Obama lets Honduras hang

So there’s one standard for Iran, and quite another for Honduras (and, at that, the US).

MCM

US leaves Honduras to its fate

Washington is unwilling to take the side of democracy in Honduras by opposing the coup leaders it helped to train
Mark Weisbrot

The military coup that overthrew President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras took a new turn when he 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 28 June – put additional pressure on the Obama administration to seek a resolution to the crisis. On Tuesday, secretary of state Hillary Clinton met Zelaya for the first time.

In many ways this is similar to the 2002 coup in Venezuela, which was supported by the US. After it became clear that no government other than the US would recognise 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 Hugo Chávez back to the presidential palace.

In Honduras, we have the entire world refusing to recognise the coup government, and equally large demonstrations (in a country of only seven million people, with the military preventing movement for many of them) demanding Zelaya’s return. The problem in Honduras is that the military – unlike Venezuela’s – is experienced in organised repression, including selective assassinations carried out during the 1980s, when the country was known as a military base for US operations in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The Honduran military is also much closer to the US 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 it kidnapped 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.” Inestroza, like the coup leader and army chief General Romeo Vasquez, was trained at Washington’s infamous School of the Americas (now renamed Whinsec).

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Originally posted:
Obama lets Honduras hang

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