Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has boasted on a number of occasions about her Foreign Policy bona fides, credentials, experience, what ever ya wanna call it. Well she does have experience, but it’s just not the kind of experience, and most importantly the “effects” of it’s aftermath, that excites me about a prospective presidential candidate.
However, to her credit, she was just following orders from her commander and chief like a good, well, cheerleader, following what has essentially been normal US Foreign Policy since the Monroe Doctrine was signed in 1823.
If they don’t bow to our demands (that is our “business interests”) the US will destabilize, overthrow and install puppets loyal to the money, or turn a blind eye to “private” (pirate) interests that do it for us. (Central and South America belong to the US)
Honduras is an especially egregious example of US Foreign Policy in action at the behest of US business interests. Ever hear the term Banana Republic? While it may be a retail chain in the US, Honduras was the country the term, coined by O. Henry, was originally meant to describe.
From WikiPedia (for a little “general” background) Banana Republic
The US has a sordid history of toppling left leaning governments all over Central and South America, well as the rest of the planet, creating one Banana Repbulic after another. (Ukraine anyone?)
William Blum’s book Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II chronicles the US use of the “stick” (CIA and other covert / overt means) in Foreign Policy, especially towards any “left leaning” governments. (“Far and away the best book on the topic.” – Noam Chomsky)
Did ya know the US invaded the Soviet Union in 1918?
She help advance American interests, which lets face it, American interests = business interests = national security interests = American interests. Right? It’s circular logic. National Security Interests are in fact American business interests. Who else get the revenues from all the weapons sales? The US government in the form of some taxes, licensing fee etc, the US weapons manufactures and related support industries, but don’t for get charity foundations indirectly from contractors and foreign governments that made large weapons sales and purchases respectively. Made possible by authorization by Mrs. Clinton on her watch at the top job of the state department, detailed in a report by MotherJones.
Honduras, the original Banana Republic the US has been kicking around for some time. In June of 2009 Honduras found it’s self in a constitutional crisis which lead to the over throw of the democratically elected President. But Salon has a different story.
“Hillary Clinton sold out Honduras: Lanny Davis, corporate cash, and the real story about the death of a Latin American democracy”
Though it’s less sexy than Benghazi, the crisis following a coup in Honduras in 2009 has Hillary Clinton’s fingerprints all over it, and her alleged cooperation with oligarchic elites during the affair does much to expose Clinton’s newfound, campaign-season progressive rhetoric as hollow. Moreover, the Honduran coup is something of a radioactive issue with fallout that touches many on Team Clinton, including husband Bill, once put into a full context.
Clinton herself even gets dangerously close to confessing a role in keeping Zelaya out of office in her book “Hard Choices,” in which she discussed the hard choice to ignore the most basic tenets of democracy and international norms:
“In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere…We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.”
One of those strategic partners appears to have been Clinton family legal pitbull, Lanny Davis, deployed as an auxiliary weapon against the rightful, legal, democratically elected president of Honduras. Davis famously defended President Bill Clinton during his impeachment proceedings, and he’s been on Team Clinton for decades, most recently serving as a booster for Hillary’s campaign in its early days.
Davis, along with another close Clinton associate Bennett Ratcliff, launched a Washington lobbying offensive in support of the coup government and its oligarchic backers, penning a Wall Street Journal op-ed, testifying before a Congressional committee, and undoubtedly knocking on office doors on Capitol Hill, where he enjoys bipartisan connections, which valuable asset he demonstrated during his committee hearing.
“If you want to understand who the real power behind the [Honduran] coup is, you need to find out who’s paying Lanny Davis,” said Robert White, former ambassador to El Salvador, just a month after the coup. Speaking to Roberto Lovato for the American Prospect, Davis revealed who that was: “My clients represent the CEAL, the [Honduras Chapter of] Business Council of Latin America.” In other words, the oligarchs who preside over a country with a 65 percent poverty rate.
The emerging understanding, that the powerful oligarchs were behind the coup, began to solidify, and the Clinton clique’s allegiances were becoming pretty clear. If you can believe it, Clinton’s team sided with the wealthy elite.
She publicly commended, but worked behind the scenes, as Common Dreams reports about her “e-mails”, to prevent the return of the democratically elected president of Honduras?
One of the first big issues to hit Clinton’s desk was the June 2009 coup d’Etat in Honduras that forced democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya into exile. Officially the U.S. joined the rest of the hemisphere in opposing the coup, but Zelaya – who had grown close to radical social movements at home and signed cooperation agreements with Venezuela - wasn’t in the administration’s good books.
