U.S. calls Honduran coup a coup, cuts aid, might not recognize November election results

BrainGlutton · September 4, 2009, 11:57pm

Story here and here. (Followup to this thread.)

So, now pretty much the entire Western Hemisphere opposes the Micheletti government and wants Zelaya restored to the presidency.

But will it make any difference? Obviously nobody wants to go to the extreme of military intervention, and will anything less make the coup regime let go?

bri1600bv · September 5, 2009, 12:21am

How was it a coup? Didn’t the supreme court say he had to go as he was doing illegal things? Do they not know their own laws?

If they have a new election, how could anyone justify not recognizing it?

Military intervention to install a dictatorship? How does that make sense?

BrainGlutton · September 5, 2009, 12:28am

:rolleyes: Have you been following this at all? Zelaya was never a dictator, nor plotting to make himself one; and the Honduran Supreme Court does not have the authority, and never did, to order the military to throw the president out of the country.

Qin_Shi_Huangdi · September 5, 2009, 12:32am

I can’t believe our President and Cabinet is selling out an ally who merely had an enforced impeachment. Suppose Richard Nixon had refused to leave the White House: would it be justified for the Secret Service or the military to go in and forcibly make him leave? It’s the same thing here and it’s outrageous President Obama is condemning President Micheletti while at the same time trying to be chummy with Castro and Chavez.

Oakminster · September 5, 2009, 12:37am

If Nixon hadn’t resigned, he’d have been impeached, and likely convicted. At that point, he’s gonna de-ass the White House whether he wants to or not. I suspect it would be the U.S. Marshall Service’s job to actually drag him out of the building

GIGObuster · September 5, 2009, 1:48am

:rolleyes:

Care to explain from where the Honduran army pulled a resignation document signed by Zelaya from? When the courts only told then that Zelaya was supposed to be arrested not expelled?

That document, that all logic and history shows that it was illegally obtained if not a fake, was used then by the Honduran congress to appoint Micheletti.

It was a coup, even the so called unanimous vote of the congress to select Micheletti was a fake:

Like many fellow Hondurans, I suffered the repression of the 1970s dictatorships firsthand. In 1975, I had to flee into exile for seven years with my husband after the regime targeted him for his involvement with labor and peasant movements. The coup d’etat and the repression that has followed have brought back terrible memories of a time that we hoped was buried in the past. The coup has also been the moral downfall of Micheletti, who through his actions destroyed the democratic credentials he had built over his career. Our Constitution does not allow Congress to remove a president from office, as it did under Micheletti’s direction on June 28. The judicial actions invoked to justify the detention of the president also go against our Constitution. Micheletti’s regime deported President Zelaya from the country without even trying him for an alleged crime, something to which even the worst criminal has a right.

Moreover, on top of being unconstitutional, the vote to approve the destitution of Zelaya was not transparent. I am a member of our Congress’ Executive Committee, yet I was not summoned to participate in the vote to approve the president’s removal, nor were another 20 fellow Liberal Party members of Congress. The regime then tried to fool the world by claiming there was a unanimous congressional decision supporting the coup, even though some 27 congress members publicly voiced their opposition.

The international community has rejected the de facto regime’s belated legal, moral and political justifications for the coup. This was not only a coup d’etat against President Zelaya, but a coup against all the leaders and institutions of the Americas. It could have a destabilizing effect on the region, and act as a distraction from grave problems such as terrorism, poverty and climate change.

Qin_Shi_Huangdi · September 5, 2009, 1:58am

It’s still not a coup. The majority of Congress has supported and the will of the people in Honduras has been done.

GIGObuster · September 5, 2009, 2:16am

:rolleyes:

Then why the lies from the Honduran coup supporters? It was a lie to say that it was an unanimous vote, and anyone can see that you refused to answer my questions. The only thing you are demonstrating here is willful ignorance. The important question to ask here is: who told you to accept the propaganda that it was not a coup?

The last poll I saw showed that a majority of Hondurans supported Zelaya after the coup.

Mind you, not all support his return, but most **oppose **the current clowns that took power.

