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The United States has a long history of domination in the hemisphere. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can chart a new course, away from the dark days of military dictatorship, repression and murder. Obama indicated such a direction when he spoke in April at the Summit of the Americas: "[A]t times we sought to dictate our terms. But I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership. There is no senior partner and junior partner in our relations."
Two who know well the history of dictated U.S. terms are Dr. Juan Almendares, a medical doctor and award-winning human rights activist in Honduras, and the American clergyman Father Roy Bourgeois, a priest who for years has fought to close the U.S. Army's School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Ga. Both men link the coup in Honduras to the SOA.
The SOA, renamed in 2000 the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), is the U.S. military facility that trains Latin American soldiers. The SOA has trained more than 60,000 soldiers, many of whom have returned home and committed human rights abuses, torture, extrajudicial execution and massacres.
Almendares, targeted by Honduran death squads and the military, has been the victim of that training. He talked to me from Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital: "Most of this military have been trained by the School of America. ... They have been guardians of the multinational business from the United States or from other countries. ... The army in Honduras has links with very powerful people, very rich, wealthy people who keep the poverty in the country. We are occupied by your country."
Born in Louisiana, Bourgeois became a Catholic priest in 1972. He worked in Bolivia and was forced out by the (SOA-trained) dictator Gen. Hugo Banzer. The assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the murders of four Catholic churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980 led him to protest where some of the killers were trained: Fort Benning's SOA. After six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were murdered in El Salvador in 1989, Bourgeois founded SOA Watch and has built an international movement to close the SOA.
Honduran coup leader Vasquez attended the SOA in 1976 and 1984. Air Force Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, who also participated in the coup, was trained at the SOA in 1996.
Bourgeois' SOA Watch office is just yards from the Fort Benning gates. He has been frustrated in recent years by increased secrecy at SOA/WHINSEC. He told me: "They are trying to present the school as one of democracy and transparency, but we are not able to get the names of those trained here-for over five years. However, there was a little sign of hope when the U.S. House approved an amendment to the defense authorization bill last week that would force the school to release names and ranks of people who train here." The amendment still has to make it through the House-Senate conference committee.
Bourgeois speaks with the same urgency that he has for decades. His voice is well known at Fort Benning, where he was first arrested more than 25 years ago when he climbed a tree at night near the barracks of Salvadoran soldiers who were training there at the time.
Bourgeois blasted a recording of the voice of Romero in his last address before he was assassinated. The archbishop was speaking directly to Salvadoran soldiers in his country: "In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: Stop the repression."
Almost 30 years later, in a country bordering Romero's El Salvador, the U.S. has a chance to change course and support the democratic institutions of Honduras. Undo the coup.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
29 Comments so far
Show AllLeave Honduras alone! Do absolutely nothing. America's interest means death and destruction for all involved. Keep your filthy, murderous hands off of other countries.
Amy Goodman was one of the fake "left" journalists who kissed Obaminable's ass last year and didn't expose him for the fraud that he is.
Now she's complaining about a coup that Obama himself authorized. Amy darling, do us a favor, get lost.
Obusha = Obysmal = Obimbo = WRONG!
Amy Goodman has people like Nader on her show when the MSM blacks out third parties.
Trollin', trollin', trollin'
keep those Democrat trolls in businesss.
Please, having Nader on the show means nothing. Her coverage of Obama last year was corrupt, nothing more than the usual ass-kissing we saw on CNN and NBC. And calling someone you don't agree with a troll just shows me that you're just like Goodman, allergic to the truth.
Anyone who's listened to Amy Goodman for any length of time, has met or talked with her, knows that the charge that she's some 'fake' left journalist is pure tripe.
obusha, I don't know if you're a reverse psychology troll or an idiot. I guess I don't care.
Darling don't attack the messenger because you can't refute the message.
The Hondurans, sadly, must do what Americans, sadly, will have to do: take up arms against their oppressors and kill them until they stop. I would like to think social change can come about peacefully, but i've never seen it in my short lifetime (65 years). There must be, at the very least, the threat of extreme violence.
With the US military base in Honduras & the CIA, we knew the coup was coming.
With our military training the coup leaders PLUS knowing it was coming?
Clearly, this time, the US's hands are clean.
Like in Iran's elections.
Georgia.
That's one reason why Ecuador is so smart to remove the US base. (unless of course the US is willing to allow an Equadoran military base in Miami).
This coup smells of Clinton and Haiti.
Then and now the US president publicly condemns what secretly is supported if not orchestrated.
If not authorized by Obama, then a CABAL at the top level of the United States military, finance and CIA had to have given the coup in Honduras a green light. Who was it?
Maybe you find a few uncomfortable answers below. It is a picture, which will be extremely hard to swallow, and very painful to digest: “Collateral Damage” by E. P Heidner, part I and II.
>>> www.scribd.com/people/documents/2169400-ep-heidner <<<
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has refused to call it what it is: a military coup because if she did she would be forced by US law to call off aid to the Honduran military. She also hasn't called for Zelayas reinstatement. Smells of Clinton and Obama is right. Stinks.
When Obama cuts funding to Honduras, then and only then will we know he opposes the coup.
