The U.S. State Department is poised to hand Senator Jim DeMint his first international policy victory after it torpedoed negotiations to return democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya to power in Honduras. The junior senator from South Carolina has warmly praised the June 28 military coup which deposed Zelaya, even traveling to Tegucigalpa, an emerging Mecca for extremist Republicans, to meet with regime leader Roberto Micheletti, who the Obama administration does not recognize as Honduran president.
Yesterday, DeMint praised an apparent shift in the State Department’s position, in an exclusive interview with the Internet site ForeignPolicy.com:
Jim DeMint is ready to release his holds against two top administration Latin America appointees, the South Carolina senator told The Cable, and he predicts the State Department will soon recognize the upcoming Honduran elections as legitimate.
In an exclusive interview, DeMint said he was seeing signs of movement from the State Department related to U.S. policy toward Honduras and that he had come close to an agreement over his hold in his meeting earlier this week with Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Thomas Shannon.
"We got a lot of agreement in the area of coming to terms with recognizing the upcoming elections there," DeMint said of his meeting with Shannon."That's what I'm waiting for from our government, signals that we're going to recognize those elections and move forward."
While most of the world believes it is impossible to conduct legitimate elections under current conditions, with repression of free assembly and expression and with a large segment of the population calling for an election boycott until democratic order is restored, the State Department announced, through press leaks and back-channel communications with regime officials, that it would recognize the elections no matter what the outcome of negotiations. Delicate talks to restore democratic order and normalize the country’s political climate immediately collapsed after the State Department publicized its position, in Time magazine and through other channels, empowering the regime to continue the stalling techniques it had perfected, with the help of hired advisor Bennett Ratcliff, in the San José negotiations.
In a meeting of the OAS Permanent Council today, Brazilian ambassador Ruy Casaes accused the regime of using ‘delaying tactics which reveal its intention of not wanting to negotiate," adding that "the de facto authorities are not dialoguing in good faith."
On Monday, the Center for Economic and Policy Research called on President Obama to account for the disparity between the White House position and that of the State Department, noting several recent examples where the State Department’s actions have undermined White House policy:
"The Obama administration should immediately and forcefully clear up any doubts about its position on the November 29 elections," Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said. "The stated position supports democratic institutions, civil liberties, and the rule of law, but some State Department officials seem ready to sacrifice all of this.
"These diplomats inexplicably suggest that elections being carried out under an illegal dictatorship that has suspended civil rights, raided and shut down independent media outlets, and continues to brutally beat and arrest peaceful demonstrators would somehow be legitimate. They are looking for a way to reverse the Obama administration's position and recognize these elections, without isolating the United States from the rest of the hemisphere."
There are signs today that the State Department has been shaken by the Time magazine report and may be taking a tougher stand on the Honduras talks. Even the troublesome U.S. OAS delegation accused the regime of "buying time" with talks and warned of further U.S. action against regime officials:
"The conversations should not serve to buy time or be used for that purpose . . . it will cause the United States, the best friend Honduras has, to continue increasing its pressure on key personnel (of the defacto government), beyond what it has already done," said Lewis Amselem.
A failure to resolve the Honduran crisis would be seen as a foreign policy setback for President Obama and will solidify a perception in Latin America that the U.S. was involved in the coup. It will undoubtedly also motivate Republicans to oppose other administration initiatives through greater use of the hold process, while burnishing DeMint’s foreign policy credentials.
On October 29, the Honduran army will be placed in charge of the electoral process until elections are held on November 29. It is widely expected to step up repression against opposition media and members of the Resistance movement from that point forward. To date, army and police repression has left more than 20 protesters dead, hundreds brutally beaten and thousands detained or jailed for "sedition" and "rebellion." A recent poll shows that 60% of Hondurans want Micheletti to leave while only 22% want him to stay.
State Department Cancels More Visas
The State Department announced today that it had cancelled more visas in Honduras, an action that has already proven ineffective in motivating the regime to negotiate. As Reuters reports:
State Department spokesman Charles Luoma-Overstreet said the department had canceled visas for "a number of Hondurans who are members and/or supporters of the de facto regime."
"This action is a reflection of the seriousness and urgency with which the U.S. government takes the need for the de facto regime to reach an agreement with President Zelaya to restore the democratic order," Luoma-Overstreet said.
Radio Globo, which has been accurate in its reporting on previous visa cancellations, said 28 visas had been cancelled, and that 600 more cancellations were expected. According to coup newspaper El Heraldo, some of the cancellation letters from the latest round went out to people who didn’t even have visas, or whose visas had been previously cancelled.
