#hondruas

Clinton: Well, let me again try to put this in context. The legislature, the national legislature in Honduras and the national judiciary actually followed the law in removing President Zelaya. Now I didn't like the way it looked or the way they did it but they had a very strong argument that they had followed the constitution and the legal precedence.

That’s only true in the sense that whatever the Honduran Supreme Court dictates is law, but it’s not clear exactly what law the court followed when it ordered Zelaya’s removal. The final tussle between Zelaya and the other two branches of government, both still beholden to the country’s oligarchic elites, revolved around Zelaya’s desire to open the debate on constitutional reform. Zelaya had already angered the ruling elite with reforms to land and labour laws – reforms that, despite not being even remotely “radical”, quickly endeared him to Honduras’ poor and marginalised social sectors, since this was the first president in living memory who gave a hoot about them. Now Zelaya wanted to hold a plebiscite (non-binding referendum) on whether to include, on the following scheduled election day, a binding referendum on creating a National Constituent Assembly that would essentially re-write the constitution and submit it for final approval by general referendum.

This sent a cold sweat down the oligarchic elite’s spine and they quickly concocted a plan to get rid of Zelaya, a plan that included accusing Zelaya of wanting to reform the constitution in order to give himself unlimited terms as President (currently, Honduras has a 1-term limit). This is a blatant lie. Let’s be clear, in order to lift term limits Zelaya would have to 1) win the plebiscite; 2) win the ensuing referendum; 3) convince the National Constitutent Assembly to lift term limits in the new draft constitution, and 4) hope the new constitution gets approved by referendum. The problem is that Zelaya’s term was going to expire by Step #2 in the above list, not to mention that Steps #3 and #4 could take years, by which time Zelaya would be long gone as president and probably enjoying his retirement. This lie was a major talking point pushed by the Honduran right in order to turn people – ordinary Hondurans, national and international politicians, international media, etc. – to their side. The State Department swallowed these talking points at the time of the coup and years later Hillary Clinton was still repeating the lie in her book Hard Choices.

Clinton doesn’t make the same mistake again here, though. She carefully says that Zelaya’s opponents followed the constitution. This is a vague statement that serves to hide the lie. Yes, Zelaya was removed by order of the Supreme Court, but this order was based on a very political interpretation of the law. It must be noted that despite all the fuss being made in public discourse about Zelaya’s unconstitutional desire to extend term limits, the Supreme Court’s decision to remove Zelaya makes no reference to this. Instead, the charges against Zelaya were treason, abuse of power, and overreach of constitutional duties. Though shrouded in legal language, these are essentially political charges. Zelaya’s “treason” is his desire to reform a constitution had had until then entrenched the power of the oligarchy and disenfranchised Honduran working classes. Zelaya’s “abuse of power” was removing an army General who had disobeyed a direct order from the President. The overreach of constitutional duties is yet another vague legal stand-in for “he pushed for policies we didn’t like”. There’s absolutely no strong legal argument there. The President had a political disagreement with Congress, and then the military picked a side and overthrew the democratically elected and at that point still quite popular President. It’s a coup by any definition of the term.

Do you need a bit more convincing? The coup government (now led by Pepe Lobo) eventually came in to a similar conflict with the Supreme Court. The Court had ruled that a pet project of the current government – the ultra-right-wing ZEDE law that would essentially privatise portions of Honduran territory – was indeed unconstitutional. Juan Orlando Hernández, then majority leader of Congress (he has since risen to President) simply removed the four (out of five!) Supreme Court judges who voted against his project. Was he charged with overstepping his authority or abuse of power, like Zelaya was when he removed an Army General who disobeyed a direct order? Of course not. Was Hernández accused of treason for pushing for a law that the Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional just like Zelaya when he insisted on holding the plebiscite? Of course not. Perhaps the funniest – well, in that sad kind of funny way – incident in all of this occurred in 2015 when the Supreme Court removed constitutional term limits on the President. Yes, the coup leaders actually did the very thing that they had falsely accused Zelaya of attempting to do. Was there a big outcry? Nope. Did anyone get escorted out of the country in their pajamas? Nope. And keep in mind that this was a decision of a Supreme Court now stacked with appointees made by former Congressional leader Juan Orlando Hernández after he summarily fired four judges he disagreed with, making a ruling regarding the term limits of current President... Juan Orlando Hernández. Abuse of power? Overreach of authority? Treason? Nah. Not this time. This should plainly show that going the coup route was not a legal obligation but a political choice, a political choice wholeheartedly backed by Hillary Clinton.

