escoto, the Organization of American States, the European Union, and the Presidents of Argentina, Costa Rica and many other governments raise greatly the bar of expectation before the Obama Administration…[emphasis added]
As usual, the media has been ignoring the plight of the most economically disadvantaged of the pro-Zelaya supporters in Honduras, and particularly it’s women:
On the morning of June 28, women’s organizations throughout Honduras were preparing to promote a yes vote on the national survey to hold a Constitutional Assembly. Then the phones lines started buzzing.
In this poor Central American nation, feminists have been organizing for years in defense of women’s rights, equality and against violence. When the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya was forcibly exiled by the armed forces, women from all over the country spontaneously organized to protect themselves and their families and demand a return to democracy. They called the new umbrella organization “Feminists in Resistance.”
On Aug. 18, Feminists in Resistance sat down with women from the international delegation for Women’s Human Rights Week, which they organized to monitor and analyze human rights violations and challenges for the organization. One after another they told their stories in a long session that combined group therapy and political analysis–a natural mix at this critical point in Honduran history and the history of their movement.
Miriam Suazo relates the events of the day of the coup. “On the 28th, women began calling each other, saying ‘what’s happening?’” At first no-one really understood the full extent of the coup, she says, but networks mobilized quickly and women began to gather to share information and plan actions. Independent feminists and feminists from different organizations immediately identified with each other and with the rising resistance to the coup. They began going out to help those who had been beaten and to trace individuals arrested by security forces.
For some, the shock of waking up to a coup d’état wasn’t new.
“This is my third coup,” relates Marielena. “I was girl when the coup in 1963 happened. Then I lived through the coup in 1972. We lived in front of a school and I saw how my mother faced the bullets, we thought they were going to kill her… Later in the university in the ’80s I lived through the repression with many of the women here… So this has revived the story of my life.”
There is a saying in Honduras about the Central American dirty war that “While the U.S. had its eye on Nicaragua and its hands in El Salvador, it had its boot on Honduras.” For the older women who remember the terror of that time when over 200 people were disappeared and hundreds tortured and assassinated, the current coup stirs up deep fears. Gilda Rivera, director of the Center for Women’s Rights in Tegucigalpa, says, “I’ve had a messed-up life. I was among the students kidnapped by Billy Joya in the ’80s… Now I’ve been to the border twice, I’ve lived with a curfew over my head. Sometimes I wake up alone, terrified…”
Ah, yes, the women. They always seem to get hit the hardest in situations like these, don’t they? And as usual, the media has been eerily silent about their plight.
Very soon today Secretary Clinton will be meeting with President Zelaya and I think that if anyone can broker some sort of solution that does not involve completely validating the Micheletti government’s actions, she can.
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