And no other nation on earth has supported the new “government”.

smiling_bandit · September 5, 2009, 2:29am

Just for starters, Zelaya was attempting to screw wildly with the polity in order to stay in office. Judging by the fact they found the results of his planned referendum on legitimizing his rule before the referendum occured, this was a real danger. You can argue that the military carried out a “coup,” buty it’s not a good argument. The “coup” involved the removal of a wildly unpopular President who was feared to be cheating the laws to establish a dictatorship and facing off against the entire rest of the government. In those situations, he ought to be thankful he didn’t end up dead.

Frostillicus · September 5, 2009, 2:35am

The coup was justified because Zeyala was guilty of pre-crimes. Got it.

GIGObuster · September 5, 2009, 2:47am

No nation on earth would had supported that result either.

The coup makes no sense whatsoever, unless, the internal polling of the coup plotters told them that the question to **allow **a vote on calling for changes in the constitution was going to win. (If you read a conservative screed telling you that it was a referendum to allow Zelaya to continue to be the president after the next elections, they lied to you).

Cheating? When he had no control of the army, congress or the courts? If they told the truth it would be clear that Zelaya would had lost in his attempt to set a vote to change the constitution, and then if Zelaya had remained in power after the next elections, then all the world (except some silly leftists) would condemn and apply sanctions to his government.

BrainGlutton · September 5, 2009, 3:33am

There was no “impeachment.” It was a military coup d’etat plain and simple.

Qin_Shi_Huangdi · September 5, 2009, 3:15pm

While the Congress’ vote had not been unanimous it was by a majority to remove Zelaya from office.

bri1600bv · September 5, 2009, 3:35pm

So he should be arrested and not expelled.

They have a new election in November, why not just accept the results of that election w/o the dictator wannabe who tried to rip up the constitution getting his “vote”.

Why insist on installing the dictator wannabe?

Why did the Supreme Court say he should be arrested? Do they not know their own laws?

GIGObuster · September 5, 2009, 3:47pm

A crime is a crime, even if a million people approve of it. (And the majority of Hondurans and the world do not swallow the propaganda of the coup supporters.)

The reality is that several crimes were committed before congress got to vote on it, corruption of that scale can not be tolerated. And I have to talk here from experience: The Honduran government has a history of being one of the most reactionary ones. Most government positions there depend or are possible only with the approval of the rich and powerful in Honduras. Any change that could come as a result of real democracy has been minimized or stopped by any means. (Calls to change the Honduran constitution are not coming just from Zelaya)

Putting a patina of democracy on this coup is ridiculous. In Ecuador in 2000 the people revolted and removed the president, it did not matter if most of the people supported the removal of an elected president, international pressure was applied to remove the coup plotters from power. The Ecuadorians learned the lesson and later elected a leftist government thanks to the ballot box and not with violent means.

It is now the turn of the right in Honduras (and some in the US too) to learn the lesson that democracy can not be dropped when it is inconvenient to the powers that be.

And it is your turn still to explain why is it that you are avoiding answering the questions.

Qin_Shi_Huangdi · September 5, 2009, 4:08pm

GIGObuster:

A crime is a crime, even if a million people approve of it. (And the majority of Hondurans and the world do not swallow the propaganda of the coup supporters.)

The reality is that several crimes were committed before congress got to vote on it, corruption of that scale can not be tolerated. And I have to talk here from experience: The Honduran government has a history of being one of the most reactionary ones. Most government positions there depend or are possible only with the approval of the rich and powerful in Honduras. Any change that could come as a result of real democracy has been minimized or stopped by any means. (Calls to change the Honduran constitution are not coming just from Zelaya)

Putting a patina of democracy on this coup is ridiculous. In Ecuador in 2000 the people revolted and removed the president, it did not matter if most of the people supported the removal of an elected president, international pressure was applied to remove the coup plotters from power. The Ecuadorians learned the lesson and later elected a leftist government thanks to the ballot box and not with violent means.

It is now the turn of the right in Honduras (and some in the US too) to learn the lesson that democracy can not be dropped when it is inconvenient to the powers that be.

And it is your turn still to explain why is it that you are avoiding answering the questions.

Look, it’s already happened now anyway. And Honduras now has a more friendly President, if it’s already happened just accept the situation.

GIGObuster · September 5, 2009, 6:43pm

:rolleyes:

Tell that to the Marines.

The ones that were training Honduras troops there against the war on drugs.

Don’t act like if you can ignore that corruption at that scale is not or will be also involved in the drug traffic that comes to America.