And as a final bit of evidence, take a look at the leaked embassy cable sent to Clinton barely a month after the coup. In it, US Ambassador Hugo Llorens goes over all the legal arguments in favour and opposed to the coup and concludes that "there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch, while accepting that there may be a prima facie case that Zelaya may have committed illegalities and may have even violated the constitution. There is equally no doubt from our perspective that Roberto Micheletti's assumption of power was illegitimate."

Ok, let's get back to Clinton's Daily News interview.

And as you know, they really undercut their argument by spiriting him out of the country in his pajamas, where they sent the military to take him out of his bed and get him out of the country. So this began as a very mixed and difficult situation.

Seriously? Hillary’s only criticism of a military coup is regarding what the deposed president was wearing? Is this meant to be a joke? She has a problem with the aesthetics of the military coup but she has absolutely no problem with the coup itself. It’s like saying “Hey, let me put this in context, slavery was perfectly legal at the time, but we really undercut our argument by making them wear filthy rags”.

If the United States government declares a coup, you immediately have to shut off all aid including humanitarian aid, the Agency for International Development aid, the support that we were providing at that time for a lot of very poor people, and that triggers a legal necessity. There's no way to get around it. So our assessment was, we will just make the situation worse by punishing the Honduran people if we declare a coup and we immediately have to stop all aid for the people, but we should slow walk and try to stop anything that the government could take advantage of without calling it a coup.

You know who else in Honduras around that time was providing support for a lot of very poor people? Manuel Zelaya. This is an incredibly duplicitous statement. If poverty was actually Clinton’s concern, maybe she should have supported Zelaya instead of egging on the military and Honduran far right whose only agenda is to maintain their privilege and extract as much wealth as possible from the working classes.

And there’s more. Following the coup, US aid to Honduras was essentially about strengthening the coup regime using the sort of “hearts & minds” strategies to win over support for an unpopular and illegitimate regime that were used in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few years later, the US came up with a new aid package for Honduras (along with its neighbours El Salvador and Guatemala) called the “Alliance for Prosperity”. This so-called “aid” package has little to do with aid and more to do with militarisation (see here, here, and here) in a region already fraught with overt political repression and human rights violations.

Given that everything Clinton has done has favoured Honduras’ wealthy elites and strengthened the military apparatus that allows them to continually repress opposition, her feigned concern for Honduras’ poor makes one's blood boil.

So you're right. I worked very hard with leaders in the region and got Oscar Arias, the Nobel Prize winner, [...]

Wait, does she seriously think name-checking Arias and insisting on his Nobel credentials somehow absolves her? Whatever, let’s move on...

[...] to take the lead on trying to broker a resolution. Without bloodshed.

According to COFREDEH, Honduras’ leading Human Rights organisation, 21 political opponents were assassinated by the coup regime and thousands wounded, threatened, or arbitrarily detained in the months following the coup (28 June to 10 October). The electoral campaign held in late 2009 was marked by more assassinations (the total had risen to 39 by the time the new “civilian” government had taken over), curfews, arbitrary arrests, and electoral fraud that essentially gave a shroud of legality to a government formed by the very same people (the National Party and their economic backers) who fomented the coup. Repression continued under the Pepe Lobo government, not just against political opponents but also against journalists: 27 journalists were murdered in Honduras during Lobo’s presidential term. Honduras has since become the deadliest place for journalists in the Western hemisphere. The country has also become perhaps the deadliest in the world for environmentalists and isn’t safe for labour unions either. This is because the coup also emboldened landowners to unleash a fury of “private” repression. In the Aguan Valley, for example, police and private security guards working for or with the Facussé family’s Dinant agribusiness corporation have murdered over 100 farmers defending their land rights against land grabbing. Hillary says “without bloodshed”; we say her pants are on fire.

