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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/ross07102009.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross07102009.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">July 10-12,
2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Latin America
Asks: Are the Gorillas Back? <br><br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
After the Honduran Coup
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By JOHN ROSS
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Mexico
City</font><font size=3>.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">T</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>he June 28th coup d'etat in Honduras that
toppled leftist president Mel Zelaya sends us back to the bad old days of
the "gorillas" - generals and strongmen who overthrew each
other with reckless abandon and the tacit complicity of
Washington.<br><br>
Perched on a hillside in the Mexican outback, we would tune in to these
"golpes de estado", as they are termed in Latin America, on our
Zenith Transoceanic short wave. First, a harried announcer would
report rumors of troop movement and the imposition of a "toque de
queda" (curfew.) Hours of dead air (and probably dead
announcers) would follow and then the martial music would strike up,
endless tape loops of military marches and national anthems. Within
a few days, the stations would be back up as if nothing had
happened. Only the names of the generals who ruled the roost had
changed. <br><br>
Guatemala was the Central American republic par excelencia for such
"golpes." Perhaps the most memorable was the overthrow of
General Jacobo Arbenz by Alan Dulles's CIA in 1954 after Arbenz sought to
expropriate and distribute unused United Fruit land. Like Mel
Zelaya, the general was shaken rudely awake by soldiers and booted out of
the country in his underwear. <br><br>
Coups in Guatemala continued unabated throughout the 1970s and
'80s. General Efrain Rios Montt, the first Evangelical dictator in
Latin America, who had come to power in a coup himself, was overthrown in
1983 by the equally bloodthirsty Romeo Lucas, a much-decorated
general. In 1993, the Guatemalan military brought down civilian
president Jorge Elias Serrano, the last gasp of the Gorillas until Zelaya
was deposed last week. It has been 15 years since the generals had
risen in arms in Central America.<br><br>
Zelaya's overthrow has stimulated generalized revulsion throughout the
world. The Organization of American States, the General Assembly of
the United Nations, the European Union, virtually every regional
organization in the Western Hemisphere, and the presidents of 33 Latin
American republics have condemned the Honduran Gorillas - yet U.S.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can't quite get her plumped-up lips
around the word "coup", preferring to describe the low-jinx in
Tegucigalpa as an "interruption of democracy" or some such
euphemistic flapdoodle. <br><br>
One wonders what descriptives Hillary would have deployed if she and Bill
had been aroused from a deep snooze in the White House master bedroom on
a Sunday morning by gun-toting troops and put on the first plane for
Ottawa in their pajamas? <br><br>
Why is Clinton so reluctant to label the Honduran military coup a coup?
Because such nomenclature automatically triggers a U.S. aid cut-off
through which Washington subsidizes the very same Honduran gorillas who
facilitated Zelaya's overthrow - $66 million of U.S. taxpayers' money is
programmed for 2010 to this end. Unlike Washington, both the World
Bank and the InterAmerican Development Bank have suspended payouts to the
coup plotters.<br><br>
The U.S. works in cozy cahoots with the Honduran military. Honduras
sent a contingent to Iraq as part of George Bush's Coalition of the
Willing. Coup leader Romeo Orlando Vazquez and at least two other
officers who participated in Zelaya's overthrow are School of Americas'
graduates - according to School of Americas' Watch, the "coup
school", as it is called by opponents, once produced two generals
who returned to Honduras and overthrew each other. Nearly a thousand
Honduran officers were trained in the U.S. under the IMET program in
2005-06, the last year for which numbers are available. The Pentagon
calculates that the camaraderie between U.S. and Honduran military
officers developed during such training enlists valuable collaborators
for a generation. In fact, these U.S.-trained assets threatened to
scramble U.S. super light F5 fighter jets to prevent Zelaya from landing
in Tegucigalpa a week after the coup.<br><br>
In collaboration with the gorillas, Washington maintains an advance
airbase in the country at Soto Cano (formerly Palmarola) with 500 troops
under the direction of the U.S. South Command on the ground at all times
on the pretext of fighting the War on Drugs and Terrorism.
<br><br>
Gregorio Seltzer, the late great historian of U.S. imperialism in Latin
America, described Honduras as "a county for rent" and from the
1920s on, United Fruit rented this impoverished nation of 7.2 million,
transforming Honduras into the quintessential Banana Republic.