As long as they suffer sanctions from the whole world and continue to refuse to budge it is clear that they are not budging because they know that organized crime will help fund the efforts of the coup plotters.

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/

Three Paths: Electoral, Armed or Something Else

The social movements in Honduras find themselves in a dilemma with no ideal solution when it comes to the scheduled November 29 elections, devoid of any Cuarta Urna, and managed by a coup regime that has already demonstrated it cares not a whit for democratic process or such quaint concepts as the will of the people. Monsters that engage in coups d’etat won’t hesitate to utilize electoral fraud if they have to, and everybody knows it. No reasonable observer thinks that such “elections” can possibly be fair or free under a regime that establishes curfews, suspends basic constitutional liberties and pours acid on critical broadcast transmitters any time it feels the slightest bit threatened by nonviolent civil resistance from below.

If the Honduran social movements decide to participate in the November 29 simulation, they risk legitimizing a game that is already fixed against them. At the same time, because of the fracture in the Liberal Party between its golpistas and anti-golpistas, there would certainly be vast gains by the Democratic Union Party, gathering what the Liberals and their hapless standard bearer, former Vice President Elvin Santos, have spilled. And it would lead to a lot more of them in the national Congress, which is the body that can place a Cuarta Urna on the ballot, if not in 2009, then perhaps in 2010.

The opposition electoral forces are also plagued by tactical disagreements in their own ranks: While the UD Party nominated César Ham as its presidential candidate, another opposition personality, labor leader Carlos Reyes, is also on the ballot as the country’s first-ever Independent presidential candidate, one without a political party. UD leaders like Congresswoman Silvia Ayala tell Narco News that they’re suspicious that the country’s Electoral Tribunal put the Independent on the ballot – an unprecedented development in Honduran politics - to divide the opposition vote. Others, like labor movement veteran Pedro Brizuela in the San Pedro Sula region, express positive feelings about both Ham and Reyes but suggest that the somewhat older Reyes might be the stronger possible candidate to unite behind. And, finally, an important sector of the left simply will boycott any election called by the illegitimate coup regime, which makes victory virtually impossible even without the predicted electoral fraud due to suppressed voter turnout by an ambivalent population.

The eight nations that belong to ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas – Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Venezuela – have declared they will not recognize the winner of Honduran elections held under a coup regime, and its highly probable that neither will the Organization of American States (OAS).

And so the electoral path, if not fully closed, is littered with enough obstacles and landmines that those that haven’t disregarded it yet will likely come to that conclusion a day late and a dollar short, on November 30 of this year, once its tragedy is fully realized.

Upon collapse of the idea that fixed elections hold a path out of the coup, talk in some corners turns to armed struggle: of mounting a guerrilla war. There are always those of limited imagination who see only two paths possible: electoral or armed. Yet the most basic rule of guerrilla combat is one has to measure the “correlation of forces” before marching out on that highly exposed limb.

That correlation, if objectively analyzed, does not at present contain the successful ingredients that would be necessary to overturn the coup through the barrel of a gun. Unlike neighboring Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala – where well organized guerrilla movements have both won and lost against entrenched oligarchies and coups d’etat – Honduras has little experience in a field that, over recent decades, technology has made even more difficult. Unlike in the 1970s, when the Sandinistas in Nicaragua toppled the Somoza regime and when the FMLN in El Salvador came extremely close to doing the same for its nation, today there are telecommunications satellites orbiting above the earth that make clandestine insurgency, even in jungle terrain, virtually impossible. Ubiquitous cell phones, the Internet and the surveillance they bring with them over their own users add to the impediments.

**Advocates for the armed path – they tend to speak in whispers, and certainly have not yet organized wide support for that scenario – accurately point out that there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of Hondurans at present so committed to winning back their country that an armed resistance could conceivably outnumber and even overpower the 9,000 members of the Honduran Armed Forces and the 14,000 National Police, perhaps, maybe if everything went right. True, but that measurement of the correlation of forces omits another powerful sector: that of organized crime.

That narco-traffickers and other crime organizations are heavily armed in Central America is no secret. In the upper echelons of this milieu are the international crime syndicates, including the ex-Cuban supporters of terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles as well as Mexican and Colombian traffickers displaced by the preference by governments in those lands for competing crime organizations. Honduras, under a coup regime that is now cut off from much legal international aid, has put up the “welcome” sign to these bandits in search of a new flag to provide them with safe haven for their activities along the cocaine route between Colombia and the United States in exchange for the vast resources they bring.