The released emails provide a fascinating behind-the-scenes view of how Clinton pursued a contradictory policy of appearing to back the restoration of democracy in Honduras while actually undermining efforts to get Zelaya back into power. The Intercept and other outlets have provided useful analyses of these emails, but there are a number of revealing passages, some in the most recent batch of emails, that haven’t yet received the attention they deserve.
A number of Clinton emails show how, starting shortly after the coup, HRC and her team shifted the deliberations on Honduras from the Organization of American States (OAS) – where Zelaya could benefit from the strong support of left-wing allies throughout the region – to the San José negotiation process in Costa Rica. There, representatives of the coup regime were placed on an equal footing with representatives of Zelaya’s constitutional government, and Costa Rican president Oscar Arias (a close U.S. ally) as mediator. Unsurprisingly, the negotiation process only succeeded in one thing: keeping Zelaya out of office for the rest of his constitutional mandate.
From the outset, U.S. interests and policy goals in Honduras were clearly identified in the emails that darted back and forth between Clinton and her advisers. On the day of the coup (June 28, 2009), Tom Shannon, the outgoing Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, provided an update for Clinton and her close staff that noted that he was “calling the new SouthCom Commander to ensure a coordinated U.S. approach [since] we have big military equities in Honduras through Joint Task Force Bravo at Soto Cano airbase.” A later email, with talking points for a phone call between Clinton and the Spanish foreign minister, indicated that Clinton’s team was already focused on making sure that Honduras’ upcoming national elections would take place on schedule (in November of 2009):
We hope Spain will work with us and the OAS to ensure a restoration of democratic order that will allow Honduras to carry through with its electoral timetable (presidential vote scheduled for November).
From Aljazeera
First, the confession: Clinton admits that she used the power of her office to make sure that Zelaya would not return to office. “In the subsequent days [after the coup] I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary [Patricia] Espinosa in Mexico,” Clinton writes. “We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.”
This may not come as a surprise to those who followed the post-coup drama closely. (See my commentary from 2009 on Washington’s role in helping the coup succeed here, here and here.) But the official storyline, which was dutifully accepted by most in the media, was that the Obama administration actually opposed the coup and wanted Zelaya to return to office.
the NYT
IT’S time to acknowledge the foreign policy disaster that American support for the Porfirio Lobo administration in Honduras has become. Ever since the June 28, 2009, coup that deposed Honduras’s democratically elected president, José Manuel Zelaya, the country has been descending deeper into a human rights and security abyss. That abyss is in good part the State Department’s making.
Dana Frank at FP
It is by now well documented that the coup led by Roberto Micheletti of Zelaya’s Liberal Party, which was ostensibly to restore the rule of law, in fact overthrew it and ushered in a human rights disaster. After months of Micheletti ruling as interim president, Honduras held elections that almost all of the opposition candidates and international observers boycotted and which brought the current president, Lobo, a member of the National Party, to power.
Once in office, he rewarded coup loyalists with top ministries. They opened the door, in turn, for worsening violence and anarchy, including, as the United Nations, Amnesty International, the Organization of American States, and Human Rights Watch have documented, widespread threats and assassination attempts against journalists, lawyers, judges, the LGBT community, and members of the opposition. At the same time, they let the police run wild. It is well documented that the police are tied to organized crime, drug traffickers, gangs, and extortionists; a member of the government's own police cleanup commission recently estimated that only 30 percent of the police are "rescuable."
From Consortiumnews
The most important part of the context to understand why not only the homicide rate, but the rate of so many other forms of violence is so high, is to understand the coup that happened in 2009. A coup that was carried out by military forces trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. And which was, in effect, supported by the United States which refused to follow the unanimous decision of the OAS [Organization of American States] at the time, to not recognize the usurping government, and instead negotiated with it and has continued through all of these years to send massive amounts of military aid, military and police aid, to a government that, in effect, has militarized the country and is murdering and terrorizing its citizens, both through this militarization and direct violence and through the more indirect violence, if you can call it, of neoliberal policy, which for many people isn’t indirect at all.
As Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton really was just doing her job, helping raise the “perception of America” around the world (ahem, #1 threat to world peace), Advance America’s interests and promote Democracy around the world. (Wild west gunslinger style!)
Well, she would not be my first choice for president, but, yeah she sure knows how to implement US “neoliberal” Foreign Policies, but I’m not sure she would be able to handled a more “respectful” approach to other nations, their own self determination, and of course that actual thing our country takes oh so for granted, democracy.