During the 1980s with revolutions raging in neighboring El Salvador and
Nicaragua, the CIA rented Honduras as a platform for
counter-insurgency. The Nicaraguan Contras' supply lines began at
Palmarola. More discreet intelligence operations were housed at
Puerto Castilla where suspected insurgents were reportedly tortured,
dismembered, and fed to the crocodiles. <br><br>
The nerve center for U.S. counter-insurgency in Honduras was Washington's
embassy in Tegucigalpa, then under the thumb of the notorious John
Negroponte, known throughout the Americas as the gringos'
"pro-consul". Negroponte, of course, went on to become George
Bush's Intelligence capo de tutti capos. Events in Honduras suggest
that he is still pushing buttons. <br><br>
Latin American leftists often refer to the Central American country as
"The U.S.S. Honduras." Perpetual susceptibility to
manipulation by Washington was perhaps best encapsulated by former
president Jose Azcona (1986-90): "we are too small and too poor to
afford the luxury of dignity." <br><br>
Honduras is in fact the second poorest country in Latin America, a few
degrees behind Haiti where the poor eat mud cakes for lunch. Things
went from "Guatemala to Guatapejor" as they say in Central
America ("from bad to worse") in the wake of Hurricane Mitch,
which leveled the region in October 1998. Hundreds of thousands of
jobless refugees took to the roads headed for El Norte to escape the
devastation of their homelands. Nearly a million Hondurans are
thought to have made it to the U.S., a seventh of the nation's
population. Many poured into New Orleans, a traditional landing
spot for Hondurans, where they found slave labor employment in the
Katrina clean up. Remittances from relatives working in the U.S.
are Hondurans' chief source of revenues. <br><br>
Meanwhile back on the homefront, violence driven by unemployed youth
holds the country in thrall. Over 30,000 Mara Salvatrucha gang members
have turned the streets of Tegoosh and San Pedro Sula into an
inferno. 86 perished in a Mara-induced prison riot in 2003 under
Zelaya's predecessor Ricardo Maduro, one of the most deadly prison
uprisings in Latin America annals, and 28 women and children were mowed
down in a hail of gunfire when the Maras attacked a San Pedro Sula city
bus in 2004.<br><br>
The scion of a prosperous cattle ranching family from the north of the
country with ties to the gorilla class, Mel Zelaya is an unlikely
champion of the poor - during the anti-guerrilla campaigns of the 1980s,
human rights workers claim that suspects were burnt alive in bread ovens
on one of the family's haciendas. Backed by the Catholic Church and
the oligarchy, Zelaya won high office in 2006 as the candidate of the
right-wing Liberal Party - Honduras has two hegemonic parties, the
Liberals and the Nationals, which take turns repressing the
populace. <br><br>
An early advocate of CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement
that annexes the economies of the region to Washington, Zelaya beat back
protests by labor unions, farmers' organizations such as Via Campesina,
and the left Bloque Popular. During 36 months in office, Mel Zelaya
navigated through two general strikes and 771 social conflicts, according
to data assembled by Mexican columnist (La Jornada) Luis Hernandez
Navarro who contends that the president's flipflops did not inspire much
enthusiasm for him on the Honduran left, despite his increasingly radical
pronouncements, a flaw that proved fatal. With congress and the
military bitterly opposed to Zelaya's leftwards tack, the Honduran
president's room for maneuvering was undercut by mistrust from down
below. <br><br>
Cheap oil was apparently what first attracted Zelaya to Hugo Chavez and
the new Latin Left. Under the San Jose Pact, Venezuela distributes
low-priced petroleum to Central American and Caribbean governments
(including Cuba) and Honduras was an eager beneficiary. <br><br>
In recent years, Mel Zelaya has been a frequent guest of Comandante
Chavez, appearing side by side up on the podiums with Big Hugo, Ecuador's
Rafael Correa, Bolivia's Evo Morales, Daniel Ortega and Raul Castro, and
his government has joined the ALBA, Chavez's Bolivarian alternative to
CAFTA and NAFTA. <br><br>
Mel Zelaya's swing to the left did not much please the highly venal
oligarchy that controls the Honduran Congress. Obligated to Washington
via commercial and military pacts, the impresarios and gorillas who
comprise that less-than-august body did their duty and tossed out
their Chavez-loving president. In the words of Samuel Zemurray,
owner of the United Fruit predecessor in another century: "I can buy
the Honduran legislature for less than I can buy a mule."<br><br>
Mel Zelaya's forcible removal from power was set in motion by a proposed
popular consultation asking voters whether or not they favored rewriting
the Honduran constitution, a document that heavily serves the interests
of the oligarchy. If the yes vote carried, the measure would have
been placed on the upcoming November 29h ballot. <br><br>
At this writing, a week into the coup, it appears that those elections
are on hold. All civil liberties have been suspended by the gorilla
government of Roberto Micheletti and a witch-hunt of
"communists" and foreigners instigated - the military urges
citizens to report suspicious types speaking in "foreign
accents" and dozens of purported Nicaraguans and Venezuelans have
been arrested. Micheletti and his goons have sworn out an Interpol
arrest warrant for Zelaya alleging drug dealing among other criminal
acts. <br><br>
Although Zelaya's proposed constitutional reform was multi-faceted and
included such items as agrarian reform (anathema to the oligarchy), CNN
and the New York Times et al fixated on the Honduran president's
intentions to write “re-election” into the nation's Magna Carta.