Brazilian Embassy to Give Evidence to Rights Commission
According to newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo, the Brazilian embassy will be presenting evidence of the regime’s siege of its facility to the commission sent by the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights to conduct an exhaustive investigation into human rights abuses since the June 28 coup. The Micheletti regime has held the embassy under siege since Zelaya’s appearance there a month ago. The evidence is expected to include photographs and recordings that chronicle the regime’s campaign of psychological warfare, including: four devices to interrupt cell-phone communications placed inside the embassy compound; photographs of a humidifer with a container of yellow liquid placed by the army next to the embassy to aerosolize a toxic substance that caused mucous membrane bleeding, vomiting and diarrhea among those inside; recordings of a long-range acoustic device used by the army to blast high-frequency sound waves (properly called radiation in Spanish) at the embassy and loud speakers to harass it with loud music, used as recently as this morning.
Honduras' de facto regime blared loud music at the Brazilian embassy to intensify pressure on deposed President Manuel Zelaya, as talks on the months-long crisis were in limbo Wednesday.
[OAS President José Miguel] Insulza on Wednesday criticized the regime for the "continuing hostility" against the Brazilian embassy, following accusations from Zelaya and his supporters inside the compound of increasing harassment.
"We've been bombarded with loudspeakers playing music at the highest level," Rasel Tome, a legal advisor to Zelaya, told Radio Globo in Honduras Wednesday.
"What we've been living is typical of psychological operations between armies."
The OAS Permanent Council is expected to approve a resolution today condemning the regime’s siege of the embassy. The Brazilian ambassador said the regime had created "conditions of torture" within the embassy and that Brazil reserved the right to take its case to international courts to punish those responsible.
[The ambassador] said conditions had deteriorated in recent hours, with the application of "new methods of psychological torture" such as the installation overnight of high-powered lamps to keep those in the building from sleeping, "bugles that play incessantly" and "noise from police imitating animal sounds" to keep those inside from sleeping.
He said the intimidation methods constituted forms of torture according to the Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture.
Honduras Plummets in Reporters Without Borders Rankings
Honduras plummeted to 128th place in new global rankings of 173 countries by Reporters Without Borders, ranking it below Venezuela, but still ahead of Mexico and Colombia. The press freedom organization noted an impressive jump in the U.S. ranking, then reported:
The other most striking development is the fall of Honduras (128th), which already had a poor ranking and where the 28 June coup d’état took a heavy toll on press freedom. The new de facto government preys on media that do not support it and has managed to impose a news blackout at the international media’s expense.
Radio Globo, the most popular radio station in Honduras, was forced off the air for 22 days after security forces raided its studios and confiscated equipment, but continued broadcasting via the Internet from a safehouse in Tegucigalpa. Its signal was rebroadcast by a Salvadoran radio station near the border, and by several Honduran stations that had not been closed. It was recently awarded the Ondas Iberoamericanas prize by Radio Barcelona for journalistic excellence in the face of regime repression. It resumed broadcasts on Monday, when a Micheletti decree forcing it off the air was finally revoked.
Micheletti Unhinged, Says Study
While I keep intending to diary a psychological study of regime leader Roberto Micheletti, conducted by an anonymous group of academics at the Honduran state university, I have not yet done so. The profile is important because it outlines several serious personality disorders which the authors believe will prevent him from accepting a negotiated solution to the crisis and stepping down. Here is their conclusion:
What is dangerous about his personality traits, as described in this document, is that we do not see a possibility of him ceding power through negotiation. This delicate combination of disorders is pushing him to stay, to seek more power and to generate fear. He came in without negotiating with constitutional authorities and he is not expected to leave through negotiation. Unfortunately, we conclude that the only way to remove him from power is through force. An additional danger in all this is his impulsiveness, which can lead him to commit the most contemptible acts if he feels threatened.
More Honduran Music
Here’s another song by Honduran folksinger José "Yeco" Hernández, Pájaro de goma. The song was written before the coup, but the video mash-up includes some post-coup imagery, including some anti-coup cartoons done by kids from throughout Latin America. The image of the "Pato Presidente" is, of course, Micheletti.
While we’re on the subject of cartoons, don’t miss the superb comic about the Honduran coup, published here Monday by Stanford University instructor Dan Archer and PhD candidate Nikil Saval. It was very important to them to publish it on Daily Kos and I was sorry to see it fly past with so little notice. The UK’s Guardian newspaper wrote an article about it today.
Archer and Saval do not accuse Obama of fomenting Honduras's current trauma but they do suggest, like many analysts and Latin American leaders, that the administration could be doing more to restore Zelaya to power. By flipping the pages of history this graphic novel reminds us why the White House is dragging its heels.