On Friday July 24, ousted President Manuel Zelaya crossed into Honduras after coup president Roberto Micheletti refused the terms negotiated by Nobel Peace Prize winner Costa Rican President Oscar Arias this weekend which would have restored Zelaya to power under a reconciliation government. He crossed with hundreds of supporters forming a circle around him in as protection but he had to retreat to avoid bloodshed. The military had blocked many more supporters 10 kilometers before the border. Zelaya asked for a private meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff General, Romeo Vasquez to restore peace.
On June 28th in the early morning President Zelaya was awoken to four gunshots. Kidnapped by a general, two colonels and 200 soldiers on the eve of the referendum vote, he was taken at gunpoint in his pajamas and flown to Costa Rica. That morning the coup planners followed through with their takeover of the government with electrical blackouts across the major cities and the shutting down of phone and cellular services.
The right wing media owners played cartoons or music rather than report the news that morning. The public television station and other TV and radio stations that supported Zelaya were shutdown. Roberto Micheletti, formerly president of congress and a newspaper owner, was sworn in as president. Judges filed 18 trumped up charges against Zelaya and a phony letter of resignation was presented to the media in an effort to make the military overthrow seem legitimate. People took to the streets in protests but the military had set up barricades and checkpoints on the major roads.
A curfew was enacted which the police and military have used to capture Zelaya cabinet members, social justice activists and journalists during home raids. CNN and most other international journalists have been kicked out of the country. Telesur journalists were beat up, threatened and told to leave but have taken refuge at the Venezuelan Embassy. The local media is only reporting propaganda in support of the new regime while also minimizing coverage of protests for the return of Zelaya. The Prensa, a major daily newspaper, went so far as to Photoshop the blood and bullet wounds out of a picture of Isis Murillo, 19, a protestor shot dead by the military at the airport where many others were wounded when Zelaya attempted to fly into Tegucigalpa only to be blocked by military vehicles on the runway. Two social activists were murdered last weekend one of them was Representative Roger Bados of the Democratic Union (UD) party, who was taken from a bus by the military and shot dead, his sister also wounded. In total seven have been verified killed by the military and two disappeared perhaps to unmarked graves with rumors of more still pending verification by international observers.
This is not what a democratic or constitutional government looks or acts like. The perpetrators of this coup are terrorists. The military historically has been independent of the government with strong US influence despite the constitution placing Zelaya as its head. The generals, backed by international and local business leaders, hatched the coup out of greed, racism and increasing their personal wealth and power. President Zelaya was elected in 2005 on a law-and-order platform by the Liberal Party, which is the equivalent of the US Democratic Party, as a center-left member of the political elite.
The current Constitution was created in 1982 after the military turned power over to a civilian government. President Reagan was beginning his killing spree in Central America and found an ally in Honduras’ repressive government which was home base for Ambassador John Negroponte and Colonel Oliver North while they were fighting dirty wars and supporting death squads in neighboring Nicaragua and El Salvador. Honduras was nicknamed the USS Honduras because of their close military ties with the US. Many Honduran soldiers have been trained at the School of the America’s (SOA) in Fort Bennett Georgia, including the former Honduran Dictator from 1980-82, Policarpo Paz Garcia, who supported the nefarious death squad Battalion 316.
Fast-forward to the present and you find many of the terrorists that enacted the violent overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Honduras were trained at the SOA. Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Romeo Orlando Vasquez Velasquez, fired by Zelaya for insubordination by refusing to distribute ballot boxes for the referendum scheduled for the same day that the coup happened was one of these SOA trained criminals. Another SOA trained commander, Colonel Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, told the Miami Herald, “It would be difficult for us, with our training, to have a relationship with a leftist government. That’s impossible.”
For the “troglodytes,” as Hugo Chavez eloquently called the coup leaders, the referendum had to be prevented from happening. Unfortunately international media routinely misrepresents what the referendum was for, claiming it was to amend the Constitution to allow Zelaya to run for another term in office. What the non-binding referendum actually stated was, “Do you agree that during the general elections of November 2009 there should be a fourth ballot to decide whether to hold a Constituent National Assembly that will approve a new political constitution?”
President Zelaya has said that there are about ten ruling families in Honduras that control everything and the referendum was not the first thing to upset them. Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Central America, 60-70% of the country lives in poverty 50% in extreme poverty according to the Inter-American Development Bank. Zelaya angered the Honduran Council of Private Enterprise (COHEP) and Chiquita, a US corporation with a sordid past in Central America, when he addressed this problem by increasing minimum wage from $157 to $289 per month at the beginning of this year. He also ruffled their feathers when he was the second to join the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, ALBA, a trading group started by Venezuela and Cuba to form mutually beneficial trade between Latin American countries. The IMF and World Bank offered loans with stringent rules that would trickle the money in, while ALBA offered better long-term rates with no policy strings attached.
These moves in favor of the popular class in Honduras by President Zelaya has increased his popularity with the majority poor and endeared him, critically, to the strong social movements. However the international media makes it seem as though he is hated in his country. Recently the Wall Street Journal issued a correction for inaccurately representing a CID-Gallop poll commissioned by the Honduran newspaper Prensa. In the original they stated a plurality of 41% thought the ouster of Zelaya was justified while 28% didn’t. In reality the poll stated the opposite that a plurality of 46% objected to the action taken to remove Zelaya while 41% agreed with it. This poll and the pictures of the pro Zelaya crowds paint a very different image of his popularity in his country.
Internationally not a single country has recognized the coup government. The UN and the OAS have both called for Zelaya’s re-instatement. The US has come short of implementing a mandatory removal of all US funding like the EU did, removing $98 million. The US has only removed $16.5 million in military support but $180 million in development funds is still being illegally delivered. This isn’t surprising since the coup government has hired Washington insider and close Clinton friend Lanny Davis to lobby Washington on their behalf as well as Bennett Ratcliff another close Clinton advisor to help with the negotiations in Costa Rica.
The coup represents the ultraconservative right wing. The Foreign Minister, Enrique Ortez Colindres, was quoted by the El Tiempo newspaper as saying, “I have negotiated with queers, prostitutes, bird-brains (meaning leftists), blacks, whites. This is my job, I studied for it. I am not racially prejudiced. I like the little black sugar plantation worker who is President of the United States.” After saying this he wasn’t fired but transferred to a new position as Minister of Government and Justice where he will be in charge of human rights issues.