Friday, July 03, 2009

Why There Was A Coup In Honduras

Crushing hope and dreams of a better society, maintaining the plutocracy, and most of all the tried and true Getting Rid of the Threat of a Good Example.

"The coup itself was an entirely traditional enterprise. Honduras is a wretchedly poor place – the third poorest in the hemisphere, where about 70 per cent of the population live in grinding poverty. President Zelaya, ousted last weekend, took office as a credentialed member of the commercial and political elite and then, against all expectation, moved to the left, as well described on this site last week by Nicholas Kozloff and other writers.

He ordered a 60 per cent increase in the minimum wage This, he declared, would “force the business oligarchy to start paying what is fair.” He joined a regional organization, the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas - known by its Spanish acronym ALBA - a socially progressive trade pact backed by Hugo Chávez of Venezuela opposing the U.S “free trade” model. He started using Chavezian rhetoric, declaring his to be “a government of great social transformations, committed to the poor.” He welcomed Cuban doctors and harshly denounced US meddling in the region.

The Honduran elite viewed Zelaya, elected to his 4-year term in 2006, with growing alarm and diligently communicated their disquiet to Washington, where the military and civilian intelligence agencies were already being primed by their substantial assets and agents inside Honduras, historically an important CIA and military staging post in Central America, from which many sinister and lethal operations in the region, such as the Contra war, were supervised.

A large number of Honduran military commanders have their own long-term relationships with the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, many of them forged during their training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Here is the notorious School of the Americas where promising officers from Argentina, Colombia, Honduras and other US allies are given training such useful skills as seizing power, hunting down leftists and torture."

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