And then there are the retail level narcos. As the above-mentioned US AID report notes, “According to police statistics, at the end of 2003, there were 36,000 gang members in Honduras.” Whether that estimate is exaggerated or undercounted its number has surely grown since then, and these must also be measured in the correlation of forces. Confronted with a guerrilla insurgency, the coup regime and its police agencies would have it in their power to bring these notoriously brutal armed sectors of organized crime into the counter-insurgency, and to do so literally overnight. Simply with a promise of impunity for their commerce in contraband, the coup regime can enlist the full weight of such armed organizations, networks and gangs to bring a wave of terror not just against any armed insurgency, but also against all social players that remain peacefully in resistance, and - coup defenders should be careful what they wish for - the vast law abiding civilian population, including middle and upper class coup supporters, expats and tourists, too. The demons would be unleashed upon the entire population, not just those from one political camp.**

An honest assessment of the correlation of forces has to conclude that, at present, both the electoral and armed paths that have changed history in other lands are closed, or about to shut, in Honduras.

The reality is that the next elections are bound to be a joke. Any reforms that were done recently by Zelaya are being eliminated. But I don’t care much about Zelaya, I care that what I see in Honduras is just a dictatorship with a democratic patina.

So, we should accept that situation and its deterioration when most of the Honduran people don’t support that?

And if you want to be taken seriously please answer my original questions, be useful so at least we can record who is giving you those rotten ideas.

GIGObuster · September 5, 2009, 6:51pm

And it seems that Curtis LeMay is just counting on the right wing media for the news.

The media that is telling him that “Nothing is happening in Honduras, [After the coup] everything is fine”

GIGObuster · September 5, 2009, 7:12pm

And even more people that do not accept the situation:

http://www.narconews.com/Issue59/article3782.html

The night before the August 20 march, in the gazebo of the city’s central park, protesters put up pictures of the violence meted out by the police against protesters, including images of journalists and photographers being beaten, and the bodies of those killed. Many protesters had a shirt that said, ”Nos tienen miedo porque no tenemos miedo,” or “They fear us because we have no fear.” If the government’s violence was intended to intimidate and break up the organization of Zelaya supporters, it has done the complete opposite.

Given scant coverage of their protests that they believe often misconstrues the events, the popular media is also viewed by the protesters as a source of repression. They feel that their views are not represented by the major media outlets, which are controlled by people who supported the president’s removal. As a result, they take to the streets in the hope that direct expression will reach their fellow Hondurans, as well as the world.

To that end, as I walked through and among the march and spoke with so many people, I felt the necessity to try and communicate what I had seen, to try and counter the misinformation that has dominated Honduran and world news. I felt, and continue to feel, that the protests exemplify a stirring, healthy constitutional dialogue: a group of citizens are peacefully expressing their views about what their government is doing, about the human rights that they demand must be respected, and continually linking this to their constitution and the future of their country. The leaders of the protest at one point stopped their protesting, and directed their attention to me. Over the loudspeaker, they told everyone about the American “gringo” in the presence who had been running around, talking to people and taking pictures, and how he was going to spread the news about what they were doing to the world. I tried the New York Times with the story, but never heard back. So here is my best attempt at spreading a bit of information, and a few pictures, from a group of loud, determined, peaceful people in Honduras who hope their government, and the world, can hear them.

Sam_Stone · September 5, 2009, 7:54pm

So, would you be happy to see a Honduran election in November, under the condition that A) Zelaya would be allowed to run as a candidate, and B) the election were closely monitored by outside agencies?

Obama’s going to be on the losing end of another issue if these elections take place and his administration refuses to recognize them. So it might be a strategically better option to come out now and say that whatever happened in the past, the election in November was scheduled long ago, and this is the Honduran people’s chance to right a wrong if that’s what they think it was. He can express worry that the new regime will rig the election, and demand oversight from international inspectors to make sure the election is carried out fairly.

Would that be okay with you?

By the way, wasn’t Zelaya’s term supposed to end in November anyway? If they reinstated him, wouldn’t he be leaving office in a month? Constitutionally, he’s not allowed to run again. Or does he have one more term before the constitutional limit kicks in?