I guess GHW Bush's invasion of Panama to kidnap Noriega wasn't a coup in the precise definition of that term, but it was regime change, which is a coup's outcome.
There must be some caution applied to the effectiveness of White House actions as demonstrated by Clinton when he helped overthrow Haiti:
"When a group of generals in the (US-founded and -funded) Haitian army, led by Raoul Cédras, overthrew the democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, US President Bill Clinton made all sorts of public gestures of condemnation towards the coup, while at the same time going so far as to violate an OAS embargo to ensure that the army would be supplied with fuel.
"Meanwhile, Aristide remained an involuntary guest in the United States, where he remained until he finally agreed to implement the neoliberal economic program of the candidate Washington had supported in the election."
As usual, actions speak louder than words. And as many have noted, Obama can act in a decisive manner very quickly if he chooses to do so. I will be watching very closely.
The story behind the story of the SOA-supported coup in Honduras is a spooky one: if we hold trendy cynicism about Barack Obama aside for just a moment, and assume the new President is sincere about reversing decades of unilateral covert and overt US intervention in Latin America, then please tell me who in the Pentagon, the CIA, or in one or more of the other sixteen federal spy agencies now umbrellaed into the Department of Homeland Security bureaucracy engineered the military coup that ousted Manuel Zelaya?
Call me naive if you want, but I simply do not believe that Barack Obama and CIA chief Leon Panetta sat down quietly in a corner somewhere recently, and decided to authorize this coup the way Nixon and Kissinger, Reagan and Bill Casey, the Bushes, and other post-WWII presidents plotted and authorized similar regime change operations abroad while maintaining plausible (and/or implausible) deniability over their actual involvement. Such an Oval Office skullduggery scenario within the Obama administration in 2009, directed at the elected government of Honduras, makes absolutely no political sense to me whatsoever.
Yet somebody, somewhere at a top level of the United States military, paramilitary, or civilian intelligence community had to have given the coup in Honduras a green light. Who was it?
If Almendares, Bourgeois, and the growing chorus of other knowledgeable insider experts are correct in their analysis - that the overthrow of Zelaya by SOA-linked heavyweights within the Honduran military was okayed in Washington - then perhaps the best place to start asking awkward questions is with Secretary of Defense (and former career CIA operative) Robert Gates. Controlling the military intelligence SOA network is a central part of Gates' current job description.
What did Robert Gates know, and when did he know it?
Is the coup in Honduras, from a north American perspective, an internal test case challenge to see if team Obama is really in charge?
Do we still actually have civilian political control over the black ops activities of the nation's soldiers and spies?
Bill from Saginaw
Gates was one of the leading hawks on Central America in the horrible days of the '80s. He even advocated bombing Nicaragua.
Bill, you have a point.
The US response to the coup may be inconsistent or ephemeral, but by being so it is quite different than past US responses.
This looks like internal cracking. I have to speculate, but I'd look for possible resentment and desperation from neglected thugs as US payola dwindles and as US blackops concentrates on romancing its connections in the Middle East, with no immediately useful returns.
Gates sounds as good a starting point as any.
Bill, it is possible that the momentum for this coup came from rich interests in Honduras and not from the US. Of course it is possible that Obama wanted to reach out to all sides and try for a consensus of coup/democratic, hand in hand, share the power, and everyone get along...Seriously (or at least more seriously), isn't is great that coups are no longer well tolerated in most of the world?
Re Bill from Saginaw July 1st, 2009 12:13 pm,
who decries the "trendy cynicism about Barack Obama.."
No, Bill. It would be man-bites-dog newsworthy if O'Bummer were NOT involved in destabilizing yet another democracy whose voters defied the wishes of capital.
Are there wheels within wheels at the intel agencies? Almost surely.
Is Gates the captain of a crew of freebooters plying that opaque and unfathomable sea? Possibly.
Is he operating without a letter of marque? Unlikely in the extreme.
But BHO must, for the sake of appearances, publically call for and end to the coup and the restoration of Zelaya. Watch for two signs: first, after a great deal of time and handwringing, the putschists are still in power; and second, military aid will flow undiminshed. Those together will answer your last question.
That probably would be my approach on gauging ultimate US support, but I don't see why we can't also try to find out specific links to current US leaders with Bill's method.
The CIA and other secret agencies are the real power behind our government. Obama, like Bush, is just a puppet. Their only mistake was not killing Manuel Zelaya in the process. It is not likely that they blew it like that, so I fear that his days are numbered. He will most likely be Wellstoned within a short period of time.
I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA is involved, but given the general awareness of the left in general after two decades of coups, another assassination would likely rouse a lot more suspicion and make US denial much harder.
As some of you have already mentioned, a repeat of the Aristide plan may be in effect.
That is why his death will be an unfortunate accident.
This is the 3rd US instigated Coup that has failed in the last year or so; Georgia, Iran and now Honduras. The empire is dying, Geo-Political balance is being restored.Thank God..
Georgia a Coup? Iran a Coup? Your smoking that wacky weed again.
http://www.iri.org/lac/cen_good_gov.asp
Your tax dollars at work!
oy vey, undo the military
Good for Amy, though she doesn't go far enough. She should explicitly demand that Obama himself put an end to the coup.