Similarly, presidential re-election has been incorporated in
constitutional reforms recently passed in Venezuela, Ecuador, and
Bolivia. <br><br>
But reforming constitutions to allow for re-election is not just the
property of the left. Having rewritten Colombia's constitution twice,
right-wing president Alvaro Uribe is now looking at a third term in
office. Indeed, the U.S. electoral process is motored by the
possibility of presidential re-election.<br><br>
U.S. involvement in the Honduran coup remains veiled but clearly
Washington had prior knowledge that Mel Zelaya's overthrow was in the
wings. For Barack Obama who, like Zelaya, aspires to re-election, the
Honduras uproar represents his baptism in Latin American upheaval.
Informed of Zelaya's ousting while hosting Colombia's Uribe at the White
House, El Baracko stumbled through a sparsely worded condemnation. In
response, the gorillas' new foreign minister Enrique Ortez called Obama
"a negrito (black boy) who knows nothing." <br><br>
Perhaps the U.S. president would not have been so constrained in his
comments had he perused the volume gifted him by Hugo Chavez during a
recent Latin American summit. Eduardo Galeano's "The Open
Veins of Latin America" chronicles centuries of U.S. intervention in
the Americas in precise detail. Nonetheless, Obama's chief
spokesperson Robert Gibbs characterized the book as "a work of
fiction."<br><br>
The key question for Latin America is whether Honduras is a nostalgic
aberration or a whiff of what's in the wind for newly left regimes
throughout the hemisphere? Certainly, the Honduran scenario must
excite the current generation of the gorilla class. But making a
coup is mostly a function of the strength of alliances between the
military and the oligarchy and how closely their interests
coincide. Coup-making in Latin America in 2009 is also very
site-specific.<br><br>
In Bolivia, for example, a nation that suffered 193 violent changes of
government between liberation from Spain in 1835 and 1981 when civil rule
was restored (the two presidents prior to Evo Morales were overthrown by
popular rebellion), threats by right-wing, white landowners in the
lowland "media luna" provinces to secede from this dirt-poor
Andean nation have had faint scratch with the military, largely a
highland Indian army. <br><br>
Similarly, although Venezuela has an active right-wing oligarchy that
appears to be active in the Honduras "golpe", the military was
neutralized by the short-lived 2002 coup to unseat Hugo Chavez engineered
out of the U.S. Caracas embassy by Bush henchman Otto Reich, that was
foiled when a million citizens descended on the presidential palace to
demand the return of the kidnapped Chavez, himself a failed coup
plotter. <br><br>
In the southern cone, Argentina has a resurgent right-wing but the
military remains so discredited by the memory of the 1976-79 "dirty
war" in which 30,000 leftists were thrown to their death from
airplanes into the Atlantic Ocean that a coup remains out of sync with
reality. Ditto in Chile where a new Pinochet will not emerge any
time soon. <br><br>
In other newly left countries like Ecuador (where the army has sometimes
sided with the left) and Paraguay, now governed by the former liberation
bishop Fernando Lugo, father of at least two, the military is
unpredictable and the emergence of civil society serves to counterbalance
residual right-wing sympathies.<br><br>
Perhaps the most likely proscenium for a Honduras-like "golpe"
remains coup-prone Guatemala where military gorillas thrive, right-wing
death squads enjoy unbridled impunity, and the civil society is
weak. History, in fact, points in this direction - Alvaro Colum is
the first president to be elected from a left-wing party since Jacobo
Arbenz who, 55 years ago, was forced to flee Guatemala in his
underwear. <br><br>
<b>John Ross</b> will present "Iraqigirl" (Haymarket Books) at
Modern Times in San Francisco July 30th. Ross developed and edited
the new volume, a coming-of-age diary of an Iraqi teenager growing up
under U.S. occupation that has been called "An Anne Frank for our
times."</font><font size=3> </font><font face="Verdana" size=2>He
can be reached at:
<a href="mailto:johnross@igc.org">johnross@igc.org</a><br><br>
<br><br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
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