And that was very important to us that… Zelaya had friends and allies not just in Honduras but in some of the neighboring countries like Nicaragua, and that we could have had a terrible civil war that would have been just terrifying in its loss of life.

Another absolutely horrifying statement that completely twists reality upside down. If Clinton can actually spew such bovine manure with a straight face, she might fit the criteria for a sociopath. Let’s be clear: at no time did Nicaragua or Venezuela or Brazil or any of Zelaya’s foreign allies mobilise their military or even suggest the possibility thereof. The Latin American members of the Organisation of American States (i.e. everyone except Canada and the US, who both did everything to legitimise the coup) were strongly and unanimously pushing for a diplomatic solution. The prospect of a civil war is pure fantasy, fabrication, or bold-faced lie - call it what you will. It’s also quite funny that Clinton cites Nicaragua as being a potential belligerent party when Nicaragua has absolutely no history of engaging in any kind of disruptive political action beyond its borders. On the contrary, Nicaragua has been the victim of US interference that fuelled a bloody 10-year civil war waged by US-trained Contras on Nicaragua from bases in Honduras. Clinton actually turns real history on its head and invents a fantasy present where Nicaragua is the likely aggressor and Honduras the likely victim. All this just in order to create a scenario – a fantasy scenario, let’s be clear – that could by comparison make her choice to pursue a bloody military crackdown seem like the justifiable alternative.

So I think we came out with a solution that did hold new elections, but it did not in any way address the structural, systemic problems in that society. And I share your concern that it's not just government actions. Drug gangs, traffickers of all kinds are preying on the people of Honduras.

Yes, and all these things got worse after the coup. It’s a pretty predictable outcome if you choose to empower the economic elites that have for decades refused to address structural inequality and social decay because it might interfere with profits.  

So I think we need to do more of a Colombian plan for Central America, because remember what was going in Colombia when first my husband and then followed by President Bush had Plan Colombia, which was to try to use our leverage to rein in the government in their actions against the FARC and the guerillas, but also to help the government stop the advance of the FARC and guerillas.

Update: Clinton’s pants are still on fire. Plan Colombia was essentially a surge against FARC positions done in coordination with paramilitary units who carried out the dirty work before the army moved in. It didn’t rein in the government, it unleashed a wave of violence that saw entire villages massacred by paramilitary units working with the military. There’s just too much to say about Plan Colombia, so we’ll just link to the Wikipedia page, which is very well-sourced.

And now we're in the middle of peace talks. It didn't happen overnight. It took a number of years, but I want to see a much more comprehensive approach towards Central America because it's just Honduras. The highest murder rate is in El Salvador and we've got Guatemala with all the problems you know so well.

So I think in retrospect we managed a very difficult situation without bloodshed,

Liar, liar, pants on fire. See above.

without a civil war

If anyone came close to causing a civil war, it was you. See above.

that led to a new election,

A fraudulent election conducted in a climate of fear caused by political murders and military crackdowns on opposition rallies. See above.

and I think that was better for the Honduran people,

Really? You think the political murders (see above), the violence, the descent into borderline failed state status, the continued corruption, the dispossession of small farmers and indigenous people, and the return of death squads are “better for the Honduran people”?! It’s official, Hillary Clinton is one sick fuck.

but we have a lot of work to do to try to help stabilize that and deal with corruption, deal with violence and the gangs and so much else.